Modern Chinese Counter-Enlightenment

Modern Chinese Counter-Enlightenment
Author: Peng Hsiao-yen
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2023-06-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 988880569X

In Modern Chinese Counter-Enlightenment: Affect, Reason, and the Transcultural Lexicon, Peng Hsiao-yen argues that a trend of Counter-Enlightenment had grown from the late Qing to the May Fourth era in the 1910s to the 1920s and continued to the 1940s. She demonstrates how Counter-Enlightenment was manifested with case studies such as Lu Xun’s writings in the late 1900s, the Aesthetic Education movement from the 1910s to 1920s, and the Science and Lifeview debate in the 1920s. During the period, the life philosophy movement, highlighting the epistemic debate on affect and reason, is connected with its counterparts in Germany, France, and Japan. The movement had widespread and long-term impact on Chinese philosophy and literature. Using the transcultural lexicon as methodology, this book traces how the German term Lebensanschauung (lifeview), a key concept in Rudolf Eucken’s life philosophy, constituted a global tide of Counter-Enlightenment that influenced the thought of leading Chinese intellectuals in the Republican era. Peng contends that Chinese intellectuals’ transcultural connections with others in the philosophical pursuit of knowledge triggered China’s self-transformation. She has successfully reconstructed the missing link in the Chinese theater of the worldwide dialectic of Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment. “This book can be considered a milestone in modern Chinese and cultural studies. It is also the most ambitious attempt in developing a new kind of interdisciplinary studies—an attempt that bears a philosophic weight and cuts across the disciplines of Sinology, comparative literature, intellectual history, and translation studies. At the same time, it seeks to demonstrate a new theory of ‘Transcultural Lexicon’ which should appeal to all scholars interested in cultural theories.” —Leo Ou-fan Lee, Chinese University of Hong Kong “In the age ruled by the myth of technoscientific triumphalism, this timely and refreshing book unearths a critical strand of thought and sensibility against enlightenment rationality in modern China. Drawing on historical archives and debates, Peng Hsiao-yen stages a compelling critique of industrial modernity and the pursuit of wealth and power at the cost of emotional ties, community, and organic lifeways.” —Ban Wang, Stanford University

Modern Chinese Counter-Enlightenment

Modern Chinese Counter-Enlightenment
Author: Hsiao-yen Peng
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023
Genre: China
ISBN: 9789888805518

In Modern Chinese Counter-Enlightenment: Affect, Reason, and the Transcultural Lexicon, Peng Hsiao-yen argues that a trend of Counter-Enlightenment had grown from the late Qing to the May Fourth era in the 1910s to the 1920s and continued to the 1940s. She demonstrates how Counter-Enlightenment was manifested with case studies such as Lu Xun's writings in the late 1900s, the Aesthetic Education movement from the 1910s to 1920s, and the Science and Lifeview debate in the 1920s. During the period, the life philosophy movement, highlighting the epistemic debate on affect and reason, was connected with its counterparts in Germany, France, and Japan. The movement had widespread and long-term impact on Chinese philosophy and literature. Using the transcultural lexicon as methodology, this book traces how the German term Lebensanschauung (lifeview), a key concept in Rudolf Eucken's life philosophy, constituted a global tide of Counter-Enlightenment that inspired the thought of leading Chinese intellectuals in the Republican era. Peng contends that Chinese intellectuals' transcultural connections with others in the philosophical pursuit of knowledge triggered China's self-transformation. She has successfully reconstructed the missing link in the Chinese theater of the worldwide dialectic of Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment.

Dao Companion to Liang Shuming’s Philosophy

Dao Companion to Liang Shuming’s Philosophy
Author: Thierry Meynard
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2023-02-20
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 303118002X

This book provides an analysis of the complex philosophy of Liang Shuming. This twentieth-century thinker opened up a number of paths that were to become central components of modern Chinese philosophy. For the first time, experts are brought together to analyze the complexity of his philosophy, which continues to exert a considerable influence today. This edited volume covers Liang’s multifaceted thought as informed by his many identities as a Buddhist, a Confucian, a Bergsonian, a rural reformer, and a philosopher. The volume will appeal to students, scholars, and general-interest readers.

A Global Enlightenment

A Global Enlightenment
Author: Alexander Statman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2023-04-26
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0226825744

A revisionist history of the idea of progress reveals an unknown story about European engagement with Chinese science. The Enlightenment gave rise not only to new ideas of progress but consequential debates about them. Did distant times and places have anything to teach the here and now? Voltaire could believe that they did; Hegel was convinced that they did not. Early philosophes praised Chinese philosophy as an enduring model of reason. Later philosophes rejected it as stuck in the past. Seeking to vindicate ancient knowledge, a group of French statesmen and savants began a conversation with the last great scholar of the Jesuit mission to China. Together, they drew from Chinese learning to challenge the emerging concept of Western advancement. A Global Enlightenment traces this overlooked exchange between China and the West to make compelling claims about the history of progress, notions of European exceptionalism, and European engagement with Chinese science. To tell this story, Alexander Statman focuses on a group of thinkers he terms “orphans of the Enlightenment,” intellectuals who embraced many of their contemporaries’ ideals but valued ancient wisdom. They studied astronomical records, gas balloons, electrical machines, yin-yang cosmology, animal magnetism, and Daoist medicine. And their inquiries helped establish a new approach to the global history of science. Rich with new archival research and fascinating anecdotes, A Global Enlightenment deconstructs two common assumptions about the early to late modern period. Though historians have held that the idea of a mysterious and inscrutable East was inherent in Enlightenment progress theory, Statman argues that it was the orphans of the Enlightenment who put it there: by identifying China as a source of ancient wisdom, they turned it into a foil for scientific development. But while historical consensus supposes that non-Western ideas were banished from European thought over the course of the Enlightenment, Statman finds that Europeans became more interested in Chinese science—as a precursor, then as an antithesis, and finally as an alternative to modernity.

Imagining Sisterhood in Modern Chinese Texts, 1890–1937

Imagining Sisterhood in Modern Chinese Texts, 1890–1937
Author: Yun Zhu
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2017-03-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1498536301

This book investigates sisterhood as a converging thread that wove female subjectivities and intersubjectivities into a larger narrative of Chinese modernity embedded in a newly conceived global context. It focuses on the period between the late Qing reform era around the turn of the twentieth century and the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, which saw the emergence of new ways of depicting Chinese womanhood in various kinds of media. In a critical hermeneutic approach, Zhu combines an examination of an outside perspective (how narratives and images about sisterhood were mobilized to shape new identities and imaginations) with that of an inside perspective (how subjects saw themselves as embedded in or affected by the discourse and how they negotiated such experiences within texts or through writing). With its working definition of sisterhood covering biological as well as all kinds of symbolic and metaphysical connotations, this book exams the literary and cultural representations of this elastic notion with attention to, on the one hand, a supposedly collective identity shared by all modern Chinese female subjects and, on the other hand, the contesting modes of womanhood that were introduced through the juxtaposition of divergent “sisters.” Through an interdisciplinary approach that brings together historical materials, literary and cultural analysis, and theoretical questions, Zhu conducts a careful examination of how new identities, subjectivities and sentiments were negotiated and mediated through the hermeneutic circuits around “sisterhood.”

Nationalism and Economic Development in Modern Eurasia

Nationalism and Economic Development in Modern Eurasia
Author: Carl Mosk
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2013
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0415605180

This book advances a new theory of why nationalism emerged in the modern world. In particular it explains why nationalism and economic development are closely linked, and why warfare plays a crucial role in the spread of the nation-state system. It is based on qualitative and quantitative evidence over the period 1600 to 2000 for seven countries - Great Britain, France, Germany, Yugoslavia, the United States, Japan and China

A New Literary History of Modern China

A New Literary History of Modern China
Author: David Der-wei Wang
Publisher: Belknap Press
Total Pages: 1033
Release: 2017-05-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0674967917

Literature, from the Chinese perspective, makes manifest the cosmic patterns that shape and complete the world—a process of “worlding” that is much more than mere representation. In that spirit, A New Literary History of Modern China looks beyond state-sanctioned works and official narratives to reveal China as it has seldom been seen before, through a rich spectrum of writings covering Chinese literature from the late-seventeenth century to the present. Featuring over 140 Chinese and non-Chinese contributors from throughout the world, this landmark volume explores unconventional forms as well as traditional genres—pop song lyrics and presidential speeches, political treatises and prison-house jottings, to name just a few. Major figures such as Lu Xun, Shen Congwen, Eileen Chang, and Mo Yan appear in a new light, while lesser-known works illuminate turning points in recent history with unexpected clarity and force. Many essays emphasize Chinese authors’ influence on foreign writers as well as China’s receptivity to outside literary influences. Contemporary works that engage with ethnic minorities and environmental issues take their place in the critical discussion, alongside writers who embraced Chinese traditions and others who resisted. Writers’ assessments of the popularity of translated foreign-language classics and avant-garde subjects refute the notion of China as an insular and inward-looking culture. A vibrant collection of contrasting voices and points of view, A New Literary History of Modern China is essential reading for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of China’s literary and cultural legacy.

Classics and Interpretations

Classics and Interpretations
Author: Ching-I Tu
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 413
Release: 2017-11-30
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1351289381

In recent years in the "West," scholars have attempted to unravel old constructs of interpretation and understanding, using the discipline of hermeneutics, or the scientific study of textual interpretation. Borrowed from students of the ever growing body of biblical interpretive literature that originated in the early Christian era, theoretical hermeneutics has given many contemporary scholars potent tools of textual interpretation. Classics and Interpretations applies this method to Chinese culture. Several essays focus on hermeneutic traditions of Neo-Confucianism. Others move outside of these traditions to attempt an understanding of the role of hermeneutics in Taoist and Buddhist textual interpretation, in Chinese poetics and painting, and in contemporary Chinese culture. This volume makes a concerted effort to remedy our ignorance of the Chinese hermeneutical tradition. Part 1, "The Great Learning and Hermeneutics," demonstrates the use of commentary to define how the individual creates his social self, and discusses differing interpretations of the Ta-hsueh text and its treatment as either canonical or heterodox. Part 2, "Canonicity and Orthodoxy," considers the philosophical touchstones employed by Neo-Confucian canonical exegetes and polemicists, and discusses the Han canonization of the scriptural Five Classics, while illuminating a double standard that existed in the hermeneutical regime of late imperial China. Part 3, "Hermeneutics as Politics," discusses the transformation of both the classics and scholars, and explores the dominant hermeneutic tradition in Chinese historiography, the scriptural tradition and reinterpretation of the Ch'un-ch'iu, and reveals the pragmatism of Chinese hermeneutics through comparison of the Sung debates over the Mencius. The concluding sections include essays on "Chu Hsi and Interpretation of Chinese Classics," "Hermeneutic Traditions in Chinese Poetics and Non-Confucian Contexts," "Reinterpretation of Confucian Texts in the Ming-Ch'ing Period," and "Contemporary Interpretations of Confucian Culture." Through these literate and brilliantly written essays the reader witnesses not merely the great breadth and depth of Chinese hermeneutics but also its continuity and evolutionary vigor. This volume will excite scholars of the Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist systems of thought and belief as well as students of history and hermeneutics.

Confucian Iconoclasm

Confucian Iconoclasm
Author: Philippe Major
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2023-12-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1438495501

Confucian Iconoclasm proposes a novel account of the emergence of modern Confucian philosophy in Republican China (1912–1949), challenging the historiographical paradigm that modern (or New) Confucianism sought to preserve traditions against the iconoclasm of the May Fourth Movement. Through close textual analyses of Liang Shuming's Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies (1921) and Xiong Shili's New Treatise on the Uniqueness of Consciousness (1932), Philippe Major argues that the most successful modern Confucian texts of the Republican period were nearly as iconoclastic as the most radical of May Fourth intellectuals. Questioning the strict dichotomy between radicalism and conservatism that underscores most historical accounts of the period, Major shows that May Fourth and Confucian iconoclasts were engaged in a politics of antitradition aimed at the monopolization of intellectual commodities associated with universality, autonomy, and liberty. Understood as a counter-hegemonic strategy, Confucian iconoclasm emerges as an alternative iconoclastic project to that of May Fourth.

The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity

The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity
Author: Edmund S. K. Fung
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2010-03-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1139488236

In the early twentieth century, China was on the brink of change. Different ideologies - those of radicalism, conservatism, liberalism, and social democracy - were much debated in political and intellectual circles. Whereas previous works have analyzed these trends in isolation, Edmund S. K. Fung shows how they related to one another and how intellectuals in China engaged according to their cultural and political persuasions. The author argues that it is this interrelatedness and interplay between different schools of thought that are central to the understanding of Chinese modernity, for many of the debates that began in the Republican era still resonate in China today. The book charts the development of these ideologies and explores the work and influence of the intellectuals who were associated with them. In its challenge to previous scholarship and the breadth of its approach, the book makes a major contribution to the study of Chinese political philosophy and intellectual history.