COMPTES RENDUS - AFEC

Comptes rendus
ance, but the main focus of his study is the philosophy of Wang Fuzhi.
And, as he déclares at the outset, it is necessary to replace Wang in the
context not only of the Chinese philosophical tradition but also of his life
and times in order to understand what he wrote.
In an introductory chapter, the author explains that Wang lived at a
time of national disaster, which saw the fall of the Ming dynasty and the
subséquent Manchu invasion of his native land, after décades of social and
political turmoil and popular uprisings. (It was also a period of intellectual
ferment that has been compared to the European Enlightenment.) It was
against this background that Wang, fierce patriot, Ming loyalist and
committed Confucian, withdrew into a life of secluded study after a brief
and almost fatal participation in the anti-Manchu résistance of one of the
surviving impérial Ming princes. In hiding in the hills of his native Hunan,
in constant danger due to his refusai to accept the new régime and his
vituperative anti-Manchu writings (too extrême to publish in his lifetime,
they were aimed primarily at posterity), he was spurred on in ail his
endeavours by an obsessive désire to understand how such a tragedy could
hâve overtaken Chinese civilization. He devoted himself to the study of
history, evolved his own philosophical System, continued dreaming of a
Chinese restoration, and wrote, and wrote and wrote.
Although, as Gernet warns the reader, one should not take Wang
Fuzhi for the représentative of some timeless Chinese philosophy
(especially given the emphasis he placed on the particular factors of time
and place, times and circumstances), one may nonetheless see in him the
ultimate exponent of a certain philosophical tradition that, as Gernet
demonstrates, can be traced back through Zhang Zai to the kind of very
early Chinese thought expressed in the Zhouyi.
Gernet's dense 400 pages carefully expound, analyze and discuss
Wang's thought and its place in the Chinese philosophical tradition, while
emphasizing that in order to understand either one must be prepared to
accept that one is confronted with an entirely différent - but equally valid
- conception of the world from the normal western one. As Gernet puts it,
"on est dans un autre univers mental que celui auquel nos modes de pensée
nous ont habitués". Rather than attempt to résume the whole of his account
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