【Editor's Note】
Zhang Ronghua, a professor of history at Fudan University, passed away in February 2023. Professor Zhang Ronghua's research expertise is the history of Chinese historiography and modern Chinese academic history, and because of his profound insights, the preservation of his works except for a small number of published texts is a common concern of academic colleagues. Recently, a number of manuscripts of Professor Zhang Ronghua's relics stored in the library of the Department of History of Fudan University were discovered and selected, and with the authorization of his family, The Paper (www.thepaper.cn) will publish these texts for the first time. This article is one of the unpublished posthumous works and was read by Zhao Lidong, an associate researcher at the Institute of Modern History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Guide (Zhao Lidong)
"The Spiritual Turn of Wang Guowei" is a teacher Zhang Ronghua who uses some materials in "Wang Guowei Academic Essays" to discuss the transformation of Wang Guowei's thought and scholarship after the Xinhai Revolution. Although it is an article from more than twenty years ago, it is still an enlightening and fascinating read.
Most of the existing research on Wang Guowei either studies the early thought and its literary criticism, or studies the late scholarship, and most of them are specialized studies, and rarely discuss the transformation of Wang Guowei's thought and scholarship and the internal relationship between its scholarship and thought, that is, a comprehensive study of the "life affairs" (Chen Yinke) of Wang Guowei, which is "quite incomprehensible". Teacher Zhang started by deleting the passages deeply influenced by Kant and Schopenhauer when Wang Guowei republished "Human Words" after the Xinhai Revolution, and proposed that Wang Guowei did not talk about the study of Western philosophical theory and abandoned the article on the exposition of Chinese tradition in his early years, but in fact, Wang Guowei realized the teleological tone of Kant, Schopenhauer and other Western philosophical thoughts, and realized that it was difficult to accommodate the two cultures of middle school and Western studies, and the reality was that Western studies and Western politics entered China by force, "Xiaoya was wasted", so that Wang Guowei had "the sorrow of the end of the Tao, and the fear of the collapse of the sky". It is their responsibility to preserve Chinese scholarship, and thus turn to the study of ancient history. Therefore, in Mr. Zhang's view, Chen Guowei's views on learning without Chinese and Western and academic independence may not be in line with Wang Guowei's own spiritual history.
Teacher Zhang's expositions are refreshing and refreshing, but there may be too deep a quest, such as the invocation and rejection of Western philosophical theories such as Kant, and the transformation of the relationship between Chinese and Western scholarship, if it is linked to the agitation and differentiation of the academic circles in the late Qing Dynasty, perhaps the interpretation will be more specific and subtle.
To this, Mr. Zhang's "deep taste in Mr. Yu's book, the connection between theology and reason", "the person who can think of seeing Mr. and the world of Mr. However, the study of intellectual history should be "theological" with the research object, and researchers will also invest their thoughts on the research object, and in this regard, "The Spiritual Turn of Wang Guowei" can also be regarded as the history of Teacher Zhang's heart.
Wang Guowei's spiritual turn
Zhang Ronghua
In November 1911, Wang Guowei and his family traveled east to Japan and began a five-year sojourn career. He confessed that this period was "the simplest in life, but the learning was very changeable". For the abrupt change in Wang Guowei's academic research in the early years of the Republic of China, researchers have so far lacked a convincing explanation for the ideological motivation behind his academic change and the spiritual turmoil caused by the re-weighing of the relationship between Chinese and Western scholarship. The various treatises that have been published are either based on the previous narrative and deduced, or according to the sad words of posterity; Among them, it is inevitable that the disadvantages of overhead diaphragms are not without the suspicion of confidants. It must be noted that Wang Guowei's spiritual movement in the early Min Dynasty not only directly restricted the approach and scale of his later scholarship, but also the key to understanding his life's pursuit and contribution, and even observing the style of the late Qing and early Minchu scholars. The reason why the existing research is unsustainable, in addition to the fact that Wang himself is deeply hidden, the characteristics of "simple and silent" are also related to the lack of complete understanding of his writings in Dongying. The three kinds of early Wang scholarly journals recently discovered and edited by Comrade Zhao Lidong of the Institute of Modern History of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences are undoubtedly extremely valuable materials for advancing research, and they open a window for us to visit directly.
The three types of notes, entitled "Miscellaneous Notes of Dongshan", "Records of Ermuxuan" and "Records of Reading Ancient Manga", with a total of 181 words and 150,000 characters, were written at the invitation of the manager of Japan's "Shengjing Times" and published in the newspaper day by day, starting from July 12, 1912 to November 28, 1915, and returning to China shortly thereafter. The contents of these diaries, which are a collection of old texts and new works, are elaborate on etiquette, architecture, customs, science and technology, religion, historical records, art and literature, clothing, weight, artifacts, characters, etc., and the content is arranged in chronological order, from the pre-Qin to the Qing dynasty, implicitly reflecting the intention to explore the history of Chinese civilization. This is very important for understanding the academic ambitions and aspirations of Wang Guowei. Before understanding the significance of this exploration, it is necessary to examine the deletion of old works in his diary, and I think Wang Guowei is expressing the spiritual turn behind his learning through this roundabout metaphorical way.
Let's give two famous articles as examples. One is the 64 articles of the "Human Words" originally published in the "Journal of National Essence" at the end of 1908 and the beginning of the following year. Professor Yip Jiaying has carefully analyzed the internal systematization of this article in Wang Guowei and His Literary Criticism, revealing that the first nine constitute the basic principles of critical theory, and the rest are the play on these norms. However, when he rewrote the introduction to the Japanese in his diary, half of it was gone. In addition to the deletion of Nietzsche's words and the belief that the main word implies Christ's bearing on human sin, it is worth noting that he omitted four of the first nine that constitute the theoretical program. These four contents mainly divide people's feelings into "self-possessed realms" and "selfless realms" according to the relationship between things and themselves, and reveal that the two different realms produce two different kinds of beauty: beautiful and magnificent. The conceptual term of the kingdom's division of the two realms and beauty was originally derived directly from the aesthetic theories of Kant and Schopenhauer, especially Kant's statement on the distinction between the nature of aesthetic judgment. Later generations have no worries about the analysis of these terms of Wang, but his own deletion undoubtedly reminds us to re-examine the development process of his aesthetics and outlook on life.
Another article, written in February 1911, is particularly famous and is the first choice for researchers to demonstrate the maturity of Wang Guowei's academic thought. At the end of 1914, Wang Guowei republished the second preface of the "Chinese Studies Series", arguing that "the two prefaces before and after, describing the academic changes and the rise and fall of the matter, are profound, and the latter order is especially windy and rainy, and the rooster is crowing, which is beyond the reach of modern literati." Scholars can read it and observe the changes in the world. However, the content published under this small introduction, except for the post-order, still retains the original appearance, and the well-known preface is not a word, and replaced by a short preface of the same name that he wrote in cursive characters, the content is to refute the two arguments of scholars that "ancient things are difficult to do in the past" and "ancient scholarship will be eliminated", and lists a series of counter-evidence, leading to the conclusion that "the current Sven has not fallen, and the revival of ancient learning". The focus of this preface has focused on ancient studies, which is not consistent with the wonderful thesis that "learning without ancient and modern China and the West", but echoes the post-preface he wrote after entering the Republic of China.
In the diary, examples like those mentioned above also reflect that the changes in Wang Guowei's governance during this period were indeed fundamental. Luo Zhenyu once said that when he stayed in the east, the Wang clan was advised by him to burn all the "Jing'an Anthology" of Xingji. This statement is regarded by many as a false statement with ulterior motives, and it is not impossible for Wang to take such a decisive attitude towards his earlier works in the case of the deletion of old works in his diary, and the question is what was the ideological motivation for these actions. Luo Zhenyu's ornaments and the current explanations of relevant treatises are obviously not comfortable. The two examples mentioned earlier from Wang's Notebook are because these two examples can become the focus of our exploration of the evolution of Wang's academic spirit, and they bring out a series of sharp questions that cannot be avoided: What is Wang Guowei's introspection on his research methods implemented in "Dream of Red Mansions Review" to "Human Words"? Does his departure from Kant and Schopenhauer indicate that he has added a trade-off or a layer of worry about the Western theory itself that he once absorbed? In what ways does the change in his approach to learning respond to the circumstances of the times? Or does he have new thoughts on the proposition of academic independence? Wait a minute. Obviously, these problems can be classified into two basic issues, namely, the relationship between Chinese and Western academia and the relationship between academia and politics. Starting from these problems, we can truly feel that the basic issues that have attracted the attention and thinking of today's intellectual circles, such as the universality of intellectual principles, the integration or conflict between Chinese and Western scholarship and civilization, and the issue of human nature and truth standards, are actually old theories and new words, and they have been reflected in Wang Guowei's writing. His reaction should not be seen as a mere "private event," but rather as a matter of how these questions stimulated and haunted the minds of the sharpened and intellectually conscious scholars of that era, just as they haunted the minds of contemporary philosophers.
Wang Guowei's acceptance of the teachings of Kant and Schopenhauer is not only related to his deeds to the meaning of life, but also closely related to his view of education. In the articles "On the Purpose of Education", "The Education of Literature", and "Small Words on Education" written in the early stage, he emphasized that the purpose of education is to shape human nature and conduct with both knowledge and will, that is, to create a true, good, and beautiful personality, and pedagogy and philosophy are in common in this basic purpose and ideal. Through a series of discourses on sexuality, interpretation, and original life, he said that it was impossible to find the personality theory that gave meaning to life in the ancient doctrines, and gladly adopted the teachings of Kant and Schopenhauer as the main basis and criterion of personality theory. This point is the key to understanding the relevant discourse in the early period of the Kingdom Dimension. The distinctive feature of Kant's doctrine of personality is that it highlights that the cultivation of personality depends on a unified and absolute form, that is, obedience to a transcendent and eternal set of intellectual categories and moral laws; The ideas of personality that develop from these categories of metaphysical subjectivity that transcend empirical sensation are clearly universal and perfect. Schopenhauer's theory of personality is a derivation of Kant's view, but with more emphasis on the anti-utilitarian criterion as the basis for measuring personality. The influence of their arguments on Wang Guowei is manifold, in his view, the prerequisite for creating an ideal personality lies in being able to comprehend the transcendent intellectual category and moral law of objectivity in "intuition", and the intuitive premise is to enter from the "desire me" to the "knowing me", so that the real self becomes a mirror that reflects the object category, that is, the "subject of pure knowledge", reaching the supreme "selfless state": no self can be intuitive. The reason why Wang Weipin's poetry commentary goes against the tradition of the ancients of "poetry and speech" is mainly because this "poet" personality theory is at work. As for his judgment of poetry according to the personality concept of universal perfection of the German philosopher, there are many examples of the ancients.
However, after Xinhai, Wang Guowei, who had a lot of understanding of the subtleties of Western human nature, replaced his speech with silence, telling Japanese scholars that he did not understand Western philosophy, and even never mentioned that he knew foreign languages. This change is also evident in relation to personality, and in his early writings there is much of the Western philosopher's method of seeing the general from the particular, favoring a particular specific case as a universal object, which is manifested in Kant's concept of universal and complete personality as the criterion for measuring characters. For example, he praised Qu Yuan, Tao Qian, Du Fu, and Su Shi for having a noble personality of eternity, and praised the context of the Southern Tang and Li Houlord for breaking through the limitations of lamenting personal life and reflecting a universal concept of life; He criticized the flaw of Yuanren miscellaneous dramas for "not knowing what the depiction of personality is", while Guan Yu in "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", Lu Zhishen in "Water Margin", and Liu Jingting in "Peach Blossom Fan" "have personality", because the motives of these characters' actions meet the anti-utilitarian personality standards of transcendent interests that he exemplified. A basic conclusion he draws from this is that "Kant's practical reason is the foundation of life in the universe." These research methods and insights were ignored by him after the Republic of China, and not only did the evaluation of Yuanren opera differ from the previous discussions, but the critical concepts and definitions derived from the philosophy of Kant's dualism in "Human Words", such as the difference between "objective poet" and "subjective poet" in rule 17, and the importance of looking at life in the universe in the inside and outside in the 60th article, were all eliminated by him in his diary.
For the performance of abandoning the path in the early stage, Wang Guowei himself has not made any confession, and today's people mostly start from his personal temperament and the changes of the times, but if you cut in from the changes in his personality theory, you can gain a deeper understanding. In this regard, it is first worth pursuing what kind of viewpoint Wang Wei used as the criterion for discussing human balance after abandoning Western personality theory. The answer to this question can be found in his later writings: through the use of Mencius's poetic method, he emphasized that "the world knows his people" and evaluated that a personality must "follow its top and bottom, and observe it from the side", which is called "taking the world as a tool for going against the will". It shows that the key to understanding and appreciating the superiority of personality lies in the specific historical environment in which the character is located, that is, the formation and characteristics of personality are regarded as the product of various institutions and cultures of society. His assessment of Zhao Mengfu, Qian Qianyi, Zhang Xun, Miao Quansun and others clearly reflects this shift. The direction of this shift is to reveal that the ideals and composition of personality are defined differently depending on the historical environment, and therefore there is no essential and perfect form. This is precisely contrary to the view of Kant and Schopenhauer that there is a unified absolute form of personality cultivation. In particular, it is important to note that there is an intrinsic teleological tone in the theory of personality of Kant and others, which describes the relationship between the rest of the world and the way in which modern European culture nurtures personality as being subordinate to an evolutionary process from the lower to the highest form. However, the tendency shown in Wang Guowei's early discussions, that is, the habit of expounding universal meaning from specific and special personnel, is actually difficult to avoid slipping into the above tone. Wang Guowei was clearly aware of this in the early years of the People's Republic of China, and without seeing this, it is difficult to truly understand his move to completely reject the text that appropriated the concept of Western philosophy to change the traditional criticism. This situation further involves a major question: how to understand the relationship between Chinese and Western academic cultures? Judging from Wang Guowei's action in publishing the well-known preface, he has doubted the optimistic views in the preface that "learning without China and the West" and "both Chinese and Western learning flourish and decline is declining", and realized that the incompatibility between the two academic and cultural cultures does not necessarily form an ideal situation of harmonious coexistence between them. In particular, after Western studies entered strongly, it interrupted the continuity of "from three generations to the modern world". Therefore, in his 1914 preface to the same name, he emphasized that "it is not the endless sorrow of the Tao, but the fear of the collapse of the sky", "after the birth of the world without vain, after the destruction of Xiaoya, it is the responsibility of academic survival". There is a clear difference between the argument and the previous order. Commentators either exaggerate the premise instead of the after, or say that the post-order reflects the regression of Wang's academic thought, and inevitably use preconceived ideas as praise and disparagement, adding to the gap theory. Wang Guowei, as an outstanding scholar who was able to learn and understand the subtle things in the late Qing Dynasty and early People's Dynasty, has a deep understanding and research of both academic and cultural cultures, and when he experiences the difficulties between different academic cultures, and witnesses the scene of trade-offs in the real environment, the conflict and collision in his heart are indescribable. Therefore, in addition to making a decisive move to publish old works, he adopted a silent attitude, which was similar to the mentality of Chen Yinke when he later wrote "Four Voices and Three Questions".
Kingdom Dimension
What makes Wang Guowei feel even more sad is realpolitik. The main feature of his later scholarship is that it is implicitly or explicitly closely related to politics, and it is not relevant to emphasize that he advocates academic independence and autonomy to lay the foundation for modern academic development. In fact, the origin of this characteristic can also be inferred from the evolution of personality theory. Since he recognized that personality or human character belongs to a particular historical creation, and its formation depends on a series of specific institutions and circumstances, then, in addition to academia, political institutions and social circumstances also constitute the conditions for the promotion of personality, which play a different role than academia and are in a state of correlation that affects each other. From this point of view, it seems that just saying that he advocated the independence of academia over politics does not seem to reveal the characteristics of his later thought. This does not mean that scholarship in Wang Guowei, lacking transcendent autonomy, is subordinate to political logic, or reduced to an instrument of external political principles or will, but rather that generalizations about the relationship between the two are useless. What needs to be done is to look at the context of historical development at that time, to explore what situations or contingencies contributed to the radiation and penetration of politics into his academic thought, and how the consciousness of the problems marked by his academic research was related to realpolitik. The former question reveals the main reason for the change in Wang Guowei's learning, and from the latter question, we can understand the spiritual tendency behind his ancient historical research.
Wang Guowei's scholarship has undergone drastic changes in a short period of time, and the change of the external environment is an important reason that must be emphasized, that is, the political event of the Xinhai Revolution directly promoted the transformation of Wang Guowei's academic spirit, and provided an opportunity for the collision and convergence of academia and politics in his thought. He was not hostile to the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty by the Xinhai Revolution, and the so-called "winning Russia seems to be a collapse, and Liang's death has been called fish rotten since ancient times", and the fall of the Qing Dynasty was self-inflicted, showing that his pessimistic view of Chinese politics did not come from the narrow concept of dynasty that left old and lonely courtiers, as he explained in his letter to Japanese scholars about the creation of the Summer Palace: "This word has a little bit of the end of the surname Jue Luo, and as for the fate of the whole people, there is more sad than the cause of the disease and the consequences obtained." What makes Wang Guowei sad is that the Western-style political system built on the ruins of dynastic politics is not suitable for Chinese society. He later discussed in more detail the shortcomings and harms caused by Western politics in "On Political Studies". In search of a cure for the crisis of realpolitik, he looked to history, and the political life of the Zhou Dynasty became a source for him to draw inspiration from tradition and conceive ideal politics. The famous "Yin Zhou System Theory" can also be said to be the product of this preconception. Attention and thinking about politics has become an important content of Wang Guowei's later academic thought, but this kind of attention and thinking is not to use academic research to promote political positions, and it is even different from the academic riffraff who stares at power and money to figure out current affairs, Wang Guowei stands on the position of strictly adhering to the way of learning, throws the spirit of wisdom into the past, tries to save the politics corrupted by realpolitik, and provides new thinking for China's political development. Therefore, in his writing, the word "politics" also has a new meaning and ideal color, which is reflected in his view of politics as a public thing of the state and an important way for members of society to practice morally. Wang Guowei looked for examples of ideal politics from ancient history in order to eliminate the legitimacy of modern China's transplantation of Western politics, and the basic reason he put forward was that different political characteristics correspond to the lifestyles and behaviors of specific social groups, and that for a country's political system to have rationality and vitality, it must conform to its "national identity, thousands of years of history and all the surrounding circumstances", that is, it must have a civilized soil suitable for its growth. Therefore, when Wang Wei observed the situation and realized that the Xinhai Revolution had opened a new political era, he immediately turned to the exploration of ancient civilizations, a change that was obviously governed by the above ideological purposes. A striking feature of the content of his diaries is that he constantly adopts a perspective from the present to ancient times, not only noticing the variability of Chinese civilizational traditions in time and space, but also paying particular attention to revealing its continuity in real society. This characteristic is no accident. These explorations of Wang Guowei need to be elaborated in a separate article.
In the diary, Wang Guowei transcribed an elegant "Records of the Wandering People on the Sea" by Li Xianyan, which must have caused the inner resonance of Wang Guowei, who lived in Dongying. In fact, after Wang Guowei experienced a spiritual turn in the early years of the Republic of China, he has become a wanderer in a double sense. The Western studies that once fascinated him have become a kind of non-self, as if facing the scenery of the Rhine River and feeling that he is just a tourist flower. After a deep understanding of both Chinese and Western scholarship, he realized the incompatibility between them, and his inner feelings and agitations are indescribable. And when Liang Qichao and Zhang Shizhao flirted freely between the two cultures, Wang Guowei was destined to turn his back. On the other hand, for the new era of Western Emperor coming to China, Wang Guowei felt strongly that he had become a wandering person whose "life was drifting". In this regard, the "wandering soul" marked by today's people can be said to have a origin. This is the fateful path of Wang Guowei, and why not the fateful path of Chinese academia!