"On Practice" Is So Good It Makes Me Cry (Part 2)

Last night, while working on the rest of my notes on "On Practice," I found that the notes I'd published up to yesterday only left one short section to go. That was honestly a huge mistake on my part.

So today I'm posting the rest of my notes for now, and after this I'll start posting my reading notes on "On Contradiction."

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To reflect a thing fully in its totality, to reflect its essence, to reflect its inherent laws, it is necessary through the exercise of thought to reconstruct the rich data of sense perception, discarding the dross and selecting the essential, eliminating the false and retaining the true, proceeding from the one to the other and from the outside to the inside, in order to form a system of concepts and theories; it is necessary to make a leap from perceptual to rational knowledge.

This short passage actually holds all of Marxist philosophy. To do this, you have to study systematically and master how to distinguish and recognize connection and development, cause and effect, necessity and chance, phenomenon and essence, possibility and reality, content and form, and so on. Only by mastering these concepts can you really form what he calls a system of concepts and theories.

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Rational knowledge depends upon perceptual knowledge and perceptual knowledge remains to be developed into rational knowledge: this is the dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge.

One summary sentence shows the contradictory relationship between perceptual and rational knowledge. The two depend on each other and also constrain each other.

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The history of human knowledge tells us that the truth of many theories is incomplete and that this incompleteness is remedied through the test of practice. Many theories are erroneous and it is through the test of practice that their errors are corrected. That is why practice is the criterion of truth and why "the standpoint of life, of practice, should be first and fundamental in the theory of knowledge." Stalin has well said, "Theory becomes purposeless if it is not connected with revolutionary practice, just as practice gropes in the dark if its path is not illumined by revolutionary theory."

From how much space Chairman Mao gives to stressing the role of practice in the development of knowledge, it's easy to see that practice itself holds an important place in that development.

Only a theory that has been tested by practice has the potential to become truth. And when we work out a method or a theory but never use it in life and concrete practice, what difference is there between that and it not existing at all?

It's like going to great lengths to write a Skill and then never feeding it to your AI. What was the point of writing it?

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In many instances, failures have to be repeated many times before errors in knowledge can be corrected and correspondence with the laws of the objective process achieved, and consequently before the subjective can be transformed into the objective, or in other words, before the anticipated results can be achieved in practice.

Don't try to walk a perfect road.

Countless biographies of famous people tell us that no road is smooth all the way.

The road is winding, but the future is bright.

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Marxism-Leninism has in no way exhausted truth but ceaselessly opens up roads to the knowledge of truth in the course of practice.

That's the greatness of Marxism. It isn't a self-consistent set of logic, or an ivory tower that traps people inside.

It's a sharp tool that lets those who carry it see the road ahead and dare to open up roads into the unknown.

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Discover 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 practice to change both the subjective and the objective world. Practice, knowledge, again practice, and again knowledge. This form repeats itself 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.

When feeling runs this deep, words fail me.