A good deal of On Practice is actually devoted to fleshing out the concept adumbrated in the quote above that, while knowledge is a reflection of objective reality, it only comes to reflect it accurately through a process of practice which may involve a considerable length of time and expenditure of energy as the subject of cognition grapples with reality and attempts to alter it. The suggestion that in either text Mao’s epistemology is premised on a simple assumption of a mirror reflection in which thought exactly or immediately mirrors reality is quite wrong. The overly passive epistemology of a simple reflection theory is absent from both texts. Moreover, the notion of a complex reflection as spelt out in Dialectical Materialism logically precedes the elaboration of epistemology contained in On Practice, and it also precedes it textually. If the three essays on philosophy are indeed part of “a single intellectual enterprise”, we would expect nothing less.
It is also important to note that the epistemological judgements rendered in Dialectical Materialism and On Practice draw heavily on arguments already existing within Marxist philosophy and in particular those elaborated by Lenin and Engels. Lenin, in particular, had devoted a rather polemical book-length study to the issue of epistemology,[1-48] and as one would expect given the genealogy of Soviet Marxist philosophy discussed above, Lenin was in turn to draw heavily on the epistemological writings of Engels.[1-49] In drawing on Engels, Lenin articulates the conceptions of both reflection and practice as premises for the dialectical materialist approach to epistemology:
Thus, the materialist theory, the theory of the reflection of objects by our mind, is here presented [in Engels’ writings] with absolute clarity: things exist outside us. Our perceptions and ideas are their images. Verification of these images, differentiation between true and false images, is given by practice.[1-50]
This concatenation by Lenin of reflection and practice as elements of a unified dialectical materialist theory of epistemology indicates the orthodoxy of Mao’s own elaboration of the problem of epistemology. In both Dialectical Materialism and On Practice, Mao drew on a position well established within Soviet Marxist philosophy, and his employment of these concepts was to persist well beyond the Yan’an Period. For example, in a speech in 1957, Mao asserted that “man’s social being determines his consciousness”, and spoke of the way in which the social changes in China had been “reflected in people’s minds”.[1-51] Similarly, in 1960 he declared:
Initiative … originates in seeking truth from facts, in the true reflections of objective conditions in the minds (tounao) of the people, namely from the people’s dialectical process of knowledge of the objective external world.[1-52]
The concept of reflection was also to appear in Mao’s “Sixty Articles on Work Methods” of 1958:
The human brain can reflect the objective world, although it is not easy to do so correctly. Correct reflection or the reflection which is closest to reality can be arrived at only after thinking and rethinking…. However great a man may be, his thoughts, views, plans and methods are a mere reflection of the objective world…[1-53]
Moreover, it is very clear from numerous references in his writings of the post-Liberation period that Mao continued to view practice as a critical element of Marxist epistemology.[1-54]Perhaps his best known statement on this issue from this period is “Where do correct ideas come from?” of May 1963. In this short text, Mao reiterates his belief in the dialectical materialist position on epistemology, and again links reflection and practice as key elements in the process of knowing the objective world:
Countless phenomena of the objective external world are reflected in a man’s brain…. Man’s knowledge makes another leap through the test of practice. This leap is more important than the previous one. For it is this leap alone that can prove the correctness or incorrectness of the first leap, i.e., of the ideas, theories, policies, plans or measures formulated in the course of reflecting the objective external world. There is no other way of testing truth…. Such is the Marxist theory of knowledge, the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge.[1-55]
The persistence in Mao’s thought of the epistemological concepts of reflection and practice and his continued linkage of the two indicates the significance of his employment of Soviet Marxist philosophical categories during the early Yan’an period.
The laws of dialectics and the “negation of the negation”
Another very significant example of this influence which can be drawn from Dialectical Materialism and subsequent writings is Mao’s reference to and utilisation of the so-called “basic laws of materialist dialectics”. Mao detailed these as follows in Dialectical Materialism:
The law of the unity of contradictions; the law of the transformation of quality into quantity and vice versa; the law of the negation of the negation.[1-56]
The first of these “basic laws”, the law of the unity of contradictions (or opposites), was (following the precedent established by orthodox Marxist philosophy) to become the most significant philosophical category in Mao’s thought. While Mao had employed the concept of contradiction in writings prior to 1937,[1-57] his acceptance of this basic law in Dialectical Materialism and his lengthy elaboration of it in On Contradiction established the basis for his continued and increasing use of it. Indeed, from 1937 on, it is very clear that this law had become for Mao more than primus inter pares, and constituted the most fundamental of all laws in Marxism. For example, the opening sentence of On Contradiction states: “The law of contradiction in things, that is, the law of the unity of opposites, is the basic law (zui genben de faze) of materialist dialectics”.[1-58] And some twenty years later, in his speech “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People”, Mao was to reiterate the significance of the law of the unity of opposites:
Marxist philosophy holds that the law of the unity of opposites is the fundamental law (genben guilu) of the universe. This law operates universally, whether in the natural world, in human society, or in man’s thinking. Between the opposites in a contradiction there is at once unity and struggle, and it is this that impels things to move and change. Contradictions exist everywhere, but their nature differs in accordance with the different nature of different things. In any given thing, the unity of opposites is conditional, temporary and transitory, and hence relative, whereas the struggle of opposites is absolute. Lenin gave a very clear exposition of this law.[1-59]
Mao’s writings of the 1950s and 1960s are replete with references to this “most basic law”, and he employed it not only in an abstract philosophical manner, but in analysis of social and political realities.[1-60]
1-49
See Frederick Engels,
1-52
1-53
Jerome Ch’en (ed.),
1-54
See for example Joint Publication Research Service,
1-57
See Nick Knight, “Mao Zedong’s
1-60
For an extensive list of Mao’s references to the law of the unity of opposites and discussion of the formulation of laws (guilü) in Mao’s thought, see N.J. Knight,