ON CONTRADICTION
August 1937
[This essay on philosophy was written by
Comrade Mao Tse-tung after his essay "On Practice" and with the same object
of overcoming the serious error of dogmatist thinking to be found in the Party
at the time. Originally delivered as lectures at the Anti-Japanese Military and
Political College in Yenan, it was revised by the author on its inclusion in
his Selected Works.]
The law of contradiction in things, that is, the law of the unity
of opposites, is the basic law of materialist dialectics. Lenin said,
"Dialectics in the proper sense is the study of contradiction in the
very essence of objects." [1] Lenin often called this law the essence of
dialectics; he also called it the kernel of dialectics. [2] In studying this law, therefore, we cannot but touch upon a
variety of questions, upon a number of philosophical problems. If we can become
clear on all these problems, we shall arrive at a fundamental understanding of
materialist dialectics. The problems are: the two world outlooks, the
universality of contradiction, the particularity of contradiction, the
principal contradiction and the principal aspect of a contradiction, the
identity and struggle of the aspects of a contradiction, and the place of
antagonism in contradiction.
The criticism to which the idealism of the Deborin school has been
subjected in Soviet philosophical circles in recent years has aroused great
interest among us. Deborin's idealism has exerted a very bad influence in the
Chinese Communist Party, and it cannot be said that the dogmatist thinking in
our Party is unrelated to the approach of that school. Our present study of
philosophy should therefore have the eradication of dogmatist thinking as its
main objective.
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