The Study Of Marx And Engels's Culture Thought

There is no monograph on culture by Marx and Engels.In the complete works of Marx and Engels,the word "culture" is not frequently used,and its connotation is not fixed,ranging from humanization to literature and art.However,we can be sure that although they have not formed a systematic culturology,there is no lack of rich and profound culture thoughts.The most generalized culture of Marx and Engels is equal to "humanization".This paper takes it as the research object to discuss its origin,classification,and the interaction between different types of "humanization".As far as the content is concerned,the emergence of Marx and Engels' culture thought has historical inevitability.1?The objective conditions are ripe.First of all,the material and social conditions are mature.By their time,the commodity economy and industrial production were relatively developed,and the capitalist system was quite stable.The relationship between survival and productive labor is directly revealed,and the dominant role of material interests is more and more obvious.Division of labor increases people's dependence on society and highlights the universality of labor.Any form of physical and mental expenditure is labor.Secondly,the background of the history of thought is ready.Renaissance thinkers put aside the afterlife,paid attention to the present world,opposed abstinence,emphasized perceptual liberation,and highlighted the importance of wealth.The religious reform affirmed the purification and redemption of labor from the theological point of view,swept away the previous Christian contempt for labor,and affirmed the secular world.Enlightenment thinkers replaced God with nature.Man is the product of nature,and pursuing happiness is nature.Therefore,value is created through labor.German classical philosophy goes a step further,rejecting the theory of natural determinism.Man is self-regulated and free of will.Marx and Engels confirmed that human freedom,social development and productive labor are closely related,which is the logical evolution and inevitable inference of the above four stages.2?The subjective condition is excellent.The reason why Marx and Engels first put forward these views in the history of thought depends on their excellent subjective conditions.First of all,excellent ideological character.They have lofty aspiration of seeking liberation for human beings,comprehensive and profound education,thorough critical spirit,dialectical way of thinking and tenacious perseverance.Secondly,the practical experience is unique.They have received good family education,rich experience in revolutionary practice and experienced frequent academic debates.There are three main theoretical origins of Marx and Engels' culture thought.1?Vico put forward that history is created by man.Cultural philosophy originated from Vico.Nature is not created by human beings,but the human world is created by human beings.Human beings create their own history,which are inherited by Marx and Engels.2?Kant thinks that everything of human beings are created by themselves.Human beings have three innate characteristics:sensibility,intellectuality and rationality.The free things outside human stimulate us to produce sensory materials.Transcendental Apperception sorts these materials through the innate intuitive form and intellectual category to generate the phenomenon of free things.All phenomena are within the subject and are the product of the subject.Following the innate rules of the subject is artificial natural legislation.Human body is also a phenomenon,following the natural law.But reason is neither the object of external sense organs,nor the regulation of internal sense organs,nor the phenomenon of belonging,but the thing itself.Therefore,man is not only a phenomenon but also a noumenon.He can resist the law of natural cause and effect and free will,but freedom is only embodied in moral practice.Marx and Engels continued that man is a dual being.Man is not only a natural being but also a self-existence.They also recognized that the field of freedom and the field of necessity are two parts.Material production is an inevitable field.3?Hegel put forward that man is the product of his own spiritual work.According to Kant,reason makes people free,but where does reason come from?He believes that this is beyond our cognitive ability and can only be ignored.Hegel believes that nature endows animal soul,and consciousness wakes up from the soul and sets itself as rationality and spiritual self-generation,which means that human beings are self generated through their own spiritual work.According to Marx and Engels,since human beings evolved from animals,animals have activity and no spirit,and human beings have both activity and spirit,so activity should produce spirit,and other innate characteristics of human beings are also produced in this way.Then human beings are self generated through objective activities and embark on the road of infinite development.In all activities,material production is the most important,which restricts all human culture creation.The culture thought of Marx and Engels has gone through five stages.In the first stage,from the creation of the world by spirit to the creation of consciousness by being.Engels is a supporter of Hegel's philosophy.Marx's philosophy has changed from Kant to Fichte to Hegel.In the reflection of Hegel,with the help of Feuerbach,their cultural view changed from idealism to intuitionistic materialism.The second stage is to practice the materialist cultural view.Feuerbach did not regard the object and reality as the practice of perceptual people,but Marx and Engels took this step and advanced to the culture view of practical materialism,that is,all cultures are the practical creation of human beings.The third stage is material production determinism.In all creative activities,material production determines all other activities,such as mental activities,political activities,religious activities,etc.,which is the material production determinism of cultural creation:Note that this is not the driving force;it is the decision and determination of the purpose and means,content and form,derivative and derived.That is,the status of other activities is consistent to material production.The fourth stage is the theory of material production restriction.After the failure of the European Revolution in 1848,Marx and Engels reflected on the determinism of material production and found that other activities could be inconsistent with material production.For example,there was an imbalance between artistic development and material production,and economically backward countries could surpass developed countries in philosophy.So they changed the determinism to the theory of restriction,that is,material production"restricts" the whole process of social life,political life and spiritual life.Moreover,material production interacts with other activities.Sometimes the reaction force of other activities is greater than that of material production,and other activities are dominant.However,the reason is caused by the situation of material production.The fifth stage is the development of the theory of material production restriction.They discussed the diversity of cultural development path(i.e.across the Kafdin Canyon);after Marx's death,Engels confirmed the dominant position of population production(blood relationship)in the primitive society through cultural anthropology research;he also confirmed that the dominant factors were constantly changing from the perspective of dialectics.Marx and Engels did not build a culture thought system,but they had many discussions about culture.It is the content of his culture thought to present these expositions logically,mainly including the following points.1?The origin of culture.Human beings generate themselves through objectified activities.The extension of objective activities is greater than material production.In reality,it is not only material production and labor to create culture,but other practical activities also derive culture.2?Classification of culture.Objective activities create culture.The result of objective activities is four kinds of culture:material,relationship,spirit and system,which are non-behavior culture.Only those beyond the natural regulations in the objective activities can be regarded as culture,that is,behavior culture,which is divided into material production and non-material production.If it is classified from the outside by other standards,culture can be divided into the past,the present and the future in terms of time,and regional culture and world culture in terms of space.3?The structure of culture.There is interaction between material production and all non-material production,and also between different kinds of non-material production.In reality,there are six pairs of interaction:material vs.relationship,material vs.spirit,material vs.system,relationship vs.spirit,relationship vs.system and spirit vs.system.Four kinds of cultures interact with each other in such a way that they are connected into a closed body.Through comparison,we can analyze who is the largest force,who is the second,who is the third and who is the smallest.According to the order of big to small,the pyramid arrangement of four cultures from the bottom to the top is the structure of culture.In the pre-private ownership and private ownership era,material culture dominates the culture of relationship,spiritual culture dominates the spiritual culture,and spiritual culture dominates the system culture;in the post private ownership era,spiritual culture dominates the system culture,institutional culture dominates the relationship culture,and the relationship culture dominates the material culture.4?The essence and function of culture.The essence of culture is humanization,which includes two aspects:the humanization of nature and the humanization of mankind.If we regard humanizing nature as the means of humanizing mankind,which is included in the process of humanizing mankind,we can say that the function of culture is to "humanize people".There are two aspects of humanizing people:to meet the needs and to prohibit the needs.To meet the need is to define the person in a positive sense,and to prohibit the need is to define the person in a definite sense.5?The driving force and law of cultural development.There is nothing to pull the culture forward outside the culture,but within the culture,people act in order to meet the needs and desires,to achieve the purpose,so as to promote the development of culture.Joint efforts are the driving force of cultural development,which is applicable to both individual cultural events and the whole civilization.It must be admitted that economy is not the main force of cultural development sometimes,and the reason is that it is caused by the economic situation,and ultimately the material production restricts the cultural development process,which is its development law.6?Cultural trends.The free nature of human beings is mainly reflected in art.Even in capitalist society,there are free artistic creations.Material production is the living condition that does not take all social forms as the transfer,and it is the eternal natural inevitability that human life can realize.Material production is a non free field.But it doesn't mean that we can't get freedom in this field.After the elimination of private ownership and highly developed productivity,art activities can produce material materials at the same time,or that the field of art activities in turn includes the field of material production and eliminates labor.Human beings can obtain freedom in all fields.The tendency of culture is freedom.The culture thoughts of Marx and Engels are of great value.1?Marx and Engels'culture thought realized the paradigm revolution in the history of cultural thought.First,spirit is rooted in practice.Consciousness comes from practice,cognition.Through practice,Marx and Engels regenerate the whole world to solve the problem of how to know foreign things,and the metaphysical epistemology is dispelled.Secondly,material production is the cornerstone of culture.In the previous culture vision,there was no status of productive labor,which was only regarded as a subordinate element of cultural history.Marx and Engels emphasized that material production was the cornerstone of culture,so it was the working people who supported the whole society,and the working people were the ultimate carriers of culture creation.Finally,material production itself is moving towards freedom.As a double being,man has both natural and self-regulated needs.Only under the promotion of natural prescriptive needs,material production and economy are moving towards freedom,which is consistent with self-prescriptive needs.Therefore,there is no need to worry about the tension between natural prescriptive needs and self-prescriptive needs.It is only a historical existence.Previous thinkers thought that this tension would exist forever,and Marx and Engels overturned their views.2?The cultural thoughts of Marx and Engels had a profound historical influence.For the real world,Marx and Engels' cultural thought not only promoted the development of capitalist culture,but also shaped the face of socialist culture.As far as the culture thoughts of later generations are concerned,Marx and Engels' culture thoughts have opened up a new pattern of cultural research in the western mainstream academic circles,become the source of their later Marxist classic writers' cultural thoughts,and become the resource pool of Western Marxist cultural critical theory.3?Marx and Engels' culture thought still has important value at present.In theory,Marx and Engels' culture thought is the start for the further development of culture research and the theoretical basis of cultural self-confidence,which stipulates the culture nature of Communists and points out the principles of treating themselves;In practice,Marx and Engels' culture thoughts provide basic principles for building a cultural power and a basic strategy for building a community of shared future for mankind.