At a speech in Hangzhou in December 1965, Mao was to return to the problem of the three categories and to the theme of the primacy of the law of contradiction; and here again, Mao was to describe the third category by the title “affirmation and negation”:
It was said that dialectics had three basic laws and then Stalin said there were four. But I think there is only one basic law – the law of contradiction. Quality and quantity, affirmation and negation, substance and phenomenon, content and form, inevitability and freedom, possibility and reality, etc., are all cases of the unity of opposites.[1-83]
Mao here restates his long-held position that the law of contradiction – the unity of opposites – is the most basic law of materialistic dialectics. What is even more significant, however, is that Mao does not overtly reject the law of the “negation of the negation”; rather, as in his “Sixty Articles on Work Methods” of 1958, Mao chooses to describe the law by the title “affirmation and negation”, a title which immediately suggests a unity of opposites. It is also significant that Mao listed this law along with a number of other categories of materialist dialectics which appear in his Lecture Notes on Dialectical Materialism. This reinforces the point made throughout this Introduction: that the philosophy enunciated in the Lecture Notes, which derived largely from Soviet sources, was to have a marked and sustained influence on the development and structure of Mao’s philosophical thought; and that it is thus illegitimate to dismiss this document as irrelevant to an understanding of Mao’s philosophy because of its derivation from and reliance on Soviet sources.
As a postscript to this discussion of Mao’s supposed rejection of the “negation of the negation” it is worth noting that its level of orthodoxy within Soviet philosophy has been far from static. As Marcuse points out, the concept “disappeared from the list of fundamental dialectical laws” following Stalin’s example of 1938.[1-84] Wetter, too, comments on the “checkered history” of this concept,[1-85] noting that Stalin’s omission of “the law of the negation of the negation” from Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1938) meant the disappearance of this law from Soviet philosophy until after Stalin’s death.[1-86] It is also interesting that on its revival in the mid-1950s, Soviet philosophers turned to the writings of Mao Zedong, especially On Contradiction, as a basis from which to elaborate the “negation of the negation” from a fresh perspective,[1-87] one which concentrated on “preserving what is worthwhile of the old state and in elevating and transforming it to a higher positive level”.[1-88]
At the very least, the “checkered history” of the law of the “negation of the negation” in Soviet philosophy calls into question the propriety of peremptory judgements regarding Mao’s heterodoxy on the issue, particularly when such judgements are based only on a single textual reference to a transcript of a conversation never intended for publication.
Empiricism and rationalism: theory and practice
I have argued above that a fresh perspective on Mao’s philosophical thought emerges if the philosophy contained in his better known essays On Contradiction and On Practice is examined in conjunction with the Lecture Notes on Dialectical Materialism. Nowhere is this judgement borne out more clearly than in the realm of epistemology. Basing their interpretations largely on the epistemology contained in On Practice, many Western Mao scholars have argued that Mao was an empiricist, that for Mao the process of knowledge production commenced with experience (practice) and that the development of theory emerged as a subsequent link in the chain of cognition and was therefore inevitably subordinate to the primacy of experience; it is held, in other words, that for Mao experience produced knowledge.[1-89] I referred earlier to Mao’s stress on practice and reflection as elements of his epistemology, and there is indeed no gainsaying that these occupy a central position in On Practice. Yet if we widen our perspective to incorporate the philosophy contained in On Contradiction, a number of troublesome questions suggest themselves. For example, how are we to reconcile the supposedly rather naive empiricism of On Practice with the overarching theoretical framework of On Contradiction? In this latter essay, Mao elaborates a highly theoretical conception of the universe and its most basic natural law, that of the unity of opposites. Incorporated in this conception are a priori ontological assumptions about the nature of matter, and in particular the belief that all things contain contradictions and that it is the ceaseless emergence and resolution of contradictions which allow change and development. It appears that, at the very least, there exists a tension between this position, with its strident assertion of overriding assumptions about the nature of the universe, and the view that humankind can only come to know the world through a piecemeal process of experience and practice. This tension raises the following questions. Did Mao believe that experience alone could provide the basis for such theoretical generalizations? Did he really contemplate the possibility that experience devoid of any prior theoretical orientation was the foundation on which human knowledge was constructed, including “knowledge” of the nature of the universe?
These questions emerge as a result of widening our perspective from On Practice to include On Contradiction. If we broaden our perspective yet again to incorporate the philosophy contained in the Lecture Notes on Dialectical Materialism, doubts regarding the propriety of branding Mao an undiluted empiricist are redoubled. The reasons for such doubts are as follows. First, the philosophical framework elaborated in the Lecture Notes rests less on an empiricist deference to the category of experience as the basis of knowledge production than on a rationalist conception of a universe in which there exists a rational order of objects constituted in a manner appropriate to the access of human thought.[1-90] That Mao perceived the universe as a rational order is borne out, as we have seen, by his deference to a number of objectively existing universal laws capable of describing the nature and change of the universe. Such universal laws indicate a universe whose structure and development are not random; there is order, logic, progression, ontological uniformity. Such characteristics exist in the very nature of the universe and the objects which comprise it. Objects and the relationships between them are thus assumed to constitute a rational order whose governing principles can be articulated within a rational framework in thought which parallels the external rational structure of the universe. This framework is constituted of a series of concepts (laws, principles, categories) which provide the criteria by which the truth or falsity of statements about reality are to be evaluated. The criteria of truth, from this perspective, appear to be provided by reason much more so than experience.
1-84
Herbert Marcuse,
1-89
See, for example, Rip Bulkeley, “On ‘On Practice’”,
1-90
See also Mao’s views in the post-Liberation period. Mao commented on the unified (