Li Zhi (philosopher)

Li Zhi

Li Zhi (Chinese: 李 贄 / 李 贽, originally Lin Zaizhi , between 1552 and 1567 Li Zaizhi , from 1567 Li Zhi ) (* November 23, 1527 ; † May 6, 1602 ) was a Chinese philosopher , author , literary critic and civil servant. He saw humans as being driven by self-interest, whose behavior leads to constant tension between individuals. He wanted to replace the socially imprinted system of norms with a moral judgment of the individual, which he would reach through independent thinking.

Life

Li Zhi was from Jinjiang County in what was then Quanzhou Prefecture . His family belonged to the wealthy but socially neglected class of traders in the coastal cities. His ancestor Lin Lü (1328–1384) was one of the richest merchants in China, who owed his prosperity primarily to overseas trade. His son Lin Nu converted to Islam under the impressions gained on his trips abroad, which from then on remained widespread in the family. The question of Lin Zai-zhi's religious affiliation in his early years cannot be conclusively resolved. A personal commitment to Islam is considered unlikely because of the lack of Islamic ideas in his writings. Nonetheless, a certain social pressure can be taken for granted both from the spread of Islam in its family and from the family's membership of the merchant caste, the lowest of the four social classes in the Confucian value system.

Lin's father was the schoolteacher Lin Baizhai, and his mother, who died immediately after birth, was a née Xu. After Lin's mother died, his father remarried. Lin Baizhai gave his son the basic instruction to prepare him for the first state exam. In his youth, Lin Zaizhi studied the Book of Changes , the Book of Rites and the Book of Documents in the classics . Throughout his life he had a special relationship with the Book of Changes. In 1552 Lin successfully passed the state examination at the provincial level and thus obtained the juren degree. His marriage to a born Huang must have taken place at the same time, because in 1552 his son died from this marriage.

In 1556, Lin received his first official post. He obtained the presidency of the county exams in Gongcheng, Henan Province. A few years later, in 1559 or 1560, he moved to Nanjing to take up a lectureship at the National Academy. A few months after his arrival, he learned of his father's death and decided to go to Quanzhou to arrange the funeral. He stayed in Quanzhou for two years to protect his family during the pirate raids in the coastal areas. Finally, in 1562, he and his family settled in Beijing. After two years of anxious waiting for a well-paid job and the exhaustion of almost all available funds, he received a lectureship at the National Academy in Beijing. However, his grandfather soon passed away, and Lin had to resign from his job and return to Quanzhou with his family to organize his funeral and observe the mandatory mourning time. On the trip south, he bought a house in Gongcheng, where he had held a job years earlier. He left his wife and children there and traveled to Quanzhou alone. When he returned in 1566, his family was impoverished and two of his daughters had even starved to death. Lin decided to sell his country estate and move back to Beijing.

The phase of Lin's renewed stay in the capital is seen as decisive for his later philosophical career. As an archivist in the Ministry of Rites , he was able to enter into a diverse intellectual exchange. He got to know followers of the Taizhou school and dealt with the teachings of Wang Yangming (he was particularly influenced by Wang's receptions through Luo Rufang and Wang Ji ) and also with Buddhist epistemology. It was during this time that his personal name was changed to Zhi and his family name was finally changed to Li. After four years of work in the Ministry of Rites, Li was promoted to the Ministry of Justice in Nanjing in 1570. In Nanjing he came into contact with the brothers Geng Dingxiang and Geng Dinglii , and a friendship with Jiao Hong developed that would last for the rest of his life. Li took up his last official post in 1577 when he became Prefect of Yao'an , Yunnan . On the trip to this distant province, he made sure that his family stayed with the Geng brothers in Huang'an in Hubei . Li's activity in Yao'an is considered to be conscientious in his work. For financial reasons he also worked in teaching, but was prevented from doing this intensively by his work as a civil servant. Li Zhi stayed in Yao'an for three years. He then gave up the last official post of his life and moved to Huang'an to join the Gengs. While his relationship with Geng Dinglii remained good, that with Dingxiang was on the verge of falling out. Li accused Dingxiang of insufficient support for He Xinyin , who died in Wuchang Prison in 1579 .

After Dinglii's death in August 1584, Li had to leave Huang'an. He sent his family back to Fujian while he himself was moving to the Zhifoyuan Buddhist Monastery on Dragon Lake , which is near Makeg, not far from Huang'an. A few years later, in 1588, Li Zhi also became a monk, which he ironically said: "After all, I wanted to look as crazy as people generally think I was." commented. In the relative loneliness of his surroundings, he is only able to teach culture and civilization. In an extension of the monastery with an adjoining terrace, he increasingly attracted more people through lectures. The most important activity in the monastery consisted of the writing of his writings on literature, history and philosophy, in which he dealt critically with the neo-Unfucian world and history as well as with Confucius himself. His dedication to a picture of Confucius that he had hung in the Buddha hall of the monastery was indicative of his tendency to break taboos and to ironically reverse the worship of Confucius.

His works soon earned him great popularity and his reputation reached as far as the capital of the empire. In 1590 his book To Burn , in which u. a. his former acquaintance Geng Dingxiang is attacked. Geng then commissioned his student Cai Yizhong to write a book against To Burn . He also accused Li of inciting the people and denigrating Confucian teachings before the local officials. Because of the impending trial, Li left the monastery and moved to the Yuan brothers in Gongan, where he lived from 1590 to 1593. Together with the brothers he lived again inmacheng from 1593 to 1596 and then traveled to Liu Dongxing in Shaanxi.

In 1598 he met the missionary Matteo Ricci in Nanjing , an encounter whose consequences were later widely received. The following year the book To Hide was published there . Soon after, he returned to the Zhifoyuan Monastery, where his residence, as well as his intended burial site, was set on fire by arsonists hired by local dignitaries. Li then fled with the censor Ma Jing-lun first to Shangcheng and then to Tongzhou near Beijing in 1602.

It was at that time that officer Zhang Wenda drafted the indictment against Li and submitted it as a submission to the throne. He explains: "Li Zhi used to be a civil servant, in his old age he shaved his head like a Buddhist monk. Lately he has written books like the Stake and In Hiding and the like that are spreading throughout the country Heat heat and confuse the mind [...] in short, he considers Confucius' value judgments about good and bad to be completely inadequate. [...] Li Zhi is crazy in his confused speech and rebellious in his deeds, really not easy to list all crimes exactly one by one. [...] He lives with drifters in a shabby monastery, where he fetches whores and women and has it with them in broad daylight. Men and even women he lures to him with temptations to come to the monastery where he supposedly wants to give lectures on "Dharma". "

The government's response to the accession to the throne took up the allegations and ordered Li to be detained and his books to be burned for rebellion, disturbance of law and order, and seduction and incitement of the people. Li was then arrested and taken to Beijing, where he committed suicide in prison on May 6, 1602, according to Yuan Zhong-dao, who cut his throat with a knife.

Think

Li Zhi's thinking dealt with the question of the normative human value system of the individual, which for him was subject to constant change. In a draft lecture from the 1590s it says: "What was right yesterday is considered wrong today; and what is wrong today may be right again tomorrow". Each person has his own system of norms, but it has no way of becoming a generally recognized order. For Li Zhi, people act primarily according to their interests, rarely thinking about the needs of other people. Li Zhi does not rule out the class of literary officials in this assessment. In a letter to his friend Geng Dingxiang he writes in his typical relaxed tone, whose language is mainly taken from the Prajna-Paa'ramita scriptures, but also uses Daoist and Confucian vocabulary:

"We all do exactly the same thing [...]. We are busy from morning to night tilling land in order to be able to live, to acquire property in order to become a respected gentry, to gain education, to pass exams, To become civil servants in order to raise our status, to practice geomantics in order to be able to pass our advantages on to the descendants. In all these activities everyone is absorbed in their own interests and those of their families other busy. "

Li Zhi was of the opinion that the literary officials only knew how to conceal their own interests and hide them under the cloak of scholarship and the common good. People are in constant competition with one another. Li Zhi thus rejected an idealistic view of man and at the same time the harmonistic social model of Confucianism. People's self-interest leads to competition, a tension that can ultimately also create something new.

Li Zhi was of the opinion that the problem of advanced egoism could only be solved if the individual replaced the collectively communicated norms with his own moral judgment, which he had arrived at through independent thought.

These views had to attack the class of the state-supporting literary officials in their existence, so that Li Zhi felt the greatest resistance from here.

literature

• Phillip Grimberg: Consecrated to Fire: The Lishi Fenshu of Li Zhi (1527-1602). Translation, analysis, commentary (= scientific articles from Tectum-Verlag ISSN  1867-772X ). Tectum, Marburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-8288-3382-1 (Dissertation University of Cologne 2013, 442 pages).
• Rainer Hoffmann, Qiuhua Hu: China. Its history from the beginning to the end of the imperial era. Rombach, Freiburg im Breisgau 2007, ISBN 978-3-7930-9499-9 .
• Jean François Billeter: Li Zhi, philosophe maudit (= Travaux de Sciences Sociales ), Droz, Genève 1979, ISBN 2-600-04086-2 .
• Pauline Chen Lee: Li Zhi (1527–1602): a Confucian feminist of late-Ming China, Stanford University, 2002, OCLC 54003946 (Ph. Dissertation Stanford University 2002, 277 pages, Photocopy. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Dissertation Services, 2003).
• Wilfried Spaar: The critical philosophy of Li Zhi (1527-1602) and its political reception in the People's Republic of China (= publications of the East Asia Institute of the Ruhr University Bochum ). Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1984, ISBN 3-447-02301-5 .
• Li Zhi, ed. by Rivi Handler-Spitz, Pauline C. Lee and Haun Saussy: A Book To Burn And A Book To Keep (Hidden): Selected Writings Columbia University Press, New York 2016, ISBN 9780231166133 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Wilfried Spaar: The critical philosophy of Li Zhi and its political reception in the People's Republic of China , p. 47
2. ^ Spaar, p. 47
3. ^ Spaar, p. 51
4. ↑ Spaar, pp. 50/51; The name Lin was the original name of the family. As a result of Lin Nu's conversion to Islam, some family members changed their names to Li in order to differentiate themselves from their relative's religious background. Lin Zaizhi seems to have acted from the same motive. The removal of the character Zai from Lin's personal name took place due to the taboo regulations after the accession of Emperor Muzong. This also bore the mark Zai in his personal name.
5. ^ Spaar, p. 51
6. ^ Spaar, p. 52
7. ↑ quoted from Spaar, p. 54