Seminars

Dai Zhen 戴震 (1724-1777) believes the set of contested desires called “human desires” (renyu 人欲), which are deemed ethically problematic by the lights of the moral orthodoxy of his time, are in fact important constituents of virtuous character. Dai proposes that there is a better moral epistemology and metaethics (his own and Mengzi’s) which doesn’t trivialize them. The paper is an attempt to offer the first close reading and careful assessment of his argument that orthodox (Zhu Xi-style) Neo-Confucianism trivializes human desires to negative effect.

his paper reads Wang Chong as a philosopher of artifice, pulling together many of his defenses of artifice, deception, fakes, and falsehood in his Lunheng. The paper argues that Wang’s discussion of artifice is connected to his understanding of “technique” (shu) and his reflections on the indeterminacy of “worthiness” (xian).

This paper, which is a portion of a chapter from a book manuscript on Manchu literary-intellectual culture, considers Manchu assertions of contribution to Confucian culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It examines a Manchu essay on Han Yu's influential and provocative "Tracing the Way to its Source," as well as the discourse on classical translation in the Qianlong court to highlight how the Manchus claimed to have not merely adopted, but transformed Confucian learning.

In this presentation, Jean Tsui will talk about her new book Affective Betrayal: Mind, Music, and Embodied Action in Late Qing China. In this book, Jean studies the musical and visual representations of the progressive reformer Liang Qichao’s (1873-1929) political writings, emphasizing how Liang expanded the reception of textual knowledge from reading to listening and visualizing experiences. By tracing the marginalized academic and philosophical positions Liang sought to restore in this uncharted epistemic transition, Jean argues that the formation of China’s modern “political” order was contingent on the radical restructuring, and even disruption, of the internal “moral, philosophical, and intellectual” order.

What makes China unique in the world? In political theory, most scholars treat Confucianism as the intellectual and cultural legacy that makes China different from other societies. This article aims to answer this question differently. It argues that since the late nineteenth century when comparative historical sociology was systematically introduced to China, important political thinkers attributed China’s uniqueness to the fact that it had been a “classless society” under a despotism for two millennia. The lack of hereditary aristocracy and the reverence for social mobility under a despotism, in the eyes of Chinese thinkers, were both a curse and a blessing: A curse, because societies with a long history of feudalism and aristocracy tend to build a representative democracy more easily; a blessing, either because China would directly evolve into a more radical form of democracy once despotism is deposed, or because China can show the world a unique form of government: a meritocratic democracy. This paper focuses on Liang Qichao’s early political thought to exemplify how Chinese political thinkers reflect on representative democracy in a “classless society.”