《中国人的精神》决赛作品 (E27 180340423李雨桐)
The Reaction to "The Chinese Spirit"
It was only vaguely known that gu hongming was a "geek" in the late qing dynasty and was known as a
die-hard royalist. I took it for granted that he was just a decadent feudal relic who could recite four books and
five classics and sing a two-poem poem about the wind and moon. The current of history has abandoned him
and wiped all his remarks clean, and there should be no regrets. After reading his book “the Chinese spirit“, I
realized how reckless and shallow I was.
This is not, of course, to endorse his long-out-of-fashion claim that no one in today's world could consider
the 'divine right of Kings' to rule as an alternative to serious political institutions. But his insights into Chinese
Confucian culture are indeed thought-provoking; And even his royalist, if you think carefully, there is his deep
logic, not entirely vested interests to protect their own rights and interests of the insincere claims.
Chinese society has never been a religious society, and the fact that the Chinese have never had a large, well-organized religious faith like western Christianity is actually quite strange. Because a person knows that he was born to die, then, if you do not give him a little meaning of survival, give him a certain sense of reality and eternal life, such a life will be a nihilistic and frightening thing. Religion is a convenient tool, through the personification of the existence of god, to solve the problem after death: this life is here, in order to good god, ready to die into the kingdom of heaven, to enjoy the beauty there. But Chinese culture, for all its polytheistic existence, does not take the afterlife particularly seriously. On the contrary, we have relatively unique customs of ancestor worship, and the belief that "unfilial three, no empress for the big". The Confucian tradition actually addresses the meaning of life with an evolutionary explanation: we worship our ancestors; they are our source; We value our children and our children's children. They are our destiny -- our ancestors, ourselves, our descendants, the present us in the middle, connecting the whole process, making the meaning of our life exist in the endless continuation of this chain. Even if we die, we know that everything we know will continue in our descendants, so that we can die in peace of mind. So, according to gu, Confucianism (or Confucianism) is roughly somewhere between Platonic philosophy and true religion. Plato's philosophy is the study of scholars, can not be pushed to the public; Religion needs a personified god to meet the needs of the masses. Confucianism effectively solves the problem of the meaning of human survival without additional assumptions. It is a brilliant creation of the Chinese people.
Such Confucianism makes us discourage change. We worship the ancient, respect the old and love the young,
and live not for ourselves but for the greater chain. The basic units of existence in society are not individuals
but families and clans. On the contrary, the salvation of westerners depends on their performance in front of
god, and has no essential connection with anyone outside themselves. Therefore, western society should regard
a single person as its basic unit. If extended, this should be the source of western ideas of freedom and
democracy, values unimaginable in traditional Chinese society.
In this way, it is completely understandable that China differs from the west in the form of social organization.
What Confucianism teaches is a set of complete social norms. "benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom
and trustworthiness" constitute the basic values of Confucian culture. It emphasizes that individuals should be in
the right position to do the right thing in the society, and that they should bear the responsibility for the society
to others. In contrast, the individualistic west developed the basic values of freedom, rights and democracy. As
long as it does not affect others, individuals have the right and freedom to do what they like. Since everyone has
such right and freedom, democratic consultation becomes a necessity for social organizations. According to gu,
what Confucianism teaches is the law of the good citizen, while what Christianity requires is the law of the good
man -- which, of course, may not be understood in the same way as we understand it now, but roughly in the
same way as "man in society." If we make the good running of the whole society the first and most important goal, then Confucianism actuallydesigns a complex code of conduct for everyone in order to achieve this goal. Western civilization, on the other hand, was based on simple individual rights and freedoms and did not specifically design this operation. Now the world seems to be showing that human purposeful design does not seem to be particularly effective, but rather to be left to its own devices to produce better results.
Gu died in the late 1920s. I don't know if he would have changed his view of the Chinese if he had lived to this day. But even if it doesn't change, maybe it shouldn't be too surprising. Culture and society are very complex things,and it is often difficult to see what the dominant factors are. What we now consider universal truths might have seemed inconceivable a century or two ago. At the same time, there is always a great possibility that what we now think is perfectlyright may be laughed at in a hundred or two years. A little more prudent and modest will make people feel a little more at ease.
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