Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No.3, 2015

 

Transcending the Traditional Subject-Object Duality—An Interpretation of the Marxist Concept of Practice

(Abstract)

 

Lu Kejian

 

In “Theses on Feuerbach,” Marx took man’s nature as being the product of practice rather than a priori and established. Thus the alienated logic founded on predetermined subject-object duality had the ground cut from under it. Marx held firmly to the materialist approach that social existence determines social consciousness. For him, “social existence” was man’s actual life itself. The process of moving from dynamic practice to static practice and thence again to dynamic practice was a continuous cycle. The critical step in Marx’s view of the materialist conception of history was his grasp of the part played by dynamic practice in complex historical phenomena. The establishment of Marx’s materialist conception of history implies the internal subversion of Western ontology and the rationalist tradition as they had developed since Parmenides. The internal reasoning behind Marx’s historical materialism enables us to interpret the transcendence of the traditional Western subject-object duality that constituted his intellectual background.