Analysis

Analysis is a method of dividing the whole thing into various parts, aspects and attributes and examining them respectively in mind. It is a necessary stage and approach to understand the whole object and its essence, and one of the methods of dialectical logic. Objective things are the contradictory unity of concrete diversity. These parts, aspects and attributes are interrelated in the unity. Without analysis, it is impossible to know specific things and grasp the essence of things through observing complex phenomena. Therefore, dialectical analysis is to discover the basic and essential things of things that connect various aspects through making investigation of various parts, aspects and attributes of things.

Bacon summed up the achievements of natural science at that time philosophically and put forward the basic principle of empiricism that knowledge starts from experience. He argued that what really exist in nature are individual objects that move according to certain laws, and the task of philosophy is to know the movement of these individual objects through applying analytical methods. Bacon one-sidedly emphasized analysis and regarded it as the only way to acquire knowledge. Making scientific experiments and applying analytical methods to rationally grasp the characteristics of things marked the budding of materialism. Although Kant admitted both analysis and synthesis, he still opposed analysis and synthesis in his transcendental logic. Hegel, based on the theoretical horizon of objective idealism, made a dialectical interpretation of analysis and synthesis for the first time. He argued that philosophical methods are both analytical and comprehensive, and both are the results of externalization of ideas. Due to different research objects and practical purposes, the analysis methods used are also different, such as qualitative analysis, quantitative analysis, causal analysis, systematic analysis, and structural analysis, etc.

Marxist classical writers critically inherited the rational thought of analysis in the history of philosophy, deepened their understanding of dialectical analysis methods in theory and practice, and pointed out the one-sidedness of using analysis methods in isolation. Engels pointed out in his Dialectics of Nature that “with all the induction in the world we would never have got to the point of becoming clear about the process of induction. Only the analysis of this process could accomplish this. Induction and deduction belong together as necessarily as synthesis and analysis. Instead of one-sidedly lauding one to the skies at the expense of the other, we should seek to apply each of them in its place, and that can only be done by bearing in mind that they belong together, that they supplement each other.” Induction and deduction, synthesis and analysis have advantages and shortcomings. They should supplement and facilitate each other. None of them should be pushed to an extreme end in a metaphysical way. Engels criticized the one-sidedness of pushing analytical methods to be absolute and polarised. He pointed out that the “metaphysical” habit of mind had been formed and led to the restrictedness unique in the following centuries after the studying method of not seeing things as in motion but static, not essentially changing but fixed, not alive but dead was introduced by Bacon and Locke from natural science to philosophy. The method of dialectical analysis is to grasp the essence of things from the perspective of moving and changing. Examining things in a static and fixed manner will inevitably lead to metaphysical one-sidedness.

Marx provided a paradigm for studying capitalist economic phenomena by using analytical methods. Lenin pointed out that: “In his Capital, Marx first analyses the simplest, most ordinary and fundamental, most common and everyday relation of bourgeois (commodity) society, a relation encountered billions of times: the exchange of commodities. In this very simple phenomenon (in this ‘cell’ of bourgeois society) analysis reveals all the contradictions (or the germs of all the contradictions) of modern society.” Through analysis, Marx grasped the generality of the capitalist society by studying individual cases, and revealed the essence of the surplus value of the working class production being possessed by the capitalists and distributed among the whole capitalist group according to certain economic rules. He scientifically grasped the special laws of motion in capitalist society. Marx skillfully used the dialectical analysis method to summarize the essential relation of things through observing phenomena and revealed the objective law of the development and decline of capitalist society.

The contradiction analysis method of materialist dialectics requires people to make concrete analysis of concrete conditions. Lenin pointed out in his article “Communism” that the essence and living soul of Marxism is the concrete analysis of concrete conditions. Lenin’s regarding “concrete analysis of concrete conditions” as the “most essential thing” and “living soul” of Marxism enhanced the recognition of the contradiction analysis method. Mao Zedong reiterated Lenin’s thought in On Contradiction that, the most essential thing in Marxism, the living soul of Marxism, is the concrete analysis of concrete conditions. Making concrete analysis of concrete conditions is to grasp the essence through observing the phenomenon, grasp the necessity through studying coincidence, and develop dynamic, changing, comprehensive and systematic understanding of things, and learn the essential laws of objects. Mao Zedong emphasized that, “The analytical method is dialectical. By analysis, we mean analysing the contradictions in things. And sound analysis is impossible without intimate knowledge of life and without real understanding of the pertinent contradictions.” Always proceeding from reality and applying a dialectical analysis method of making investigation and survey of the reality is true to the Marxist ideological guideline.