The Change Of The Idea Of World History

People always want to know the world in which they live and pursue the meaning of their existence.It is the understanding of the world and the pursuit of meaning that reflect people's thinking about history.In the ancient Greek period,people sought after the eternity behind nature,and the area of activity was quite narrow,therefore at that time history was neither universal nor cosmopolitan.And when Christianity took the totality of human beings as its starting point to think about the world,history began to be universal and cosmopolitan.But the world history at this time was only the history of salvation in theological sense.In modern times,the right to interpret the world was in the hands of man.Therefore,Vico affirmed the subjective status of man in world history.When Kant divided the world into the phenomenal world and the thing in itself,he tried to introduce judgment to bridge the gap between them,and constructed a historical concept with a teleological concept.The world history thereby became the universal history from the perspective of teleology.Facing the division caused by Kant,Hegel gave the world a totality again and introduced the dialectics to make Kant's abstract universal history into the concrete world history.According to Hegel,the world history is a mixture of reason and passion.They are not external or opposed to each other,but two aspects of the development of world history.The development of world history is essentially the self-development of spirit.Each stage of its development is a sublation of the previous stage.It is in this process of negation that the spirit is constantly realized,and finally it returns to itself and achieves freedom.The realization of this freedom is manifested in the state.Only in the state can the individual and the state achieve absolute unity and ‘the freedom of the whole' be realized concretely.Hegel's speculative philosophical investigation of world history was nearly perfect,but when he took the development of spirit as the essence of the development of world history,it inevitably resulted in an impersonal and non-historical understanding of history and obscured true freedom.In response to the above questions,Marx surpassed Hegel's philosophy of world history with science of world history.First of all,for the impersonal understanding of Hegel's world history,Marx emphasized that the real person is the logical starting point of history,and history is not world history at the beginning.History became world history only when universal interactions were formed within.Secondly,for Hegel's non-historical understanding of world history,Marx believed that the development of world history is the result of two-way interaction between man and the environment,and its root lies in the contradictory movement of productive forces and modes of communication.Therefore,capitalism is not an eternal form of world history.Finally,regarding Hegel's obscurity to freedom,Marx pointed out that under the condition of capitalist private ownership,division of labor is an alien force for people.Only through the realistic communist movement can division of labor and private ownership be eliminated and people achieve true freedom.The formation of world history has laid the foundation for the true realization of freedom.