Mao’s heavy reliance on Chinese translations of Soviet philosophical sources is thus not accepted here as sufficient grounds for the dismissal of Dialectical Materialism as unimportant to the project of understanding the development of Mao’s philosophical thought. At the very least, Mao’s use of Soviet Marxist categories in the 1930s and their subsequent reemergence in later writings throws doubt on the widely held view that Mao broke entirely with the orthodox Marxist tradition in a number of important respects. Let us take a few examples.
Ontology and epistemology
It is often suggested that Mao deviated from or broke with orthodox Marxism by distancing himself from the materialist premises on which it is founded.[1-38] From very early in his revolutionary career, these accounts suggest, Mao inverted the ontological assumptions of Marxism by delineating a distinction between thought (consciousness, ideas) and matter, a distinction in which thought had causal priority. Consequently, the material preconditions for the emergence of a particular form of consciousness need not necessarily exist, for consciousness was not dependent on, and indeed could create, a particular material environment. In this respect, Mao is accused of “idealism”, “voluntarism”, and the like.
However, an opposite interpretation can be taken from the position articulated in Dialectical Materialism and his other two better known philosophical essays. The ontology contained there is unmistakably a materialist one. From the outset, Mao refuses to entertain the possibility of a dualism between mind and matter predicated on an ontological distinction. In rejecting such a dualism, Mao argues that everything in the universe (thought included) is comprised of matter, and that the unitary character of the universe derives from its uniform materiality. “Materialism”, he notes, “considers the unity of the universe to derive from its materiality, and that spirit (consciousness) is one of the natural characteristics of matter which emerges only when matter has developed to a certain stage”.[1-39]
Indeed, Mao goes further to define the material character of consciousness as “a form of matter in movement”, as “a particular property of the material brain of humankind”.[1-40]Moreover,
…this form of matter is composed of a complex nervous system…. These objective physiological processes of the nervous systems of human beings function in line with the subjective manifestation of the forms of consciousness that they adopt internally; these are themselves all objective things, are certain types of material process.[1-41]
The unrelenting materialism of Dialectical Materialism thus suggests as faulty the view that Mao juxtaposed thought and matter as separate ontological realms and attributed thought with analytical priority because it possessed an ontological character different from matter, rather, thought was matter.
On the basis of this ontological unity Mao did, however, construct an epistemological dualism; but here again the reflection theory of epistemology articulated in Dialectical Materialism and the empiricist deference to experience elaborated in On Practice preclude the suggestion that Mao regarded thought as either independent of matter or was to be attributed analytical priority in the epistemological relationship between thought and matter. In Dialectical Materialism, Mao constructs the epistemological dualism on an ontological unity as follows:
Accordingly, it is apparent that it is conditional when we make a distinction between matter and consciousness and moreover oppose the one to the other; that is to say, it has significance only for the insights of epistemology.[1-42]
It is thus only in the realm of epistemology, and not ontology, that one could speak of a distinction between thought and matter, and much of Mao’s epistemology is concerned with the mechanism by which thought can have access to and come to know objectively the realm of reality. This dichotomy was made clear in an earlier article (1936) on military strategy; “everything outside of the mind (tounao) is objective reality”.[1-43]Moreover, in Dialectical Materialism, Mao refers to the “knowability” (kerenshixing) of matter by consciousness,[1-44] and proceeds to argue that the theory of reflection of dialectical materialism has positively resolved the problem of “knowability” and is thus the “soul” of Marxist epistemology.[1-45]The suggestion that human thought is a reflection of objective reality permeates Dialectical Materialism and a short section (Section 9 of Chapter 2) is devoted to it. The formulation of reflection theory contained there is fundamentally similar to the epistemology contained in On Practice. Schram has, on the basis of sections 1‒6 of Chapter 2, suggested a more profound epistemology to be found in On Practice than in Dialectical Materialism.
…the extraordinarily simplistic exposition of the “reflection” theory as the beginning and end of Marxist epistemology is a far cry from the sophisticated presentation of “On Practice”.[1-46]
This judgement cannot, I would suggest, be borne out by a close comparison of the two documents. While it is true that On Practice devotes a good deal more space (and perhaps intellectual effort) explicitly to the issue of epistemology, the notions of knowledge as a reflection of natural and social realities, and of deepening knowledge through a process of progressive engagement with reality (i.e., practice) are present in both sources. For example, in Dialectical Materialism, Mao argues that:
Objective truth exists independently and does not depend on the subject. Although it is reflected in our sense perceptions and concepts, it achieves final form gradually rather than instantaneously … in the process of cognition, the material world is increasingly reflected in our knowledge more closely, more precisely, more multifariously, and more profoundly.[1-47]
1-38
See, for example, Schram,
1-43