Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No.2, 2018

Ideological Consciousness and Value Rationality Identification

(Abstract)

Cheng Changchun, Zhang Tinggan and Tang Rongguang

As a topical theory and major subject in the study and practice of the socialist core values, ideological consciousness and value rationality identification have a logically isomorphic relationship. The former is about the ideological function and spiritual consciousness of socialist core values, and takes as its starting point the construction of a theoretical discourse that integrates ideology and cultural values, while the latter involves the traditional cultural foundation and value recognition of socialist core values, taking as its key point the direct reality of multidimensional discrimination of core value identification and kinetic energy in the realization of its spiritual mechanism. The construction of socialist core values requires the spiritual integration of the two, but instrumentalist tendencies and the purely cultural method of intellectual analysis are unable to address the paradox in core value recognition, and have thus failed to permeate the integrative mechanism of “ideological consciousness” and “value rationality identification.” To escape this predicament, one can turn to an ethical ecological perspective, promoting the cultivation of the value community and universal value practice based on system design and the construction of public policy. In so doing, one not only transcends the contradiction and opposition between “individual” and “substance,” but also finds a way through the mutual transformation of “de facto” and “de jure” and links up the spiritual chain of the “ontological world－life world－individual world,” so as to construct a spiritual value ecology uniting “substance value consciousness” and “individual value freedom,” and theoretical rationality and practice rationality. This direction of practice has shown that the current threedimensional conceptual structure of nurturing socialist core values needs to gain theoretical and immediate explanatory power and converge into a practical form of the ecological integration of ideological consciousness and value rationality identification.