ABSTRACT
Starting in the spring of 1971, under a dim kerosene lamp, I began gnawing on G.W.F. Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline, translated by Mr. He Lin. Twenty years passed since then. It may be difficult for people to imagine that the thoughts of this Western philosopher from more than a hundred years ago gave a student in a remote country who was studying at night by lamplight enlightenment and comfort. Early on, I was determined to eat this hard walnut in preparation for reading Karl Marx’s Capital. I believe Vladimir Lenin when he said, “If you don’t study and understand all of Hegel’s Logic, you can’t fully understand Marx’s Capital, especially its first chapter.” After roaming in the realm of Hegel’s “absolute spirit,” although I did not find a God playing with “rational cunning” as the old Hegel expected, I truly experienced the tremendous power that permeates everyone’s heart from the thoughtful activities of the universal human spirit, the power of reason. Facing a bizarre and irrational reality at that time, this force encouraged me to explore a rational world and to firmly believe that this rational world transcends finitude.
