On Feng Youlan's Cultural Ideology

From the four aspects of individual cultural realm,group cultural difference,cultural historical inheritance and traditional cultural modernization,this paper systematically analyzes the cultural ideology of Feng Youlan,a famous modern Chinese philosopher,summarizes its characteristics and theoretical gains and losses,and concludes that Feng Youlan's cultural ideology is a cultural evolutionism cultural view.Feng Youlan's cultural ideology comes from the era of cultural conflict and collision caused by the military,political and economic invasion of western powers.This reality prompted Feng Youlan and his contemporary thinkers to compare and consider Chinese and western cultures with the aim of saving the nation.In theory,Feng Youlan's cultural ideology is the result of the integration of western philosophical methods and traditional Chinese philosophical resources.Among them,Bergson's life philosophy,Dewey's empiricism and Montague's neo-realism had a great influence on him,and the mystical thinking mode of Taoism and Buddhism in Chinese traditional culture and the relationship between the directors of Cheng-Zhu school's neo-confucianism had a direct influence on him.Feng Youlan's discussion on individual cultural realm involves cultural philosophy issues such as the essence of culture,the driving force of cultural production,and the form and function of culture,and so on.His discussion shows that culture is humanization.It is the rational self-creation of human beings,and it is the overall life style of human beings with the mode of production as the core.Culture comes from people's inner need of self-realization,which urges people to take actions to constantly improve themselves.The difference of individual level of education is reflected in different states.The value of culture lies in promoting the transformation of society as a whole through individual self-improvement.Feng Youlan's comparison of Chinese and western culture has gone through threestages,the theory of cultural region,the theory of ancient and modern culture and the theory of cultural type.This process is the process of Feng Youlan's transfer from the position of cultural relativism to that of cultural evolutionism.Feng Youlan's theory of cultural difference in regions indicates that the direct source of culture is people's economic life,while different sources of economic life are people's different desires and natural environment.The theory of ancient and modern culture and the theory of cultural type put forward by him show that Chinese and western culture is essentially one kind of culture.The differences between Chinese and western cultures are superficial.Chinese culture needs to adopt industrialized production mode and abandon agricultural culture to construct modern Chinese industrial culture.Feng Youlan's discussion on historical and cultural inheritance shows his views on the mechanism of cultural development,which provides a theoretical perspective on how to view the relationship between traditional culture and modern culture and how to evaluate traditional culture.His discussion shows that: culture takes itself as the foundation of development,and human's progress is to obtain the new character on the basis of retaining the original one;history is not a matter of the past,but of the present.At the same time,his discussion on potential also involves the issue of cultural evaluation,that is,the development of culture needs certain objective historical conditions--potential;a good culture should take advantage of the potential,while a culture that falls behind or surpasses the potential is anachronistic.Feng Youlan's discussion on the modernization of traditional culture involves the premise,content and methods of traditional culture inheritance.Feng Youlan put forward the theory of cultural common phase,continue to speak and abstract inheritance law in essence;this means that the modern transformation of Chinese traditional culture is systematic;inheritable traditional culture is not because it is traditional,but because it can have new value and play a new role in the new cultural system.The inheritance of traditional culture should be integrated with modern social life.Meanwhile,he emphasized that the core of the modernization of traditional culture lies in the modernization of human rational spirit by discussing therelationship between human social life and culture.This paper holds that Feng Youlan's cultrual ideology shows the characteristics of self-transcendence,cultural consistency and life style.This evolutionist view of culture can provide reference for Chinese current cultural construction and practical issues such as maintaining national cultural individuality and participating in cultural globalization.