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“On the ‘Birth’ of Historiography of ‘Philosophy’ in China”
Professor Han-liang Chang, National Taiwan University
Paper presented at the Invited Session (IS02) of
Reframing the Historiography of Philosophy: A Dialectic Approach
XXII World Congress of Philosophy
Seoul National University, Seoul , Korea
30 July – 5 August, 2008
Venue: IS02-2, B83 (Multimedia Lecture Building), 305
Time: 2008-08-01, 15:00-18:00
This paper gives a critical account of the early stage of writing Chinese
historiographies of philosophy based on Western models in the early 20th century.
The special phenomenon in textual practice, though not wide-spread and of little
consequence beyond the confines of academe, bears witness to the large-scale
reception of Western culture in China since the late 19th century. This kind of textual
practice, albeit still novel to the Chinese intellectuals in the 1910s, had already been a
specialized “independent science” (Windelband 1901: 11) in Europe for nearly a
century.
In response to the Invited Session’s call for paper on the topic of Reframing
the Historiography of Philosophy: A Dialectic Approach, the paper sets as one of its
tasks to examine the concept of “dialectic” and to propose that cross-cultural
reception, imitation, and survival of the genre under discussion present a unique
hermeneutic situation involving the interpreter’s constant engagement of past texts
and his articulation of them in another text that is his historiography.
It was Hegel
who inaugurated the modern genre of Geistesgeschichte , with his strong conviction
on China’s lack of philosophy and its history. Since both of the two early
historiographers, Hu Shi 胡適 (1891-1962) and Feng Yulan [Fung Yu-lan] 馮友蘭
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(1895-1990), make free use of Hegel in their interpretations of historical process, the
paper will discuss a special version of dialectic, developed by Gadamer, in relation to
Hu’s and Feng’s histories of Chinese philosophy.
Postulating “the historiography of philosophy” in the Chinese context creates
special difficulties on top of those already existing in the Western context.
first task is to clarify the complicated issue of name and substance.
One’s
It is generally
agreed that the bi-syllabic expression, zhe-xue 哲學 (philosophy), is a loan-word,
directly from Japan and indirectly from the West.
Therefore, talking about
Chinese philosophy begs the question of knowledge systems’ cross-cultural
dissemination and mutations.
The Chinese equivalent zhexue, meaning literally
“learning of sagacity”, hence approximating í, was a coinage in Kanji
(Chinese script) by the Japanese scholar Nishi Amane 西周 (1829 -1897) in1874
(Zang 1982: 1), it was adopted by political reformers in China around 1896 and,
according to one version, first appeared in Xinmin congbao 新民叢報 (New
people’s bulletin), a journal published by Liang Qichao 梁啟超 during his sojourn
in Yokohama, Japan, in 1903 (Huang et al, 1991: 108).1
This anecdote makes it difficult to write a history of Chinese “philosophy” -at least in name, if not in substance.
Interestingly, the first histories of Chinese
“philosophy” that emerged in the early 20th century were all modelled on Western
historiography, in particular that by Wilhelm Windelband through English or
Japanese translation.2
Writers of such books often had to assume the position of
an apologist, by first acknowledging the importation of terminology, and then
either blurring the terminological distinction (Xie 1932), or insisting on writing
about the Chinese tradition in its own terms (Jia 1934).
If one postulates some
universal conceptual categories of philosophy, such as metaphysics, epistemology,
ontology, truth, value, morality, ethics, aesthetics, and projects them onto a
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historically-evolved body of knowledge that can be termed Chinese, one would be
either bringing into rapport two (or more) systems or imposing one on the other.
Such were the cases of the early Jesuits and sinologists, and philosophers like
Leibniz, Hegel, and Derrida, in their representations of Chinese thinking.
Lacking a system of knowledge which could barely qualify as “philosophy” in
the sense of Western tradition since Plato, Chinese history of thoughts, however,
does witness the evolution of the so-called Yi li zhi xue 義理之學 (learning of
principles [or forms]).
It began as the exegesis of the Confucian canons beyond
the philological (i.e., supra-lexico-syntactical) level in the Han Dynasty (206
BCE-220CE) , and can be construed as a kind of cultural hermeneutics; it was later
used to refer to the Song Dynasty (960-1279) and post-Song “metaphysics” and
“epistemology” represented by the Confucianists or better known to the West as
the Neo-Confucianists; and finally after the 17th century it referred to the
scholarship devoted again to the exegesis of Confucian Canons before their
contamination by Daoism and Buddhism.
However, even regarding this native
scholarship, opinion divides as to its origin and development.
One tradition
categorically denies any link between Li Xue 理學 and the exegetical tradition
started by Han scholars (Jia 1964: 1, 145) and thus making an arbitrary and
fictitious distinction between text-oriented hermeneutics and more theoretical
speculations on cognition and ontology that characterize Song “philosophy”.3
Whatever the approach, unless one rearticulates it, and recasts it in another
terminology, tracing the development of li xue or yi li zhi xue would make little
contribution to world history of “philosophy”.
This cross-cultural phenomenon of reception and appropriation involves a
long history of cultural hermeneutics and textual practice, reading, writing,
re-reading and re-writing, disrupted now and then by historical contingencies and
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temporal gaps and confounded oftentimes by linguistic barriers. Reconstructing
the route is next to impossible, and drawing parallels often ends up in
impressionism and lyricism.
My preliminary observation is that writing a history
of philosophy in China involves at least the following tasks: (1) accounting for the
approximation of two (or more than two) heterogeneous systems of thought, in
other words, engaging them in “dialogue”; (2) representing a history of their
approximation; (3) historicizing the “presentist” approximation of the
historiographer. And the tasks are always registered in three temporal coordinates:
(1) the moment of enunciation (of the historiographer); (2) the moment of the
enunciated (i.e., Chinese materials in the historical perspective); and (3) the
moment of approximation (or rapprochement of the approximated and the
approximating systems). It is obvious that here the act of writing historiography
based on the speech-act (énonciation) model can be also taken as a hermeneutic
enterprise, where the interpreter-historian (locutor) is found perpetually engaging
the interpreted past (allocator or pace Gadamer, interlocutor).
The kind of historiography I am suggesting here falls into the first category in
Richard Rorty’s genre classification, namely, rational reconstructions from the
point of view of analytical philosophy (1984: 69).
But this position would
inevitably involve a dilemma, as Rorty observes: “Either we anachronistically
impose enough of our problems and vocabulary on the dead to make them
conversational partners, or we confine our interpretive activity to making their
falsehoods look less silly by placing them in the context of the benighted times in
which they were written.” (Ibid, 49). Rorty’s description already suggests a
hermeneutic, discursive situation in which the historiographer engages his distant
allocutors, or what I have described elsewhere as “controvert the dead”.
All these
considerations will serve to respond to the earlier reflections on the conditions of
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history of philosophy posed by Hegel in the first decades of the 19th century, a
topic we shall pursue later. Based on the aforesaid assumptions, the paper will
comment on the two histories of Chinese philosophy produced respectively by Hu
Shi (1919) and Yulan Feng [Yu-lan Fung] (1931, 1934) in the early 20th century,
and interpret their approximations in terms of cross-cultural dialectic.4
Let me take an excursion before returning to Hu and Feng. Cultural
“dialectic” in the classical sense of dialogue is obviously not the concern of this
Invited Session on the “dialectic approach” to history/historiography. I recall
having exchanged views with Professor Marcelo Dascal about the semantic
overcharge of the word “dialectic”. In his reply, Marcelo tried to disambiguate the
word by cutting off its links with the classical tradition and Hegel, echoing, as it
were, Hegel’s attempt at disconnecting his version of dialectic from classical
antiquity (Gadamer 1976: 5). Having worked with Marcelo for some time, I can
certainly share his view of dialectic as a mechanism of controversy. But let me
begin by rehearsing a commonplace of the word “dialectic” before moving to the
two texts of Chinese philosophy, which I believe adequately demonstrate the full
conceptual and semantic range of the word under discussion.
Whilst advancing his method of trial and error or “conjectures” and
“refutations”, Karl Popper famously launches a severe criticism of the “vulgarized”
and simplified Hegelian dialectical method. Let me quote a lengthy passage from
his critique.
We must be careful, for instance, about a number of metaphors used by
dialecticians and unfortunately often taken much too seriously. An
example is the dialectical saying that the thesis ‘produces’ its antithesis.
Actually it is only our critical attitude which produces the antithesis,
and
where such an attitude is lacking—which often enough is the case—no
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antithesis will be produced. Similarly, we have to be careful not to
think that it is the ‘struggle’ between a thesis and its antithesis which
‘produces’ a synthesis. The struggle is one of minds; and these minds
must be productive of new ideas: there are many instances of futile
struggles in the history of human thought, struggles which ended in
nothing.
And even when a synthesis has been reached, it will usually
be a rather crude description of the synthesis to say that it ‘preserves’ the
better parts of both the thesis and the antithesis.
This description will
be misleading even where it is true, because in addition to older ideas
which it ‘preserves’, the synthesis will, in every case, embody some new
idea which cannot be reduced to earlier stages of the development.
In
other words, the synthesis will usually be much more than a construction
out of material supplied by thesis and antithesis.
Considering all this,
the dialectic interpretation, even where it may be applicable, will
hardly
ever help to develop thought by its suggestion that a synthesis
should be
antithesis. (1968:
constructed out of the ideas contained in a thesis and an
315-6)
The passage contains a couple of infelicitous interpretations, including the
imputed separation of ideas and minds (or attitudes), the failure to differentiate
between internal dialectic and external dialectic, and the mechanistic causality of
thesis-antithesis-synthesis. What interests me is two-fold: first, that this vulgarized
Hegelian formula was adopted by both Hu Shi and Feng Yulan in their historical
accounts of Chinese philosophy; second, that it leads to Popper’s subsequent
taxonomy of “dialectics”, a type of which is “contradiction”, not the inherent
aporía that characterizes a thesis – be it an idea or attitude, but a contradiction, as
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the word’s etymology indicates, formed by the opposing statements of two
opponents.
This may qualify as the Dascalian “controversy”.
I would argue that the dialectic method cannot be reduced to the mechanic
triadic functioning of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, nor can be the Hegelian historical
process interpreted as such. Otherwise, Popper’s method of trial and error would be
no less a meta-discourse attempting to account for the historical process of science
and as such not incompatible with the Hegelian dialectic. The only difference
perhaps lies in Hegel’s and Popper’s respective belief or disbelief in historical
continuity (i.e., evolution versus revolution) with regard to their respective subject
matter of “exact” science and philosophy. In terms of their insistence on “pure
reason” and the cleansing of social, historical contingencies and individual,
subjective elements from the historiography of philosophy or science, and their
teleological vision of ultimate truth, Popper is not unlike Hegel. Perhaps it would
take a radical historicist to debunk both, one for his metaphysics, the other for his
positivism.
The above reference to Hegel is no accident.
It was Hegel who, among his
immediate predecessors, founded the modern genre of Geistesgeschichte through
the delivery of his famous Lectures at Jena, Heidelberg and Berlin crossing a span
of nearly three decades (Brown ed. 1990). Equally famous is his strong conviction
on China’s lack of philosophy and its history. To the German philosopher, whilst
“the universal Mind does not remain stationary” and “the world-spirit does not sink
into this rest of indifference,” Chinese intellectual activities have been “at a
standstill” for two thousand years (Hegel 1974: 2).
Ironically, both Hu and Feng,
as if unaware of the Hegelian critique of China, make free use of Hegel in their
interpretations of the historical process..
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In their historiographies, neither Hu nor Feng draws on Hegel’s Lectures on
the History of Philosophy (1892-96, 1985, 1990). In his introduction, Hu makes a
passing reference to the English translation of the Kantian Windelband (1961: 29)
and, following the latter, identifies the special nature of history of philosophy as
that of “problems” [problematics]. A more careful reading of Windelband would
have made Hu reflect on the German historiographer’s intentional departure from
Hegel for the latter’s “a priori logical construction” (Windelband 1901: x). To
Windelband, Hegel’s error “arose from the wrong idea . . . that the historical
progress of philosophical thought is due solely, or at least essentially, to an ideal
necessity with which one ‘category’ pushes forward another in the dialectical
movement.” (Ibid., 11).
Without heeding this critique, Hu Shi does respond to
Windelband’s call for “an all-sided, unprejudiced investigation of the facts” (Ibid).
The German historian’s insistence on objectivity and factualism, however, leads
Hu to return to a native historical method with which he is already familiar, and
thus turning his historiography into textual criticism rather than
Problemgeschechite, and bearing witness one again to “the triumph of the
philological method”. (Krüger 1984: 88). Not knowing how to write a history of
philosophy – according to a later historiographer Lao Siguang 勞思光 (1968), and
knowing Hegel only limitedly, the two earlier authors Hu and Feng provide
disappointingly general surveys of Chinese thoughts, or according to Rorty’s
classification, versions of “intellectual history” (Rorty 1984: 69).
Part of Hu Shi’s History of Ancient Chinese Philosophy overlaps with his
doctoral thesis at Columbia University (Hu 1968 [1922]). The two texts, written
respectively in Chinese and English, were produced about the same time.
In all
fairness, the work is more a traditional doxography, coupled with philology (in
Hu’s words, textual criticism plus “higher” criticism [1968: 7]) dear to the late
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Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) exegetes. The book’s major contribution lies perhaps in
Hu’s reassessment of the school of logicians during the Pre-Qin period (before the
3rd century BCE). Hu’s reference to Hegel is only peripheral and characteristic of
popular imagology. A curious instance is his discussion of Zhuangzi’s
“evolutionism”, where the historian draws a parallel with hai-zhi-er 海智爾
(Hegel)’s concept of historical process without documentation.
The strange
pronunciation of the German philosopher’s name as [hai·zhi·er] was presumably a
borrowing from Ma Junwu’s 馬君武 (1881-1940) 1903 use in his essay, “Weixin
juzi heizhier xueshuo” 唯心巨子黑智兒學說 (The great idealist Hegel’s theory)
(Huang et al., 1991: 56-57). It is surprising that the American- educated Hu should
have followed Ma for this appellation because only a few years later in 1906 the
British-educated translator Yan Fu 嚴復 (1854-1921) was to offer a more accurate
and hereafter generally adopted transliteration of [hei-gə-er] (Huang et al, 1991:
92). Forty years later in 1958, when prefacing the revised edition (1970, 1976) of
his Hisory to be published in Taiwan, Hu still adhered to the pronunciation of
[hai-zhi-er].
Hu’s reference to Hegel is an impressionistic parallel lacking the analytic
rigour required of a philosopher and the positivistic sécurité the author insists upon
a historian. According to him, Zhuangzi’s mutable and “evolutionary” concepts of
morality and truth are “a bit like” [those of] the German Hegel.
“Hegel asserts that truth and falsehood, right and wrong in the world
follow a definite evolutionary order.
An example runs like this:
Someone said first: ‘This is A.’ and then another person said ‘This is
non-A.’ These two then engaged in a verbal fight.
Still later, a third
person said: ‘This is neither A, nor non-A, but B.’ This B would be the
quintessence of A and non-A, a combination of both.
After a
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generation, another person came out and said: ‘This is non-B.’ So
advocates of B and non-B started another flight.
Later, a person drew
on the best parts of B and non-B and announces that he has found C.
Hegel believes the evolution of thoughts is always like this.
Let me
represent this process in a diagram . . .” (Hu 1976, 2 of 2: 126).
In his 1958 preface, Hu recants his earlier remarks on evolutionism, and regrets
about his misreading Zhuangzi’s concept of mutability in terms of the “origin of
species” as well as his misuse of some apocryphal materials, especially those on
Liezi 列子 (Ibid, 2-3).
There was no mentioning of his reading of Hegel.
Feng Yulan’s History of Chinese Philosophy (1937, 1952-53, 1994), with a
popular simplified version originally published in English (1948) and later
translated into several languages, including his mother tongue, is probably the best
known historiography to the West because of its widely accessible English
translation published in Beijing, London, Princeton and Delhi over a period of
sixty years during the last century. Although both Hu and Feng studied with John
Dewey and received their doctorates from Columbia University respectively in
1917 and 1924, and after returning to China became ardent promoters, especially
Hu, of the pragmatism of Dewey and William James, no evidence shows their
access to Hegel’s lectures on the history of philosophy (Hegel [Brown ed.] 1990:
1-2). In fact, Feng’s forte remains li xue or “Neo-Confucianism” and his writings
are predominantly in that field.
Although Feng draws parallels here and there in
his History and in his doctoral thesis Comparative Studies of Life Ideals 人生理想
之比較研究(1924), his corpus shows that the author’s knowledge of Western
philosophy is fairly limited, a fact which Feng himself regrets in the concluding
chapter of his Short History (1948).
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However, armed by his translator Derk Bodde, Feng is seen making
occasional references to Hegel and using the term “dialectic” in different senses,
now in the context of Daoism, now in Buddhism.
For instance, the “medieval”
Doaist scholars Xiang Xiu 向秀 (ca. 221-300) and Guo Xiang’s 郭象 (died 312)
annotation of Zhuangzi’s remarks, “Thus, though mutually opposed, they [self and
other] at the same time are mutually indispensable” (1967: 638, 1953: 2: 211),
according to Feng, “may also be interpreted as an illustration of the [Hegelian]
dialectic” (1974: 639). The word in brackets, “Hegelian”, was not in the original,
but an addition by the translator Derk Bodde. The translator seems to be fond of a
Hegelian reading of Feng. On Chi-tsang’s 吉藏 (549-623) theory of double truth
(erh ti 二諦), Bodde annotates: “Thus, in a manner curiously reminiscent of
Hegelian dialectics, the highest level of truth is to be reached through a series of
successive negations of negation, until nothing remains to be either affirmed or
denied.” (1953, 2: 295)
Although Bodde’s reading or over-reading is open to question, he may have
followed Feng’s impressionism. Feng himself makes two explicit references to
Hegel.
The first instance is Feng’s comment on the Buddhist doctrine of jñāna
(enlightenment) which he likens to the Hegelian reconciliation of subjective spirit
with objective spirit:
This doctrine is similar to that of Hegel, according to whom, once
theoretical reason and practical reason unite, the implicit nullity of the
contrast of subject and object is at once explicitly realized.
Reason
knows that the subjective purpose is no longer subjective, and that the
objective world is but its own truth and substantiality.
It turns to itself
and is now the Speculative or Absolute Idea. (1953, 2: 383, 1967: 768).
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The most explicit use of the Hegelian dialectic is found in his interpretation of the
Laozi’s famous paradoxes in nature.
Hegel has said that the progress of history is always marked by the three
stages of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.
When from one extreme
something moves to the opposite extreme, this is the step from thesis to
antithesis. ‘What is most straight seems crooked; the greatest skill seems
like clumsiness.’ Were there merely straightness and skill alone, these
would necessarily have to change into crookedness and clumsiness.
But it is because they are of a straightness which contains
crookedness,
and of a skill which contains clumsiness, that they are
called the most
straight and the greatest skill. They are the synthesis
arising out of
thesis and antithesis.
crooked, but only
seems so, and the greatest skill is not clumsiness, but only
looks so.
Those who comprehend the Invariable, ‘know the male
yet cleave to the
female,’ and so always remain in the final position of
synthesis in which
they will not fail throughout their lifetime. (Fung 1952, 1:
Hence the most straight is not
185)
Like the previous example on Buddhist enlightenment, this passage is no less
cryptic, and one may question the relevancy between the Daoist paradox and the
Hegelian formula of meta-history.
Laozi’s message, 大直若屈大巧若拙 (“what
is most straight seems crooked; the greatest skill seems like clumsiness”) is a
metaphorical account for the relativism in human perception [of wood] and value
[skill and the lack thereof], and as such has nothing to do with the dialectic
approach to the historical process.
The two issues are irrelevant.
I have apparently made strange bedfellows out of Popper, Hu and Feng.
The
three authors all address Hegel’s “dialectic”. Popper poses his critique from the
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point of view of formal logic, from which dialectical logic reflects only benighted
mind. On the other hand, Hu and Feng accept a facile, highly reduced version of
Hegelian formula of historical process. Neither uses Hegel to account for history of
philosophy.
The cases of Hu and Feng, with their misreading and appropriation of Hegel,
witness the working of an effective-historical consciousness (Gadamer 1975). Each
embedded in his specific historicity, the historiographer inevitably refers to his
own horizon, perhaps unwittingly, before looking towards the past.
The horizon
is not just a phenomenological metaphor, but a network of systems of knowledge,
which constitutes the historiographer’s perceptual model and interpretive strategies,
and it is, above all, a discursive space that govern his reading of and writing about
past philosophy.
This explains why Hu Shi interprets Zhuangzi’s concept of mutability in
terms of a joint model of Hegelian dialectic and Darwinian evolutionism -- the
former he may have picked up randomly from philosophy on the streets, the latter
based on his own interest in Thomas Huxley, possibly his training with Dewey,
and most likely his exposure to the pervasive intellectual milieu of Darwinism in
the wake of Yan Fu’s translations of Darwin and Huxley.
That was the Hu Shi of
the 1918 when he was preparing the first draft of his Ancient History. Forty years
later, Hu recanted his early interpretation, not because he became more enlightened,
but because his horizon had changed. Were Hu around with us, he might endorse
some of the arguments of Neo-Darwinism to rewrite the history.
In this regard, Feng’s reading of materialism and mechanism into the
apocryphal Liezi (Feng 1967: 621), which is denounced by Hu, can be aptly
renovated by a Neo-Darwinian reading, as I have done elsewhere in a recent paper.
This same phenomenon of interpreter’s changing horizon also serves to explain
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Feng’s later conversion to Marxist-Leninism, at, alas! the expense of his fine
scholarship in Confucianism. His six-volume chef-d’oeuvre on Neo-Confucianism
were published in 1937-1946, but after the founding of the PRC in 1949, Feng
began to rewrite his history of philosophy, the first thing was to negate himself by
negating idealism, at the same time to embrace Marxism by adopting its dialectic
materialism.
It seems the Hegelian precept of bringing the abstract before
consciousness remains unattainable to both Hu and Feng because of the eventual
politicization that was to compromise their roles as philosophers.
On top of the
historiographers’ dialectic (in the sense of dialogue) with past philosophers, and
their negotiation of a borrowed Western discourse with an already alienated
tradition, the historiographers have to carry on a perpetual interior dialectic in the
course of their textual practice. Hu Shi and Feng Yulan can be said to have
epitomized the spirit of the age when Chinese historiography of philosophy was
born.
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NOTES
1
Huang and others (1991: 53) have identified an earlier use of zhexue shi 哲學史
(history of philosophy) in 1902.
It appeared in the journal Fanyi shijie 翻譯世界
(The world of translation), Nos. 1-4.
2
Although both Hu and Feng claim they deal with the history of philosophical
conceptions, the first Problemgeschichte in Chinese had to wait for half a century
for Lao Siguang’s 勞思光 History of Chinese Philosophy (1968, 1971, 1981).
In
addition to Hu’s reference, the reception of Windelband in China is an interesting
topic in itself; it dated back to the end of the 19th century.
For instance, shortly
after his arrival in Shanghai in 1898, Wang Guowei 王國維 is reported to have
read the Japanese translation of Windelband’s History. (Zhou ed. 1987: 120).
Liang Qichao served as a major promulgator of Western philosophy through
Japanese mediation at the turn of the century. Feng refers to the Danish
philosopher’s History of Modern Philosophy in Feng 1967: 15, and Max Nordau’s
The Interpretation of History (Ibid., 20).
3
Jia Fenzhen’s zhongguo lixue shi (A history of Chinese learning of principles)
was published in 1936, shortly after Feng Yulan’s Zhongguo zhexue shi (A history
of Chinese philosophy) (1934), with an apparent polemic trust against his
predecessors. Jia denies China has zhexue (philosophy) and kexue (science), but
has a long tradition of lixue which, in contrast to usual practice, he traces back to
the pre-Confucian past. The distinction he makes between lixue and zhexue is
rather arbitrary and loose. Whilst zhexue deals with natural phenomena, lixue
relates them to human affairs. That the first trigram of the Yijing 易經 (the book
of changes), ≣ 乾, represents heaven is a statement of zhexue, but that ≣
signifies such virtues as yuan 元(supreme good), heng 亨 (all auspices), li 利
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(righteousness), and zhen 貞 (truthfulness) belongs to the discourse of lixue (1964:
1). Elsewhere, he goes even so far as to label Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas
Hobbes as lixuejia 理學家 (thinkers of the Learning of li) regarding their
discussions of human nature (Ibid, 48).
If these are li thinkers, why can’t their
Chinese counterparts be “philosophers” (zhexuejia)?
Jia pays tribute to
Confucius’ grandson Zisi 子思 of the third-century BCE as an unmistakable
precursor of lixue, and draws a parallel and suggests further comparative studies
between Zisi’s doctrine of the mean in Zhongyong 中庸 (On the Mean) with
Aristotle’s similar doctrine (Ibid, 33-34). What Jia has in mind is no longer
restricted to the Song ontological and epistemological thinking, but may be termed
as a general “ethical philosophy”.
4
The first history of “philosophy”, bearing explicitly the expression zhexue in the
title, is authored by Xie Wuliang 謝無量（1884-1964）in 1914(?) (Xie 1932). He
adopts a rather tolerant position by negotiating the Western concept of zhexue
(“philosophy”) with Zhuangzi’s concept of daoshu 道術 (the art of way) and
those who practiced daoshu, namely, ru 儒 (Confucian scholars), as
“philosophers”. To Xie, the Learnings of Confucianist ru, Daoist dao, Song
Confucianist li, Buddhist yi 義, and Western zhe (alias sophia) have similar
conceptual substance. (1932: 1). Feng also regards daoxue, lixue, and yixue as
Chinese counterparts of zhexue.
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REFERENCES
Feng, Yulan 馮友蘭 1967 [1934]. Zhongguo zhexue shi 中國哲學史(A history of
Chinese philosophy) . Hong Kong: Wenlan tushu gongsi [book company].
Fung, Yu-lan [Feng, Yulan] 1937. A History of Chinese Philosophy. Trans. Derk
Bodde. Vol 1 Peiping [Beijing]: Henri Velch. London: Allen & Unwin.
Fung Yu-lan 1948. A Short History of Chinese Philosophy. Ed. Derk Bodde. New
York: Macmillan.
Fung, Yu-lan 1952-53. A History of Chinese Philosophy. Trans. Derk Bodde. 2
vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Fung, Yu-lan 1994. A History of Chinese Philosophy. Trans. Derk Bodde. 2 vols.
Delhi: Matilal Banarsidass Publishers.
Gadamer, Han-Georg 1975 (1960). Truth and Method. Trans. Garett Barden and
John Cumming. London: Sheed & Ward.
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