| This dissertation examines how four late Qing thinkers adapted their tradition by analyzing the responses of four late Qing figures to a single question that has dominated Chinese ethical thought from its conception. This question is: In what sense, if any, can morality be seen as natural to human beings? This study begins with a review of the debate about the relation between nature and ethics from the pre-Qin era through the mid-Qing. I go on to look closely at works from four different thinkers of the late Qing: Tan Sitong, Kang Youwei, Yan Fu, and Liang Qichao. I argue in this study that the late Qing thinkers approached the question of what was natural to human beings on two different levels. On the one hand, they continued and in some cases radicalized the early to mid-Qing tendency to see human nature in terms of the spontaneous "feelings and desires." At the same time, though, each of the four also tried in different ways to establish a sense in which moral feelings or action could be seen as natural to human beings, based on an understanding of a kind of "ultimate reality" of the human condition that stressed the essential interconnection between self and others. I also examine how fundamental assumptions about personhood functioned in the interpretation of Western ethical, political, and institutional concepts. |
