On November 3, 2021, Purple Qi came from the east, greeted the morning light to go to work, when I drove just past Tiananmen Square, I received the bad news of Mr. Li Zehou's death, and at that time, I was already in tears, choking up and speechless... Although it has long been known that this day will come, when it comes, it seems so abrupt and unacceptable.
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Originally, I would contact Mr. Li every day, send a short message, share various social insights, that is, this week was busy with family affairs and neglected contact, and I did not expect Mr. Li to pass away. Last week, I was still laughing about what I had seen in the academic circles, and I also shared a piece of my personal good news, Teacher Li expressed his heartfelt congratulations, and he was grateful to get the blessing, and our address book was frozen there.
The most coincidental thing is that when Mr. Li returned to China for the last time in 2017, we also visited Tiananmen Square together, and the place where I got the news was exactly where Mr. Li gave me a short article that year. It was a day on October 16th, according to Mr. Li's proposal the day before, the two of us got up early to swim together in Beihai Park, talking and taking photos along the way, and Mr. Li was very interested. After swimming in the North Sea, Mr. Li suddenly said to go around Tiananmen Square again, and after not going for many years, we took advantage of the fun.
Li Zehou in Beihai, 2017
When I was driving into the square less than Nanchizi, Mr. Li suddenly took out a copy of the newspaper from his pocket and handed it to me, saying that it was an interview with him, which was a forward look at the development of contemporary China. Although Mr. Li lives overseas, he has always been concerned about the motherland and has always been optimistic about China's future.
On that day, we also went to the "Lao Chuan Office" for a light meal, and Mr. Li had a very good appetite and ate four bowls of Dan Dan noodles in one go, which was his favorite delicacy. Before eating Sichuan cuisine, you must eat noodles before eating vegetables, saying that you can better taste the delicious taste of noodles. People always say that he is a foodie, which is difficult to say, more is just a love of delicious food. His wife's style of cooking is really compatible with Both East and West, and in his American home, he has tasted the Israeli-style dishes made by Mrs. Lee herself. On the phone with Mr. Li's former friend Le Daiyun of Peking University, she also said that Mr. Li loves to eat and loves to eat the meals she cooks. After Mr. Tang Yijie died, Mr. Li also made a special trip to visit her, and she repeatedly lamented to me: If Mr. Li listened to her advice at that time and stayed in Beijing, it would be fine.
Mr. Li also told me that he likes to go with Mr. Wang Shixiang to taste unique cuisine, especially The Peking Duck must be eaten when he returns to Beijing. There must be good wine, Mr. Li loves wine, in addition to the local Moutai wine, he also likes all kinds of overseas whiskey, because of insomnia, so he has to drink some almost every day. Once, when he had just returned home from the airport, we met alone, and he brought a bottle of alcoholic wine that he liked to drink, and he roasted the duck and drank it in a few sips. He never took a sip, and every time he drank heavily, just as cheerful as his own bold personality.
Liu Yuedi and Li Zehou in the American apartment, New Year's Day 2014
As soon as Mr. Li passed away, Mr. Cheng Zhongying of the University of Hawaii, who learned the news, called me for an hour to recall his interactions with Mr. Li. He said that in the early 1990s, once at the top of widow's Mountain in Marancia, the two of them soaked in hot springs and looked up at the stars, and he deeply felt that Mr. Li always had a kind of "ambitious and unpaid" talented and bookish temperament. We also agreed on Mr. Cheng's tie on the phone:
"The first sight of Hangzhou's West Lake, the style is flourishing,
Genius is unhindered, critical and critical;
Again on the white horse mountain, the momentum is slightly weakened,
Endlessly contemplative, aesthetically pleasing and sensual"
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Now when it comes to Li Zehou, everyone always says that he is "finished in the past". But his "The Course of Beauty" has been selling well for forty years, and who dares to stand up and say that his book will still be a big seller in forty years? Mr. Li has this confidence, he declares: his book is written for readers fifty years later, western readers really want to understand the East, it will have to wait a hundred years! Whenever I see "The Course of Beauty" selected as "East Asian Academic Classics" and "Thirty Years and 30 Books", I often complain about him, because his theory of modern and ancient intellectual history in the 1980s is actually more important, and "Chinese Aesthetics" is far more profound than "The Course of Beauty", but this is the choice of the public, and he himself does not like to be called "aesthetician" by others, because he is a great philosopher who is authentic.
Now when it comes to Li Zehou, everyone always regards him as a "target of criticism", and most of the scholars around him cannot be offended, but Mr. Li can arbitrarily refute it, just like Mr. Li, who is in his twenties, criticized Mr. Zhu Guangqian. Mr. Li has never been afraid of others criticizing him, and once suggested editing a collection of Criticisms of Li Zehou's thoughts, which is estimated to be able to collect seven or eight hundred texts, right? However, it is difficult for critics to talk to him on the same "philosophical platform" as him, criticizing and judging, but his ideas have finally become the benchmark of China, and it is difficult for successors in these fields of philosophical thought to look back on them. Only in the face-to-face conversation with Mr. Li can we "unscrupulously" enjoy the pleasure of the sea of thought and the sky. I studied under Mr. Li, from the beginning of the chat to the end of the chat, and the exuberance after the conversation was deeply happy.
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Now when it comes to Li Zehou, everyone always believes that his thought and aesthetics have ended, and his death represents "the end of the ideas and aesthetics of an era." This is also the surging news live broadcast of Mr. Li's death, I gave a revised topic, at that time only wanted to call "the aesthetic end of an era", I said that this is far from enough. Saying that an era has ended, only half right, Mr. Li's thoughts and philosophy are pointing to the future, in fact, it does not matter that the era has surpassed the philosophers, but only the question of whether philosophical ideas match the times, and many ideas can exert great power in the future, and the "love ontology" thought proposed by Mr. Li in his later years belongs to this category.
Now when it comes to Li Zehou, everyone always thinks that he is "not willing to be lonely when he is old", he is more of a "thought teacher" in the eighties, and his mentality is still stuck in the past. But the accusers did not know that the editors and directors of Phoenix SATELLITE TV and CCTV had all looked for him through me, hoping that the interview would even be done with me, but the original words that Mr. Lee entrusted me to bring were: South Korea and Japan national television stations have also looked for him, and the reason why he does not "electrocute" or speak is because of "abominable face", and the second is "chewing wax with words", and he is most happy to eat and chat. What really pleased him was that his book was surrounded by so many "quiet readers."
In the summer of 2011, the Institute for Advanced Humanities of Peking University held an international symposium on "The Creativity of Chinese Thought in the 1980s: A Case Study of Li Zehou's Philosophy" at the LinhuXuan of Peking University, at which I again asked , "Who is Li Zehou really like?" Question: Who is Li Zehou, from the perspective of ideological comparison? If we look at the "totality" of thought, he is like Lukács, the founder of Western Marxism; if we say from the status of the "intellectual teacher" of the 80s, he is more like the French existential thinker Sartre; if we look at it from the perspective of philosophical "practical reason", he is more like Dewey; and some people say that he is like the medieval Abelard, the lone star of the era of ideological decline! There are similar statements in foreign countries, and overseas scholar Gu Mingdong believes that Li Zehou's philosophical and aesthetic ideas are quite similar to the British cultural thinker Raymond Williams and the famous French social thinker Sartre.
The most authoritative literary and artistic theory anthology in the Western world today, "Norton Literary Theory and Criticism Anthology", is a 148 humanistic anthology selected from Plato to the contemporary 2,500 years, including a comprehensive definition of the two literary theory types, theory and criticism, which includes selected essays from Li Zehou's "Four Lectures on Aesthetics". When the original four pieces of Liu Xunzhi's "Wenxin Carved Dragon", Lu Ji's "Wenfu" and Ye Xie's "Original Poem" were originally selected for selection by the editorial board, they were rejected because the concepts and viewpoints of cultural differences needed to be carefully noted, the emphasis on perceptual comments, and the difficulty of in-depth discussion.
When the chosen eye turned to modern literary theory and introduced Li Zehou to the editorial board, a Western judge believed that Li Zehou's aesthetic ideas were similar to those of the French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu of the same period. Coincidentally, the two were born in the same year, became famous in roughly the same period, and were deeply influenced by Marx and other Western thinkers, and expressed their views on the core issues of aesthetics in the same period, while Li Zehou mainly used the methods of anthropology and historical psychology to explore the issues of "how human beings are possible" and "how aesthetic consciousness is possible", but came up with a unique theory of "cultural accumulation". Therefore, when communicating with Li Zehou, we all felt that the part of the eighth chapter of the English edition of the "Four Lectures on Aesthetics", "Formal Layer and Primitive Accumulation", was indeed unique.
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Li Zehou is indeed a philosophical thinker who "goes his own way", and it is precisely the originality of his ideas that makes him finally selected and becomes the first Person selected by Chinese authors. But from the perspective of philosophical originality, I would rather think that Li Zehou is more like "China's Dewey". Perhaps domestic scholars do not agree with this statement, but in the exchanges with the sinologist Mr. An Lezhe, he basically agrees with my idea. In fact, dewey and Li Zehou's ideas are very close in terms of experience, society, practice and symbols, although there are fundamental differences in the three aspects of "practice view", "accumulation theory" and "emotional ontology", which are precisely Mr. Li's philosophical originals.
I still remember that at the Peking University seminar, I said this opening remark before I spoke: In the autumn of 2007, in this Linhuxuan meeting for Teacher Tu Weiming, "The Third Phase of Confucianism thirty years" was held, when Mr. Li called me to accompany him on a trip, the purpose was to clearly counter the "Three Phase Theory" with his own idea of "Confucianism Phase IV"; and today, four years later, Mr. Du actually held this meeting in the same place with Li Zehou's philosophy as the center, Mr. Du as a Confucian "Confucianism". Unlike Mr. Li's self-proclaimed Zhuang Chanzhi's "fierce but not crazy", his personality is so different! The same is that at that Confucian meeting, Mr. Du flew back to the United States because of a family affair, and should have been "present" but not there, while Mr. Li was supposed to come to the "hearing" today, but he was not present.
Paradoxically, it is precisely the bold and unscrupulous personality of the unusual person that opens up the creativity of Li Zehou's philosophical thought. When we have crossed Li Zehou's philosophical thought, we can't help but ask, after the originality of the ideological circles in the 1980s was exhausted, what can the Chinese intellectual circles leave us? This is the great charm brought about by the originality of Li Zehou's thoughts. This influence still shines thirty years later in the era when Mr. Li called "thinkers fade out and scholars stand out", because the value of original and original ideas will not be obliterated by the passage of time.
In October 2015, the World Federation for the Study of Confucian Culture and the Center for The Study of East and West held an international symposium on "Li Zehou and Confucian Philosophy" at the University of Hawaii, and began to focus on Mr. Li's great contribution to Confucianism, in fact, as Mr. Li himself admitted, "I am a Confucian, and I am the real Confucian!" This is because Mr. Li's thinking has always been "the unity of knowledge and action", and it is also "the use of the body", in this sense he really continues the Confucian tradition, no wonder he himself is very much in line with Liang Shuming's "I have been desperately doing it all my life" activist school
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Now, it is finally time to take stock of Li Zehou's philosophy and thoughts. From a higher level, Li Zehou's philosophy is basically two dimensions - "human nature" and "humanization", the inner is "human nature", the external is "humanization", and these two aspects need to be fully developed. If it must be said that Li Zehou is also a "post-Neo-Confucian", then his concept of human nature is rooted in the theory of "benevolence", while the theory of humanization comes from the study of "etiquette". In this sense, Li Zehou's philosophical thinking is really not finished. As the title of an English article written by Mr. Li himself, Human Nature and Human Future, shows, the fundamental solution to the problem of human nature is directly related to the future destiny of mankind.
On the basis of the ideological core of the "theory of practice" formed in the 1960s, Li Zehou continued many theories of "enlightenment and salvation", "juche philosophy", "western use", "creation and transformation" and "four phases of Confucianism" in the 1980s, but the ideological realm has gradually moved to the level of ontology since then, thus forming multiple ontology of "tool ontology", "psychological ontology", "degree ontology" and "emotional ontology". From "Historical Ontology" in 2002, "Anthropological Historical Ontology" in 2008, "Philosophical Compendium" in 2011, "Anthropological Historical Ontology" in 2016, and then expanded to the "Ethics Compendium", "Epistemological Compendium" and "Existential Outline" of the three-volume "Anthropological Historical Ontology" in 2019, through several consecutive collections, his philosophical system has been summarized to varying degrees, which is the core work he has done in his old age.
Li Zehou is concerned with the construction of his own philosophical framework, and the more holistic "Ontology of Anthropological History" consists of the "Outline of Ethics", "Epistemological Outline", and "Existential Outline", thus forming a trinity, which corresponds to the problems of goodness, truth, and beauty, which seems to be a classical trichotomy structure. However, the logical framework of Li Zehou's true philosophical thought is "beauty-goodness-truth-beauty", or starting from beauty and ending with beauty, which makes his philosophy form a circular structure.
At the beginning of the "Outline of ExistentialIsm", Li Zehou added the following new text: "There is no existential theory (that is, ontology) in China. Extracting and compiling the discussions about 'man living' and some of its religious-aesthetic arguments in humble works, and synthesizing them with the first two "Outlines", it is logical to open up a universal 'post-philosophy' path for the invisible and existential tradition of Chinese 'philosophy'. It can be seen from this that Li Zehou is inside philosophy and tries to go beyond philosophy, or that this "overflowing" philosophy is the essence of Chinese wisdom.
Li Zehou's philosophy appeared precisely from this point, as a form of Chinese philosophy. This philosophy, more fully expressed, should be the "anthropological historical ontology" philosophy of the traditional Chinese "ontology of emotion". The reason why this expression is complete is because it synthesizes the "philosophy of subjectivity" and "anthropological ontology" formed in The early days of Li Zehou with the "ontology of emotion" ideas prominently displayed in the later period, of course, historicism is always consistent in it. It is hoped that this expression will eventually become a "definitive conclusion", that is, it will become the basic "positioning" of Li Zehou's philosophical thought.
In Li Zehou's philosophical ideological framework, whether it is "music culture" (as opposed to western "guilt culture"), "aesthetic metaphysics" (confronting Mou Zongsan's "moral metaphysics"), "harmonious coexistence between man and the universe" (close to Feng Youlan's "heaven and earth realm"), or "aesthetic generation religion" (from Cai Yuanpei's "aesthetic education generation religion"), "harmony is higher than justice" (as opposed to Rawls's "theory of justice"), it emphasizes the highest level of Chinese philosophical wisdom, the most innovative statement, or " Aesthetics as the first philosophy" (as opposed to Levinas's "ethics as the first philosophy"), this may be the so-called "post-philosophy" road that Li Zehou wants to take.
Li Zehou declared that his philosophy should use Confucius to digest Kant, Marx, and Heidegger: to use Confucius to verify the mutual verification of Marx' "practical reason" and production practice (historical reason), to confucius to Kant - "experience becomes a priori", but to use "history to build reason" to expound it, to Confucius to Heidegger - "emotional ontology", and finally to implement the "psychological cost body", which is exactly a kind of Chinese philosophy or One of Chinese philosophies that should appear. Li Zehou's philosophical thought process began with the use of Confucius to transform Marx, then Confucius to Kant, and then to Confucius to Heidegger, thus achieving his own philosophical path.
After all, Li Zehou is still Li Zehou, and what he has always taken is his "own road", but this road is both the local road and the world road!
Author| Liu Yuedi (Researcher, Institute of Philosophy, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)
Editor| Luo Haoling
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Liu Yuedi (Research Fellow, Institute of Philosophy, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)