Liang the Philosopher of Living: On the Counter-Enlightenment Thought of Liang Shuming During the 1920s

The popularity of counter-Enlightenment thought, or namely critiques towards Enlightenment rationalism and universalism, during and following the May Fourth period (1915–1927) is a remarkably influential phenomenon within modern Chinese history, albeit one which is seldom studied or even mentioned. Of the different counter-Enlightenment schools, the present study primarily focuses on Liang Shuming’s (1893–1988) “philosophy of living” owing to it being the most influential counter-Enlightenment thought during the May Fourth period and the best representative of the contentions between Western rationalism and the traditional Chinese mind. In this article, I elucidate the metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics as well as the social aspects of Liang’s philosophy of living, while paying particular attention to the Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist sources of his views. One of the major goals of the present work is to indicate that his philosophy of living, being a response to Enlightenment rationalism, is not another form of Romantic or Neo-Romantic philosophy, or even of German Lebensphilosophie (often translated as “philosophy of life”), since it predominantly draws from Buddhist and Chinese sources which differ significantly from Western philosophies. Liang was likely the first modern Chinese intellectual to successfully articulate several of the most fundamental differences between the Western and Chinese worldviews, epistemologies, mindsets, and even ethics. His philosophy exalts will, nature, holism, dynamism, intuition, and compassion, as well as valuing concepts such as process, art, emotion, mutual affection, social instincts, voluntary action, harmony, guild socialism, and above all, “becoming.” In contrast, he sought to criticize the will to acquire, self-regarding desire, atomism, rationalism, intellectualism, calculative reason, utilitarianism, law, social engineering, capitalism, modernity, and a mechanistic worldview based on the idea of “being.” He placed particular emphasis on the idea of a dynamic, life-like cosmic process and affectionate society, while criticizing the reification and alienation caused by Enlightenment rationalism that imbued itself with the conceptions of static substance, law, form, and utility. Nevertheless, Liang acknowledged the merits of the Western rational world order and attempted to integrate it with traditional Chinese culture. Yet it appears that he ultimately failed to achieve a genuine philosophical synthesis of the fundamental principles of these distinctive worldviews.