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.
