Feng Yu-lan (1895-), noted philosopher, best known for his Chung-kuo che-hsueh-shih [history of Chinese philosophy] and for his philosophical system, which combined Neo-Confucianism of the Ch'eng-Chu school with Western realism and logic and with elements of Taoist thought. After 1950, he publicly committed himself to interpreting Chinese philosophy according to the tenets of Marxism-Leninism.
A native of T'angho, Honan, Feng Yu-lan was born into a landlord family. He received ] his early education from his parents, especially his mother, and from pi-ivate tutors. In 1910 he entered the Chung-chou Institute at Kaifeng, the provincial capital of Honan, where he came under the influence of teachers who exposed him to nationalistic and revolutionary ideas. Feng then was awarded a provincial scholarship which enabled him to study at the Chung-kuo kung-hsueh [China academy] at Shanghai. At that time, Western political and social thought was being introduced into China through the translations of Yen Fu (q.v.). The Chung-kuo kung-hsueh, one of the more progressive schools of that period, offered its students a course in logic, using Yen Fu's Chinese version of William Stanley Jevons' Primer of Logic as the textbook. However, the teachers were not capable of teaching the course. Feng related that one teacher made the students recite the text word by word and that another teacher resigned because he could not solve one of the problems in the book. In 1915, when Feng heard that a department of Western philosophy was to be established at National Peking University, he immediately applied for admission. But the professor who was to teach Western philosophy died, and Feng entered the department of Chinese philosophy instead.
After graduation from Peking University in 1918, Feng returned to Kaifeng and edited a bi-weekly paper devoted to current events. In 1919 he was granted a scholarship by the ministry of education in Peking to continue his studies abroad. After arriving in New York in December 1919, he sas admitted to the graduate school of Columbia University. He received instruction from two of America's most eminent philosophers of that period, John Dewey and Frederick J. E. Woodbridge, and obtained the Ph.D. degree in 1923. His dissertation was entitled "A Comparative Study of Life Ideals: the Way of Decrease and Increase, with Interpretations and Illustrations from the Philosophies of the East and West." After returning to China in the latter part of 1923, Feng was appointed professor of philosophy at the newly founded Chung-chou University at Kaifeng. That winter he gave a lecture, "A Conception of Life," to the students of the Shantung First Provincial Middle School. In that lecture, later published as a booklet, he touched on some of the topics then being debated by Chinese intellectuals. In 1926 he published his Jen-sheng che-hsueh [philosophy of life], which was based on his doctoral dissertation, but which incorporated some of the points made in the 1923 lecture. The publication of Jen-sheng che-hsueh coincided with heated debates among Chinese intellectuals about the comparative value of Western and Oriental civilizations and about the superiority of a scientific or a metaphysical view of life. In general, the conservative camp, including such men as Carsun Chang (Chang Chia-sen), Liang Ch'ich'ao, and Liang Shu-ming (qq.v.), argued for the superiority of Oriental civilization because of its dominant concern for the spiritual aspects of man's existence, as opposed to the materialistic preoccupation of the West. The liberal camp, including such men as Shu Hsin-ch'eng, V. K. Ting (Ting Wen-chiang), and Hu Shih (qq.v.) emphasized the material foundation of moral values and the importance of scientific method in achieving that material progress which is the indispensable basis for a moral life. Thus, Feng's book was another manifestation of the general concern in China about the validity of the Chinese way of life.
Feng stated in his book that the material world is real and that the universe exists independently of human purpose. The laws of nature, which are immutable, can be discovered through scientific experiments and logical reasoning. But human norms and values are relative: their validity is dependent upon their ability to harmonize the greatest number of conflicting human desires. Because human societies are not static, human values also change in accordance with changes in the social system. Feng adhered to the traditional Chinese view that the achievement of social harmony is the chief criterion for judging the worth of a particular social system. In this regard, he made the following statement: 'Tor example, at present we all consider a socialist social system superior to a capitalist social system. W^hy? It is just because many of the human desires that can be satisfied by a socialist social system cannot be satisfied by a capitalist social system, while many of those human desires that can be satisfied by a capitalist social system can be satisfied by a socialist social system. The relative superiority of the socialist social system is due precisely to its ability to obtain a greater measure of 'harmony'." In 1927 Feng was appointed professor of philosophy at Tsinghua University. That year, he and his associates founded the Che-hsueh p'inglun [philosophical review], a journal which continued publication until the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937. Feng was promoted in 1933 to chairman of the department of philosophy and dean of the college of arts at Tsinghua. Two years later, he helped to organize the Chung-kuo che-hsueh hui [philosophical society of China], which held its first meeting in Peiping.
Feng's major contribution to the history of philosophy was the two-volume Chung-kuo chehsueh-shih [history of Chinese philosophy] . The first volume, published by the Shen-chou Publishing Company in Shanghai in 1931, covered what is perhaps the most brilliant period of Chinese philosophy—its beginnings to about 100 B.C. The first volume was reprinted by the Commercial Press in Shanghai in 1934, and a second volume, which covered the subject from about 100 B.C. to the twentieth century, was published. A separate supplement to the work appeared in 1936. The most complete work on the subject, Feng's Chung-kuo che-hsueh-shih won him acclaim in China. It became known in the West through the English translation of Derk Bodde, who attended Feng's class on Chinese philosophy in 1934-35 and undertook the task of translating the work shortly thereafter. The translation of the first volume was published in Peiping by Henri 'etch in the summer of 1937.
In his preface, Feng stated .-t^at his approach to the writing of the history of« Chinese philosophy was influenced by the methodolog' of modern Western historiography. He asserted that up to the end of the Ch'ing dynasty China had had only ancient and medieval philosophies. He attributed the absence of modern philosophies to the fundamental stability of Chinese political, social, and economic institutions since the establishment of the Ch'in empire in the third century B.C. During the post-Ch'in period—which Feng called the Period of Classical Learning, as distinguished from the pre-Ch'in or ancient period, which he called the Period of Philosophers—philosophical discussions were essentially medieval in spirit because the philosophers expounded their views within the framework of the ancient systems. However, according to Feng, history is progressive, advancing from the simple to the complex. Therefore, although the scholars of the Period of Classical Learning did not formulate completely new philosophical theories, they nevertheless refined, expanded, and modified the old concepts. But the intellectual and social changes in twentieth-century China were so great that the classical philosophies no longer sufficed for the needs of the modern generation, and the Period of Classical Learning finally came to aH end.
Feng's Chung-kuo che-hsueh-shih was completed at a time when the methods of Chinese historical study were changing. The traditional writing of history by separate dynasties, with its obligatory categories of praise and blame and its cyclical interpretation of human events, had been discredited. In its place appeared histories written to present the linear progress of human societies and the interrelatedness of political, economic, and intellectual trends. Some historians subjected ancient documents and writings to searching criticism, questioning their reliability and authenticity, and others attempted to reconstruct the early history of China with the aid of modern archaeological discoveries. As the problems of political reform, economic reconstruction, war, and revolution increasingly claimed the attention of the nation's intellectuals, historians became involved in ideological disputes. Scholars often reconstructed the past to make a point about the present. Though stressing the philosophical thought of the past, Feng was also seeking inspiration for the construction of his own philosophical system, which he hoped would provide guidance to the Chinese people at a time of national crisis. The Sino-Japanese war began in 1937. Peiping was lost to the Japanese soon after the beginning of hostilities. The three famous northern universities—Tsinghua, Peking, and Xankai—moved from the enemy-occupied zone to Changsha in Hunan province, where they combined their resources. The college of arts was located at Heng-shan, one of the five sacred mountains of China. During the four months that Feng was there, he drafted most of Hsin li-hsueh [new Neo-Confucianism] . The manuscript was finished in the summer of 1938 in Yunnan and the book was published in 1939. Hsin shih-lun [new culture and society] and Hsin shih-hsun [new self] were published in 1940, followed by Hsin yuan jen [new morality] in 1943, Hsin yuan tao [new philosophy] in 1944, and Hsin chih yen [new scholarship] in 1946. Together with Hsin li-hsueh, these works constitute a complete philosophical system. Feng called them a '"series written at a time of national rebirth" as an affirmation of his faith in China's ability to survive its gravest modern crisis. The war touched Feng deeply. He' saw his beloved country ravaged by an enemy, and he sent his eldest son to the Salween front in 1943. He returned in 1944 to his ancestral home in Honan, which he had not seen for some 20 years, to bury his mother in an enemy-infested province.
Feng's wartime series was reprinted many times during the 1940's. The metaphysical features of Hsin li-hsueh were summarized by Feng himself in the last chapter of The Spirit of Chinese Philosophy (the English translation of the Hsin yuan tao by E. R. Hughes, London, 1947). This work was basically a new development of the Xeo-Confucianism of the Ch'eng-Chu school. The rationalist Xeo-Confucian element was combined with Western realism and logic and with elements of negativism and transcendentalism found in Taoism. In a sense, Feng's philosophical system was in the mainstream of the Chinese philosophical tradition, although he modified tradition to suit the requirements of modern times. Of particular interest, in view of his later conversion to Marxism-Leninism, was his assertion that the economic foundation of a society determines its moral values. For this reason, he declared, neither parliamentary democracy nor Communism could be effective in contemporary China until the nation had been industrialized. The energy expended on ideological disputation, he concluded, might better be spent on economic construction. At the end of the war, Feng went to the United States on a Rockefeller grant as a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania for the academic year 1946-47. He spent 1947-48 at the University of Hawaü. In April 1947 he participated in a colloquium on China held at Princeton University during its bicentennial celebrations. Princeton awarded him an honorary Doctor of Laws degree. During the year in Philadelphia, while he was collaborating with Derk Bodde on the English translation of the second volume of the Chung-kuo che-hsueh-shih, he decided to write, with Bodde's assistance, a brief version of his work for Western readers. This version also embodied a number of conclusions and interpretations arrived at by Feng after the original publication of his work in China. In 1948 A Short History of Chinese Philosophy was published in New York. Although not an objective historical summary, it is a stimulating interpretation of Chinese philosophical history. The disproportionate emphasis placed on Sung Xeo-Confucianism and on the Confucian way of spiritual development is in accordance with Feng's assertion that the history of Chinese philosophy is a continuous effort to discover the way of "sageness within and kingliness without." After returning to China in the summer of 1948, Feng resumed his teaching post at Tsinghua University. During 1948-49 Professor Bodde, who was in China on a Fulbright fellowship, continued to work with Feng on the translation of the second volume of the Chung-kuo che-hsueh-shih despite the tensions that accompanied the final period of Xationalist rule in north China. (The English translation of the second volume was published in 1953 by the Princeton University Press, which also reissued the translation of the first volume.) In December 1948 troops of the Communist Fourth Field Army reached the Tsinghua campus, located just west of Peiping. Feng Yu-lan remained at the university during and after the takeover.
The Central People's Government, which was inaugurated on 1 October 1949, demanded intellectual conformity. As early as 1 1 October 1949, the Peking government promulgated a set of provisional regulations governing the teaching of humanities in institutions of higher learning. According to them, the teaching of philosophy was aimed at guiding students to a deeper understanding of the theory of dialectical materialism. They also required that the history of Chinese philosophy be interpreted in accordance with the tenets of Marxism-Leninism. Feng, together with other non-Communist intellectuals, was to undergo the process of thought reform.
The Communist revolution, by its very boldness and energy in tackling the problems of postwar China, was attractive to many Chinese intellectuals. Feng was particularly impressed by the agrarian reform program. In 1950 he wrote a letter to Mao Tse-tung saying that he was "unwilling to be a remnant of a bygone age in a time of greatness" and offering to participate in the remolding of his own ideas. Mao Feng Yu-lan [36] replied immediately, welcoming his decision. Subsequently, Feng went to a village and took part for a time in land reform.
Later in 1950 Feng wrote for the editors of the Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopedüa [great Soviet encyclopedia] an article on the development of Chinese philosophy in which he attempted for the first time to explain the history of Chinese thought in Marxist terms. The article ended with a tribute to Mao Tse-tung's On Practice, which, according to Feng's article, had solved the traditional Chinese philosophical problem of the relationship between "knowledge" and "practice" within the framework of Marxism- Leninism, thus showing the way for the present and future development of Chinese philosophy. In 1952 the Central People's Government completed the reorganization of the country's institutions of higher education. Tsinghua became a polytechnical university. Its department of philosophy was transferred to Peking University, and Feng went to teach there. In 1956 he was appointed to the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. In keeping with the spirit of the Hundred Flowers Campaign, Feng was sent to Europe in the autumn to attend the Geneva meeting of intellectuals on the problem of tradition and innovation in the modern world. Then Feng went to Venice to attend a conference sponsored by the European Cultural Association. In his report on these meetings, he asserted that the preoccupation of the Western intellectuals with the "cultural crisis" of the modern world reflected the contradiction between advanced methods of production and backward social systems in the Western nations.
The Hundred Flowers Campaign and its attendant relaxation of ideological control did not last long. In 1957 an anti-rightist campaign was launched when the Communists came to realize the extent of the opposition to their policies despite years of indoctrination and government control of all public expression. Feng was not ostracized as a rightist, but official guardians of political orthodoxy regarded his former confessions of ideological errors as being insufficiently thorough, and his writing came under a barrage of criticism.
On 8 January 1957 Feng had published an article in the Kuang-ming jih-pao entitled "The Problem of Inheriting the Philosophical Heritage of China." He deplored the fact that the Peking authorities, by negating the relevance of much of China's philosophical tradition on the grounds that it was idealistic and feudalistic, hampered the teaching of the history of Chinese philosophy. He argued that such teaching had been unfruitful in meeting ^lao Tse-tung's stated desire for a thorough reexamination of China's cultural heritage, "retaining its essence and discarding its dregs." Feng therefore proposed that certain traditional philosophical concepts and propositions be accepted as valid by abstracting them from their concrete, practical meaning as understood in traditional Chinese society. In other words, he argued that there are concepts and propositions which transcend the confines of class and time and can be applied equally well to feudal, bourgeois, or socialist societies. His Marxist critics declared that his position was essentially the same as the one advanced in his Hsin li-hsueh and that he had attempted to resuscitate the idealistic philosophies of traditional China under a new guise. From 1957 to 1959 Feng's philosophical ideas again became the target of criticism. By 1960 the fury of the anti-rightist campaign had spent itself, and the intellectual atmosphere had become more relaxed. It was perhaps at this time that Feng began to wTite a new history of Chinese philosophy in accordance with Marxist theories as he understood them. In 1962 he published Chung-kuo che-hsueh-shih shih-liao-hsueh cK'u-kao [a provisional study of the materials for a history of Chinese philosophy] in which he reviewed and criticized the resources in the field. In 1964 Chung-kuo che-hsueh-shih hsin-pien [new history of Chinese philosophy] appeared. It covered the period from Shang to Eastern Han.
Feng's Chung-kuo che-hsueh-shih sas reprinted in 1961 . Perhaps its reprinting was an acknowledgment by the authorities that the book had no peer and that the author was deemed ideologically reliable. In any event, Feng pointed out in a new introduction that the principal value of the book was to serve as an example of how the history of Chinese philosophy was erroneously written from the standpoint of the bourgeois class and in accordance with the methodology of bourgeois historiography. Feng's Chung-kuo che-hsueh-shih successfully utilized the methodology of modern historiography to systematically present the story of Chinese philosophy from the ancient period to the beginning of the twentieth century. His own philosophical system represents, to date, probably the most successful effort in modern times to revive Neo-Confucianism. In a period when different ideologies competed for the allegiance of the Chinese people, it wag a great tribute to Feng that the voice of a philosopher, not identified with any political faction or party, was both heard and respected.
Feng Yu-lan had a younger brother, Feng Ching-lan, who was a scientist. His younger sister, Feng Shu-Ian (1902-), better known as Feng Yuan-chün, was a graduate of the Women's Normal University at Peking who obtained the D.Litt. degree at the Sorbonne. She married Lu K'an-ju, and both she and her husband taught Chinese literature at Shantung University. In 1935 the couple collaborated on Chung-kuo shih-shih [history of Chinese poetry]. One of Feng Yuan-chün's major interests in the 1940's was the traditional theater, and in 1947 she published Ku-chu shuo hui [on the classical Chinese drama]. In 1957 she and Lu K'an-ju produced another joinc work, Chung-kuo ku-tien wen-hsueh chien-shih, which was republished in English translation in 1958 by the Foreign Language Press at Peking as A Short History of Classical Chinese Literature.
