CU Course on Hegel,
Part 9a
Pablo Picasso, 1937: “Guernica”
Lenin on the
Theory of Knowledge
The Criterion of Practice in
the Theory of Knowledge
Lenin’s 1908 “Materialism and
Empirio-Criticism” is a full-length book, but a difficult one to
include under any particular category. It is a polemic against Ernst
Mach and his Russian followers, whom Lenin said had little to
distinguish themselves from the 18th-century subjective idealist Bishop Berkeley. This controversy
does not seem quite so important today as it may have been in 1908, but it is
still useful.
Our text from Lenin’s book is “The
Criterion of Practice in the Theory of Knowledge” (download linked
below).
It begins: “We have
seen that Marx in 1845 and Engels in 1888 and 1892 placed the criterion of
practice at the basis of the materialist theory of knowledge.” This shows
up some of our difficulty in the field of Marxian philosophy. As the footnote
says, Lenin is referring to Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845)
and to the works by F. Engels: “Ludwig
Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy” (1888) and
the “Special
Introduction to the English Edition of 1892” of his “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”.
The latter pamphlet is made out of excerpts from Engel’s “Anti-Dühring”, while the “Theses
on Feuerbach” are part of “The German Ideology”,
a book written between 1845 and 1847 by Marx and Engels and then abandoned “to
the gnawing criticism of the mice”.
Karl Marx had a Doctorate in Philosophy but he did not, as a
“Marxist”, write a book of philosophy as such, except insofar as his long
“Capital” project could be taken as philosophy, and there are indeed some
philosophical statements here and there among the preparatory works and in the
three originally-published volumes of “Capital”.
So, what is linked from this post comprises the major part
of the overtly philosophical work of Marx, Engels and Lenin. It is a tiny
amount when compared to the world’s literature on philosophy.
It is therefore clear that the classical literature does not
provide us with a full, exclusively Marxist exposition of philosophy. Perhaps
this is fitting, because Marxism is after all not outside of the main stream of
learning. As we have seen, it is a continuation of, as well as a reaction to,
Hegel’s work, while Hegel’s work stands in a similar relation to Kant’s, and so
on.
Taken together, all this means that for the philosophy that
is necessary for revolution, the revolutionaries will have to go beyond Marx
and Engels, and study the full discipline of philosophy, its history, its
development and its meaning. This is exactly what Lenin began to do in the
early 1900s.
In “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism” Lenin quotes Hegel
several times in passing, and briefly, though not in this particular chapter.
It would seem that Lenin’s interest in Hegel really only got going later, at
about the time (1914) when he prepared his ‘Conspectus
of Hegel’s book “The Science of Logic”’. The Lenin Philosophy Archive
on MIA is here.
Lenin is saying in this short chapter that that the test of
truth is practice, and this provides us with a continuity in relation to our
previous instalment, from Ilyenkov.
The next part will be the last in this Hegel series.
Picture:
Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica”. Picasso
was the most distinguished painter of the 20th Century, and a
communist. His famous mural depicting the fascist aerial bombing of the Spanish
village of Guernica is now at the United Nations.
- The above is to introduce the original reading-text: The Criterion of Practice in the Theory of Knowledge, Lenin, 1908.
- To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.
0 comments:
Post a Comment