Without being a professional philosopher, he was inspired primarily by Engels and devoted his philosophical reflection to the critique of what he judged to be a deviation from dialectical materialism, that is, a sort of idealism implicit in the doctrines of Russian populists such as Mikhailovsky, Neokantian-oriented Marxists such as Struve and the supporters of Mach's empirocriticism, such as Bodanov, Bazarov and Lunacharsky.
Engels had attacked mechanistic materialism that considered matter to be static driven by mechanical interaction, postulating a dynamic and evolutionary conception of dialectical materialism. But in Lenin's time, science had already abandoned the mechanistic positions and philosophers of science such as Mach, Deum, Poincaré and Ostwald, defended a new conception of science and reality. Mach suppressed, for example, the distinction between the physical and the psychic by reducing both to original elements that are neither physical nor psychic: sensations (colors, sounds), Ostwald, reduced matter and spirit to a common principle: energy. Thus, my declared itself the “conventional” character of physical theories (Hertz, Deum).
Russian Empirocriticists thought that in the aftermath of the new scientific paradigms, it was necessary to modernize Engels' dialectical materialism so that they could place themselves above materialism and idealism. But for Lenin, this perspective was nothing but a danger, because matter disappeared, leaving only equations. Then reason seemed to dictate its laws to Nature, returning to idealism in the Kantian way.
Philosophical postulates of Lenin:
Materialism:
The central problem of philosophy is the relationship between being and knowing, for which, there are only two possible answers:
idealism: linked to reactionary thinking
materialism: linked to revolutionary thought, is the recognition of the independence and priority of being over knowing, which is but a reflection of being, the existence of the reflected, regardless of what it reflects, is the fundamental premise of materialism. This means that the outside world is independent of consciousness.
Lenin's materialism is:
Gnoseological and is equivalent to realism because being materialistic, from its perspective, means that it is possible to recognize the objective truth that is revealed to us by the senses.
Ontological dialectical and non-mechanistic character. The world is the matter in perpetual moving and development and is reflected by the developing human consciousness. Matter is the primary and consciousness is only a property of the most organized matter.
Knowledge is a reflection of man's nature. But it is not a simple and immediate reflection, but the process of a series of abstractions and formulations covering in a relative and approximate way the laws of living and developing nature.
The theory of reflection does not imply that knowledge is a definitive position without movement, but as a realist, Lenin asserts that absolute reality exists and although our knowledge is always relative (incomplete, perfectible and historical) it should not be confused with conventionalism or with the phenomenism of Kant.