Thinking

Thinking has two meanings. Broadly speaking, it refers to the philosophical category synonymous with consciousness and in contrast to matter. In a narrow sense, it refers to the category synonymous with rational knowledge in contrast to perceptual knowledge. Thinking is a highly organized substance, i.e., the function of the human brain. The human brain is a thinking organ. Thinking is a dynamic, generalized and indirect reflection process of the human brain on the real world, including logical and visual thinking, usually logical thinking. Engels pointed out in Anti-Dühring that thinking and consciousness are products of the human brain and that man himself is a product of nature, which has developed in and along with its environment. Marxism is complete materialist on the issue of the formation and development of thinking.

Thinking is social. Thinking is a unique reflection form of people in society. Its generation and development are closely linked with social existence and language. Only in society can thinking exist and develop. Language is the tool of thinking, and thinking can only be carried out in the form of language. Marx expounded the close connection between thinking, language and society in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844: Not only is the material of my activity given to me as a social product (as is even the language in which the thinker is active); my own existence is social activity, and therefore that which I make of myself, I make of myself for society and with the consciousness of myself as a social being. Social existence determines the generation and development of human thinking. Thinking activities can only be carried out in the language product of society. Human beings, as social existence, determines the sociality of thinking.

Thinking is practical. Thinking is carried out on the basis of practice through analysis and synthesis of acquired perceptual materials, which are the direct basis of thinking. Thinking can not only reflect and understand the objective world actively and grasp the laws, but can also react to the objective world actively through practice and formulate corresponding plans and measures according to certain purposes to transform the world. Marx pointed out in Theses On Feuerbach that “the question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking, in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.” Thinking exists and develops in practice, to prove its actuality and strength and test its truth.

Thinking is indirect and general. Thinking, as an advanced form of human consciousness, is an indirect and generalized reflection of objective things in human mind. The so-called indirectness means that thinking can construct a logical theoretical system from phenomena to essence through direct and perceptual things and through abstract forms of thinking such as concepts, judgments and reasoning, reflecting the essential attributes and laws of motion of objective things. The so-called generality refers to that thinking can process the materials obtained at the stage of perceptual knowledge, summarizing general laws from a large number of individual phenomena and generalizing the relatively more essential and regular connections from many characteristics. It is a process from concrete to abstract and then from abstract to concrete. Mao Zedong pointed out in On Practice that: “Fully to reflect a thing in its totality, to reflect its essence, to reflect its inherent laws, it is necessary through the exercise of thought to reconstruct the rich data of sense perception, discarding the dross and selecting the essential, eliminating the false and retaining the true, proceeding from the one to the other and from the outside to the inside, in order to form a system of concepts and theories—it is necessary to make a leap from perceptual to rational knowledge.” The indirectness and generality of thinking determine that men’s grasp of objective things and their laws is a gradually deepening process.

Thinking, as a philosophical category synonymous with consciousness and spirit, is opposite to “existence”. The relationship between thinking and existence is a basic question of philosophy. Different answers to this question lead to the materialist and idealist camp in philosophy. Lenin pointed out that “the question here is…of the opposition of materialism to idealism, of the difference between the two fundamental lines in philosophy. Are we to proceed from things to sensation and thought? Or are we to proceed from thought and sensation to things? The first line, i.e., the materialist line, is adopted by Engels. The second line, i.e., the idealist line, is adopted by Mach.” Marx and Engels founded dialectical materialism precisely because they scientifically solved this basic question of philosophy—the relationship between thinking and existence. It was also precisely because Chinese Marxists adhered to the basic principles of Marxist philosophy and carried out theoretical innovation in practice that they established the ideological line of “seeking truth from facts”. Correctly understanding and grasping the philosophical connotation, characteristics and basic principles are conducive to upholding the ideological line of dialectical materialism and seeking truth from facts, and preventing subjectivism and voluntarism in work.