Philippe Major

Confucian Iconoclasm proposes a novel account of the emergence of modern Confucian philosophy in Republican China (1912–1949), challenging the historiographical paradigm that modern (or New) Confucianism sought to preserve traditions against the iconoclasm of the May Fourth Movement. Through close textual analyses of Liang Shuming's Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies (1921) and Xiong Shili's New Treatise on the Uniqueness of Consciousness (1932), Philippe Major argues that the most successful modern Confucian texts of the Republican period were nearly as iconoclastic as the most radical of May Fourth intellectuals. Questioning the strict dichotomy between radicalism and conservatism that underscores most historical accounts of the period, Major shows that May Fourth and Confucian iconoclasts were engaged in a politics of antitradition aimed at the monopolization of intellectual commodities associated with universality, autonomy, and liberty. Understood as a counter-hegemonic strategy, Confucian iconoclasm emerges as an alternative iconoclastic project to that of May Fourth.

This chapter provides a short history of the reception of LIANG Shuming's thought in European-language scholarship since 1922. By reviewing a significant number of monographs, collected volumes, and articles published in academic and missionary journals in English, French, and German during the last one hundred years, the chapter aims to provide a historical typology of the multifaceted reception of Liang's thought through time. In the scholarship reviewed, Liang is variously portrayed as a philosopher, a social reformer or activist, a religious thinker, an educator, a legal thinker, and a political figure. Throughout the years, Liang has been described as a conservative, a restorationist, a fundamentalist, and a modern thinker, and has been labeled a Confucian, a Buddhist, and a populist. The many faces of LIANG Shuming laid bare by this short history are revealing of the complexity and tensions of the man and his thought, but also of the interpreters' gaze and the historical evolution of the academic field in the Euro-American region. The end result is a genealogy of sort-one that to some extent challenges our most deep-seated assumptions about Liang by tracing them back to a particular and contingent historical moment and by situating them within a broad spectrum of alternative positions vying for attention in the small but diverse discursive space allotted to the thought of LIANG Shuming in European-language scholarship.

Proceeding from the role ethicist distinction between the Enlightenment atomistic individual and the Confucian person, this articles argues that Xiong Shili’s discourse on self-cultivation in the New Treatise on the Uniqueness of Consciousness can be better described by appealing to the language of atomistic individualism, insofar as it depicts others, tradition, the body, and the affective as limitations imposed on the inner core of selfhood.

This article adopts Ernesto Laclau's notion of empty signifier to discuss Tang Junyi's uses of the concept of lixing ("reason" or "rationality") in his seminal work Cultural Consciousness and Moral Reason (文化意識與道德理性; 1958). My dual goal, in doing so, is to bring to light the relations of power constitutive of the text's discourse on lixing and relate them to the problematic of writing philosophy from the periphery. I argue that in this work, lixing's dual referents-as a translation of "reason" and as denoting a Neo-Confucian faculty to intuit moral truths-allow Tang to inscribe himself in a philosophical field designed to exclude non-Western philosophies, while at the same time enabling him to symbolically relegate Euro-American philosophy to a peripheral position by filling in the notion of lixing with a content that legitimizes his own agenda. Tang could thus authorize his Confucian metaphysics by presenting it as the true content of lixing, understood not only as a universal faculty enabling humanity's access to all that is universal, but also as a condition sine qua non for one's inclusion in the philosophical game. By attempting to coopt the empty signifier (lixing/reason) for his own purposes, I argue Tang employs one of two possible strategies that can be adopted by those situated at the periphery in order to oppose the hegemon; one that leaves the structure of power relations intact but working in favour of the periphery.

This article situates XIONG Shili's classic work New Treatise on the Uniqueness of Consciousness (Xin weishi lun 新唯識論; 1932) within the central dilemma of post-May Fourth China surrounding the concerns with so-called modern universalism and Chinese particularism. I look at the way the text portrays its author as situated both within particular traditions and outside of them (in a realm of universality) in order to show how the figure of the author is presented as a site wherein Chinese/Asian particularism and universalism can be fused. My central aim, in doing so, is to argue that within the text's discourse on the positioning of its author resides an implicit argument for the universality of Chinese or Asian philosophy-as interpreted and subsumed by the text-and against the hegemonic intentions of Western philosophy. Yet I also suggest that the text reiterates a conception of universality and an intention to monopolize the universal which are characteristic of hegemonic discourses.

This article argues that Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies adopts an ambiguous attitude vis-à-vis the relation between tradition and modernity, incorporating both traditionalist and anti-traditionalist attitudes with an at-times reconciliatory approach to tradition and modernity. This ambiguity, it is argued, can be seen as representative of historical tensions the text set out to resolve.

This article discusses the temporalization of space central to the mainstream discourse of European modernity: a discourse which hierarchized all cultural spaces into a temporal narrative enabling Europe's self-portrayal as the emancipatory future of humanity. This discourse created a gap between the perceived particularism of non-European cultures (seen as traditional) and the universalism of a modernity associated with the contemporary cultures of Europe and North America, while portraying modernization as a passage from the former to the latter. Chinese intellectuals who adopted this metanarrative therefore faced the following challenge: how can Chinese particularism be adapted to a culture of modernity regarded as universal? While May Fourth iconoclasts answered this question by simply rejecting the idea that an accommodation between Chinese particularism and modern universalism was possible, other intellectuals attempted to argue that at least some aspects of Chinese culture could still be of value within the context of modern universalism. This article discusses an interesting instance of such an attempt at negotiating the perceived tension between the modern discourse of universalism and the particularism of Chinese culture, as provided by Liang Shuming in Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies. This work attempted to show that Chinese culture could still be of value within the context of modernity by providing a new metanarrative which peripherized the role of Western culture in the process of modernization. This article suggests, however, that by adopting a portrayal of modernization as a passage from particularism to universalism, Chinese culture could be reauthorized, within Liang's metanarrative, only at the cost of being de-complexified, homogenized, and de-historicized; only at the cost of being no longer Chinese.

This article discusses how Liang Shuming's Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies adopted a genealogical mode of textual authorization which took shape in its depiction of Chinese history as a failure to live up to an ideal way of life imagined by Confucius. Implied in this discourse was the idea that Liang himself had been the first Confucian to understand what Confucius had truly meant. This genealogical discourse authorizing Liang and his text by linking them directly to Confucius was further strengthened by a rhetoric which naturalized the discourse passed down from Confucius to Liang, distinguishing it from other forms of discourse seen as artificial. Finally, the text's genealogical discourse also managed to incorporate the May Fourth critique of Confucianism by rejecting the historical manifestations of Confucianism before salvaging an ideal imaged by Confucius which was presented as uncontaminated by history and Confucianism's enmeshment with state power.

This article argues that Anglophone works on Chinese democracy have tended to build their analyses on assumptions that tradition is either (1) a pre-modern phenomenon unrelated to China's democratization process, (2) a hindrance that should be gotten rid of if China is to democratize, (3) a static phenomenon which cannot but appear antiquated with regards to a dynamic, fast-paced modern China, or (4) an object from which modern agents can freely draw. In order to challenge these assumptions, this article suggests that modernity and democracy were translated into a Chinese milieu already ripe with Gadamerian prejudices; prejudices which not only modified the meaning of modernity and democracy, but also provided the very conditions without which modernity and democracy would not have been meaningful or understood at all. Max Ko-wu Huang's work can contribute to our understanding of the role played by various traditions in the process of translating democracy during the transitional period of modern China (1895-1925).

This study provides an analysis of the discourse on tradition of two of the first texts written in the Republican period which endeavoured to oppose the May Fourth portrayal of Confucianism as an artifact of the past and which enjoyed a significant amount of success at the moment of their publication and thereafter: Liang Shuming’s Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies (Dongxi wenhua jiqi zhexue 東西文化及其哲學; 1921) and the classical Chinese edition of Xiong Shili’s New Treatise on the Uniqueness of Consciousness (Xin weishi lun 新唯識論; 1932).
Through discourse analysis, this study examines two interrelated aspects of the texts: their discourse on the role tradition plays in individual emancipation or in a modernization process teleologically oriented toward human liberty on the one hand, and the discursive techniques they employ in order to legitimize their discourse through the authority of tradition. My central aim is to see which discursive tools could be employed in texts that are presented as reactivating the Confucian dao (道) within the modern Chinese context, especially as one of their main objectives is to oppose the modern discourse of anti-traditionalism which emerged during the May Fourth Movement.
My contention is that both texts are for the most part as anti-traditional as the most iconoclastic of May Fourth discourses, as they both deny that traditions can contribute to individual emancipation and to the modernization process, and both conceptualize emancipation as a breaking free from the hold of traditions. There is an exception to this general rule, however. The Confucian tradition (as they define it), and to some extent the Buddhist one, are singled out as traditions which can point the way to a transcendence and a liberation from tradition. Traditions are therefore valueless unless they represent what I call “traditions of anti-traditionalism”: traditions that show the way to a final liberation from tradition.
At work in these claims, I argue, is a dialectic whereby the texts salvage particular traditions yielding trans-historical truths from the dustbin of history before presenting themselves not only as contemporary representatives of those traditions, but also as their highest point: a point at which these traditions of truth are entirely subsumed, clarified, finalized, and monopolized by the contemporary texts. The texts, moreover, not only re-appropriate the modern discourse of anti-traditionalism to their own ends; they also redefine it in a way that relegates the Euro-American conceptualization of modernity (as a tradition of anti-traditionalism) at a lower echelon while celebrating their own vision of Confucian and Buddhist traditions as the highest form of a universal culture capable of emancipating once and for all humanity from the shackles of tradition and history. These texts, in other words, offer alternative visions of a tradition of anti-traditionalism which compete with that of the Euro-American discourse of modernity, but do so in a manner that is for the most part equally hegemonic in its rejection of competing perceptions of truth.