Abstract
The article explores Jiang Menglin’s philosophy of life and his notion of rensheng guan (“view on life”) in the period between his studies in the USA and the year of the May Fourth events in 1919. In the first part, the paper traces the origins of Jiang’s idea back to the then-prevalent version of pragmatism propagated by John Dewey and other pragmatist thinkers gathered at Columbia University, while in the subsequent parts it aims to illuminate the later developments of Jiang’s own version of pragmatism in the context of the May Fourth intellectual discourse. While the article aims at presenting a positive outline of Jiang’s philosophy, it also endeavours to expose its less explicit aspects through its apophatic (exposition by negation or denial) expositions in Jiang’s writings from the period. Finally, it focuses on Jiang’s contributions to the debate on suicide that developed after Lin Deyang’s suicide in November 1919.
Highlights
By the mid-1920s the term rensheng guan 人生觀 (“view on life, life-view”) came to represent one of the defining ideas underpinning the major dilemmas of contemporary intellectual debates
Ern philosophy related to the physical sciences. It was probably pragmatism’s seemingly human life–centred notion of objectiveness, especially in the work of John Dewey, that convinced Jiang of this philosophy’s highest relevance for both his education in the West and his future work in China; throughout his studies in the USA, Jiang always sought to link Western thought to Chinese thought. Another important aspect of Dewey’s pragmatism, which was highly relevant for the contemporary Chinese intellectual climate, was his non-dualistic approach towards human nature and experience, built on his interpretation of Darwinian evolution
As a student of the pragmatist philosophy of education at Columbia, Jiang deeply immersed himself in the pragmatist worldview
Summary
By the mid-1920s the term rensheng guan 人生觀 (“view on life, life-view”) came to represent one of the defining ideas underpinning the major dilemmas of contemporary intellectual debates. The evolution of such a “philosophy of life”, which came to life in the process of the Sinicization of the Western philosophical current of vitalism, cannot be confused with the genuinely Chinese “philosophy of life” (shengming zhexue 生命哲學) developed by several proponents of the neo-conservative revival of Chinese ideational tradition, for instance, Fang Dongmei 方東美 (1899–1977) This stream of the Chinese philosophy of life cannot be confused with the philosophical movement that spread in Germany in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries known as Lebensphilsophie ( referred to as German vitalist philosophy), even though the two discourses share some commonalities, such as a critique of purely materialist and mechanistic approaches to human existence and thought. In the last, central part of this paper I will discuss Jiang’s contribution to the 1919 debate on suicide, casting some light on his notion of life through a negative, apophatic perspective
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