The Quest for Liberation

Chunjie Zhang is Associate Professor of German at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Transculturality and German Discourse in the Age of European Colonialism (2017), editor of Composing Modernist Connections in China and Europe (2019), and coeditor of Gender and German Colonialism: Intimacies, Accountabilities, and Intersections (2023), Aesthetics and Politics in the Wake of the Enlightenment (The Germanic Review 2020), and Asian German Studies (German Quarterly 2020). She coedits the book series "Asia, Europe, and Global Connections" (Routledge).

Introduction: Global Intellectual History, Ecology of Little Beings, and World Culture 1 1. Encounter in Beijing: Hermann Graf Keyserling, Gu Hongming, and Confucian Cosmopolitanism 25 2. Re-enchanting Confucianism: Max Weber, Care of the Self, and Charisma 46 3. Zhang Junmai as Philosopher: Rudolf Eucken, Life, and Spirituality 82 4. Liang Shuming, World Culture, and Rural Modernity 114 5. Early Feng Youlan's Negative Method: Metaphysics, World Philosophy, and Sage 144 6. Bertolt Brecht's Me-ti or the Aesthetics of Translation: Universal Love, Mutual Benefits, and Transience 177 Coda: Conservatism or Alternative Modernity 193 Acknowledgments 197 Notes 201 Works Cited 239 Index 253

"Groundbreaking on a grand philosophical scale, The Quest for Liberation shows how German and Chinese thinkers drew on each other in search of emancipation from the confines of their own traditions. The book goes beyond comparison to articulate a horizon of exchange, mutual learning, and convergence between East and West in search of broader horizons of world culture. Zhang's extraordinary polyglot proficiency and knowledge of major thinkers in the West and East makes for an outstanding intellectual history: bold, provocative, and admirable" - Ban Wang, Stanford University "An excellent intervention into the burgeoning scholarship on German and Asian studies, Chunjie Zhang's The Quest for Liberation shows us how Chinese and German intellectuals harnessed each other's philosophical traditions to rethink economics, ethics, politics, and spirituality in a quest for global justice over imperial hegemony." - Glenn Penny, UCLA