Chapter 62 Where do people's correct ideas come from? [1]

(May 1963) Where do people's correct thoughts come from? Did they fall from the sky? No.Is it inherent in your own mind? No.Man's correct thinking can only come from social practice, from the three social practices of production struggle, class struggle and scientific experiment.People's social existence determines people's thoughts.Once the correct ideas representing the advanced class are mastered by the masses, they will become a material force that transforms society and the world.People have engaged in various struggles in social practice and gained a wealth of experience, with some successes and some failures.Countless phenomena of the objective external world are reflected in a person's brain through his five sense organs - the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and body. At first, knowledge is perceptual.When the material of this perceptual knowledge accumulates a lot, it will make a leap and become rational knowledge, which is thought.This is a cognitive process.This is the first stage in the whole process of cognition, that is, the stage from objective matter to subjective spirit, from existence to thought.Whether the spirit and ideas (including theories, policies, plans, and methods) at this time correctly reflect the laws of the objective external world has not yet been proved, and it is still uncertain whether they are correct. From the spiritual to the material stage, from thought to existence, this is to put the knowledge obtained in the first stage into social practice, to see whether these theories, policies, plans, methods, etc. can achieve the expected success.Generally speaking, those that succeed are correct and those that fail are incorrect, and this is especially true of man's struggle with nature.In social struggles, the forces representing the advanced class sometimes fail, not because their thinking is incorrect, but because, in terms of the balance of forces in the struggle, the advanced forces are not as good as the reactionary forces for the time being, so they fail temporarily. , but one day it will be successful.People's understanding will make another leap after being tested by practice.This leap is more meaningful than the previous one.Because only this leap can prove whether the first leap in cognition, that is, the ideas, theories, policies, plans, methods, etc. obtained from the reflection process of the objective outside world, are correct or wrong, nothing else A way to test the truth.The purpose of the proletariat in knowing the world is to transform the world, and it has no other purpose.A correct understanding often needs to go through many repetitions, from matter to spirit, and from spirit to matter, that is, from practice to knowledge, and from knowledge to practice.This is the Marxist theory of knowledge, the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge.Many of our comrades still do not understand this theory of knowledge.When asked where they get their ideas, opinions, policies, methods, plans and conclusions, eloquent speeches and long articles, they consider the question a strange one and cannot answer it.I also find it incomprehensible that matter can be transformed into spirit, and spirit can be transformed into matter, which is a common leap phenomenon in daily life.Therefore, our comrades should be educated in dialectical materialism and the theory of knowledge in order to correct their thinking, be good at investigation and research, sum up experience, overcome difficulties, make fewer mistakes, do a good job, work hard, and build a great socialist country. And help the oppressed and exploited people in the world to fulfill the great internationalist obligations we should shoulder.

It is published according to "Selected Readings of Mao Zedong's Works (Type B)" published by China Youth Publishing House in 1964. -------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------ note [1] This is a paragraph Mao Zedong added before the ten questions when he reviewed the draft of the "Decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China Concerning Several Issues in Current Rural Work (Draft)" (the first ten articles).