1. In a class society, everyone lives in a certain class status, and all kinds of thoughts are stamped with the imprint of class.
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2. Marxists believe that only people’s social practice is the criterion for the truthfulness of their understanding of the outside world.
3. If people want to achieve success in their work, that is, to get the expected results, they must make their thoughts conform to the laws of the objective external world. If they do not, they will fail in practice. After failure, people learn lessons from failure and correct their thoughts to adapt to the laws of the external world. Then, they can turn failure into victory. The so-called "failure is the mother of success" and "every failure makes you wiser" is this truth.
4. The standard of truth can only be social practice. The perspective of practice is the primary and fundamental perspective of the epistemology of dialectical materialism.
5. The reason that logical understanding is different from empirical understanding is that empirical understanding pertains to the one-sided, phenomenological, and external connections of things, while logical understanding advances a significant step to reach the entirety, essence, and internal connections of things, exposing the internal contradictions of the surrounding world, thus allowing one to grasp the development of the surrounding world in terms of its overall and internal connections.
6. No matter who wants to understand any matter, it cannot be solved without coming into contact with that matter, that is, living in (practicing in) the environment of that matter.
7. If one wants to directly understand a certain or several matters, one must personally participate in the practical struggles to change reality and those certain or several matters, only then can one touch the phenomena of those matters, and only by participating in the practical struggles to change reality can one expose the essence of those matters and understand them.
8. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear and taste it yourself.
9. I often hear some comrades say a phrase when they cannot bravely accept a work task: 'I have no confidence.' Why is there no confidence? Because they do not have a regular understanding of the content and environment of this work, or they have never come into contact with this type of work, or they have had very little contact, making it impossible to discuss the regularity of this type of work.
10. Only those who subjectively, one-sidedly, and superficially view problems rush to a place without asking about the environmental situation, without looking at the entirety of the matter (the history of the matter and its overall current state), and without touching the essence of the matter (the nature of the matter and its internal connections with other matters), and then self-righteously issue commands, such people are bound to fail.
11. The reason rational things are reliable is precisely because they originate from empirical things; otherwise, rational things would become like water without a source, trees without roots, and would only be unreliable things born out of subjective imagination.
12. A person who is closed to the outside world and completely insulated from the objective external world has no understanding. Understanding starts from experience—this is the materialist view of epistemology. Secondly, understanding must be deepened; the empirical stage of understanding must develop into the rational stage—this is the dialectic of epistemology.
13. To fully reflect the entire matter, to reflect the essence of the matter, and to reflect the internal regularity of the matter, one must go through the process of thinking, refining rich sensory materials to extract the essence, discard the false and preserve the true, and make conceptual and theoretical systems, which requires a leap from empirical understanding to rational understanding.
14. Rational understanding relies on empirical understanding, and empirical understanding needs to develop into rational understanding; this is the epistemology of dialectical materialism.
15. The philosophy of Marxism considers that the important issue is not understanding the regularity of the objective world, and thus being able to explain the world, but rather taking this understanding of objective regularity to actively transform the world.
16. If there is a correct theory, but it is only talked about for a while, shelved, and not implemented, then no matter how good this theory is, it is meaningless. Understanding begins with practice, and after obtaining theoretical understanding through practice, it must return to practice. The dynamic action of understanding is not only manifested in the dynamic leap from empirical understanding to rational understanding, but more importantly, it must also manifest in the leap from rational understanding to revolutionary practice.
17. The reason dialectical materialism is a universal truth is that no matter who practices, they cannot escape its scope.
18. Many theories are incorrect and are corrected through the test of practice. The so-called practice is the standard of truth, and the so-called 'the perspective of life and practice should be the primary and fundamental perspective of epistemology' is justified for this reason.
19. The sum of countless relative truths is absolute truth. The development of objective processes is filled with contradictions and struggles, and the development of human understanding is also filled with contradictions and struggles. All dialectical movements of the objective world can reflect back into human understanding sooner or later.
20. Truth is discovered through practice, confirmed through practice, and developed through practice. From empirical understanding, one actively develops to rational understanding, and from rational understanding, one actively guides revolutionary practice, transforming both the subjective world and the objective world. This cycle of practice, understanding, then practice again, and then understanding again continues infinitely, with each cycle's content progressively reaching a higher level. This constitutes the entirety of the epistemology of dialectical materialism and embodies the unity of knowledge and action in dialectical materialism.
Read Mao's Selected Works more, and you will have new experiences.
