國立臺灣大學政治科學論叢

Abstract / Chinese PDF Download

Nation-building and reconstructing the Chinese civilization had captured the most vehement imagination of many Chinese intellectuals since the late Qing period. This article explores how these were unfolded in the cultural discourse that Li Dazhao developed with a view to rejuvenate China during his pre-Marxist years (1914-1918). Highlighting the cosmological underpinnings of Li’s thoughts which he derived from the Chinese traditions, the article attempts to reveal the ways how the two concerns were integrated into one under a vista fusing the universal and the particular, and eventually led to the search for a “third civilization.” Taking shape under the influences of WWI and the Russian revolutions, Li’s concept of the “third civilization” was politically significant, in that it was posited as an alternative to the 19th-century Eurocentric model of civilization in the global project to resolve crises faced by China and the world. However, it should not be reduced and purely taken as a political concept, for it is emanated from a whole complex of ideas about individual, culture, history and the universe. “Civilization” may be essentialized to identify one’s identity, or posed as the legitimating principle of a nation-state. Yet in the case of Li Dazhao, the most prominent significance of civilization lies in the fact that it is a critical category to interpret and to change the world. For him, universality and particularity related to each other in a dialectical way, and the genuinely universal civilization in the 20^th century could only arise from crossing the barriers of and fusing the various cultures/ civilizations from the East and the West. It was through the vision of the “third civilization” that he first discovered revolution as an alternative. Still, given that his conception of universality was grounded on a specific and culturally- bound cosmology and that he never confronted the substantial problem of how to assimilate Eastern and Western civilizations into a harmony whole, the civilizational ideal about the unity of soul and body that he proclaimed for the future is oftentimes hard to be reified. He thus left the question unanswered: in the process of a revolution, what resort would there be to prevent the ideal from being reduced into a tool of political mobilization?