China and the West

Qu, Qiubai. She hui ke xue jiang yi [ID D19717].
Nick Knight : Qu's initial foray into Marxist philosophy concentrated on its critique of the history of Western philosophy, although there are occasional references to other philosophical traditions, including China's. The purpose of his exploration into Western philosophy was to construct and map the historical development of the two great rival camps of philosophical thought : materialism and idealism. In Outline of social philosophy Qu considers why philosophy should have emerged at all, and why certain tendencies within it - idealism and materialism - should have become pronounced. He argues that philosophy developed as human knowledge became more complex, this giving rise to a variety of different sciences and the gradual specialisation of philosophy itself into methodology and epistemology. The root of philosophy was a concern with the nature of the universe. Materialism sets out from the objective (or nature, reality) and regards the subjective (or thought, mind) as built on objective reality. Idealism proceeds from the subjective, and perceives the objective as constructed on the basis of the subjective. Qu argues that the spiritualism of religion, which was inevitably in opposition to materialism, resulted from the attempt by 'primitive peoples' to explain their natural environment. The result was animism, a belief that natural phenomena were not themselves the result of natural causes, but of spirits residing within them.
Qu employed the logical tensions within the philosophies of individual philosophers to prosecute his critique of idealism. In particular, he was sensitive to the way philosophers sometimes unwittingly incorporated both materialist and idealist elements within their largely idealist philosophies. The result was eclecticism, something that indicated an advance over pure idealism, but which nonetheless was tainted by its retention of idealist themes. Examples of such eclecticism are the philosophies of Brekeley, Voltaire, Kant and Huxley. Qu gives the example of Hegel and Schelling, both of whom believed in an 'absolute spirit' that supposedly incorporated both the subject and object, the spiritual and natural worlds. He does come to the defence of Spinoza, and argues that he is often incorrectly identified as an idealist philosopher. He concurs with Fauerbach that Spinoza's philosophy was actually a manifestation of the materialism of his time, although he was not able to escape the influence of the 'spirit of the age', and his materialism consquently assumed a theological garb.
Qu consequently repudiates the idealists and neo-Kantians who accuse materialism of reducing psychological phenomena to material phenomena, for the distinction is a false one. He gives the exemple of Friedrich Lange who posed materialism a question to which it supposedly could not respond. Qu approvingly quotes Diderrot, a member of the neo-Spinozan school : "There is only matter in the universe and it can possess sense perceptions ; the existence of matter thus explains everything".
Qu refers in passing to the realms of freedom and necessity. Freedom, he argues, is based on necessity, a knowledge of necessity. If humans know the natural laws of the universe, this will allow them freedom ; but the laws orf nature come first.