Background
He Lin was born in 1902 in Qintang, Sichuan Province, China.
何琳
He Lin was born in 1902 in Qintang, Sichuan Province, China.
Western philosophers during his period in the USA and Germany. He was the leading Chinese expert on Hegel's thought. In applying his insights to the problems of China. He was drawn to the theoretical framework of Sun Zhongshan. especially regarding the relationship between knowledge and action. As a leading member of the highly professional Chinese Philosophical Society in the 1930s and 1940s, He organized the systematic translation of important Western philosophical texts into Chinese and was himself a gifted translator.
In discussing knowledge and action, He touched on deep questions concerning the nature of theoretical and practical reason and the relation between epistemology and morals. He understood how these questions arose in the Western tradition of Plato, Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, but also saw them deeply embedded in idealist neo-Confucian thought. He wanted to use the this common ground to unite the traditions. He accepted Wang Yangming’s theoretical unification of knowledge and action and the primacy of the practical, but accepted the constraints on action, including political action, which Sun Zhongshan understood to arise from the difficulties of knowledge.
Although proficient in technical philosophy. He was also a moralist and critic of culture. He combined a Confucian respect for social hierarchy with a Western cult of heroes and heroic action as a remedy for modern unhappiness. The hero triumphed over reality through self-confident optimistic action aimed at the ideal. Education, unless it was based on awakening a sense of the heroic, could lead to unstable commercial success but not happiness, because it would fail to develop personalities capable of stable happiness.
After Liberation in 1949 He was severely criticized for trying to secure a continuing place for idealism in Chinese philosophy, but maintained his role as an expert on Western philosophyIn the 1957 Symposium on Chinese Philosophy’' which determined the basis for Chinese philosophical work in later decades, He characterized the relationship between idealism and materialism as a relationship between teacher and student or between friends. Although he cited Marx’s debt to Hegel in support of his position, he was again criticized.