Background
Zhang Dongsun was born in 1886 in Suzhou district, Jiangsu Province, China.
张东荪
Zhang Dongsun was born in 1886 in Suzhou district, Jiangsu Province, China.
Studied Buddhism and Western philosophy in Tokyo, Japan and received an imperial degree on the basis of his foreign education.
Leading member. Progressive Party. Member, Liang Qichao’s research clique. 1916, Secretary General.
Parliament; Editor of China Times and other newspapers and journals. 1925-1930. Professor of Philosophy and Dean, College of Arts, Guanghua University, Shanghai. 1925-1930. President, China
Institute, Wusong.
1930-1951, Professor of Philosophy, Yenching University, Beijing. Leading member. National Socialist Party. Leading member, China Democratic League.
Zhang Dongsun was a major commentator on Western philosophy, who developed his own neoKantian system of epistemology and metaphysics. After wartime imprisonment by the Japanese he argued that sociology rather than metaphysics was the key to understanding knowledge. In politics, he was influenced by Western constitutional theory and the principles of Liang Qichao. In the 1920s and 1930s he sought to find a middle way between nationalist and Communist rule. After the Second World War he sought an intellectual rapprochement with Marxism, but was none the less excluded by the new authorities from the faculty of Yenching University.
After the 1911 revolution Zhang edited and contributed to journals seeking to determine a constitutional basis for republican politics. He supported the 1913 attempt to designate Confucianism China’s state religion and took part in Liang Qichao’s 1916 'research clique’, serving as Secretary General of Parliament. The failure of Parliament to establish reforms led Zhang to become Editor of the independent Shanghai newspaper China Times, where he was a major progressive commentator on Chinese affairs. He also sought to enrich Chinese intellectual life by introducing the young to the central concepts of Western philosophical thought. Although involved in the earliest stages of introducing Marxism to China, Zhang came into conflict with the party leaders by arguing that capitalism was necessary to achieve China’s industrial development and by rejecting the application of Marx’s concept of class struggle to China. Zhang was a major figure in the 1923 ‘science versus philosophy’ debate, in which he supported the view of his friend Zhang Junmei that the categories of science were inadequate for many central aspects of human experience. His assessment of the crude understanding of his opponents provided the setting for his own account of idealist epistemology and of the place of philosophy in scientific knowledge. With Zhang Junmei and other contributors to the journal National Renaissance, he founded the democratic National Socialist Party in 1934. He continued to oppose Marxism, notably through editing The Debate on Dialectical Materialism (1934). Zhang emerged from his wartime imprisonment by the Japanese to become a leading figure in the China Democratic League, a further attempt to mediate between the Communists and nationalists. Zhang’s growing sympathy for Marxism led to a break with Zhang Junmei and to prominent activity in the early days of the People’s Republic. In 1952, after a campaign of criticism related to his independent attitude towards ideological reform among Chinese academics, Zhang was removed from his academic and other posts.
Zhang’s academic career began in 1925, but his most important work, dealing with knowledge, appeared after 1930 when he became a Professor at Yenching University, Beijing. Although deeply influenced by Kant. Zhang rejected Kantian dualism, according to which phenomena were produced by sensations ordered by mentally imposed categories. As an alternative source of order he proposed an ‘epistemological pluralism’, with Kantian phenomena produced by combinations of four mutually dependent but irreducible elements of knowledge: order, category, postulate and concept. His reliance on structures and laws to constitute the external world and his denial of sensation led to a vehement rejection of the concept of substance. Without substance, the universe was a construct, with the process of construction partly ascribable to nature and partly to our cognitive activity. Consciousness itself was also a construct derived from an underlying synthesis. Knowledge, even apparently direct perceptual knowledge, included interpretation, and Zhang rejected any absolute distinction between direct acquaintance and recognition under a concept. He saw sensations, perceptions, concepts and the categories as different products of a single integrative synthesis. Concepts were seen as signs having a normative role: the entry of concepts into the conceptual world in which all concepts were related allowed the strongest concepts to shape the others. Concepts were also regulated by the demand that they not conflict with perceptions. In his later work Zhang sought a sociological rather than a philosophical explanation of why some concepts played the role of categories. Zhang’s structuralism, influenced by mathematical formulae as paradigms of knowledge, perhaps prepared the way to his rejection of metaphysics in favour of sociology during his incarceration by the Japanese. After the war his books dealt with society, democracy and socialism. He argued that socialism and democracy were synonymous and that intellectuals were obliged to guide society towards democratization and the eventual disappearance of the state.