Background
Wang, Guowei was born in 1877 in Haining. Zhejiang Province, China.
archaeologist critic literary historian poet
Wang, Guowei was born in 1877 in Haining. Zhejiang Province, China.
Studied Chinese classics. Japanese and European languages in Shanghai: physics in Tokyo. Ancient historical materials in Kyoto.
Teacher of ethics and psychology. Nantung Normal School. Officer, Board of Education.
Professor, private university, Shanghai: Adviser, Graduate School in Chinese Studies, University of Beijing. Tutor, staff of deposed Emperor Puyi: Professor of Sinological Studies, Qinghua University.
Considered to be among the most brilliant and original Chinese scholars of this century, Wang Guowei made important contributions to a wide range of fields. He gave up his early interest in philosophy and literature at the age of 30 to concentrate on ancient Chinese history and archaeology. His work deciphering inscriptions on oracle bones, tortoise shells and bamboo strips transformed the study of Shang history. His examination of the history of Chinese script showed a mastery of Qing textual criticism and modem historiographic and archaeological method. His studies of the Chinese novel The Dream of the Red Chamber, poetry and Yuan drama were critically revolutionary. Unlike other early Chinese admirers of Western thought. Wang had a deep understanding of the works he studied. His philosophical interests centred on German idealism, especially Kant. Schiller, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Wang used his studies of foreign philosophy to analyse basic Chinese philosophical concepts and to form a theory of aesthetics to use in his critical writings. Three essays are worth examining: ‘Discussing nature’, ‘Analysing reason' and ‘The origin of life’. Wang took up Kantian themes in his account of xing, but argued that nature was beyond experience and unknowable. His discussion of li distinguished a broad unchanging notion and a narrow notion of li within nature, neither of which was contained in the world of experience. He saw life as having an origin in the natural world, but also as orientated towards a human ideal. He claimed that life was controlled by outside forces and that free will was illusory. In sum, he held the pessimistic view that unreal concepts controlled mankind. Wang’s early enthusiasm for Kant gave way to a deeper attachment to Schopenhauer. He argued that Kant’s treatment of noumena led to scepticism, which could be overcome only through Schopenhauer’s account of time, intuition, reason and will. He claimed that Schopenhauer used Kantian epistemology to form a coherent system of metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics. Wang integrated the aesthetic ideas of Kant, Schiller, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche into traditional Chinese theories of art. Beauty, he claimed, gave pleasure without serving any external function, although he accepted Schopenhauer's view that art relieved mankind from pain. He explored Kant’s account of genius and saw literature as the free creative play of genius. He discussed the complex relationship between natural and artistic beauty, arguing that, although they had the same form, judging natural beauty differed from judging artistic beauty. Natural beauty has to be mediated through artistic beauty to reach its completion, and something naturally unbeautiful can be seen as beautiful through art. The aesthetic ideal of classical elegance is accidental and acquired through experience rather than necessary and universal. Its achievement depends partly on genius but also on cultivation and practice. Wang’s decision to give up philosophy derived from a tension between the grand metaphysical, ethical and aesthetic systems which he loved and the more modest claims of positivism, hedonism and empiricism which he thought worthy of belief. The scrupulous sense of method and justification which governed his later historical and archaeological work extinguished his desire to carry on with the philosophical work which gave him gratification. Wang, a committed royalist, drowned himself in Kunming Lake at the Summer Palace when political events in 1927 seemed in his eyes to threaten humiliation.
