The Quality of Practice

The universality and direct reality of practice is an important philosophical principle put forward by Lenin in his Philosophical Notebooks. Lenin said that “Practice is higher than (theoretical) knowledge, for it has not only the dignity of universality, but also of immediate actuality.”

Practice is the only criterion for testing truth. Human cognition is subjective and limited in terms of its abstract form, but in terms of the content and source it reflects, it is completely objective and actual, and is a reflection of the external actuality. Therefore, to judge whether one’s understanding can correctly reflect the essence of objective reality, i.e., to test whether one’s understanding is true, one must strive to find a bridge and medium that can connect thought and reality, subjectiveness and objectiveness, and such “crossing points” cannot be conceptual things or objective objects themselves but can only be practice. Lenin pointed out that in Hegel’s view, practice serves as a link in the analysis of the process of cognition, and indeed as the transition to objective (“absolute”, according to Hegel) truth. Marx, consequently, clearly sided with Hegel in introducing the criterion of practice into the theory of knowledge. Firstly, practice is universal. Practice does not refer to the activities of individuals, but the sum-total of all human activities in the history. From the perspective of epistemology, people’s knowledge comes from practice, which is the result of sorting out and processing perceptual materials and reflects to a certain extent the universal connection and development laws of the objective world. Therefore, the process of practice is the process of continuously comparing and improving knowledge and the process of raising the universality of knowledge.

Secondly, practice has objective reality. Practice is what the subjective sees in the objective. The process of practice is the process of objectifying people’s subjective knowledge and the process of eliminating one-sidedness and subjectivity of people’s consciousness. The result of practice is the objectified subjective purpose. The result of practice is consistent with people’s subjective cognition, which verifies the truth of cognition, otherwise it would be fallacy. Therefore, to test whether there is truth in people’s knowledge, we must guide human’s new practical activities with the knowledge derived from objective things and answer whether there is truth with the results of practice. It is precisely this dual character that determines that practice is the only criterion to test truth in knowledge.