Afterword

Knowledge accrues through accumulation. The accumulation of knowledge comes from long and sustained systematic research on a focused subject. I greatly appreciate Hegel’s statement in The Shorter Logic: The man who will do something great must learn, as Goethe says, to limit himself. The man who, on the contrary, would do everything, really would do nothing, and fails. There is a host of interesting things in the world: Spanish poetry, chemistry, politics, and music are all very interesting, and if any one takes an interest in them we need not find fault. But for a person in a given situation to accomplish anything, he must stick to one definite point, and not dissipate his forces in many directions. ¹ I also appreciate the French sociologist Durkheim’s statement in The Division of Labor in Society: In the age of Leibnitz and Newton, there were many talented scientists. However, since the 19th century, not only is the scientist no longer immersed in different sciences at the same time, but he can no longer encompass the whole field of one science. The range of his research is limited to a finite category of problems or even to a single one of them. The time is past when the perfect man seemed to us the one who, capable of being interested in everything but attaching himself exclusively to nothing, able to savor everything and understand everything, found the means to combine and epitomize within himself the finest aspects of civilization. We are wary of those too volatile men of talent, who, lending themselves equally to all forms of employment, refuse to choose for themselves a special role and to adhere to it. We feel a coolness towards those men whose sole preoccupation is to organize their faculties, limbering them up, but without putting them to any special use or sacrificing a single one, as if each man among them ought to be self-sufficient, constituting his own independent world. It appears to us that such a state of detachment and indeterminateness is somewhat antisocial. The man of parts, as he once was, is for us no more than a dilettante, and we accord no moral value to dilettantism. Rather, do we perceive perfection in the competent man, one who seeks not to be complete but to be productive, one who has a well-defined job to which he devotes himself, and carries out his task, ploughing his single furrow. ² These statements by Hegel and Durkheim instruct us to correctly understand and deal with the relationship between the breadth and depth of knowledge. There is no doubt that the more extensive a person’s knowledge is, the better person s/he is. But if there is only breadth and no depth, it goes 161to an undesirable extreme. Durkheim believes that by the 19th century, it was impossible to have generalists and all-rounders like people in the age of Newton. And some of us who have entered the 21st century still whimsically want to cultivate the so-called “master” who knows both astronomy and geography, who is proficient in both Chinese and Western cultures, and who is professional in both science and art. Those people criticize the current education system for not cultivating such a “master.” To produce all-rounders in the age of knowledge explosion is at best an unfulfillable illusion. Even with the most perfect education system, the so-called “masters” are now impossible to nurture and produce. In the late 1970s, when I was in my 40s, I began to study the concept of the “Asiatic mode of production” and its status in social development. In 1982, I wrote A Brief Introduction to the Theory of Social Formation of Marxism, a booklet of about 150,000 words. Since I had to typewrite the whole thing, production of the book took a long time. It was finally published in 1985 by Peking University Press. This was my first solo-authored monograph. After that, I began to focus on Russian rural communes and the Russian path to social development. This was a hot issue in Chinese academia in the 1980s. In 1997, I was fortunate to be entrusted by the Ninth Five-Year Plan of the National Office for Philosophy and Social Sciences to work on a major research project entitled “Persistence and Development of Marxist Philosophy and Deng Xiaoping’s Philosophical Thoughts.” I co-chaired this project with Professor Sun Bokui of Nanjing University. Professor Sun was my teacher when he taught at the Department of Philosophy in Peking University. Later he worked in the Department of Philosophy in Nanjing University. Out of this project, my colleague Feng Ziyi and I wrote the book The Historical Investigation and Contemporary Significance of Marx’s Theories on Oriental Society. It was published by the Higher Education Press in 2002 as one of the final results of this commissioned research project. In addition to elucidating the concept of the “Asiatic mode of production” and its position in social development, this work also discusses the nature of Russian rural communes and the path of Russia’s social development. Meanwhile, a large part of the book discusses basic theoretical issues such as “the theoretical basis for studying the problems of the Eastern society” and “reflection on the practice of socialism.” After that, while studying other issues, I continued to study Marx and Engels’ theories on the developmental trajectory of the Eastern society and the “Notes on Ancient Social History” Marx wrote in his later years (also known as “Notes on Ethnology,” “Notes on Anthropology,” etc.). Recently, my colleague and friend Wang Haiming invited me to write a monograph on “The Theory and Practice of Socialist Development in Oriental Society” for his “National Governance Series.” This monograph expands and deepens the theoretical thoughts in the first two books. At about age 40, I began to study Marx and Engels’ theories on the development trajectory of Eastern society. Now, I have solo-authored this monograph in my 70s. After its publication, I will be 80 or 90 years old. My research on Marx and Engels’ theories on the development trajectory of the Eastern society has lasted for 40 years, a career that occupied the bulk of my academic life. I cherish the results of this research and I would be very pleased if it can play a positive 162role in furthering the study of this issue in China’s academia. I independently completed this work. However, some areas in it are not my academic forte and so in two major locations in the work I borrowed research results from my students. First, the content regarding “the connotation of historical progress” was borrowed from “On Historical Progress and Historical Costs” authored by my student Dr. Lin Yanmei, the third volume in the Marxist Historical Philosophy series edited by me. Second, the content regarding “the cost consciousness of historical progress” was borrowed from the section of “cost consciousness” written by Zhang Libo and published in the book The Course of Marxist Philosophy edited by Nie Jinfang, Zhang Libo, and me. I used to be the post-doctoral co-advisor of Zhang Libo. Here, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Lin Yanmei and Zhang Libo. In addition, this book is supported by the Bainiankangcheng Fund of Minzu University of China, to which I remain indebted as well.