동아시아 사회진화론의 선구자, 엄복의 사상적 지형도－『천연론(天演論)』을 중심으로－

Abstract

After China had suffered the ignominy of defeat by Japan at the Sino-Japanese War (of 1894-5), Yan Fu (1854-1921) began to worry about the future of China. He attempted to modernize China by introducing western thoughts. In 1898, he translated “Evolution and Ethics”, and published “Tianyanlun”. Through this book, he earnestly introduced Social Darwinism to China for the first time. In “Evolution and Ethics”, Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) stressed the need for humane interventions to combat the cosmic process. However, at the same time, he maintained a seemingly contradictory opinion that humane interventions such as ethics were still subordinate to the cosmic process. On the vague theory of Huxley, Yan Fu's stance was ambiguous. On the one hand, he came around to Huxley’s theory but, on the other hand, he criticized it. The basis of his criticism was the theory of Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). Spencer had underlined the individualistic liberty, but Yan Fu regarded the liberty as a way to found a rich and powerful country. Yan Fu thought that Spencer's reasoning had a stronger base than Huxley's and Spencer haunted his mind. Eventually, “Tianyanlun” could be considered as an attempt to spread the theory of Spencer through a translation of Huxley’s book.