Abstract

Li Zehou's philosophical theory of Chinese modernity is studied by comparing it with Lukács' Hegelian Marxism. Totally and uncritically accepting Lukács' later thought, Li holds a labor-centered conception of practice, a Marxist materialistic category, as the starting-point of his own anthropological ontology. In a Hegelian-Lukácsian Marxist framework, Li makes a great philosophical effort to transform Kant's dualistic, idealistic doctrine of subjectivity into a monistic, materialistic one. This is a new holistic, historicist theory of subjectivity, in which physical sense and reason, humankind and nature, society and history, knowledge and morality, and material production and spiritual life are synthesized. Li calls this grand synthesis "humanity."