On the Differences and Similarities in the Thought of Hu Shi and Ding Wenjiang

SPRING 2006 33 Chinese Studies in History, vol. 39, no. 3, Spring 2006, pp. 33–50. © 2006 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved. ISSN 0009–4633 / 2006 $9.50 + 0.00. LEI Y I On the Differences and Similarities in the Thought of Hu Shi and Ding Wenjiang In 1919, Hu Shi and Ding Wenjiang were introduced to each other by a mutual friend. Hu Shi was twenty-eight years old at the time, one of the leaders of the then vigorous New Culture movement and at the apex of his fame. Ding Wenjiang, thirty-two years old, was the director of the first modern Chinese geological survey and was enduring great hardship in pioneering this modern Chinese scientific enterprise. They both had established careers and their thinking had basically been fixed. The notable thing is that before they had met or been influenced by each other, the development of their thinking was basically similar, and therefore they felt like old acquaintances at their first meeting, becoming bosom friends. Interestingly, Hu Shi, the humanist, was doing his best to pro- claim his advocacy and defense of science, whereas Ding Wenjiang, the scientist, was very fond of the humanities and devoted his thought and cudgeled his brains for ways to unite science and the humanities. Translation © 2006 by M.E. Sharpe, Inc. from the Chinese text, originally published in Hu Shi and Advocates for Democracy, ed. Li Yu-ning (New York: Outer Sky Press, 1998), pp. 207–26. Reprinted with permission. Revised for this edition. Translated by Sylvia Chia. Lei Yi is a research fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Chinese Acad- emy of Social Sciences, Beijing. 33 02lei.pmd 33 5/17/2006, 2:34 PM 34 CHINESE STUDIES IN HISTORY Of course, although their ideas were largely similar, there were still minor differences between them; and they even had heated disputes. But regardless of how heated the disputes were, their private friendship was never hurt. In a sense, their common and different views, their contradictions and vexations, their hopes and despair, their pursuits and failures, their aims and dashed ideals, all reflected the journey within the Chinese liberal intellectuals of their generation. Philosophical Thought Similar experiences had likely formed their similar thoughts. Hu Shi had received an education in traditional Chinese culture as a child in his native village in Anhui province. He had read from the Four Books and Five Confucian Classics all the way to romantic novels. Later he studied “new learning” in Shanghai and in 1910 at the age of nineteen he went to the Unites States to study. After a short period of time there studying agriculture, he acknowl- edged John Dewey as his master and majored in experimentalist philosophy. Ding Wenjiang had also received an education in traditional Chinese culture in his native village in northern Jiangsu province as a child. He said: “I began to study under a teacher at the age of five. Whatever books I looked over I could read aloud. I finished studying the Four Books and the Five Confucian Classics in just four years. Aside from my studies at private school, I also often skimmed through the ancient and modern novels.”1 At the age of fifteen, he was influenced by the “new learning” and went to Ja- pan to study. Two years later he again went to Britain where he majored in geology and studied various kinds of Western doctrines on the side. Thus we can see that they both received a traditional Chinese education as children, were affected by the “new learning” a little later, and spent their youth in study abroad. We can say their ideas were formed in Britain and America and were deeply influenced by the Anglo-Saxon tradition. The political philosophy of John Locke and John Milton, the utilitarian ethics and liberalism of John 02lei.pmd 34 5/17/2006, 2:34 PM SPRING 2006 35 Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, and the philosophical thoughts of David Hume, John Dewey, and Karl Pearson had all deeply impressed them, not to mention the theory of evolution of Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley. Of course there were some acciden- tal elements in the respective experiences of Hu Shi and Ding Wenjiang. However, this kind of accident reflected a certain his- torical trend and the current of the times. Their experiences indi- cate that at the beginning of the twentieth century, the influence of Western culture had expanded and penetrated from the Chinese coastal regions into the southeast farming villages. They also indi- cate that more and more Chinese students had foreign educations, their professions had become many and varied, and they had formed an entirely different professional intelligentsia vis-à-vis traditional Chinese scholars. They were destined to play a major role in the course of the modernization of China. In the domain of thought, they were no longer introducing “West- ern learning” in a general way. Instead, they concretely introduced the various Western schools of thought and hoped to use these ideas to make China rich and strong in order to save the nation from subjugation and ensure its survival. Therefore, the various Western philosophers, from Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and from Auguste Comte to Bertrand Russell and John Dewey, all had their believers and propagandists in China. Hu Shi and Ding Wenjiang were among the most influential Chi- nese endorsers and propagandists of the Anglo-Saxon philosophical tradition. Nevertheless, although both were adherents of experimentalist philosophy and enthusiastic defenders of science, their understanding of science was not identical. In the 1923 “polemic of science and metaphysics,” the similarities and differences between their philosophical ideas were apparent. The author does not intend to carry out an overall study of this polemic here; instead, he only hopes to explain these similarities and differences through this polemic. From the slogan “Learning the skills of the foreigners in order to check the foreigners” of the period of the Opium War to the slogan of “Down with the Confucian store” of the May Fourth movement, we can see the general yielding of Chinese culture and 02lei.pmd 35 5/17/2006, 2:34 PM 36 CHINESE STUDIES IN HISTORY the gradual penetration of Western culture in the collision between the two in China. However, the extremely tragic World War I ex- posed the inner contradictions of Western culture. Pessimism and despair enveloped Europe and deeply affected the Chinese circle of thinkers. In 1920, Liang Qichao, once a famous propagandist of new thinking, wrote Thoughts and Feelings from Travel in Europe [Ouyou xinyinglu], in which he sighed with feeling about the suf- ferings science had brought to human beings and cried out in alarm: “Science has become bankrupt!” Liang Shuming, in his Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies [Dongxi wenhua jiqizhexue], also believed that Western civilization was a material civilization, that Eastern civilization was a spiritual civilization, and that Confucianism would certainly revive in the future. In all fairness, this criticism of the conservatives, which ran counter to the tidal current of the May Fourth movement period’s “new culture,” was sharp and somewhat reasonable, and had made the conservatives basically different from the “foreign affairs school” of those years who supported using Chinese learning as a base and Western learning as an application. It was in just this kind of atmosphere that Zhang Junmai, who had studied in Germany under the German idealist philosopher Lorenz Oken, gave a speech at Qinghua University in February 1923, the topic of which was “The View of Life.” In this speech, he put forward the viewpoint that “no matter how developed science is, it can never resolve the issue of the view of life.”2 He then talked about the differences between science and the view of life and said, “Science is objective and the view of life is subjective. Science is governed by logical method, whereas the view of life is governed by intuition. Science can be approached using analy- sis, whereas the view of life is comprehensive. Science originates in the similar phenomena of the target, whereas the view of life originates in the singularity of personality”; therefore, “No matter how developed science is, it can never resolve the issue of the view of life; human beings themselves will have to resolve this issue.” At this point, Zhang Junmai put forward significant topics like “science and value,” “science and ethics,” and the “limita- tions of science.” He had basically inherited the nonrationalistic 02lei.pmd 36 5/17/2006, 2:34 PM SPRING 2006 37 philosophy of continental Europe. He sought the absolute metaphysical existence that transcended feelings on the one hand, and stressed the nonrational intuition and impulse of the inner world on the other. After the publication of Zhang Junmai’s essay, Ding Wenjiang immediately published an essay entitled “Metaphysics and Sci- ence: Commenting on the ‘View of Life’ by Junmai” [Xuanxue yu kexue—ping Junmaide “renshengkuan”], in which he sharply re- futed Zhang Junmai, condemning him as a “metaphysical ghost.”3 Ding Wenjiang’s criticism was entirely based on the experimental philosophical tradition of Britain and the United States. He said: “What we call ‘material’ includes mainly many recorded thoughts and feelings of the sensory organs, plus a little bit of the direct thoughts and feelings of the sensory organs.” On this basis, he further believed that “this kind of psychological substance is all scientific material. What we know as material is originally but psychological thought and feeling of the sensory organs. From perceptions concepts can be formed.

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