Hegelianism and Chinese intellectual discourse: A study of Li Zehou

This article is a study of Li Zehou, a significant Marxist cultural theorist in contemporary China, focusing on his critical interpretations of Kant's epistemology, ethics and philosophy of history. It argues that Li is actually a Hegelian, not a Kantian Marxist as he is generally considered. The Kantian principle of subjectivity, cognitive and moral, is reconstructed by Li within a Hegelian discourse of historicism and based upon a Marxist concept of practice. In holding an intellectual presupposition of the teleological view of history, Kant's notion of “the history of reason,” as a subjective faith for regulating an agent's moral actions, is misunderstood as an objective. Hegelian idea of historical necessity. The end of the inevitable process of history, according to Li's practical philosophy of subjectivity, is in the aesthetic realm, that is, an ideal state characterized by the unity of nature and freedom.