Literary Theory Tutorial (Revised Second Edition) Teaching Reference Book

Author: Tong Qingbing (Editor)
Publisher:
Publish Date: March 27, 2005
Features: 3. On Material and Spiritual Production – As is evident, the situation is as follows: A certain individual engaged in production activities in a specific manner gives rise to 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 emerge from the life processes of certain individuals. However, the individuals here are not the ones imagined by themselves or others, but the real individuals, meaning these individuals are engaged in activities, carrying out material production, and thus act within certain material boundaries, premises, and conditions beyond their arbitrary control. The production of ideas, conceptions, and consciousness is initially directly intertwined with people’s material activities, 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 consciousness, as reflected in the language of a nation’s politics, law, morality, religion, and metaphysics, follows the same principle. People are the producers of their own ideas, conceptions, etc., but the people here are real, active individuals, constrained by the development of their productive forces and the corresponding interactions—from the most distant forms of interaction. Consciousness [das Bewusstsein] can at any time only be 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 process of people, just as the reflection of objects on the retina is directly derived from the physiological life process 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 process, we can also depict the development of the reflection and resonance of this life process in ideology. Even the vague illusions in people’s minds are the necessary sublimations of their material life processes, linked to material conditions and verifiable 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, yet the people developing their material production and material interactions are changing this 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 method of examination 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. – Marx and Engels: The German Ideology, Selected Works of Marx and Engels, Volume 1, People’s Press, 1995 edition, pp. 71-73 (p. 30-31)