Chapter 64 3. Discussion on Human Nature

My master's major is contemporary Soviet philosophy.The reason why I applied for this major is because I used to learn Russian as a public foreign language, and I have a good foundation and are relatively sure.For me, the most important thing is to go to Beijing for the test. I believe that the major itself cannot limit me.However, I really passed the exam, and I couldn't do nothing in Soviet philosophy. The first thing I did was turn over old accounts.In the Soviet Union in the 1920s there was a Deborin who was a leading figure in philosophy.In the early 1930s, Stalin himself launched criticism against him, defining him as "Menshevik-style idealism," and knocked him down.In this critical movement, the most ferocious thug Midin replaced him in the leading position in the philosophical circle, and has since become Stalin's number one royal philosopher.Mao Zedong also criticized De Bolin's views in "On Contradiction". Therefore, in the Chinese theoretical circles, De Bolin has always been regarded as a villain.I studied de Bolin's main works and found that he was proficient in Hegel's philosophy and was quite seriously doing the work of materially transforming Hegel's dialectics.On the contrary, after reading the materials that criticized him, I found that it was a bunch of nonsense. There was no theoretical discussion in it, only a murderous ideological trial.De Bolin himself is not at all the kind of philosopher I am interested in, he is a bookworm, devoid of personality and creativity.What caught my attention was that this criticism set a bad precedent, using leaders to set the tone and the central government to make decisions to solve academic problems, replacing academic discussions with mass criticism, and completely canceling the independent status of academics.So, I decided to reverse the case for Deborin and wrote the article "Correct Evaluation of Deborin".In the article, in addition to defending some of Deborin's criticized theoretical viewpoints, I mainly emphasized the bad influence of this criticism, especially on our country, including: on the relationship between theory and practice, practical On the issue of the relationship between philosophy and politics, one-sided emphasis on philosophy serving politics has actually canceled philosophy; on the history of philosophy, one-sided emphasis on the revolutionary significance of Marxist philosophy has obliterated The value of two thousand years of human philosophical exploration. In September 1979, the Graduate School held the first academic exchange meeting. I introduced the above viewpoints at the meeting, which caused quite a stir.My article was published in Issue 5, 1980, of the internal journal "Unfinalized" of the Chinese Social Sciences Magazine, and then included in a "Discussion Collection of Stalin's Philosophical Thought".This is the first academic paper I have published, and it is actually the first time that my words have been printed in type, so I am very happy.

From the second year of my studies, I turned my attention to understanding the dynamics of contemporary Soviet philosophy, browsed the journals of the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and read some newly published books.I don't like this stuff at all, because it's still too ideological, and because of the Soviet prose style full of nonsense.However, in the process of reading materials, I noticed that in the Soviet philosophical circle at that time, the study of human beings, human nature, and humanitarian issues was a hot topic, and this was a reflection of the general trend of philosophy concerned with human issues worldwide.Compared with ours, the Soviet philosophers reacted much more sensitively to the world's philosophical problems, and explored them much more deeply.I have always been interested in human issues, and I feel that there are still many obstacles to research in this area in China. Therefore, I have successively written some articles introducing the research situation of the Soviets, translated some relevant materials, and published them in journals. Chinese provide reference.I also spent a lot of time participating in the compilation of the book "Soviet Contemporary Philosophy" hosted by Teacher Jia, and undertook the writing of a considerable part of the chapters and the final drafting work.In addition, I was involved in a large number of translations of Soviet philosophical books, which I continued to do until two or three years after graduation.I translate very quickly, at least 5,000 words a day, and sometimes nearly 10,000 words.But, on the whole, I'm getting more and more bored with this kind of work, and think it's a waste of time.I wrote in my diary one day: "I finally finished writing the missing part of Soviet philosophy, and I feel relieved. Take it away, take away all this pile of waste paper, whether to publish it or feed it to rats, I I don’t care.” This reflected my mood at the time, and I did feel that there was little value in what I was doing, so there was a growing resistance.

The task of the third year was to write a master's thesis. I decided not to be restricted by my major, and basically put aside Soviet philosophy and directly studied human nature.Teacher Jia is very open-minded and readily agreed to this, and gave me enthusiastic encouragement and appreciation in the process of writing.It came naturally to him, but I knew it would never be possible if I had been under some dogmatic and conceited mentor.Therefore, on the one hand, I rejoice that I am lucky, and on the other hand, I am also sincerely grateful to Teacher Jia.When I was in college, I had a strong interest in human nature. I took the opportunity of writing a master's thesis to do a systematic discussion, which can be said to be a long-cherished wish.The title of the dissertation is "Philosophical Discussion on Human Nature", and it is planned to write six chapters, namely: 1, philosophy and view of human nature; 2, basic types of view of human nature; 3, human activities and human nature; 4, human biology and sociality ; Five, human rationality and irrationality; Six, some methodological issues of human nature theory.Finally, I finished the first four chapters and part of the sixth chapter, about 180,000 words.During that year and later, combined with my master's thesis research, I also wrote and published some articles on Marx's theory of human nature, including "Marxist Philosophy and Values", "There is Only One Marx", "The History of Historical Progress" Double Standards", "Marx's View of Freedom", etc.Among them, the article "There is only one Marx" mainly demonstrates that Marx was as much a humanitarian in his later period as he was in his youth. I read it at the annual meeting of Marxist philosophy held in Luoyang in April 1981.After I spoke, the orthodox faction launched fierce criticism, but I had no intention of fighting. Huang Kejian, who was teaching at Huazhong Institute of Technology at the time, fought back for me.He is a leader who advocates Marxist anthropology. He has shown his skills in debates. He is very familiar with the original works of Marx. He quotes casually and has excellent eloquence. Spectators.

My master's thesis and related articles undoubtedly bear the obvious traces of that era, which is manifested in the relatively simple use of Marx as an ideological resource, and I have to cite a large number of original works to defend my views.If I do this research now, I will definitely make more just and comprehensive use of intellectual resources throughout the history of Western philosophy.However, I still believe that Marx deserves to be a great thinker belonging to the excellent spiritual tradition of the West, and his theories, including the theory of human nature, are still a treasure trove.Undoubtedly, when I base my views on his theory, I have given weight and play.Looking back now, I still agree with some of the viewpoints I expounded at that time, and my later thoughts are related to them.In the theoretical circles in China at that time, as long as the issue of human nature was discussed, Marx's famous assertion that the essence of human beings was "the sum of all social relations" was bound to be cited.However, people's understanding of this sentence is extremely superficial and narrow. The basic idea is to attribute human nature to social nature and social nature to class nature.In view of this, I emphatically expounded the following points--

First, human nature has rich connotations. It is a complex of unique and common biological attributes, mental attributes and social attributes formed in human activities.Due to the humanization of human nature, human biological attributes should also be included in human nature.I distinguish mental attributes into rationality and irrationality, emphasizing that irrationality means that individual emotions and emotional experiences are also an important part of human nature.The rich attributes of human beings, the historical development of attributes, and the overall connection in development constitute the complete human nature.At each stage of human development, the degree of humanization of human nature, the degree of deepening of human social essence, and the degree of enrichment of human mental life are mutually restricted and consistent.The same is true for individuals. The degree of satisfaction of a person's needs and the degree of development of abilities are subject to and reflect the degree of development of his entire personality.Personality is an important concept in the theory of human nature, which expresses the degree to which a specific individual possesses rich humanity and the uniqueness of the way.

Second, the strongest and most absurd prejudices exist on the question of the social nature of man.People have unanimously declared that in a class society, class nature is the only concrete human nature, and if class nature is removed, only abstract human nature, or even animal nature remains.Some people really ask: If the class attributes of sex and maternal love are removed, what is the essential difference between humans and animals in these matters?This is equivalent to saying that when making love or breastfeeding, the essential difference between humans and animals is that they do these things with class feelings.Such a ridiculous argument was written by a theoretical authority at the time, occupying a mainstream position.The problem is that these people attribute the "summary of social relations" to production relations, and then to class relations, so they also attribute human sociality to class characteristics.Real social relations have rich content, and I analyze them from two aspects.From a horizontal perspective, contemporary social relations not only include classes, but also include nations, countries, occupations, families, etc., all of which have special connotations that cannot be replaced by classes, and create corresponding social regulations in people.In addition, there are personal interactions at the microenvironmental level, such as teachers you admire, close friends or lovers, etc. This kind of interaction often has an important, sometimes even critical, impact on a person's growth.From a vertical perspective, there is also the social relationship of historical inheritance, that is, the individual's contact with and acceptance of the culture handed down from history.This should be especially taken into account when analyzing the social attributes of intellectuals.Another manifestation of the simplification of human social essence is that when discussing the development process of social relations and human social essence, we only pay attention to the replacement of social systems and class types, ignoring the development of social relations and the social essence of human beings. The more important aspect of deepening.People seem to deliberately forget the great historical progress made by capitalism that Marx repeatedly emphasized in this respect, that is, the breaking down of rural, provincial and national borders, and individuals becoming more and more citizens of the world, or in Marx's own words, "narrow territorial The sexual individual is replaced by the world-historical, truly universal individual".

Third, human nature is formed and developed in human activities.The essential feature that distinguishes human activities from the life activities of animals is freedom, that is, the purpose and highest enjoyment of the activity itself, that is, the use and development of ability itself.In this sense, free activities are defined as the real essence of human beings, which is where the value and mission of human beings lie, and also the goal of the development of human society.The society that guarantees the free development of all individuals' abilities to the greatest extent is the society that conforms to human nature.However, in the history so far, for the majority of human beings, activity has always been reduced to a mere means of maintaining human physical existence, which is alienation.The main reason is low productivity, and material production inevitably takes up most of human time.But, according to Marx, the productive forces of capitalism are sufficient to make this unnecessary, and the only obstacle is the capitalist relations of production.Therefore, he came to the conclusion of ownership revolution.According to his vision, in communism where the productive forces are highly developed and private ownership is eliminated, the free development of people can replace material production and become the main content of history.From this we can see that Marx was completely faithful to the Western spiritual tradition on the point of taking freedom as the highest value, and the difference between him and liberal thinkers lay more in the way to realize this ideal value.

My master's thesis was not published, only some chapters of it.Later, some overseas publications listed me as one of the representative figures of a school when reviewing the debate on human issues in domestic academic circles in the early 1980s.However, I was very dissatisfied with the polemical way of citing classics and the writing style of excerpts from chapters at that time.Citing Marx is to open up a restricted area, but there are no restricted areas in the world, and mediocrity sets them up.According to my temperament, I would rather taste the forbidden fruit set by God than break into the forbidden zone set by man.I've always realized that when I write these things, I'm not myself.I write hard, but I seldom do the talking.I don't want to be an academic machine, even if it is a high-efficiency machine, which consumes a lot of knowledge raw materials and produces batches of academic products.No, I still have to have a soul, I want to be a living person with a soul.If I really need a system, it is only to express my life feelings more completely.Yes, it's still life, it's the only thing I have, and I have to feel it all the time to feel alive.I haven't found an expression that works for me.