Content area
Full text
In any civilized engagement, perhaps no one believes that negotiation is always either impossible or easily accomplished. In any case, potential pitfalls and misunderstandings abound. The Chinese conversation with Marxism is no exception to this rule. For example, a surprisingly large number of scholars have shared the opinion that Chinese Marxism can be understood fully in terms of Western categories. Many of these scholars-for example Stuart Schram, Joseph Needham, and Nick Knight-have said that there is something distinctly Chinese about Chinese Marxism, but have failed to make clear what this implies, in terms both of what makes it distinct and of how it differs from the Marxism of Marx or of later "Marxists."
Unlike the approaches of previous scholarly efforts, this essay tries to draw attention to the fundamental issue that certain cosmological assumptions of the Western tradition have led to the differences between Western Marxism and particular philosophical currents in the Chinese tradition that developed independently of Western Marxism. Following the assumptions of David Hall and Roger Ames concerning a "correlative" modality of thinking, I argue here that tongbian ... as a correlative thinking had weighty pertinence in the discourse of "dialectical materialism," or bianzheng weiwu zhuyi ... . Tongbian means literally "continuity through change," suggesting a worldview of correlations among the myriad things in the world. Ancient Chinese thinkers first authored the concept in the Xici text of the Yijing (The Book of Changes) and it is stamped heavily on the development of classical Chinese culture. In modern times it has influenced the reading of Marxist "dialectics" according to a worldview that sees a continuity between all things or events, a worldview that is devoid of transcendence and order and in which the complementary and contradictory interactions of the two basic elements of a polarity like yin and yang constitute the fundamental forces that produce change. This distinct modality has precluded the dichotomy and the attendant difficulties that have beset Western Marxisms.
In what follows I will begin by introducing tongbian as a form of correlative thinking that appeared as far back as two thousand years ago in the form of functional analogues in the Yijing ... . I will then employ a discussion by the modern Marxist thinker Ai Siqi on "materialism"...