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PARTISAN REVIEW
which had so often in recent years commanded a majority against
Lenin.
Materialism and Empiriocriticism,
then, is first of all a document
in an intraparty struggle. This should not surprise us, for the same
can be said of every line Lenin ever wrote for publication. Its primary .
concerns are to defend orthodox Marxism against every species of
modification, revision, criticism, or attack, and to convict Bogdanov
and his associates of deviations from Marxist orthodoxy. But over and
.above this, the work has a more ambitious aim: to expound afresh
the basic philosophical position of Marx and Engels, and to evaluate
from its standpoint the main philosophical currents and scientific
discoveries of Lenin's day.
Engels had insisted, and now Lenin insisted after
him,
that the
recognition of a world independent of the percipient subject, and the
recognition of man's ability through analysis and action to form an
ever more exact notion of the nature of that world, are the prerequi–
sites of modem science. To those who assert that there is no such
"objective" world, or that it is forever unknowable, Engels answers
that science and industry, man's knowledge-in-action, teach us how
the unknown becomes known, how out of ignorance arises knowledge.
It is this knowledge-in-action which enables us to test the correctness
of our conceptions of a given phenomenon, by producing it out of its
elements or determinants, by devising critical tests, by predicting or
foreseeing, by revising and refining our hypotheses in terms of crucial
experiments and observable errors. Many of the best pages in Lenin's
book are quotations from Engels, followed by explanations and illus–
trations of this view. Passionately he asserts that, though the
known
be little and the
unknown
vast, the area of man's knowing and power
to predict and plan and control is capable of indefinite en1argement.
To postulate an
unknowable,
however, is to set arbitrary, self-degrad–
ing limits upon man's efforts to understand and master his world.
In the midst of all the antirationalism that surrounded him in the
post-1905 reaction, and that surrounds us in our own day, Lenin's
plea for a rational, experimental approach to nature and society–
however much he may have deviated from it himself in his own dog–
matic authoritarianism in the sphere of Marxist orthodoxy-repre–
sents an important contribution. "Man's intelligence," he cries, "may
be only a feeble rush-light in the darkness of night, but I am not
going to let that flickering flame be blown out by mystics and meta–
physicians. . . . "
