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
具體描述
好的，這是一份關於一本名為《從中國宇宙論到英國浪漫主義：一個一元論思想的麯摺旅程》的書籍的簡介，其內容聚焦於探討一個核心的哲學概念——一元論（Monism）——如何在跨越文化和曆史的鴻溝時，演變、重塑並最終體現在不同的思想體係中。 --- 《從中國宇宙論到英國浪漫主義：一個一元論思想的麯摺旅程》 導言：思想的遷徙與形變 本書旨在深入剖析一個看似跨越巨大文化和時空鴻溝的哲學命題：一元論（Monism）。它並非簡單地描繪一個單一思想從東方到西方的直綫傳播，而是著重考察這一核心觀念——即萬物歸於一，存在本質上是統一的——如何在不同的文化土壤中，被接納、解釋、改造，並最終催生齣具有自身鮮明特徵的理論體係。 我們的考察始於古代中國的宇宙論和形而上學傳統，特彆是那些強調“道”（Tao）、“氣”（Qi）或“太一”（The Ultimate Unity）的哲學流派。隨後，我們將追蹤這一思想的潛在迴響和結構性相似之處，觀察其如何在十八、十九世紀的英國浪漫主義運動中以新的麵貌和功能重新浮現。 第一部分：東方之源——宇宙的統一性與古代中國的形而上學 本部分將建立對“一元論”在中國哲學語境下的初步理解。我們不將此視為對西方術語的簡單套用，而是深入挖掘中國思想傢們如何處理“一”與“萬”的關係。 1. “道”的本體論地位： 我們將詳細考察老莊哲學中“道”的不可名狀性及其作為萬物本源的地位。這裏的“一”是生成一切、卻又超越一切的基底。它不是一個僵硬的實體，而是一種動態的、內在的秩序或過程。本節將對比早期道傢文本，探討“無”（Wu）如何成為“有”（You）的絕對前提，從而確立一種內在的統一性。 2. 儒傢與宇宙的有機整體觀： 盡管儒傢更側重於社會倫理，但其宇宙觀同樣根植於一個統一的秩序之中。我們將探討硃熹理學中的“理”的概念。盡管硃子學常常被視為二元論（理與氣），但“理”的普遍性與不可分割性，使其在一定程度上指嚮瞭一種終極的、貫穿天地萬物的原則，即一種超越現象的單一性。 3. 早期思想的結構性分析： 在這一部分，我們將使用比較分析的方法，識彆齣中國古代思想中關於“整體性”和“聯係性”的結構性特徵，這些特徵為後來的討論提供瞭基礎。我們的重點在於理解這種“一”是如何被用於解釋自然現象、社會結構和個體精神生活的，而不是孤立的抽象概念。 第二部分：思想的間隙與轉譯的挑戰 跨越數韆年和數韆英裏的思想流變，絕非坦途。這一部分將審視思想在不同知識體係中遭遇的阻力、過濾和必要的“轉譯”。 1. 知識的路徑與失落： 我們將考察在西方啓濛運動的理性主義和笛卡爾式二元論盛行的背景下，源自東方的哲學洞見是如何被西方學者所接觸和理解的。早期漢學傢、傳教士的記錄和翻譯實踐，往往受製於當時的哲學框架，導緻對中國思想中“統一性”的片麵或誤讀。 2. 術語的陷阱： “一元論”本身是一個源於西方後柏拉圖主義和斯賓諾莎哲學的術語。我們將分析當這一概念被投射到“道”或“理”上時，所産生的語義張力。這種張力揭示瞭文化語境如何決定瞭哲學概念的效力和意義。 3. 浪漫主義的準備： 在十八世紀末，歐洲思想界對僵化的啓濛理性主義和笛卡爾的物質-精神二元論産生瞭普遍的不滿。這種“反思”為接納那些強調整體性、情感體驗和自然內在活力的思想體係創造瞭心理和智力上的空間。 第三部分：英國浪漫主義的“一”的重構 本書的高潮在於考察一元論的觀念如何在英國浪漫主義的文學、詩歌和自然哲學中得到“重寫”和“情感化”。這裏的“一”不再是古代形而上學的抽象基石，而成為瞭主體經驗的核心。 1. 自然即神性：自然神論（Pantheism）的復興： 我們將聚焦於柯勒律治（Coleridge）和華茲華斯（Wordsworth）的思想。浪漫主義者對自然的沉浸式體驗，本質上是一種對“萬物相連”的身體感知的迴歸。他們的“自然神論”傾嚮，將神性或絕對性內在於自然界本身，這在結構上與古代中國的“道”在萬物中展現自身具有驚人的相似性。 2. 想象力與統一場： 柯勒律治對“統閤性想象力”（Primary and Secondary Imagination）的論述，是理解浪漫主義“一元論”的關鍵。想象力被視為一種能洞察並重構世界內在統一性的官能。我們分析詩歌如何通過象徵和意象，嘗試彌閤主體（觀察者）與客體（自然）之間的鴻溝，實現一種短暫的、體驗性的“閤一”。 3. 審美體驗中的超驗： 浪漫主義的一元論常常通過審美體驗來達成。沉浸於宏偉的景觀或深刻的藝術作品中，個體暫時超越瞭日常自我的局限，體驗到與更廣闊、更永恒的存在的連接。我們將考察雪萊（Shelley）詩歌中對“無名之靈”（The Unacknowledged Legislator）的頌揚，如何體現瞭對一種滲透萬物的、非人格化的絕對力量的信仰。 結論：思想的連續性與曆史的非綫性 本書最終的論點是，雖然具體的文化錶達和哲學術語截然不同，但人類對“存在統一性”的根本探尋，構成瞭跨文化、跨時代思想史中一個強韌的暗流。從中國宇宙論中對“道”的敬畏，到英國浪漫主義者對自然統一性的狂熱追求，我們看到的是同一哲學母題在不同曆史語境下的適應性重生。 這種考察並非旨在證明直接的因果關係，而是揭示不同文明在麵對人類存在的根本問題時，所能達到的結構性相似性。它挑戰瞭將思想史視為孤立進步鏈條的傳統敘事，轉而倡導一種更加網絡化、具有潛在共鳴的全球思想圖景。本書邀請讀者重新審視那些被我們視為“異質”的思想傳統，以發現其中隱藏的、跨越界限的深刻哲學聯係。 ---
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).
圖書目錄
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
圖書序言
- ISBN：9781643363806
- 叢書係列：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
- 齣版地：颱灣
圖書試讀
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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