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to Philosophy East and West
120 Philosophy East & West Volume 49, Number 2 April 1999 120-149
? 1999 by University of Hawai'i Press
Since Li wanted to explore the problem of freedom and necessity, his choice to study
Kant was most appropriate. In Li's view, Kant faced the same challenges in his own
day that Chinese intellectuals faced in post-Mao China. On the one hand, there was
rapid scientific progress, epitomized in Kant's time by Newtonian mechanics, and in
post-Mao China by the introduction of the new physics of Einstein and Bohr,
accompanied by the post-Kantian philosophies of science of Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos,
Kant sought to resolve the dilemma between freedom and necessity by making what
we would today call a revolutionary paradigm shift. The causal view of reality,
according to Kant, does not contradict the possibility of freedom since it is actually a
construct of our own minds. It is the forms and categories of our own understanding
that synthesize the chaotic impressions received by our senses into objects. The
reason that universally valid knowledge is possible is that we all share the same
forms and categories of understanding. They are not derived from experience (a
posteriori), but are logically prior to all experience (a priori).29 But this also means,
Kant explained, that since we can only know objects insofar as our own under-
standing is able to synthesize them from sense impressions, we cannot know them
insofar as they transcend sense impressions; that is, we cannot have knowledge of
"things-in-themselves," or noumena. Now, since, from the point of view of Kant's
transcendental philosophy, the deterministic world of science is actually a construct
of our own understanding (of what Kant calls the "transcendental Ego"), the claims
of science do not exclude the possibility of freedom, so that both causality and
freedom can be saved.30
Li's Kant commentary analyzes Kant's three Critiques: the Critique of Pure Rea-
son, which deals with knowledge, the Critique of Practical Reason, which is con-
cerned with ethics, and the Critique of Judgment, which is about aesthetics and
teleology. Li's commentary on the first Critique is the longest, which is not usual
since this work is the most complicated of the three in terms of argument and tech-
nical vocabulary. However, there was also a special reason why Li wanted to pre-
sent Kant's epistemology in so much detail: in his view, one of the most tenacious
remnants of mechanistic, non-Marxist materialism in China is the doctrinaire
"mirror" theory of knowledge. Expounded in all textbooks, it states that knowledge
is the product of the reflection of objects in the mind. The mind is thus depicted as
passive, while, for Kant, the understanding is actually extremely active: it constitutes
our very picture of reality-in terms not of content but of form. This is basically also
the point of view of the new physics and the meta-theories of science formulated
by philosophers such as Popper, Kuhn, and Lakatos: the subject actively sets the
parameters within which reality is allowed to appear, by means of hypotheses,
paradigms, research programs, and so forth, which means that the mind is not a
passive mirror as suggested by Communist doctrine.31 If China wants to catch up
with the latest developments in physics, Li implied, the "mirror" theory of knowl-
edge must go.32 He regards the latter as an unfortunate product of Marx's successors
that is incompatible with Marx's own doctrine because it is mechanistic and deter-
ministic, ignoring the role of human agency.
Li's struggle with the "mirror" theory can be traced as far back as his debate on
the nature of beauty with Cai Yi in the 1950s. While Zhu Guangqian held that
All the pieces written after the 1950s that are collected in Li's Essays on the History
of Chinese Thought should be regarded as forming a sequel to the commentary on
Kant. They are not merely a collection of unrelated capita selecta from the history
of Chinese philosophy, but a coherent attempt at formulating a critical analysis of
Chinese thought based on the views set forth in the Kant commentary. On the basis
of the concept of "sedimentation," Li argued that the particular view in Chinese
thought of the relationship between humankind and nature is largely the product of a
society based on small-scale agriculture. This, in his opinion, was a major reason
why Marx has been misunderstood in China: Marx's doctrines were interpreted in
terms of ideas and concepts derived from traditional Chinese philosophy, which
views the relationship between humankind and nature in categories derived from a
feudal small-peasant society. Modern Chinese intellectuals were ill prepared to
understand Marx, who was as much an heir to, as an opponent of, the bourgeois
Enlightenment.
The bourgeois conception of the relationship between humankind and nature,
and therefore Marx's own views as well, Li pointed out, were derived from the
modern scientific worldview since Newton. This worldview is based on the insight,
based on industrial experience, that the resistance of nature to humankind's inten-
tions is massive, and that human needs can only be fulfilled if humankind confronts
nature as an opponent and seizes control over it by means of technology. Bourgeois
thought regards subject and object as being in conflict with each other, in contrast to
All major schools of Chinese thought, Li holds, contributed to the stress on egali-
tarianism and the idealization of the simple life in the rural village that characterized
the Maoist utopia. They all moved within the orbit of organicism and holism, failing
to develop the concept of humankind and nature as antagonists, which is basic to
the modern worldview. Within the boundaries of the organicist paradigm, however,
Confucianism developed a strong belief in human agency, epitomized in the doc-
Since Xunzi, according to Li, the Chinese Spirit marched increasingly away from the
antagonism between subject and object. While celebrating the potential of the moral
subject, it tended to leave the position of the object vacant. Mainstream Chinese
thought became a philosophy about a strong-willed subject that was not confronted
with any substantial material object: the infinite malleability of material reality was
taken for granted. Since, within the organicist and holistic cosmology from the Han
onward, the independent status of the material object was obliterated, there were no
longer any impediments to ascribing increasingly fantastic powers to the subject,
which enabled it to know reality purely by means of intuitive introspection and
transform the material world by moral willpower alone.
In Li's view, this trend reached its culmination in Song and Ming Neo-
Confucianism, when Confucian ethics was turned into an ontology.87 Neo-
Confucianism was holistic in nature, Li explained, since, to a greater or lesser extent,
all the Neo-Confucian thinkers fused ethics with cosmology, positing a unity
between Heaven and humankind.88 Zhang Zai ~th (1020-1077) still viewed
human nature as a duality. On the one hand, there is a part which humankind has in
common with the animals, consisting of the desires and functions connected with
the limited, particular, and sensual, and which dissolves on the person's death. On
the other hand, there is also a part which controls the passions, and which human-
kind shares with the cosmic order of Heaven and Earth. It transcends sense percep-
tion, and survives the person's death. It is this part that distinguishes us from the
animals, and which enables us to transcend our finite and sensual material existence
Wang Yangming systematized the ideas of Lu Xiangshan and held that one's
liangzhi .4n ("intuitive knowledge") embodied the original substance that human
beings had in common with Heaven, but which became obstructed by selfish
desires. One's task, therefore, should be to remove these desires in order to recover
one's original substance, and restore its unobstructed continuity with the vastness of
the cosmos.98 In this way, Li argued, the Wang School completed the transformation
Notes
1 - The most recent and, in Li's own view, most reliable edition of his collected
works has appeared in ten volumes under the title Li Zehou lunzhu ji (Col-
lected works of Li Zehou) (Taipei: Sanmin Shuju, 1996).
2 - Li's role in the debates on aesthetics of the 1950s and 1980s is analyzed in
Heinrich Geiger, Philosophische Asthetik im China des 20. Jahrhunderts: Ihre
Stellung zwischen Tradition und Moderne (Philosophical aesthetics in twen-
tieth-century China: Its position between tradition and modernity) (Frankfurt
am Main: Peter Lang, 1987). The papers issued during the 1950s debate have
been collected in Meixue wenti taolunji (Collected debates on aesthetics)
(Beijing: Zuojia Publishing House, 1957, 1959, 1964).
3 - See the Bibliographical Note below.
4 - Pipan zhexue de pipan-Kangde shuping t$-lJ U t ttlJ J (A
critique of the critical philosophy-A commentary on Kant), 2d rev. ed.
(Beijing: Renmin Chubanshe, 1979, 1984), hereafter Pipan, and Li Zehou and
Liu Zaifu, Gaobie geming alJ'i (Goodbye to revolution) (Hong Kong:
Cosmos Books, 1995).
8 - Li Zehou and Liu Gangji, Zhongguo meixue shi (History of Chinese aes-
thetics), 2 vols. (Beijing: Zhongguo Shehui Kexueyuan Chubanshe, 1987); Li
Zehou meixue lunwenji (Li Zehou's collected writings on aesthetics) (Shang-
hai: Xinhua Shudian, 1980); Huaxia meixue -Pg~ X (The aesthetics of
China) (Taipei: Shibao Wenhua, 1989); Meixue sijiang X* iJ# (Four dis-
courses on aesthetics) (Hong Kong: Sanlin, 1989). Li regards the latter two
works as philosophically more important than his well-known booklet Mei de
licheng t1jTh4 (The path of beauty) (Beijing: Wenwu, 1981). The latter has
been translated into German in Karl-Heinz Pohl and Gudrun Wacker, eds.,
Der Weg des Schonen (Freiburg: Herder, 1992). The English translation by
Gong Lizeng (Beijing: Morning Glory, 1988), while lavishly illustrated, omits
all the theoretical parts of the original text, making it useless for research
purposes. For a monograph on Li Zehou's aesthetics, see Wang Shengping,
Li Zehou meixue sixiang yanjiu (A study of Li Zehou's aesthetic thought)
(Shenyang: Liaoning Renmin Chubanshe, 1987).
12 - See David Kelly, "The Emergence of Humanism: Wang Ruoshui and the Cri-
tique of Socialist Alienation," in Merle Goldman et al., eds., China's Intellec-
tuals and the State: In Search of a New Relationship (Cambridge: Council on
East Asian Studies at Harvard University, 1987), pp. 159-182.
16 - Makesizhuyi zai Zhongguo, pp. 97, 105-106 (pp. 76, 83-84 in the
translation).
22 - Ibid., p. 242.
23 - Ibid., pp. 254-256, 272, 282; Meixue sijiang, p. 74.
24 - Pipan, pp. 388, 391, 407, 414.
25 - Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Truth and method) (TObingen:
J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1990), pp. 275, 277.
26 - Pipan, p. 362.
27 - Ibid., pp. 27-42.
28 - Ibid., p. 179.
29- Ibid., pp. 72-73.
30- Ibid., p. 128.
31 - Ibid., p. 180.
32 - Ibid., p. 174.
33 - Gaobie geming, pp. 185-186.
34 - Meixue sijiang, pp. 44-47.
35 - Li elaborates this thesis in Mei de licheng. See Jane Cauvel's discussion of this
in this issue of Philosophy East and West. See also Karl-Heinz Pohl, "Zu Bei-
tragen Li Zehous in der Debatte um Tradition und Identitat in den 80er Jahren
in der Volksrepublik China" (On Li Zehou's contributions to the debate on
tradition and identity in the 1980s in the People's Republic of China), in Ralf
43 - Zhongguo jindai sixiangshi lun, pp. 286-311. See esp. pp. 304, 306-307.
53 - Ibid., p. 22.
54 - Ibid., p. 25.
56 - Ibid., p. 27.
57- Ibid.
66 - Ibid., p. 36.
67 - Ibid.
75 - Ibid., p. 82.
81 - Ibid., p. 155.
82 - Ibid.
83 - Ibid., p. 156.
84 - Ibid.
90 - Ibid., p. 35.
91 - Ibid., p. 36.
92 - Ibid.
102 - Ibid.
103 - Ibid., p. 31. On Mao and Paulsen, see Wakeman, History and Will, pp. 201-
206. See also Stuart Schram, ed., Mao's Road to Power, vol. 1, The
Pre-Marxist Period, 1912-1920 (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1992),
pp. 175-316, for a complete English translation of Mao's marginal notes to
Paulsen's A System of Ethics.
Bibliographical Note
For Western-language analyses of Li's role within the context of the cultural debates
of the period, see Liu Kang, "Subjectivity, Marxism, and Cultural Theory in China,"
Social Text 10 (2/3) (1992): 114-140, which is also printed in Liu Kang and Xiaobin
Tang, eds., Politics, Ideology, and Literary Discourse in Modern China (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 23-55; Lin Min, "The Search for Mo-
dernity: Chinese Intellectual Discourse and Li Zehou," China Quarterly, December
of Li's reception in China and Taiwan, see Huang Kewu V,k, "Lun Li Zehou
sixiang de xin dongxiang: Jian tan jinnian lai dui Li Zehou sixiang de taolun"
i^ 4 I, $,gMA1i;fT]: ?N ii,FintteJedrc,$liBiitn (On the new direction in
Li Zehou's thought: Also on the discussions of Li Zehou's thought in recent years),
Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo jikan ji]ft Tlt fiiEfViWlt
(Taipei), no. 25 (June 1996): 427-460. A controversial and little-understood
criticism is Liu Xiaobo AIJOi, Xuanze de pipan: Yu sixiang lingxiu duihua
Agttt ' l^J , it~: (A critique of choice: A dialogue with intellectual
leaders) (Taipei: Fengyun Shidai Chuban Gongsi, 1989). This book is analyzed in
Woei Lien Chong, "The Tragic Duality of Man: Liu Xiaobo on Western Philosophy
from Kant to Sartre," in Kurt Werner Radtke and Tony Saich, eds., China's Modern-
ization: Westernization and Acculturation (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1993), pp. 111-
162.