When I have been sick for a while and finding it hard, as I slowly regain concentration, I often go to Marxist texts to restart any interest in philosophy because they always deal with undeniably important matters. I also start dabbling with my coin collections because money, however it is interpreted, is always the most serious indicator of ‘presuppositionless’ value whether as indicator or as undeniable value in itself. In fact, even as indicator, as such it always remains stable whereas any indicated object changes with practical situation or with mood. It also serves to illustrate Lenin’s necessity of accepting materialism as something an “educated” or “sane” person would do by “instinct”. Anyone truly ignoring the value of money in all of their situations, I think would legitimately be classified as insane or having despaired to the point of or beyond suicide as I have written about Nietzsche. It fulfills what I think is one of Lenin’s very most important philosophical statements about the necessity of accepting materialism: “Materialism clearly formulates the as yet unsolved problem and thereby stimulates the attempt to solve it, to undertake further experimental investigation” (46). Money solves problems, all and any kind of problem at least at some stage.

I made this statement first to make perfectly clear my commitment to materialism, a commitment that Lenin so ardently evokes. The actual background bringing out this comment is the impressively clear declaration of Marxism that the main fundamental legitimate philosophical debate is only between the only two truly self-consistent philosophies, subjectivist idealism and objectivist materialism. The main problem I have with Lenin, a productive problem in him, though, because he maintains his insistence in a genuine dialogue with other thinkers that does, on the one hand, bring out the real contradictions in idealism while, on the other hand, implicitly but clearly showing what he is wanting to force on the reader: a complete rejection of subjective idealism as a whole which, as a whole, he undeniably accomplishes but while using an idealist standard of ‘absolute certainty’ in an illegitimate way because he wants total commitment when his own observations and even explicit declarations have rejected any “certainty” as “absolute”. Sartre points out part of the problem in Engels as a confusion of abstraction with induction (31). Induction is the strength of the science Lenin holds so highly in value. But induction is a gradual accumulation of knowledge piece by piece which undeniably necessitates a materialist premise. Induction has nothing in common with abstraction as the grasping of a whole as any ‘undeniable reality’, which Lenin in detail recognizes but is far too impatient not to use abstractions to make overall ideological points as if absolutely certain laws of nature when in fact such ‘laws’ are accumulations of facts revealing great areas of ignorance, a fact Lenin backhandedly acknowledges.

Lenin’s main endeavor, in MATERIALISM AND EMPIRICO-CRITICISM (1908) is to demonstrate there can be no intermixture of subjective idealism and objective materialism. He does demonstrate the absurdity of some basic premises of idealism, destroying it as an ideological competitor to materialism, but also demonstrates the insufficiency of his view of materialism. Idealism as an ideology needs a subjective world of “the great I” versus an unknown external world. That is adequately taken care of by NOT approaching objects as whole realities but as accumulative accounts of experience that is never complete and never absolutely certain because new knowledge could always be discovered that will fundamentally change the concept of the object. And in such a situation, there are going to be factual observations that propose problems that may possibly never be solvable so that there cannot be any ‘absolutely certain’ sense that all problems presented in the materialist conception can be solved. All real knowledge is finite, therefore every solution of a problem is only a solution in process, knowledge of any and every thing is always incomplete. This is actually what motivated idealism – the ability to put all local unsolved problems within fields or Ideas of certainty. It fails ingloriously in doing that, but leaves the problem for materialism that the skepticism of Descartes first put to the philosophical consciousness that certainty resides in the self because the ‘self’, regardless of what it really is, regardless whether it is an atomic whole or swarms of elements, is the only place of the certainty of perception. The perception is certain as much as the certainty it is always my point of view, and that materialistically I can deduce that all other people share the same general situation and yet materialistically can never share actual perception but only relative coincidence of experience.

Sartre sums up the problem, “If dialectical reason is to be possible as the career of all and the freedom of each, as experience and as necessity, if we are to display both its total translucidity (it is no more than ourself) and its untranscendable severity (it is the unity of everything that conditions us), if we are to ground it as the rationality of praxis, of totalisation, and of society’s future, if we are then to criticize it as Analytical Reason has been criticized, that is to say, if we are to determine its significance, then we must realized the situated experience of its apodicity through ourselves the experience of the dialectic is itself dialectical: this means that it develops and organizes itself on all levels. (39)

Idealism arose because it identified a real problem but cannot succeed as an over all ideology whereas materialism can include partial, specific elements of idealism to maintain its own materialistic continuity. That this was identified early on is found in Marx and Engls debate with Max Stirner in THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY where in their private correspondence concluded Max Stirner’s position of absolute idealism as self was, though impractical, logically unassailable in itself.

MERE OFFHAND NOTES History is an accumulation that can either build up quantity or be torn down.

Marx, Engels and Lenin believe in a historical progress and therefore materialist providence. They believe in “higher” states of matter and that the purpose of philosophy is the development of “change”.

Lenin believes the materialist philosophy sets up scientific problems that cannot be dealt with in idealism. Materialism is a standard to judge education and mental health. It is something obvious and instinctual. However, he regards idealism as the only other serious and self-consistent philosophy whose main weakness is that it ends up as “the great I” or solipsism. Lenin refuses to believe idealism has any sort of valid standpoint because it either must resolve in solipsism or a God to support any notion of existence. The explanation of temporal development from the past into the present situation such as the development of conscious matter from unconscious matter can only have a valid ground in materialism. He repudiates an abstract line of causality for a dialectic of action that is able to reconstruct from the present situations before the present that explain how things came to be the way they are in the present.

Lenin’s handling of Berkeley is excellent but extremely disappointing when coming to Hume whom he uses as a straw man, ignoring even the problem he finds in Huxley’s book as to whether he can even be classified as materialist or idealist. Lenin here violates his own position that only by going back to and going thoroughly through the classic thinkers of idealism can you understand the blunders of modern thinkers who mix their categories illogically. Even more embarrassing, Lenin ignores Hume’s actual career that is highly relevant to Marx’s own development. Both start out as primarily philosophers but soon give up philosophical endeavors as their primary aim and take on politics, economics, and history as their major concerns for the rest of their lives. Many scholars are disappointed in Hume that he did not continue to produce philosophical texts, but I find it very plain in reading the later Hume those materialist concerns outweighed in importance any philosophical endeavor he could possibly get involved with, that is, politics, economics, and history WERE the legitimate continuation of what his actual philosophical endeavor truly was.