China & East Asia · 1895–1990
Feng Youlan
Historian of Chinese philosophy and builder of a “new principle learning”
Used Western logical analysis to rebuild Cheng–Zhu principle learning and wrote a landmark modern history of Chinese philosophy; he described four realms of life, rising to the “realm of heaven and earth”.
Life and thought
Feng Youlan, born in Henan in 1895, studied at Peking University and took a doctorate at Columbia. As a professor at Tsinghua he published his two-volume History of Chinese Philosophy (1931–34), the first full modern account of the subject. During the war, teaching in exile in Kunming, he wrote six books building his own system, beginning with the New Treatise on Principle (1939). After 1949 he repeatedly renounced his earlier views, joined the campaign against Confucius in the 1970s, and in his last years rewrote his history once more. He died in 1990.
His “new principle learning” used Western logical analysis to rebuild Cheng–Zhu thought. For anything square there is the principle of squareness, a purely formal concept that “is” even if nothing square exists; principle, qi, the Great Whole and the Dao are reached by analysis, not found in the world. Human life has four realms, depending on how much one understands: the natural, the utilitarian, the moral and the “realm of heaven and earth”, where one sees oneself as part of the whole. His Short History of Chinese Philosophy (1948) shaped how generations abroad met the subject.