Oriental and Occidental Culture and Their Philosophy
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hen Lai, Tradition and Modernity: A Humanist View
This book is the first comprehensive English-language translation of key academic works by Chen Lai (陈来) – a leading mainland philosopher and Dean of Tsinghua University’s Guoxue Research Institute (清华国学研究院). The collection brings together writings produced in the dramatic decade beginning with 1988. Together the chapters provide deep insight into the ways that one of China’s key contemporary intellectuals has grappled with the question of how to best utilise China’s traditional culture for the nation’s modernising aspirations. The tension encapsulated in a tradition-modernity duality has dominated many of China’s best minds for long stretches of the last century. Chen’s book provides us with insights into how that binary was understood in the rapidly changing years of Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms. In the introduction to the book Chen leaves no room for misunderstanding his motivation, declaring, “The main focus of this book is the significance of the tradition of Confucian values in contemporary society” (p. 1). Chen’s attention to this question has lost none of its urgency as Confucius has become an international and domestic icon for the soft power and “harmonious society” campaigns of the Hu Jintao era. 2One of Chen’s major themes is the way that cultural conservatives reacted to the iconoclastic May Fourth New Culture Movement and its active denigration of Confucianism. In Chapters 2, 3, and 4 Chen explores the distinctions between the cultural conservatives and the cultural radicals that dominated the tradition-modernity debate in early twentieth-century China and ultimately sides with the conservatives’ view for their appreciation of traditional culture’s value to a modern and modernising China. Without diminishing the May Fourth New Culture Movement’s many significant contributions to China’s modernity and the nation’s development processes, Chen revisits the May Fourth’s “mainstream” cultural thought and re-evaluates its radical rejection of tradition. The author identifies cultural utilitarianism as the major flaw of intellectual thought in the May Fourth New Culture period. To Chen, cultural utilitarianism is the rejection of traditional culture based upon the utilitarian norms that judge any “aspect of human culture that is not directly related to strengthening the working of political economy [as] valueless” (p. 83). The May Fourth radicals’ negative appraisal of Confucianism emerged from within this utilitarian thinking, and in contrast to their views Chen argues that traditional Chinese Confucian values are indispensible to modern Chinese society. Chen’s logic is that an economy without a core moral code produces a fragmented society. To justify this position, he makes frequent references to Christianity and its demonstrated capacity to provide core cultural continuity in Western nations despite the vast social changes they have experienced. Chen writes that Christianity, with all the changes it has experienced through history, continues to be “…the source of values for existence and for affirming the course of life for modern western civilization.” (p. 59). Following this line of reasoning, Chen believes that the Confucian value system should be accepted as a spiritual resource and accommodated as part of modern Chinese cultural fabric as well. 3Chen analyses the Confucian tradition from diverse perspectives and multiple angles. He discusses the basic ideas and concepts of Confucian philosophy in Chapter 14. The importance of Confucian values to the modernisation of East Asia and to modern China’s transformation is explored in Chapters 9 and 10, respectively. In each of these chapters Chen aspires to demonstrate the importance of Chinese traditions, as represented by the Confucian value system, to China and the Asian region. He proposes a formula for future Chinese cultural development in Chapter 16, suggesting the following model:“Pushing ahead by absorbing Western culture; pulling forward by exalting Chinese culture.” In Chen’s opinion, China needs to continue absorbing Western culture, but should develop simultaneously “a good cultural nominal system, critically inheriting the past, creatively transforming traditional culture, especially the value system of traditional culture.” This envisioned cultural system should also include “values of socialism, Marxism in modern Chinese culture…” (pp. 352-353). Chen’s cursory description of the actual processes of “critical inheritance” and “creative transformation” leaves readers pondering the multifaceted and somewhat contradictory dimensions of this hybrid cultural form – but the primacy of Confucianism is never in doubt. Moreover, Chen presents Confucianism as a potential moral foundation for Chinese socialism and not only Chinese culture, mirroring his idea that Christianity underpinned the progress of Western civilisation. In this rubric, little or no attention is given to the impact of other religious or cultural systems on either China or “the West.” The search for a single moral code to guide both individual behaviour and national governance in China underpins Chen’s logic. The author’s optimism about the significance of traditional Confucian values is encapsulated in his statement that what China offers to humanity in the twenty-first century is precisely its traditional cultural legacies: “Benevolence as substance and harmony as means.” 4Chen’s volume also introduces readers to a key platform for the rehabilitation of Confucius in China today – guoxue (national learning/studies, 国学). This branch of academic research has evolved into a popular cultural movement yet has only recently started drawing the focused attention of the academic community outside of China (see China Perspectives No. 1, 2011). In a chapter with the lengthy title of “The Difficulty of Undertaking National Studies Research in the Nineties: The Problem of the National Studies Fever and Research into Traditional Culture,” readers are provided with an important and authoritative study of guoxue. Presented at a conference in 1994 and first published in 1995, this article is one of Chen’s early analyses of the guoxue phenomenon. The chapter commences with an overview of events at Peking University in late 1993, generally regarded as the starting point for broad academic discussion on guoxue. The public nature of the academic debate in turn generated widespread popular interest in Chinese traditions and together ignited the so called guoxue craze (国学热). Chen suggested that the craze was “encouraged by media whilst the ceremonies to remember Confucius were arranged and conducted by the Party” (p. 334). Although Chen Lai remains rather sceptical of the genuine usefulness of the guoxue craze for enhancing academic research, he proposes that the “fever” should be regarded as having a tight connection to Deng Xiaoping’s famous “Southern Tour” of 1992, which subsequently led to official endorsement of the socialist market economy system. He writes: “Indeed, the propagation of national studies fever in the latter half of 1993 might be seen as the product of a reaction against the counter-example set by the irrational commercialisation that surged because of the market economy. (…) The so-called national studies fever of 1993 can be read as a form of resistance by academic scholarship to the shock of commercialisation” (p. 344). The chapter also contains Chen’s examination of the etymology of the term guoxue that simultaneously provides a short overview of guoxue’s historical development. Amidst tortured academic debates about the precise nature of guoxue, Chen posits the view that guoxue is “quite simply the idea of ‘traditional Chinese culture’.” He also notes possible ideological collisions that arise from the guoxue revival – on the political level with Marxism, and on the intellectual level with the “dominant enlightenment liberalism and closed dogmatism” – both legacies of the May Fourth Movement. Consistent with the tone of the entire collection, Chen Lai is optimistic about guoxue’s (or traditional Chinese culture’s) future prospects and anticipates the revitalisation and reconstruction of China’s national spirit (p. 347). Just as Tradition and Modernity tended to conflate Chinese tradition with Confucianism, in academic debates about guoxue “national learning” is likewise frequently used as a synonym for Confucianism. 5This collection also includes several book reviews and in-depth studies of the works of key cultural and philosophical thinkers from China and beyond. In Chapter 6, Chen discusses Liang Shuming’s (1893-1988) ideas on culture as espoused in his Eastern and Western Cultures and their Philosophies, and later, in Chapter 13, compares Liang’s thought system to Weber’s in a detailed analysis. The author also analyses Feng Youlan’s (1895-1990) philosophical system (in Chapters 7 and 8), Bellah’s Tokugawa Religion: The Cultural Roots of Modern Japan (Chapter 11), and the scholarship of Thomas Metzger (Chapter 12). These chapters demonstrate Chen Lai’s deep knowledge of and engagement with Western scholarship and provide a significant point of comparison for his comments on China. 6In sum, mainland China in the late 1980s-early 1990s experienced a major revival of interest in traditional culture, including the academic re-evaluation of its validity and rekindled popular interest in various traditional legacies. This trend shows no signs of abating any time soon. One manifestation of this cultural shift has been a renewed academic enquiry into the Chinese past that often critically re-evaluates the hitherto unproblematised impact of the May Fourth thinkers.Chen Lai’s Tradition and Modernity provides a convenient avenue through which English reading audiences can appraise this critical scholarly re-evaluation and understand how socialism and Marxism are integrated into this heady mix. Chen’s proposed cultural model is meant to “…consolidate in a stable fashion a socialism with Chinese cultural characteristics and a complete market economy” (p. 353). Despite oftentimes referring to “traditional Chinese culture” and its value system, it seems that Chen’s view of tradition is exclusively linked to Confucianism. Chen does explicitly point to his stance and motivation at the beginning of the book by saying that his goal is to confirm Confucian values – a key notion that brings together all the essays of this collection. It would nevertheless be interesting to read whether any other traditional Chinese values (beyond the Confucian) have anything to offer to modern Chinese society or humanity. 7Edmund Ryden’s translator’s notes are an important addition to this wonderfully translated volume. To those interested in acquiring more detailed background knowledge on the issues raised in Tradition and Modernity, Ryden’s annotations provide a useful guide. They simultaneously clarify possible “less-known” facts and events, thus ensuring that the book is accessible to the general reader and experts alike. The appearance of Chen Lai’s work in English will enable a broader reading audience to understand the ongoing process of China’s modernisation as it inevitably propels academic and popular reappraisals of that nation’s long cultural heritage.
Housing, Urban Renewal and Socio-Spatial Integration. A Study on Rehabilitating the Former Socialistic Public Housing Areas in Beijing
Abstract The initiative of this study derived from my concern of two critical urban issues in China today: housing and urban renewal. In the recent two decades, the Chinese urban housing stock underwent a significant, if not extreme, transformation. From 1949 to 1998, the urban housing stock in China largely depended on the public sector, and a large amount of public housing areas were developed under the socialistic public housing system in Beijing and other Chinese cities. Yet in 1998, a radical housing reform stopped this housing system. Thus, most of the public housing stock was privatized and the urban housing provision was conferred to the market. The radical housing privatization and marketization did not really resolve but intensified the housing problem. Along with the high-speed urbanization, the alienated, capitalized and speculative housing stock caused a series of social and spatial problems. The Chinese government therefore attempted to reestablish the social housing system in 2007. However, the unbalanced structure of the Chinese urban housing stock has not been considerably optimized and the housing problem is still one of the most critical challenges in China. Based on the background of privatization, the former socialistic public housing areas in Beijing confront the ambiguity of their housing stock and the confusion of housing management. While they still accommodate the majority of urban residents and are identified by their good places, (social and programmatic) mixed communities, vibrant local life, and diversified housing types, they are facing the serious challenges of physical deterioration and social decline. Therefore, urban renewal was thought as an effective solution seeking to improve the living conditions in those neighborhoods. Nevertheless, urban renewal in itself is also a controversial issue. In order to solve the housing problem, the large-scale urban renewal in Beijing started at the beginning of the 1990s. The radical housing reform further boosted urban renewal, often in the form of wholesale reconstruction and linked to real estate development. The market-driven urban reconstruction resulted in the resident displacement, community destruction, disappearance of historical images and, more threatening, socio-spatial segregation. It encountered the rising criticism from scholars and activists and resistance from the residents. As a result, many housing renewal projects, including the reconstruction projects of former public housing areas, had to be stopped or suspended in Beijing after 2004. Nowadays there is a dilemma for the urban renewal of Beijing’s former public housing areas. On the one hand, its conventional approach became inadaptable in the existing transitional context of China, and thus led to the increasing conflict of interests between different actors (or groups) and the tension between individuality and collectivity; but on the other hand, if there will be social-oriented, adapted strategies, urban renewal would still be an effective means to improve the quality of living and to solve the housing problem of the city. Therefore, my study addressed the general research question, “What will be the adapted strategies used for the urban renewal of former socialistic public housing areas in Beijing to improve the local living conditions and to deal with the existing urban housing problem?” As a social-oriented, step-by-step approach to avoid wholesale reconstruction, urban rehabilitation might be an alternative approach for Beijing’s urban renewal. It is the hypothesis of my study. However, here comes the question if this approach, originally developed in the West, can adapt to the Chinese situation. In a transitional society undergoing continuous social diversification and differentiation as well as ethical collision, contemporary Chineseness could refer to the hybridity of ethoses. Facing this super hybrid situation, the adaptability of the Western approach, which was developed in the context of the hybrid ethos (an ethos based on the common belief of individualism and consumerism), is questionable. Therefore, we need a pragmatic and inclusive theoretical thinking, as ontology and methodology, to guide and to frame the research. In my study, that is what I called the thinking of spatial phenomenon. Thinking of spatial phenomenon starts with an idea of pragmatization and phenomenalization of spatiality, which stems from both the Chinese tradition and the Western modernity. As an analytic tool, it includes different ethical viewpoints and is hence composed of three dimensions: the socio-economic dimension (a structuralistic point of view for the modern society), the community-placial dimension (a humanistic point of view for everyday life) and the aesthetic-technical dimension (a positivistic point of view for physical environments). As a philosophy of practice, it emphasizes the historicality and practicality of thinking and the unity of theory and practice. Moreover, considering the current Chinese situation in general, thinking of spatial phenomenon has its primary thesis of socio-spatial integration, which recalls the Chinese tradition of approaching-to-the-good society and is the ethical task of contemporary Chinese urban rehabilitation. My research study is thus enframed by the methodology of thinking of spatial phenomenon. It is both problem-driven (the problems on housing and urban renewal for the former socialistic public housing areas in Beijing) and purpose-driven (the purpose of socio-spatial integration in the context of the hybridity of ethoses in a transitional society). And the research followed a matrix composed of its historical and dimensional axes. The former axis represents the consideration from a historical review and the analysis of the status quo to the referable case studies and the development of new strategies, while the latter is demonstrated by the analyses in the socio-economic, community-placial and aesthetic-technical dimensions in each section. This research framework is presented in my writing. In this book, Part II, following the introductive Part I, reviewed the historical evolution of Beijing’s socialistic public housing in the socio-economic, community-placial and aesthetic-technical dimensions, respectively. Part III subsequently analyzed the current urban housing problem, the existing conditions of Beijing’s former socialistic public housing areas and the dilemma of urban renewal. It concluded by raising the concrete challenges of an alternative approach for renewing those housing areas. These challenges comprise the balance of housing affordability and economic sustainability, the stabilization of mixed community and the alternative physical initiatives instead of the wholesale reconstruction. In order to answer to these challenges, the study in Part IV focused on several successful and referable experiences of urban renewal in cities with a comparable context, i.e. Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Berlin, Vienna and Hong Kong. And Part V, based on two “pilot design research projects” on Sanlihe Neighborhood 1 in Beijing, developed a proposal for rehabilitating the former socialistic public housing areas in Beijing. This proposal is called an integrated plural approach. This approach is made up of six recommended strategies that are also sorted by three dimensions. There are housing re-socialization and economic sustainability in the socio-economic dimension, housing differentiation and community participation in the community-placial, as well as a combination of housing renovation and reconstruction and an integral physical planning/design in the aesthetic-technical dimensions. In conclusion, while those strategies gave answers to the existing practical challenges, the integrated plural approach in all proposed a new establishment of urban rehabilitation to adapt to the hybrid, diverse and plural Chinese situation and to fulfill the ethical task of sociospatial integration. However, in comparison with drawing concrete conclusions, this research study has more to do with inspiring reflection. On the one hand, my study on rehabilitating the former socialistic public housing areas in Beijing can only be concluded as a proposal, same as many other urban studies. The applicability of an integrated plural approach must be proved in practice. A proposal of urbanistic research has to be tested and modified within urban practice. On the other hand, this book cannot be seen as an end but as a beginning of new explorations in urban study, theoretically. The openness, inclusion and integration of thinking of spatial phenomenon might contribute to the establishment of new ontology and methodology for the study of not just Chinese but also universal urban issues in an era of globalization. Keywords urban housing stock; housing; social housing; Beijing; China; urban renewal; urbanism; socialistic public housing areas Full Text: PDF EPUB B/W References Aedes vereniging van woningcorporaties, Dutch Social Housing in a Nutshell, 2003. 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Zhang Junmai (Carsun Chang, 1887—1969)
Zhang Junmai (Chang Chun-mai), also known as Carsun Chang, was an important twentieth-century Chinese thinker and a representative of modern Chinese philosophy. Zhang’s participation in “The Debate between Metaphysicians and Scientists” of 1923, in which he defended his Neo-Confucian views against those of Chinese progressives and scientists, made a strong philosophical impression on an entire generation of Chinese intellectuals by championing the value of traditional Confucian truth claims and asserting the limits of scientific knowledge. Subsequently, Zhang’s two-volume study of The Development of Neo-Confucian Thought (1957) and his Manifesto for the Reappraisal of Chinese Culture (1958) cemented his identification with Confucianism, and the view of Confucianism as compatible with modernity, in the English-speaking philosophical world. Despite his association with Confucianism, Zhang was deeply influenced by the work of the French thinker Henri Bergson and exponents of German Idealism, particularly Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Zhang is best known today, however, not for his original philosophical work but rather for his political activities during China’s Republican era (1912-1949), through which he and his “Third Force” party attempted to mediate between the polarized Nationalist and Communist factions in the Chinese political landscape, as well as his promotion of Neo-Confucian studies in the West. His personal motto was, “Do not forget philosophy because of politics, and do not forget politics because of philosophy.” Due perhaps to his acknowledgment of Western influences as well as his involvement in politics, Zhang remains one of the modern Confucian movement’s most understudied figures, especially in comparison to his contemporaries Feng Youlan and Mou Zongsan. Yet his dual participation in both philosophy and politics makes him an exemplary Confucian and an embodiment of the Neo-Confucian ideal of “the unity of knowledge and action” (zhixing heyi). Table of Contents Early Life The Debate of 1923 and Zhang’s Moral Metaphysics Political Philosophy Confucianism and Chinese Modernity Influence and Key Interpreters References and Further Reading Primary Works Secondary Studies 1. Early Life The man known as Zhang Junmai was born Zhang Jiasen, son of a merchant family in the Jiading district of China’s Jiangsu Province, on January 18, 1887. His early education included the memorization of the Four Books and Five Classics of traditional Confucianism. At the age of eleven, however, his forward-thinking family sent him to study Western history and science as well as the English language, although he continued to read the work of influential Neo-Confucian thinkers such as Zhu Xi. At the age of fifteen, he passed the district-level civil service examination and earned the basic shengyuan or xiucai degree, which entitled its bearers to exemption from corvée labor and corporal punishments and granted them access to local government facilities. After continuing his studies for a few more years, Zhang taught English in Hunan Province for two years before traveling to Tōkyō, Japan in 1906 and enrolling in Waseda University’s undergraduate program in economics and political science. Like many other Chinese intellectuals of that era, he intended to take advantage of Japan’s recent and rapid modernization by studying Western thought while remaining within an East Asian cultural context. In Japan, Zhang befriended the constitutional monarchist Liang Qichao (1873-1929), a political reformer whose activities led to his exile in 1898. Zhang began to publish articles in Liang’s biweekly, New Citizen (Xinmin Congbao), including translations of excerpts from John Stuart Mill’s Considerations on Representative Government. Zhang’s other activities within expatriate Chinese circles included participation in the creation of the Political Information Society (Zhengwen she), which competed with Sun Yat-sen’s United League (Tongmeng hui) for the hearts and minds of reform-minded Chinese of the period. After graduating from Waseda in 1911, he returned to China and successfully passed the entrance examination for the Hanlin Academy, a prestigious Confucian college founded in the eighth century. However, the Hanlin Academy, like other official Confucian institutions, soon fell victim to the Chinese Revolution, which swept away this and other vestiges of imperial rule in favor of a more democratic and scientifically-minded “New China.” Unable to pursue his dream of becoming a government official, Zhang returned to his ancestral home, where he was appointed chairman of the local parliament. Soon afterward, Zhang’s publication of an article critical of government policy toward Mongolia led to his proscription, and he fled to Germany to avoid repression. In Germany, as in Japan, Zhang once more pursued academic studies, registering at the University of Berlin for preparatory coursework that would lead to enrollment in the University’s doctoral program in law and political science. World events disrupted his plans yet again when the First World War broke out in 1914. Zhang turned his attention to the ongoing conflict, publishing articles in about the European political and military situations in Chinese newspapers. In 1915, Zhang traveled to England before returning to China one year later to assume the editorship of the newspaper New Current Affairs (Shishi xinbao) and teach law at Beijing University. With the conclusion of hostilities in 1919, Zhang toured Europe in the company of Liang Qichao and other Chinese intellectuals and attempted to intervene in the transfer of sovereignty over China’s Shandong Province (the home region of Confucius) from Germany to Japan by the Peace Conference of Versailles that ended the war. Having recently produced a Chinese translation of the American president Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points,” which justified the Allies’ use of force in the name of democracy and national self-determination, Zhang was devastated and rapidly lost interest in politics, turning his attention “from social sciences to philosophy,” as he later called this crucial transition in his life. In January 1921, Zhang met with Rudolf Eucken (1846–1926) in Jena, Germany. This encounter was perhaps one of the most important turning points in Zhang’s life. After a brief interview, Zhang decided to stay in Jena to learn philosophy under Eucken’s patronage. Studying with Eucken opened Zhang’s mind to new sets of ideas, especially those of Henri Bergson (1859-1941), and questions of life, ethics and culture gained a more important place in his thought. In 1922, Zhang collaborated with Eucken in the writing of a book in German entitled Das Lebensproblem in China und in Europa (The Problem of Human Life in China and Europe). The first half of the book, written by Eucken, was a short introduction to the history of European conceptions of life, while the second half, written by Zhang, dealt with the outlooks on life found in the work of major Chinese philosophers. Although Zhang’s treatment of Chinese thought was mainly historical in perspective, this text marks the first occasion on which he drew parallels between Confucian traditions and the philosophy of Kant. Here, Zhang argued that Confucius’ dictum that “what the superior man seeks is in himself, while what the petty man seeks is in others” (Analects 15:21) was comparable to Kant’s claim that the sources of morality are to be found within oneself. Thus, in Zhang’s view, both Confucianism and Kantianism see human morality as grounded in human nature and thus autonomous. Despite Zhang’s immersion in philosophical studies, he remained active in politics. During his time in Germany, he met with many activists and leaders, including the social democrat Philip Scheidemann (1865–1939) and the architect of Germany’s post-war constitution, Hugo Preuss (1860–1925). These encounters with Weimar Republic intellectuals helped to form Zhang’s conceptions of socialism and exerted a lasting influence on his dual life in politics and philosophy. Both aspects of this dual life were expressed in his participation in “the Debate between Metaphysicians and Scientists” of 1923. 2. The Debate of 1923 and Zhang’s Moral Metaphysics Having returned to China, in February 1923 Zhang gave a speech at Beijing’s Qinghua School (later Qinghua University) about the differences between science and what he called “outlooks on life” (rensheng guan). In this speech, Zhang claimed that the former is characterized by “objectivity,” “logic,” “analytic methods,” “causality,” and “uniform phenomena,” while the latter are “subjective,” “intuitive,” and “synthetic,” based on “free will.” Moreover, he defended the idea that, in her path to modernization, China should not only consider the sciences but also ought to define a new way, based on the “outlooks on life” of ancient Chinese sages. Zhang’s position drew considerable criticism from intellectuals associated with the anti-traditional May Fourth Movement, especially the famous geologist Ding Wenjiang (1887–1936). The difference of opinion between Zhang and Ding developed into a major political and philosophical event in the intellectual history of Republican China and became known as “the Debate between Metaphysicians and Scientists.” This debate played an important role in the emergence of a neo-conservative trend in modern Chinese thought by raising the questions of what place science ought to have in modern Chinese society and whether scientism and positivism ought to influence modern Chinese worldviews. The debate also played an important role in the development of Zhang’s philosophy insofar as it prompted the first publication of Zhang’s philosophical views in Chinese. By 1923, Zhang’s conception of himself as a “realist idealist” (weishi de weixin zhuyi)—one who refused to sacrifice empirical issues for the sake of his deeply-held ideals—was fully established. Because of Zhang’s attraction to the thought of Bergson and Eucken, he was often criticized as an “anti-rationalist” (fan lixing zhuyi zhe). What his critics appear to have had in mind was not an opposition to reason on Zhang’s part, but rather his concern to avoid the over-use of the “process of abstraction” (chouxiang licheng). On Zhang’s view, when considering abstractions such as “Humanity” or “Nature,” one should always keep in mind that they are real and in front of us. Instead of building abstract systems and concepts, Zhang wanted to construct a philosophy that would embrace the reality and the fullness of the universe. Zhang founded his “realist idealist” philosophy on the basis of a classically dualistic conception of the world. On the one hand, there is matter (wuzhi or wu); on the other hand, there is spirit (jingshen) or mind (xin). Zhang rejected monistic conceptions of the world as incoherent, going so far as to translate the English philosopher C. E. M. Joad’s Mind and Matter, which advocated the same position, in 1926. Zhang’s dichotomy between mind and matter is a structural division in his philosophy, which generates a series of opposing notions: matter is outside (wai) of the self and is fixed (ding), while mind or spirit is always inside (nei) the self and in motion (dong). The material world of nature is governed by causality, while the spiritual world of humanity is conducted by free will (ziyou yizhi). In later years, when discussing the relation between liberty (ziyou) and power (quanli) in political philosophy, Zhang categorized the former as belonging to the realm of spirit and the latter as relative to matter. His division between science and “outlooks on life” thus is an extension of these binary oppositions that are basic to his thought. Zhang regarded science (kexue) as a plural signifier and subdivided it into two types: “material sciences” (wuzhi kexue) and “spiritual sciences” (jingshen kexue). This opposition was based on the German distinction between “natural sciences” (Naturwissenschaften or Exactewissenchaften) and “spiritual sciences” (Geistwissenchaften). While his opponents advocated science as one universal epistemology based on specific methodology, Zhang argued that one should consider sciences according to their objects, which could be any of three types: “inert” (si zhi wu), “alive” (huo zhi wu), or “alive and thinking” (youhuo yousi zhi wu). Incapable of moving by themselves, inert objects are bound to follow the rules of causality. Their movements can be explained by natural laws, and it is the purpose of material sciences to discover and analyze these laws. For instance, astronomy aims at explaining how planets gravitate around the sun. On Zhang’s account, physics and astronomy are the most archetypal material sciences. Although plants and animals lack “mind” in Zhang’s sense, they are alive nonetheless, so for Zhang, their analysis raises further issues. Unlike inert objects, plants and animals can move on their own, so despite the fact that causality applies to them, it doesn’t explain everything. But Zhang insisted that the presence of life in itself couldn’t be questioned by science. Following the ideas of the German vitalist Hans Driesch (1867–1941)—who was at that time visiting in China, where Zhang served as his translator—Zhang seems to believe that there is an entelechy, a driving principle that directs life and its development without being part of the soul or the organism, the existence of which precludes questioning its manifestation. To Zhang, the very foundations of life were completely impossible to analyze. Therefore, biology was not literally “the science of what is alive” but only the science that analyzes the material structure and development of living animals and plants As for what Zhang called “spiritual sciences”—by which he meant something like social sciences—these moved beyond the realm of matter and were capable of analyzing humanity itself. Yet all the natural laws that could be found in those sciences were always linked to a material aspect of life. For instance, Zhang accepted that there were laws of development in economy; economy and society were at some point to follow specific patterns. But he insisted that these laws could only be found because there are material and fixed data to analyze. Economics, for example, deals with manufactured goods. On Zhang’s account, spiritual sciences could discover and analyze laws of nature only if their object was somehow linked to something material. Even if there are laws that condition the development of social phenomena, human beings still can use their minds and free will to modify the situation. For that reason, social laws or historical patterns can only be sought in the past. Following Bergson, Zhang noted that the human spirit is in perpetual transformation (xin zhi wanbian): it is impossible to divide thought into fixed mental states, as our minds are always on the move (dong). Having no place to settle, no analysis can be made. Therefore, for Zhang, there cannot be any real psychology, but only physiology, a study of the relation between stimuli and the mind. According to Zhang, science cannot predict the future of humanity, which is why he rejected Marxism. In contrast to such “sciences,” Zhang outlined his understanding of “outlooks on life” as a coherent alternative to claiming that everything could be understood and controlled by Science. In her fight for a new culture (xin wenhua), China was to cast away naturalism and positivism, and develop a new “outlook on life,” based on both Western modernity and the teachings of the ancient Chinese sages, that did not exclude or condemn metaphysics. Zhang even claimed that the introduction of Bergson’s and Eucken’s philosophies to China could give birth to “Neo-Song [Dynasty] Learning” (xin songxue 新宋學), just as the introduction of Buddhism to China had permitted the emergence of the original Neo-Confucianism of the Song dynasty (songxue). In Eucken’s philosophy, humanity is a being at the frontier of matter and spirit, and is in a perpetual struggle to achieve a spiritual life that can overcome his material nature. By promoting metaphysics, Zhang wished to foster human spiritual life and dismiss a scientistic conception of the world that would bind human beings in the web of material causality. Borrowing from Eucken’s Die Lebenschauungen der grossen denker (Outlooks on Life of the Great Thinkers, 1890), Zhang defined “outlook on life” as follows: The observations, holds, hopes, and demands that I have toward the persons and the objects external to myself—that’s what I call an outlook on life. (Zhang 1981, p. 935) Outlooks on life are not under the control of sciences. They find their source in the self (wo). Considering that “toward the world, man’s life is inner as spirit and outer as matter” (ibid.), outlooks on life are in fact what link our spiritual life with the material world. Even if people of the past can be models to follow (Zhang 1981, p. 913), everyone ought to develop his own outlook on life according to what his heart-mind (xin) tells him. That is what Zhang called the mandate of moral conscience (liangxin zhi ming). For Zhang as for other Confucians, the heart-mind is the center of the self; every moral thought and volition is generated from it. Having three principal functions, knowledge (zhi 智), emotions (qing 情) and will (zhi 志), it is what makes us human. In total opposition to the view defended by Hu Shi (1891-1962) at that time, Zhang argued that the difference between humans and animals is qualitative, not quantitative. The use of such concepts and terminology shows how deep the influence of Mencius’ and Wang Yangming’s moral thought on Zhang was. As a thinker who was steeped in Confucian tradition, Zhang considered human beings to be good by nature and wanted to promote Neo-Confucian metaphysics as a means to cultivate oneself (xiushen). Finally, a word should be said about Zhang’s debt to Kant, which was the result of his lifelong infatuation with this eighteenth-century German thinker. Zhang’s epistemology was mainly drawn from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781); he considered Kant to be the man who “had succeeded in harmonizing British empiricism and German rationalism” (Zhang 1981, p. 949). For Zhang, knowledge is the result of an encounter between material sense information and the innate categories of the mind. Human beings have innate categories or “concepts of reason” (lixing zhi gainian) that enable them to understand, classify, and aggregate all of their sensations (ganjue). It is these concepts of reason that link sensations to meanings (yiyi). Later, Zhang suggested that knowledge, built up from the encounter of sensations and concepts of reason, is always internal to one’s mind. For instance, in 1957, he wrote that the Song dynasty Confucian thinker Ch’eng I’s statement ”Human nature is reason” [(xing ji li ye], “means nothing other than the rationalist doctrine that forms of thought exist a priori in the mind” (Chang 1957, p. 35). For Zhang, the key philosophical question was that of the relationship between a mind able of knowing (zhizhi zhi xin) and the myriad things (wanwu zhi you) or phenomenal universe, through which knowledge of all that exists, materially and spiritually, could be integrated. Assuming that the principle of mind (xin li) is universal, Zhang anticipated that the development of thought ought to be somehow similar in every culture. This argument would form the basis of his claim that a genuine Chinese modernity was possible. 3. Political Philosophy Despite Zhang’s leap “from social sciences to philosophy,” he did not abandon political life. On the contrary, he participated in the drafting of a new Chinese constitution and wrote On the Meaning of Constitutions (1921). He struggled to introduce socialism in China. Very much taken with the newly-established Weimar Republic in Germany, Zhang wished to establish a very similar political system in China. In 1923, he opened a “Political Institute” in the suburbs of Shanghai, the aim of which was to form a new political elite that would be able to shape the nation’s affairs in future years. Under its auspices, Chinese students were exposed to political philosophy, economics, sociology, and international relations as well as Zhang’s critiques of both the Chinese Communist Party and the Guomindang (Kuomintang, KMT) or Chinese Nationalist Party, which contended against each other for political and later military supremacy throughout the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. After the KMT occupation of Shanghai in 1927, Zhang was forced to close the Institute and ventured into underground political activities. With Li Huang (1895—1991), a leader of the Chinese Youth Party (Zhongguo qingnian dang), he illegally published a journal, The New Way (Xinlu), in which he proclaimed his political values: [D]emocratic government, opposition to both one-class and one-party dictatorships, freedom of speech and association, opposition to the denial of these basic human rights under the pretext of party or military rule, the opposition to party control of education, of judicial affairs, of civil servants, and the use of the army for personal or party purposes. (Chi, p. 141) These points can be regarded as the key ideas of Zhang’s political thought at the time. In opposition to nationalist and communist conceptions of the political power in China, Zhang totally forbade the political parties to indoctrinate their members, to use military force or to practice dictatorial politics—all of which may have prevented Zhang’s own political parties from ever succeeding in the brutal political climate of China during the 1930s. Frustrated by chronic repression at the hands of the KMT, Zhang fled China once again and returned to Germany, where he obtained a position as Professor of Chinese Philosophy at the University of Jena through the assistance of Eucken’s former students. Eventually, he returned to China just before Japanese invasion of Manchuria in September 1931. In this politically-charged and highly unstable climate, Zhang assumed professorial duties in philosophy at Yanjing University in Beijing, teaching mostly about Hegel, before being ejected from his position as a result of his critical stance vis-a-vis the KMT government. Siding with the warlord Chen Jitang, the de facto ruler of Guangdong Province, Zhang again found work as a professor of philosophy, this time teaching Neo-Confucianism—first at Sun Yat-sen University and later at his own Learning Ocean Academy (Xuehai Shuyuan). At this institution, which blended traditional Confucian education with what Zhang saw as the best of Western learning (humanities, social sciences, and physical education), he was able to put into practice what he had defended during the debate of 1923: an education that would place equal and shared emphasis on the humanities (especially metaphysics), the arts, sports, and of course the sciences. In 1939, Zhang opened another such school: the Institute of National Culture (Minzu Wenhua Xueyuan), the guiding documents of which stated: The objectives of this academy are as follows: one, to achieve one’s personality; two, to temper and foster intelligence in order to contribute to the world scholarship; three, to deploy these activities, in which moral and knowledge are one, to participate grandly in the ordering of the world (or statecraft). (Zhang 1981, p. 1435) To participate in the world, either as politicians or as scholars, students were first to develop their personality. For Zhang, such psychological development, along with physical ability and intellectual knowledge, were all necessary to become a full human being. Self-cultivation through education, in turn, was key to the development of Chinese democracy, which was Zhang’s primary political commitment. In his political philosophy, there is a very strong bond between the people and the idea of the State. Democracy should not be implemented from above, but rather it should arise from the heart-minds of citizens. Influenced by Confucian ethics, Zhang appears to have viewed democracy through the prism of the canonical Confucian text known as the Daxue (Great Learning), which states: To bring the world at peace, one should first govern one’s State; to govern one’s State, one should first order one’s family; to order one’s family, one should first cultivate oneself. Zhang believed that the Chinese people would permit the emergence of democracy as the result of their own self-cultivation. For him, the State was no longer understood as a simple technical term of political science. It was the realization of the spirit of a people, founded on the basis of law and morality. Borrowing the Hegelian idea that “State is the realization of the Spirit [or Reason]” (guojia zhe jingshen zhi shixian ye), Zhang linked the question of the State with a certain humanism and a valorization of Chinese culture. The emergence of a new political system was to be the result of a New Culture (xin wenhua), from which would emerge a new outlook on life. Unfortunately, Zhang’s academies never stayed open very long. The Ocean Learning Academy was active for only two years, while the Institute of National Culture was closed in 1942, after three years of operation. 4. Confucianism and Chinese Modernity As was the case with Zhang’s moral metaphysics and political philosophy, so also in his understanding of culture did Zhang cleave closely to his Confucian heritage. His philosophy of culture upheld a certain conservatism, according to which both Chinese cultural unity and Chinese social development could proceed organically from a shared basis in Neo-Confucian thought. In The Chinese Culture of Tomorrow (1936), which can be regarded as a response to Liang Shuming’s Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies (1921), Zhang defended this view: Spiritual freedom [jingshen ziyou] is the foundation of a national culture [minzu wenhua] and therefore it should be the central principle to direct the politics, the sciences and the arts of China from now on. (Zhang 2006b, p. 1) Zhang argued that a culture is a spiritual entity that is created by, and evolved through, the free contributions of its people—not a static expression of an ahistorical will, as Liang claimed. The nation is in fact the group of persons that build a cultural unity and live together within it. The influence of the Western philosophers of history Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) and Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) can be seen in Zhang’s view. Zhang understood European modernity to be the result of a threefold historical process, which consisted of (1) religious reform (zongjiao gaige), (2) scientific development (kexue fazhan), and (3) the emergence of democratic government (minzhu zhengzhi). The challenge for China, therefore, lay not with importing European modernity, but rather with completing its own historical process of development in evolutionary terms specific to Chinese culture. Like many Chinese intellectuals of the early twentieth century, Zhang advocated the need for a “New Culture”; like his rival Liang, Zhang believed that Chinese culture would become the global culture of the future. However, Zhang believed that this “New Culture” would develop only in response to the intellectual challenge represented by the West, just as Neo-Confucianism had developed in response to the intellectual challenge represented by the introduction of Buddhism from India—an historical event to which Zhang repeatedly referred as a positive precedent for China’s ability to adapt to foreign systems of thought. As “the culture of harmony,” Chinese culture would find the middle way (zhezhong) between all global philosophical and cultural trends—but only if she initiated the first step in the threefold historical process by rediscovering and reviving the “Chinese national spirit” (Zhonghua minzu jingshen), which Zhang identified with Neo-Confucianism. After China revived the quintessence of her past culture—that is, Neo-Confucianism as interpreted by Zhang—she would be able to formulate a new outlook on life, which in turn would give birth to a new culture. From this new culture, a new political system and a new economic organization soon would follow. However, unlike many Chinese intellectuals of the era who defended a racial conception of the nation, Zhang had no interest in the question of blood lineage. As he pointed out in The Chinese Culture of Tomorrow (1936) and The Way to Establish the State (1938), one could not find any racial unity in China; since various “barbarian” invasions had produced a “blood mix” in the population, the blood of the Han ethnic majority was no longer “pure.” Constructing a blood-based nationalism would be irrelevant and self-destructive, but constructing a culture-based nationalism was another matter: I won’t dare say that in History there was such a thing as a pure blood Han nation, however I can attest that there is a Han Culture, which embodies the language spoken, the characters used, the calendar, the customs, the rites and so on. (Zhang 2006d, p. 9) Zhang’s activity as a non-aligned political thinker was curtailed by the end of cooperation between the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party in 1941, and he was placed under house arrest because of his opposition to KMT policies. In 1944, he was released and traveled to the United States, where he attended the founding meeting of the United Stations. While in the United States, Zhang renewed his interest in constitutionalism and spent much of his time studying the American Constitution. After returning to China in 1946, he began to argue that a conception of human rights, or at least its seeds, could be found in the Chinese intellectual tradition, especially in the thought of Mencius. His work became the basis of the Constitution of the Republic of China adopted in 1946, which is still in effect in Taiwan today. The implementation of the Constitution failed to resolve China’s ongoing civil war, however, and with the triumph of Communist forces in 1949, Zhang fled to a life of exile in Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, Zhang produced The Third Force in China and initiated the modern Chinese discourse on democracy’s roots in Chinese tradition. Having identified elements of democratic sensibilities in ancient Chinese texts, Zhang held out hope that the establishment of democracy in China still was possible despite the victory of Communism on the mainland. He even suggested that the Enlightenment and the development of democratic ideas in the West during the eighteenth century were made possible due to the introduction of Confucian thought to Europe by Jesuit missionaries a century earlier. Thus, in Zhang’s view, Confucius and Mencius were the hidden sources of the West’s Enlightenment. Moreover, Zhang regarded Marxism as being in total opposition to the “Chinese outlook on life,” and anticipated the eventual decline of Communist ideology in China. In 1957 and 1962, he issued in English the two volumes of his magnum opus on the intellectual history of China, The Development of Neo-Confucian Thought, which opens with the following sentence: China is the land of Confucianism. (Chang 1957, p.15) In Zhang’s biographically-focused and comparatively-oriented account of Neo-Confucianism, rooted in his conception of “outlooks on life” in the East and the West, he criticized Communism as an alien system of thought that would not take root in Chinese culture, which he believed was characterized by Confucianism despite the influence of other traditions. Identifying himself as a twentieth century “Neo-Confucian,” Zhang continued to advocate what he saw as a genuine Chinese Confucian modernity until his death at age eighty-two in the United States in 1969, which also marked the height of the Communists’ “Cultural Revolution” campaign against Confucianism and other emblems of Chinese tradition. 5. Influence and Key Interpreters Zhang’s involvement in the production of A Manifesto on the Reappraisal of Chinese Culture (1958), a document that aimed to promote an appreciation of Chinese culture among Western intellectuals, marks him as one of the key influences on the modern “New Confucian” movement, which seeks to promote Confucianism as a spiritual tradition that is fully compatible with democracy, science, and other aspects of modernity. Zhang’s participation in this movement probably stands as his foremost legacy in the world of contemporary Chinese philosophy. Despite Zhang’s stature as a founder of New Confucianism
Knowledge Graph
Examples
1 Liang Shuming's cultural thoughts is firstly created in "Eastern and Western cultures and their philosophies".
2 In his Eastern and Western cultures and their philosophies, by comparative researching Western culture, Chinese culture and Indian culture, Liang Shuming advanced a theory that there have been three major culture paths and the world culture will reappear three times, and then pointed out that the future of the world culture is the rejuvenation of Chinese culture.
3 In his“Eastern and Western cultures and their philosophies”,Liang Shuming put forththe idea of accepting the Western-culture in an allround way while re-using the inherentspirit of Chinese culture in a critical manner with a view to revitalizing the traditionalculture of China with Confucianism as the mainstay.