Study On Legal Culture Re-construction And Its Historical Influence In The Evolution And Ethics Translated By Yan Fu

From the middle of the 19 th century,western countries invaded China with an irresistible force.Facing drastic changes and setbacks,the Chinese intelligentsia endeavoured to explore the way to save the nation and marched forward.After continuous attempts,they realised that the reform of "technologies" and "systems" were not the solutions for the problems of modern China.Yan Fu,as one of the essential enlightenment thinkers in modern times,translated lots of western works and introduced western knowledge based on cultures,to help China learn the survival rules from it.Among all his translations,Evolution and Ethics(Yan Fu)has exerted the most profound and widest influence.It is the premise and foundation of social evolution recognised by Chinese academic circle in the late Qing Dynasty,especially after the May Fourth Movement.However,what he expressed in Evolution and Ethics(Yan Fu)was not western culture,but the Chinese experience generated from Chinese culture since the Westernisation Movement.In other words,China needed "powerful force" to stand on its own,save the country and the people,and become powerful.This thought ran through the whole process of Yan Fu’s translation of Evolution and Ethics(Huxley).In terms of the Chinese translation for the book name and the content,he did not translate literally;instead,he altered the content and the form of the original work according to his ideology,i.e.,the re-expression and recreation by adding,deleting,revising,subtracting and changing the work.To be specific,Yan Fu absorbed the values of "morality","justice","freedom" and "rights" in the traditional Chinese legal culture,utilised the social mentality of modern Chinese to actively learn from the west and seek to become a prosperous and powerful country,and conveyed the social evolution theory with "Chinese style" by means of Evolution and Ethics(Huxley),which influenced and dominated the development processes of Chinese society and legal culture.In this paper,the introduction briefly elaborated on the research background,the research situation at home and abroad,and the research methods and innovation of this paper,to explain the following four problems.Firstly,regarding the research object,this paper sorted out the publishing and dissemination of Yan Fu’s translation of Evolution and Ethics(Huxley)and its historical influence,and illustrated the research reasons.Secondly,as for the research content,this paper found the origin of the basic principles of the original works and related works,extracted the theoretical framework,and paved the way for the core argumentation of the main part of the paper.Thirdly,from the perspective of the reference,the significance and value of the existing research results were summarised for this paper.Fourthly,in terms of the research path,the specific methods were described,to achieve the research objectives.This paper was written based on the four points.Chapter I focused on the modification of the original legal culture in Evolution and Ethics(Huxley).This chapter mainly conducted the legal culture analysis to systematically sort out the core concepts and views of the original work,to clarify the legal culture characteristics that the "ethical process" expressed in the original work was superior to the "cosmic process",analysed layer by layer,and extracted the legal culture of the original work.Taking this as a contrast,this paper analysed how Yan Fu modified the original work in terms of form and content,to establish a legal cultural position to meet the needs of modern China.Specifically,Yan Fu mainly extracted two essential parts of the original work and translated them into the Evolution and Ethics(Huxley).He extracted the core elements,established the "hypothetical equivalences" between discourses,re-arranged the factors such as the structure of the titles,meaning groups and words.In the meantime,he collected the elements of traditional Chinese legal culture,absorbed the new elements of western legal culture,changed the legal culture standpoint of the original work,and achieved the aim of introducing western knowledge,enabling the country to become stronger and saving the nation.This was the result of the interaction between the surface and deep structure of culture and its "chemical effect" when western culture was "implanted" into the soil of China.It was also the inevitable product of social development under the special background of the era.Chapter II was about the adjustment of the value of justice in the original work.As one of the essential elements in legal culture,"justice" was built based on the common natural environment,language,thinking mode and national habits of a group of people for a long time.It combined the basic and essential elements in a nation’s living conditions,and finally decomposed into "justifiable reasons" that allowed individuals to desire and pursue.However,various countries and even different "civilisation circles" have diverse conditions for deriving the concepts of justice value,and the attributions of justice value were not the same either.Yan Fu changed the attribution of justice value in the original work of Evolution and Ethics(Huxley),which differed considerably from the original work in the sense of legal culture.This chapter traced back to the origin of the western legal culture that generated this standpoint by sorting out the legal cultural standpoint in the original work,clarifying the justice value attribution based on "morality" the author of the original work hoped to express,followed by a comparative analysis of Yan Fu’s specific change to the core principles,basic principles and political attribution of justice in Evolution and Ethics(Huxley).Eventually,this paper clarified the elements of the Chinese legal culture and the significance of his alteration in the process of the translation.Chapter III explained the change of "the concept of free value"(CFV)in the original work.CFV,as the foundation of the western legal culture,was one of the driving forces and sources for its continuous development.In the original work,Huxley clarified the limited CFV through the concepts of "self-assertion" and "self-restraint",and evaluated this "idea" as "the ideal of ethical men".Different from CFV in the original work,what Yan Fu expressed in his translated version was a CFV with Chinese traditional legal culture features with the purpose of "national prosperity and strength".This chapter,by tracing the elements of legal culture formed by CFV in Western civilisation,aimed at sorting out the connotation and purpose of CFV in the original work,then analysed Yan Fu’s specific adjustment on this concept in Evolution and Ethics(Huxley),and revealed the legal culture elements that played a role in Yan Fu’s alteration of the original work and the significance of such alteration.In Chapter IV,the alteration of "the concept of value and right"(CVR)in the original work was introduced."Right",as an element of legal culture,is equally essential as "justice" and "freedom".Taking "interest" as its core,it has gone through a tortuous development process in western legal culture,impacting every generation of social researchers,including Huxley.In the original work,Huxley connected CVR with "the environment",and regarded it as "the ethically proper thing" based on individuals.Influenced by CVR in Chinese traditional culture,Yan Fu altered the basis and core of CVR in his translation of Evolution and Ethics.His "right" was included in the "civil rights" and closely associated with "state power" and "monarchy power".The“right”was no longer a symbol highlighting "individuals";instead,it was endowed with instrumental significance and proved to be the foundation of a country to become abundant and powerful.This chapter sorted out CVR expressed by the author of the original work,and analysed Yan Fu’s alteration of CVR in his translation.Finally,this chapter clarified the Chinese legal culture elements and the significance of the change of CVR in Evolution and Ethics(Yan Fu).Chapter V illustrated the historical influence of the alteration of legal culture in Evolution and Ethics(Huxley).By rendering and rewriting the original work,Yan Fu not only introduced the theory of biological evolution,but also expressed a kind of survival logic to Chinese people,which was applicable to the human world as well.Such logic encompassed "the law of the jungle","survival of the fittest",and "social evolution".The logic of saving a nation expressed by Evolution and Ethics(Huxley),provided the Chinese people with the fundamental path to survive among the world’s nations,while triggering the rising of the social ideological trend of saving the nation in modern times.This chapter was based on the change of legal culture in Evolution and Ethics(Yan Fu),expounded the close connection among the "the law of the jungle","the survival of the fittest","social evolution" and "the ideological trend of saving the country by industries","the trend of thought of saving the country by education" and "the ideological trend of rural construction".Furthermore,by sorting out the national salvation thoughts and works of the three trends’ representatives such as Zhang Jian,Cai Yuanpei and Liang Shuming,this chapter further clarified the historical influence of altering the legal of culture in Evolution and Ethics(Yan Fu).In conclusion,after reading through the original book and the translated version,the author believed it necessary to objectively summarise and evaluate the alterations of the legal culture and its historical influence in Evolution and Ethics(Yan Fu)from the following aspects.Firstly,in terms of historical necessity,from the late Qing Dynasty,the national situation became worse and worse,and the Chinese people continuously looked for ways of salvation while they were confronted with the invasion of western countries.Undoubtedly,Yan Fu’s translation of Evolution and Ethics(Huxley)contained his primary concern for the prosperity of his country.Also,it was because of this translation’s powerful response to the social crisis,it quickly penetrated all domains of the society,and was closely related to the political,ideological,legal and cultural changes in China’s society.Secondly,from the perspective of the legal culture reconstruction process,due to the different original environment,this process of absorbing foreign legal cultural elements for integration and reconstruction was inevitable to cause distortion and mutation,and it was this process that carried mutation that met the needs of the society at that time.Thirdly,regarding the situation at that time,through the ideological renewal brought by Evolution and Ethics(Yan Fu)with the background of the country’s crisis,a new theoretical basis for the salvation and development of China was discovered.This theory of social evolution,which considered power as the core and emphasised the connotation of survival,was reasonable enough to replace the values in traditional legal culture.