Ideological Dialogue Across Time and Space: Starting from "Marx's Entry into the Temple of Literature"

General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out in an important speech at the conference celebrating the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China that "why the Communist Party of China can and why socialism with Chinese characteristics is good is, in the final analysis, because of Marxism." General Secretary Xi Jinping stressed that on the new journey, it is necessary to "persist in integrating the basic tenets of Marxism with China's specific reality and with China's excellent traditional culture." The party's historical experience of the past hundred years tells us that integrating with China's excellent traditional culture is one of the indispensable and important conditions for Marxism to "work." The combination of the two is possible not only because their thinking on nature, society, and life is similar, but also because the ideological factors of China's excellent traditional culture flow in the origin of Marxism. The latter aspect is often not noticed by people, and Guo Moruo realized this with the sensitivity of a writer and the eyes of a historian, and wrote the article "Marx Enters the Temple of Literature" in 1926.

　　Guo Moruo wrote in the article: Confucius and three proud protégés were "eating cold pork head meat at the Shanghai Confucian Temple", only to see someone carrying a palanquin with vermilion paint break in, and the palanquin stopped and walked out of the bearded Marx. After some conversation between the two, Marx sighed: "I don't want to have an old comrade like you two thousand years ago, in the far East!" Marx recognized this "old comrade" because utopian socialism, one of the sources of Marxism, absorbed Confucius's datong thought. Marx and Engels told an interesting story in 1850: the German missionary Charles Gutzlaff (1803-1851; the common name in modern Chinese literature is Guo Shila, who participated in the opium trade and the Opium Wars, and the translation of the New Testament Bible, which was deleted and adopted by the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom) returned from China 20 years after leaving Europe to publicize That China "faces the threat of violent revolution"; Among the rebellious populace, some have pointed to the poverty of some and the wealth of some, demanding the redistribution of property, and have been and are calling for the total abolition of private property". When he returned to Europe, "he heard people talking about socialism and asked: What does this mean?" After the others explained it to him, he exclaimed, 'So, I can't hide from this evil doctrine anywhere?' This is exactly what many ordinary people in China have been preaching lately! Then Marx and Engels said: "Socialism in China and socialism in Europe have in common like Chinese philosophy and Hegel's philosophy. "Chinese socialism" here refers to the utopian socialism of Confucianism. In 1850, on the eve of the Taiping Rebellion, Hong Xiuquan wrote a propaganda draft reviving the Confucian idea of Datong, while he was active in Guangdong and Guangxi. And Gützlav, who also preached mainly in Guangdong, was no doubt aware of these situations. "European socialism" here refers to European utopian socialism. Marx and Engels believed that the two socialisms, which are thousands of miles apart, have at least one thing in common, that is, they advocate public ownership. They once quoted the utopian socialist Cabe as saying: "You who oppose collectivism ... Let me ask you about history and all the philosophers: Listen! I am not going to speak to you of the many ancient peoples who practiced communal property ownership! Nor is it about the Hebrews... The priests of Egypt, Minos... Lycagus and Pythagoras... Of the last two, Confucius and Zoroastrian, the former proclaimed this principle in China, and the latter in Persia. In order to distinguish themselves from some utopian socialists who do not advocate public ownership, Marx and Engels called Cabe a utopian communist, and thus they also said in this sense: "The perfect Chinese is the communist." The "Chinese" here refers to Confucius in the European context at that time. It can be seen that Marx and Engels regarded utopian socialism as an important source of their own ideas, including an examination of Confucian datong thought.

　　Another important source of Marxism is German classical philosophy, of which Hegel's influence on Marx and Engels is particularly prominent. Marx and Engels pointed out that Chinese philosophy and Hegel philosophy have something in common, which means that their critical inheritance of Hegel includes the critical inheritance of Chinese philosophy. Although Hegel has many derogatory views on Zhou Yi and Lao Tzu, the influence of these two on his construction of the dialectical framework of "positive and negative" that is, negation, cannot be erased. Hegel said: "Chinese also have philosophy, and its basic laws are quite old. For example, the book of destiny, 'Yin and Yang', which deals with 'birth' and 'annihilation', has very abstract ideas of monity and duality. So Chinese philosophy seems to be the same as the Pythagorean doctrine, starting from the same basic concept. The principle is reason, called the 'Tao'. This is the source of all things, the source of all things. To know their forms is also the most profound science for Chinese. The two basic images of "yang and yin" are a straight line (-, yang) and a straight line divided into two equal segments (--, yin); the first image... Expressed in the affirmative. The meaning of the second image is... Negative". And "the 'Tao' (reason) is established because of the combination of two principles, as the I Ching points out. The Way of Heaven or Reason of Heaven is made up of two creative principles of the universe. The way of the earth or material reason also has two opposing principles, 'rigidity and softness' (very uncertain to understand). The human way or human reason contains (with this opposition) love for one's neighbor and justice. Apparently, Hegel realized that the Zhou Yi "one yin and one yang is the Tao" contains "positive and negative combinations": yang is "positive" (affirmation), yin is "anti" (negation), and Tao is "union" (negation of negation). He thought that Lao Tzu's "Tao gives birth to one, life to two, two to three, and three to all things" is similar to this. He said that the Taoists "the main concept of this school is 'Tao', which is 'reason'", and "'reason produces one, one produces two, two produces three, and three gives rise to the whole world', the universe." "What is strange is that in Taoism, that is, in the whole, there are three provisions. One created two, two created three, three created the universe... One is only realistic if it contains two within itself, and from this three arises." Hegel paid particular attention to the "three", regarding it as the "union" of "positive and negative", believing that "one" (Tao, nothing) implied the "two" (being) that denied itself, thus differentiating the yin and yang and the two qi, thus forming the "three", that is, the harmony of the yin and yang and the two qi and the biochemical of all things. Hegel's "positive and negative combination" can be said to express the "yin and yang combination" of China in the "European way of thinking", making it enter the "kingdom of category".

　　Marx saw this. In 1842, when criticizing the German censorship system, he said: "The cross-cut bar and bar drawn by the censor of books and newspapers when they are altered is like the pair of thinking of Chinese straight line, gossip. The gossip of the prosecutor is the various categories of the work; and the categories, as we all know, are the typical things of the essence of the various contents. By teasing the censor's words, it is not difficult to see that Marx was no stranger to the dialectic of Zhou Yi, which was incorporated into the Hegel category kingdom. In his criticism of the young Hegelians, he pointed out: "Hegel said that the predominant prescriptiveness of China is 'being', the predominant prescriptiveness of India is 'nothing', and so on, then absolute criticism will 'fully' echo Hegel, and reduce the characteristics of the present era to the logical category of 'non-prescriptiveness', and will more fully include 'non-prescriptiveness' in the first chapter of speculative logic, that is, in the first chapter on 'quality'. The "first chapter of speculative logic" mentioned here, that is, the first chapter of Hegel's "Logic", is mainly concerned with the negation of the negation of "being" (positive), "nothing" (reverse), and "changing" (union). Here Marx reveals that Hegel's "being", "non-being" and "change" clearly have a deep imprint of Taoist dialectics. Therefore, the inheritance of Hegel's philosophy by Marx and Engels includes the inheritance of Chinese philosophy internalized in it.

　　It is well known that British classical political economy is also one of the sources of Marxism, but Marx regarded Quesnai before it as "the true originator of modern political economy". Quesnay was highly regarded for Confucianism and was known as the "Confucius of Europe". He pointed out that 11 works, including the Four Books and Five Classics of Confucianism, show that "Chinese make no distinction between morality and politics. In their view, the art of the good life is also the art of good politics, and the two sciences are one and the same as each other." He believed that Confucian renzheng thought combined morality and politics, and that the entire Analects revolved around virtue, beneficial work, and the art of domination; and that Mencius, which put forward renzheng, was almost entirely about the good management of government and the methods for establishing such good management. Quesnay developed Confucian ideas of benevolence into two aspects: agriculture-oriented and laissez-faire. The Confucian doctrine of benevolence advocated "constant production" for the peasants, and Quesnay thus considered China to be a model based on agriculture, which led to his theory of heavy agriculture, that is, agriculture was regarded as the source of all the wealth of the country, emphasizing that the surplus products that led to the increase in wealth could only come from agriculture. In this regard, Marx commented: "The merit and characteristic of the Physiocrats is that it derives value and surplus value not from the field of circulation but from the field of production." Quesnay's theory has a core concept of "natural order" (natural law), which is actually the Confucian principle of heavenly principles. According to Tianli Tian, it is to implement the "natural law", abolish the government's "artificial order" on economic activities, and let it be "laissez-faire" (corresponding to the Chinese "rule by doing nothing"). Heroite, a pioneer of the Physiocratist school, said: "The writings of the Chinese philosopher Confucius tell us that as long as we obey the commands of nature, nature can make things run in its own power. He is based on the Analects' "He who rules by inaction, qi shun also has the same as the rule of the analects." What is a husband? Congratulations are just south of it", from which the French word "laissez-faire" was distilled. Marx said that the Physiocrats "with their laissez-faire slogans" "fundamentally negate all government interference in the activities of civil society." Obviously, Quesnay's influence on Confucian benevolent government influenced Marx's political economy.

　　Marxism is influenced by traditional Chinese thought from its three sources. At that time, european intellectual circles believed that Marx's thought had a distinctly Chinese component, and he was ridiculed by his opponent Dühring as "Chinese erudition", which may indicate this from one side. Therefore, Marx's entry into the Temple of Literature is not a joke that crosses the drama.

　　(Author Affilications:Department of Philosophy, East China Normal University, Institute of Modern Chinese Thought and Culture)

Source: China Social Science Network - China Social Science Daily Author: Chen Weiping