Background

Feng Youlan, whose zi ("style") or courtesy name was Zhisheng, was born on December 4, 1895, in Tanghe County, Henan Province, to an affluent and prominent family. Feng’s father, Feng Taiyi, completed the highest level of study required by the Qing dynasty imperial civil service and headed the local Confucian academy, but also maintained a personal library that included books about the West and modern affairs.

Education

From the age of six, Feng pursued a private education in the Confucian curriculum typical of the time but had little interest in traditional rote learning. At the age of fifteen, he began studying in the county middle school and one year later transferred to high school, first in the provincial capital of Kaifeng, and then in neighboring Hubei Province. At the age of seventeen, he was admitted to the preparatory class of the China Public School in Shanghai, where all courses were taught with English textbooks and the curriculum included Western logic and philosophy.

Feng studied philosophy at Peking (Beijing) University from 1915 to 1918, during which time he was exposed to various forms of foreign thought, ranging from the philosophy of Henri Bergson to the "New Realism" associated with British philosophers such as W. P. Montague. Also during this time, the New Cultural Movement, which questioned traditional Confucian values, was in full swing, provoking counter-reactions from conservative Confucian scholars. At Peking University, Feng met both Hu Shi, the iconoclast critic of Confucianism, and Liang Shuming, the New Confucian apologist and social activist. In 1919, he traveled to the United States and, like Hu Shi before him, studied with John Dewey at Columbia University. He was deeply impressed by the United States' advanced technology, emphasis on commerce, and atmosphere of law and order, which helped to confirm his sense that the Chinese psyche was inward-looking, contemplative, and holistic, while the Western spirit was outward-looking, analytical, and reductionistic. He was among the first to introduce Liang Shuming's work to America.

In 1923, Feng completed his Doctor of Philosophy at Columbia, having entitled his dissertation A Comparison of Life Ideals.

Career

After completing his doctoral studies at Columbia, Feng returned to China and began his long teaching career there, having paid close attention to intellectual trends in China while he was abroad. He went on to teach at a number of Chinese universities (including Guangdong University and Yanjing University), and in 1928 became a professor of philosophy at Tsinghua University in Peking. It was while at Tsinghua that Feng published what was to be his best-known and most influential work, a two-volume History of Chinese Philosophy, presenting and examining the history of Chinese philosophy from a Western viewpoint. This work established his reputation and remains the standard general history of Chinese philosophy. It also reignited interest in Chinese thought.

When the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out, the students and staff of Beijing's Tsinghua and Beijing universities, together with Tianjin's Nankai University, fled their campuses. They went first to Hengshan, where they set up the Changsha Temporary University, and then to Kunming, where they set up Southwest Associated University. When, in 1946, the three universities returned to Beijing, Feng went again to the United States to take up a post as a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He spent the academic year 1948-1949 as a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii.

While Feng was in Pennsylvania, news from China made it clear that the communists were on their way to seizing power. Feng's friends tried to persuade him to stay in the United States, but he was determined to return; his political views were broadly socialist, and he felt optimistic about China's future under its new government.

Once back home, Feng began to study Leninist thought, but he soon found that the political situation fell short of his hopes. By the mid-1950s his philosophical approach was being attacked by the authorities. He was forced to repudiate much of his earlier work as idealistic, abstract, and devoid of a historical and practical character; and to rewrite the rest, including his History, in order to fit in with the ideas of the Cultural Revolution. From 1957 to 1963 he was harshly attacked by Marxist-Leninist critics for continuing to promote an idealistic philosophy, but he remained in China. After enduring much hardship, he finally saw a relaxation of censorship and was able to write with a certain degree of freedom. He died on November 26, 1990, in Beijing.

Achievements

• Feng continues to be known mostly for his History of Chinese Philosophy, which was translated into English in 1937 by Derk Bodde and is still in print. This book not only used Western philosophical methods to provide a systematic interpretation of Chinese philosophy for Chinese scholars but made the thought of Chinese philosophers intelligible to Western readers for the first time. The theme of contrast and comparison between the East and the West, ancient and modern, permeated all of his work, and he continually showed how one could help in understanding the other. Although he has received the most recognition for his role as a historian, Feng was in fact an original and influential philosopher in his own right, deserving of greater attention.

Works

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• book

  • The Spirit of Chinese Philosophy

    (The Spirit of Chinese Philosophy covers the major philoso...)

    1947
  • Chuang-Tzu: A New Selected Translation with an Exposition of the Philosophy of Kuo Hsiang

    (This book reprints an ancient Chinese work from the late ...)

    2015
  • Selected Philosophical Writings of Fung Yu-Lan

    (The essays collected in this volume, all originally writt...)

    2008
  • A Short History of Chinese Philosophy

    (The classic chronicle of Chinese philosophical thought fr...)

    1934
  • A Taoist Classic: Chuang-Tzu

    (Professor Fung Yu-lan is a distinguished contemporary Chi...)

    1989

Religion

Feng was a Confucian and didn't seem to believe in the existence of god relying on the ethical-philosophical side of this teaching.

Politics

In 1934, Feng had a fateful encounter with Communist ideology that would influence the future course of his life. While en route to a philosophical conference in Prague, he stopped to visit the Soviet Union, where he found a grand social experiment in progress. Although he was not blind to the imperfections of Soviet Communism, he also was attracted to its utopian possibilities, as he later proclaimed in public speeches. As a result of his visit to the Soviet Union, he was detained briefly by Jiang Jieshi’s (Chiang Kai-shek's) Nationalist government, but upon his release established a close relationship with the regime, which then ruled China despite the revolutionary activities of Communist factions.

During China's Cultural Revolution Feng, along with many other academics, was denounced by Mao. Near the end of this period, however, Feng was able to regain a measure of public influence by allying himself with Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, who enlisted his aid in her propaganda campaign against Confucius between 1973 and 1976. After Mao's death and Jiang’s arrest and imprisonment, Feng’s political decisions cost him both his mianzi ("face" or public reputation) and, for a short time, his freedom. By the 1980s, Feng was able to return to teaching and began work on a new manuscript entitled A New History of Chinese Philosophy, which was incomplete when he died in 1990.

Views

Despite his apparent conversion to doctrinaire Marxism, Feng attempted to preserve a place for Confucianism under Mao’s aegis, asserting that this and other Chinese philosophical traditions, despite their reactionary historical baggage, could be "conceptually and abstractly" relevant in the Communist era. For example, Feng argued that the Confucian concept of ren or "benevolence" had in the past served the purpose of making the oppressed and exploited masses lose sight of intense class struggle and had sedated them into believing a dream of an impossible classless and harmonious society. Feng believed, however, that if taken "abstractly," ren for all people could be a helpful idea even in Mao’s "New China."

Membership

Feng Youlan was a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Academia Sinica.

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  Chinese Academy of Sciences , China

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  Academia Sinica , Taiwan

Personality

Feng Youlan had a hobby of collecting antique weapons which also other members of his family loved. Through them, he acquired an interest in martial arts.

Interests

• collecting antique weapon

Connections

The details of Feng Youlan's private life are not widely known. His daughter Feng Zhongpu is a well-known Chinese novelist.

Father:

Feng Taiyi

Daughter:

Feng Zhongpu

Sister:

Feng Yuanjun

teacher:

John Dewey

References

• Metaphorical Metaphysics in Chinese Philosophy: Illustrated with Feng Youlan's New Metaphysics
  2011