Impressions-《中国人的精神》
First of all, we have to say that Mr. Gu is a genius. A man who is fluent in nine languages and has 13 PhD degrees. The second thing I want to point out is that this book is very difficult for me. So after I read off is, I also read a translation of it.
Written entirely in English and published in 1915, Mr. Gu defended the dignity of Chinese culture with his own pen and changed some westerners' prejudice against China. And the article is written in the beginning of last century during the first world war, when European civilization was in crisis, Gu's purpose was obvious, to point out a way out for the crisis-hit Europe, even for the whole world civilization. The purpose is to try to explain the spirit of Chinese civilization and reveal its value. Although I personally think some ideas are extreme, under the historical condition that almost totally repudiated Oriental culture, in the case of an extreme form of thought, maybe only a matter of the other extreme can against it and achieve a real balance.
As far as I know, what I had read is just the tip of the article. According to the wiki of the article, Dr. Gu’s book has more than three times the number of words in the article. We just read one third of the book.As what I had read, Dr. Gu described the different between Chinese culture and western culture, the spirit of the Chinese women, and the characteristic of the Chinese language.Of course, there are still two more chapters to follow them. But I did not pay much time to reading them.In the first three chapters, we can easily see Mr. Gu's profound understanding and pride of Chinese Confucian culture. In hie opinion, China do have religious, but the religious is moral self-restraint, and the final of the moral self-restraint is “Dever de lealdade”——duty of loyalty，and it is this that determines the Chinese life style——spiritual life. So a real Chinese person has both an adult brain and a child's heart. We do not need any other things, like priest and police, to keep our social stable. But for the western social, they think that human nature is vicious. Also to keep the social stable, they need coast a lot of financial to provide for “Idle privilege”, to make citizens afraid of god and low. And strong constraints on the individual are also brought in. In the end, do not like Chinese, militarism will be the last choice for countries. There is no doubt that this is also a major reason for foreign countries coveted China at the beginning of the 20th century.
However, some thoughts of Mr. Gu felt like a little pedantry and backwardness, especially his attitude toward women. Not only that, in my opinion, the reason why Chinese can not develop in the Ming and Qing dynasties, especially in the Qing dynasty, is our life style——spiritual life. Spiritual life can make us satisfaction and stop us from exploring technology.
All in all, nowadays, China is more and more like western countries, re-hold Mr. Gu’s opinions is a way to neutralize “worship things foreign and fawn on foreign countries”.Of course, the exploration for spirits of Chinese still need to be continued.
1801013-Kang Chenyu(康辰宇)
京公网安备 11010802032529号