Two Lines of Cognition

Refers to the two fundamentally opposite directions and approaches that people follow in cognizing things. Lenin elaborated profoundly on this issue, mainly in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Philosophical Notebooks and Karl Marx.

The relationship between thought and existence, consciousness and matter is an important and fundamental question of all philosophy. According to different answers to whether matter or consciousness is primary, it can be divided into two fundamentally opposite cognitive routes or philosophical paths. Materialist epistemology holds that matter is primary, and human cognition should follow the route from matter to sensation, and then to thought. Idealism holds that thought is primary, and people’s cognition should follow the cognitive route from sensation to thought, then to matter. The opposition between the two lines of cognition is also the opposition between the two basic philosophical factions of materialism and idealism. No philosophical form could surpass these two basic forms. Lenin said: “Are we to proceed from things to sensation and thought? Or are we to proceed from thought and sensation to things? The first line, i.e., the materialist line, is adopted by Engels. The second line, i.e., the idealist line, is adopted by Mach.”

All materialist philosophy holds that matter is primary and exists outside the mind, while consciousness is a subjective reflection of objective matter. Therefore, people’s understanding must follow a path from matter to sensation and consciousness, while practice is the only criterion for testing the truth emerged from understanding. On the contrary, all idealistic philosophy insists that consciousness is primary, matter is secondary, and the external world is only the product of subjective spirit. Therefore, one can only grasp the external world in subjective thinking. When criticizing Russian Machists, Lenin explained in detail the two lines of cognition. In his view, senses give us faithful images of things, that we know the things themselves, that the outer world acts on our sense-organs. This is materialism—with which the agnostic is not in agreement. What then is the essence of the agnostic’s line? It is that he does not go beyond sensations, that he stops on this side of phenomena, refusing to see anything “certain” beyond the boundary of sensations.

In other words, the materialist line of cognition recognizes the causality and inevitability of the world, and leads to the inevitability of cognition and thinking. On the contrary, idealism tries to draw out the causality, regularity and inevitability of the external world from thinking. The really important epistemological question that divides the philosophical trends is not the degree of precision attained by our descriptions of causal connections, or whether these descriptions can be expressed in exact mathematical formulas, but whether the source of our knowledge of these connections is objective natural law or properties of our mind, its innate faculty of apprehending certain a priori truths, and so forth.

Lenin pointed out that any attempt to blur or transcend the two basic lines of cognition will eventually fall into absurdity and become complete idealism. Lenin argued Machists’ attempt to replace matters with “elements” or “complexes of sensations” and confuse materialism and idealism undoubtedly a simple rehash of Berkeleianism in the 20th century. Machism holds that matters are connections of “elements” that follow certain rules, and “elements” are “complexes of sensations”. Its essence is merely an attempt to smuggle in confused idealism under the disguise of some new terminology. The struggle between materialism and idealism has always existed in the history of philosophy, which is also a reflection of the contradictions in social life at a certain time. The struggle between these two lines closely revolves around the debate on the basic philosophy question, which to a certain extent promotes the development of human philosophy. It is incorrect to either exaggerate or deny the struggle.