The Virtue And History

This article aims to study the ideological foundation on which Chen Duxiuaccepted Marxism, and how this ideological foundation influence ChenDuxiu’s understanding of Marxism, on the perspectives of interacting betweenvirtue and history.Emphasis on virtue is the essential feature of traditional Chinese way ofthinking, which tries to rouse the intrinsic goodness of human as the approachto problem solving. Its ideological foundation is a stationary view of humannature, and it has great affinity for voluntarism as well. The idea of history isa brand-new concept for traditional Chinese thought. Its core idea is thattaking history as a process of continuous progress with a fixed direction. Inchina, this idea can divide into two types: biological evolution and historicalmaterialism.Early Chen Duxiu’s virtue idea which he inherited form tradition has agreat influence on his accepting of biological evolution. This show up in threeaspects: the evolution of human is also the evolution of moral; the destinationof evolution is a moral ideal society; Chen’s point of view on motive power ofevolution also shows somewhat inclination of voluntarism.After accepting Marxism, particularly historical materialism, Chen’s ideaof virtue was restrained on the face of things. This shows up in Chen’s stressthat productivity force is the determinant of progress throughout our history,and his dialectic resolution on the relation between the natural character ofhistory progress and the active character of class struggle. However, he inpractice still hold the stationary view of human nature, which made heretreated to the pre-Marxist way of thinking, and split the dialectic relationbetween the natural character of history progress and the active character ofclass struggle. The idea of virtue was continued in fact. In the meantime, because of the lose of great revolution on 1927, Chen Duxiu, coming from hispoint of virtue, was pessimistic about people’s consciousness, andimpercipient about the dialectic relation between material base and activefunction, which lead to his Right opportunism mistake and two revolutionarytalking.