Comprehensiveness of Truth

One basic property of truth, referring to that truth is a comprehensive reflection of the nature and law of objective things. Lenin pointed out that truth is comprehensive and consists of phenomena, the sum of all aspects of reality and their (mutual) relationships.

Since concrete things that exist objectively are the unity of diverse aspects and have mutual connections with other things, to achieve the consistency with a specific object, one understanding must comprehensively reflect all aspects and various connections of the object. Therefore, truth is a comprehensive and unified understanding of all diverse aspects, and thus has comprehensiveness. One understanding cannot become a truth about a specific thing if it only reflects one aspect of the object and fails to cover the whole thing. Lenin pointed out in his Philosophical Notebooks that one single existence (object, phenomenon, etc.) (merely) is one aspect of a concept (truth); truth needs other aspects of the reality. The comprehensiveness of truth requires us to try our best to understand and grasp the objective matter as a whole. Lenin pointed out that to truly understand things, one must learn and clearly understand all aspects, all connections and “intermediaries” of them. We may never succeed to fully achieve this, but the requirement of comprehensiveness could prevent mistakes and rigidities. Since objective things are always moving and changing, truth is also constantly developing and will never be finally defined. The comprehensiveness of truth requires us to understand truth as a process.