Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
Conference co-organizer
Professor Murthy’s work probes the historical conditions for the possibility of philosophy and politics in the modern world and in East Asia in particular. He is generally interested in the attempts of East Asian intellectuals to resist modernity through reviving premodern philosophies and religions, such as Buddhism.
His present book project concerns how East Asian intellectuals drew on G.W.F Hegel to uncover logics to Chinese and Japanese history, which culminate in a new world order inspired by their respective cultures.
In addition to the above projects connected to East Asia, he is involved in a project exploring how traditions have been reconstituted by capitalist modernity in South Indian classical music and Tamil identity. He has also been interested in how Marxists (primarily in the North Atlantic) have drawn on Jewish Messianism to confront capitalist modernity.
Panel 4 | Global and Planetary Implications from China Studies
Wang Guowei’s Philosophy and the Problem of Modernity
Abstract
One of Wang Guowei’s major contributions concerns introducing Western philosophy, especially German idealism to a Chinese audience. He was deeply influenced by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, which shows that he emphasized the aspect of German idealism that went against modernity and overlaps with the positions of Lu Xun and Zhang Taiyan.
In his “Concerning Imbalanced Cultural Development (wenhua pianzhilun),” Lu Xun describes Nietzsche’s historical significance in the following manner: “The depth of Nietzsche’s insight made the delusions and the excesses of modern civilization apparent to him, extinguishing all hope within him for his own contemporaries and compelling him to look toward the men of the future.”
Lu Xun asserts that the foundation for a new futural thinking of the twentieth century is German idealism. Lu Xun and Wang Guowei’s respective discussions of German idealism often touch on Nietzsche or Kant but rarely mention Hegel, perhaps the most well-known German idealist of the nineteenth century.
Through such a jump, Wang Guowei appears to avoid the problems of nineteenth century philosophy, namely dualism and linear history and prepare the way for a new philosophy based on intuition. However, if Wang Guowei’s thought did skip the nineteenth century; his trajectory also questions such a jump. After all, Wang’s thought abandoned philosophy for literature and history. Through examining Wang’s philosophical writings, I argue that these transformations were fundamentally connected to his attempt to ground morality.
I conclude that he left philosophy because he wanted to avoid dualisms such as those between subject and object and was not able to accomplish this within the frameworks of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. Could this mean that, philosophically, the twentieth century did not realize the truth of the nineteenth?
