Understanding

Understanding refers to the intuition, insight, or comprehension ability of the nature or content of an object. Kant and Hegel respectively explained understanding from the philosophical perspective. Kant argued that human beings have three innate cognitive powers, namely “sensibility” [Sinnlichkeit], “understanding” [Verstand], and “reason” [Vernunft]. People’s knowledge all starts from sensation (sensibility), and develops from understanding to reason in the end. Kant gave a rich definition of “understanding” and explained it as the spontaneity of knowledge, the ability of thinking, the ability of conception, or the ability of judgment, etc. If we really understand these definitions, we’ll find they actually mean the same thing—the ability to recognize and express laws. This recognition is more effective and closer to the nature of understanding. Sensibility shows people intuition, while understanding gives people laws. Understanding often focuses on the study of phenomena to find a certain law in phenomena. Kant regarded perception and intuition as the premise of understanding, but he argued understanding itself establishes laws for nature. Understanding, as an ability to discover laws in phenomena, integrates various perceptual materials. There can never be another ability to comprehensively unite various things in nature apart from understanding. Therefore, understanding itself is the root of the unification of natural laws and methods. Category can only come from understanding and has nothing to do with perception. The actuality, substantiality, causality and interaction derived from the category of understanding are priori and have universality and necessity. It can be found that Kant’s understanding is not the ability to penetrate and understand objective things and grasp their objective laws on the basis of social practice, but the inherent, fixed and transcendental cognitive ability of human beings, thus falling into transcendental idealism. He argued that what people know is only phenomena, while the objects studied by reason—universe, soul and God—are thing-in-themselves. However, since the thing-in-itself has no empirical materials and are unknowable, Kant’s belief fell into agnosticism.

Hegel started from the basic principle of identity between thinking and existence and criticized Kant’s dualism and agnosticism of separating thinking and existence, phenomenon and essence. Hegel argued that the difference between understanding and rationality is manifested in the difference between the low-level form and the high-level form of cognition. Understanding is “limited”. There is an insurmountable gap between thing-in-itself and understanding. Things themselves are on the other side beyond our reach. Therefore, understanding cannot possibly grasp the essence of objects. Hegel argued that “universality” does not just exist outside, “class” itself cannot be perceived, and that the laws of planetary motion are not written out there in the sky. Therefore, “universality” cannot be seen or heard by people, but only exists for spirit. People, with sensibility and understanding, can only cognize “limited things” or specific things and phenomena, but cannot grasp the “universality”, law or essence of things. The “basis of existence” of things is determined by “universal and divine concepts” and can only be grasped by reason. Kant and Hegel’s thoughts on understanding and reason were narcotic drugs to the working people, misleading them to regard the humiliation and exploitation they suffered in the capitalist system as “pure thoughts” that exist only in their minds, and thus give up the real struggle.

Marx and Engels criticized the idealist theory of understanding of Kant and Hegel and revealed its essence of being the spiritual chains of the laboring people. In The Holy Family, they pointed out that “to rise it is not enough to do so in thought and to leave hanging over our real sensual head the real palpable yoke that cannot be subtilized away with ideas. Yet Absolute Criticism has learnt from Hegel’s Phenomenology at least the art of changing real objective chains that exist outside me into mere ideal, mere subjective chains existing in me, and thus to change all exterior palpable struggles into pure struggles of thought.” Obviously, when criticizing this theory, Marx and Engels mainly revealed the philosophical basis that caused direct harm to it.

In Materialism and Empirio-criticism, Lenin stressed that the existence of matter does not depend on sensation. Matter is primary. Sensation, thought, consciousness (including understanding) are the supreme product of matter organised in a particular way. Lenin pointed out that it is true that all knowledge comes from experience, sensation and perception, but what is “perceptual”, that is to say, is objective reality the source of perception? If you answer yes, then you are a materialist. If you answer no, then you are an incomplete materialist, and you will inevitably fall into subjectivism and agnosticism. Whether you deny the knowability of the thing-in-itself and the objectivity of time, space and causality (like Kant) or you do not allow the idea of the thing-in-itself (like Hume), it is the same anyway. In this case, the incompleteness of your empiricism and philosophy of experience lies in that you deny the objective content of experience and the objective truth of experience. Lenin’s emphasis on different answers to the mutual relations among sensibility, understanding and rationality fundamentally separated materialism and idealism, knowability and agnosticism.

In his On Practice, Mao Zedong criticized the so-called idealist empiricism which confines experience to so-called introspection, and put forward 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—and this is more important—it must manifest itself in the leap from rational knowledge to revolutionary practice.” Although Mao Zedong didn’t directly discuss the relationship between sensibility, understanding and reason, he explained the dialectical relationship between perceptual and rational knowledge in a scientific way, creatively put forward the two leaps of human knowledge, and adhered to that “practice is the criterion for testing the truth in knowledge”, which had great theoretical guidance significance for us to correctly grasp the meaning of “understanding”.