Mao Zedong On Dialectical Materialism полностью

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,

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: