On Feng Youlan's Reference And Application Of Marxism

Feng Youlan is a philosopher and historian of philosophy who is well-known both at home and abroad.He is not an orthodox Marxist,but his reference of Marxism is obvious.Throughout Feng Youlan's entire academic career,Marxism had always occupied a place in his thoughts,and even became the mainstream of his thoughts in the latter half of his life.Feng Youlan's reference and application of Marxism can be divided into three stages.In different stages,his reference and application of Marxism presented different characteristics.The first stage is between 1927 and 1945.In the 1930s,Marxism was widely spread in China.Feng Youlan was influenced by Marxism,so he introduced historical materialism in his research on the history of Chinese philosophy.He explained the emergence and development of philosophies by using economic and political factors by absorbing some ideas of Marxism.But unlike the Marxist scholars in the same period,Feng Youlan only accepted Marxism as an academic theory and did not believe in Marxism as an ideology.The second stage is between 1949 and 1978.With the founding of the People's Republic of China,Marxism became the guiding ideology of China.Feng Youlan began to turn to Marxism with all his efforts and tried to use Marxism to re-research Chinese philosophy and the history of Chinese philosophy.Due to the influence of the age and the society,he inevitably went to the misunderstanding of dogmatization and ideology.But Feng Youlan still retained some of his own opinions and put forward new ideas such as "the method of abstract inheritance" and "universal form of thoughts".The third stage is after 1978.In the process of emancipating the mind,Feng Youlan did not abandon Marxism,but turned Marxism into a part of his own thought and abandoned the dogmatism method of"copying authority" on the basis of drawing lessons from the past.Then Feng Youlan began to rewrite the history of Chinese philosophy and put forward some new insights by using Marxism which he understood.Feng Youlan's reference and application of Marxism in these three stages is mainly in academic,but not ideology.It not only reflects the academic value of Marxism,but also provides a new idea of the sinicization of Marxism and the application of Marxism on the history of Chinese philosophy.