Yin Haiguang

Yin Haiguang ( Chinese  殷海光 , * December 5, 1919 in Huanggang ; † September 16, 1969 ), actually Yin Fusheng ( Chinese  殷福生 ), was a lecturer at the philosophy faculty of the National Taiwan University ( Chinese  國立 臺灣 大學 , Pinyin Guólì Táiwān Dàxué ) and was part of the so-called liberal opposition of the 1950s and 60s in Taiwan , which had grouped itself around the magazine Free China .

Born in Huanggang, Hubei Province , he left middle school early in 1932 and began an apprenticeship in a grocery store in Hankou . But after just eight months he returned to school, graduated from Gaozhong ( upper secondary school ) in 1936 and went to Beijing to continue his education there. In 1937, Yin Haiguang planned to study at Tsinghua University , but returned to Hubei Province after the Lugouqiao Incident on July 7, 1937. The following year, Yin went to Kunming , where Xinan Lianda University had recently been founded, and passed the entrance exam to the Philosophy Faculty. Although Yin Haiguang studied in Kunming rather than Beijing, he is still referred to as a student of Jin Yuelin . In addition to Jin Yuelin, Xiong Shili is said to have influenced Yin Haiguang. Yin's political attitudes during his stay in Kunming are assessed as nationalistic, anti-Japanese and anti-communist. After graduating from university in 1942, Yin Haiguang left Kunming and volunteered in the army in 1944. He received his military training in India .

After the Japanese surrender , he returned to China, became a lecturer in logic at the University of Nanjing and worked for the newspaper Zhongyang ribao . When Zhongyang ribao moved its editorial office to Taibei in 1949 , Yin Haiguang also came to Taiwan.

Upon arriving in Taibei, Yin became a lecturer in the philosophy faculty at National Taiwan University. In parallel to his teaching activities, he began to publish articles in the magazine Ziyou Zhongguo , published by Hu Shi , in which he dealt with the political situation in Taiwan and with liberal and democratic ideas of Western theorists. In the following years he translated, among others, Friedrich August von Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and John Stephen Reshetar's Problems of Analyzing and Predicting Soviet Behavior into Chinese and was appointed professor at the National Taiwan University in 1957.

1958 was a difficult year for Yin. After a public lecture in December 1958 in which Chen Duxiu was one of the four most influential modern Chinese thinkers and also held the view that the Three Principles of the People of Sun Yat-sen were unsuitable as a guide to contemporary China, Yin became from the university management is prohibited from giving lectures outside the curriculum.

In the period between 1960 and 1966, Yin Haiguang was much less concerned with current political issues and turned to the subject of Chinese and Western culture . His main work The Future of Chinese Culture ( Chinese  中國 文化 的 展望 ), which appeared in 1966 and was immediately banned, can be seen as the result of this research activity . The reason for the ban stated, among other things: The book violates "the spirit of traditional culture and violates the idea of ​​the five human relationships within society". Yin, who stated that he wanted to report in this book on his research into the socio-cultural problems of China over the past 100 years, lost his position as a result of this ban and the ban on the magazine Apollo - as the spiritual leader of which he was regarded as a professor at National Taiwan University. The last three years of his life were mainly marked by health and financial problems. Yin still intended to write a book on the history of political ideas in modern China, but he was unable to complete it by the time he died.

Yin Haiguang was mainly influenced by Bertrand Russell . However, this influence did not emanate from the Principia Mathematica , which Russell wrote together with Alfred North Whitehead in the years 1910 to 1913, but from Russell's works, in which he addressed more popular-philosophical and socio-political questions. Yin can be seen as a representative of modern empiricism - in the broadest sense - which had great confidence in the achievements of empirical science ( scientism ).

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1. ↑ 韋 政通 (1989), 傳統 的 更新, 台北
2. ↑ Boormann, Howard et al. (eds) (1967), A Biographical Dictionary of Republican China , New York. Vol. 2, pp. 116-117
3. ↑ 陳俐甫 (1993), 爲 自由 殉身 的 殷海光 in: 李豐 楙 (1993), 當代 臺灣 俠客 誌, 台北 pp. 219-235
4. ↑ The day before was in 1959 under the title胡適與國運in the journal Free China published
5. ↑ 殷海光 全集, Volume 9, p. 160
6. ↑ 韋 政通 (1989), 傳統 的 更新, 台北, p. 268