China and the West

Opposition to John Dewey's pragmatism derived its power from the new currents of Western philosophy, based on the thought of Hegel and Bergson, that began to appear in the 1920's. Zhang Junmai expressed this opposition to Dewey in a lecture delivered at Qinghua University in Beijing on February 14, 1923, dealing with philosophies of life. This led to a new controversy. Zhang was at the time returned from studies in Japan and Germany. His study of Bergson had given him a vision of reality radically opposed to the positivistic philosophies of the period, particularly when he saw these philosophies imported into China and used by Chinese scholars against the classical thought of the Chinese themselves. He was among the few Chinese at this time who had a true insight into what constitutes philosophical thought in the Western sense and what makes it distinct from inductive scientific thought. He insisted that our acquaintance with reality obtained through philosophy, aesthetics and religion is a higher and more necessary type of knowledge than that obtained by science and that, consequently, we must go beyond the range of the empirical sciences, both in subject matter and in method.