Vol. 4: The Theory of Knowledge in "On Practice"

Hi everyone. Today is May 4, so you're probably all still on the May Day holiday.

I want to start today's post with two stories from the Three Kingdoms.

When Ma Su lost Jieting, all he could think about was that he held the high ground. The military manuals describe that kind of terrain as easy to defend and hard to attack, so he believed he had every advantage the ground could give.

His "belief" really came from those manuals: other people's experience, other people's theory. He himself had almost no real combat experience. His deputy Wang Ping urged him again and again to make camp at the foot of the mountain, right across the road, but he wouldn't listen, because his head was full of what the books said.

We all know how it ended. Jieting was lost, and Zhuge Liang tearfully had Ma Su executed.

Now look at Guan Yu losing Jing Province.

Guan Yu was nothing like Ma Su. Ma Su was a bookish man who had barely fought and still dared to hold forth. Guan Yu? He had been fighting since the Yellow Turban Rebellion. He killed Hua Xiong before his wine went cold, beheaded Yan Liang and slew Wen Chou, crossed five passes and killed six generals, went to a feast in enemy territory with only his blade. A lifetime of storms, truly a veteran of a hundred battles.

But precisely because of all those great victories, his experience told him he was invincible.

Was that experience right? On the battlefields of the past, yes. The problem was that he applied past experience directly to a new situation that had completely changed.

Wu changed its grand commander. Lü Meng pretended to be ill, Lu Xun took over and wrote Guan Yu a letter full of flattery. Guan Yu read it, laughed out loud, decided Wu was nothing to worry about, and moved the troops defending the rear of Jing Province to attack Fancheng.

He was judging by decades of accumulated experience and decided Wu wasn't worth worrying about. But he didn't analyze the new situation afresh. He didn't see that the Sun-Liu alliance was already cracking, or that Lü Meng's show of weakness was the prelude to crossing the river in white robes.

The result: through carelessness, he lost Jing Province.

You see, Ma Su and Guan Yu: one was defeated by books, the other by his own experience.

Ma Su's mistake is easy to spot, because he had never practiced at all. He took other people's ideas as truth and dared to act on them. Anyone can see that's fighting a war on paper.

But Guan Yu's mistake? Much harder to see than Ma Su's. Because Guan Yu really was capable. His experience was won with real swords and spears, so when he used it to make judgments, it was hard for those around him, and even for him, to notice anything wrong.

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Friends who read my post last week have probably caught on already.

Last week, through "On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party," I talked about what kind of mistake subjectivism is. In that post I mentioned two phenomena under subjectivism: dogmatism and empiricism.

Ma Su is dogmatism. No thinking, just take the book and start executing, without even a starting point of his own.

Guan Yu is empiricism. He had practice early on, but once he had built up experience he stopped pursuing progress and made his accumulated experience into a new dogma.

Where exactly did each go wrong? The dogmatist's mistake is resting his knowledge on other people's practical experience. The empiricist's experience does come from his own practice, but as things develop, he never tests his old experience through practice again.

In last week's post I pointed out that the mistake of subjectivism is, in the end, a mistake in the theory of knowledge.

So what is a theory of knowledge? If we want to recognize and overcome subjectivism at the root, we need to understand another theory of knowledge, one distinct from subjectivism: the dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge.

Mao wrote countless great essays in his life, but boil it down and he spent his whole life practicing dialectical materialism and proving it right. And he had long since put the question of knowledge into an essay: "On Practice."

Today, let's start from "On Practice" and get a systematic understanding of the theory of knowledge in it.

My Story with "On Practice"

In my life, whenever I meet someone who wants to read the Selected Works but is afraid to, I recommend "On Practice" and "On Contradiction." I've written before that these two essays are the essence of Mao Zedong Thought. Anyone studying Mao Zedong Thought and materialist dialectics can't get around them.

The first time I read the Selected Works, I didn't start with these two. I only got to them at the very end of Volume I. Honestly, I was seventeen then. The writing felt highly abstract, duller than Dream of the Red Chamber in its old-style language, but I gritted my teeth and read on.

I read it, but I couldn't put it to use.

Back then "On Contradiction" affected me more than "On Practice." Yet looking at it now, as a theoretical work, "On Contradiction" carries far more information and complexity than "On Practice." So why was "On Practice" the harder one to digest?

The answer is hard and simple at the same time.

Later I read the Selected Works a few more times and gradually seemed to understand. But over those years I was changing all the time. I went through eighteen and nineteen, from high school to university, then started working. My social age and social identity changed qualitatively, and I went through many things only adults go through.

And "On Practice" hadn't changed a single word, yet every word had changed.

Maybe that's the magic of "On Practice." I read it when I was young and didn't understand it. That was fine. The words worked their way mechanically into my head. A few years later, still young, I read it again. I had read every word before, but every word set off a chemical reaction with my old self.

It was a kind of sudden awakening.

That feeling is hard to describe, so let me write it out in real words instead.

And that's the end of my story.

The Theory of Knowledge in "On Practice"

Why the Theory of Knowledge Matters

To be frank, I think a lot of people hear the term "theory of knowledge" and find it baffling.

What is a theory of knowledge? Simply put, it's a theory that explains where human knowledge comes from.

Any normal person hearing that would say: got too much time on your hands? Go get a job. Who spends all day studying where their own knowledge comes from?

I think that's exactly the problem. All our lives we've been told to build the right "three outlooks," on the world, on life, and on values. But how many people have ever really thought systematically about their own three outlooks?

Honestly, the dread people feel facing their own three outlooks is exactly the same as the dread they feel facing a theory of knowledge.

As I see it, part of the reason is that Chinese people are mostly practical and don't go deep into summing up such highly theoretical self-knowledge. Another part is that many people think that in this society, making money comes first, and things like the three outlooks or theories of knowledge are for people with money and time to spare.

But is that really so?

If this kind of thinking needs rich material conditions, why did Mao write "On Contradiction" and "On Practice" during the Party's hardest period?

Think about what the situation was like in 1937.

So why does the theory of knowledge matter? Because the theory of knowledge and the world outlook are inseparable. You can simply think of it this way: when we think about questions of knowledge, we're really thinking about our world outlook.

And what's a world outlook? Simply put, it's how people see the relationship between themselves and the world, and between humanity and the world.

The theory of knowledge decides how you answer that question.

Now, at last, we've reached the heart of today's post.

The Dialectical-Materialist Theory of Knowledge

In "On Practice," Mao divides the development of knowledge into four levels.

The bottom level is practice. All human knowledge comes from initial practice, but that practice doesn't produce theory directly. It produces a faint perception.

The second level is knowledge, the perception I just mentioned. At this level knowledge divides into perceptual knowledge and rational knowledge, which develop and change as a person's practice accumulates.

When knowledge rises to rational knowledge, then through the effect of a great deal of practice, a person can distill the laws of things from their knowledge, and those laws are already fairly theoretical.

The third level is applying the distilled theory to practice again to test whether it's right.

Why is there this step? Because the materialist view of development holds that everything develops. That's why environments and conditions keep changing, past practice becomes old practice, and new practice is needed to test the theory that came out of old practice.

And practicing again means knowing again.

Practice, knowledge, again practice, and again knowledge.

That's how knowledge develops in dialectical materialism.

Back to Ma Su and Guan Yu

Now that we have the framework of the dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge in hand, let's look back at Ma Su and Guan Yu. We'll see them more clearly.

Where did Ma Su get stuck? At the very beginning. He had no practice at all and skipped the starting point of the whole loop, taking other people's rational knowledge from books as his own. For him, the loop never even began.

And Guan Yu? Guan Yu got much further than Ma Su. He had practice, lots of it, and built up his own knowledge from it. But he stopped at "again practice" and "again knowledge." His past knowledge wasn't wrong, but the conditions had changed and the situation had changed, and he didn't put his old knowledge back into the new practice to test it again.

That's exactly what makes empiricism frightening. Unlike dogmatism, you can't see through it at a glance. It hides inside real success, wearing the coat of "I have experience," and people sink into it without noticing.

Dialectical materialism never denies the value of experience. It accepts practice as the starting point of knowledge. But at the same time, it demands that you never treat the knowledge from any one round of practice as eternal, unchanging truth. When the conditions change and the situation changes, your knowledge has to change with them.

Practice, knowledge, again practice, and again knowledge.

The loop never stops.

So after reading this post, what do you have in hand?

A framework, one you can use to check your own process of knowing.

On the question of knowledge, the answer dialectical materialism gives is neither "read more books" nor "trust your own experience." It's that loop: practice, knowledge, again practice, and again knowledge, never stopping.

Back to the question at the start of this series: why is subjectivism a mistake in the theory of knowledge? It should be clear now. The dogmatist has no practice. The empiricist has stopped knowing again. Both are stuck at some point in the loop, and both take the place where they're stuck for the finish line.

The dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge tells us there is no finish line.

With this framework, when you spot subjectivism, you won't just say on a hunch that "this person is too subjective." You'll be able to say which step they're stuck on.

Of course, we still haven't touched the most crucial question in the theory of knowledge: how does the leap between perceptual and rational knowledge happen? Why do some people, after a lifetime of doing things, distill real laws, while others just pile up experience?

That question will wait for the next post.