Reflections On The Theory Of Social Utopia

Utopia is an ultimate social ideal that is comprehensively conceived or designed, though impossible to realize ultimately, which representatives a certain kind of purposeful pursuit and expectation of a social ideal for human beings. It is easy to fall into a practical craziness of utopianism according utopian social ideal, resulting to despotism and autarchy necessarily, while it will also deprive human beings of social ideal with transcendentality, ultimateness and comprehensiveness to resist utopianism completely, displaying a 'desert' of mediocre and despairing. It is only to be with a necessary imaginary utopia that the history horizon of future may reveal and clarify itself to us, which will not render human beings to stay at a definite point of history ad infinitum to eternize a fraction of history, and not be satisfied with any given actual condition of any age. Utopia is a transcendental wisdom and creation of human beings in western traditional society and an internal dynamic mechanism for a society to self-renovate and self-reflect, which always foresees the end of an old age and the beginning of a new age. Though fine as itself, for not finding a reasonable basis in existence by itself, utopia is often been confused with social movement of utopia and been imputed to the disaster by the latter, hence contrarily, the good wish of the human race turns into a "monster" to restrain and limit itself. Yet Marx's practical ontology realizes the dialectic synthesis to utopian theories, inheriting the traditional pursuit of ultimate social ideal transcendental of given reality and seeking for the feasible way to realize the ideal society.However, in modern cultural views from the Enlightenment, ultimate happiness has been attempted to be realized depending on the finity of human being itself under present actual society, holding absoluteness infinite by means finite, which make modernity fallen into a paradox. Then modern society loses its transcendentality and comprehensiveness, ultimate social ideality concealed. Resulting from this, modern society that appears as "a society of one facet" loses its internal mechanism of self-reflection and self-criticism. The tension among reality, verity and eternity disappeared to be a trinity; the history of the human race seems to put itself end of modernity. So now, in order to transcend modernity from the Enlightenment, we must resume to underscore the transcendental and critical spirit of human beings to rebuild a healthy and reasonable Utopian theory, in the heading of Marxism.