Win The Crisis Of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Antitraditionalism In The May Fourth Era Depicted By Lin Yu-Sheng Represented In Digital Copy

history of ideas with indepth background on Chinese History,figures well presentedkinds of intellectuals of that period,
Writtenyears ago, I recommend Chinese readers read 王汎森's 中國近代思想與學術的系譜 as a more comprehensive, simpler in terms of language but looser since it's a collection of essays alternative.
This book traces the holistic iconoclasm in MayFourth era not from western intrusion in both material and intellectual senses, but rather from the highly culturalintellectualistic confucian tradition.
In this long tradition, as Lin interprets, social realities and social changes if possible were believed to be primarily accounted by the mind of the people, without the change of which social changes was simply impossible.
It is in this belief that May Fourth leaders attacked the traditional Chinese value system as a whole relentlessly, since in their eyes it was ultimately the Chinese culture that rendered the Chinese people powerless in the confrontation with the West, including newly westernized Japan.
In order to generate a new people, they want to instill a new mindset to the whole nation, at the expense of the old culture altogether.
This radicalism, Lin claims, belongs largely to an old cultural heritage rather than to an importation of western ideas, Although the content of the old culture was attacked, its structure still stamped the minds of these leading intellectuals who wanted to abandon the old "bad" culture altogether.
Good point.

However, in his analysis of individual intellectuals of that time, mainly Chen Duxiu, Hu Shi, Lu Xun, Lin overuses another theoretical apparatus which he doesn't make clearly until his later publications.
He accuses these intellectuals in being singleminded, in overlooking a high possibility in which good parts of both the west and of the Chinese culture can be put into "creative transformation" rather than dichotic confrontation.
He expresses his disappointment in the form of "if they can imagine the creative transformation, . . " as if this possibility was a ready and tested remedy for the problem pressing these May Fourth figures, Being a pluralist myself, I do agree that there is more than one way towards modernity assume modernity itself is a desirable state of affairs and prosperity and each way will inevitably include, for good or for ill, local characteristics, including the western modernity.
But this does not mean that compatibility between western ideas and traditional Chinese culture is already an settled issue, especially for those May Fourth intellectuals, who faced not only the danger of being enslaved but also had seen the total failure of transplantation of western apparatus to the Chinese soil.
Compatibility between the west and Chinese ideas, is still a heatedly debated today, far from reaching a conclusive agreement, In his later publications, Lin relies on the universality of the values both Confucius and Mencius defend in order to render connectedness between Chinese culture and western ideas.
He claims, despite the abuses and misunderstandings later confucianism endorsed, the lighthouse of the whole system was unbiasedly the same, almost the same as in Socrates and Plato.
He criticizes Chen who divides the values a system claims to honor and the system's teachings, Chen sees these values universally endorsed across civilizations and thus not counted as the real content of a particular culture, Lin can't bear this split since it is these vales that renders these concrete teachings legitimate, I strongly disagree. Actually Lin has already noticed a difference between Chinese and western

way of thinking about morality when he compares Confucius and Mencius with Socrates and Plato in the appendix to his PhD dissertation, namely there is no independent place for human reason in the Chinese way of thinking.
Moral intuition and moral teachings consist the whole system of morality without reason's checking, Then, there lies a possibility of abuse, which is largely true to Chinese history, of moral intuitions, And this abuse often leads to catastrophe, as Lin's mentor Hayek aptly pointed out, in his Road to Serfdom and CounterRevolution of Science.


Additionally, Lin's attack on these particular intellectuals is also exclusively carried out in the culturalintellectualist way, although the first part of the book took a lot of sociohistorical accounts into consideration.
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