I agree that it's unambiguous that what Mao wrote is "correct ideas,"
rather than "the correct ideas."
^^^
In fairness to the Swedisth translator, though, it should be noted that
Chinese does not use a definite article like "the" (or le/la/les); so
it's not as if he added the word where the original would have had one if
it was supposed to be there.)
On Tue, 7 Nov 2006, Leif Strandberg wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I checked my Little Red Book (from 1968) and saw that Mao wrote about three
> (3) kinds av social practice:
>
> the stuggle for production
>
> the class struggle
>
> and
>
> scientific experiments
>
> (p 206)
>
> Just a note from Sweden - where we had a conflicted conversation about just
> that quote - as the Swedish translator wrote;
>
> Where do the (sic) correct ideas come from....
>
> But Mao wrote "correct ideas".
>
> It was interesting to look in the old book again - esp after reading Jung
> Chang's and Jon Halliday's book Mao The unknown story.
>
> Leif
>
> Sweden
>
>
> 2006-11-05 kl. 16.51 skrev Tony Whitson:
>
>> Actually, Mao was attempting to render Marxist theory in a way that would
>> be accessible. His essay "On Practice" ["Shijian Luen" - could be
>> translated "On Praxis"]. The English is at
>> http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/
>> mswv1_16.htm
>> & that site would have it in many other languages as well.
>>
>> This is one of the essays that everybody in China studied during the
>> Cultural Revolution. I bet many knew it almost by heart. When Mao wrote
>> for the masses, he was very deliberate about limiting the vocabulary so
>> that everyone could read it (which was a good thing for second-year
>> students of Chinese in places like the US!); but he doesn't shy away from
>> presenting concepts like "social praxis" in a theoretically rich way.
>>
>> As I recall the standard English version of the slogan (which I don't see
>> now, and which might actually be not from this text itself):
>>
>> "Where do correct ideas come from? From social practice, and from nowhere
>> else."
>>
>> This was pretty straightforward Marxism, against Hegelian or other
>> idealisms.
>>
>> On Sun, 5 Nov 2006, Jay Lemke wrote:
>>
>> ...
>>>
>>> Praxis, as I understand it, is not activism. It is the near-fusion of
>>> practice and theoretical understanding, with the latter informed by
>>> participation in practice, and informing an always-learning and
>>> ever-changing practice. I was, of course, quoting Mao a bit
>>> provocatively in regard to correct ideas coming from the people, and
>>> assumed it was clear what people he was referring to. He was speaking,
>>> in context, of course, to cadres working with the masses, and he was
>>> talking about praxis without using the formal vocabulary.
>>>
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>
> _______________________________________________
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>
Tony Whitson
UD School of Education
NEWARK DE 19716
twhitson@udel.edu
_______________________________
"those who fail to reread
are obliged to read the same story everywhere"
-- Roland Barthes, S/Z (1970)
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