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Modern China

The word came from Japan. In the 1870s Nishi Amane coined tetsugaku for Western philosophy, and at the end of the nineteenth century Chinese took it over as zhexue. Already in the seventeenth century, Chinese scholars working with the Jesuits had matched the Latin philosophia with lixue, the Learning of Pattern. With the new universities came the first histories of Chinese philosophy under the new name: Hu Shi’s in 1919 and Feng Youlan’s in 1931–34. Hu Shi defined the subject: “any learning that studies the vital problems of human life, thinks from the root, and seeks a fundamental solution is called philosophy”. Feng stated his method plainly: to select, from the kinds of learning in Chinese history, those that could be named by what the West calls philosophy.

The logician Jin Yuelin, reviewing Feng’s history, asked what such a book is: “Is the so-called history of Chinese philosophy a history of Chinese philosophy, or a history of philosophy in China?” One can treat Chinese philosophy as “a special kind of learning within China’s national learning”, or as “philosophy discovered in China”. Both Feng’s book and Hu Shi’s, he judged, took the second road; reading Hu Shi’s, one sometimes feels “its author is an American studying Chinese thought”. The historian’s difficulty, he wrote, is thought that “has the substance of philosophy without its form, or the form without the substance”.

Feng gave his own answer in A Short History of Chinese Philosophy (1948). “What I call philosophy is systematic, reflective thinking on life.” Its task, in a phrase from the Zhuangzi’s “Tianxia” chapter, is to enable a person to develop “sageliness within and kingliness without”; “philosophy is not simply something to be known, but is also something to be experienced”, and its function “is not the increase of positive knowledge of matters of fact, but the elevation of the mind”. The Chinese philosophers wrote in “aphorisms, apothegms, or allusions”, and what they lack in articulateness “is compensated for … by their suggestiveness”.

On New Year’s Day 1958 four New Confucians, Mou Zongsan, Xu Fuguan, Zhang Junmai and Tang Junyi, published a manifesto to the world on Chinese culture. In China, it says, philosophy, science, religion, politics, law and ethics shared one cultural source, and “there was no view that an individual’s philosophical speculation could form a world of its own, still less that a philosopher must build a system of thought by himself and set it out wholly in written works”. So Chinese philosophical works aim at few and essential words, are “careless of fixing definitions and building arguments”, and cannot be understood apart from the philosopher’s “whole personality and whole life”. The learning of heart-mind and nature “is precisely the core of Chinese scholarly thought”. Studied without sympathy and respect, Chinese history and culture become “like dead fossils”.

At the turn of the century Zheng Jiadong reopened Jin Yuelin’s question as the “legitimacy” of Chinese philosophy. His first statement of it, in 1999, was titled “‘Chinese philosophy’ and ‘philosophy in China’”. His target was the method of interpretation since Hu Shi: the measuring of the Chinese past by the Western discipline. Derrida’s remark in China in 2001, “China has no philosophy, only thought”, was taken up in the same debate.