---
title: Vladimir Ilyich Ulianov (Lenin) (1870-1924)
description: philosophy - marx - engels - Marxism - dialectics - communism -
  metaphysical - knowledge - ethics - politics - aesthetics - psychology -
  Vladimir Ilyich Ulianov (Lenin) (1870-1924) - Theory of reflection
author:
  name: Graciela Paula Caldeiro
  url: http://graciela-caldeiro.idoneos.com
canonical: https://philosophy.idoneos.com/370096/
source: 370096/index.md
---

<h2 id="vladimir-ilyich-ulianov-lenin-1870-1924">Vladimir Ilyich Ulianov (Lenin) (1870-1924)</h2>

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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&#39;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&#39;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&#39; 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:

1.  **idealism**: linked to reactionary thinking
    
2.  **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&#39;s materialism is:

1.  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.
    
2.  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.
    

<h3 id="reflection-theory">Reflection theory</h3>

Knowledge is a reflection of man&#39;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**.