China and the West

Qu, Qiubai. Xian dai she hui xue [ID D19717].
Nick Knight : For Qu, the 'vexing problem' of the relationship between mind and matter had implications that extend beyond philosophy to the social sciences ; it was therfore essential to get a precise understanding of this relationship. The phenomena of the universe can be divided into two categories. The first (matter) has the capacity of 'extension' ; in other words, matter is all those things that exist in space, are in motion, and that can be experiences with the human senese. These are material phenomena. The second (mind) does not exist in space, and cannot be seen or experiences in the same way as material phenomena. Examples are human thought, will and feelings. Qu cites Descartes' aphorism - "I think, therefore I am" - to support the proposition that thoughts and feelings do have existence even though they are not material objects in the conventional sense.
Qu's cirtique of social theory focused on three schools - Enlightenment, utopian socialist, and Hegelian - and employs these, supposedly incorrect, theories as foils to establish the objective correctness of Marxist social theory. Qu responds to these fine ideals dismissively : "We of the twentieth century understand that the supposedly rational world painted by Enlightenment philosophy was nothing more than a rationalisation of an emerging boureois society, in which perpetual justice became bourgeois laws, equality became formal legal equality, and the rational state became the bourgeois democratic republic".
The Hegelian philosophy was quite different. Qu explains that Hegel had recognised that the universe is in a process of perpetual motion, change and devlopment ; and he sought the 'inner connections' of this motion, change and development. He recognised that history becomes the real process of the development of humankind, and that philosophy's task was to examine the way in which humans developed out of nature, and to discover laws from the myriad 'accidents' within this process. For Qu, these Hegelian postulates represented a significant achievement. Hegel's major failing was his idealism. Qu argues that, if the causal relationship articulated by Hegel was reversed, and based on a materialist premise, the positive, dialectical, dimension of his philosophy could be incorporated within scientific socialism. But for this to eventuate, fundamental change had to have occurred in social reality, and in particular the reality of capitalism.
Qu moves with facility through the philosophies of some of the most difficult of Western thinkers : Plato, Socrates, Kant, Fichte, Berkeley, Voltaire, Hume, Huxley, Descartes, Diderot, Feuerbach, and Marx, as well as many lesser philosophical luminaries. He illustrated his materialist social philosophy by reference to Durkheim, James Mill, Comte, Spencer, Owen, Saint-Simon, and Fourier. His view on quantum mechanics, cosmology and evolution were reinforced by reference to Laplace, Darwin, Rutherford, and Moseley, amongst others.