Aischi (1910 – March 22, 1966), formerly known as Li Shengxuan, was a native of Nantengchong and of Mongolian ethnicity. China's outstanding proletarian revolutionary, famous Marxist philosopher and educator. He studied in Japan in his early years and joined the Communist Party of China in 1935. He has long been engaged in the research, propaganda and education of Marxist philosophy, and has paid attention to popularizing and popularizing Marxist philosophy. He has successively served as the director and vice president of the Philosophy Teaching and Research Office of the Senior Party School of the CPC Central Committee, the vice president of the Chinese Philosophical Society, and the member of the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is the author of "Popular Philosophy", "Philosophy and Life", "Aischi Anthology", and the chief editor of "Dialectical Materialism, Historical Materialism" and so on. (*March 22 is Mr. Aischi's death anniversary)
"Esquire's Philosophical Speech? Isn't it Popular Philosophy? To this day, even readers who have some understanding of the history of the development of Chinese philosophy in the past hundred years, when they think of the name Aischi, their first reaction is "Popular Philosophy", and they are much stranger to "Philosophical Speech", the predecessor of "Popular Philosophy". Even if the author brings the newly published book "Philosophical Speeches" published by the Beijing Publishing House in front of them, some people will be quite curious.
As we all know, from the first publication to the end, a work may be reprinted several times, and in this reprint, there will always be some changes based on the author's initiative, or passive changes based on the environment. Therefore, discussing the change of the edition of a book has become a discipline of philology, publishing, history, etc., especially when the book is still a masterpiece, this kind of knowledge is not only full of academic research interest, but also can glimpse some details of "big history".
For example, as mentioned at the beginning, his most famous work is "Popular Philosophy", of course, the connotation of "mass" philosophy is Marxist-Leninist philosophy, which is clearly written on the pseudonym "Aischi". Ai is "love"; thought, is Marx; qi, is Lenin, because Lenin's original name was Urakimir Ilyich Ulyanov, which is already a common sense.
However, the "Popular Philosophy", which is most common today and published by many famous publishing houses, is slightly different from the original appearance. Consider a review of the history of the changing versions of Popular Philosophy. According to Li Weiwu's "Aischi and Yi Siqi", in 1934, the "Declaration" presided over by the famous newspaperman Shi Liangcai opened a supplement to "Reading Questions and Answers", because this supplement became more and more influential, evolving into a semi-monthly magazine of "Reading Life", which also had columns such as "Literary Speech", "Philosophical Speech", "Scientific Speech", etc. In the column of "Philosophical Speech", Eschi published 24 articles from November 1934 to "the end of 1935, and published under the title of "Philosophical Speech". (Press: January 1936)
Philosophical Speeches, Aischi, Beijing Publishing House, November 2018.
This history not only makes us understand what kind of book "Philosophical Speech" was originally, but also reminds us that Aischi, who joined the party in 1935, was not a full party member when he wrote the book. Therefore, "Philosophical Speech" has two more distinctive characteristics: First, as a collection of newspaper column articles into a book, "Philosophical Speech" has a colloquial color, and each important topic starts from the phenomenon of life and the current events of the time, and then opens the discussion. In order to accommodate the continuity of the column, some chapters are slightly repetitive with the previous content, and some chapters are left with the tail of the following text at the end. These features have been retained as advantages in subsequent versions. Second, although "Philosophical Speeches" is Marxist-Leninist philosophy, because of the white terror of the 1930s, there is no mention of Marx and Lenin in the whole book. Moreover, precisely because of the author's identity as a party member and the background of the "Declaration", "Philosophical Speech" cannot be regarded as a propaganda reading, but a popular book that is truly open to the public, regardless of whether old or young.
This enabled philosophical speeches to temporarily escape the fate of being banned at that time, and quickly exploded into influence, "only five months after its birth, it was already four editions" (Aischi, four generations). It was this powerful influence that finally made the rulers of the time notice that the book was about Marxist-Leninist philosophy, so they banned it. The fourth edition of Philosophical Speeches was changed to Popular Philosophy, and by about the time of liberation it had been printed in its thirty-second edition, and was undoubtedly a "phenomenon-level" bestseller in today's parlance. Many years later, especially after liberation, many politicians and scholars of the older generation referred to this series of versions when they talked about the influence of philosophical speeches or popular philosophy when they were young.
After liberation, the situation in the whole country underwent tremendous changes, and Ai Siqi, who had become an important theoretician in the Party, systematically reviewed and revised the "Philosophy of the Masses", and the basis for the revision was Mao Zedong Thought. This revised edition was not published during Escher's lifetime, and was not published until 1979 by Triptych Bookstore, and the Popular Philosophy, which was reprinted by several publishing houses, was this revised edition.
If we compare the "Philosophical Speech" of the Beijing Publishing House with the common "Popular Philosophy (Revised Edition)", we will find some interesting revisions, for example, the revised version has more language that we are familiar with today, but has distinct personal characteristics in the revision, such as "from the masses, to the masses", "there is no right to speak without investigation"; for example, in the "Philosophical Speech", there is "In terms of content, our truth is always absolute, and all truths have absolute content." relative form" (p. 111), the expression of truth "formally relative and contentally absolute" was removed in the revised edition because it was inconsistent with some of the statements of the 1950s.
Therefore, in a sense, the "Philosophical Speech", which retains more of its original appearance, has the same reading value as the later "Popular Philosophy (Revised Edition)", and it is also more historical value. In addition, the method of writing "Philosophical Speech" is particularly worthy of the attention of contemporary writers. Frankly speaking, the Philosophical Speech is not an interpretation of Marxist philosophy in the strict sense, but a reference to the Marxist-Leninist philosophical framework of the Soviet Union (which is also the driving force for Aischi to revise the content in the 1950s to strive for more Chineseization), which is determined by the historical conditions at that time, and there is nothing wrong with it. However, what really "sinicized" the "Philosophical Speech" at that time was its "popularity."
As the author himself puts it: "I only wish that this book would give the lost scholars an intellectual solution to the famine of the intellect on the streets of the city, in the shops, in the countryside, for it is not a beautifully decorated pastry, but just a dry-baked flatbread." It can be said that if any kind of learning is to really influence the masses, it must be somehow entered into the masses. In ancient Greece, it was through the streets of Socrates that "debates" or "philosophical dramas"; in Confucianism, especially song and mind science, it was through a large number of township rules and civil covenants. In the 1930s, although Marxism had spread, its philosophical part, or philosophy itself as a discipline, was still far from the general public, which required the efforts of Aischi and others.
The practice of the Philosophical Discourse is to divide philosophy into several parts, each of which solves a number of problems, each of which is summarized by subheadings, introduced by one of the most common and interesting phenomena, gradually transitioning to the general proposition of philosophy, and then giving explanations based on Marxist-Leninist philosophy. This kind of writing was a new way at the time, in the words of Li Gongpu, "the most popular brushwork, the genre of daily conversation, and the theory of dissolving specialization", so it won the popularity of many young people. Today, popular writing about the classics, about some specialized knowledge, is common, but some of them are purely technical introductory books for beginners, and some are commercial writing that caters to the masses for the sake of profit, how many of them can rely on popular writing to win the youth, win ideas, and win the future of the nation, like "Philosophical Speech"?