The Reading Review of the Chapter6-7

香山亭

Reader:
谢嗣婷

Reading Time:
第七周

Reading Task:
Chapter6-7

Summary of the Content:
As shown in the figure.

Evaluation:
Ku Hongming 's writing exhibits three distinctive characteristics. First, it demonstrates a grand comparative civilizational vision that elevates Sino-Western academic differences to fundamental contrasts between intuitive and logical thinking patterns, as well as ideographic and alphabetic writing systems. Second, he skillfully employs a "using their own weapons against them" strategy by citing Western thinkers like Goethe and Matthew Arnold's critiques of material civilization to inversely validate the modern value of Chinese moral scholarship. Third, his language is imbued with the urgent consciousness of a cultural guardian, using poignant expressions like "the exile of scholarship" to depict the predicament of traditional learning, reflecting profound cultural anxiety and a sense of mission. These stylistic features collectively construct Ku's unique intellectual discourse that is at once comparative, polemical, and culturally defensive.
Additionally, Ku Hongming 's intellectual framework exhibits a dual theoretical limitation. On one hand, he displays a marked idealization of traditional scholarship, particularly Confucianism, deliberately overlooking its historical manifestations as an oppressive instrument-most notably the Neo-Confucian doctrine of "using principle to kill" and structural oppression under the ritual orthodoxy (e.g., the chastity paradigm for women)-through selective blindness. On the other hand, while critiquing Western material civilization, he lapses into another form of bias by insufficiently acknowledging the revolutionary contributions of Western natural sciences and their methodologies (e.g., positivism, experimental rigor) to human knowledge systems. This romanticized glorification of tradition coupled with one-sided negation of modernity renders his cultural conservatism theoretically self-contradictory.

Reflection：
Ku Hongming 's critique carries profound historical significance and contemporary relevance, establishing him as a pioneering voice that anticipated postcolonial academic criticism long before Edward Said's critique of "cultural hegemony" in Western scholarship, while advocating for intellectual autonomy in non-Western civilizations. His warnings about cultural revival remain particularly prescient - the current "Guoxue fever" (national studies revival) risks repeating past mistakes if it focuses solely on superficial forms while neglecting Confucianism's essential practical spirit. Most enduring is his proposed paradigm for cross-civilizational dialogue: a "methodological borrowing + value subjectivity" model of exchange that continues to offer valuable insights for today's global humanities and social sciences research, particularly in balancing cultural appropriation with civilizational authenticity.