Richard Heinrich Ludwig Avenarius (1843-1896)

German philosopher lived in the 19th century; one of the founders of empirio-criticism or empirio-criticism. Born in a bookshop owner’s family in Paris, he studied physiology, linguistics and philosophy at the University of Zurich, the University of Berlin and the Leipzig University. In 1875, he received his Ph.D. from the Leipzig University. In 1877, he became the professor of philosophy at the University of Zurich until his death.

He is one of the founders of the Philosophical Society of the University of Zurich and the first editor in chief of the Journal of the Society. His major works include Philosophy: Thinking of the World According to the Principle of Least Effort (1876), Critique of Pure Experience (1888-1890), The Human Concept of the World (1890-1891), Investigation on the Concept of Psychological Object (1894-1895), etc.

Avenarius disagreed with the materialist theory of reflection that regards experience as the subjective image of the objective being, and opposed the previous idealism that regards experience as pure subjective introspection. He proposed to criticize the concept of experience of the previous philosophy, so his philosophy was called “Empirio-criticism”.

The world outlook of Avenarius established the view of isomorphism between the natural world concept and principle. The world concept of nature refers to the self, the world composed of various interrelated parts and the existence of others. He attributed these existences only the existence in experience, denied the objective existence of the material world, and argued that “only feeling can be conceived as the existence”. The so-called principle of isomorphism refers to that the ego as the subject and the environment as the object are in an inseparable isomorphism, that is, interdependence. The ego is the regular or central item of the isomorphism, and the environment is the opposite project of the isomorphism, both of which are always found together. Without subject, there is no environment, without environment, there is no subject. He argued that materialism and idealism regard the relationship between subject and object (self and environment) as subordination, distort the face of the natural world, and divide the world unified by pure experience into two parts. There is no physical or psychological thing in nature, only “the third thing”, that is, “pure experience”, which is a neutral element of non mind and non object exists. He wants to reconcile the opposite world view of materialism and idealism with the theory of principle of congruence.

In epistemology, Avenarius put forward the theory of life series law and the theory of anti-embeddedness. According to the theory of life series law, the process of human cognition is attributed to the process of biological stimulation and response, that is, the interdependent process of self experience (E) through central nervous system (C) and environment stimulation (R). This denies that human feelings and thoughts are the images of the objective objects which are not transferred by human beings, denies that the correct understanding of human beings is subjective and objective, regarding human feelings and thoughts only as the physiological response after being stimulated by external factors, compares human cognition with the intrinsic activities of animals, and is fundamentally opposite to the materialistic theory of reflection. He thinks that the common mistake of traditional philosophy is “embeddedness theory”, which separates perception (feeling, thought, idea) from the object of perception (object, phenomenon), regards the latter as something other than consciousness, and puts the former into consciousness. In his opinion, the theory of reflection of materialism is embeddedness, and the root of various forms of idealism is embeddedness. He proposes to exclude embeddedness and the separation of subjective and objective. To some extent, the anti-embeddedness theory reveals the phenomenon that various forms of idealism separate the subject and the object, but denies that human cognition is the unity of opposites between the subjective and the objective, distorts the unity of opposites between the subject and the object existing in the process of human cognition into the absolute unity of the two, and regards both the subject and the object as the pure experience of unity, and that cognition is not the reflection of subject to object, and brain is not the residence of thinking, which leads to subjective idealism.

Lenin revealed the absurdity of the philosophy of Avenarius and his followers in his book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.