From Chinese Cosmology to English Romanticism explores the intricate early-modern English and European reception of the Chinese monistic idea tianren heyi or humanity’s unity with heaven via the Chinese rites controversy, the philosophical innovation of Spinoza, the transformation of English garden layout, and the poetic revolution of Coleridge and Wordsworth.
“Yu Liu offers a groundbreaking analysis of cross-cultural exchange by exploring the influence of Chinese philosophical traditions on English art, gardening, and literature up to the Romantic period . . . A must-read for scholars interested in Anglo-Chinese relations between 1600 and 1830.”—Robert Markley, W. D. and Sara E. Trowbridge Professor of English, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
“In this deeply learned study, Yu Liu traces a ‘relay of ideas’ that made their way from Chinese philosophy to Western Romanticism, transformed along the way in Spinoza’s thought and in theories of English landscape gardening. A tour de force of intellectual history, his book shapes a persuasive story out of disparate strands whose significance deepens when seen in a unifying perspective.”—Leo Damrosch, Ernest Bernbaum Research Professor of Literature, Emeritus, Harvard University
“A thoughtful and imaginative attempt to trace the migration of the ancient Chinese cosmological unity of heaven and humanity to seventeenth-andeighteenth-century Europe via the China Jesuits, Spinoza, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, leading to the redesign of English gardens and Romantic poetry.”—D. E. Mungello, professor of history emeritus, Baylor University
“In his powerfully original monograph, Yu Liu upends the all-too-familiar asymmetry of theorizing Chinese culture through a Western conceptual structure. He mounts a carefully documented and compelling argument that the ‘idea’ of the persistent Chinese organismic worldview captured in the language of ‘humanity’s unity with nature’ set its roots in the antinomian European Enlightenment thinkers as early as the complex Rites Controversy, and then spreads out as a root system through the heretical philosopher Spinoza to shape British Romanticism in all of its parts.”—Roger T. Ames, Peking University
具体描述
好的，这是一份关于一本名为《从中国宇宙论到英国浪漫主义：一个一元论思想的曲折旅程》的书籍的简介，其内容聚焦于探讨一个核心的哲学概念——一元论（Monism）——如何在跨越文化和历史的鸿沟时，演变、重塑并最终体现在不同的思想体系中。 --- 《从中国宇宙论到英国浪漫主义：一个一元论思想的曲折旅程》 导言：思想的迁徙与形变 本书旨在深入剖析一个看似跨越巨大文化和时空鸿沟的哲学命题：一元论（Monism）。它并非简单地描绘一个单一思想从东方到西方的直线传播，而是着重考察这一核心观念——即万物归于一，存在本质上是统一的——如何在不同的文化土壤中，被接纳、解释、改造，并最终催生出具有自身鲜明特征的理论体系。 我们的考察始于古代中国的宇宙论和形而上学传统，特别是那些强调“道”（Tao）、“气”（Qi）或“太一”（The Ultimate Unity）的哲学流派。随后，我们将追踪这一思想的潜在回响和结构性相似之处，观察其如何在十八、十九世纪的英国浪漫主义运动中以新的面貌和功能重新浮现。 第一部分：东方之源——宇宙的统一性与古代中国的形而上学 本部分将建立对“一元论”在中国哲学语境下的初步理解。我们不将此视为对西方术语的简单套用，而是深入挖掘中国思想家们如何处理“一”与“万”的关系。 1. “道”的本体论地位： 我们将详细考察老庄哲学中“道”的不可名状性及其作为万物本源的地位。这里的“一”是生成一切、却又超越一切的基底。它不是一个僵硬的实体，而是一种动态的、内在的秩序或过程。本节将对比早期道家文本，探讨“无”（Wu）如何成为“有”（You）的绝对前提，从而确立一种内在的统一性。 2. 儒家与宇宙的有机整体观： 尽管儒家更侧重于社会伦理，但其宇宙观同样根植于一个统一的秩序之中。我们将探讨朱熹理学中的“理”的概念。尽管朱子学常常被视为二元论（理与气），但“理”的普遍性与不可分割性，使其在一定程度上指向了一种终极的、贯穿天地万物的原则，即一种超越现象的单一性。 3. 早期思想的结构性分析： 在这一部分，我们将使用比较分析的方法，识别出中国古代思想中关于“整体性”和“联系性”的结构性特征，这些特征为后来的讨论提供了基础。我们的重点在于理解这种“一”是如何被用于解释自然现象、社会结构和个体精神生活的，而不是孤立的抽象概念。 第二部分：思想的间隙与转译的挑战 跨越数千年和数千英里的思想流变，绝非坦途。这一部分将审视思想在不同知识体系中遭遇的阻力、过滤和必要的“转译”。 1. 知识的路径与失落： 我们将考察在西方启蒙运动的理性主义和笛卡尔式二元论盛行的背景下，源自东方的哲学洞见是如何被西方学者所接触和理解的。早期汉学家、传教士的记录和翻译实践，往往受制于当时的哲学框架，导致对中国思想中“统一性”的片面或误读。 2. 术语的陷阱： “一元论”本身是一个源于西方后柏拉图主义和斯宾诺莎哲学的术语。我们将分析当这一概念被投射到“道”或“理”上时，所产生的语义张力。这种张力揭示了文化语境如何决定了哲学概念的效力和意义。 3. 浪漫主义的准备： 在十八世纪末，欧洲思想界对僵化的启蒙理性主义和笛卡尔的物质-精神二元论产生了普遍的不满。这种“反思”为接纳那些强调整体性、情感体验和自然内在活力的思想体系创造了心理和智力上的空间。 第三部分：英国浪漫主义的“一”的重构 本书的高潮在于考察一元论的观念如何在英国浪漫主义的文学、诗歌和自然哲学中得到“重写”和“情感化”。这里的“一”不再是古代形而上学的抽象基石，而成为了主体经验的核心。 1. 自然即神性：自然神论（Pantheism）的复兴： 我们将聚焦于柯勒律治（Coleridge）和华兹华斯（Wordsworth）的思想。浪漫主义者对自然的沉浸式体验，本质上是一种对“万物相连”的身体感知的回归。他们的“自然神论”倾向，将神性或绝对性内在于自然界本身，这在结构上与古代中国的“道”在万物中展现自身具有惊人的相似性。 2. 想象力与统一场： 柯勒律治对“统合性想象力”（Primary and Secondary Imagination）的论述，是理解浪漫主义“一元论”的关键。想象力被视为一种能洞察并重构世界内在统一性的官能。我们分析诗歌如何通过象征和意象，尝试弥合主体（观察者）与客体（自然）之间的鸿沟，实现一种短暂的、体验性的“合一”。 3. 审美体验中的超验： 浪漫主义的一元论常常通过审美体验来达成。沉浸于宏伟的景观或深刻的艺术作品中，个体暂时超越了日常自我的局限，体验到与更广阔、更永恒的存在的连接。我们将考察雪莱（Shelley）诗歌中对“无名之灵”（The Unacknowledged Legislator）的颂扬，如何体现了对一种渗透万物的、非人格化的绝对力量的信仰。 结论：思想的连续性与历史的非线性 本书最终的论点是，虽然具体的文化表达和哲学术语截然不同，但人类对“存在统一性”的根本探寻，构成了跨文化、跨时代思想史中一个强韧的暗流。从中国宇宙论中对“道”的敬畏，到英国浪漫主义者对自然统一性的狂热追求，我们看到的是同一哲学母题在不同历史语境下的适应性重生。 这种考察并非旨在证明直接的因果关系，而是揭示不同文明在面对人类存在的根本问题时，所能达到的结构性相似性。它挑战了将思想史视为孤立进步链条的传统叙事，转而倡导一种更加网络化、具有潜在共鸣的全球思想图景。本书邀请读者重新审视那些被我们视为“异质”的思想传统，以发现其中隐藏的、跨越界限的深刻哲学联系。 ---
著者信息
作者簡介
Yu Liu（劉豫）
Yu Liu（劉豫）is professor of English at Niagara County Community College (SUNY). In addition to over thirty-five essays in peer-reviewed journals of literature, history, and philosophy, he is author of Poetics and Politics: The Revolutions of Wordsworth (1999), Seeds of a Different Eden: Chinese Gardening Ideas and a New English Aesthetic Ideal (2008), and Harmonious Disagreement: Matteo Ricci and His Closest Chinese Friends (2015).
Yu Liu（劉豫）
Yu Liu（劉豫）is professor of English at Niagara County Community College (SUNY). In addition to over thirty-five essays in peer-reviewed journals of literature, history, and philosophy, he is author of Poetics and Politics: The Revolutions of Wordsworth (1999), Seeds of a Different Eden: Chinese Gardening Ideas and a New English Aesthetic Ideal (2008), and Harmonious Disagreement: Matteo Ricci and His Closest Chinese Friends (2015).
图书目录
List of Illustrations
Series Editor’s Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A Distinct Type of Cross-cultural Interaction and Influence
Part 1. By Chance or Design: The Detectable Route of Philosophical Transmission
Chapter 1 Behind the Book Cover: The Real Fight and Legacy of the Chinese Rites Controversy
Chapter 2 The Uncanny Resemblance: A Telltale Clue to the Unusual Cosmology of Spinoza
Part 2. For Pride or Prejudice: The Hitherto Unrecognized Route of Aesthetic Transmission
Chapter 3 From Regularity to Irregularity: The Landscaping Innovation of William Kent
Chapter 4 Changing What Is Foreign into What Is Native: The Horticultural Nationalism of Horace Walpole
Part 3. To Accept or Reject: The History-Making Choices in English Romanticism
Chapter 5 The Intrigue of Both Attraction and Repulsion: Coleridge, Spinoza, and China
Chapter 6 The Inspiration of an Originally Chinese Idea: The Conceptual Innovation of Wordsworth in The Ruined Cottage
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Series Editor’s Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A Distinct Type of Cross-cultural Interaction and Influence
Part 1. By Chance or Design: The Detectable Route of Philosophical Transmission
Chapter 1 Behind the Book Cover: The Real Fight and Legacy of the Chinese Rites Controversy
Chapter 2 The Uncanny Resemblance: A Telltale Clue to the Unusual Cosmology of Spinoza
Part 2. For Pride or Prejudice: The Hitherto Unrecognized Route of Aesthetic Transmission
Chapter 3 From Regularity to Irregularity: The Landscaping Innovation of William Kent
Chapter 4 Changing What Is Foreign into What Is Native: The Horticultural Nationalism of Horace Walpole
Part 3. To Accept or Reject: The History-Making Choices in English Romanticism
Chapter 5 The Intrigue of Both Attraction and Repulsion: Coleridge, Spinoza, and China
Chapter 6 The Inspiration of an Originally Chinese Idea: The Conceptual Innovation of Wordsworth in The Ruined Cottage
Notes
Bibliography
Index
图书序言
- ISBN：9781643363806
- 叢書系列：East-West Cultural Encounters in Literature & Cultural Studies
- 規格：精裝 / 256頁 / 15.8 x 23.5 x 3.58 cm / 普通級 / 單色印刷 / 初版
- 出版地：台灣
图书试读
叢書主編序
Series Editor’s Preface
In accounts of planetary history, scientists often elaborate on alien meteors’ impact to envisage the prehistoric momentum of the earth rock. The takeaway of such an approach is simple: it takes the dizzying ecology of the universe, or the cosmopolitanism of stars, to comprehend the long duration of our home, the planet Earth. In a similar sense, Yu Liu urges readers to open their visionary imagination to the alien contributions to the untold stories of Europe and the British Isles in much the same way as scientists take seriously the generative contributions of alien visits. This book turns us away from a vision of individuated cultures to an ecology of civilizational cohabitation and collaboration.
First, we draw your attention to another author, the anthropologist William Pietz, to borrow his cross-cultural vision in describing the civilizational significance of Liu’s project. Pietz articulates the coexistence of civilizations in his study of fetishism. He exposes a reductive understanding of fetishism that prevailed in European history. This reduction was possible because it was done in abstraction from the ecology of civilizational exchanges. Countering this appropriation, Pietz locates fetishism in a geography between the two sides of the Atlantic, which delimits an ecology of civilizational clusters. When the Portuguese interacted with West Africans in the sixteenth century, the encounters were nothing short of a sci-fi rendering.
Europeans sought to translate alien practices and perplexing thoughts of pantheism in the term of “fetish,” the pidgin word fetisso, deriving from the Portuguese word feitiço, meaning “magical practice” or “witchcraft” in the late Middle Ages (Pietz 5, 1985). Pietz accentuates the cross-cultural nature of this translation: “The idea of the fetish originated in a mercantile intercultural space created by the ongoing trade relations between cultures so radically different as to be mutually incomprehensible. It is proper to neither West African nor Christian European culture” (24, 1987). Fetishism neither derives linearly from Africa nor finds its true meaning exclusively in the African soil. Instead, it derives its new semantic affordance from alien provocation. Fetishism does not just mean idolatry; it also makes it possible that material objects can mean what the given cultural lexicons cannot articulate and becomes a vitally productive source in Western cultures.
Now, Yu Liu joins Pietz in this cross-cultural dialogue, chiming in with “monism,” which, Liu describes, emerged in an ecology of cultural crossings between East Asia and Western Europe. Historically, Europeans faced Chinese civilization in the missions of the Jesuits, parallel to the encounters of the Portuguese with West African cultures at the coast of Guinea. Europeans were as bewildered by strange rites in China as they were in Africa. The European Jesuits needed to translate an alien cosmology behind the Chinese’s rites into Christian concepts. But they did not attempt a coherent assimilation of the Chinese cosmology of tianren heyi, “humanity’s unity with heaven,” to Western philosophical concepts. One had to wait until Baruch Spinoza, Liu maintains, stabilized the coworking of Europe and China for the transmission–translation of tianren heyi in terms of monism; Spinoza’s monism belongs to neither China nor Europe, but to both. As a result of such coworking, Liu contends, monism owes everything creative to the impetus of fresh input from China. This alien monism was nothing less than a cosmological challenge to any conceptualization of how the world existed. Liu reminds the reader that monism ushered in an affordance of meaning previously unavailable in the West, which encouraged the appreciation of a self-propelling and self-ordering ecology. In fact, Spinoza’s monism still enjoys a suggestive potency in contemporary efforts to rethink the Western Enlightenment. The new-millennial philosophers of ontological materialism, by critiquing the human-centeredness of the Enlightenment, often hark back to Spinoza for the recognition of ontological self-power and self-order, as Jane Bennett does in Vibrant Matter. Liu’s thesis on the Chinese origin of monism supports Bennett’s argument, which not only goes back to Spinoza’s monistic conatus to historicize the ontology of “thing power” but also visualizes this power with the Chinese notion of shi, a historical term for imagining how ecologies demonstrate self-adjusting flows from a bird’s-eye view (34–35).
Liu’s serious historical and relational reading evinces that toward monism, intellectually productive Europeans, such as the Jesuits, Spinoza, Horace Walpole, or Samuel Taylor Coleridge, entertained relationships not just of love and hate but also of hate and create. In their first encounters, Jesuits were locked in debates about whether the westernization of Chinese cosmology could facilitate the cause of the church, as an indirect result of which the Jewish Spinoza created monism. In the history of the English garden, Horace Walpole, a professed hater of China, used the monist nature, the ecological consciousness from China, creatively (and without explicit acknowledgment). Instead of imposing the geometrical order as found in the French garden, Walpole articulated a revolutionary design based on the irregularity principle, which drew on Chinese conceptualizations of nature’s self-generated ordering. Liu describes Walpole’s innovation as “evocative of [the Jesuit] Ricci’s calculated conceptual sleight of hand in the early seventeenth century,” creatively using the Chinese logic of tienren heyi without saying so (7). Liu also shows Coleridge’s precarious balance of explicit hate and implicit love of China to account for the poet’s brief span of high creativity.
Attending to civilizational crisscrossing, Liu takes a challenging path to investigate how monism thrived. The main chapters resemble historical-biographical sketches of Europeans, in which Liu depicts in narratives how from their viewpoints Europeans used resources when complex cultural crossings were the real deal. Even though such a mode of writing demands on the part of Liu the patient work of historical recoding, this unique approach avoids oversimplified ideas of cultural dissemination that map cultural influences by returning to the origin. It is important to note that on the basis of the narrative mode, Liu is well poised to explore the constitutive moments when the key players depicted in these sketches make creative leaps in the midst of genuinely making sense of cultural crossings. Monism in the six moments described in this book did not manifest itself in abstraction.
Instead, it suggested itself forcefully to the key players who had explored ecologically, having taken into serious consideration their changing environments with insights gained from an alien cosmology and having recognized the self-initiating newness of the environments in which they lived.
Thus, the East-West Encounters in Literature and Cultural Studies series editors proudly present Yu Liu, who invites readers to globally minded readings open to civilizational ecologies.
Series Editor’s Preface
In accounts of planetary history, scientists often elaborate on alien meteors’ impact to envisage the prehistoric momentum of the earth rock. The takeaway of such an approach is simple: it takes the dizzying ecology of the universe, or the cosmopolitanism of stars, to comprehend the long duration of our home, the planet Earth. In a similar sense, Yu Liu urges readers to open their visionary imagination to the alien contributions to the untold stories of Europe and the British Isles in much the same way as scientists take seriously the generative contributions of alien visits. This book turns us away from a vision of individuated cultures to an ecology of civilizational cohabitation and collaboration.
First, we draw your attention to another author, the anthropologist William Pietz, to borrow his cross-cultural vision in describing the civilizational significance of Liu’s project. Pietz articulates the coexistence of civilizations in his study of fetishism. He exposes a reductive understanding of fetishism that prevailed in European history. This reduction was possible because it was done in abstraction from the ecology of civilizational exchanges. Countering this appropriation, Pietz locates fetishism in a geography between the two sides of the Atlantic, which delimits an ecology of civilizational clusters. When the Portuguese interacted with West Africans in the sixteenth century, the encounters were nothing short of a sci-fi rendering.
Europeans sought to translate alien practices and perplexing thoughts of pantheism in the term of “fetish,” the pidgin word fetisso, deriving from the Portuguese word feitiço, meaning “magical practice” or “witchcraft” in the late Middle Ages (Pietz 5, 1985). Pietz accentuates the cross-cultural nature of this translation: “The idea of the fetish originated in a mercantile intercultural space created by the ongoing trade relations between cultures so radically different as to be mutually incomprehensible. It is proper to neither West African nor Christian European culture” (24, 1987). Fetishism neither derives linearly from Africa nor finds its true meaning exclusively in the African soil. Instead, it derives its new semantic affordance from alien provocation. Fetishism does not just mean idolatry; it also makes it possible that material objects can mean what the given cultural lexicons cannot articulate and becomes a vitally productive source in Western cultures.
Now, Yu Liu joins Pietz in this cross-cultural dialogue, chiming in with “monism,” which, Liu describes, emerged in an ecology of cultural crossings between East Asia and Western Europe. Historically, Europeans faced Chinese civilization in the missions of the Jesuits, parallel to the encounters of the Portuguese with West African cultures at the coast of Guinea. Europeans were as bewildered by strange rites in China as they were in Africa. The European Jesuits needed to translate an alien cosmology behind the Chinese’s rites into Christian concepts. But they did not attempt a coherent assimilation of the Chinese cosmology of tianren heyi, “humanity’s unity with heaven,” to Western philosophical concepts. One had to wait until Baruch Spinoza, Liu maintains, stabilized the coworking of Europe and China for the transmission–translation of tianren heyi in terms of monism; Spinoza’s monism belongs to neither China nor Europe, but to both. As a result of such coworking, Liu contends, monism owes everything creative to the impetus of fresh input from China. This alien monism was nothing less than a cosmological challenge to any conceptualization of how the world existed. Liu reminds the reader that monism ushered in an affordance of meaning previously unavailable in the West, which encouraged the appreciation of a self-propelling and self-ordering ecology. In fact, Spinoza’s monism still enjoys a suggestive potency in contemporary efforts to rethink the Western Enlightenment. The new-millennial philosophers of ontological materialism, by critiquing the human-centeredness of the Enlightenment, often hark back to Spinoza for the recognition of ontological self-power and self-order, as Jane Bennett does in Vibrant Matter. Liu’s thesis on the Chinese origin of monism supports Bennett’s argument, which not only goes back to Spinoza’s monistic conatus to historicize the ontology of “thing power” but also visualizes this power with the Chinese notion of shi, a historical term for imagining how ecologies demonstrate self-adjusting flows from a bird’s-eye view (34–35).
Liu’s serious historical and relational reading evinces that toward monism, intellectually productive Europeans, such as the Jesuits, Spinoza, Horace Walpole, or Samuel Taylor Coleridge, entertained relationships not just of love and hate but also of hate and create. In their first encounters, Jesuits were locked in debates about whether the westernization of Chinese cosmology could facilitate the cause of the church, as an indirect result of which the Jewish Spinoza created monism. In the history of the English garden, Horace Walpole, a professed hater of China, used the monist nature, the ecological consciousness from China, creatively (and without explicit acknowledgment). Instead of imposing the geometrical order as found in the French garden, Walpole articulated a revolutionary design based on the irregularity principle, which drew on Chinese conceptualizations of nature’s self-generated ordering. Liu describes Walpole’s innovation as “evocative of [the Jesuit] Ricci’s calculated conceptual sleight of hand in the early seventeenth century,” creatively using the Chinese logic of tienren heyi without saying so (7). Liu also shows Coleridge’s precarious balance of explicit hate and implicit love of China to account for the poet’s brief span of high creativity.
Attending to civilizational crisscrossing, Liu takes a challenging path to investigate how monism thrived. The main chapters resemble historical-biographical sketches of Europeans, in which Liu depicts in narratives how from their viewpoints Europeans used resources when complex cultural crossings were the real deal. Even though such a mode of writing demands on the part of Liu the patient work of historical recoding, this unique approach avoids oversimplified ideas of cultural dissemination that map cultural influences by returning to the origin. It is important to note that on the basis of the narrative mode, Liu is well poised to explore the constitutive moments when the key players depicted in these sketches make creative leaps in the midst of genuinely making sense of cultural crossings. Monism in the six moments described in this book did not manifest itself in abstraction.
Instead, it suggested itself forcefully to the key players who had explored ecologically, having taken into serious consideration their changing environments with insights gained from an alien cosmology and having recognized the self-initiating newness of the environments in which they lived.
Thus, the East-West Encounters in Literature and Cultural Studies series editors proudly present Yu Liu, who invites readers to globally minded readings open to civilizational ecologies.
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