Interview with Li Zehou

Southern People Weekly, “Li Zehou Thanks his Readers in his Final Interview”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Li Zehou (b. 1930), a towering figure in contemporary Chinese intellectual life, died on November 2, 2021 in Boulder, Colorado at the age of 91.  Despite his immense prestige in China, Li had never really been on my radar, perhaps because he did most of his thinking and writing (although certainly not all—Li remained extremely active throughout his life) prior to China’s rise, the main focus of this site, or perhaps because Li was principally interested in aesthetics and ethics, fields I do not often visit.  That said, while reading through the outpouring of Chinese commentary Li’s death evoked, I was struck by the fact that certain expressions, concepts, and turns of phrase that are widely used in the Chinese intellectual world, and that had heretofore struck me as simply idiosyncratic, were in fact Li Zehou’s inventions, and thus stand as monuments to the impact he has had over several generations of Chinese thinkers.  In a modest effort to plug some of the holes in my vast ignorance of Li , I decided to translate a long interview Southern People Weekly did with him last year, on the occasion of his 90th birthday.  The magazine reprinted the interview the day following Li’s death.
 
Li Zehou was born to a poor family in Hunan in 1930, but by dint of brilliance and hard work studied philosophy at Peking University, graduating in 1954.  For the rest of his career in China he worked at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, where China’s best and brightest are paid to do their research and to read and write; Li never had regular teaching duties until his American exile in the 1990s. 
 
Li was a convinced Marxist but a stubbornly independent thinker.  He first made his mark in the 1950s when, as a very young man, he took on China’s reigning authorities in the field of aesthetics, Zhu Guangqian 朱光潛 (1897-1986) and Cai Yi 蔡仪 (1906-1992), arguing essentially that beauty cannot be reduced to material causes or class interests, but speaks instead to human agency and interaction with nature and the world.  Although this willingness to challenge dogma and authority seems to have characterized Li throughout his life, he generally seems to have stayed out of trouble until the early 1990s.  Like many intellectuals of his generation, he was sent down to a May 7th Cadre School during the Cultural Revolution to “learn from the poor peasants.”   During this period, Li did much of the work on Kant that he later published as Critique of Critical Philosophy: A New Approach to Kant ­批判哲學的批判—康德述評 (1979).  Li was extremely active during the 1980s, a major figure in what is known as “China’s Second Enlightenment.”  He was openly critical of the government’s crackdown on students and other demonstrators in 1989, and after a period of house arrest, he was eventually allowed to leave for the United States, where he remained for the rest of his life, although he made occasional visits to China.  He continued to publish at a remarkable rhythm.

I find it impossible to do justice to the range of Li’s ideas in a few paragraphs.  He was deeply learned, steeped in many fields of knowledge both Chinese and Western, had a keen sense for what mattered, and was also something of a contrarian.  Marx was important to him, because he had grown up poor and understood the necessity of struggle; in the interview translated below, Li talks about his “philosophy of eating,” which speaks to the same concern.  At the same time, Li opposed any kind of determinism, which he saw as a denial of human agency, which in turns explains his embrace of Kant, who was concerned above all with the mental and ideal aspects of human nature—knowledge, morality, and aesthetics. 
 
For Li, the defining characteristic of humankind is our ability to make tools, allowing us to confront nature and shape our destiny.  These tools are handed down and evolve, becoming the heritage and common property of a culture or eventually humanity as a whole.  The “tools” modern China needed were those that would facilitate China’s modernization.  Hence Li’s controversial argument that China’s task at hand was to “take Western learning as fundamental” and Chinese learning as something to be practically applied in the course of modernization, reversing the terms of Zhang Zhidong’s well known nineteenth-century dictum that China must take “Chinese learning as fundamental” and exploit Western learning for its practical utility.   Zhang Zhidong’s formula came to symbolize an almost tribal loyalty to Chinese culture and tradition.  Li Zehou seems to have had few tribal instincts.
 
In the 1980s, for example, Li joined in the widespread criticism of Maoist voluntarism, which to many Chinese intellectuals explained the excesses of the Chinese revolution or perhaps the revolution itself.  At the same time, Li also criticized thinkers like Wang Ruosui who sought to revive Marx’s original humanism through discussion of ideas like “alienation.”  Li fully endorsed humanism, but felt that Wang and company were in danger of leaving Marx’s promise of “changing the world” behind with their embrace of their particular understanding of the young Marx.  Li similarly felt that many Chinese thinkers who rushed to adopt Western ideas and ideologies in the 1980s were taking Mao’s voluntarism in another direction by overemphasizing the importance of ideas, and he pushed back by highlighting the “practical rationality” that marked traditional Confucian thought.  At the same time, Li often traced the source of Mao’s voluntarism to Wang Yangming and other Confucian thinkers.
 
I do not know if Li ever achieved a grand synthesis of his ideas; he may have been too intelligent to attempt such a thing.  I like Woei Lien Chong’s summary appraisal:  “Li’s own life work is a consistent attempt to define the role of human agency in such a way that the extremes of determinism and voluntarism can be avoided.”[2] In any event, the interview translated here will give readers a taste of Li’s ideas as well as a sense of his feisty character.  In the Chinese text, the interview is preceded by a long reflection on Li which I did not translate.  I found it to be a bit too much “inside baseball” for my taste.
 
For those who might like to know more about Li and his ideas, I highly recommend Woei Lien Chong’s “Combining Marx with Kant:  The Philosophical Anthropology of Li Zehou,” from which I borrowed most of my summary.  There is a recent book on Li—Jana Rošker, Following His Own Path:  Li Zehou and Contemporary Chinese Philosophy—which I have yet to read.  For those interested in Li’s aesthetics, the best source in English is probably Four Essays on Aesthetics: Toward a Global View (2006), which Li wrote together with his Colorado College colleague Jane Cauvel.  Relatively little of Li’s work is available in English (see here for a list of his principle publications), perhaps because it is too philosophical?  Li published two volumes of “conversations”—one with the New Confucian Chen Ming, and another with the author and literary scholar Liu Zaifu—which I will take a look at.  Interviews or conversations are often useful shortcuts to complicated ideas.
 
Translation
 
Sound Rung Out of Profound Silence:  A Dialogue with Li Zehou
 
Talking about the Past
 
LZH:  I’ll say a few words to start things off, if that’s okay.
 
RWZK:  Please go ahead.
 
LZH:  I have not been interviewed for many years, and I hesitated for a bit before agreeing to do this one. I am ninety years old and don’t have many years left, and I think this will be my last opportunity. Friends have told me that there are still people who are eager to read my books, even those I published decades ago, and in fact I have always appreciated the enthusiastic attention and support of my readers. Publishers tell me that my books are selling well in third-tier cities, which particularly pleases me. At the time, I did not expect that books like The Path of Beauty 美的历程 or A Critique of Critical Philosophy 批判哲学的批判, which were written in the 1970s, would continue to sell well for decades. It makes me wonder if philosophy has to be esoteric and incomprehensible. Heidegger and Wittgenstein both raised their objections to this, but their books are still hard to read, so I wonder if philosophy has to be like this.  I don’t know the answer, and bring it up for general discussion. Anyway, my last word to my readers is thank you! This is a farewell of sorts.
 
RWZK:  I can’t help but be moved. 
 
LZH:  It is what it is.  My health has not been too good recently.  I got tuberculosis in my twenties, and when I was in the May 7 cadre school,[3] I was assigned to the group of the old, sick, and disabled. Both of my parents died before reaching the age of 40, so I thought that I would not make it past 60.  I had no idea that I would live so long, which is also a random piece of luck.  It sounds bad when I say it like that, but it’s true. 
 
RWZK:   Li Er 李洱 (b. 1966) mentions you in his novel Brother Yingwu 应物兄, for which he won the Mao Dun Literature Prize, and part of the novel is based on a lecture you gave at East China Normal University in 1986. Do you remember this event? I heard that you only spoke for 15 minutes at that time? Why was it so short, and do you still remember it? 
 
LZH:  I wasn’t the only one speaking, and other people had already said a lot.  But they really wanted me to talk, even though I hadn’t prepared anything in particular.  A lot of people were dissatisfied with me, but there was nothing I could do! (Laughter). 
 
RWZK:  In an interview from ten years ago you said that had you known how popular you were on university campuses you would have gone more often. Do you feel that you gave too few talks like this? 
 
LZH:  Once I’ve written my articles, I don’t want to repeat myself over and over.  My ego is not comfortable doing that.  I feel like I don’t have that much to say, so I wound up refusing a lot of invitations.  I’m not like a lot of people who are always giving talks all the time.  Of course, I’m not against people who do that.  
 
RWZK:  In 2014, you went to East China Normal University to give a seminar on ethics.  What was the occasion? After so many years, why did you go back to the university? 
 
LZH:  Tong Shijun 童世骏 (b. 1958), the Party Secretary at East China Normal University, is a very good scholar, and he is the one invited me. Another thing was that Professor Yang Guorong 杨国荣(b. 1957) had invited me several times, and I accepted four times but never wound up going.  In 2014, when I gave my first lecture, I said that I had come to pay my debt because I promised people that I would speak four times, so I would give four lectures. 
 
The important thing for me on that occasion was to give a relatively concentrated exposition of the three major points addressed in my overall outline of ethics. So I asked questions, and let the students answer them, after which I made comments. They edited a book called What is Morality? My habit is to not change a single word that others say, and to only make changes in what I say. I followed the same principle in other dialogues such as The Theory of the Floating Life[4] 浮生论学, and Farewell to Revolution[5] 告别革命.
 
RWZK:  Do you still like to use the question and answer format? 
 
LZH:  Yes, I think the dialogue form suits the way I express myself as I get older.  It’s crisp, fresh and direct, and I don’t have to bother with quoting the classics or marshalling a lot of evidence to prove my points.  I don’t come off like a big shot reading his own essays, and I don’t get lost in formalities. This may be not be what other people are doing in academics these days, but I don’t care.  I model myself on Confucius and Mencius, Plato, Zhu Xi, and Wang Yangming. 
 
As I have said many times, philosophy is about "making concepts and developing perspectives to advance critical reflection."  This is different from knowledge (something about which we are objectively certain) and belief (something about which we are subjectively certain) (this is Kant's statement, with which I agree), but philosophy is not knowledge, understanding, or science. But there’s no harm in being penetrating, and you can clear things up in a few sentences, without so much detail. It is the style of postmodernism to ramble on for so long that no one knows what you are talking about. 
 
The book I published last year, Overview of a New Theory on Ethics, is also in the form of a dialogue with myself, and serves as well as a concise summary of my work on ethics.  When I talk about a “new theory,” I mean something that exists neither in the West nor in China.  I make a strict distinction between the terms "ethics" and "morality.”  There is a similar distinction in the West, but it is not as strict as mine. People in the West might accept my ideas at some point, but probably not now.  This brief book gives a summary account of the three main points of my view ethics. I talk mainly about the philosophical framework of ethics as a whole, and not about content. Since ethics includes political philosophy, various kinds of normative ethics, and moral psychology, etc., it is important to first figure out the entire formal structure, which is a prerequisite for the study of something this vast and boundless.
 
The point of my ethics is mainly to show that human morality, in terms of individuals, comes down to education, meaning education as understood in broad terms, not just the education you receive in school.  Your entire environment is a sort of education, including family, society, customs and habits, these are all part of education. Indians eat with their hands and wipe their butts with their hands as well. When I was talking about cleanliness, an Indian raised an argument with me, saying:  "It is unsanitary to eat with chopsticks, like you do in China, because everyone winds up sharing everyone else’s saliva.”  He was right.  Some customs wind up turning into external ethics and internal morality. Chinese Confucians make a big deal about "filial piety," a sort of a priori "filial piety." It is very abstract and esoteric to say that "filial piety" is part of an a priori "nature,” and in fact "filial piety" is very concrete. In the olden days, it was said that " There are three things which are unfilial, and to have no posterity is the greatest of them,"[6] but is this still the case? In the past, free love was immoral and young people had to “obey the parents' orders, and the matchmakers' decisions," and women did not have the right to choose their husbands. Before 1949, in remote rural areas, people who committed adultery were drowned in a pig cage, a punishment called "sinking in the pond." Now, free love is moral, and it is immoral to oppose free love. It is not clear which is a priori. The same is true of filial piety. If you first wife cannot give birth to a son, then filial piety means taking a concubine.  Is this "a priori"? We can see that "filial piety” is made up of concrete and tangible behavior and psychology.

RWZK:  It seems as if it never bothered you to offend people. 
 
LZH:  I have never worried about offending people over issues of scholarship. In my view, scholarly differences should not hurt personal relationships, and during the Cultural Revolution, I would bring a bottle of liquor to Zhu Guangqian's[7] 朱光潜 (1897-1986) house and we would share a meal. I have several good friends, many of whose views I have explicitly opposed. Sun Changjiang 孙长江 (1933-2020), Jin Chongji 金冲及 (b. 1930) and I have argued on paper, but we’re still good friends.
 
 
RWZK:  When you were in your twenties and started to debate aesthetics with the older generation of scholars, were you not a little bit hesitant? 
 
LZH:  Not even a little bit. When I was a student at Peking University, to tell the truth, I mainly studied on my own, and after reading a certain number books, I had an idea of what I was worth. I never believed in mentors. Later, Feng Youlan 冯友兰(1895-1990) and Hu Sheng 胡绳[8] (1918-2000) both wanted me to be their graduate student, but I refused. My feeling is that, at least in the field of humanities, you don’t need advisors like that, because they come with constraints.  You’re an adult, you can make your own choices and think for yourself. I always looked for answers in books. In fact, you can also ask a teacher.  The word for “scholarship” in Chinese means “study and ask,” so you should ask.  But this is one of my deficiencies, and I suffered a lot for it.  I am not very willing to interact with people, and this is my biggest weakness. 
 
RWZK:  Have you always been this way? 
 
LZH:  Since I was a little kid.  This is just my character, the randomness of character. (Laughter).
 
RWZK:  When the martial arts novelist Jin Yong 金庸 (1924-2018) passed away, you wrote a article commemorating him, and mentioned that he once offered you $6,000 USD, which you did not accept but also did not tell anyone, and only the person who had gone with you to Jin Yong's place knew about it. This article caused a great deal of controversy when Jin Yong died. 
 
LZH:  When I went to the U.S. to teach, my salary was pretty good.  When most Chinese professors go abroad to “teach” in fact they are visiting scholars, and they don’t teach.  At the time, I was teaching just like the other professors, and was giving three courses a year.  In material terms, there’s a huge difference between visiting scholars and visiting professors.  Later on, I kept getting invited, was never unemployed, and always had plenty of money.  Jin Yong helped out a friend of his, by giving him $30,000 USD, but the friend did not need it all, and gave $6,000 back to Jin Yong. Jin tried to give it to me, which just seemed like charity. I was in Hong Kong for a meeting, and he asked me to come by and pick it up, but of course I refused categorically.   At the time, I was sending $3,000 USD to my sister in China, so why would I need his money? I didn’t want to be shouldered with a debt of gratitude for this $6,000, so I firmly refused. Jin Yong was very surprised, and when I left, he made a big deal about seeing me out.  We were both very polite and no one was upset. I thanked him for his kindness. I've never had a problem with Jin Yong. I participated in his activities as I always did, and when he invited me to dinner, I went, and we still talked and laughed, and he even complimented my writings once when he was in Anhui. This event did not cause any falling out, but then again we had never been all that close either. I think is was no big deal for either of us. 
 
This was in the 1990s, and someone did some calculations and said that I could have bought a house with $6,000 USD in China at the time, but I just laughed.  Later on, some people wanted to include my piece on Jin Yong in a memorial collection and asked my opinion. I said, "I won't change a single word.”  They asked me twice, and I gave the same answer, because there was nothing that I needed to change. A lot of people around Jin Yong said that he paid a lot of attention to money, maybe too much attention. This is not a big fault, he just liked money, it is not a huge shortcoming. He was not really a miser, and although he knew lots of people thought he was stingy, he didn’t care. 
 
I didn't really want to write the piece about Jin Yong, but my friends kept pushing me, but since I had nothing to say other than praise for Jin Yong, I mentioned the story of the $6,000 in passing.  After the article came out, many people criticized me. And to tell the truth, I am indeed too ignorant of the human condition. There is an old Chinese saying: "There are no good people at a struggle session 批判会, and no bad people at a memorial service." If you are going to criticize someone, you can’t talk about their merits, and you shouldn't talk about their flaws at a memorial service. I didn’t pay much attention to this, and went against everybody’s ideas of etiquette, so I deserved to get yelled at.  

On Scholarship 
 
RWZK:  During the May 4th period this year, there was a video on the Internet about changing generations of Chinese youth[9] that provoked a lot of discussion.  What do you think about the question? 
 
LZH:  I wrote two articles about the May Fourth Movement. One is "Salvation and Enlightenment:  Variations on a Theme 救亡与启蒙的双重变奏," which has been talked about a lot. The other one is shorter, and called "Where the Enlightenment is Heading 启蒙的走向," which has not received much attention, but is in fact very important. On the 70th anniversary of the May Fourth Incident in 1989, Peking University organized a symposium, and many people gave speeches, which is when I talked about “Where the Enlightenment is Heading.”  One of the topics of the May Fourth Movement was enlightenment, but beginning in the 1990s, some young Chinese scholars came out with a lot of postmodern theories and opposed the idea of enlightenment. First we need to be clear on what enlightenment is. Kant made it very clear that enlightenment is the awakening of reason. During the May Fourth period, China's enlightenment was also for the purpose of saving the country, which I also made clear. Some people criticized me, but they had not bothered to read my article. From the very beginning of that article, I insisted that salvation and enlightenment were mutually reinforcing. In "Where the Enlightenment is Heading," I also said that the May Fourth Movement was "more passionate than rational.” At that time, people were burning down Zhaojialou and beating up the foreign minister,[10] and only one person noted that this was against the law—Liang Shuming[11] 梁漱溟 (1893-1988).  Another thing is that during the Republican period, the Kuomintang wanted to change the Youth Day from May 4 to March 29, which was the day of the death of the 72 martyrs of the Second Guangzhou Uprising[12] 黄花岗七十二烈士殉难, which was the Kuomintang's attempt to preserve the unity of the Party and the country, but it didn't work out. Our generation still remembers it, but I suspect that yours doesn’t know much about it.
 
The Enlightenment gave birth to modern society. Modern society is based on the individual unit and the principle of contract. Traditional China had no contracts.  But now some people talk about enlightenment in a very strange way, and include all kinds of weird things. I think the Enlightenment is still the Enlightenment of the past, and that there is no other Enlightenment. There are famous American scholars who say that the Song-Ming Neoconfucianism was a kind of enlightenment, can you agree with that? This is why in 2004 I argued that we still need the Enlightenment, and not something else.  At that time, Jiang Qing 蒋庆 (b. 1953) and his New Confucian crowd were organizing groups to read the classics, saying that there was no more need for schools. Some people even argued that the Empress Dowager Cixi was wrong to abolish the imperial examinations, but if you do not abolish the imperial examinations and set up new-style schools, how will there be modernization? Some people really believed in this and talked about “academies” rather than schools.  The result proved to be a decade of failure, producing students who know nothing. Enlightenment is a necessary condition to promote modernization. Enlightenment is what Europe talked about, the Enlightenment of rationality.  There is no other Enlightenment. 
 
RWZK:  Have you thought about the problems the Enlightenment wrought? 
 
LZH:  Of course, the Enlightenment did bring many problems. In the Overview of a New Theory of Ethics, which I mentioned a few minutes ago, there is a special section called "going too far is just as bad as not going far enough." If reason controls everything, it results in the supremacy of reason. It leads to vicious competition, disparity between the rich and the poor, control of resources in the name of the individual, etc. As a result, it leads to the anti-Enlightenment and anti-rational thinking. It started with Nietzsche, and continued with Foucault, Derrida and others.  Anti-Enlightenment and anti-rational thinking is new and fashionable, so it has been taken up by some people in China, who say that people in the West are against Enlightenment ideas, and they talk about neocolonialism and the rest of it, as if the Enlightenment was a kind of elitist plot. This is why some people were adamantly opposed to China’s joining the WTO at the time, and I debated verbally with them, because I thought that joining the WTO would definitely be good for China. 
 
The natural sciences are constantly being renewed, because the more they develop the more detailed they become, so they come up with new insights. This is harder in the humanities, because you have a few basic conclusions, so how do you renew them? That's why some people, in order to get famous, write things that overturn received wisdom. Many foreign scholars in the humanities are famous for this. For example, they used to say that the Middle Ages was a dark period, but now some scholars say that there were many good things in the Middle Ages, even progressive things, so they write revisionist articles and become famous, even if what they say is not correct. Another example is that some foreign scholars think that China's modernization in the modern and contemporary periods was self-generated, and the foreign stimulus-native response theory is wrong, overturning the old theories of John King Fairbank (1907-1991) and others, which is actually not correct. You can argue anything with this kind of reasoning, like saying that because now things are fast and time is short, living 80 years in the present age is less than living 40 or 50 years in the past, so those 40 or 50 years were better…There’s all sorts of stuff like this, that looks to be new and different but in fact is simply wrong, but it can make you famous.  Updates in the natural sciences generally do not do harm by moving us in the wrong direction, but this can happens in the humanities, although it does not happen every time. 
 
In fact, many of the old theories are better than the new ones, and it is not the case that the newer the better. As I have said before, Locke and Kant are better than Strauss and Schmidt, in fact much better. Of course you cannot generalize, sometimes revisionism is right, sometimes it produces different perspectives which are of great benefit, etc., and you have to go case by case. But the important thing now is that, after more than forty years, people in China are still seeing Western postmodernism as fashionable, and are paraphrasing and imitating all that. There is not a lot of fundamental creativity. I have said that some contemporary scholars have two major problems: one is that their emotions control their intellect, so that they cannot perform objective analysis; the other is that they like abstract arguments and lack concrete thinking. 
 
Enlightenment has its advantages and disadvantages, but on the whole, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages and move history forward. Steven Pinker wrote a book called Enlightenment Now, condemning postmodernism, and criticizing everyone from Nietzsche to Foucault and Derrida, which earned Pinker the opprobrium of many scholars. I, however, am quite in agreement with Pinker. I disagree with his views on language acquisition, but strongly agree with him on the issue of denouncing the postmodern anti-Enlightenment views, and with his use of statistical material to denounce Nietzsche and others. The fact that the Enlightenment was Western is not a problem—the Enlightenment was different in England, France, and America, but the overall trend was to promote rationality. At present, China’s problem is not that it has too much rationality, but that it has too little. In this regard, I am still a Kantian, and believe that rationality is what makes humans human. 
 
Nietzsche was skeptical of everything, and there will always be people that like Nietzsche. Hegel said that young people have three characteristics: first, they think everything should be destroyed and reevaluated; second, they think they themselves are the greatest, that they are geniuses; third, they see things as either black or white. It is not surprising that young people like Nietzsche, since they always think that they are the best and that they should destroy everything. I think it is understandable that twenty-year-old people like Nietzsche; Lu Xun also liked Nietzsche, but if you still like Nietzsche when you’re 60 then you need to take a hard look at yourself. Is Nietzsche better or is Kant better? I think Kant is much more brilliant than Nietzsche. Nietzsche has his academic value, but some Chinese scholars have made Nietzsche a saint, something invincible, and I can’t agree with this. 
 
RWZK:  Why do they worship Nietzsche?
 
LZH:  One reason is because they are young and want to destroy everything, but finally it’s about fame and fortune. It’s really great to be an independent philosopher, like Hume and Kant.  Philosophers are very different from politicians. A politician can have many academic advisors counseling him, but he ultimately has to decide on one course of action, and then he has to adapt it and apply to different situations.  There is no way for him to be very scholarly. A politician cannot be a philosopher in his study, nor can he be Plato’s "philosopher king."  Nor do philosophers have to be the politician’s “master teacher.”  There has always been a division of labor between the two, and there is no need to try to bring them together.
  
Some foreigners have said that I made a mistake in not training a lot of students, who could have supported and spread my theories. It’s true that many scholars and professors today have a lot of students, who become generations of disciples, and maybe a school, which ensures the teacher’s fame. I didn’t have many students.  I never even asked my students to read my books, so they didn’t.  This is my fault, and I regret it now. If I had asked them to read my books, they might have achieved more! (laughs) 
 
RWZK:  The preface you wrote for student Zhao Shilin 赵士林 (b. 1954 )is available on the Internet. Everyone finds both of you very frank, because in the preface, you criticized your student, saying that he wrote the book behind your back and that you were not responsible for it. It's rare for someone to write a preface like that, and Zhao Shilin published it anyway.[13] 
 
LZH:  I don't care, I'm not responsible for that book. But that book also offended people because Zhao Shilin criticized other people in the book. I wrote the preface, but people still think I told Zhao Shilin to write the book. So there’s nothing to be done.  I’m not in the habit of criticizing people, not even people I don’t like.
  
RWZK:  Many scholars say that the kind of originality you display in you scholarship is extremely rare. Have you yourself ever wondered what makes you so original? 
 
LZH:  I never really thought about it. I tried to read a wide range of things. When I was studying at Peking University, I read Plato in the morning and Belinsky[14] (1811-1848) in the afternoon, philosophy in the morning and literature in the afternoon. The study of philosophy may look to be more exalted, because you are always trying to understand the big picture, but it tends to be very abstract. If you don’t read enough, you wind up only able to play with a couple of concepts.  People who do history have to be narrow and deep, and they wind up concentrating on that field at the expense of other disciplines, thinking they lack value.  But historians have to have a lot of data before they can produce genuine scholarship, so it is really hard to come up with something that is truly original.  Those who study literature read a broader range of things, but it also winds up being more superficial. I told my students many years ago that to be original, you have to aim high, go deep, but also broaden yourself at the same time.  This is not necessarily true for natural scientists, but it seems to be a prerequisite for those working in the humanities.
 
Where does originality come from? Imagination is of course important, but my feeling is that the most important thing is judgment. Kant said that judgment cannot really be taught. The originality of natural scientists also comes from particular choices and judgments the scientists make.  Artists don’t necessarily have to be strong in their rational judgment, but they need to have a keen emotional sense leading them toward originality. 
 
Originality relies in part on your innate ability to understand things, but there are also some examples you can follow. In the 1980s I talked about the issue of “subsidiary awareness.”[15]  It is remarkable that Kant's books from two hundred years ago are still very readable. Kant was extremely knowledgeable and possessed a strong sense of judgment, and the questions he raised have not yet been fully answered, so this is the sort of person we should learn from. This is wisdom, not knowledge. Knowledge can be taught, but wisdom cannot. Some great thinkers had no teachers; who was Einstein’s teacher?  On the one hand, I think China’s current literary scene and academic world seem to lack originality, because most of what they do is to use Western academic discourse to talk about Chinese problems. 

At the same time, there is still a lot of the Red Guard style of "there is no creation without destruction," this disrespect for the achievements of previous generations or of their colleagues, this excessive fault-finding and criticizing.  All they like to do is point out their peers’ flaws and errors, and ignore their contributions, which of course has long been a problem in the Chinese tradition.  As Cao Pi[16] (187-226) put it, scholars have always ridiculed one another. In the correspondence between the two Tang poets Yuan Zhen (779-831) and Bai Juyi (772-846), they noted no one could stand Wei Yingwu’s (737-793) poetry while he was alive, but everyone praised him after he died. This is sort of what I am talking about. There are always people who claim to be creative when they really have no creativity, just like the “Creation Society”[17] that Lu Xun liked to make fun of. 
 
RWZK:  There was a time when the American political philosopher Michael Sandel (b. 1953) was very popular in China, and you wrote a very long text responding to his ideas.[18]  Why were you so interested in this topic?
 
LZH:  At the time, he was too popular in China.  He gave lectures in Beijing and Shanghai and made a lot of appearances.  People went crazy over him, but very few scholars asked him any questions. For example, he would talk about places that had been hit by a disaster, and ask the students listening to him:  “Should they raise prices?  Are you for moral principles or market principles?”  The students were asked to respond with a "yes" or "no" sign. Sandel advocated the moral principle that prices should not go up. This is already misleading. Even in the context of a disaster, areas are affected differently, and the people affected have different income levels, so we have to get down to specifics. Hegel and Marx talked a lot about deciding what is right and wrong according to the specific times, places, and conditions. You can't simply always cite moral principles and say that you have to reduce taxes, that makes no sense. There are places where you can cut taxes and places where you can't. You can't use an a priori concept to decide everything. What I wrote about Sandel was against this kind of black-and-white monolithic idea of the supremacy of reason, that is, it has to do with a priori reason, so that book is both against Sandel and also, so to speak, a development of my own ethical ideas in response to Sandel.
  
RWZK:  In the past few years, there has been a lot of talk about "extending one’s conscience 致良知."[19]  What are your thoughts about this? 
 
LZH:  In my most recent article, which is twice the length of the original draft, there is a page dedicated to this question, and I also talk about what “extending conscience” means in my book Overview of a New Theory on Ethics.  Since Chinese people don’t believe in God, and since businessmen have made enough money for their children and grandchildren to live a very good life, we start to look for some other spiritual sustenance, some other way to cultivate ourselves, and someone came up with “extending conscience,” but this has nothing to do with what Yang Wangming meant.  Wang Yangming meant to turn morality into a kind of intuition, refining yourself through painstaking practice.  It was not liking suddenly “believing” in the Buddha or like believing in anything.  The people who are talking about this are looking for something to believe in, right? and they decided on “conscience.” But where does conscience come from? It comes from the heavens, and the Chinese heavens are murky.
 
The Pandemic and Philosophy 
 
RWZK:  The pandemic is still quite serious in the U.S.  What has been your experience of it? 
 
LZH:  At the outset, because Trump did not promote the wearing of masks, and because the people don’t have the habit of wearing masks and don’t like to do so, and because they did not take isolation and social distancing and all the rest seriously, relatively few Americans worse masks, which was a big mistake.  People seem to think that if you are wearing a mask, it is because you are sick, but in fact the point of the mask is to keep from being infected by other people.  In the beginning, they didn’t pay attention to social distancing either, but now there are some restrictions. We've lost over seventy people in the small town where I live. The epidemic is spreading unevenly throughout the country. Each state has its own authority and the federal government can't exercise any control. Some states are better off, some are worse off, and our state is among the worst. Trump talks nonsense, and is not consistent, saying one thing one day and another the next. The U.S. government has made huge mistakes, allowing the epidemic to get this serious. 
 
RWZK:  The American attitude towards masks is very different from the Chinese attitude.  Could this be due to the "cultural psychological structure" you mentioned? 
 
LZH:  Yes. The cultural psychological structure refers to society, and in terms of the individual, it is their personal emotional structure. Americans believe that wearing a mask means you are sick, and this is what the custom has become. This is not the case with the Chinese. In China, no one feels you are sick when you wear a mask. 
 
RWZK:  What do you think the impact of the pandemic will be on globalization? 
 
LZH:  I am not qualified to talk about this issue because I am not an economist. But as an ordinary intellectual, I can also offer some opinions. I am not as pessimistic as some people are. What we are discussing are mainly economic issues. My philosophy begins with the proposition that there is human life.  This is the most important thing.  Only after there is human life do we have God, language, consciousness, the meaning of life, etc.  In the 1990s, I wrote an essay eulogizing Feng Youlan, and argued that philosophy should grapple with fundamental questions, the most important of which is human life, which means the destiny of humankind. This destiny includes the destiny of human beings, the destiny of nations, and the destiny of individuals. The epidemic has served to prove my theory. The so-called economic issue is to discuss how people can continue to live and live better, whether people can have access to food, clothing, shelter and transportation, and whether they can increase their access to these things. 
 
I have always believed that globalization is an inevitable historical trend, because globalization is first and foremost economic integration, but the epidemic may push globalization back some 20 or 30 years. But what are 20 or 30 years in the context of human history? Humanity has been around for millions of years, and civilization has been around for 4,000 to 5,000 years, so these 20 or 30 years are nothing. Before the epidemic, there was already the British exit from the European Union and Trump's talk about America first, in other words the rise of nationalism and populism.  They argue that protecting national interests is the most important thing, but in fact, what they are doing is slowing down globalization. 
 
Since the 1950s I have always believed that the European Union was an example of a global path towards a world unity, and the EU is also based on economics. Germany and France were at war for so many years, but this is no longer possible, because economic integration means that everyone is living better, so what’s the point of war? So this is the general long-term trend. I am talking about the anthropological historical ontology of all humankind, which sooner or later will come to pass. I won’t see it, nor will many others, but history always moves forward despite its twists and turns and reversals. I am optimistic about China's future and the world's future, but pessimistic about my personal future, because hope means little at my age. A person will live at most a hundred years or so, which is nothing in the context of thousands of years of human history. Globalization might be postponed, but not for very long.   All economies need one another, and the development of high technology is pushing economic integration. Aren’t these decades witnessing the rapid development of science and technology, the Internet and so on, so that everyone around the world is in contact?   High tech is conducive to globalization. It is unlikely that countries will be completely cut off from one another. Of course, this depends on the wisdom of national leaders. 
 
History often suffers reversals, and sometimes can go back hundreds of years. The population of the Han Dynasty had already reached 60 million, but during the wars at the end of the dynasty the population was dramatically reduced.  Wars and plagues in the past killed so many people that "white bones covered the wild plains, and no chicken cried for thousands of miles." (Cao Cao's poem) What we are experiencing now is not nearly as acute. 
 
RWZK:  You have often talked about the antimony between ethics and history, and you focus particularly on history. 
 
LZHL  That’s right.  When I was in middle school, I was good at math, physics, and chemistry, especially chemistry, and I memorized a lot of equations. Everyone thought I would go into the sciences. But my first choice was philosophy, and the second was history. These two departments were the only ones for me. I much prefer reading history books to philosophy books. I know Chinese history really well, and I know all the important events from any dynasty. I have read a lot of jishi benmo 纪事本末, [a way of writing history by grouping events thematically and then putting them in chronological order]. My philosophy is called anthropological-historical ontology, which contains the word "history". I believe that mathematics is the basis for studying science and technology, and that history—and not anthropology—is the basis for studying liberal arts. 
 
RWZK:  Some people might laugh at your idea of a "philosophy of eating."
 
LZH:  Some people really don’t get this, or they may think it is too vulgar, and some scholars even denounced it as a kind "spoof" of materialism. In my book on Kant, I expounded my fundamental views that "the practice of labor, meaning the using and making of tools" or "productive forces, meaning science and technology,” are the basis of human society.  Marx said, "In order to live, one first needs clothing, food, shelter, etc., and therefore the humankind’s first historical activity was the production of the means to satisfy these needs, that is, the production of material life itself." This is a very accurate statement. This is a historical activity that people must perform every day and every hour (still today, just like thousands of years ago) just to be able to live, that is, this is a basic precondition for history to exist. This is the basic meaning of my proposition that "human life" is the primary question philosophy must address, as well as the basic meaning behind my notion of the "philosophy of eating.”

So the term "philosophy of eating" has always been intentionally colloquial, in which I purposely adopt “vulgar” language to heighten its value when I take aim at theories and doctrines that belittle material existence and daily life, and prefer to talk about moral rationality, spiritual life, or the salvation of the soul. My original name for it was "anthropological-historical ontology." 
 
Because people live to eat, right? The difference between humans and animals is not language, because animals can also communicate. I think that what sets people apart is the use of tools. Chimpanzees can use more than a dozen tools, but they can also live without tools, say, by picking bananas with their hands. But people can't live without tools. Even people who go off to live in the mountains now take electrical appliances with them, right?
 
The pandemic proves flat out that my "philosophy of eating" is correct. The first thing that people are concerned about is what to do if they lose their jobs, because without a job, they have no money, and they can’t eat. Philosophy is the study humankind’s most basic issues. It’s all well and good to worry about metaphysical or nebulous questions, such as the nature of the world, or language, but these are secondary issues, and not the fundamental issues of philosophy. The most ordinary common sense is often the most important starting point. So I never backed down.  The more people criticized me, the more I talked about it. 
 
RWZK:  Speaking of  the "philosophy of eating," this is linked to another of your ideas, which is “to take Western learning as our primary essence, and Chinese learning as practical use.” 
 
LZH:  Zhang Zhidong's[20] 张之洞 (1837-1909) idea to “take Chinese learning as our fundamental essence, and view Western learning as something to be practically applied” did indeed promote science and technology, but loyalty to the emperor came first, because China at the time was a feudal monarchy, so Zhang opposed Kang Youwei’s 康有为(1858-1927) proposals to create popular assemblies and reform the system,[21] so the empress dowager Cixi[22] 慈禧太后(1835-1908) very much appreciated Zhang Zhidong and made use of him. 
 
I put forward my idea of "the West as fundamental essence, China as practical application" in the 1980s, and the twin objects of this were Zhang’s original proposition and the waves of “total Westernization” that were sweeping the country at that time.  When I talk about the "Western fundamental essence," I am talking about the "philosophy of eating." What do you rely on for food and for the needs of daily life? Deng Xiaoping said that technology is the number one productive force. The Western fundamental essence I was talking about is modernization, the modernization of all sorts of things and machines, which is not a "practical application," but rather a "fundamental essence." We did not invent these technologies, we imported them from the West. The productivity of science and technology is the "fundamental essence." Daily life is the "fundamental essence." This is the only way to live and to achieve modernization. Of course, in traditional agricultural society, people were indeed “living,” but are we still willing to live in the era of no air conditioning in the summer, no heat in the winter, no cell phones, and no electrical appliances in the kitchen? Maybe there are a minority of people who want to do this, but that’s up to them.
  
Marx said that technological productivity moves outward, and affects relations of production, class struggle, and changes in society. I am going inward. I look at the inward movement of technological productivity, a movement that produces rationality, and makes the human psychology different from that of animals. Human rationality is not a gift from nature, we weren’t born with it; the use of tools created rationality. I am against the idea of an a priori rationality. One of my questions was when rationality first appeared in the history of humanity, and no one could answer me. "Practical rationality" is indeed a term I coined, which did not exist before. Just like "the culture of optimism 乐感文化," a term I also created. This is what I called "creating concepts and providing perspectives," which some people denounced at first, but now some people seem to be using it. 
 
RWZK:  Many philosophers have expressed their views on the epidemic. What do you think philosophers should do or think about in the face of the epidemic? 
 
LZH:  I said years ago, and I just said it again a few minutes ago—that those engaged in theory should be separate from those engaged in practice, that philosophers and thinkers should be separated from revolutionaries and politicians, and that we can’t talk about these in the same breath. Revolutionaries and politicians are the direct practitioners and guides of social change, and the zeal they need to employ to control and influence the masses is not the same thing as the zeal of the theorists. Moreover, the two will differ in their ways of thinking and methods. Thus there should be a clear division of labor between theorists, thinkers, philosophers, and revolutionaries, politicians, and leaders of various groups. It’s great to have lots of theories, to see “a hundred schools of thought contend,” but revolutionaries, politicians, and leaders demand a centralized will and unity of action. They have to make decisions and act according to the realities of the moment, the stakes at hand, and strategic considerations, which leads to a choice or compromise of theories, but often allows only one. Theorists, on the other hand, can reflect and argue from a longer-term macro- perspective, regardless of the current stakes. Of course, there are different levels and kinds of theorists and revolutionaries and politicians, and there are various cases of mutual interaction, which I am now dividing into "ideal types.” Marx said that in the past philosophy only explained the world, but the problem was to change it. This is a profound philosophical perspective. However, the theory of changing the world and effecting change in practice can be undertaken by different people. While theories require long discussions and repeated debates, revolutionary or political decisions, even if fiercely debated, require rapid decisions leading to immediate implementation.
 
The same is true for the pandemic.  We cannot expect philosophers to provide consistently correct opinions about the epidemic.  That’s too hard. Even if they are right, those in power are not always able to put what they say into practice. Administrative measures, administrative strategies, are different from theories. There are times when those in power get it right, but that doesn't mean they are always right. A philosopher's theory, whether applied to politics or economics, may not always fit, it may not give the expected results, it may not be practical. Philosophers may well issue various judgments about the epidemic, and it’s fine to have various theories, but it may be that none of them is correct.
 
RWZK:  Speaking of the problem of philosophy and history, you said many years ago that the key question in the realm of historical philosophy is the problem of chance and necessity. 
 
LZH:  I argued in the 1950s that history is full of contingencies. I talked about this in another interview, entitled "History, Ethics, and Metaphysics 历史、伦理与形而上学," which was published this year. I think of history as having three properties: the first is specificity. History must be something that happened in a certain time, a certain place, and under particular conditions. This is history’s most important property; the second is that history has an accumulative nature. This is something that people don't pay much attention to. In terms of human history, it is progressive, and I am not pessimistic about human history as a whole. Humans live by tools. Tools are technology. After the epidemic, technology will still develop, it can't be stopped. I strongly agree with Steven Pinker that the postmodernism is wrong, Foucault and Derrida are wrong. History is cumulative, and the inherent accumulation produces the growing complexity, richness, and diversity of the human mind—this is what I mean by "sedimentation"—and  there is no need to be pessimistic; the third is the contingency of history. For example, if terrorists use atomic bombs or create viruses, then humanity might die, which is very possible. It was impossible prior to the invention of such weapons, but now it is possible, which is why philosophy should study the fate of mankind.
 
RWZK:  You said in Overview of a New Theory of Ethics that "history is absolutely not just a bunch of boring documents, not just what we call deeds, people, data, and accounts…It actually contains the joys and sorrows and random realities of people's lives for countless generations." The phrase "random realities" may make people scratch their heads.
 
LZH:  There are two worlds in the West and the idea is to go to the kingdom of heaven once your stay on earth is done.  In China, we stay in this world so we need to pay attention to our feelings about it. In the West, God's love is paramount, God’s love comes first, and it is God who tells you to love your loved ones, which is hard for the Chinese to accept. Chinese people value history. Because life is nothing more than joy and sorrow, history is nothing other than daily life, so the daily life as lived in this world is what matters, not seeking something in the kingdom of heaven, which may be perfect, but is also rather homogeneous, monotonous, and boring.
  
RWZK:  You always emphasize logic, your articles are very logical and remove a lot of emotions and let the power of logic speak for itself. How do you maintain this attitude and not let your emotions get the better of you?
 
LZH:  In the 1980s I wrote a short article called "People who Write Articles Should Learn some Plane Geometry 写文章的人要学点平面几何," in which I argued that theoretical articles should be clear about their concepts and respect logic.  They should present clear arguments, and not beat around the bush, so that people would not waste their time trying to figure out what they were trying to say.  For scholarship to develop, this is a fundamental issue. I also said that China needs a "baptism of language 语言的洗礼." If what you want to do is vent, you can write poetry, you can write novels, because it doesn't matter what kind of emotions you vent in literature and art. The point of literature and art is to move people emotionally.  In scholarship, the point is to focus on logic, to convince people with reason, it is as simple as that. I have paid attention to logic since I was in high school. When I was in college, I specialized in logic specifically. I am very self-consciously logical. 
 
RWZK:  You are so rational, yet your theories also emphasize "emotional ontology." 
 
LZH:  People do not rely simply on reason, so I talk about "emotional-rational structures."  If you are purely rational, then you are a machine. Machines do not have emotions. If you were purely emotional, you would be an animal, because animals have no reason.
 
"Ontology" here is not Kant’s ontological world which for him was distinct from the phenomenal world, but means instead something like the “root,” the “foundation,” the "final reality." The idea of an “emotional ontology” speaks to ultimate reality, the root of human life.  Behind the "emotional ontology," there is actually a Chinese tradition, which is what I have in the past referred to as "heaven, earth, state, family, and teacher 天地国亲师,"[23] something in which Westerners have a hard time understanding. I said that it might take two hundred years for the West to completely understand and accept this tradition. More than twenty years ago I was giving a talk in Germany, and asked the audience, "Who among you professors, with the exception of  sinologists, can name ten Chinese people? It doesn't matter what kind of Chinese, whether living or dead.” They couldn’t do it. But in China, any random professor could name 20 Germans. So on a cultural level, it will be a long time before foreigners understand Chinese ideas.
 
On Human Life 
 
RWZK:  Ten years ago, when you celebrated your 80th birthday, you just had a meal with your family and a few glasses of liquor.  How will you celebrate your 90th birthday? 
 
LZH:  I’ll do the same thing.  I have a bottle of Rémy Martin Louis XIII, which is a relatively high class liquor.[24] I never celebrate birthdays. This is true for my 80th birthday, too.  People tried several times to get me to do something but I declined. Last year, two groups of people from China proposed to come to the U.S. to celebrate my 90th birthday with me, but I politely refused. I just don’t see the point. I've only had one birthday party, and that was when I turned 60. That was in 1990, in Beijing, and I only invited a few of my brothers and sisters to the house for a meal, without any outsiders. 
 
RWZK:  People used to say they never saw you without a book in your hand Do you spend a lot of time reading now? 
 
LZH:  My eyes are not good.  They were never that good, but now I’m old, and can only read for short periods of time.  But if I don’t read books, there is nothing else I like to do. 
 
RWZK:  Boulder, where you live, is very small and you said before that it is lonely living here because there are so few people.
 
LZH:  There’s nothing to do about it.  It’s been that way for half my life.
 
RWZK:  Over the course of your 90 years, has it ever occurred to you to believe in God? 
 
LZH:  No, not at all.  I never believed in God.  We decide our destiny, not God. You can only turn your reflections on yourself. You can't count on God. People say God died in Auschwitz, and ask how God could allow Hitler to kill so many people and be so cruel if he was all-knowing. This is why I think whether there is one world or two is an important philosophical question. 
 
RWZK:  Ten years ago, we talked about "happiness" in our interview. This has been a frequent topic in the past ten years as well.  What is your understanding of "happiness" now? 
 
LZH:  There is no objective standard for "happiness."  Maybe in terms of material life, with the improvement of food, clothing and housing, the average person finds happiness. But some people think that material life has no value, so they would rather be ascetics. Some people think material life is suffering, and are not happy. Some people think that happiness is a matter of ethics.  I think not, happiness is a religious issue, an aesthetic issue. 
 
RWZK:  When I interviewed you ten years ago, you said that you would freeze your brain after death, so that a few hundred years from now people could study it to see if they could find the remnants of Chinese culture and prove your theory of accumulation. If you could prove that culture influences the brain, you think it would be a greater contribution than all your books put together?  Are you still thinking about doing this? 
 
LZH:  It’s not just an idea.  I've already contacted the cryonics organization made a donation $80,000 USD, plus few hundred dollars a year in membership fees. Of course, if it doesn't work out or can't be done, the $80,000 will be returned, so now it stands as an investment in the organization. Many people contact this organization because they want to be resurrected (the Bible promises the resurrection of the human body) and they want to be resurrected soon after they die. I think resurrection is impossible. I’m not hoping for resurrection, but just to be preserved long enough until brain science is advanced enough to do the research, although I don't know if it can be done. But I’ve already taken measures, so I’m not just blowing smoke, but I’m still 95% sure that nothing will come of it. 
 
RWZK:  You have always been interested in neurological science, so it makes sense that you are happy to try to bring together your theories and brain science. 
 
LZH:  Human beings know much more about the world, the universe, and foreign objects than we know about ourselves. Compared to theoretical physics, medicine is still a very immature science, because medicine is more difficult; with biology and social factors it is not so easy to figure out. Let’s imagine theoretical physics as a university, and medicine a kindergarten, so the two are a long way apart. Human beings are actually the principal brain, the brain governs everything. Therefore, it is important to study brain science. The brain directs everything, but at present we don’t know precisely how it does that, which is why I say we’ll need three to five centuries to arrive at a basic understanding.  
 
RWZK:  Thank you for the interview. I’ve probably worn you out talking to you over the course of these days. Is there anything else you would like to say to your readers? 
 
LZH:  I would like to cite a some lines from a couple of my favorite poems with which I identify: "Sighing as the early morning sunlight changes to night, how not to feel the lengthy labor of life?” (Tao Qian 陶潜 365-427); “For it is being, created from a void/It is sound rung out of profound silence. (Lu Ji 陆机 261-303)."[25]  I will end here, and bid farewell to my readers.  Thank you!

Notes 

[1]南方人物周刊, “李泽厚生前最后访谈，他向读者说：谢谢!” originally published in the same journal in 2020 on the occasion of Li’s 90th birthday, republished on November 3, 2021, in commemoration of Li’s passing. 

[2]Woei Lien Chong, “Combining Marx and Kang:  The Philosophical Anthropology of Li Zehou,”  Philosophy East and West 49.2:  123.

[3]Translator’s note:  The May 7 Cadre Schools were “schools” established in the countryside where intellectuals were sent to “learn from the peasants” during the Cultural Revolution.  The playwright and translator Yang Jiang recounts her experience in a May 7 Cadre School in her book Six Chapters from my Life “Downunder.”

[4]Translator’s note:  Published in 2001, this book records a dialogue between Li and Chen Ming (b. 1963), a prominent New Confucian philosopher in China.

[5]Translator’s note:  Published in 1997, this book records a dialogue between Li and Liu Zaifu (p. 1941), a writer and literary scholar, and like Li, an exile from mainland China.

[6]Translator’s note:  This is a quote from Mencius.

[7]Translator’s note :  Zhu Guangqian was a leading Chinese authority on aesthetics whose theories Li Zehou attacked in the 1950s.

[8]Translator’s note:  Both Feng and Hu were famous scholars in China.

[9]Translator’s note:  The question actually asks about earlier and later “waves” of generations of Chinese youth.  See here for a discussion of the video and the topic elsewhere on this site.

[10]Translator’s note:  Li is referring to the activities of student demonstrators at the time.

[11]Translator’s note:  Liang Shuming was prominent intellectual figure, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s, and also engaged in rural reconstruction efforts, trying to rebuild China’s countryside.

[12]Translator’s note:  This was a failed uprising against the Qing dynasty, led by Huang Xing, on April 27, 1911.

[13]Translator’s note:  Zhao was Li’s graduate student, and in 1986 published a book entitled Research in Aesthetics in Contemporary China  当代中国美学研究概述, and subsequently asked Li to write him a preface, a very common practice in China (and elsewhere).  However, Zhao had not told Li that he was writing the book, and he wrote it at the same time that he was completing his doctoral dissertation, so Li wrote a preface in which he said as much, and also wrote that “I refuse to read a single word of the book.”  The tone of the preface is a mixture of exasperation and admiration, and is frank in a way that is extremely rare in such circumstances.  See http://www.scshuokang.com/xinzhoukan/20200714/39490.html. 

[14]Translator’s note:  Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky was a Russian literary critic who supported liberalization and Westernization.

[15]Translator’s note:  Karl Polanyi’s term for perception to which an individual does not have direct access, as it is not part of their “focal awareness.”

[16]Translator’s note:  Cao Pi, second son of Cao Cao, put an end to the Western Han dynasty and in 220, set himself up as emperor of the state of Cao Wei.

[17]Translator’s note:  The Creation Society was a literary society established in China in the 1920s, and which embraced “art for arts sake,” largely eschewing social responsibility.

[18]Translator’s note:  On Sandel in China, see Evan Osnos’s introduction to Encountering China:  Michael Sandel and Chinese Philosophy (Harvard, 2018).  Li’s response was 回應桑德爾及其他 (Sanlian, 2014).

[19]Translator’s note:  This idea is generally associated with the late Ming philosopher Wang Yangming (1472-1529), but apparently has been part of recent ethical or philosophical discussions in China.

[20]Translator’s note:  Zhang Zhidong (1837-1909) was a Qing official implicated in many reform efforts over the course of the late nineteenth century, and famously said that China should “take Chinese learning as our fundamental essence, and view Western learning as something to be practically applied.”  In other words, we will remain culturally Chinese, but we will learn the science, technology, industry and military might of the West.  Li Zehou revered the terms of the proposition, saying in essence that our primary goal is to learn to create material conditions as the industrial West has done, and then we will modify this reality so that it conforms to Chinese culture.

[21]Translator’s note:  Kang Youwei is associated with the abortive Hundred Days’ reform of 1898.

[22]Translator’s note:  Cixi took advantage of the youth of China’s emperor to exercise considerable power in late Qing times, and is generally identified as a very conservative force.

[23]Translator’s note:  This refers to a plaque found in many Chinese places of worship, which reminds those present of what should be revered, and in what order.  A slight variation is 天地君亲师, in which one reveres the ruler rather than the state.  For visual images and an explanation (in Chinese) see here.

[24]Translator’s note:  About $2,500 USD a bottle, at today’s prices.  Would I have waited for my 90th birthday?  I would not.  Even if someone had given me a case.  Perhaps historians are more logical than philosophers, or maybe we are just in closer touch with our emotional ontology.

[25]Translator’s note:  Translation of Lu Ji’s poem taken from the following:  http://web.mnstate.edu/gracyk/courses/web%20publishing/LuChi.htm.