Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-5lx2p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-26T16:01:04.904Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

T'ien-hsia and Kuo, and the “Transvaluation of Values”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

Joseph R. Levenson
Joseph R. Levenson
Affiliation:
University of California
Get access

Extract

Confucian reformers found a great deal wrong with China in the seventeenth century. The trouble was this, they felt: men had strayed from the fixed ideals of Chinese civilization. In the early twentieth century, anti Confucian reformers found a great deal wrong in the China of their day; they traced disaster, however, not to the flouting of fixed ideals but to blind and slavish respect for them, to the fixity itself. A seventeenth-century world, a t'ien-hsia, in which traditional values claimed authority, had become a twentieth-century nation, a kuo, in which traditional values were impugned as tyranny.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , August 1952 , pp. 447 - 451
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1952

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Huang Tsung-hsi , Ming-i tai-fang lu , 1 chuan, in Ku Hsiang (ed.), H siao-shi shan-fang ts'ung-shu , 1874, tse 5, lb-2bGoogle Scholar. A translation of a part of this passage and of several others in the Ming-i tai-fang lu will appear in the forthcoming volume tentatively entitled China's Response to the West, by J. K. Fairbank, Teng Ssu-yu, and E-tu Zen Sun.

I wish to thank Mr. David Nivison for valuable criticism and suggestions.

2 Huang, op. cit., 4.

3 Ku Yen-wu , Jih-chih lu , 32 chuan, ed. Huang Ju-ch'eng , 1834, 1.13Google Scholar.

4 Ibid., 13.5b.

5 Ibid., 13.6.

6 Ibid., 7.1b.

7 Mencius, VII B, ch. 13. See Legge, , The Chinese Classics, (Oxford, 1895) II, 483: “There are instances of individuals without benevolence who have got possession of a (single) state, but there has been no instance of the throne's being got by one without benevolence.”Google Scholar

8 Ku, op. cit., 12.10b.

9 Ibid., 2.12–12b.

10 Liang Ch'i-ch'ao , “Hsin-min shuo” (Discourses on the new people), Yin-ping-shih wen-chi (Collected essays of the Ice-drinkers’ Studio), Shanghai, 1925, 12.51–51bGoogle Scholar.