Mao Zedong On Dialectical Materialism полностью

Produce[3-376] the truth through practice, and again through practice verify and develop the truth. Start from perceptual knowledge and actively develop it into rational knowledge; then start from rational knowledge and actively guide revolutionary prctice to change both the subjective and the objective world. Practice, knowledge, again practice, and again knowledge. This form develops[3-377] in endless cycles, and with each cycle the content of practice and knowledge rises to a higher level. Such is the whole of the dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge, and such is the dialectical-materialist theory of the unity of knowing and doing.

Source: Takeuchi Minoru (ed.), Mao Zedong ji bujuan [Supplements to Collected Writings of Mao Zedong] (Tokyo: Sososha, 1983‒1986), Vol. 5, pp. 240‒278. In this translation, words shown in bold type are those incorporated into the official text of On Contradiction in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. I, pp. 311‒347. Translated and annotated by Nick Knight.

[p. 240] This law is the basic law of dialectics. Lenin said: “Dialectics in the proper sense is the study of contradictions in the very essence of objects.” Therefore, Lenin often called this law the essence of dialectics; he also called it the kernel of dialectics. Because of this, in our study of dialectics, discussion should commence from this problem, and moreover should receive somewhat closer attention than other problems.

This question includes many problems, and these are:

The two views of development;

the law of identity in formal logic and the law of contradiction in dialectics;

the universality of contradiction; the particularity of contradiction;

the principal contradiction and the principal aspect of a contradiction;

the identity and struggle of a contradiction;[4-378]the place of antagonism in contradiction.[4-379]

These problems will be explained in sequence below.

Throughout the history of human thought (sixiang),[4-380] there have been two conceptions concerning the development of the world,[4-381] the metaphysical view[4-382]of development, and the dialectical view of development. What are the differences between these two views of development?[4-383]

Another name for metaphysics isxuan-xue, and this occupied a dominant position in the thought of former times. The content of this philosophy was an explanation of those things supposedly outside experience, that is, a theory which discussed absolutes and essences, etc. In modern philosophy, so-called metaphysics is a method of thought which employs a static viewpoint to observe things, and which holds that all the different things in the world and all their characteristics have been forever unchanged. This type of thought prevailed in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe.

With the arrival of the present era, namely the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, because of the results of the class struggle and the development of science, dialectical thought rapidly strode onto the world stage. But metaphysics, in the form also of vulgar evolutionism (vulgar, that is superficial, simple), stubbornly opposed dialectics.