Combining Marx With Kant in China

Combining Marx with Kant: The Philosophical Anthropology of Li Zehou
Author(s): Woei Lien Chong

Source: Philosophy East and West, Vol. 49, No. 2, "Subjectality" : Li Zehou and His
Critical Analysis of Chinese Thought (Apr., 1999), pp. 120-149
Published by: University of Hawai'i Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1400199
Accessed: 10-08-2017 23:09 UTC
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1400199?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
University of Hawai'i Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Philosophy East and West
This content downloaded from 46.177.38.27 on Thu, 10 Aug 2017 23:09:30 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
COMBINING MARX WITH KANT: THE PHILOSOPHICAL
ANTHROPOLOGY OF LI ZEHOU
Woei Lien Chong ])i?

Researcher at the Documentation and Research Centre for Contemporary
China, Sinological Institute, Leiden University
Among those interested in contemporary Chinese thought, Li Zeh

needs any introduction. The basic facts of his long and eventful c
known. Born in Changsha in 1930, he has devoted his life's work
Chinese thought and aesthetics.' Already as a young man, he m
himself when he joined the "aesthetics debate" in the 1950s, putting
of beauty that differed both from Zhu Guangqian Yjtf, a disciple
founder of modern Chinese aesthetics, and Cai Yi ,y, who defe
Leninist position.2 One of the earliest critics of dogmatic Marxism
China, Li became a paramount figure of the post-Mao "Enlightenm
contribution to the intellectual ferment in the 1980s known as "culture fever" has
been the focus of numerous publications in various languages.3 Last but not least, he
is the author of a monumental commentary on Kantian philosophy, prepared under
extremely difficult circumstances when he was forced by the "Gang of Four" to
undergo "political reeducation" at a May Seventh cadre school.4 Following the
bloody crackdown on the 1989 protest movement, he became the target of two
years of intense criticism in the official press for being an advocate of "bourgeois
liberalism," finally leaving the country in early 1992. Since then, Li has lived and
worked outside China, only returning for occasional visits.
As is almost inevitable for an author with such an encyclopedic oeuvre, there
has been a tendency in the secondary literature to focus only on a small number of
Li's writings, while the meaning and aims of his life's work as a whole have
remained unclear. Especially well known are those essays in which Li has provided
convenient catchwords to summarize certain phenomena in modern Chinese his-
tory. One famous example is his wordplay on the conservative adage from the turn
of the century that "Chinese learning is the essence, Western learning is for practical
purposes" (Zhongti Xiyong tPBf). In Li's view, it is, rather, "Western learning
that is the essence, and China has to apply it" (Xiti Zhongyong 4*rpft), a remark
that, predictably, offended quite a few people.5 Another of his much-quoted state-
ments is that the Chinese enlightenment (qimeng fp .) process came to a premature
end in the nineteenth century when it was pushed aside by the nationalistic concern
to save the country from foreign aggression (jiuwang i*t).6
The attention that these strikingly unorthodox statements have aroused is justi-
fied, as it makes clear that Li's voice was a forceful one in the explosion of criticism
in the 1980s against the Cultural Revolution and what was felt to be the persisting
negative influence of Chinese culture and tradition on the modernization process.
120 Philosophy East & West Volume 49, Number 2 April 1999 120-149
? 1999 by University of Hawai'i Press
However, these particular texts do not belong to what Li regards as the body of his
philosophical writings, and, indeed, can only be properly understood when read in
the context of the latter. Particularly important in this respect is Li's monumental
commentary on Kant, which is seldom addressed in the secondary literature due to
its inaccessibility to the nonspecialist. The general feeling seems to be that Li's
commentary on Kant, his history of Chinese thought,7 his aesthetics,8 and his social
criticism can all be dealt with separately, as if they are totally unconnected. In real-
ity, this separation is artificial and persistently obscures the major questions that
inform Li's oeuvre as a whole.
What are these major questions? I would argue that they can be discovered by
taking as our starting point Li's own claims about the nature and goals of his philos-
ophy. In the first place, we have to take very seriously his statement that he is a
Marxist who wants to renew Marx's doctrine by combining it with Kant's. That this
claim has not yet been given the full weight it deserves is probably because its
meaning is unclear until Li's commentary on Kant is analyzed-and this, as already
noted, has been done by few commentators. In the second place, we have to pay
careful attention to Li's statement that his philosophy is an "ontology of human
subjectivity" (renlei zhuti de benti lun A ht j~4t* )j, or an "anthropology of
human practice" (shijianlun de renleixue S;t .At) . In other words, his aim
is to formulate a philosophical anthropology-a philosophy about what constitutes
the essence of humankind-revolving around the key concepts of "practice" (shijian
1A) and "subjectivity" (zhuti t1i). It is, Li states, because human beings possess
"subjectivity" and engage in "practice" that they are different from animals. The
meaning and significance of Li's philosophy of human nature will be analyzed in this
article on the basis of the Kant commentary and the Essays on the History of Chinese
Thought.
It was precisely Li's desire to formulate a new philosophy of human nature in
post-Mao China that prompted him to combine Marx and Kant: while Marx focused
on the crucial aspect of the capacity of the collective human subject to engage in
economic production by means of "tools," Kant provided Li with the philosophical
framework to reflect on the mental and ideal aspects of human nature, that is, the
faculties of knowledge, ethics, and aesthetics. While Marx had dealt with the mate-
rial infrastructure of human existence, Kant had addressed the spiritual super-
structure. The fact that Li turned to Kant was significant in itself: he thereby opened a
philosophical road to a treatment of intellectual and spiritual phenomena that
reduced them neither to class, as in the Mao period, nor to the epiphenomena of
matter, as in vulgar materialism. Kant was attractive to Li because he dealt with
consciousness in its own right and on its own terms, raising three momentous ques-
tions about the meaning of human existence: (1) "What can we know?" (2) "What
should we do?" and (3) "What may we hope for?" In Li's view, these philosophical
questions had to be taken up again in order to provide the Chinese with the possi-
bility of making their own life choices and finding their way out of the social and
cultural vacuum of post-Mao China. He watched the various intellectual debates in
the mid- and late 1970s with increasing apprehension, since he felt that, far from
Woei Lien Chong 121
pointing toward ways out of the quandary, they took directions that could only lead
to the repetition of past mistakes.
The Problem of Subjectivity: Human Agency versus Objective Constraints
In post-Mao China, an intense debate arose on what constitutes "human nature," in

reaction against the idea upheld in the Cultural Revolution that human nature is
identical to class. While rejecting the reduction of human nature to political cate-
gories, Li also opposed biological reductionism. Regarding Homo sapiens merely as
one kind of animal among others, he held, denies the special nature of human
agency. Unlike animals, humans consciously aim at the transformation of their
environment by means of "tools" (gongju ITL) or technology. This is what Li means
by "practice." Human subjectivity must be defined in terms of the ability to make
and apply tools, which is the result of both biological and social factors.9 It is artifi-
cial to reduce "human nature" to either.
Li's entire anthropology moves between two poles: on the one hand, humankind
is different from animals because of its capacity to mold its own environment in a
conscious and goal-directed way, which means that subjectivity is real-humankind
can, indeed, to a great extent control its own destiny. This point had to be defended
against both biological and mechanistic determinism. On the other hand, human
control over nature is subject to limitations that are largely determined by the level of
technology and social organization in any society at any particular time. This is the
point made by Li's "tools" interpretation of Marx against Maoist voluntarism, which,
in his view, ignores the reality of objective constraints on subjective agency.10 Li's
anthropology must thus be regarded as an attempt to provide an alternative to Maoist
voluntarism while at the same time avoiding the opposite extreme of determinism.
From the standpoint of a Western reader, Li's anthropology seems eminently
reasonable and even commonplace. In China in the 1970s, however, the treatment
of the relationship between human agency and external constraints was still a
heavily politicized affair. A debate was waged in the official media concerning the
relative importance in social development of the human factor vis-a-vis the so-called
"objective laws of social development." Edgar Bauer, who has analyzed this debate
in detail, found that from the beginning, the real issue at stake was the assessment of
Mao's Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.11 Those who wanted to
defend Mao's mobilizational policies tended to stress the subjective factor, while
those who were critical of him put relatively more stress on the role of the "objective
laws." In general, it was felt that "subjectivity" and "objective laws" both had a role
to play, but this was as far as the "debate" could go, as the participants remained
content merely to toss around stereotyped phraseology.
Another sign, in Li's view, that real philosophical reflection on the relationship
between human subjectivity and objective constraints was lacking was the rising
popularity in post-Mao China of philosophies such as socialist humanism (the most
prominent spokesman of which was Wang Ruoshui E~7JC),12 Sartrean existen-
tialism, and the Marxism of the early Lukacs and the Frankfurt School, who, in
122 Philosophy East & West
reaction against the extreme collectivism of the previous period, inspired calls for
individual freedom to remedy the widespread feeling of alienation following the
Cultural Revolution. While Li Zehou employed Marx's early writings to support his
technology-oriented view of social development, Wang Ruoshui and others put
these selfsame writings in the service of "socialist humanism."13 However, Li held
that they, the existentialists, and "Western Marxism" all reduced the project of social
progress to a mere appeal to ethics and culture criticism, while ignoring the impor-
tance of science and technology in the transformation of nature.14
This easily happens, he felt, when one separates the early, so-called "Hegelian"
and "philosophical" Marx from the mature, "scientific" Marx, whose central doc-
trine, in Li's interpretation, was that technology ("tools") is the key to social devel-
opment.15 In reality, Li argues, there is no discontinuity between the early and later
Marx: he was always a humanist who regarded the liberation of the individual as the
end of history.16 But he understood better than any thinker before him that this can
only take place after the establishment of socialism, when science and technology
have advanced to the level that they can fulfill all our material needs. To try and
liberate the individual solely by means of a passionate appeal to consciousness and
ethics, as if the transformation of reality is a pure act of the moral will, is utopian.17
The fact that the reaction against the Cultural Revolution in post-Mao China took
mainly idealistic and voluntaristic forms was very disconcerting to Li, because it
meant that even the opponents of the Cultural Revolution actually shared its erro-
neous assumptions about the relationship between subject and object: nature and
society can supposedly be transformed by cultivating people's moral consciousness,
and the purified moral will can act directly upon the world without the support of a
technological infrastructure. 8
Just as disturbing, in view of the major importance Li attached to scientific and
technological progress, was that in 1975-1976 an attack was made on Einstein's
relativity theory by doctrinaire Marxist leaders, who declared Einstein's statement
that the speed of light was the highest possible velocity "arbitrary" and "undialec-
tical."19 Scientist Yan Jiaqi H^ (who became a dissident in exile after June 4,
1989), launched a counterattack in his science-fiction story "Three Courts of Law,"
published in Guangming Daily in 1978, in which he drew an analogy between
this event and the conviction of Galileo by the Church.20 Like Yan, Li was greatly
worried about the prospect that scientific debate would continue to be controlled by
politics, as if the secrets of nature could be unveiled by subjective political decisions
rather than by scientific research. Here again, an exaggerated confidence in the
power of subjective agency impeded progress in science and technology, thus crip-
pling China's ability to transform the natural environment.
It was clear to Li Zehou that in not only official, but also unofficial, circles the
failure to appreciate the limitations of the human will vis-a-vis objective reality,
which had characterized Mao's era, was still the dominant intellectual attitude even
in the post-Mao period. Li's own life work is a consistent attempt to define the role of
human agency in economic production, knowledge, ethics, and aesthetics in such a
way that the extremes of determinism and voluntarism can both be avoided. To what
Woei Lien Chong 123
extent is humankind free, and to what extent is it determined by factors outside the
human will?
Li's anthropology takes up these great philosophical questions concerning free-
dom and necessity, subject and object, spirit and body. His answers are inspired by
not only Kant and Marx but also ancient Chinese philosophy: Li wants to hold fast to
the Mean, for which he uses the classic Confucian term zhongyong t*.21 The art of
choosing the Mean is a matter of developing a sense of the right proportions (du
J-).22 This sense of proportion in turn has to be nurtured by jiaoyu t , a word that
means "education" but which is here more accurately translated by the German
word Bildung, since Li uses it to refer to aesthetic education in the humanistic
sense.23 Aesthetic education cultivates the senses, the imagination, and the intellect,
allowing them to interact freely without any concern for orthodoxy or practical util-
ity. Li felt attracted to the aesthetic philosophy from Kant to Schiller because it
opened up a whole universe of spiritual and artistic freedom that was alien to both
Mao and Marx.24
Li's anthropology holds that in principle, humankind has the capacity to control
its own destiny, but whether or not it actually succeeds in doing so depends, in the
first place, on its ability to overcome obstacles in objective reality, which in turn
depends on the level of technological development in society. This is what Li calls
"material civilization," or "the humanization of external nature." In the second
place, it depends on humankind's ability to build community-to maintain and
create a sense of shared meaning and cultural continuity. This is necessary because
traditional, simple societal forms continuously develop into increasingly modern and
complex ones-a deeply unsettling process in which the danger of alienation is
forever present. The effort to expand the sense of community to match society's
growth in size and complexity, going from the ancestral village to the city, then to
the nation, and then beyond the nation to embrace the whole of humanity, is what Li
calls "spiritual civilization," or "the humanization of internal nature." In this pro-
cess, aesthetic education plays an important role, since it provides a realm of free-
dom that does not exist in everyday reality, but which is necessary for that flight of
the imagination that elevates us above our particularistic concerns and interests.
Moreover, it cultivates our sensitivity, increasing our capacity for "empathy" with
other human beings.
In contemporary China, Li holds, "spiritual civilization" should help people
outgrow parochialism and nationalism and become increasingly cosmopolitan both
in outlook and practice. But becoming cosmopolitan, in Li's view-and this is where
he differs from the "May Fourth" paradigm-is only possible if people can draw
inspiration and spiritual support from their indigenous heritage. In contrast to the
European Enlightenment25 and its echoes in China's May Fourth Movement, Li holds
that there is no antithesis between "tradition" and "reason"-it is just that the
Chinese tradition has its own sense of rationality. To unveil the nature of this Chinese
form of rationality, which he calls "practical rationality" (shixian lixing B' S1f ) as
opposed to abstract speculation and transcendent religion, is one of the aims of Li's
history of Chinese thought. Although much of "Chinese tradition," in Li's view, is
merely the contingent expression of a particular stage in socioeconomic develop-
ment (that of small-scale agriculturalism) that has outlived itself, other aspects tran-
scend space and time and must be made available again to the Chinese today in
order to give them the sense of continuity and meaningfulness that the moderniza-
tion process tends to undermine. In this way, a counterweight can be provided to
destructive tendencies such as nationalism and racism.
In today's China, both the material and spiritual dimensions of civilization are
still underdeveloped. The first, Li writes, has been impeded by decades of anti-
intellectualism and the neglect of science and technology under Mao, while the
latter is obstructed by the parochialism that is the result of millennia of small-scale
agriculture. Li in fact regards these two phenomena as intimately related, since
Maoism itself is an expression of the norms and values of Chinese village culture. But
while Mao, according to Li, inherited many aspects of the mentality of the lower
strata of Chinese rural society, especially the preoccupation with physical strength,
manual labor, and egalitarianism, in other aspects he was also definitely an heir to
Chinese elite culture. The latter, especially Confucianism, developed a marked vol-
untaristic strain culminating in the activism of Wang Yangming, whose philosophy
exercised a great influence on the young Mao.
Li's anthropology of the Mean is an attempt to answer the following problem: in
order to defend human agency against determinism, the reality of free will must be
emphasized. However, this must not lead to the opposite extreme of voluntarism,
which is the reason why Li emphasizes the equal reality of nature's resistance to
human intervention. Basing himself on Kant, Li argues that human nature is active
and dynamic rather than passive, which means that humankind does have the
capacity to rebuild society according to reason. However, human agency (zhuti de
nengdongxing t?; f 'st), while real, is not boundless, but subject to objective
limits and constraints. Consequently, the transformation of reality cannot take place
purely via inner moral cultivation, as suggested by the Mencian tradition, which, Li
argues, influenced Mao via Wang Yangming, but by the mediation of human will-
power through technology ("tools"). Progress does not primarily rely on morally
outstanding individuals assuming paramount leadership (the Confucian position),
but on the capacity of the entire society to coordinate labor and promote the growth
of knowledge in an increasingly effective manner. Therefore, Li argued, in order to
counter voluntarism, Kant's emphasis on the activity of the human subject must be
revised on the basis of Marx's analysis of the role of social labor.
Parallels between Kant's Time and Post-Mao China
Since Li wanted to explore the problem of freedom and necessity, his choice to study
Kant was most appropriate. In Li's view, Kant faced the same challenges in his own
day that Chinese intellectuals faced in post-Mao China. On the one hand, there was
rapid scientific progress, epitomized in Kant's time by Newtonian mechanics, and in
post-Mao China by the introduction of the new physics of Einstein and Bohr,
accompanied by the post-Kantian philosophies of science of Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos,
Woei Lien Chong 125
and Feyerabend. On the other hand, Kant supported the ideals of Rousseau and the
French Revolution, which took Europe by storm, sweeping away the old order in the
name of freedom and emancipation. The post-Mao parallel to this, in Li's view, was
the upsurge of socialist humanism, the extreme individualism of Sartrean existen-
tialism, and the subjectivistic forms of "Western Marxism."26
The claims of the deterministic Newtonian worldview obviously clashed with
the Rousseauian call for freedom and emancipation, and on top of that they were
also both in conflict with the claims of the Church and the established rationalistic
philosophy of Leibniz-Wolff. Li implied that the contemporary Chinese parallel to
Church dogma was the dictatorial claims of the Chinese Communist Party (a parallel
openly drawn by Yan Jiaqi in his above-mentioned science-fiction story).
The problem tackled by Kant, as presented by Li, was thus immediately relevant
to post-Mao China: eighteenth-century Europe and post-Mao China were shaken by
the same fundamental intellectual problem. While Rousseau advocated a philoso-
phy of freedom, Newtonian mechanics portrayed the world as determined by the
law of causality, which seemed to leave no room for free will at all. The task Kant set
himself, Li explained, was to reconcile Newton with Rousseau, that is to say, to
demonstrate that both science and freedom are possible and that they are not
mutually exclusive.27 Kant came to the rescue of science in its battle against the
dogmatic metaphysics of the Church and Leibniz-Wolff, but he did not sacrifice
freedom to Newtonian determinism. Li Zehou apparently felt that he had to accom-
plish a similar feat in post-Mao China: to rescue the autonomy of science in its battle
against Party interference, but without replacing Party dictatorship over society by a
dictatorship of science. Li does not favor a technocratic management of the future of
humankind-in the spirit of Kant, he regards the building of our future as a matter of
free choice, on the levels of both the individual and society. But at the same time, he
stresses over and over again that free will is only one of philosophy's major con-
cerns: the other is the problem of the objective world, which is ruled by laws that
cannot be controlled by the human will. This is the realm of scientific research,
where arbitrary intervention by ethics and politics can only lead to failure. Li felt that
he had to drive this message home with utmost force, in order to counter the vol-
untarism prevalent in the post-Mao intellectual and political climate.
As a philosopher, Li felt that he had to start by clearing away the various mis-
understandings in China in regard to the key concepts of "idealism" and "materi-
alism." While Engels had stated that the opposition between these two was the
"key problem" in philosophy, the understanding in China of the historical develop-
ment of these terms was vague. In the first place, Li explained why Marx's historical
materialism is different from that of "old" or "French" eighteenth-century mecha-
nistic materialism. Marx's form, Li held, is superior to the former because it
acknowledges the crucial role of human agency, which the former neglects. At the
same time, in his battle against voluntarism, Li was at pains to distinguish Kant's
transcendental idealism from Berkeley's subjective idealism, which were often con-
fused in China.28 Li undertook a detailed exposition of Kant's epistemology, in order
to show not only that Kant's view of human agency is different from Berkeley's, but
that, after revision, it is even eminently compatible with Marx's "tools" theory of
social development.
Kant's Epistemology: The Relationship between Freedom and Necessity
Kant sought to resolve the dilemma between freedom and necessity by making what
we would today call a revolutionary paradigm shift. The causal view of reality,
according to Kant, does not contradict the possibility of freedom since it is actually a
construct of our own minds. It is the forms and categories of our own understanding
that synthesize the chaotic impressions received by our senses into objects. The
reason that universally valid knowledge is possible is that we all share the same
forms and categories of understanding. They are not derived from experience (a
posteriori), but are logically prior to all experience (a priori).29 But this also means,
Kant explained, that since we can only know objects insofar as our own under-
standing is able to synthesize them from sense impressions, we cannot know them
insofar as they transcend sense impressions; that is, we cannot have knowledge of
"things-in-themselves," or noumena. Now, since, from the point of view of Kant's
transcendental philosophy, the deterministic world of science is actually a construct
of our own understanding (of what Kant calls the "transcendental Ego"), the claims
of science do not exclude the possibility of freedom, so that both causality and
freedom can be saved.30
Li's Kant commentary analyzes Kant's three Critiques: the Critique of Pure Rea-
son, which deals with knowledge, the Critique of Practical Reason, which is con-
cerned with ethics, and the Critique of Judgment, which is about aesthetics and
teleology. Li's commentary on the first Critique is the longest, which is not usual
since this work is the most complicated of the three in terms of argument and tech-
nical vocabulary. However, there was also a special reason why Li wanted to pre-
sent Kant's epistemology in so much detail: in his view, one of the most tenacious
remnants of mechanistic, non-Marxist materialism in China is the doctrinaire
"mirror" theory of knowledge. Expounded in all textbooks, it states that knowledge
is the product of the reflection of objects in the mind. The mind is thus depicted as
passive, while, for Kant, the understanding is actually extremely active: it constitutes
our very picture of reality-in terms not of content but of form. This is basically also
the point of view of the new physics and the meta-theories of science formulated
by philosophers such as Popper, Kuhn, and Lakatos: the subject actively sets the
parameters within which reality is allowed to appear, by means of hypotheses,
paradigms, research programs, and so forth, which means that the mind is not a
passive mirror as suggested by Communist doctrine.31 If China wants to catch up
with the latest developments in physics, Li implied, the "mirror" theory of knowl-
edge must go.32 He regards the latter as an unfortunate product of Marx's successors
that is incompatible with Marx's own doctrine because it is mechanistic and deter-
ministic, ignoring the role of human agency.
Li's struggle with the "mirror" theory can be traced as far back as his debate on
the nature of beauty with Cai Yi in the 1950s. While Zhu Guangqian held that
Woei Lien Chong 127
beauty is in the eye of the beholder, Cai Yi held that beauty is a property of the object
itself, which does not depend on being perceived by a human subject. In this way, Li
stated, Cai established a mechanistic dualism between mind and object in which the
human subject became a passive receptor instead of an active agent in the constitu-
tion of beauty.33 At the same time, Li did not agree with Zhu Guangqian's position that
beauty is a purely subjective perception-rather, it is the product not of the individual
but of the collective human subject. Social practice as it unfolds in history gradually
shapes the human capacity for perceiving beauty: its basic origin is the pleasure we
feel when we interact successfully with the environment. This feeling of pleasure is
"sedimented" in certain forms-that is to say, we find these forms beautiful because
they arouse in us a feeling of pleasure.34 The beauty that we perceive in form is thus
a "sedimentation" of the pleasure that our earliest ancestors felt about a concrete
content, but in the course of history this concrete content became unconscious.35
This is how Li seeks to explain how pure form can be perceived as meaningful-
referring to Clive Bell's term "significant form."36 After decades of "socialist real-
ism" and its dogma concerning the precedence of content over form, Li's emphasis
on form can be regarded as a contribution to the rehabilitation of both abstract and
decorative art. In the realm of art and aesthetics, Li states, "everything goes."
Li had laid the groundwork for his "sedimentation theory" in aesthetics in his
Kant book, in which he set out to unseat the "mirror" theory in epistemology. Li
restored human agency in the field of knowledge by means of Kant's doctrine of the
a priori faculties of the mind, which argues, as we have seen, that knowledge is the
result not of the mind passively receiving sense data but of the mind's active
synthesis of sense data into objects. However, there was a catch: Li realized that
accepting Kant's epistemology could open the door to voluntarism, as exemplified
by Fichte.37 Once the form in which the world appears to the human mind is con-
ceived, as Kant conceived it, as a product of the synthesizing activity of conscious-
ness as applied to sense data, then it is but a small step to throw the sense data
overboard altogether and arrive at Fichte's conclusion that consciousness is the only
factor in the constitution of experience: the Ego creates the world to serve as an
arena for its own activity. Thus, when Li brought Kant in to overthrow the naive
reflection theory of knowledge, he also had to build in a safety valve to prevent the
turn toward Fichtean idealism. Otherwise, his effort to counter determinism by
reasserting human agency could set in motion a logical movement toward vol-
untarism, which, as we know, he was just as anxious to avoid.
The solution to this dilemma, Li held, was already formulated by Marx. Kant had
raised the right question ("how is knowledge possible?") but had only come halfway
in providing the right answer. It was Marx who completed his work, by discovering
the real conditions that make all knowledge possible. Both the "transcendental ego"
(the origin of the synthesizing activity of the intellect) and the "thing-in-itself," Li
stated, are social and historical in nature. They are products of the accumulated
experience of humankind that has "sedimented" in each individual mind, not in
terms of content, of course, but in terms of "form" (xingshi J~f) or "structure"
(jiegou M tf).
The drawback of Kant's doctrine of the a priori, Li stated, is that it ignores his-
tory. The forms and categories of the understanding are only a priori from the point
of view of the individual; from the point of view of the collective, they are a poste-
riori, that is, derived from experience. Humankind, while engaging in the technical
transformation of external nature, also transforms its inner nature. The process of
the "humanization of nature" (ziran de renhua HM,lt1)0 works in two ways:
humankind humanizes external nature in the sense of making it a place fit for human
beings to live in, and at the same time, by this very activity, it humanizes its own
physical and mental constitution by becoming increasingly de-animalized and
adapted to life in organized society. This is how the forms and categories of the
human understanding evolved over time: the need to coordinate labor gave rise to
an increasingly sophisticated language and a standardized conception of space,
time, and logic. In this way, the human species moved progressively away from its
animal beginnings.38
By thus identifying Kant's transcendental Ego with social experience, Li hoped
that a Fichtean turn toward subjective idealism could be preempted. Although the
moral autonomy and uniqueness of the individual is real, the individual is also a
member of society and an heir (however unconsciously) to that society's history.
Individuals possess free will, but prior to making any choice, they are already
embedded in a social and linguistic community that shares a particular history,
which means that they do not make their choices in a vacuum. Thus, the "May
Fourth" view that "tradition" can be recognized as such and thrown off like a gar-
ment is too simple: tradition is within us, and its effect is especially strong precisely
when we are not aware of it. Nor is this necessarily always negative: tradition con-
tains both positive and negative aspects, and when the Chinese have acquired a new
consciousness based on a modernized social existence, they should make the pos-
itive aspects of their inheritance work for them in the modern era.39
Li has noticed the similarity of his idea of redefining the Kantian a priori in psy-
chological terms with the theories of Jean Piaget, the famous Swiss developmental
psychologist.40 But since Piaget primarily devoted himself to showing how the a
priori unfolds according to a universal pattern in the growing individual child, Li
held that his theory was "biologistic," neglecting the historical factor, that is, the role
of the social activity of making and using tools.41 By combining Piaget's ideas with a
technology-oriented interpretation of Marx, Li arrived at the theory that, since the a
priori is in reality a product of social practice, the structure of the faculties of the
mind are shaped by the mode of production in each successive phase of social
development. The dominant mode of production of a society-that is, in China's
case, small-scale agriculture in a kinship context-supposedly produces a particular
"cultural-psychological formation" (wenhua xinli jiegou dtjL'BM_) that leads
the individuals belonging to this society to view reality in a certain way and to act in
certain ways.42 It is a kind of "collective unconscious," although not in Jung's ahis-
torical sense. Li did not concretely explain how Piaget's theories can be extrapolated
to the macrolevel, however, and his "sedimentation theory" is not much more than
a rough outline.
Woei Lien Chong 129
But while its content has remained vague, its function in Li's philosophy is very
clear. In the first place, it seeks to explain how the gradual increase of humankind's
ability to mold its environment by means of technology ("the humanization of
external nature") also results in the gradual transformation both of human physiology
and human psychology ("the humanization of internal nature"). Li's theory of sedi-
mentation turns Kant's transcendental philosophy of the a priori into an empirical
theory of the evolution of human psychology, on the level of the species. Second, it
seeks to formulate an alternative epistemology to replace not only the Kantian a
priori but also the doctrinaire Marxist "mirror" theory of knowledge. Third, the
theory of sedimentation enables Li to present "cultural psychology" as an autono-
mous factor in historical development on the level of culture, rejecting the doctri-
naire thesis that history can be explained solely in terms of class struggle. The
"sedimentation theory" made it possible for Li to detach culture both from class
struggle and the mode of production, acknowledging on the one hand the lasting
value of certain elements in Chinese traditional culture, while on the other hand
criticizing the continued influence on the Chinese mind of specific antimodern
ideals and concepts. This is important since Li attributes the widespread ideological
appeal of Maoism to the persistence of traditional Chinese images of the ideal Man
and the ideal society, and the exaggerated belief in the transformative power of the
human will. It is to his treatment of this problem that we now turn.
Li Zehou's Essays on the History of Chinese Thought
All the pieces written after the 1950s that are collected in Li's Essays on the History
of Chinese Thought should be regarded as forming a sequel to the commentary on
Kant. They are not merely a collection of unrelated capita selecta from the history
of Chinese philosophy, but a coherent attempt at formulating a critical analysis of
Chinese thought based on the views set forth in the Kant commentary. On the basis
of the concept of "sedimentation," Li argued that the particular view in Chinese
thought of the relationship between humankind and nature is largely the product of a
society based on small-scale agriculture. This, in his opinion, was a major reason
why Marx has been misunderstood in China: Marx's doctrines were interpreted in
terms of ideas and concepts derived from traditional Chinese philosophy, which
views the relationship between humankind and nature in categories derived from a
feudal small-peasant society. Modern Chinese intellectuals were ill prepared to
understand Marx, who was as much an heir to, as an opponent of, the bourgeois
Enlightenment.
The bourgeois conception of the relationship between humankind and nature,
and therefore Marx's own views as well, Li pointed out, were derived from the
modern scientific worldview since Newton. This worldview is based on the insight,
based on industrial experience, that the resistance of nature to humankind's inten-
tions is massive, and that human needs can only be fulfilled if humankind confronts
nature as an opponent and seizes control over it by means of technology. Bourgeois
thought regards subject and object as being in conflict with each other, in contrast to
traditional Chinese philosophy, which, basing itself on agricultural experience, gen-
erally does not view nature as putting up resistance against human goals; on the
contrary, humankind can attain its goals not by resisting nature, but by adapting to
the flow of its unchanging patterns. Li holds that the rural, organicist worldview is an
obstacle to China's modernization, and that this rural mentality can only be changed
by changing the mode of production from small-scale agriculture to large-scale
industrialization. This is consistent with his "sedimentation theory": although the
"cultural-psychological formation" exercises a relatively autonomous role on his-
tory, it is itself shaped by the mode of production. Thus, it can only be changed by
changing the mode of production, not simply by appeals to "consciousness" and the
moral will as in Mao's mass campaigns.
This point, Li stated, was overlooked by most early twentieth-century Chinese
intellectuals, not only Mao. They were still so much under the influence of tradi-
tional rural ideals of the simple, egalitarian life in the unspoiled village that they,
almost to a person, wanted China to "skip" the exploitative capitalist stage and
immediately forge ahead toward the just society.43 But according to Li, attempts to
leap from the feudal stage to the post-capitalist stage necessarily lead to new forms of
feudalism (a reference to the "Gang of Four").44 Therefore, China must first go
through a phase of capitalism and industrialization before it is able to establish
socialism. Without economic change, there can be no liberty and democracy.45 The
greatest problem in modern and contemporary China, according to Li, is the persis-
tence of "feudal" (that is, pre-bourgeois) modes of thought and practice, not aliena-
tion and capitalist exploitation.
The Essays revolves around Li's central thesis that, while bourgeois philosophy
regards nature as humankind's adversary, to be subjected to technical control and
manipulation, this is not the case in Chinese philosophy. All schools of Chinese
thought, Li argued, ascribe formidable powers to the subject, but the nature of this
power is not technical: it is exercised without the mediation of tools, since its source
is the purified moral will of the Superior Man. This view of the moral will as the main
agent of change could arise because Chinese thought neglected to thematize the
inertia and refractoriness of the material object. This is the ancient stem of which
Mao's voluntarism is a branch, and the soil that feeds it is composed of various
elements.
In the first place, a crucially important element is the "practical rationality" of
most Chinese philosophical schools, particularly Confucianism, Mohism, the Mili-
tary Thinkers, and Legalism. Although the term "practical rationality" is derived from
Kant, Li uses it in an informal sense to refer to the preoccupation of Chinese thought
with practical matters, especially statecraft and how to maintain social order, while
neglecting abstract thought, pure theoretical speculation about nature, logic, and
pure mathematics. Nature was not given a status separate from society, as matter
was not regarded as ontologically different from mind. It was assumed that the
methods used to establish social harmony were also effective in harmonizing the
relationship between humankind and nature. But although this was detrimental to
the development of science, Li holds, it was also a positive factor since their
Woei Lien Chong 131
"practical rationality" protected the Chinese from fully embracing life-denying reli-
gions such as Buddhism and Christianity. Rather, the reverse happened: in the Chan
school, for example, Buddhism was adapted to the life-affirming attitude of Chinese
"practical rationality."
In the second place, Li argues, the tendency to look upon the relationship with
nature as unmediated and instantaneous was strongly encouraged by Zhuangzi, who
identifies authentic human existence with life in a mythical village life where people
can still be in direct touch with nature in direct aesthetic experience.46 This mystical,
intuitive, and aesthetic approach to nature was subsequently carried further in Wei-
Jin metaphysics and Chan Buddhism, and was, in spite of its great intrinsic merits, an
additional factor in leading the attention of Chinese thinkers away from the abstract
nature of philosophy, logic, and mathematics that have characterized the modern
scientific worldview.47
This modern worldview is based on the mechanization and mathematization of
the world.48 According to Li, it views reality as consisting of substances or essences
that can be isolated from the whole for mathematical analysis and empirical experi-
mentation. In contrast, Li holds, in China, both the Confucian mainstream and the
countermovement inspired by Zhuangzi never regarded the cosmos as a machine or
clockwork, each part of which can be studied in isolation from the others, but as a
system or organism that can only be contemplated as a whole, as a complex network
of analogies, interactions, and "feedback processes." The human world is supposed
to be directly influenced by events in the natural world and vice versa. The Chinese
view of reality is, according to Li, moral and aesthetic rather than based on abstract
theoretical speculation. The schools that were concerned with logic and mathe-
matics never attained a lasting position of importance.
The reason why Chinese thought is organicist rather than mechanistic is that it is
the expression of small-scale agriculture based on kinship relations. In small-scale
agriculture, people tend to adapt to the regularities of nature rather than attempt to
conquer and subjugate nature. Humankind and nature are seen as basically in har-
mony rather than locked in conflict. The only real exception to this rule, Li points
out, was Xunzi, who was the only ancient Chinese philosopher to emphasize that
human culture depends on humankind's ability to combat nature and force it to
provide humankind with the means for survival.49 But even Xunzi, Li noted, did not
pursue this idea consistently and was unable to make a clean break with the
organicist worldview.50
Philosophical Roots of China's "Small Agriculturalists' Mentality"
All major schools of Chinese thought, Li holds, contributed to the stress on egali-
tarianism and the idealization of the simple life in the rural village that characterized
the Maoist utopia. They all moved within the orbit of organicism and holism, failing
to develop the concept of humankind and nature as antagonists, which is basic to
the modern worldview. Within the boundaries of the organicist paradigm, however,
Confucianism developed a strong belief in human agency, epitomized in the doc-
trine of benevolence. It was thus, according to Li, that the seed for the voluntarism of
later Confucianism was sown.51
Confucius transformed the shamanistic rituals of the primeval past, which the
Zhou aristocracy had monopolized, into the internalized principle of benevolence
(ren {-),52 a task continued by Mencius.53 The self-disciplining of the individual
became more important than external social constraints.54 The doctrine of benev-
olence was aimed at the cultivation of the initiative and independence of the indi-
vidual, or more precisely the "Superior Man," the aristocrat who held a position in
the clan hierarchy.55 His task was to cultivate his character in order to rule tribal
society. In order to fulfill this supreme duty, the Superior Man was supposed to apply
himself to the study of history and actual life, as well as the restraining and steeling
of his will.56 Confucius' ideal for individual character-building was assiduous self-
cultivation and a grand sense of historical mission.57
The doctrine of benevolence assumes that the order in the universe depends on
the moral self-cultivation and, if need be, even the self-sacrifice of the Superior
Man.58 It defines rulership predominantly in terms of subjective character-building,
and does not thematize the conquest of material nature. While it formally acknowl-
edges that rulership has two complementary dimensions, one of the "inner sage"
(neisheng Nf*) and one of the "outward king" (waiwang FE), Li argued that the
doctrine of benevolence increasingly emphasized the former much more than the
latter. Moreover, he pointed out, the Confucian view of character-building is limited
to the social duties that the Superior Man must perform within the hierarchy of con-
sanguineous clans and tribes. In contrast to the Western bourgeois idea of "sub-
jectivity," Confucianism never encouraged an exclusive focus on the self in isolation
from these hierarchical social obligations.59
Since the doctrine of benevolence worked on the emotional and psychological
levels rather than by insisting on conformity to external rites, it led to the "sedi-
mentation" of certain unconscious, everyday attitudes and behavior, developing into
the "unconscious collective archetype of the Han people" (Han minzu de yizhong
wu yishi de jiti yuanxing XKY-5 E 4IL--4tL4;) . It is not a collective
unconscious in the ahistoric Jungian sense, but a cultural and psychological forma-
tion (wenhua xinli jiegou), which was formed in the course of social and biological
evolution.60 Sedimentation is a product of history. Because in China the mode of
production has always been small-scale agriculture, the accompanying mentality
has also remained in place up to the present day.61 The doctrine of benevolence is
sedimented in the unconscious layers of the individual psyche, directing the every-
day thought and behavior of every Chinese, and cutting through all boundaries of
class and epoch. The forms of the Chinese psychology remain stable, dominating the
differences that may exist as a result of class or period.62
Under the dominant influence of the doctrine of benevolence, Li stated, Chinese
philosophy came to focus mainly on the problem of proper conduct in social rela-
tionships, that is, on social ethics, pushing aside ontology and epistemology. The
orthodox Marxist dichotomy of "idealism" and "materialism" obscures the fact that
all Chinese philosophical ideas are similar in the sense that they are functionalistic
Woei Lien Chong 133
and never essentialistic. This goes for the theories of Yin and Yang, wuxing E!ii (the
Five Phases), qi N (Pneuma), dao j (the Way), shen * (the Spirits), xin ,J (the
"heart-mind"), and so forth. Chinese philosophy is concerned with the quality of
things, their functions, effects, and relationships, not with breaking down phenom-
ena into separate elements or determining their essence.63 The tendency to view
nature in terms of functions rather than substances, in Li's view, was an impediment
to the rise of modern science.64
Moreover, the harmonious view of social relationships encouraged by the doc-
trine of benevolence led to a harmonistic view of the cosmos. Traditional Chinese
dialectics stresses the complementarity of opposites (such as Yin and Yang) and their
spontaneous adaptation to one another, guaranteeing the harmony and stability of
the organic whole. This, Li noted, is in sharp contrast with ancient Persian philoso-
phy, which posits a dichotomy between darkness and light, as well as the thought of
the Greek philosopher Heraclitus (sixth century B.C.), who held that the genesis and
destruction of all things is based on conflict and struggle.65 Chinese thought was
always focused on harmony and systemic equilibrium because it was modeled on
tribal society.
Moreover, Confucianism, in Li's opinion, was just as opposed to inequality as
Mohism. Confucius propagated economic egalitarianism in order to protect the
closed system of small-scale agriculture based on physical labor, and the ancestor
cult that was connected with it.66 He feared that the accumulation of wealth and the
ensuing income differentials would lead to the breakdown of clan society. In the
Song period, Li continued, Confucianism protected the feudal order by advocating
low consumption ("asceticism") and shared poverty. Even today, in Li's view, the
ideal of egalitarianism continues to form a serious obstacle to China's industrializa-
tion and modernization. Ironically, while Confucianism was formally attacked after
1949, its ideals remained: under Mao and the "Gang of Four," shared poverty and
moral self-cultivation were still regarded as more important than trying to increase
economic production.67
The egalitarian ideology of Mozi was, in Li's view, a very important root of the
"small-producers' mentality." It fostered a widespread bias among Chinese intel-
lectuals against capitalism, and the tendency to idealize the simple life in the rural
village.68 While the ethos of Confucianism is aristocratic, Li stated, Mohism is the
typical ideology of the lower echelons of society-particularly the small artisans-
who opposed the "objective" trend toward commercialization, higher consumption,
and income differentiation, in which they were bound to lose out.69 Major elements
in the Mohist working-class ideology are egalitarianism, reciprocity, frugality, the
idealization of physical strength and hard labor, a strong prejudice against book-
learning and abstract thought, and the naive view that problems of social change
can be solved by "good leaders" and faith in an omnipotent personified deity, while
it never puts forward any viable alternatives to the traditional clan society.70
Li holds that the Mohist mind-set is revived in China each time history enters a
phase of increased social complexity and economic expansion, so that the lower
classes, whose horizon is too narrow to understand these changes, feel threatened
and rise to oppose them. These are periods of increased class antagonisms, of which
peasant uprisings and peasant wars are the most violent forms.71 The typical reaction
of the Mohist thought complex is to try to turn the clock back to a life of simplicity
and frugality, and foster social stability by launching a policy of egalitarianism and
shared poverty instead of economic growth.72 But inevitably, when the revolutionary
momentum is lost, peasant rebels, because they are unable to change the mode of
production, always tend to fall back on quasi-imperial structures with a rigid social
hierarchy and elite prerogatives under one despotic leader. Li explicitly mentioned
the example of Hong Xiuquan #A- and the Taiping Uprising, but the covert ref-
erence to Mao and the Communist revolution was, of course, obvious.73
Another origin of the Chinese "practical rationality"-its preoccupation with
everyday social matters and almost complete neglect of theoretical speculation-
was the ideas of the Military Thinkers, notably Sunzi .,J\-.74 While Confucius and
Mencius emphasized harmony rather than conflict, the Military Thinkers made the
handling of conflict their special focus of attention. But this did not mean that they
conceived subjectivity in terms of domination over inert matter. They viewed the
subject as being confronted with another subject, not against nature as a passive and
refractory object.75 The main thing, they held, in any arena of conflict, is to size up
the situation as a whole and grasp the "main contradiction" (one of Mao's favorite
catchwords).76 The use of reason is to calculate one's interests in real-life situations,
not to speculate about abstract matters for their own sake.77 Thus, like the Confucian
mainstream, the Strategic School also failed to appreciate the importance of tech-
nology, and encouraged a concept of subjectivity in terms of pitting one's will and
ingenuity against those of another strong-willed person. Li suggested that Mao's
neglect of technology and theoretical knowledge was to a great extent shaped by
traditional strategic thought. A great military leader, Mao failed to be a good ruler in
peacetime because he tried to use the tactics of guerrilla warfare in the field of eco-
nomics and social development.78
A further step in the growing tendency of Chinese thought to emphasize human
agency rather than objective constraints, Li continued, was taken in the Han period.
Dong Zhongshu, the philosopher who founded China's imperial ideology, synthe-
sized various ideas from earlier Chinese thought into an intricate system of cosmic
correspondences linking the world of nature and the world of humankind.79 He
combined the Yin-Yang and Five Phases doctrines, which deal with Heaven, with
the Confucian doctrine of benevolence, which deals with human affairs. The result
was his theory of the "correspondence between Heaven and humankind," which
merged politics and the heavenly phenomena into one all-compassing cosmological
system.80
In Dong Zhongshu's synthesis, Li pointed out, the nature of both the Yin-Yang
doctrine and the doctrine of benevolence changed profoundly. In the first place,
while the Yin-Yang doctrine portrays humankind as powerless vis-a-vis the laws of
nature, and passive in a world in which everything is already predetermined, Dong
Zhongshu used the doctrine of benevolence to correct this passive image of
humankind. Although his cosmology views the universe as an objective structure, it
Woei Lien Chong 135
also leaves a great deal of scope for humankind's subjective spirit.81 In comparison
with the original Yin-Yang doctrine, Dong greatly elevated the position of human
beings in the universe. Looking upward, they are "on a par with Heaven and Earth,"
and looking downward, the human being "is the master over all things."82
The reason is, according to Dong, that human beings, while forming an organic
unity with Heaven and Earth, also play a pivotal role in realizing the latent poten-
tiality hidden in nature. It is Heaven that gives potentiality, but it is human beings
who have the capacity of realizing this potentiality by means of their efforts.83 It is in
this sense that Heaven is dependent on humankind, and that human beings can
influence Heaven and help shape their own external circumstances. This is why
there is said to be a "correspondence" between Heaven and humankind.84
As a result, Li argued, the power of the moral will that early Confucianism had
already vested in the human subject was now blown up to cosmic proportions. The
ruler's moral character was portrayed as capable of controlling not only human
affairs, but also the affairs of nature and the entire cosmos, by realizing its vast hid-
den potential. Eventually, this belief in the transformative power of the moral will,
the ability to "tap the power of the cosmos" (Thomas Metzger's term),85 was brought
to a culmination in Song and Ming Neo-Confucianism, particularly in the philoso-
phy of Wang Yangming, who would exercise a great influence on the young Mao.86
Neo-Confucianism and Mao's Voluntarism
Since Xunzi, according to Li, the Chinese Spirit marched increasingly away from the
antagonism between subject and object. While celebrating the potential of the moral
subject, it tended to leave the position of the object vacant. Mainstream Chinese
thought became a philosophy about a strong-willed subject that was not confronted
with any substantial material object: the infinite malleability of material reality was
taken for granted. Since, within the organicist and holistic cosmology from the Han
onward, the independent status of the material object was obliterated, there were no
longer any impediments to ascribing increasingly fantastic powers to the subject,
which enabled it to know reality purely by means of intuitive introspection and
transform the material world by moral willpower alone.
In Li's view, this trend reached its culmination in Song and Ming Neo-
Confucianism, when Confucian ethics was turned into an ontology.87 Neo-
Confucianism was holistic in nature, Li explained, since, to a greater or lesser extent,
all the Neo-Confucian thinkers fused ethics with cosmology, positing a unity
between Heaven and humankind.88 Zhang Zai ~th (1020-1077) still viewed
human nature as a duality. On the one hand, there is a part which humankind has in
common with the animals, consisting of the desires and functions connected with
the limited, particular, and sensual, and which dissolves on the person's death. On
the other hand, there is also a part which controls the passions, and which human-
kind shares with the cosmic order of Heaven and Earth. It transcends sense percep-
tion, and survives the person's death. It is this part that distinguishes us from the
animals, and which enables us to transcend our finite and sensual material existence
and be considerate toward other people, treating them as we would treat our-
selves.89 It is thus that the universal principles are manifested in the sensual world.
Zhang Zai called these the principles of Heaven (tian li )_A) or Heaven's ordi-
nances (tian ming iJp). A man should develop the principles of Heaven that dwell
within him, by extinguishing his desires.90 The ultimate aim was to extinguish sense
perception and attain a kind of mystical union in which the distinction between ego
and non-ego disappeared, and humankind and Heaven became one.91
However, Zhang's dualism was greatly reduced by the Cheng brothers-Cheng
Hao _y, (1032-1085) and Cheng Yi l_1f (1033-1107)-who pushed Zhang's
philosophy further in the direction of idealism. They abandoned those elements in
Zhang's thought that were directed toward the outside world and sense perception,
considering the eternal principles far more important. They de-emphasized the dif-
ference between the world of the phenomena and the world of noumena, until they
were both identified with li, while the material element of qi was pushed aside.92
Zhu Xi Xv~ (1130-1200) went even further, entirely obscuring the difference
between ethics and the laws of nature, that is, between norm and fact. In Li's Kantian
terminology, Zhu Xi identified the "Ought" of Confucian social ethics with the "Is"
of the laws of the cosmos. Zhu Xi subsumed them in the same concept of li, which as
a result became a "categorical imperative" for the individual: to obey one's duty
within the Confucian social hierarchy was to conform to the laws of the cosmos.93
The philosophy of Wang Yangming 3tHPEI (1472-1529), Li argued, was the
culmination of a development started by Cheng Hao, the elder of the two Cheng
brothers, and Lu Xiangshan [FtLLU (1139-1193). Cheng Yi, the younger brother, had
still displayed dualistic tendencies in that he wanted to make a separation between
the world of sense perception and a transcendent world. The elder Cheng opposed
such a separation, stating that reason (lixing _fqI) and sense perception (ganxing
!,it) were one.94 Lu Xiangshan likewise denied that a person had a dual nature,
even identifying the human "mind" (xin L)) with the principle governing the entire
universe (li _).95
A crucial consequence of this holistic view of reality, Li pointed out, was that it
gave rise to a particular theory of knowledge as being intuitive and totally unme-
diated by practice. Cheng Hao held that reality could be grasped by direct intuition,
and Lu Xiangshan consciously took this a step further. If one's own xin is identical to
the li that governs the entire universe, then one does not have to engage in the
laborious examination of the external world in a piecemeal, accumulative fashion.
One can grasp the whole truth all at once merely by examining one's own mind.96 If
only the xin is cleansed from all disturbances, the truth will automatically shine forth
in all its brilliance.97
Wang Yangming systematized the ideas of Lu Xiangshan and held that one's
liangzhi .4n ("intuitive knowledge") embodied the original substance that human
beings had in common with Heaven, but which became obstructed by selfish
desires. One's task, therefore, should be to remove these desires in order to recover
one's original substance, and restore its unobstructed continuity with the vastness of
the cosmos.98 In this way, Li argued, the Wang School completed the transformation
Woei Lien Chong 137
of Neo-Confucianism from an outward-looking cosmology into an inward-looking
ethical doctrine. It increasingly denied the necessity of external norms, that is, the
abstract, a priori concepts of reason, to control the heart-mind and repress the
desires,99 believing that introspection was the only way to restore the unity between
the individual and the cosmos, and that this unity would provide the individual with
unlimited powers to transform reality. Being active in the secular world became a
matter of great moral and ontological importance. Wang held that humankind's true
being is attained in action that is based on its "intuitive knowledge." His school
of thought opposed the pursuit of objective knowledge as an end in itself and
turned increasingly against the contemplative and quietistic ideals of the Cheng-Zhu
school, striving instead after active participation and involvement in daily life.?00
The activism of the Wang School, Li continued, is characterized by an individ-
ualistic and subjective militant spirit. Already in Lu Xiangshan, there had been a
strong emphasis on "being one's own master," "self-reliance and self-respect," the
doubting of canonical authority, and the rejection of blind obedience.101 As men of
action, Wang and his followers stressed ethical subjectivity and the independent
will. In the end, the Wang school became entirely focused on cultivating the indi-
vidual's consciousness of his historical mission and moral self-awareness.102
This extraordinary stress on the power of the subjective will, Li argued, shaped
the minds of many later intellectuals, including Kang Youwei, Tan Sitong, the young
Mao Zedong, and Guo Moruo. The philosophy of Wang Yangming is the source of
their stress on moral cultivation, the steeling of the will, and the militant spirit. The
young Mao, Li stated, was a particularly good example. In the period 1917-1918, he
read A System of Ethics by the Neo-Kantian Friedrich Paulsen and wrote a comment
on it, observing that Song Neo-Confucianism had certain ideas in common with
Kant.103 Li, however, believes that Mao's voluntarism does not so much go back to
Kant as to the image of the undaunted moral hero created by Mencius, Wang
Yangming, and the popular traditional novels The Water Margin and The Romance
of the Three Kingdoms, which Mao loved to read.104
Although many Chinese intellectuals attacked Neo-Confucianism for its feudal
ideas, Li pointed out, its influence continues to haunt the Chinese mind up to the
present day-the enormous stress on frugality (low consumption) of Chinese Marx-
ism and its virulent attacks on "selfishness" being cases in point.105 Chinese intel-
lectuals never abandoned the conviction of the Wang school that the purified
human will is endowed with vast transformative powers because it is the seat of
heavenly principles,106 and that purifying the will from "desire" is therefore a nec-
essary condition for transformative action in the world. Commitment to social ideals
and activity in the world enjoyed a much higher moral and ontological status than a
life of contemplation.
There is no basic difference, Li stated, in the assumptions of Neo-Confucianism
and Liu Shaoqi's How to Be a Good Communist, in spite of the difference in content:
they are both predominantly concerned with steeling the subjective will and sense of
moral responsibility as motors of social change. This demonstrates, in his opinion,
how Neo-Confucianism shaped the Chinese character, with its emphasis on virtue,
the control of reason over the emotions, self-discipline, and the spirit of militant
resolve.107 In the twentieth century, both revolutionaries and conservatives, Li
argued, were alike in their voluntarist activism and militant social commitment and
their neglect of science, technology, and industrial production. Combined with the
external pressure of foreign aggression, this led to their premature and fatal aban-
donment of the project to bring enlightenment to China, that is, bourgeois ideas
and institutions,108 rallying behind the call for "national salvation."109 Mao's own
obsession with moral purification campaigns and the power of the subjective will
was also fully in accord with traditional Chinese misconceptions about the trans-
formation of reality.110
In the Confucian paradigm, Li argues, knowledge (as an effect of the world on
the subject) is a matter of direct intuition, unmediated by abstract theory, experi-
ment, and mathematization; and similarly, action (the effect of the subject on the
world) is a matter of the moral will, unmediated by technology. The relationship
between the subject and the world is direct and unmediated in both directions.
Combined with the failure to acknowledge the passive inertia of material nature, this
led to Mao's error that the whole of reality can be changed within a very short time
span, directly and instantaneously, as long as the ideological conditions on the
subject side are ripe. It was no coincidence that he felt little need for the long-term
establishment of a viable scientific and technological infrastructure. Fundamental
traditional fallacies about knowledge and action being unmediated, and matter
being infinitely malleable, culminated in Mao's erroneous belief that society can
be changed by means of convulsive mobilizational campaigns aimed at changing
people's ideology such as the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution, rather than by
the technical transformation of the environment in a gradual, evolutionary process.
But Mao, in Li's opinion, was certainly not alone in these misconceptions. Moralistic
theories of social change have always been more easily accepted in China than
technology-oriented scenarios, Li argues, because Confucianism came to emphasize
the cultivation of the "inner sage" (neisheng) much more than the outward-looking
dimension of sagehood (waiwang) as the key to social change, especially when the
Wang school had collapsed the latter into the former.
Li Zehou's "Marxism for the Twenty-first Century"
Summarizing, we could say that Li regards Chinese philosophy as a philosophy with

a godlike subject but without an object. His own theory of subjectivity, or "sub-
jectality" (zhutixing), a term he has recently coined, is a reaction both against this
traditional Chinese misconception of human activity and the Western philosophical
tradition from Descartes to Kant, which predominantly defines subjectivity in terms
of the cogito.111 In the first place, Li's theory of "subjectality" draws renewed
attention to the inert resistance of nature to human goals, and redefines Marxism
mainly as a technological approach to social development. This is the basic message
of what Li has called his "Marxism for the twenty-first century," and which he
developed in reaction to the voluntarism of the Cultural Revolution.
Woei Lien Chong 139
In the second place, in opposition to the idea of subjectivity as mere cogito,
taking a detached stance vis-a-vis the object from a neutral and sovereign point of
view, Li's theory of subjectality views the human subject as sensual and embodied,
and already embedded, prior to all perception, in a historical and social context that
shapes the categories with which it organizes its perceptions of reality. Li's subject is
physical, historical, and involved in practice, defined as the humanization of internal
and external nature. Unlike Mao's socialist hero, whom Li argues was mainly mod-
eled after traditional Chinese philosophical and literary paradigms, the subject in Li's
own philosophy, while active, creative, and concrete, always operates within
objective boundaries. It has no access to omniscience and omnipotence, as knowl-
edge as well as action are circumscribed by the objective limitations of technology
and the existing level of cultural development. This is the position that Li defends
against the voluntarisms of Mao and Fichte, which regard the objective world as the
playground of a godlike ego.
On the one hand, Li acknowledged Kant's "Copernican revolution," which
regards the phenomenal world as a product of the mind's own activity, in order to
counter the orthodox "mirror" theory of knowledge that had become a huge
impediment to China's arts and sciences. Li's fight against this theory already dates
back to his confrontation with the "determinism" of Cai Yi in the aesthetics debate
in the 1950s. Cai Yi is one of the two major opponents whom Li implicitly criticizes
in his commentary on Kant, and in his histories of Chinese thought and aesthetics.
Cai Yi stands for the mechanistic view that human beings never take the initiative,
but only react to external stimuli, which Li associates with the Stalinist orthodoxy.
Mechanicism and determinism deny the existence of subjectivity, reducing the in-
dividual to a passive tool in the hands of politics and economics.
But on the other hand, while reviving the Kantian heritage in post-Mao China, Li
also realized that one logical possibility of the Kantian turn was Fichtean voluntar-
ism, just as, in his view, Maoist voluntarism was an extreme development of Wang
Yangming's activism. In Li's writings, Mao is the other major opponent next to Cai
Yi. Li could not accept Kant's epistemology without revision, because, although Kant
never denied the reality of the objective world, he did reduce it to a thing-in-itself, a
noumenon that cannot be known by the human intellect, which is limited to the
knowledge of phenomena. However, as soon as the reality of the thing-in-itself is
denied-a step taken by Fichte-and the ego is regarded as the sole source of
experience, possessing an unlimited transformative power capable of changing the
universe, then the doctrine of subjectivity no longer supports but endangers the
cause of science and civilization. This is why, Li holds, the Kantian epistemology has
to be reformulated using the terms of Marx's "tools" theory of history. While Kant's
dualism had separated the thing-in-itself (the unknowable source of sense data) from
the transcendental ego (the unknowable source of the synthesis that makes knowl-
edge possible), they can in fact, according to Li, be traced back to one and the same
origin. Marx, breaking through the thick idealistic crust that Kant had built around
these notions, discovered that social practice is the origin of both the world and our
knowledge of the world, the "hidden root" that Kant had sought in vain.
This means that, on the one hand, the refractoriness of the world is real, since it
is made of matter, and matter is independent of the human will. But on the other
hand, humankind is also capable of overcoming the world's objective constraints
thanks to its ability to produce and apply technology, moving forward, in a long and
protracted historical process, toward an ideal horizon where both the humanization
of external and internal nature will be completed. This horizon Li calls socialism, the
realm of freedom on earth. The focus of humankind's hopes and efforts is a society
where all its material needs are fulfilled, making possible the full development of
each individual's unique talents and abilities as envisaged by Marx.
Socialism is the realm where the old, vexing conflict between reason and sensi-
bility, subject and object, humankind and nature is finally resolved.112 This, the
"unity of Heaven and humankind" (tianren heyi XA~ -), which the holism and
organicism of ancient Chinese thought erroneously took for granted as a principle of
all being,113 actually has to be established by humankind itself, by conquering and
subjugating nature and establishing democracy and the rule of law. History, for Li, is
the story of this project, and its goal is the freedom of the individual. The unity of
Heaven and humankind appears, not at the beginning of history, but on a distant
horizon, always receding as we try to approach it. It is an ideal limit rather than a
state of perfection that can be attained at a concrete point in time: history is open-
ended since it is a learning process, and learning never ends.
The historic achievement of German Idealism from Kant to Hegel, Li explained,
is that it overcame the determinism of mechanistic materialism by acknowledging
the role of human agency. But in Hegel's view of history, Humanity is merely an
abstraction, since Hegel's subject of history is Spirit rather than humankind. The
Hegelian preoccupation with history as the history of consciousness eventually led
Fichte to the notion that the world is merely a playground for the Ego's activity.114
Therefore, Kant's true heir was neither Hegel nor Fichte but Marx, who finally dis-
covered how human agency in history really works. By continuous technical inter-
action with its environment in the context of social organization, humankind learns
to conquer nature and make it subservient to human needs.
As we have seen, the main question addressed in Li's writings is how to redefine
the role of human agency versus the determinism of Cai Yi and mechanistic materi-
alism on the one hand and the voluntarism of Mao and Fichte on the other. Mao's
Cultural Revolution, in Li's opinion, was a figment of the voluntaristic imagination, a
short-lived dream of realizing the egalitarian utopia as described in ancient Chinese
sources solely by relying on the transformative power of the purified will, with the
"proletariat" taking the place of the Confucian "Superior Man." But after the deluge,
Li points out, the Chinese should be careful not to make the opposite mistake,
believing that the failure of utopianism means that the idea of improving the human
situation should be abandoned altogether. Against the waves of existentialism, cul-
ture pessimism, and crass commercialism flooding China in the 1980s, Li has always
defended the idea that it is the very ideal of making our material and spiritual exis-
tence increasingly humanized that defines our humanity. Although the ideal society
(lixiang shehui g,g-It-) can never be found, he stated, we should still strive to live
Woei Lien Chong 141
in light of humankind's progressive humanization as a social ideal (shehui lixiang
i?,jr_*).115 His anthropology of the Mean is the expression of his strong Enlight-
enment confidence in humankind's ability to take rational control of its own destiny,
not by revolution but by evolution.
Some critics, looking at Li's philosophy from the standpoint of the counter-
Enlightenment of, for example, existentialism and postmodernism, have called his
position "old-fashioned." But this, in Li's opinion, is to forget that China has still not
gone through an Enlightenment phase of its own, aimed at the conquest of nature
and the building of a community based on the ideals of liberty, democracy, and
cosmopolitanism. As long as this has not taken place, Li states, "I'd rather be called
old-fashioned."
Notes
This article is based partly on an earlier study I published in China Information 11

(2/3) (Autumn/Winter 1996): 138-175, titled "Mankind and Nature in Chinese
Thought: Li Zehou on the Traditional Roots of Maoist Voluntarism." My visit to the
seminar "Subjectality: Li Zehou and His Critical Analysis of Chinese Thought" at
Colorado College on 12 October 1996, organized by Dr. Timothy Cheek, and to
various American research libraries was made possible by travel grants from the
Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Faculty of Arts,
Leiden University. I am solely responsible for the views presented in this article and
all remaining errors.
1 - The most recent and, in Li's own view, most reliable edition of his collected
works has appeared in ten volumes under the title Li Zehou lunzhu ji (Col-
lected works of Li Zehou) (Taipei: Sanmin Shuju, 1996).
2 - Li's role in the debates on aesthetics of the 1950s and 1980s is analyzed in
Heinrich Geiger, Philosophische Asthetik im China des 20. Jahrhunderts: Ihre
Stellung zwischen Tradition und Moderne (Philosophical aesthetics in twen-
tieth-century China: Its position between tradition and modernity) (Frankfurt
am Main: Peter Lang, 1987). The papers issued during the 1950s debate have
been collected in Meixue wenti taolunji (Collected debates on aesthetics)
(Beijing: Zuojia Publishing House, 1957, 1959, 1964).
3 - See the Bibliographical Note below.
4 - Pipan zhexue de pipan-Kangde shuping t$-lJ U t ttlJ J (A
critique of the critical philosophy-A commentary on Kant), 2d rev. ed.
(Beijing: Renmin Chubanshe, 1979, 1984), hereafter Pipan, and Li Zehou and
Liu Zaifu, Gaobie geming alJ'i (Goodbye to revolution) (Hong Kong:
Cosmos Books, 1995).
5 - "Manshuo xiti Zhongyong" iqi4I? 4ffl (Western learning is the essence,

and China should apply it), in Zhongguo xiandai sixiangshi lun (Essays on the
history of contemporary Chinese thought) (Beijing: Dongfang Chubanshe,
1987), pp. 311-341, originally in Kongzi yanjiu (Confucius studies), 1987,
no. 1.
6 - "Qimeng yu jiuwang de shuangzhong bianzou" Ai ;-tb1,iit, (The

dual variation of enlightenment and national salvation), in Zhongguo xiandai
sixiangshi lun, pp. 7-49, originally printed in Zouxiang weilai tr,t ~
(Toward the future), 1986, no. 1.
7 - Zhongguo jindai sixiangshi lun (Essays on the history of modern Chinese

thought) (Beijing: Renmin Chubanshe, 1979); Zhongguo gudai sixiangshi lun
(Essays on the history of ancient Chinese thought) (Beijing: Renmin Chu-
banshe, 1985); Zhongguo xiandai sixiangshi lun.
8 - Li Zehou and Liu Gangji, Zhongguo meixue shi (History of Chinese aes-
thetics), 2 vols. (Beijing: Zhongguo Shehui Kexueyuan Chubanshe, 1987); Li
Zehou meixue lunwenji (Li Zehou's collected writings on aesthetics) (Shang-
hai: Xinhua Shudian, 1980); Huaxia meixue -Pg~ X (The aesthetics of
China) (Taipei: Shibao Wenhua, 1989); Meixue sijiang X* iJ# (Four dis-
courses on aesthetics) (Hong Kong: Sanlin, 1989). Li regards the latter two
works as philosophically more important than his well-known booklet Mei de
licheng t1jTh4 (The path of beauty) (Beijing: Wenwu, 1981). The latter has
been translated into German in Karl-Heinz Pohl and Gudrun Wacker, eds.,
Der Weg des Schonen (Freiburg: Herder, 1992). The English translation by
Gong Lizeng (Beijing: Morning Glory, 1988), while lavishly illustrated, omits
all the theoretical parts of the original text, making it useless for research
purposes. For a monograph on Li Zehou's aesthetics, see Wang Shengping,
Li Zehou meixue sixiang yanjiu (A study of Li Zehou's aesthetic thought)
(Shenyang: Liaoning Renmin Chubanshe, 1987).
9 - Pipan, pp. 423-424.

10 -The interpretation of Marxism as a "tools" theory of history was common
among Chinese Marxists of the early 1920s, such as Li Dazhao, Dai Jitao, Hu
Hanmin, and Guo Moruo. See Arif Dirlik, Revolution and History: The Origins
of Marxist Historiography in China, 1919-1937 (Berkeley: University of Cal-
ifornia Press, 1978), pp. 31-33, 141.
11 - Edgar Bauer, Ideologie und Entwicklung in der VR China. Philosophische und

politische Aspekte der Entwicklungsideologie der Kommunistischen Partei
Chinas (Ideology and development in the People's Republic of China: Philo-
sophical and political aspects of the development ideology of China's Com-
munist Party) (Bochum: Studienverlag Dr. N. Brockmeyer, 1980), pp. 233-257.
12 - See David Kelly, "The Emergence of Humanism: Wang Ruoshui and the Cri-
tique of Socialist Alienation," in Merle Goldman et al., eds., China's Intellec-
tuals and the State: In Search of a New Relationship (Cambridge: Council on
East Asian Studies at Harvard University, 1987), pp. 159-182.
Woei Lien Chong 143
13 - These trends are discussed in Jing Wang, High Culture Fever: Politics, Aes-
thetics, and Ideology in Deng's China (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1996), pp. 93-113.
14- Pipan, pp. 55, 358-361.
15 - Pipan, p. 363; Makesizhuyi zai Zhongguo (Marxism in China) (Beijing: San-
lian schudian, 1993), pp. 106-107 (pp. 83-84 in the translation). Li points out
that the role of science and technology in the creation of surplus value is
underemphasized in Capital.
16 - Makesizhuyi zai Zhongguo, pp. 97, 105-106 (pp. 76, 83-84 in the
translation).
17 - Pipan, pp. 55-56, 363, 417-421.

18 - Pipan, pp. 362-363.
19- Pipan, p. 184.
20 - Pipan, ibid. See Yan Jiaqi, Wode sixiang zizhuan (My intellectual autobiog-
raphy) (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing Co., 1988), chap. 6.
21 - Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu, Gaobie geming, pp. 54, 66.
22 - Ibid., p. 242.
23 - Ibid., pp. 254-256, 272, 282; Meixue sijiang, p. 74.
24 - Pipan, pp. 388, 391, 407, 414.
25 - Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Truth and method) (TObingen:
J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1990), pp. 275, 277.
26 - Pipan, p. 362.
27 - Ibid., pp. 27-42.
28 - Ibid., p. 179.
29- Ibid., pp. 72-73.
30- Ibid., p. 128.
31 - Ibid., p. 180.
32 - Ibid., p. 174.
33 - Gaobie geming, pp. 185-186.
34 - Meixue sijiang, pp. 44-47.
35 - Li elaborates this thesis in Mei de licheng. See Jane Cauvel's discussion of this
in this issue of Philosophy East and West. See also Karl-Heinz Pohl, "Zu Bei-
tragen Li Zehous in der Debatte um Tradition und Identitat in den 80er Jahren
in der Volksrepublik China" (On Li Zehou's contributions to the debate on
tradition and identity in the 1980s in the People's Republic of China), in Ralf
Moritz, ed., Sinologische Traditionen im Spiegel neuer Forschung (Sinological
traditions in the light of recent research) (Leipzig: Universitatsverlag, 1993),
pp. 45-47.
36 - Meixue sijiang, pp. 45, 55.
37- Pipan, pp. 192, 410.

38- Pipan, pp. 111, 114-115, 164-166, 176, 412-413.
39 - Pohl, "Zu Beitragen Li Zehous," p. 50.
40 - Pipan, pp. 53-54, 90.

41 - Ibid., p. 54.
42 - Zhongguo gudai sixiangshi lun, p. 32.
43 - Zhongguo jindai sixiangshi lun, pp. 286-311. See esp. pp. 304, 306-307.
44 - Zhongguo jindai sixiangshi lun, p. 21; Makesizhuyi zai Zhongguo, p. 83 (p. 63

in the translation).
45 - Zhongguo jindai sixiangshi lun, p. 311.
46 - Zhongguo gudai sixiangshi lun, pp. 179-180, 189. On Zhuangzi's aesthetics,

see also Li Zehou and Liu Gangji, eds., Zhongguo meixueshi, vol. 1.
47 - Zhongguo gudai sixiangshi lun, pp. 218-219.
48 - For an analysis of this process, see E. J. Dijksterhuis's classic work, De mecha-

nisering van het wereldbeeld (The mechanization of the worldview)
(Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1950).
49 - Zhongguo gudai sixiangshi lun, pp. 113-114. Xunzi's exceptional position in

this regard is systematically analyzed in Heiner Roetz, Mensch und Natur im
alten China: Zum Subjekt-Objekt-Gegensatz in der klassischen chinesischen
Philosophie. Zugleich eine Kritik des Klischees vom chinesischen Univer-
sismus (Man and nature in ancient China: On the subject-object opposition
in classical Chinese philosophy: Simultaneously a critique of the Chinese
universism cliche) (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1984).
51 - The following is based on Li Zehou, "A Critical Reappraisal of Confucius," in

Zhongguo gudai sixiangshi lun, an extensive summary of which is provided in
Woei Lien Chong, "Mankind and Nature in Chinese Thought," pp. 154-158.
52 - Li Zehou, "Kongzi zai pingjia" (A Critical Reappraisal of Confucius) in

Zhongguo gudai sixiangshi lun, p. 18.
53 - Ibid., p. 22.
54 - Ibid., p. 25.
Woei Lien Chong 145
55 - Ibid., pp. 25-26.
56 - Ibid., p. 27.
57- Ibid.
58- Ibid., p. 28.

59- Ibid., p. 31.
60- Ibid., p. 32.
61 - Ibid., p. 35.
62 - Ibid., pp. 34-35.

63 - Ibid., p. 32.
64- Ibid., p. 33.

65 - Ibid.
66 - Ibid., p. 36.
67 - Ibid.
68 - "A Preliminary Investigation of the Mohist School," in Zhongguo gudai si-

xiangshi lun, pp. 52-76; "An Outline of Early Twentieth-Century Bourgeois
Revolutionary Thought," in Zhongguo jindai sixiangshi lun, pp. 306-307.
69 - Ibid., pp. 55-56.

70 - Ibid., pp. 53, 55, 61-63.
71 - Ibid., pp. 65-66.
72 - Ibid., p. 67.
73 - "Remarks on Hong Xiuquan and the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace," in

Zhongguo jindai sixiangshi lun, pp. 7-30; reprinted from Lishi yanjiu (His-
torical studies), 1978, no. 7. This early post-Mao text is an excellent example
of the ancient Chinese strategy of covert criticism: everything said about Hong
Xiuquan in this article is also meant to apply to Mao. Li's own policy pro-
posals are conveyed through a discussion of Hong Rengan's ~f{~-f Zizheng
xinbian *0,fj (New treatise on financial administration), which, Li states,
was actually a call for the establishment of capitalism in the area occupied by
the Taipings (pp. 28-30).
75 - Ibid., p. 82.
76 - Ibid., pp. 78-79, 81.

77 - Ibid., p. 82.
78 - Makesizhuyi zai Zhongguo, pp. 48-49 (pp. 37-38 in the translation).
80 - Ibid.
81 - Ibid., p. 155.
82 - Ibid.
83 - Ibid., p. 156.
84 - Ibid.
85 - Thomas Metzger, Escape from Predicament: Neo-Confucianism and China's

Evolving Political Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), esp.
pp. 85, 115, 119, 127.
86 - The relationship between Wang Yangming's philosophy and Mao's thought

was put forward long ago by Shimada Kenji, among others, in Tohogakuho,
no. 28 (March 1958): 1-80. I am indebted to Professor Wm. Theodore de
Bary for pointing this out to me. See also Frederic Wakeman, Jr., History and
Will: Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse-tung's Thought (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1973), chaps. 16 and 17. On activism and indi-
vidualism in Ming thought, see Wm. Theodore de Bary, ed., Self and Society
in Ming Thought (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1970),
esp. Wm. Theodore de Bary, "Individualism and Humanitarianism in Late
Ming Thought," pp. 145-248.
87 - Li Zehou, "Aspects of Song and Ming Neo-Confucianism," in Zhongguo

gudai sixiangshi lun, pp. 220-266. References in the following are to the
earlier version in Zhongguo shehui kexue, 1982, no. 1:31-52. An English
translation, containing many inaccuracies, appeared in Social Sciences in
China (SSC), 1982, no. 4:155-189.
88 - Zhongguo shehui kexue, 1982, no. 1 :34.
89 - Ibid., pp. 34, 35.
90 - Ibid., p. 35.
91 - Ibid., p. 36.
92 - Ibid.
93 - Ibid., pp. 38, 39.
94 - Ibid., pp. 43-44.

95 - Ibid., p. 44.
96 - Ibid.
97 - Ibid.; SSC, 1984, no. 4:175.
Woei Lien Chong 147
99 - Ibid., p. 46.
100- Ibid., p. 48.

101 - Ibid.
102 - Ibid.
103 - Ibid., p. 31. On Mao and Paulsen, see Wakeman, History and Will, pp. 201-
206. See also Stuart Schram, ed., Mao's Road to Power, vol. 1, The
Pre-Marxist Period, 1912-1920 (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1992),
pp. 175-316, for a complete English translation of Mao's marginal notes to
Paulsen's A System of Ethics.
104 - Zhongguo xiandai sixiangshi lun, p. 132.
105 - Ibid., p. 50.

107- Ibid., p. 51.
108 - Yan Fu, in Li's opinion, was a great enlightenment figure in modern China
because he introduced Western bourgeois thought. See Zhongguo xiandai
sixiangshi lun, pp. 249-285. See also "Manshuo xiti Zhongyong" (Western
learning is the essence, and China should apply it), in Zhongguo xiandai
sixiangshi lun, pp. 311-341, originally in Kongzi yanjiu, 1987, no. 1.
109 - "Qimeng yu jiuwang de shuangzhong bianzou" (The dual variation of

enlightenment and national salvation), in Zhongguo xiandai sixiangshi lun,
pp. 7-49, originally printed in Zouxiang weilai, 1986, no. 1.
110 - Zhongguo gudai sixiangshi lun, p. 258.
111 - Li Zehou, "Subjectivity and Subjectality: A Response," in this issue of Philos-

ophy East and West.
112 - Pipan, pp. 416 ff.
113 - Pipan, pp. 419, 419 n. 2,436 n. 2.

114- Pipan, p. 192.
115 - Personal conversation, 16 October 1996.
Bibliographical Note
For Western-language analyses of Li's role within the context of the cultural debates
of the period, see Liu Kang, "Subjectivity, Marxism, and Cultural Theory in China,"
Social Text 10 (2/3) (1992): 114-140, which is also printed in Liu Kang and Xiaobin
Tang, eds., Politics, Ideology, and Literary Discourse in Modern China (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 23-55; Lin Min, "The Search for Mo-
dernity: Chinese Intellectual Discourse and Li Zehou," China Quarterly, December
1992; Mu Ling, "From Social Criticism to Cultural Criticism: A Study of Chinese
'Culture Craze' and Li Zehou" (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Asso-
ciation of Chinese Studies, Los Angeles, 1993); Karl-Heinz Pohl, "Zu Beitragen Li
Zehous in der Debatte um Tradition und Identitat in den 80er Jahren in der Volks-
republik China" (On Li Zehou's contributions to the debate on tradition and identity
in the 1980s in the People's Republic of China), in Ralf Moritz, ed., Sinologische
Traditionen im Spiegel neuer Forschung (Sinological traditions in the light of re-
cent research) (Leipzig: Universitatsverlag, 1993), pp. 41-56; Sylvia Chan, "Li
Zehou's Theory of Ethics: A Synthesis of Marxism and Confucianism?" New Zealand
Journal of East Asian Studies 2 (1) (1994): 50-65; Lin Tongqi, Henry Rosemont,
Jr., and Roger T. Ames, "Chinese Philosophy: A Philosophical Essay on the
'State-of-the-Art'," in Journal of Asian Studies 54 (3) (August 1995): 727-758; Gu
Xin jfltJ, Heige'erzhuyi de youling yu Zhongguo zhishifenzi: Li Zehou yanjiu
,ii L IAt l~,X, L J'jf : i )fjW (The Specter of Hegelianism and
Chinese intellectuals: A study of Li Zehou) (Taipei: Fengyunshidai, 1994); Gu Xin,
"Hegelianism and Chinese Intellectual Discourse: A Study of Li Zehou," Journal
of Contemporary China, no. 8 (Winter/Spring 1995): 1-27; Gu Xin, "Subjectivity,
Modernity, and Chinese Hegelian Marxism: A Study of Li Zehou's Philosophical
Ideas from a Comparative Perspective," in Philosophy East and West 46 (2) (April
1996): 205-246; Ban Wang, The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics
in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), chap. 5; Jing
Wang, High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng's China
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 93-113; and Woei Lien Chong,
"Mankind and Nature in Chinese Thought: Li Zehou on the Traditional Roots of
Maoist Voluntarism," in China Information 11 (2/3) (Autumn/Winter 1996-1997):
138-175. A brief impression of Li's thought is provided in Shiping Hua, Scientism
and Humanism: Two Cultures in Post-Mao China (1978-1989) (New York: State
University of New York Press, 1995), chap. 7. The Chinese-language literature on
Li Zehou and the "culture fever" is more than abundant. For a recent overview
of Li's reception in China and Taiwan, see Huang Kewu V,k, "Lun Li Zehou
sixiang de xin dongxiang: Jian tan jinnian lai dui Li Zehou sixiang de taolun"
i^ 4 I, $,gMA1i;fT]: ?N ii,FintteJedrc,$liBiitn (On the new direction in
Li Zehou's thought: Also on the discussions of Li Zehou's thought in recent years),
Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo jikan ji]ft Tlt fiiEfViWlt
(Taipei), no. 25 (June 1996): 427-460. A controversial and little-understood
criticism is Liu Xiaobo AIJOi, Xuanze de pipan: Yu sixiang lingxiu duihua
Agttt ' l^J , it~: (A critique of choice: A dialogue with intellectual
leaders) (Taipei: Fengyun Shidai Chuban Gongsi, 1989). This book is analyzed in
Woei Lien Chong, "The Tragic Duality of Man: Liu Xiaobo on Western Philosophy
from Kant to Sartre," in Kurt Werner Radtke and Tony Saich, eds., China's Modern-
ization: Westernization and Acculturation (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1993), pp. 111-
162.
Woei Lien Chong 149

Combining Marx With Kant in China

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Combining Marx With Kant in China

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Combining Marx with Kant: The Philosophical Anthropology of Li Zehou

Author(s): Woei Lien Chong

Woei Lien Chong ])i?

Among those interested in contemporary Chinese thought, Li Zeh

Woei Lien Chong 121

The Problem of Subjectivity: Human Agency versus Objective Constraints

In post-Mao China, an intense debate arose on what constitutes "human nature," in

122 Philosophy East & West

Woei Lien Chong 123

124 Philosophy East & West

Parallels between Kant's Time and Post-Mao China

Woei Lien Chong 125

126 Philosophy East & West

Kant's Epistemology: The Relationship between Freedom and Necessity

Woei Lien Chong 127

128 Philosophy East & West

Woei Lien Chong 129

Li Zehou's Essays on the History of Chinese Thought

130 Philosophy East & West

Woei Lien Chong 131

Philosophical Roots of China's "Small Agriculturalists' Mentality"

132 Philosophy East & West

Woei Lien Chong 133

134 Philosophy East & West

Woei Lien Chong 135

Neo-Confucianism and Mao's Voluntarism

136 Philosophy East & West

Woei Lien Chong 137

138 Philosophy East & West

Li Zehou's "Marxism for the Twenty-first Century"

Summarizing, we could say that Li regards Chinese philosophy as a philosophy with

Woei Lien Chong 139

140 Philosophy East & West

Woei Lien Chong 141

This article is based partly on an earlier study I published in China Information 11

5 - "Manshuo xiti Zhongyong" iqi4I? 4ffl (Western learning is the essence,

142 Philosophy East & West

6 - "Qimeng yu jiuwang de shuangzhong bianzou" Ai ;-tb1,iit, (The

7 - Zhongguo jindai sixiangshi lun (Essays on the history of modern Chinese

9 - Pipan, pp. 423-424.

11 - Edgar Bauer, Ideologie und Entwicklung in der VR China. Philosophische und

Woei Lien Chong 143

17 - Pipan, pp. 55-56, 363, 417-421.

21 - Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu, Gaobie geming, pp. 54, 66.

144 Philosophy East & West

37- Pipan, pp. 192, 410.

40 - Pipan, pp. 53-54, 90.

42 - Zhongguo gudai sixiangshi lun, p. 32.

44 - Zhongguo jindai sixiangshi lun, p. 21; Makesizhuyi zai Zhongguo, p. 83 (p. 63

45 - Zhongguo jindai sixiangshi lun, p. 311.

46 - Zhongguo gudai sixiangshi lun, pp. 179-180, 189. On Zhuangzi's aesthetics,

47 - Zhongguo gudai sixiangshi lun, pp. 218-219.

48 - For an analysis of this process, see E. J. Dijksterhuis's classic work, De mecha-

49 - Zhongguo gudai sixiangshi lun, pp. 113-114. Xunzi's exceptional position in

50 - Zhongguo gudai sixiangshi lun, pp. 118-119.

51 - The following is based on Li Zehou, "A Critical Reappraisal of Confucius," in

52 - Li Zehou, "Kongzi zai pingjia" (A Critical Reappraisal of Confucius) in

Woei Lien Chong 145

58- Ibid., p. 28.

62 - Ibid., pp. 34-35.

64- Ibid., p. 33.

68 - "A Preliminary Investigation of the Mohist School," in Zhongguo gudai si-

69 - Ibid., pp. 55-56.

73 - "Remarks on Hong Xiuquan and the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace," in