Study On Several Problems Of Sino-Western Enlightening Trends

The Chinese intellectuals in the modern times have ever been persevering in their pursuit of enlightenment .They desired to enlighten the whole Chinese nation! They believed only through enlightenment could China be thoroughly remolded, only through enlightenment could stagnate China be saved! By reflecting the 18th western enlightening trends and the enlightening cause of Chinese modern intellectuals. The thesis studied on Several problems of Sino-Western Enlightening Trends we and came to a conclusion, in contemporary China, there was still the necessity of enlightenment. In this thesis I will do my bit trying to pose some new thoughts helpful to create a paragon of life on the enlightening road of the Chinese masses. This is a road where the Chinese intellectual forerunners have been exerting their utmost, but a road still being bleak and desolate. My thesis can be mainly divided into three Chapters.Chapter One: Discuss the internalism and externalism of the enlightening trends. The problem of internalism and externalism is actually a problem of relationship between the enlightenment and the tradition, a problem of nativization of the enlightenment. By the probation and comparison of both"the unripe status"the Chinese and Western enlightening currents of thought must surpass, the writer points out it was in the divinity cultural background that the Western masses have lost the subjectivism and rational glory as a man. The task of enlightenment in the West was to decode the ignorance and extremity of the Divinity, rationalize the God and thus approve the humanity. While the reason which led to the unripe status in China was the constraint and denial of the human beings by the Chinese long-lasted patriarchal clan system, the right of the crown and the culture of Confucian canon. Thus the task of Chinese enlightenment was to release the subjective man from the affiliation with the Way of Heaven, the patriarchal clan system and the right of the crown. Digging for the ideological origins, we could see the Western enlightening trends were the inheritance and development of Renaissance; while in the early Chinese traditional thoughts, we could also find the initial rudiments of freedom, equality and civil rights which were the same things advocated by the Enlightenment. In one word, for the Sino-Western enlightenments, their causes were different, their tasks were different, and they both had their own internal traditional ideological resources, so they were not and they could not be laterally displaced with each other. The Chinese Enlightenment was a kind of internal enlightening deriving from its own traditional culture, just as the Western Enlightenment derived from the western culture. Chapter Two: Enlightenment and revolution (salvation) though always had complex relations, they had different motivate, different target indication and running orbit. There was no necessary relation between Enlightenment and revolution. It was not Enlightenment that led to revolution, neither was revolution. But there was huge influence between these two, which we could not doubt. In the West, the enlightening currents of thought kept the central theme of the bourgeois revolution within limits; in China, Enlightenment came together with revolution, both of which gave impetus to each other.Chapter Three: The losses and gains of the values of Enlightenment. Enlightenment brought the West civilization, promoted the West to make enormous progress in many fields such as politics, economics, military affairs and culture and took a dominant position in the world at last. It provided the world one of the most practical"civilization model". Chinese Enlightenment in modern times though had never made China undergo a radical transformation, its contribution to the development of modern Chinese scientific and technological civilization could not be denied. While appreciating Enlightenment, we must reflect upon its negative side or we can say the disaster brought by Enlightment to man. Western enlightening currents of thought, because of its own cultural exclusiveness, provided theoretical support for the Western centralism and hegemonism while Chinese modern enlightening currents of thought misplaced the form and the content, thus the enlightening thinkers, for the ignorance of their own traditional cultural roots, in the waves and waves of anti-traditional movements, lost their contact with our ancestors gradually, and step by step lost themselves in the contradictory fights between the"Western learning"and the"quintessence of Chinese culture"...