On The View Of Freedom, Of Cai Yuanpei

As a modern conception, liberty derived from the West and extended to the whole world with capital and opium. In modern China, the concern about liberty has not stopped since Yan Fu and many other intellectuals, whose thoughts are of great significance in the process of value reform and therefore requires our close examination.It is in the background of such process of value reform in modern China that this paper investigates the understanding of liberty together with freedom (free personality) of Cai Yuanpei, who was well-known as one of the most important liberalists for his claim of "Embracing various schools in the sprite of academic freedom ".Five parts are contained here.The first part is preface, which mainly introduces the purpose and significance of this paper.The second part is a brief introduction to Cai's life and the ideological development of his understanding of liberty and freedom.The third part investigates the content of Cai's understanding of liberty and freedom from four aspects: the freedom of belief and thought; the academic freedom and academic discussion; liberty as right; freedom as personality.The fourth part evaluates Cai's understanding of liberty and freedom in the process of value reform in modern China and examines its significance and limitation as well.As an epilogue, the fifth part summarizes the whole paper and pointsout that we should have a sympathetic understanding to the thoughts in the history rather than negate them without deliberation. Only regarding their thought as the foundation of our study and further developing their thought, we can just make our culture innovation be full of vitality.