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Dialectics as immanent critique. Or, dialectics as both ontology and epistemology with a practical intention

Shijun Tong (Department of Philosophy, East China Normal University; Shanghai New York University), st101@nyu.edu

This response to Asger Sørensen’s paper From Ontology to Epistemology: Tong, Mao and Hegel is made on the basis of a reflection on the author’s intellectual development with special reference to the idea of ‘dialectics’. This development is mainly composed of three periods, in which the author formed his strong antipathy toward dialectics as a mere tool of power (in the 1970s), learnt to understand the importance of ‘dialogical logic’ in providing conceptual tools for human knowledge of a type of reality which is both objective and subjective - human practices (in the 1980s) - and attempted to understand the ‘dialectics of rationalization’ by integrating ‘dialectics’ in the Western tradition of Critical Theory with the Chinese tradition of ‘dialectics’ systematically interpreted by Feng Qi (1915-1995) since the 1990s.

Keywords: dialectics, ontology, epistemology, Mao, Hegel, critical theory