The Sixty-year Samsara of Studies in Pragmatism and the road of cultural development in China - 中欧社会论坛 - China Europa Forum

The Sixty-year Samsara of Studies in Pragmatism and the road of cultural development in China

Authors: Liu Fangtong

Published by Cultural Heritage and Contemporary Change, Series III, Asia, Volumes 13

URL: www.crvp.org/book/Series03/III-13/chapter_xi.htm

Liu Fangtong discriminates two major moments that are crucial for the development of contemporary Chinese culture and for the study of pragmatism in China: 1919 and 1979, whence, his ‘sixty-year samsara’. Pragmatism became a main trend of thought in China in the May 4th New Culture Movement. Especially the theories of John Dewey were very influential in the China of that time. In China, pragmatism was understood (1) to reject traditional metaphysics of materialist and idealist nature alike; (2) to be human action, life, practice itself, not a knowledge resulting from a process of cognition; (3) to maintain that human action is different from the instinctive behaviour of animals, and, therefore, is always guided by intelligence; (4) to hold that every idea, theory and doctrine should serve to adapt human beings to their environment, and therefore, that the criterion of every practice should be its practical value; (5) to be individual in this sense that an individual’s existence and interaction with the environment is an individual behavior. Hereby, pragmatists emphasize that individual freedom must not harm that of other’s and must be regulated by society. Society, for its part, should avoid both totalitarianism and anarchism. The success of this pragmatist theory in China at the time of the May 4th Movement is explained by the fact that, on the one hand, some characteristics coincide with aspects of the Chinese traditional culture, while on the other hand, others coincide with the demands for science and democracy of the progressive Chinese intellectuals. Liu Fangtong states that pragmatism, in the United States, played a very important role in constructing the world’s most developed country on an almost uncultivated soil, in the prosperity of science and culture, and in the development of America’s democratic system, and that this strongly impressed Chinese intellectuals who were striving for social progress and the renewal of their culture. In China, however, pragmatism did not play as big a role as it did in the United States because the Chinese culture, unlike the American, lacked the social and intellectual premises required for pragmatism to play its full role. Therefore, at the time, according to the author, China’s urgent need was for a revolutionary theory which would shape the future path of development of Chinese society. Because many propagators of pragmatism did not deeply investigate the relation of Chinese and Western culture and the problems of how Western culture could be adapted to the Chinese soil, pragmatism in China lost its active and progressive meaning.

Since 1979, after a period in which pragmatism had been heavily criticized, Chinese society once again took up the path of innovation and development. Also pragmatism and other Western trends started to be studied again. The actual situation at this moment was different from the moment of the May 4th Movement, however, some great similarities exist between the two: poverty and backwardness in economics, deficiency of democracy in politics, underdevelopment in science and ossification in thought. According to the author, this new wave of pragmatism is, in the same way as was the case in the period following the May 4th Movement, hindered in its development by political utilitarianism. Yet, useful ideas in pragmatism often are shared with Marxism to some extent, or are worth being referred to by Marxism. Second, some ideas in pragmatism are similar to aspects of Chinese traditional culture.

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