Feng Youlan | |||||||||||
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| Born | (1895-12-04)4 December 1895 Bi villageTanghe County, Henan,Qing China | ||||||||||
| Died | 26 November 1990(1990-11-26) (aged 94) | ||||||||||
| Alma mater | Peking University Columbia University | ||||||||||
| Occupation | Philosopher | ||||||||||
| Known for | Revival ofNeo-Confucianism, synthesis of Western and Chinese philosophy | ||||||||||
| Children | Zong Pu | ||||||||||
| Chinese name | |||||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 馮友蘭 | ||||||||||
| Simplified Chinese | 冯友兰 | ||||||||||
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Feng Youlan (Chinese:馮友蘭;Wade–Giles:Feng Yu-lan; 4 December 1895 – 26 November 1990) was a Chinese philosopher, historian, and writer who was instrumental for reintroducing the study ofChinese philosophy in the modern era. The name he published under in English was 'Fung Yu-lan,' as used in the Bodde translation ofA History of Chinese Philosophy. This earlier spelling also occurs in philosophical discussions, see for example the work ofWing-tsit Chan.
Feng Youlan was born on 4 December 1895 inTanghe County,Nanyang, Henan, China, to a middle-class family. His younger sister wasFeng Yuanjun, who would become a famous Chinese writer. He studied philosophy in the China Public School in Shanghai, between 1912 and 1915, a preparatory school for college, then studied in Chunghua University, Wuhan (later merged intoCentral China Normal University) andPeking University between 1915 and 1918, where he was able to study Western philosophy andlogic as well asChinese philosophy.
Upon his graduation in 1918, he traveled to the United States in 1919, where he studied atColumbia University on theBoxer Indemnity Scholarship Program. There he met, among many philosophers who were to influence his thought and career,John Dewey, thepragmatist, who became his teacher. Feng gained his PhD from Columbia in 1923. His PhD thesis was titled "A Comparative Study of Life Ideals".
He went on to teach at Chinese universities includingJinan University,Yenching University, andTsinghua University in Beijing. From 1934 to 1938 (and again from 1946 to 1949) he was Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Tsinghua.[1] It was while at Tsinghua that Feng published what was to be his best-known and most influential work, hisHistory of Chinese Philosophy (1934, in two volumes). In it he presented and examined the history of Chinese philosophy from a viewpoint which was very much influenced by the Western philosophical fashions prevalent at the time, which resulted in what Peter J. King of Oxford describes as a distinctlypositivist tinge to most of the philosophers he described. Nevertheless, the book became the standard work in its field, and had a huge effect in reigniting an interest in Chinese thought.
In 1935 Feng, on his way to a conference inPrague, stopped briefly in theSoviet Union and was impressed with the radical social changes and cultural ferment. His speeches extolling the utopian possibilities of communism, although also describing the mistakes he saw, drew attention from Chiang Kai-sheks's police. Feng was arrested and spent a short time in jail, but soon became a firm supporter of the government and its resistance to Japan. During theSino-Japanese War he published works which supported theNew Life Movement for revitalizing Confucian values.[2]
In 1939, Feng brought out hisXin Lixue (New Rational Philosophy, orNeo-Lixue). Lixue was a philosophical position of an important group of twelfth-centuryneo-Confucianists (includingCheng Yi andZhu Xi); Feng's book took certain metaphysical notions from their thought and fromtaoism (such asli andtao), analyzed and developed them in ways that owed much to the Western philosophical tradition, and produced a rationalistic neo-Confucian metaphysics. He also developed, in the same way, an account of the nature of morality and of the structure of human moral development.
When theSecond Sino-Japanese War broke out, the students and staff of Beijing's Tsinghua and Peking Universities, together with Tianjin'sNankai University, fled their campuses. They went first toHengshan, where they set up theChangsha Temporary University, and then toKunming, where they set upSouthwest Associated University.When, in 1946 the three Universities returned to Beijing, Feng instead went to the U.S. again, this time to take up a post as visiting professor at theUniversity of Pennsylvania. He spent the year 1948–1949 as a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii.[citation needed] He served as President of Tsinghua University from December 1948 to May 1949 because ofZhang Dongsun's refusal (it was known as National Tsinghua University until January 1949).[3]
While he was at Pennsylvania, news from China made it clear that the communists were on their way to seizing power. Feng's friends tried to persuade him to stay, but he was determined to return; his political views were broadly socialist, and he thus felt optimistic about China's future under its new government.
Once back home, Feng began to study Marxist–Leninist thought, but he soon found that the political situation fell short of his hopes; by the mid-1950s his philosophical approach was being attacked by the authorities. He was forced to repudiate much of his earlier work, and to rewrite the rest – including hisHistory – in order to fit in with the ideas of theCultural revolution.
Despite all this, Feng refused to leave China, and after enduring much hardship he finally saw a relaxation of censorship, and was able to write with a certain degree of freedom. He died on 26 November 1990 in Beijing.
