Chinese Philosophy: Topics, Misc

Since the publication of his influential book The Discourse of "Revolution" and Chinese Modernity in 2000, Chen Jianhua, who currently teaches at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, has been acknowledged as a leading scholar in the study of modern Chinese literary culture and thought. The current issue includes three essays taken from the three chapters in his latest book, From Revolution to the Republic: Literary, Cinematic, and Cultural Transformations in the Late Qing and Republican Period, originally written (...) in Chinese. Inspired by Western theory, yet firmly rooted in the modern Chinese cultural context, Chen's inquiry into the dominant modern Chinese discourse of revolution demonstrates how the ideology of revolution was formed through a complex translation process and is extremely instructive in redirecting contemporary Chinese thought for those seeking alternatives to such dominant ideas as "revolution.". (shrink)

In the age of Globalization, cultural identity is a pointed and hotly debated question in academia. Cultural identity involves a core of traditional values and therecognition of several developing layers: the individual, the community and the nation. China has two dominant cultural tendencies: conservatism and protectionism. This has resulted in rejecting Western discourse to preserve a supposedly unchangeable Chinese identity. Comparative models that study cultural and literary exchanges between China and the West were based on dualist perceptions of spatio-temporal orientation. (...) The multi-dimensional model of cross-cultural research espoused in this paper re-examines the relationships between Chinese and Western cultures and their literature. It also examines the misappropriation, transplantation, transfer and transformation of cultural representations and theories across diverse historical periods. As opposed to the dualist model of traditional comparators approaches, where relations are simplified to A influences B. the multi-dimensional model operates complex mapping, between ancient Chinese culture and Western culture, and then back to modern Chinese culture. This paper offers a case study of the complexity of cross-cultural exchanges over time, with the example of Ji Junxiang’s The Orphan of Zhao, its sources, adaptations and critical interpretations. (shrink)

When asked by students taking Chinese Philosophy classes with me what I can recommend as reading material, I usually say, among other things, anything written by François Jullien. Thankfully, with Vital Nourishment: Departing from Happiness, there is now a new title available in English translation to add to this list. As with the works of most philosophically inclined writers whom I like, this book by Jullien does not really say much that has not already been said by him, at least (...) implicitly, in previous publications. More or less "creative" writers, paradoxically, tend to produce variations of one or more themes and thus repeat themselves to a certain degree. That is, so to speak, the price one has to pay if one .. (shrink)

The last decade has seen the rapid rise of China as a global power, and the stability of China-U.S. relations has taken on global significance. The two political giants are meeting in the Middle East, Africa, and even Latin America. As Joseph Grange aptly points out, rising tensions over such issues as human rights and national sovereignty are not simply the result of differing political agendas. Underlying cultural assumptions and historical meanings are at the root of these differences, and opening (...) a constructive dialogue on these differing cultural assumptions is the key to a fruitful political relationship. This charge is left to philosophy.In John Dewey, Confucius, and Global Philosophy Joseph Grange provides .. (shrink)

By focusing on the Confucian ideal of forming one body with Heaven, Earth, and myriad things, I argue that the distinctive feature of Chinese cosmology is not the absence of cosmogonist concerns, but faith in the interconnectedness of all modalities of being as the result of the continuous creativity of the cosmic process.

This volume has grown out of the international East Meets West Conferences established by Dr. Murthy, also the founder of Long Beach Publications. The stated object is “to stimulate a new debate between differing cultures and modes of thinking... [and] cross-cultural thinking which the global civilization now emerging needs”. Ninian Smart contributes the Preface and a short article, “The Comparative View of the Person: East and West,” which serves to set the tone of the volume. Although the article does not (...) attempt any final conclusion regarding the person, it brings to our notice the fact that “there are wildly diverse inner psychological vocabularies” and that the “Hindu views of the person... draw the line in a different place than do Western systems”. These divergences are “challenging and thought provoking,” and failure to consider them is “because of lingering tribalism, pervasively evident in our whole educational system,” says Smart. (shrink)

In the West, the mission of cultural studies is often inextricably linked with practice, or intervention. Stuart Hall, the British scholar of cultural studies, believed that cultural studies is essentially "a sort of practice in which one constantly gives thought to intervening in the world, and the purpose of practice is always to reform, to effect change, and to have practical and actual effect on things."1.

I have to admit, in the realm of contemporary Chinese aesthetics, Li Zehou's influence is second to none. Every one of his new works is widely read, many of his viewpoints are frequently quoted, and in particular, his "cultural sedimentation" is, at certain levels, already used as a fundamental tenet and applied to real theoretical research and literary criticism; his evaluations of traditional culture, together with One Hundred Years Of Solitude and Jung's "Archetype Essays," have produced an influence that cannot (...) be underestimated on contemporary literary circles enveloped in "the trend of searching for roots." Like a great number of my contemporaries, I enjoy his writing a great deal, and must read every one of his books that I encounter. However, after just having read A Discussion of the History of Ancient Chinese Thought and Volume One of The History of Chinese Aesthetics, I have suddenly felt that these works aren't to my taste. Is the May Fourth New Culture Movement's thorough negation of traditional culture really as poetic as Li Zehou depicts it? Do today's countrymen really want to promote "New Confucianism" in order to reestablish a unified faith? Is the psychological constitution of the Chinese people actually an unalterable reality? I honestly had not thought that he felt such tenderness and love for traditional culture. In order to clarify my confusion, I reread all of his works and finally realized: when one uses the "sedimentation" perspective to examine tradition, Li Zehou's conclusion is inevitable. "Sedimentation," his theoretical foundation for evaluating tradition, is itself a product of traditional "sedimentation." The proposition that sedimentation is rational, just like Hegel's proposition that reality is rational, is oriented toward the past, is conservative. When one uses sedimentation to formulate the true nature of beauty, this conservative quality becomes even more distinct. From Li Zehou's perspective, traditional Chinese culture has more positive qualities than negative, an attitude just like that of Hegel toward the reality of his contemporary Germany. (shrink)

"Western Marxism" first made its appearance in the early 1920s and rapidly developed and spread after the Second World War, especially since the mid-1950s. Currently, it is not only popular in the advanced capitalist countries of Europe and America, but also commands considerable influence in some socialist and Third World countries. One of the major reasons for its broad influence is that it has managed to grasp the modern-day characteristic of scientific technology increasingly becoming the primary force of production, and (...) to use this to carry out multi-faceted observations and criticisms of contemporary capitalist society. In this way, it has expressed a positive and actively critical spirit. In this article, we shall provide a general survey of some critical theories of Western Marxism. (shrink)

We often give culture a narrow definition, confining it to the sum of works of art or of science, and to institutions such as universities, middle schools, primary schools, and museums, and to language, civilized behavior, and the social superstructure. Under the influence of cultural anthropology, we have already come to accept a broader concept of culture, and that is that culture is the sum of the activity of humankind in accordance with a certain intention to transform nature or the (...) things of nature. In this sense, agriculture, dance, physical drills , education, the processes of economic activity, and ancient traditions all would belong to the category of culture. In life, even activities such as eating and sleeping are no longer considered purely natural behavior because they are different from the eating or sleeping of animals; rather, they have been transformed by culture, their shapes and states have been changed. For example, the way in which the Chinese people eat is different from the way that Europeans, or Americans, eat. The emphasis of this new and broader definition of culture is no longer on things; culture is no longer defined in reference to objects such as the products of a museum or a scientific product, but to an activity, such as a dance performance, or some form of cultural heritage in an ancient or a modern society. We can therefore draw a conclusion that the term "culture" is no longer a noun, referring to some kind of substance, but is a verb, and points to a process. (shrink)

Chinese intellectuals, as they are perched at the intersection of history and reality, often have a tremendous sense of bewilderment and perplexity: Why and how did China, before the Ming dynasty, create such a resplendent scientific culture and stand at the forefront in the world? And why, then, has she fallen far behind the West in modern times? Why is it that she is beset with difficulty and hesitation every step of the way along the road to modernization, seemingly unable (...) to take even the slightest step ahead without tremendous hardship? (shrink)

Fang Dongmei was a native of Tongcheng, Anhui Province. He taught for over fifty years, and produced over ten major works. He devoted his entire life to the study of comparative cultures and comparative philosophy, developing a unique philosophy of Eastern and Western cultures. This article is limited to an objective appraisal of Fang Dongmei's discussions of the modernization of traditional Chinese culture.

Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu was an outstanding thinker of the French Enlightenment in the first half of the eighteenth century, a sociologist and philosopher that laid the foundation for the theory of the bourgeois state and of the science of law. He was, with Voltaire and Rousseau, an intellectual pioneer of the French bourgeois revolution. This glorious name, Montesquieu, has to the ears of our people of China both a familiar ring and a sense of intimacy.

The idea that China's inability to produce its own modern science led to its falling behind in the last three hundred years has become a major ingredient in today's critique of China's traditional culture. In this latest discussion of culture, quite a few essays traced this [phenomenon] to the question of the mode of thought and argued that differences in modes of thought to a very large extent influenced ideological culture.

The New Culture Movement of the May Fourth period may have carried with it many serious shortcomings; nonetheless, in the final analysis, it was still a watershed enlightenment in the history of modern thought in China. As its outstanding spokesman, Chen Duxiu, pointed out more than once, there were three major events that deeply influenced the modern civilization of mankind and "were most instrumental in changing the ways of tradition and totally renewing and overhauling the minds of men and society." (...) Of these three, one was the great French Revolution and the concept of the Rights of Man that attended it.1 It would not be too far wrong to say that today we are still inheriting and continuing the May Fourth legacy and tradition of science and democracy, and striving to fulfill its unfinished task; naturally, however, we are doing this at a higher level of meaning, and this therefore entails a rethinking and a new understanding and evaluation of certain basic arguments of the May Fourth period. (shrink)

From the time of the conflict among states to the unification under the Qin and Han dynasties, the newly emergent landowner class in China opened up a new era altogether. It brought about political unity on the mainland of China, a country of a vast territory and large population, and in so doing it speeded up the historical process of the blending of the various nationalities in China and the exchange of cultures among them, thus laying down a firm foundation (...) for the formation and development of the Chinese nation. Our academic circles have already done a great deal of research on the four hundred years of history represented by the Qin and Han and have seriously explored the fruits of intellectual and cultural progress produced in this period. Furthermore, in recent years, several scholarly symposia and conferences have been held, and journals and magazines have published quite a few high-quality academic articles. Through all of these avenues, the philosophy of the Qin and Han periods has been studied. Nonetheless, in a general sense, the study of the philosophy of this period of some four hundred years is weak; there is still not a monograph that comprehensively and systematically reflects the full picture of Qin-Han philosophical thought and at the same time represents the current standards of scholastic research on the subject. The volume on the Qin-Han periods in the multivolume History of the Development of Chinese Philosophy, compiled and edited under the direction of Ren Jiyu, has managed to push the study of the history of Qin-Han philosophy forward a step. The editors and writers of this volume have reexplored the subject with the spirit of searching for truth and for new perspectives and interpretations, and they have demonstrated their erudition by the breadth of their annotations, discoveries, and citations. Whether in terms of breadth or depth, this book is enlightening and inspiring. (shrink)

At home and abroad, in recent theoretical studies concerning the nature of creative thought, the theory of divergent thinking has played an extremely important role. This essay proposes some disagreements with this traditional opinion; for we believe that it is integrative thinking that is the essence of creative thought. Our reason is this: Creative thought is realized through cognitive activity, and cognitive activity is always, continuously, in a process of combination. Creative thought is also realized through the motions of the (...) human brain. Although the actions of the human brain are complicated, they are, nonetheless, still composed of combinations of lower forms of motion—such as physical motion. Thus they must obey certain laws of physical motion. Based on this understanding, the authors hypothesize that initially, in the space of thought, knowledge exists in a chaotic state but is relatively ordered. When the creative premise has been affirmed, the units of knowledge that are related to that premise would attract one another, and form a knowledge cluster, which is relatively amorphous, composed of various and diverse units of knowledge. Then, in the creative thought process, these various units of knowledge, in order to find a reasonable combination, would reject and repel one another or attract one another in many possible combinative forms, and thus lead to the rotation of the knowledge cluster. The greater the quality of the knowledge cluster, the greater the velocity of its rotation, and the more unified its direction. According to this, the axis of rotation of the knowledge cluster in creative thought ought to point toward a fixed direction in the thought-space. The authors also attempt to distinguish between the essence of divergent thinking and the essence of combinative or integrative thinking. We believe that there is an express difference between the nature of the energy produced in the act of integrative thinking and that produced in the act of divergent thinking. Only integrative thinking has the ability to muster up all different types of knowledge to effectively apply them to a particular object, and thus realize the anticipated goal of creativity. (shrink)

On humankind's great and endless road toward a modern civilization, all nations of the world have become relatively estranged from each other and remained within their own unique environments. As a result, there are great differences among their modes of thinking. Their ideas on culture are also quite disparate, bringing about unceasingly, generation after generation, wide differences in their national spirit. As for today, the people of China are only now facing modernization, the world, and the future with a vision (...) like a torch. How can the essence of the nations of the world be melted into one pot, creating a brand-new one-world civilization? This is the mission the times have bestowed upon us, though it definitely cannot be achieved overnight. I believe that first we must use present-day ideology to examine the differences, analyze, judge, and mutually utilize and copy the traditional cultures of China and the West. By doing so, the areas where Chinese and Western culture integrate and converge can be found. This paper will attempt to compare the views of nature in Chinese and Western traditional thought. (shrink)