materialism-and-empirio-criticism
Lenin uses “metaphysics” in the same way that engels does, distinct from the branch-of-philosophy metaphysics:
Link to originalWhat Engels calls "metaphysics" roughly translates to "un dialectic"
Maps to what we’d today call essentialism about “natural kinds”, the reification of analytic distinctions, and static/snapshot thinking as opposed to process thinking (can’t understand a glider (GoL) by looking at a snapshot).
His reasoning: classical metaphysics since Aristotle tended to analyze being through fixed essences and rigid categories, so he labeled that whole static/categorical habit of mind “metaphysical.”
Mach
Ernst Mach was an Austrian physicist who revived Bishop Berkeley’s and Hume’s subjective idealism under new vocabulary (“empirio-criticism,” “recent positivism”). Bodies are not things that cause sensations, they are “complexes of sensations.” He renamed sensations “elements” and claimed that when elements stand in one functional relation they count as “physical,” in another as “psychical,” so he had supposedly transcended the materialism/idealism split. Science, on this view, should not try to get behind phenomena to any underlying reality; it should just organize experience with maximum “economy of thought.” Matter, causality, necessity are all “metaphysics” we should drop.
Concretely: take “red.” Consider red in its dependence on other elements outside my body (the sun, light waves, the apple) and it counts as a physical object. Consider the same red in its dependence on my retina and brain and it counts as a sensation, a psychical object. Same stuff, two relational roles. No need to ask which is primary (matter or mind), because physical and psychical are just two ways of grouping the same neutral elements. The old materialism/idealism fight supposedly dissolves.
Why he likes it:
- No “metaphysics” — you never posit anything beyond what’s given in experience.
- Science just describes relations among elements. “Economy of thought”: don’t postulate hidden substances (matter) or hidden subjects (soul).
- Claims neutrality between the two camps.
Why Lenin calls it a verbal trick:
Mach explicitly says elements are “colors, sounds, pressures, spaces, times — what we usually call sensations.” So the base ontology is still sensations, just relabeled. The “element” is either:
A sensation (Mach’s own definition) → then “everything is elements” = “everything is sensation” = Berkeley in new clothes = solipsism.
Not a sensation → then the word is empty; Mach hasn’t told us what it is.There’s no third option where “element” is some genuinely neutral stuff that’s neither mental nor physical but grounds both. Mach never supplies one. The “neutrality” is purely terminological.
If all that exists are elements-qua-sensations, only my sensations are directly given. Other people, their bodies, their sensations, the Earth before life — all of these have to be reconstructed out of my sensations. Mach tries to escape by saying “our sensations,” but “our” smuggles in other subjects whose existence his framework can’t ground. Whenever he talks plausibly about science (the brain is required for thought; the Earth existed before observers; red is produced by light waves hitting the retina), he’s silently borrowing the materialist premise he officially rejects — sensations are caused by an external reality that isn’t itself a sensation.
So Mach’s system ends up as what Engels calls a “pauper’s broth of eclecticism”: idealist in its foundations, materialist wherever it needs to touch real science, held together by the decorative word “element.”
What happened in the late 19th centruary, hat lead physicists to think matter had disappeared
Several discoveries late 19th / early 20th century shook the old mechanical picture of matter (indivisible hard atoms, constant mass, impenetrability, inertia):
- Radioactivity. Radium transmutes into helium. Atoms, supposedly the immutable bedrock, decay into other elements. Conservation of mass starts to look violable.
- Electron theory. The atom is not a hard pellet but a tiny solar system of electrons in the ether. “Matter” can be reduced to electricity-in-ether.
- Electromagnetic mass. At high velocities the electron’s mass turns out to depend on velocity, and it is entirely electrodynamic — its “mechanical” mass is zero. Mass, formerly a primary absolute property of matter, becomes a function of motion.
- Breakdown of Newtonian principles. The equality of action and reaction, the constancy of mass, the principle of inertia all hold only for “moderate velocities.” Classical mechanics becomes a special case of electromagnetism.
Rapid formalization of physics into differential equations (Maxwell, Hertz, Lagrange) amplified the effect: the equations worked, but what they were equations of became obscure. The mathematical spirit, Rey says, “interposed a screen” between physics and physical reality.
The philosophical reading that spread among Mach, Poincaré, Ostwald, Pearson, Duhem: matter has been dissolved into equations, symbols, “working hypotheses.” Poincaré: “it is not nature which imposes on us the concepts of space and time, but we who impose them on nature.” Ostwald: there is no matter, only energy (and energy is a pure methodological symbol). Pearson: “all things move, but only in conception.”
The materialist definiton of matter
Matter is the objective reality given to us in sensation, existing independently of it and reflected by it.
Matter is a philosophical category denoting the objective reality which is given to man by his sensations, and which is copied, photographed and reflected by our sensations, while existing independently of them.
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Matter is reflected in consciousness through sensation.
Why matter did not, in fact, disappear
The “physical idealists” stumbled because they were “metaphysical” (non-dialectical) materialists: they had fused the philosophical/epistemological definition of matter and the current scientific description of matter, pinning philosophical materialism to a specific list of immutable atomic properties.
When those properties dissolved, they thought materialism itself had been refuted, and slid into idealism by default. A dialectical materialist holds the former firm while letting the latter update freely: our knowledge is relative truths converging on absolute truth through successive approximation.
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Rebuttal to agnosticism
Agnostic (Hume, Kant): “we only have access to sensations; whether there’s a real world behind them producing them is unknowable.”
Lenin’s rebuttal, compressed:
Unstable middle: You either do or don’t posit something beyond sensations. If you don’t, you’re an idealist (world = sensations). If you do but call it “unknowable,” you’re a shamefaced materialist. There’s no coherent third position; agnosticism is just idealism with cold feet.
Practice settles it: If we synthesize alizarin from coal tar, we’ve made the thing-in-itself act for us. The Kantian “ungraspable” thing has been grasped. The criterion of practice (experiment, industry, successful prediction) refutes the claim that we can never know what’s beyond sensation.
Wrong boundary: Agnosticism puts an absolute fence between phenomenon and thing-in-itself.
Lenin: there’s no difference in principle, only between known and not yet known. What was unknowable yesterday (alizarin in coal tar, atoms, radio waves) is routine today. The fence is imaginary.The political kicker: Once you deny knowability of objective reality, you’ve opened the door to fideism. “We can’t know” leaves room for “so you may as well have faith.” Every major agnostic school, Lenin shows, has been exploited by religion and reaction for exactly this reason. Non-partisanship in epistemology is a de facto alliance with idealism.