Lü Zuqian’s Political Philosophy

Abstract

Northern Song thinkers like Zhou Dunyi 周敦頤, Zhang Zai 張載, and the Cheng brothers (Cheng Hao 程顥 and Cheng Yi 程頤) are often seen as marking a turning point in the long history of Chinese philosophy. Unlike earlier Confucian thinkers who paid little attention to abstract issues, these thinkers apparently have turned toward “pure thought” and advanced cosmological, even metaphysical explanations of the world. In fact, they seem to be true “philosophers” in the original Greek sense. However, this description misses one crucial point: the followers of the Learning of the Way (daoxue 道學) never practiced the “value-free” contemplation of the world sub specie aeternitatis: they always maintained that their ideas about the cosmos and moral cultivation would eventually result in the radical transformation of the political, cultural, and social worlds. This notion of profound renewal certainly has less in common with the ideas of a traditional Western philosopher like Plato who retreated from the muddiness of the human world by founding the famous academy and who never thought of society as perfectible (Plato 2000: 312[592b]). Rather, it more closely resembles the views of modern thinkers like Marx, Heidegger, or Wittgenstein, who called for the abandonment of the philosopher’s detached “theoretical stance,” arguing instead for a close engagement with the realm of human practice.