Human Freedom and the Values of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful by Feng Qi Jeanne Haizhen Allen

Author:Feng Qi, Jeanne Haizhen Allen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2023-08-21T08:44:27.320000+00:00

The Ideals of the Individual

The Community and the Individual

The ideals in an individual’s life generally refer to a person’ idealistic outlook on his or her life. An individual’s ideal always emerges after his or her knowledge and evaluation of human life. But it is difficult to acquire accurate knowledge of human life, and in particular, accurate knowledge of the relation between the community and the individual.

Community and society are composed of individual beings. Each individual is constrained by historical conditions in virtue of social relationships. On the one hand, people are subjects of history, which is created by actual and concrete individuals. Without individual beings, social history would be impossible. As Engels pointed out, history does not use human beings as instruments for its own end, and history itself consists of the activities of people who pursue their own goals. That is to say, the end of history is human beings themselves. In this sense, the end of human activities lies in the effectuation of people’s self-values. On the other hand, human history is a natural process, and history, as the sum of the purposeful activities of millions of people, has its own laws that are independent of human will. Individual wishes can be realized only when they observe historical laws. However, taking a panoramic view of human history, the goal of social progress consists in the free and all-around development of human nature, even as the completion of that goal is dependent on human activities in a particular historical era, that is, on each person’s contribution to the society, including their material and spiritual productions. The more people use their talents for creative activities, the greater their contribution to the society. From this perspective, an individual’s activities do have a social value that ought to be unified with self-value. The ideal in life fulfills a person’s self-value through their contribution to society by means of creative activities. This is in terms of the relation between the community and the individual, and the self and society.

The concept of the self has a long history. The book of the Dao De Jing states that “he who knows himself is intelligent […]; he who overcomes himself is mighty.”4 Many modern disciplines, such as psychology, biology, and anthropology, study human needs, human capacities, and human spirit, and their research increases human knowledge of the self. Nevertheless, in terms of values, knowledge of the self still contains an important issue: the self not only constitutes a concrete existence, but also possesses the essence of that which is the self. True knowledge of human life requires that we treat humanity as the subject, and human life as the activities of the subject. As the subject, the I is first of all the subject of practice. It is in the activities of practice that human beings undergo material exchange with their surroundings. Therefore, the I is actually a substantial subject that possesses an identity that includes its ontological significance and its own duration. In this sense, the I is more than a concrete subject, but possesses self-consciousness.

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