Philosopher
Tang Junyi
1909–1978
New Confucian philosopher and co-founder of New Asia College in Hong Kong, who analysed Chinese and Western cultures as expressions of the mind's pursuit of ideals.
Tang Junyi was born in Sichuan in 1909 and studied philosophy at Beijing University and then National Southeast University, graduating in 1932. He moved often during the war with Japan and the civil war, and in 1949 left for Hong Kong, where he stayed for the rest of his life and helped found New Asia College.
He was extraordinarily prolific, ranging over the moral self, the cultures of China and the West, the history of Chinese thought, and knowledge, ethics, metaphysics and politics. He drafted what became known as the New Confucian Manifesto, written with Mou Zongsan, Xu Fuguan and Zhang Junmai and now seen as a watershed of modern Confucian thought. He died in 1978.
Key ideas
- Spirit as pursuit of ideals
- Spirit means a mind that consciously upholds an ideal and makes realising it its aim. Families, economies, arts and sciences are all products of action to realise ideals.
- Ideals can be judged
- More controversially, Tang held that the ideals behind cultures can themselves be judged as more or less reasonable.
- China and the West compared
- Of the New Confucians, Tang analysed the cultural contrast between China and the West most thoroughly, contrasting Chinese humanistic culture with Western materialist culture.
- Tradition
- Chinese
- Region
- Sichuan and Hong Kong
- Schools
- Confucianism
Influences
Where these links come from
- Tang Junyi studied with Xiong Shili. Source: David Elstein, Modern Confucianism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Key works
- Cultural Consciousness and Moral Reason, 1958
- Origins of Chinese Philosophy
- Life Existence and the Horizons of Mind, 1977
Sources
- David Elstein, Modern Confucianism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy