Abstract
Li Zehou is widely regarded as one of China’s most influential contemporary thinkers, and was particularly prominent during China’s period of reform and intellectual awakening during the 1980s. Li adopts a syncretic and comparative approach to Confucian and Western thought, and developed an account of a Chinese modernity that integrates three distinct philosophical influences. These are Chinese history and culture, which Li understands as largely Confucian; Marxism, particularly its historicist and materialist conceptions of social life and the mind; and Western thought more generally, as represented by figures such as Immanuel Kant and the discipline of aesthetics. Li’s theoretical framework describes the integration or harmonization of the human subject with wider cultural and environmental contexts, in a manner consistent with the traditional Confucian ideal of the unity of humanity and the cosmos. The chapter assesses whether Li offers a robust and coherent account of a modernity, in which individual freedom is balanced with the social nature of human thought and practice.
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- 1.
A detailed bibliography of Li’s work can be found in Jana Rošker (2018).
- 2.
Li finds similarities here between his and Kant’s thought. He highlights the teleology in Kant’s philosophy of history, and Kant’s neglected account of the role of sense experience and human history in social progress (Li 2018a: 349–350)—a reading of Kant that Li finds shared with some Western scholars (Wood 1999: 245–248).
- 3.
See Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” (Mao 1980).
- 4.
Marx also appeals to beauty as a practical ideal: “…[M[an knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species and knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard to the object. Man therefore also forms objects in accordance with the laws of beauty” (Marx 2007: 32).
- 5.
Compare Li’s historicist account of beauty with Marx’s insistence in final pages of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy that certain art forms are possible only during certain historical moments or social formations. “Is the conception of nature and of social relations which underlies Greek imagination and therefore Greek (art) possible when there are self-acting mules, railways, locomotives and electric telegraphs?” (Marx 2000: 128).
- 6.
An illustration of how Li’s aesthetic theory ties in with his account of Confucian thought is his claim that the sincere concern for others, compassion for the masses and the shared experience of suffering later became the criterion for evaluating Chinese artists. Li cites, for example, the depth of fellow-feeling and humanitarian concern in Du Fu’s poetry (Li 2010: 43–44).
- 7.
Li claims that Analects 7.6 conveys a similar position: “Set your intention upon the way, rely on its virtue, lean on benevolence, and wander in the arts.”
- 8.
In Li Zehou’s words, “This pleasure…is a spiritual realization and a freedom to live, in which human wisdom and virtuous behavior are sedimented and transformed into a psychological noumenon that transcends the foundation of wisdom and morality upon which it is built” (Li 2010: 52).
- 9.
A ‘culture of concern’ refers to Xu Fuguan’s categorization of classical Chinese culture as one of ‘concern consciousness’ (youhuan yishi憂患意識), which was intended to contrast with cultures characterized by guilt. For more on Xu’s thought here see (Ni 2002).
- 10.
A feature of Chinese Marxist theory was expediency. Caught up in an intense revolutionary struggle, Chinese Marxists did not have the leisure for in-depth study of classical Marxist theory that the Western intelligentsia had enjoyed; expediency demanded practical doctrines. After 1949, official orthodoxy demanded that theorists cleave to the official party line, with only a small number of Marxist-Leninist texts approved for discussion by party czars (Maurice Meisner 1985: 3). See also Brugger and Kelly (1990). On the relation of Maoist thought, Marxism, and Leninism see Benjamin Schwarz (1979) and Richard Pfeffer (1976). A recent creative attempt to once more integrate Marxist and Confucian thought is Chen Weigang 陳維綱 (2014).
- 11.
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Lambert, A. (2021). Li Zehou: Synthesizing Kongzi, Marx, and Kant. In: Elstein, D. (eds) Dao Companion to Contemporary Confucian Philosophy. Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy, vol 15. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56475-9_13
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