Vol. 6: Figuring It Out Doesn't Count: Why Knowledge Must Return to Practice in "On Practice"

Hi everyone. Today we're wrapping up the "On Practice" series.

At the end of the last post, I left a question: knowledge comes from practice and rises from perceptual to rational knowledge. Why does it then have to go back to practice?

At first this sounds easy to answer. A lot of people's first reaction might be "practice is the sole criterion for testing truth." That's right, of course. But if you've only memorized the line, it's just a slogan, not your own knowledge.

So today I want to take this question apart properly.

Once You've Figured It Out, Are You Done?

In the last two posts, we went through the first half of the theory of knowledge.

Vol. 4 laid out the whole framework: practice → knowledge → again practice → again knowledge, a loop that never stops. Vol. 5 went deep into the link in the loop that's easiest to overlook: perceptual knowledge doesn't turn into rational knowledge on its own. The material has to be processed before that leap can happen.

Now we have a few things in hand.

We know knowledge has to come from practice. We know a feeling isn't a conclusion. We know the material from practice has to be compared, analyzed, and sorted before it can rise to rational knowledge.

But at this point, there's a trap that's very easy to fall into.

Once a judgment that seems very reasonable takes shape, people feel the matter is closed. They've figured it out, analyzed it properly, the logic holds together, so it's done.

Mao is very clear about this in "On Practice":

The truth of any knowledge or theory is determined not by subjective feelings, but by objective results in social practice. Only social practice can be the criterion of truth.

This points to a very plain but very important judgment: what you think is right isn't necessarily right. Only the results of practice can be the final judge.

Figuring it out has never been the finish line.

Why Figuring It Out Doesn't Count

Some people might think: I've already risen from perceptual to rational knowledge, I've analyzed and judged and reached a conclusion that captures a law, so the conclusion should be right, shouldn't it?

That's a natural thought, but that's exactly where the problem lies.

Rational knowledge is formed through processing and analysis, but it's still done inside a person's head. And the head's processing power has limits. You might have missed some material. Your angle of analysis might not be complete. Your own experience and preferences might have nudged you in one direction without your noticing.

More importantly, rational knowledge is distilled from past practice, and it corresponds to past conditions and environments. Reality keeps changing. That the old conditions held doesn't mean the current ones still do.

So rational knowledge has to go back to practice for at least two reasons:

First, to test whether it's right at all. A judgment can make sense however you run it in your head, but only by putting it back into reality and doing it can you know whether it actually works.

Second, to check whether it still holds under new conditions. Conditions change, environments change, and knowledge that was once right may stop applying in a new setting.

These two reasons look simple, but few people really manage them in life. Because once most people have "figured it out," they already feel secure. They feel they're holding an answer and all that's left is to execute.

But executing and testing are two different things. Executing means doing things according to what you already know. Testing means watching the results with doubt while you do it. Do the results match what I expected? If not, is it a problem with execution, or with the knowledge itself?

The difference looks tiny, but it's exactly the most crucial step in the theory of knowledge.

The Lesson of Carb Cycling

I ran into this myself when I was cutting fat.

At first I used carb cycling. It's a very common method in fat-loss circles. Put simply, you alternate high-carb days and low-carb days, so your body keeps a certain calorie deficit without your metabolism dropping too fast.

It really worked well. My weight came down steadily and I felt fine. For a while I thought I'd found a reliable method. As long as I kept eating according to the plan, things would keep moving in the right direction.

At the time that judgment was right, because the results of practice supported it. My weight really was dropping.

The problem came later.

After I'd lost about five kilograms, I found my weight wasn't moving much. My body seemed to have hit a plateau. I was confused, because my diet hadn't changed and my training hadn't changed. By rights I should have kept losing.

Later I realized: I was still eating by the original carb-cycling plan, but my weight had changed, and so had my basal metabolism. At my new weight, the same amount of food no longer created a big enough calorie deficit. The method was the same, but the conditions had changed, and the same plan no longer gave the same results.

It's not just carb cycling. Methods like gradually cutting carbs work the same way. They all need regular adjustment as your weight changes. No single plan can carry you from start to finish.

That taught me something: a method that works doesn't work forever. If the conditions it depends on change, the method has to change with them.

Looking back, that's exactly what "On Practice" is talking about. Carb cycling, as a piece of rational knowledge, had been verified in my earlier practice. But that verification was conditional. It matched my original weight and metabolism. Once the conditions changed, if I didn't put that knowledge back into practice to test and adjust it, it would go from correct knowledge to outdated knowledge.

And being right in an outdated way is, at bottom, no different from being wrong.

Writing This Column

There's another thing, about writing this column.

When I started Life Lessons from Mao's Selected Works, I gave it a direction: leave the politics out and focus on materialist dialectics. In other words, I don't write political commentary or do historical research. I just take apart the dialectics in the Selected Works and map it onto ordinary people's daily lives.

Honestly, at first I wasn't sure about that positioning. The Selected Works of Mao Zedong is, after all, an intensely political work. Strip out the politics and talk only about method: would that work? Would it turn into something neither here nor there? Would readers accept it?

Back then those doubts were just thoughts in my head. I couldn't answer them by imagination alone.

So I started writing.

From Vol. 1 until now, five posts in, I've gradually felt something through the writing. After each post, readers' feedback, how firmly I grasped the content, how well the posts connected to real life, all kept telling me: this direction is right.

I wasn't sure from the start. I confirmed it by writing.

And I noticed something interesting. I'm writing a column about materialist dialectics, and the process of writing it is itself a concrete case of materialist dialectics. I started from an uncertain judgment, tested it through practice (writing), and finally confirmed in practice that it was right.

This and the carb-cycling experience turn out to be two different sides:

Carb cycling taught me that knowledge verified by practice may stop working when conditions change, and needs to be tested again.

Writing the column taught me that knowledge that hasn't been verified by practice, however clearly you've thought it through, can only be known right or wrong once you actually do it.

One is "what's been verified can expire." The other is "what hasn't been verified doesn't count." And both point to the same conclusion: the final judge of knowledge can only be practice.

The Loop Never Stops

Now we can walk through the whole theory of knowledge in "On Practice" from start to finish.

From Vol. 4 to today, these three posts have really been taking one loop apart, beginning to end.

Practice produces perceptions. Perceptions are real, but they aren't conclusions. They're just material. That messy perceptual material has to be processed, compared, analyzed, and sorted, before it can rise to rational knowledge. And once rational knowledge forms, it's still not over. It has to go back to practice to be tested. The test either confirms it, corrects it, or overturns it, and then new knowledge comes out of new practice.

Practice, knowledge, again practice, and again knowledge.

The loop never stops, because conditions change, environments change, and people change too. Stop at any point and take that point as the finish line, and problems appear.

In Vol. 4, I used Ma Su and Guan Yu to illustrate this. Ma Su got stuck at the start. He had no practice at all and took theory straight from the books as truth. Guan Yu got further than Ma Su. He had lots of practice and experience, but he stopped at again practice and again knowledge, and applied past experience directly to a new situation.

Now, having walked the whole loop and looking back, their problem isn't just that they "got stuck at different places." They share the same essence: each of them took one step of the loop for the finish line.

Ma Su thought reading the books was enough. Guan Yu thought experience was enough. But the dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge tells us that no step in this loop is the finish line. After reading you have to practice, after practicing you have to sum up, after summing up you have to go back to practice and test it, and when the test shows the conditions have changed, you practice again and know again.

That's also why I think "On Practice" is much harder than it looks. None of its sentences are complicated, and the ideas aren't deep or obscure. But it demands that you admit something very hard to admit: what you think is right now may not be right forever.

The experience in your hands may expire. The ideas you've figured out may never have been tested. The answer that makes you feel secure may only feel that way because you haven't yet put it back into reality to see if it holds up.

Only by daring to put your knowledge back into practice, and accepting that it may be corrected or even overturned, does knowledge truly move forward.

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This is the last post in the "On Practice" series.

After writing these three, I feel my understanding of "On Practice" is clearer than before. But I know this clearer understanding isn't the finish line either, because I'm still walking the loop myself.

The end point of knowledge isn't figuring it out. It's doing it, testing it, and being ready to have it overturned.

That's probably what "On Practice" most wants to tell us.