梁啓超의 啓蒙주의 역사관과 國學

Abstract

In the period of the failed political reform, 1895~1898, Liang Qichao began to form an embryonic ideas of enlightenment, e.g. ‘new people’(新民), ‘enlightening people's intellect’(開民智), but his thoughts of those days were captured by the idea of political reform through Sino-Western syncretism, more advanced than the previous Yangwu(洋務) movement. Liang, a follower of Japanese model of Meiji Restoration(明治維新) in political reform, was transformed to one of earlier leaders of the Western-oriented enlightenment trend in China, considerably separated from Chinese traditional culture. His ideas of enlightenment was influenced by such Japanese achievements as Fukuzawa Yukichi represented. Now, his populous magazines were very powerful intermediaries to spread extensively the various western knowledges and ideas into literate classes of China proper, even Korea. As following Liang's conversion from political reform to enlightening propaganda, the focus of his thoughts and activities also moved from his teacher Kang Youwei's Confucian religious reform into the renaissance of ancient classical learning, reorganized under the influence of western scientific methods. He found out the way to promote the national learning through rehabilitating ‘archaic learning’(古學), with pivotal position given to the various competitive schools(諸子學) during the period of ‘Spring-autumn annals and Warring states’(春秋戰國) before China was united by the universial empire since B.C. 221. In his opinion, the Chinese traditional learning, in Qing(淸) dinasty since 17th century, was on the way for revolving to the archaic learning via the learning of Han dynasty(漢學), the early empire, against the dominant current of Zhu Xi(朱熹)’s Neo-Confucianism since Song(宋) dinasty. Liang's national learning aimed to complete this task of Chinese renaissance. Liang's new history proposed the first modern theory for explanation of China's history, based on nationalism and histirical ideas of progress, which were introduced from the western ideas of history of civilization and Social Darwinism through the intermediary of modern Japan. His Chiese history as the history of one national state would exclude Kang's cosmopolitan utopianism, for even national imperialism was now accepted as one of universal stages of historical progress in the contemporary global world. His idea of new history already appeared in 1901 before he wrote the famous essay, “New History”(新史學) and “On New People”(新民說) in 1902. In his national history, the Chinese nation, the sovereign member of the national state as an artificial political community in the west, appeared united inseparably with the concepts of ethnic groups or human races, which Liang called as ‘race of state’(國族). But his modern nationalism, as power to unite national state, was composed of the national race and national learning, separated from two universalism of Confucian culture and Imperial politics. Liang's actual research on the national learning was concentrated on the history of Chinese philosophical schools and political thoughts. In his opinion, Chinese political tradition was characterized by the centralized despotism, the longest and most elaborate one in the world, and was contrasted against the decentralized feudal tradition in the medieval Europe. People's rights was not developed in China, for it was the despotic monarchs that defeated the feudal aristocracy in ancient China, while the self-governing communal cities did it in Europe, or the warrior class in Japan. He thought that the division of power among monarch, nobles and commoners, not people's equality under despotism, was favorable to promote people's rights.