Abstract
Huang Jincheng's monograph Organic Modernity: The Young Hegel and the Discourse of Aesthetic Modernity focuses on the relationship between nature and spirit. It provides a deep and forceful discussion of the different understandings of organism held by major German intellectuals around 1800, as well as the internal rationale for the transformation from mechanical to organic modernity. Following the intellectual thread of Huang's work, this essay first offers a complementary elaboration on Kant's concept of the “organic beings,” and then traces the lines of thought in Hölderlin, Schelling, Hegel, and others concerning the leap from a regulative to a constitutive relationship between nature and spirit. Finally, this study examines the entanglement of Chinese culture with Spinoza and Leibniz, the two “progenitors” of organism. It concludes that there is a de facto correspondence between the Confucian theory of li (principle) and qi (vital force) and the Western organism. In this way, it provides a different perspective for a comprehensive understanding of the “theory of organism” and the Western discourse of aesthetic modernity based on it.
Keywords
Organic Modernity:The Young Hegel and the Discourse of Aesthetic Modernity, organism, the Confucian thought of Li and Qi, Spinoza, Leibniz
First Page
67
Last Page
75
Recommended Citation
Liu, Yunhua. 2025. "Whose Philosophical Evidence Is the Organism? A Discussion Based on Huang Jincheng's Organic Modernity: Young Hegel and the Discourse of Aesthetic Modernity." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 45, (5): pp.67-75. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol45/iss5/10
