Abstract
After the arrival of the vitalist philosophy of Henri Bergson and Hans Driesch in the 1910s, Chinese intellectuals formulated and expanded a domestic version of vitalism that located its origin in such classical passages as“repeated generation of life constitutes change 生生之謂易” from the Book of Changes. Liang Shuming 梁漱溟 first formulated this domestic vitalism, which mirrored Bergson’s philosophy of change, flow, and life. Zhu Qianzhi 朱謙之, Li Shicen 李石岑, Xiong Shili 熊十力, and Fang Dongmei 方東美 expanded the idea in the context of their responses to new cultural, intellectual and geopolitical realities. This article surveys the trajectory of this domestic Chinese vitalism in the first half of the twentieth century and elucidates its importance as a curious combination of conservative and liberal, Eastern and Western, traditional and modern thinking.
Keywords
vitalism, Henri Bergson, Hans Driesch, New Confucians, Yogƒcƒra Buddhism (weishi 唯識), Republican China
Cite
Citations are generated automatically from bibliographic data as a convenience, and may not be complete or accurate.
