This article discusses the temporalization of space central to the mainstream discourse of European modernity: a discourse which hierarchized all cultural spaces into a temporal narrative enabling Europe’s self-portrayal as the emancipatory future of humanity. This discourse created a gap between the perceived particularism of non-European cultures (seen as traditional) and the universalism of a modernity associated with the contemporary cultures of Europe and North America, while portraying modernization as a passage from the former to the latter. Chinese intellectuals who (...) adopted this metanarrative therefore faced the following challenge: how can Chinese particularism be adapted to a culture of modernity regarded as universal? While May Fourth iconoclasts answered this question by simply rejecting the idea that an accommodation between Chinese particularism and modern universalism was possible, other intellectuals attempted to argue that at least some aspects of Chinese culture could still be of value within the context of modern universalism. This article discusses an interesting instance of such an attempt at negotiating the perceived tension between the modern discourse of universalism and the particularism of Chinese culture, as provided by Liang Shuming in Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies. This work attempted to show that Chinese culture could still be of value within the context of modernity by providing a new metanarrative which peripherized the role of Western culture in the process of modernization. This article suggests, however, that by adopting a portrayal of modernization as a passage from particularism to universalism, Chinese culture could be reauthorized, within Liang’s metanarrative, only at the cost of being de-complexified, homogenized, and de-historicized; only at the cost of being no longer Chinese. (shrink)

This article discusses how Liang Shuming’s Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies adopted a genealogical mode of textual authorization which took shape in its depiction of Chinese history as a failure to live up to an ideal way of life imagined by Confucius. Implied in this discourse was the idea that Liang himself had been the first Confucian to understand what Confucius had truly meant. This genealogical discourse authorizing Liang and his text by linking them directly to Confucius was (...) further strengthened by a rhetoric which naturalized the discourse passed down from Confucius to Liang, distinguishing it from other forms of discourse seen as artificial. Finally, the text’s genealogical discourse also managed to incorporate the May Fourth critique of Confucianism by rejecting the historical manifestations of Confucianism before salvaging an ideal imagined by Confucius which was presented as uncontaminated by history and Confucianism’s enmeshment with state power. (shrink)

Within the long tradition of debating the role of tradition in modernity that has been central to the Western and Chinese experiences of modernity, I believe three possible attitudes toward the relation between modernity and tradition can be distinguished. The first regards them as essentially antithetical. Modernity is basically construed, from this first perspective, as a process of emancipation from a tradition perceived as limiting the human potential for liberty. The Enlightenment thinkers have generally been associated with this approach, which (...) I will call "anti-traditionalist."The second attitude offers a reversed image of the first. Modernity and tradition retain an essentially antithetical relation, but... (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article argues that Anglophone works on Chinese democracy have tended to build their analyses on assumptions that tradition is either a premodern phenomenon unrelated to China’s democratization process, a hindrance that should be gotten rid of if China is to democratize, a static phenomenon that cannot but appear antiquated with regard to a dynamic, fast-paced modern China, or an object from which modern agents can freely draw. In order to challenge these assumptions, this article suggests that modernity and democracy (...) were translated into a Chinese milieu already ripe with Gadamerian prejudices: prejudices that not only modified the meaning of modernity and democracy, but also provided the very conditions without which modernity and democracy would not have been meaningful or understood at all. Max Ko-wu Huang’s work can contribute to our understanding of the role played by various traditions in the process of translating democracy during the transitional period of modern Chin... (shrink)

This article situates Xiong Shili’s 熊十力 classic work New Treatise on the Uniqueness of Consciousness within the central dilemma of post-May Fourth China surrounding the concerns with so-called modern universalism and Chinese particularism. I look at the way the text portrays its author as situated both within particular traditions and outside of them in order to show how the figure of the author is presented as a site wherein Chinese/Asian particularism and universalism can be fused. My central aim, in doing (...) so, is to argue that within the text’s discourse on the positioning of its author resides an implicit argument for the universality of Chinese or Asian philosophy—as interpreted and subsumed by the text—and against the hegemonic intentions of Western philosophy. Yet I also suggest that the text reiterates a conception of universality and an intention to monopolize the universal which are characteristic of hegemonic discourses. (shrink)

This article adopts Ernesto Laclau’s notion of empty signifier to discuss Tang Junyi’s uses of the concept oflixing(‘reason’ or ‘rationality’) in his seminal workCultural Consciousness and Moral Reason(文化意識與道德理性; 1958). My dual goal, in doing so, is to bring to light the relations of power constitutive of the text’s discourse onlixingand relate them to the problematic of writing philosophy from the periphery. I argue that in this work,lixing’s dual referents—as a translation of ‘reason’ and as denoting a Neo-Confucian faculty to intuit (...) moral truths—allow Tang to inscribe himself in a philosophical field designed to exclude non-Western philosophies, while at the same time enabling him to symbolically relegate Euro-American philosophy to a peripheral position by filling in the notion oflixingwith a content that legitimizes his own agenda. Tang could thus authorize his Confucian metaphysics by presenting it as the true content oflixing, understood not only as a universal faculty enabling humanity’s access to all that is universal, but also as a condition sine qua non of for one’s inclusion in the philosophical game. By attempting to co-opt the empty signifier (lixing/reason) for his own purposes, I argue Tang employs one of two possible strategies that can be adopted by those situated at the periphery in order to oppose the hegemon; one that leaves the structure of power relations intact but working in favor of the periphery. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

The aim of this volume is to provide an exhaustive and updated analysis and discussion of the philosophy of Liang Shuming 梁漱溟 (1893–1988), one of the most contested figures of modern Chinese intellectual history. For the last 100 years, his thought has been interpreted in such contrasting and contradictory ways—as Buddhist, Confucian, and Marxist, as conservative and modernist—that it seems at times difficult to grasp who the “real” Liang was. Confronted with the many faces of the man and his thought, (...) researchers can either attempt to discern the one identity that ties them all together or allow for the multifaceted nature of his thought to remain open and focus on the diversity and tensions inherent in it. The present volume opts for the latter option. (shrink)

This chapter provides a short history of the reception of Liang Shuming’s thought in European-language scholarship since 1922. By reviewing a significant number of monographs, edited volumes, and articles published in academic and missionary journals in English, French, and German during the last one hundred years, the chapter aims to provide a historical typology of the multifaceted reception of Liang’s thought through time. In the scholarship reviewed, Liang is variously portrayed as a philosopher, a social reformer or activist, a religious (...) thinker, an educator, a legal thinker, and a political figure. Throughout the years, Liang has been described as a conservative, a restorationist, a fundamentalist, and a modern thinker, and has been labeled a Confucian, a Buddhist, and a populist. The many faces of Liang Shuming laid bare by this short history are revealing of the complexity and tensions of the man and his thought, but also of the interpreters’ gaze and the historical evolution of the academic field in the Euro-American region. The end result is a genealogy of sort—one that challenges some deep-seated assumptions about Liang by tracing them back to a particular and contingent historical moment and by situating them within a broad spectrum of alternative positions vying for attention in the small but diverse discursive space allotted to the thought of Liang Shuming in European-language scholarship. (shrink)