Fu Freedom And Its Theoretical Significance Exploration

Owing to deal with the problems coming from the challenges of western civilization and growing declining of pre-modern Chinese nation,Chinese intellectuals with open mind paid painstaking efforts to design many plans among which Yan Fu worked out some quite unique responses and replies based on his delicate insight and affluent knowledge on the contemporary situation of Chinese nation. Especially on the sense of liberty,he put forward his unique opinions on the principles and achievements of liberty,which greatly influenced the thoughts of that times on how to get rid of the old thoughts and retain the new thoughts,and to reconstruct the culture. Therefore,full understanding and illustrating Yan Fu's thoughts on the sense of liberty becomes the main clue to retrace the way of Chinese cultural development of that times. At same time,further analysis and exploration on Yan's thoughts has the great meaningfulness of sorting out the origin of the ideology of modernization at the end of Qing Dynasty.This dissertation tries to depict the outline of the thoughts on Yan Fu's ideas on transitions of pre-modern Chinese nation,and it dwells on the connotation of sense of liberty and analysizes the limits of his theory. It also provides some advice on how to seek human's modernization and the whole society's modernization. During the process of writing,the author,after retracing the history of western conception of liberty,hopes to understand and study the connotation of Yan Fu's sense of liberty through horizontal comparison,in an attempt to assess Yan Fu himself and his thoughts.