Empirio-Monism

A kind of subjective idealism doctrine put forward by Bogdanov, a Russian Machist. Empirio-monism advocates a monistic interpretation of experience. It regards all that exists as a continuous chain of development, the lower links of which are lost in the chaos of elements, while the higher links represent the experience of men—psychical and still higher, physical experience, and the top link is the knowledge takes its source therefrom. Experience is the foundation—material concepts come from experience, and knowledge comes from “experience”. Empirio-monism is in fact subjective idealism deeming spirit as primary and material secondary.

The fundamental viewpoint of empirio-monism could be summed up as that, the world is merely a chaotic world consisting of elements, and the elements are nothing but sensations; from elements people’s psychological experience and physical experience are divided and physical experience is derived from psychological experience. In Bogdanov’s words, the physical world is the force of experience that people have organised together, i.e., it exists depending on everyone’s perception for its existence, rather than depending on individual consciousness. The description of the said experience is what is called knowledge.

Bogdanov presents this absurd view as being in accordance with Engels’ materialist formula of the primary status of matter and the secondary status of consciousness. In fact, he completely rejected Engels’ criterion of differentiation between materialism and idealism, because materialism advocates that the unity of the world lies in its materiality. The material world existed long before human beings came into being, and it does not depend on individuals or human consciousness to exist. However, idealism holds that spirit is the origin of the world. No matter idealists call spirit “absolute spirit”, “God”, “sensation” or “experience”, they cannot hide the idealistic stance in solving basic philosophical problems. Bogdanov started from the subjective idealist experience and drew out the physical world from it, which was sheer idealism and no materialism. The reason why he distorted it this way was nothing more than to cover for him to replace Marxist dialectical materialism with subjective idealism, his “empirio-monism” is just another version of Mach’s “world elements” theory.

Lenin made a sharp criticism of Bogdanov’s “empirio-monism” in his book Materialism and Empirio-criticism, and said: “To think that philosophical idealism vanishes when the consciousness of mankind is substituted for the consciousness of the individual, or the socially-organised experience for the experience of a single person, is like thinking that capitalism vanishes when a singly owned capitalist enterprise is replaced by a joint-stock capitalist company.”