Three Important Epistemological Conclusions

At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, Russian Machists represented by Bazarov, Bogdanov and Viktor Chernov, starting from Humeism and Kantianism, denied the objective reality of matter and the existence of any form of “thing-in-itself” besides human sensations and experiences. On this basis, they wantonly refuted and attacked Plekhanov and Engels’ ideas about the knowability of “thing-in-itself” and its transformation into “thing-for-me”. In response, Lenin pointed out in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism that all materialists will recognize the knowability of “thing-in-itself”, and recognize that the process of understanding the world is also the process of transforming the “thing-in-itself” into “thing-for-me”. Lenin pointed out that, from this we could draw the only and inevitable conclusion: “…outside of us and independently of us there exist objects, things, and bodies: that our perceptions are images of the outer world.” The inference, which all of us draw in practical life, is consciously taken by materialism as the basis of its theory of knowledge. The converse theorem of Mach (bodies are complexes of sensations) is nothing but sheer idealistic thinking.

On this basis, Lenin put forward three important epistemological conclusions: (1) Things are independent of our consciousness or they exist independent of our sensations and they exist outside us. (2) There is no and can’t be any principled difference between phenomenon and thing-in-itself. The difference only exists between what has been known and what has not been known. There is a specific boundary between the two. The philosophical speculations that “thing-in-itself is on the ‘other side’ of the phenomenon” (Kant), or “we can and should use a philosophical barrier to separate us from the questions about a part of the world that has not yet been known but exists outside us” (Hume) are just nonsense, strange theories, chicanery and fabrication. (3) In epistemology, as in all other fields of science, we should think dialectically, that is to say, we should not think that our knowledge is immutable, but should analyze how to learn from ignorance and how to learn from incomplete and inaccurate knowledge to more complete and accurate knowledge.

Lenin made a scientific interpretation of the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge and came to these three important conclusions. He combined the dialectical relationship between matter and consciousness, the dynamic theory of reflection with the viewpoint of practice, and materialism and dialectics. On the basis of correctly revealing the occurrence and development law of human cognition, he criticized Machism’s tendency of subjective idealism and agnosticism in epistemology.