Li Zehou
Reason and our sense of beauty are not innate but have settled in us over history through human work and practice.
Placement
Philosopher of the post-Mao “aesthetics fever”: reads Kant through Marx and Confucius – reason and beauty “sediment” from human practice in history.
Key ideas
- Sedimentation
- Anthropo-historical ontology
- Aesthetics as first philosophy
Influence
Influenced by 3
Confucius
influenced by
In Reading the Analects Today (Lunyu jindu, 1998) Li Zehou read Confucius’ teaching as the core of a Chinese culture of this-worldly joy and reason infused with feeling. Li Zehou, Lunyu jindu (1998); J. S. Rošker, Following His Own Path: Li Zehou and Contemporary Chinese Philosophy (2019)
Evidence: AI draft
Confucius › traditionally 551–479 BCE
Immanuel Kant
influenced by
In Critique of Critical Philosophy (1979) Li Zehou read Kant’s a priori forms of knowledge and morality as products of collective practice, calling this process ‘sedimentation’. Li Zehou, Pipan zhexue de pipan: Kangde shuping (1979), Eng. A New Approach to Kant (2018); J. S. Rošker, Following His Own Path: Li Zehou and Contemporary Chinese Philosophy (2019)
Evidence: AI draft
Immanuel Kant › 1724–1804
Karl Marx
influenced by
Li Zehou took from Marx the primacy of material practice, above all making and using tools, as the ground of his anthropo-historical ontology (Pipan zhexue de pipan, 1979). Li Zehou, Pipan zhexue de pipan (1979); J. S. Rošker, Following His Own Path: Li Zehou and Contemporary Chinese Philosophy (2019)
Evidence: AI draft
Karl Marx › 1818–1883
Works
A reading of Kant through Marx: the forms of reason and beauty are “sedimented” from collective human practice over history.
Position
Li Zehou combined Marx, Kant and Confucius in an “anthropo-historical ontology”. Kant was right that knowledge and morality have universal forms, but these are not given a priori: they are “sedimented” over millennia from collective practice, above all the making and using of tools, and form a cultural-psychological structure in each individual. Beauty marks the point where nature has been humanised and reason has become feeling; hence aesthetics can be first philosophy. Chinese culture, shaped by Confucius, is for him a culture of this-worldly joy and of reason infused with feeling. His books fuelled the “aesthetics fever” of the 1980s and made him a guide for a generation of students.
Life & context
Li Zehou was born in 1930 in Changsha (Hunan), studied philosophy at Peking University and then worked at the Institute of Philosophy in Beijing. He made his name in the aesthetics debates of the 1950s; sent to a re-education cadre school in the Cultural Revolution, he secretly worked on Kant there. Criticised after 1989, he moved to the United States in 1992 and died in Boulder, Colorado, in 2021.
Further main works
- The Path of Beauty (Mei de licheng, 1981)
- Essays on the History of Ancient Chinese Thought (Zhongguo gudai sixiang shilun, 1985)
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