Li Zehou

Li Zehou (; 13 June 1930 – 2 November 2021) was a Chinese scholar of philosophy and intellectual history. He is considered an influential modern scholar of Chinese history and culture whose work was central to the period known as the Chinese New Enlightenment in the 1980s.

Li served as a long-term vice president of the Chinese Society for Aesthetics (1980–1998). His works on aesthetics, such as The Path of Beauty: A Study of Chinese Aesthetics, triggered an "aesthetics fever (美学热)" in mainland China in the 1980s. Soon after the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, Li was severely criticized by the Chinese authorities for "poisoning a whole young generation" and his works were forbidden for several years. In 1992, he emigrated to the United States and held visiting or chair professorships at numerous universities, including Colorado College, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin, Swarthmore College, and University of Colorado Boulder.

Life Li was born in Daolin, Ningxiang County, Hunan, on 13 June 1930. (Another saying: he was born in the city of Hankou, but his family moved to Changsha when he was four years old. )

Li was born into a declining gentry family. His father, an employee of the post office, died of illness in another province. His mother Tao Maolan was a teacher in a primary school in his hometown. His elementary school studies occurred at Ningxiang No. 4 High School and his secondary studies at Hunan First Normal University. Li was a Marxist at an early age and participated in covert Communist activities.

In 1992, he moved to Boulder, Colorado, United States.

Philosophy An overriding goal of Li's work has been to promote a philosophy of the human being that was not only based on the materialistic and historical realities as analyzed and posited by Karl Marx, but which also supported the view of Immanuel Kant as to the individual's intellectual, moral and aesthetic capacities. As a core element in his analysis, he incorporates the thinking of the greats of Chinese philosophy as well. This blended and fundamentally optimistic view of humankind was a counterbalance to the views of humans during and after the Cultural Revolution.

Motor thinking Motor Thinking is the conscious coordination of using a tool. To elaborate, the use of tools is not an instinctive biological activity, but rather one "attained and consolidated through a long period of posteriori learning from experience". The Motor Thinking process creates self-consciousness arising from the attention paid to tool making. Transmission of tool based activities to others, using primitive language, results in semantic thinking: "The forms of motor thinking gradually made way for the forms of language-led thought". Coupled with primitive language, motor thinking ultimately results in the creation of a "vague, common consciousness of being a community" which develops into the "symbolic tools of shamanic rites and ceremonies resulting in the establishment of primitive human society… fundamentally different from that of the animals".

Chinese aesthetics and the relation to freedom Li's 1981 The Path of Beauty is among his most significant works.

Impact on traditional Chinese thought Li also wrote critiques of contemporary Chinese thought in the second half of the 1980s. Li Zehou's 1987 essay "The Western is the Substance, and the Chinese is for Application", turned conventional contemporary Chinese thought on its head. Li stated that Western Learning encompasses technology as well as conceptual systems and philosophies including Marxism and is the pluralistic and diverse technosocial basis of modern-day China's reality. Li Zehou concluded that the Chinese application should adapt Western Learning with Chinese traditions, influencing but not dictating the results. To paraphrase, the goal of this examination synthesis should preserve in ethics the strength and splendor of giving precedence to others before oneself; should preserve the value of intuition within the process of reasoning, and should preserve the rich Chinese culture with regard to the handling of inter-human relationships.

Salvation overwhelmed enlightenment

In "Dual Variation of Enlightenment and Nationalism", Li Zehou argues that all modern concepts such as freedom, independence human rights, which were discarded after 1919, and all Chinese traditions should be analyzed and investigated. He proposed the idea of "Salvation overwhelmed enlightenment". He wrote that following a relatively long period of peace, developing prosperity and modernization, China would benefit from an examination of the West's "centuries of experience in political-legal theory and practice such as the separations of the three powers". He foresaw that the concept of freedom limited by law would protect the weak and prevent Party officials standing above the law.

Works Li and Liu Zaifu wrote A Farewell to Revolution in 1995. The book, which criticised Mao-era radicalism and mass uprising as violent and called to "bid farewell to revolution" in favor of incremental reform and the development of democratic temperament, became a major text for those who continued to advocate the New Enlightenment ideals.