Scheller Selections (Volume 1 and 2)

Author: [German] Scheler, edited by Liu Xiaofeng
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1999-01-01
Features: Over the past century, Chinese intellectual scholarship has been greatly unsettled by the impact of Western thought and the reform and transformation of Chinese society. One manifestation of this is the separation of thought and scholarship: thought has become empty and speculative, while scholarship has become imbalanced between the real and the unreal. Confucius, the original ancestor of Chinese thought, once said, "I have not eaten for a whole day or slept for a whole night, thinking, but to no avail. It is better to learn." Confucius warned, "To learn without thinking is to be lost; to think without learning is perilous." Scholarship and thought should mutually promote each other in depth and caution. The great thinkers of the late Qing Dynasty (Kang Youwei, Zhang Junmai, Liang Qichao) were all deeply versed in and advanced in a specific academic field; the May Fourth New Culture Movement thinkers, in their debates over "ideology," encouraged a speculative and unfounded intellectual trend. The situation of thought and scholarship in the 20th century was particularly difficult, not unique to Chinese thought, as Western thought also faced numerous reform challenges. However, the great Western thinkers of this century were all deeply rooted in a specific academic field, with scholars who were cautious and thoughtful thinkers or thinkers who were scholars emerging one after another. They used practical scholarship to contemplate the modern dilemmas of society and thought, and the brilliance of their intellectual scholarship was not something ordinary people could disrupt. The academic landscape of 20th-century Western thought was dominated by social theory and emerging disciplines. In the past, the Chinese academic world has focused more on philosophers and thinkers, neglecting political, economic, historical, linguistic, and anthropological thinkers, so there has been a self-imposed blind spot in understanding 20th-century Western thought and scholarship. The translation of Western classics into Chinese, pioneered by intellectuals in the late Qing Dynasty, remains an unfinished task for the Chinese academic world over the past century. At the turn of the 20th century, the translation of Western studies into Chinese should pay special attention to the accumulation of social thought over the past century. The 20th century's thought and scholarship bear the burden of harmonizing and coordinating: first, the tension between technical knowledge, empirical knowledge, metaphysical knowledge, and religious knowledge; second, the tension between classical knowledge and modern knowledge. For Chinese scholarship, there is also the need to harmonize the tension between the Chinese cultural tradition and the Western cultural tradition. However, the relationship between Chinese thought and Western thought is fundamentally not one of national competition but of a shared predicament in modernity. The intellectual scholarship advancing in these two linguistic traditions both faces fundamental modern dilemmas: the re-argumentation of the legitimacy of social order and the order of the human heart. Therefore, establishing the "20th-Century Thinkers' Library" is of great significance. How can academic achievement be achieved without a century of accumulation? The works of Western thought and scholarship in this century are so numerous that they fill the libraries. The future of Chinese intellectual scholarship should be nurtured from the great achievements of Western academic thought in the 20th century.