| Since the Opium War, with the influence exerted by the western culture over Chinese society, the conflicts and integration of these two different cultural values have brought the western culture and the traditional Chinese culture into the same social context of China. Where course should China follow? Should we make all our efforts to dispute western cultures or absorb them completely, or bring them in selectively? After the creative commenting and digesting of these two cultures on the basis of absorbing the elites of them, Jiang Menlin evades the apparent tangle and dispute between these two cultures and develops his own viewpoints by his subjective initiative thinking, discrimination and conformity according to his own knowledge and the characteristics of the times. This paper tends to explain and analyze Jiang's views on Chinese and Western cultures in the hope of understanding and grasping this scholar's achievements in the modern history of China.This paper intends to generalize and comment on Jiang Menglin's views on Chinese and western culture from the following five aspects.In Chapter One Jiang's Chinese and Western binary cultural background is introduced through the analysis of his academic achievement and cultural characteristics in respect of his family background, experience, social background, and geographic environment.Chapter Two, Chapter There, and Chapter Four are to analyze Jiang Minglin's understanding of Chinese traditional culture and Western culture as well as his comparative research on them from cross direction respectively. In Jin Jiang's opinion, the Chinese culture originates in ancient Chinese culture and improves itself by absorbing and merging with other cultures. To some extent, Chinese culture can be summarized as a Virtue Culture with the emphasis on moral and humanity; while the Western culture developing from the ancient Greek and Hebrew Culture is mainly Rational Culture with a focus on reason and science. When a serious crisis lies ahead of the traditional culture of China, Jiang Menlin, by analyzing the contrast between Chinese and Western culture, puts forward a solution for the development of Chinese culture, that is, learning from strong points of other culture to offset the weakness of Chinese culture and combining these two cultures harmoniously.Cultural criticism and selection is an important task lying in front of Chinese scholars in the first half of 20th century. On the basis of comparison, Jiang Menlin's views on Chinese and western cultural are summarized and evaluated in the last chapter of the paper.Little attention has been paid to the research on Jiang Menlin himself as well as his thought. As a result, it is a kind of innovation for the present author to comb and summarize his thoughts and cultural values in an all-around way, especially the redefinition of Jiang Menlin's views on Chinese and Western cultures. For a long period of time, Jiang has been regarded as a fully westernized scholar by the academic circle because of his political preference. Casting away all those ideology, political bias and partial understanding towards Jiang Menlin's theory, the author finds out that Jiang's theories is a combination of the Chinese and western culture rather than a fully westernized one after reconsidering of his views according to the comprehensive and objective reality.Today, with the frequent and deep communication of Chinese and western culture, how to vitalize the Chinese culture, to a great extent, is well connected with how to treat the traditional culture and how to pick out the elite from other cultures. By means of the study of Jiang's views, all the characteristics of Chinese and western culture are well presented to the Chinese so that we can benefit from the western culture by absorbing the elites of them so as to promote Chinese culture and strive to make China stronger. Besides, at present whereas the academic circles are indifferent to the Jiang Menlin's study, the author expects to endure great hardships to do some pioneer work.In the process of writing, the author is guided by dialectical materialism. As a bourgeoisie liberalist, no doubt Jiang Menlin's thought is limited in some fields for his misunderstanding of Marxism and Materialism. Yet generally speaking, Jiang Menlin is an ambitious and conscientious scholar who concerns his country and his people in the hope of peace and prosperity in the world forever. |
