The Good Life from the Perspective of Historical Materialism

The report of the 19th National Congress of the CPC made a major historical judgment from a strategic height: “Socialism with Chinese characteristics has entered a New Era. The principal contradiction facing Chinese society has evolved into the contradiction between the people’s ever-growing need for a good life and unbalanced and inadequate development.” How to understand and realize the “good life” from the standpoint, viewpoint, and method of historical materialism is a topic of great theoretical and practical significance. On the one hand, Marx and Engels’ construction of historical materialism began precisely with a reflection on capitalism’s alienation of humanity, and through the reconstruction of modernity, they proposed communism as the good life. On the other hand, as a scientific social theory, historical materialism also has revelatory value for exploring the governance principles of the “good life” in the “New Era”; once historical materialism is abandoned, the ideal of the good life degenerates into “utopian socialism.”

党的十九大报告从战略高度作出了重大的历史性判断：“中国特色社会主义进入新时代，我国社会主要矛盾已经转化为人民日益增长的美好生活需要和不平衡不充分的发展之间的矛盾。”如何以历史唯物主义的立场、观点与方法理解“美好生活”、实现“美好生活”，是一项具有重大理论和现实意义的课题。一方面，马克思和恩格斯对历史唯物主义的建构正是以反思资本主义对人的异化为起点，通过重建现代性，提出作为美好生活的共产主义；另一方面，历史唯物主义作为科学的社会理论，其对于探寻“新时代”美好生活的治理原则也具有启示性的价值，而一旦离开历史唯物主义，美好生活的理想就会成为“空想”。

The “Ancient-Modern” Transformation of the View of the Good Life

美好生活观的“古今”之变

As a question of universal significance in philosophy, the concept of “life” in the “good life” points to “social life,” and it ponders how “man,” a “species” being, “ought” to choose the “good life.” In ancient philosophy, this question involved greater universality and truth; it was both an ethical question and a question of ontology or truth. Once the knowledge of the good life and the good society is taken as the goal of thought, political philosophy emerges. Here, “politics” denotes the theme and object—the search for the good life; “philosophy” denotes a thorough and holistic method of handling problems, aiming to obtain “complete knowledge” of political matters. In this sense, Socrates, as the founder of political philosophy, implied in his creed “knowledge is virtue” that the choice of the good life is first conditioned on mastering the relevant “knowledge” of what constitutes the good life, and philosophy is precisely about grasping the “knowledge” of the good society to replace various “opinions.” Further, whether it is Plato’s “philosopher-king” regime or Aristotle’s typology of constitutions, both understood constructing the good life as exploring the best regime. Because they directly linked the good life to a good end, and politics was considered the form of arranging and organizing life according to this end, classical political philosophy generally had an idealist character. Even Aristotle, who is regarded as having a realist quality, admitted that the establishment of the best constitutional order requires an incalculable fortune.

“美好生活”在哲学上作为一个具有普遍意义的问题，其中的“生活”概念指向是“社会生活”，其思考的是“人”这样一种 “类”存在物“应该”如何选择“好生活”的问题。在古代哲学中，这个问题牵涉到更大的普遍性和真理性，既是一个伦理学问题，也是一个存在论或真理论的问题。而一旦把有关好的生活、好的社会的知识作为思想的目标，政治哲学就出现了。在此，“政治”表示主题和对象，即探求美好生活；“哲学”则表示一种彻底性、整体性的处理问题的方法，以期获得关于政治事物的“整全的知识”。在这个意义上，苏格拉底作为政治哲学的创始人，其关于“知识即美德”的信条寓意对美好生活的选择首先是以掌握关于何谓好生活的相关“知识”为条件的，而哲学就是要掌握有关好社会的“知识”以取代种种“意见”。进一步，无论柏拉图的“哲人王”政制，还是亚里士多德的政体类型学，也都把建构美好生活理解为探究最好的政制。由于他们都将美好生活直接关联于一种善的目的，而政治被认为是按照这一目的对生活进行安排、组织的形式，因此古典政治哲学大体上具有一种理想主义特征，即使被认为具有现实主义品质的亚里士多德，也承认最佳政制秩序的建立是需要无法把捉的机运的。

The decisive turning point came from Machiavelli. Machiavelli consciously lowered the target, shifting the focus from man’s moral existence to his actual existence, no longer appealing to the best regime for the realization of the good life, but turning instead to power politics. Further, Hobbes, by replacing the deontological tradition of natural law with natural rights, inaugurated modern contractarian politics. By the time of Locke, the argument for private property further perfected the justification of modern natural rights theory and the separation of powers. As for the classical German philosopher Kant, he provided a conceptual justification for the subjective principle of modern politics at the level of transcendental philosophy, with the purity and abstraction unique to German philosophy. According to Leo Strauss, these “modern solutions” appear different, but they contain a common tendency: shifting from the pursuit of man’s noble ends to thinking about man’s beginnings. The inevitable result is to reduce man to a being driven by the fear of death and the desire for comfortable self-preservation, and the regime, as common life, is also established on these natural passions, taking the realization of man’s natural rights as its end. In this sense, modern political philosophy underwent a huge transformation in its understanding of what constitutes the good life—that is, descending from the pursuit of moral and human perfection to the pursuit of practical goals such as security, comfort, and the possession of wealth.

决定性的转折点来自马基雅维利。马基雅维利有意识地降低了目标，把关注点从人的道德存在落实在人的现实存在上，不再把美好生活的实现诉诸最佳政制，而是转向权力政治。进一步，霍布斯通过以自然权利置换自然法的义务论传统，开启了现代契约论政治。到了洛克，对私有财产的论证进一步使现代自然权利论和分权制得到完善化论证。至于德国古典哲学家康德，则在先验哲学层面以德国哲学特有的纯粹性和抽象性为现代性政治的主体原则进行概念化的论证。按照列奥·施特劳斯的观点，这些“现代的解决方案”看似不同，但其中包含一个共同倾向，那就是从对人的高尚目的的追求转向对人的开端进行思考，其结果必然把人下降为一种受怕死的、追求舒适地自我保存的欲望推动的存在，而作为共同生活的政制，也建立在这些自然激情之上，把实现人的自然权利视为目的。在这个意义上，现代政治哲学对于何谓美好生活的理解发生了巨大的转折，也就是从追求道德与人性的完善下降到追求安全、舒适以及财富的占有等实际目标上。

However, after modern political philosophy dissolved classical moral teleology, the goals of universal prosperity, freedom, and equality that emerged at the beginning of the Enlightenment as the aims of modernity were never truly realized. The torrent of capitalism caused “all that is solid melts into air,” and especially after the two world wars of the 20th century, humanity fell from boundless hope in the Enlightenment into thorough nihilism. The critique of capitalism launched by Marx and Engels on the basis of historical materialism was intended to rescue modernity and reshape the ideal of the good life for mankind.

然而，现代政治哲学在消解掉古典的道德目的论后，发轫于启蒙运动之初的那些作为现代性目标的普遍富裕、自由、平等也并未真正得到实现。资本主义的洪流使“一切坚固的东西都烟消云散了”，尤其在20世纪的两次世界大战之后，人类从对启蒙的无限憧憬彻底堕入虚无主义之中。马克思和恩格斯以唯物史观所发动的资本主义批判，意图在于挽救现代性，重塑人类美好生活的理想。

Historical Materialism Opens the Real Path to the Good Life

唯物史观开启探寻美好生活的现实道路

From the perspective of reflecting on modernity, Marx’s concern for the poor classes during his period at the *Rheinische Zeitung* drove him to critique Hegel’s philosophy of right, in order to reveal the class nature of the state. In *On the Jewish Question*, Marx pointed out the antinomy of liberal values, advancing from human emancipation to social emancipation. Social emancipation is essentially the sublation of civil society itself. In the *Paris Manuscripts*, the initial result of his political-economic study of civil society, Marx concluded that “the sublation of self-alienation follows the same path as self-alienation,” indicating that only through the sublation of private property and the reconstruction of the unity between man and the objective world can individuals realize the richness of their senses in free, conscious labor, making life manifest as an internally harmonious whole. Here, philosophical communism directly contains a theoretical imagination of the good life proper to man.

从反思现代性来看，马克思在《莱茵报》时期对贫苦阶级的关注推动其展开黑格尔法哲学批判，以揭示国家的阶级本质。在《论犹太人问题》中，马克思指出自由主义价值的背反性，从人的解放推进到社会解放。社会解放实质是对市民社会自身的扬弃。在对市民社会进行政治经济学研究的最初成果《巴黎手稿》中，马克思得出“自我异化的扬弃与自我异化走的是同一条道路”，表明了只有通过扬弃私有财产、重建人与对象世界的统一性，个人才能在自由自觉的劳动中实现感觉的丰富性，使生命表现为一个内在和谐的整体。在此，哲学共产主义直接内蕴了对属人的美好生活的理论想象。

By the stage of *The German Ideology*, Marx transcended the bourgeois conception of civil society, establishing a perspective on production that penetrates social history, starting from “real individuals” and their material practice. This not only advanced the idea of labor as objectification on a social level, pointing out that the premise of real history is the production of means to satisfy material life, but also revealed, through the division of labor, the historical logic of the genesis from tribal ownership, ancient communal ownership, feudal hierarchical ownership, to modern capitalist ownership. Its theoretical significance lies not only in explaining the historical materialist principle of “setting out from civil society to explain the various different theoretical products and forms of consciousness… and tracing their process of genesis,” but also in thereby pointing out the objective basis for the transcendence of modernity—the powerful social forces created by modern large-scale industry, “namely, the multiplied productive forces.” From the perspective of historical materialism, modernity originates in the capitalist mode of production, and equally falls into difficulty because of it: to date, these social forces and forms of cooperation have not been formed voluntarily but naturally, giving rise to an alien, dominating power external to man, i.e., alienation or reification. This means that the realization of the good life must eliminate the reified social reality and reshape man’s subjective freedom. According to historical materialism, overcoming reification is nothing other than making the alien, coercive power once again a “united force” belonging to man, and communism is precisely “the conscious treatment of all spontaneously developed premises as the creations of preceding generations, the elimination of the spontaneity of these premises, and their subordination to the power of the united individuals.” In this sense, Marx and Engels grounded the realization of the good life from philosophical communism in the actual “communist movement.”

到了《德意志意识形态》阶段，马克思超越资产阶级市民社会观，以“现实的人”及其物质实践为起点确立起透视社会历史的生产视角，由此不仅在社会性层面推进了劳动的对象性思想，指出现实历史的前提是满足物质生活资料的生产，并且从分工揭示出从部落所有制、古代公社所有制、封建等级所有制到现代资本主义所有制生成的历史逻辑。其理论意义不仅在于说明“从市民社会出发阐明意识的所有各种不同的理论产物和形式……追溯它们产生的过程”这一唯物史观的原理，并且由此指出现代性得以被超越的客观基础——由现代大工业所创造的强大的社会力量，“即成倍增长的生产力”。在唯物史观视野中，现代性既源于资本主义生产方式，也同样因其步入困境：迄今为止，这种社会力量和共同活动本身还不是自愿而是自然地形成的，由此产生了外在于人的异己的统治力量，也即异化或物化。这就意味着，美好生活的实现必须消灭物化的社会现实、重塑人的主体自由。依据唯物史观，物化之克服无非在于使异己的强制力量重新成为属人的“联合力量”，而共产主义就是“自觉地把一切自发形成的前提看做是前人的创造，消除这些前提的自发性，使这些前提受联合起来的个人的支配”。在此意义上，马克思和恩格斯就把美好生活的实现从哲学共产主义落实在了现实的“共产主义运动”中。

However, *The German Ideology* only provides a general perspective of production for examining social development; it is only by penetrating into the critique of political economy that one can transcend the humanism of the logic of production and grasp the determinations of the specifically capitalist relations of production and forms of labor in history. At this point, alienation is understood as the result of the abstract domination of capital. For capital is capital precisely because, as the power to command others’ labor, it achieves its own self-valorization through the exploitation of surplus labor. In the sense of being a relation of production, capital possesses an ontological implication: it is the “universal light” and “specific ether” that measures the weight of all existence, while the intrinsic richness of things themselves is abstracted away. Therefore, modernity is a world in which capital becomes the subject and the human being becomes the object. On the one hand, capital is like a demon, a force that dominates everything; on the other hand, as “civilization,” capital is the driving force of the development of social intercourse. Marx stated more than once that scientific socialism and communism consist in revealing the “factors of the new society” within capitalism and in maximizing the “civilizing aspect of capital.” This is particularly clearly revealed in the discussions of producers’ cooperatives and “social capital” in Volume III of *Capital*.

不过，《德意志意识形态》只是为透视社会发展提供了一般的生产视角，而只有深入到政治经济学批判中才能超越生产逻辑的人本学，对历史特殊的资本主义生产关系与劳动形式的规定性进行把握。此时，异化被理解为资本的抽象统治的结果。因为资本之所以为资本，就在于作为支配别人劳动的权力通过剥削剩余劳动而达到自身增殖的目的。在作为生产关系的意义上，资本具有一种存在论的意蕴：它是衡量一切存在的比重的“普照的光”和“特殊的以太”，而事物自身的内在丰富性却被抽象掉了。因此，现代性是一个资本成为主体、人成为客体的世界。资本一方面像魔鬼一样是统治一切的力量，另一方面，资本作为“文明”，是社会交往发展的推动力。马克思不止一次阐明，科学社会主义与共产主义就是揭示资本主义中的“新社会的因素”，最大程度地发挥“资本的文明面”，这一点尤其在《资本论》第三卷关于生产合作社、“社会资本”的论述中有明确的揭示。

In sum, because the ontological foundation of modernity is the logic of capital, the reconstruction of modernity also requires re-appropriating and steering the logic of capital—that is, ultimately relying on the revolutionary class to promote the transformation of capitalist productive forces into social forces by reconstructing the structure of social ownership, so that the elements of commonality produced in the movement of capital are transformed into truly social elements. This is the realistic path to the good life as opened up by the perspective of historical materialism.

总之，由于现代性的存在论基础是资本逻辑，对于现代性的重建亦要求重新占有、驾驭资本逻辑，也就是最终依赖革命阶级通过重建社会所有制结构推动资本主义生产力向社会力量的转变，使资本运动中所生产的共同性的要素转化为真正的社会性的要素。这就是唯物史观视域所开启的美好生活的现实道路。

Web editor: Paul

网络编辑：保罗