This leads to a second and related point. In a number of places in the Lecture Notes on Dialectical Materialism, Mao insists that no ontological distinction can be made between matter and thought. As we noted in an earlier section, Mao believed thought to be a particular form of matter; that is, matter in motion. Given this insistence, it follows that thought must inevitably obey the same natural laws as does matter generally. It can do no other. Consequently, the conception of a universe possessed of a rational structure refers equally to mind and thought as it does to an external reality. Both thought and reality (in ontological terms the distinction is an artificial one) are ordered in the same way and governed by the same imperatives. It is thus entirely possible for the rational structure of the universe to be replicated in thought, a position which emerges in the pages of both On Contradiction and the Lecture Notes on Dialectical Materialism.
Third, in all of these philosophical essays we find references to the “essence” of objects. The conception of an “essence” of a phenomenon is one which is entirely foreign to the empiricist tradition to which Mao is so often purported to belong. From the empiricist (or positivist) perspective, no distinction is made, or can be made, between the surface appearance of a phenomenon and its “true” nature; the data apprehended by sensory perceptions (the visual character of a phenomenon, for example) is all that is available for the human subject of cognition to arrive at knowledge of a phenomenon, and indeed all that is necessary. If Mao had been a genuine empiricist, the concept of an “essence” would have been absent from his philosophical writings, and yet it is very clearly present. And the reason is that Mao did not subscribe to the empiricist assumption that it is possible to know an object of cognition on the basis of a sensory familiarity with its surface appearance. This latter position was guilty of superficiality and one-sidedness, he believed, and the subject of cognition had to move beyond this and progress in a dialectical process to a deeper and deeper understanding of the nature of a phenomenon until its “essence” was grasped; and only when this had been achieved was true knowledge created.
Fourth, we can find in a variety of the Mao texts an explicit rejection of empiricism (jingyanzhuyi). It must be noted, however, that Mao appeared to understand the epistemology of empiricism as one which limited the subject of cognition to a one-sided and superficial perception of its object. For example, in the Lecture Notes on Dialectical Materialism Mao attacks the “strident realism” of Machism for its view that “truth is already established in final form in sense perceptions”.[1-91] This “narrow viewpoint”[1-92] was empiricist in preventing a dialectical progression from sense perceptions to rational knowledge and back again; it remained locked in the stage of sense perceptions. Mao’s rejection of “empiricism” did not, therefore, betoken a rejection of experience, and it remained an important element of his epistemology.
Given the importance of the concept of experience in Mao’s epistemology, on what basis is it possible to challenge the received view that Mao’s epistemology was an undiluted empiricism? The answer lies in the elaboration in the Lecture Notes on Dialectical Materialism of a theoretical framework which could provide direction and focus to the process of experience. As we have noted, the most fundamental laws of the universe are articulated in these Lecture Notes, laws seemingly not capable of formulation through empiricism with its deference to experience. Such laws were of necessity posited a priori, as premises which constituted the foundation for the epistemological project. An example is Mao’s insistence on the materiality of the universe:
The first condition of belonging to the materialist camp is the acknowledgement that the material world is separate from and exists independently of human consciousness -it existed prior to the appearance of humankind, and following the appearance of humankind it remained separate from and existed independently of human consciousness. The recognition of this point is the fundamental premise of all scientific research.[1-93]
