Are you familiar with Michael Sandel’s work?Yes I am. In the nineties I read several books on communitarianism, including Michael Sandel’s Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy.What do you think of communitarianism?I discussed communitarianism in my books Five Essays from 1999 and, especially, Historical Ontology more than ten years ago. My thoughts have not changed since then. Simply put, I think communitarianism is the product of developed countries with long traditions of liberalism. It has referential value, but (...) if directly or indiscriminately adopted in other societies it can be quite dangerous.In recent years Sandel has become very... (shrink)

Translated, with a philosophical introduction.

The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition touches on all areas of artistic activity, including poetry, painting, calligraphy, architecture, and the "art of living." Right government, the ideal human being, and the path to spiritual transcendence all come under the provenance of aesthetic thought. According to Li this was the case from early Confucian explanations of poetry as that which gives expression to intent, through Zhuangzi’s artistic depictions of the ideal personality who discerns the natural way of things and lives according to it, (...) to Chan Buddhist-inspired notions that nature and words can come together to yield insight and enlightenment. In this enduring and stimulating work, Li demonstrates conclusively the fundamental role of aesthetics in the development of the cultural and psychological structures in Chinese culture that define "humanity.". (shrink)

Li Zehou responds personally to the analyses of his ideas by Chong and Cauvel, acknowledging their summary evaluation while restating the main ideas of his publications, using his own vocabulary.

Li Zehou is widely regarded as one of China’s most influential contemporary thinkers. He has produced influential theories of the development of Chinese thought and the place of aesthetics in Chinese ethics and value theory. This book is the first English-language translation of Li Zehou’s work on classical Chinese thought. It includes chapters on the classical Chinese thinkers, including Confucius, Mozi, Laozi, Sunzi, Xunzi and Zhuangzi, and also on later eras and thinkers such as Dong Zhongshu in the Han Dynasty (...) and the Song-Ming Neo-Confucians. (shrink)

In the following, I will be speaking about my basic views regarding Chinese aesthetics. […] I identify four features that sum up the whole.

For example, it is commonly held that the difference between human beings and nonhumans, between human social practice and the activities of animals, lies in the self-conscious agency of humankind ; that is to say, human beings act in a self-conscious and intentional way. This gives rise to the question: If labor is characteristic of humankind and begins with the making of tools, and if tool-making activity is a universal and necessary characteristic which already implies intentional, conscious, and self-conscious activity, (...) does this then mean that human consciousness is prior to human activity ? As a scientific expression of this view, some paleoanthropologists emphasize the decision-making function of the human brain [as a defining characteristic of humankind]. I disagree with this view. (shrink)

It came as a complete surprise to me that my paper "An Outline of a Theory Concerning the Philosophy of Kant and the Establishment of Subjectivity" [henceforth called "Outline"], written in commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the publication of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and published in a relatively unknown location, gave rise to so much response. This seems to suggest that our younger generation longs to make a contribution to the fields of philosophy, and that they are searching (...) [for new avenues] to meet the nation's general goal of modernization as well as the challenge to answer the question about what direction the world is heading. However, that paper was just a preliminary sketch of what I had in mind, in order to raise certain questions. Although this paper is also still nothing more than a supplementary outline, I would like it to serve as a call for more exhaustive investigation. (shrink)

If we say that the school of Confucianism—Confucius, Mencius, and Xun Zi—focused on the nurturing and forming of the psychological temperament of man, that it emphasized humanizing the innate nature so that the natural physiological desires and the sensory needs of man—that "which is unavoidable in man's nature and feelings"—are nurtured in a societal way and attain societal functions, and that for this reason the state and results of its appreciation of beauty are often related to pleasing the ear, the (...) eye, the heart, and the mind, and on the whole are controlled by the realm of human relationships and ethics, then it is possible to say that the characteristics of Daoist aesthetics as represented by Zhuang Zi were precisely focused on transcending just this. (shrink)

The rise and development of the characteristics of all peoples and nations, their cultural-psychological structure, and the formation and continuation of all traditions of thought originate in actual material existence.

[T]he modern [conceptions of] freedom, independence, human rights, democracy, and so forth, which were suited to the era of Western industrial capitalism, could not undergo a truly in-depth investigation after the May Fourth Movement [of 1919], nor were they ever subjected to a Marxist, indepth analysis and investigation. Instead, during the tide of "national salvation and revolution," they were simplistically rejected as the merely worrisome garbage of the bourgeois class. Today, while inheriting and developing the tradition of the May Fourth (...) Movement, besides reemphasizing these ideas, we ought to analyze them further, investigate them carefully, and construct new theories about them. This should be the case with regard to all Chinese traditions, and we should not allow ourselves to remain bogged down in the emotionalism of the May Fourth period, or the abstract negation characterizing the post-May Fourth revolutionary period. (shrink)

If we say that on the level of form, works of art correspond to the humanization of sense perception in the human psychology, then on the level of the image, they correspond on the whole to the humanization of desire. As a result, their aesthetic effect is manifested as artistic sedimentation.

First, we should reinvestigate and clarify the meaning of the categories "substance" and "application".1.