Joseph R. Levenson

The Place of Confucius in Communist China

In Chinese Communist fashions, Confucius seems to be “in” this year. Earlier, certainly in the nineteen-twenties, revolutionaries were quite ready to see him out, and even now, in the first decade or so of the Peoples Republic, there are plenty of people with little patience for the sage of the old intelligence. Indeed, “despise the old” and “preserve the national heritage” have been chasing each other down the mneteen-fifties and incipient sixties, and contemporary historians, hi this area, should perhaps not dwell too seriously on trends pro and anti , so foreshortened, if discernible at all, in the foreground of our age. What seems historically significant is the range, not the petty successions, of recent Communist options in evaluating Confucius. For all the possibilities are equally modern, all plausible and consistent within a new Chinese view —an essentially anti-Confucian view informing even the pro-Confucius minds.

The Abortiveness of Empiricism in Early Ch'ing Thought

In Sung and Ming intellectual life, idealist philosophies came to the fore. Later, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to a number of Chinese thinkers, that predominance of idealism seemed a disaster, and they formally disavowed it. Is there an indication, perhaps, in the early existence of this group of materialists, that the seemingly stable, traditionalistic Chinese society had the capacity to develop under its own power, without a catalytic intrusion of Western industrialism, into a society with a scientific temper?