Learning to Emulate the Wise: The Genesis of Chinese Philosophy as an Academic Discipline in Twentieth-Century China

Introduction

Chapter 8 Introduction John Makeham When I graduated [from secondary school] our head teacher, Mr. Li Denghui, asked the students in our class about their future plans. I replied, “I want to study philosophy.” He said, “Aah, so you want to be Confucius.” —Feng Youlan1 This volume is an inquiry into how “Chinese philosophy” (Zhongguo zhexue 中國哲學) became an academic discipline in China in the early decades of the twentieth century. We seek to show how Chinese philosophy was conceived and shaped in the course of its early development. Our enquiry has been driven by a range of questions, in particular: What factors influenced this process of formation and development? What was the relationship between Chinese philosophy and traditional forms of learning in China? What role did Japanese scholarship have in its genesis? What was its relationship with European and American philosophy? What impact did models of Western learning and knowledge compartmentalization have on its formation? Who contributed to its development and how? What continued agency and relevance did the past have in the present; and to what extent were new knowledge systems viewed as tools in the recovery of tradition rather than its abandonment? Each chapter in this volume addresses one or more of these issues. This volume is not a work of philosophy. It is a study in intellectual history, with a nod to the sociology of knowledge. Nor has our aim been to provide a comprehensive history of all the key figures involved in the development of Chinese philosophy as an academic discipline; rather we 2 · John Makeham have sought to include coverage of a sufficient range of representative individuals and institutions to underscore the complexity and diversity of interests involved. As editor, I have eschewed replicating approaches found in textbook-type accounts of the history of modern Chinese philosophy. I have similarly refused to impose a unilinear, teleological trajectory on the development of modern Chinese philosophy. Instead, I have drawn on the expertise of the different contributors to demonstrate the wide range of possibilities that contributed to the academic formation of zhexue 哲學 and to highlight the creativity which went into its development . In the words of one of the Press’s readers, “the different styles and emphases in various chapters exemplify the polyphony in zhexue, which, to this day, is still a discipline without a fixed identity.” This Introduction consists of two sections. The first section examines the formal processes involved in creating Chinese philosophy as an academic discipline, in order to provide a grounded historical account of how traditional categories of Chinese knowledge were “translated” into the new academic category of zhexue. The second section summarizes the volume’s ten chapters in order to give the reader an overview of the content and scope of individual chapters. An appendix to the Introduction lists subjects offered in the Peking University Philosophy Department , 1914–1923. The volume concludes with an Epilogue, “Inner Logic, Indigenous Grammars, and the Identity of Zhongguo zhexue,” in which I argue that the views of the scholars examined in this volume are not only of intellectual-historical significance but also throw into relief how “Zhongguo zhexue” is understood today. 1. Formal Processes Forty years ago, intellectual historian Joseph Levenson famously commented : “What the West has probably done to China is to change the latter’s language—what China has done to the West is to enlarge the latter’s vocabulary.”2 Levenson was referring to a process that began in the decades immediately before and after 1900, through which Western disciplinary models superseded traditional schemes of knowledge classification in China. Borrowing Levenson’s metaphor, it is well known that Chinese intellectuals introduced a new “language” or “grammar”— academic philosophy—into China soon after the turn of the twentieth century, subsequently leading to the institutional incorporation of the discipline “Chinese philosophy” (Zhongguo zhexue 中國哲學) alongside Introduction · 3 Western philosophy. This was one of many responses to an “epistemological crisis”3 in which China found itself in the closing decades of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). Western philosophy provided key conceptual paradigms , vocabulary and technical terms, bibliographic categories, and even histories and periodization schemes essential to the demarcation, definition, and narration of the discipline of Chinese philosophy. This was not, however, a simple case of the blanket inscription of Western philosophy upon a Chinese tabula rasa. Nor was the process by which Western models of knowledge categorization were introduced into China a passive one in...