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Starting out by assessing the intellectual foundation of a civilization seems particularly appropriate to the study of traditional China.
ForChina’s intellectual life was not as highly compartmentalized into separate and sometimes competing categories like philosophy, religion, and science as were most others.
Its politics, for example, was the extension of its ethics from the individual to his society; its knowledge implied action.
China’s early thinkers debated vigorously among themselves about all the things that it was useful for man to know, and to do.
In the Golden Age of Chinese philosophy, with which historical period, it is quite possible to seek out the interaction between intellectual thought and the larger culture, particularly in the social and political realms, and to regard that thread of interaction as the most interesting and illuminating one to follow.
Because that thread has remained unbroken and central to Chinese life from those early times to our own, its beginnings are remarkably pertinent to the life ofChinain our time.
EvenChina’s most recent modernizing leaders have attested to that. Both the apparently moribund and the obviously vital aspects of oldChina’s civilization remain relevant to an understanding of China.
