PhD student, UChicago Divinity School

In the tumultuous transition from the late Qing to the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, Chinese thinkers from Liang Qichao to Zhang Taiyan debated the task of “establishing a religion” for modern China, in addition to their better remembered political theories. These understudied theories of religion, similar to their Western counterparts, played pivotal roles in the transition of Chinese and more broadly East Asian moral thought to their modern forms. This paper is an attempt at characterizing Zhang Taiyan’s proposal in the larger arena of modern East Asian philosophical and religious re-workings of premodern ideals of freedom in conversation with the new ones imported from the West. By departing from two later, more developed, and politically opposed models of freedom for East Asian modernity, that of autonomy in the New Confucian Mou Zongsan and that of resistance in the literary critic Takeuchi Yoshimi, I show that Zhang’s position can be said to prefigure both, and that a better characterization of its modernity forces us to ask what philosophical modernity is and how it is related to freedom beyond its orthodox formulations with attention primarily to actors within the Euro-American geographical sphere. With such concerns in mind, I put Kant’s notion of “ethical community” in the Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793) into dialogue with Zhang’s advocation for a revolutionary morality in the Minbao period (1906-08), which have been linked to the French Revolution and the Xinhai Revolution respectively. I abstract from them a potentially productive fourfold modern structure of the political-religious and the private-public, which then serves as a prelude to future work on Zhang’s philosophy of religions and the trans-modern conversations I hope to contribute to.