Literature Theory Teaching Reference Book

Author: Tong Qingbing (Editor) / Country: Mainland China
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-03-01
Features: [Excerpt:] 3. Marx and Engels on Material and Spiritual Production
It is clear that this is the case: certain individuals who engage in production activities in a specific manner establish certain social and political relationships. Under any circumstances, empirical observation should reveal the connection between social and political structures and production based on experience, rather than being colored by any mysticism or speculation. Social structures and the state always arise from the life processes of certain individuals. However, the individuals here are not the kind imagined by themselves or others, but the real individuals—those who are active, engaged in material production, and thus operating within certain material boundaries, premises, and conditions beyond their arbitrary control. The production of thought, ideas, and consciousness is initially directly intertwined with people's material activities, their material interactions, and the language of real life. People's imagination, thinking, and spiritual exchanges here are still direct products of their material actions. The production of spirit, as manifested in the political, legal, moral, religious, and metaphysical languages of a particular nation, follows the same principle. People are the producers of their own ideas and thoughts, but here, "people" refers to real, active individuals who are constrained by the development of their productive forces and the corresponding forms of interaction—up to the most distant forms of interaction. Consciousness [das Bewusstsein] can never be anything other than the consciousness of being [das Bewusste Sein], and people's existence is their real life process. If, in all ideologies, people and their relationships are inverted images like those in a camera, then this phenomenon also arises from the historical life processes of people, just as the reflection of objects on the retina is directly produced from the physiological life processes of people. German philosophy has descended from heaven to earth; conversely, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not start from what people say, imagine, or conceive, nor from the spoken, thought-out, imagined person, to understand the flesh-and-blood person. Our starting point is the person engaged in practical activity, and from their real life processes, we can also depict the development of their reflection and response in ideology. Even the vague illusions in people's minds are the inevitable sublimations of their material life processes, which are connected to material premises and can be confirmed through experience. Therefore, morality, religion, metaphysics, and other ideologies, as well as the consciousness forms corresponding to them, no longer retain an appearance of independence. They have no history, no development, but the people who are developing their material production and material interactions are changing their reality while also changing their thinking and the products of their thinking. It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness. The former examination method starts from consciousness, viewing it as a living individual. The latter, which aligns with real life, starts from the real, living individual itself, viewing consciousness merely as their consciousness.