Abstract
Janik’s chapter discusses an early-modern encounter between Spinozism and Neo-Confucian metaphysics. The chapter claims that early-modern atheism played the role of medium between these two philosophical discourses. The Jesuit sources discussed here show that the monist interpretations of Neo-Confucian philosophy and denunciation of atheism which have been attributed to Chinese authors and scholars prepared solid ground for the later linking of Chinese thought with Spinozism by such authors as Pierre Bayle or Nicolas Malebranche. Simultaneously, the interpretations of Spinozism as a doctrine analogous or similar to some of the intellectual currents encountered by the Jesuit missionaries in China served the polemical purpose of relocating Spinozism outside the corpus of European philosophical tradition.
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Notes
- 1.
In the following article I am using the French translation of this work which appeared in 1617 (Trigault and Ricci 1617).
- 2.
The situation had changed after the Manchu conquest of China, after which the Jesuits found themselves in a new situation—much closer to the Imperial court and thus less dependent from the support of the Confucian scholars and officials. For later generations of missionaries, like Joachim Bouvet, the four books consisting Confucian teachings were much less interesting than the Yi Jing which was supposed to contain the traces of the primitive religion from the times preceding the Biblical Deluge (see Mungello 1989, 300–28).
- 3.
We find the same Neo-Confucian notions in the anti-Spinozist text (Entretien d’un philosophe chrétien et d’un philosophe chinois, sur l’existence et la nature de Dieu) written in 1707 by Nicolas Malebranche in which “The Chinese philosopher”, styled on Zhu Xi, is presenting the main features of Spinoza’s metaphysics (see Malebranche 1708).
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Science Centre in Poland [Grant number: UMO-2019/31/D/HS1/00864].
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Janik, M. (2020). Early Modern European Atheism with Chinese Characteristics: First Jesuit Descriptions of Neo-Confucianism and Their Spinozist Reception. In: Wróbel, S., Skonieczny, K. (eds) Atheism Revisited. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34368-2_3
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