TRANSFORMATION OF THE EMPIRICAL INTO THE TRANSCENDENTAL: LI ZEHOU’S DEVELOPMENT OF KANT’S THEORY

Li Zehou ranks amongst the most influential contemporary Chinese philosophers and theorists. After the Tian An Men incident, he was forced to immigrate to the USA, where sadly he passed away last November. His philosophy has often – and mostly against his own will - been compared to the work of numerous Western theoreticians. Remaining mainly loyal to the conceptual framework of early Marxist historical materialism, he was simultaneously influenced by the works of Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, the Frankfurt School, Lukács, Piaget, Lacan, Sartre, Althusser, Habermas and others. In spite of this colourful palette of different influences, his work has most often been seen as being rooted in certain basic paradigms derived from the ones defining the thought of Marx on the one hand, and Kant on the other. Most of these comparisons were grounded in the assumption according to which the majority of Li’s theories were based upon insights derived from the philosophies of these two great European thinkers. On this basis, he developed several innovative approaches and new methods of anthropological philosophy; in this context, the present article focuses on his theory of the transformation of the empirical into the transcendental.