A few more thoughts. Lenin's own philosophical thinking would continue to evolve after 1908. His later philosophical development complicates the rigid epistemological framework deployed in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. In his Philosophical Notebooks (1914–15), written as private working notes rather than polemics, Lenin repeatedly stressed mediation, abstraction, and the historical character of concepts. He explicitly revised his reflection theory of knowledge, insisting that reflection is “not a dead, not an abstract, not a mirror-like, but a living, dialectical process” ( CW 38, 190; PSS vol. 29, 163), and he criticized “vulgar materialism” for treating philosophical categories as fixed dogmas rather than methodological tools ( CW 38, 221–22; PSS 29, 197–98). Lenin’s intensive engagement with Hegel led him to emphasize that scientific and theoretical concepts are socially mediated abstractions rooted in practice, famously concluding that Marx’s Capital could not be fully understood without Hegel’s Logic ( CW 38, 180; PSS 29, 161). In no way was Lenin retreating from materialism, but his later thoughts do undercut the assumption that every refusal to ground science in explicit ontological definitions must be classified as Kantian or idealist. From this later standpoint, Frank’s anti-apriorism and practice-centered account of scientific objectivity would no longer be automatically assimilable to the Machism Lenin was combating in 1908, even if Lenin would still have taken Frank to task for insufficient philosophical militancy.
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