The main questions of classical philosophy and the five main questions of philosophy highlighted at its present stage are considered. They are analyzed in the historical and modern context. Of particular importance, in the opinion of many philosophers, is the issue of the opposition between reality and the text, which is relevant in almost all areas of knowledge. In the natural sciences and related to them mathematics, the description of reality has been developing for a long time independently of the corresponding empirical studies. In the social sciences and humanities, the interpretation of reality is also far from what actually takes place. This is clearly demonstrated by the comparison of texts and reality in sociology, political science, literature, painting, cinema, art, and culture. F. Engels left a significant mark in the study and interpretation of the main questions of philosophy, but only at the present time his works in Russia can be considered objectively. Many of Engels’s theses about the community of wives, the abolition of the fatherland, nationality are obvious mistakes. The notions of classes, the death of capitalism, the victory of communism in the world also turned out to be untenable. It is hardly possible to make any claims to Engels himself. He was a man of his time, who, as far as possible, wrote about how he understood philosophy and its popularization, the problems of the labor movement, and made a huge contribution to the formation of the latter. His work was used by totalitarian regimes to justify their political and socio-economic doctrines, among which, for example, was the Third Program of the CPSU adopted at the 22 Congress of the CPSU, which announced the construction of communism in the USSR by 1980.