Tang Junyi

Works

• 1953The Spiritual Value of Chinese Culture

  Written in Hong Kong exile: Chinese culture rests on a humanist spirit in which heaven and humanity, the moral and the natural, are not separated; science and democracy can grow from it.

• 1958A Manifesto on Chinese Culture to the World

  Drafted by Tang Junyi and signed with Mou Zongsan, Xu Fuguan and Zhang Junmai: Chinese culture is not a dead object for sinology but a living tradition whose core is the learning of mind and nature; it should take up science and democracy.

• 1977Life, Existence and the Horizons of Mind

  His last major work: nine horizons in which the mind relates to individual things, kinds, causes, itself, ideal meanings, morality and finally the transcendent – from Buddhist emptiness and the Christian God to the Confucian unity of heaven and virtue.

Position

Tang Junyi started from the moral self: in “The Establishment of the Moral Self” (1944) and later works he argued that every form of culture – science, art, religion, politics – expresses a moral reason that transcends the individual and connects people with one another. Chinese culture, in his view, had developed this humanist spirit most fully, because it did not separate heaven and humanity, nature and morality; its weakness was that it had not developed science and democracy, which it could and should take up. After 1949 he saw Chinese culture as scattered like blossoms and fruit that have dropped to the ground and called on the diaspora to replant its roots. His late system, “Life, Existence and the Horizons of Mind” (1977), describes nine horizons in three groups: horizons of objects (individual things, kinds, causes and purposes), horizons of the subject (mutual sensation, contemplation of ideal meanings, moral practice) and horizons beyond subject and object – the one God of Christianity, the emptiness of self and dharmas in Buddhism, and the Confucian flowing of heavenly virtue. The order recalls Hegel’s Phenomenology, but Tang understood the horizons as mutually responsive rather than as stages that are simply overcome. With Mou Zongsan he is regarded as a central figure of the second generation of New Confucianism.

Life & context

Tang Junyi was born on 17 January 1909 in Yibin, Sichuan, the son of a scholar and teacher. He studied in Beijing, where he heard Liang Shuming and Xiong Shili, and then at the National Central University in Nanjing, where he graduated in philosophy in 1932. He taught in Sichuan and at Central University, where he became professor and head of the philosophy department during the war years. In 1949 he moved to Hong Kong and, with the historian Qian Mu and others, founded New Asia College, which in 1963 became part of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. There Tang taught philosophy and built up the department. In 1958 he drafted the “Manifesto on Chinese Culture to the World”, which he published together with Mou Zongsan, Xu Fuguan and Zhang Junmai. In the 1960s he wrote a six-volume study of the basic concepts of Chinese philosophy. In 1974 he left the university after disputes over its reorganisation and continued teaching at the New Asia Research Institute. He completed his last great work while ill with lung cancer and died in Hong Kong on 2 February 1978.

Further main works

• The Establishment of the Moral Self (Daode ziwo zhi jianli, 1944)
• The Reconstruction of the Humanist Spirit (Renwen jingshen zhi chongjian, 1955)
• Cultural Consciousness and Moral Reason (Wenhua yishi yu daode lixing, 1958)
• Manifesto on Chinese Culture to the World (with Mou Zongsan, Xu Fuguan and Zhang Junmai, 1958)
• Fundamental Treatises on Chinese Philosophy (Zhongguo zhexue yuanlun, 1966–75)