Biographical Review of the Academic Thought of Zhang Dongsun

Author: Zuo Yuhhe
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1999-09-01
Features: Zhang Dongsun was a philosopher of great achievement who introduced Western philosophical thought and proposed distinctive suggestions for Chinese cultural construction. Especially his expressions on ethnic and religious issues are enlightening. As a renowned scholar in China in the 20th century, his intellectual contributions have greatly influenced scholars. Zhang Dongsun focused on philosophy from a cultural perspective, believing that philosophy represents theoretical knowledge and should be connected to actual life. He was concerned with Chinese cultural construction and aware of China's cultural context, striving to expand the spiritual world of the Chinese people and establish a hall of faith for them. He chose philosophy, believing that establishing a new philosophical system was the only path to achieve these goals. He introduced Western philosophy while remaining deeply connected to Chinese traditions. He advocated the concept of the "Dao tradition," believing there are two fundamental traditions in the world: one represented by China as the Eastern tradition, and the other represented by Europe and America as the Western tradition. The Chinese tradition primarily consists of Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism (a development form of Confucianism), while the Western tradition is Christianity (Jiaoxue) and democracy. In his view, if the spirit of the Western tradition were integrated into the Chinese tradition, Chinese culture would find a new lease on life. Zhang Dongsun particularly emphasized cultural liberalism, which means maintaining freedom of scholarship and thought. He had a deep understanding of the spirit of Chinese intellectuals influenced by Western culture, and his insights remain inspiring today.
(1) The Turning Point of the Transformation of Philosophical Thought
The reasons for Zhang Dongsun's third transformation in philosophical thought in the mid-1930s were relatively complex, largely influenced by the following factors. First, examining the internal logic of his own intellectual development. Through more than a decade of research on epistemological issues, he gradually discovered the limitations of previous Western epistemology. He realized that the human being as a philosophical research subject was not an abstract, pure individual but a social being living in a specific social environment; not an individual existence but a being as a class and a group. Previous Western philosophers' epistemology primarily discussed the cognitive process, cognitive nature, and acquisition of knowledge of the abstract individual, whereas the actual issue was that the influence of the external environment on human cognition as a social group far outweighed the influence of other cognitive elements in the process. However, previous philosophers had overlooked the significant impact of the external cognitive environment on cognition, limiting their focus to the factors within the cognitive range. This research was clearly highly limited, making it difficult to fully explain many phenomena of human cognition, especially the true reasons behind its limitations. This limitation was not only a constraint of Western philosophers but also a limitation of Zhang Dongsun's "pluralistic epistemology." What is valuable is that Zhang Dongsun consciously recognized this limitation and sought to remedy it. This conscious effort to compensate undoubtedly prompted him to focus the core of his epistemological research on the influence of social culture on knowledge. Regarding his doubts about the limitations of previous epistemology and the emergence of his conscious awareness, Zhang Dongsun elaborated on them extensively in Knowledge and Culture. He said, "Previous scholars, when discussing knowledge, only recognized the existence of the individual organism realm and failed to see that there is another realm above it that also exists." This "other realm" refers to the socio-cultural realm beyond the organic world. It was precisely because he recognized the profound and sustained influence of the socio-cultural realm on the formation of human knowledge that Zhang Dongsun broke through the narrowness of previous epistemology and worked to discuss the issue of how individual knowledge accumulates into social knowledge and how social knowledge constrains individual knowledge. At the same time, through years of dedicated study of Western philosophy, Zhang Dongsun increasingly felt that many problems in Western philosophy were not the issues Chinese people were thinking about, and that there were differences in the intellectual approaches of Eastern and Western philosophers. This difference indicated that the problems in Western philosophy were not common human problems but merely the issues of the Western people. For such differences, there was no theoretical explanation. This phenomenon prompted Zhang Dongsun to compare and study Chinese and Western philosophy and thought, and to revise the modern epistemology since Kant. Regarding this, Zhang Dongsun himself explained, "This idea had been in my mind for many years. Initially, it was suggested to me when I discovered that most problems in Western philosophy are not the issues Chinese people grapple with. As a result, I realized that there are indeed differences between the East and the West in terms of psychology, in other words, in terms of intellectual approaches. Based on this point, I was compelled to acknowledge that the issues of the Western people are..."