东西之辩还是古今之变?——对胡适“全盘西化”思想的再评价

The Debate between the East and the West or the Change of the Ancient and the Modern? ——Re-evaluation of Hu Shi’s Thought of “Whole Westernization”

1929—1931年,胡适先后写过三篇题为“文化的冲突”的英文文章,他指出当时人们对于以西方文明为代表的现代文明有三种不同态度,第一种是抗拒的态度,第二种是全盘接受的态度,第三种是选择性吸收的态度,他主张采取第二种态度。他的主张先在《中国评论周报》上引起了争论,后来随着陈序经的《中国文化之出路》发表,争论又延伸到《独立评论》上。经过上世纪50年代“胡适思想批判”后,胡适成了“全盘西化派”的代名词。根据新发现的胡适英文文章和其他史料,重新考察其“全盘西化”思想,并与陈序经等人的观点比较,可以发现胡适所谓“全盘西化”的问题本质上是一个“古今之变”的问题,而不是“东西之辩”的问题。

From 1929 to 1931, Hu Shi wrote three English articles entitled “Cultural Conflict” in which came up with three different attitudes towards modern civilization represented by Western civilization at that time, namely resistance, total acceptance, and selective absorption. He agreed with the second attitude and around his proposition there were divisions firstly available in The China Critic;later with the publication of Chen Xujing’s The Outlet of Chinese Culture , the battlefield extended to The Independent Review. The arguments continued to the 1950s, at a time when the criticism targeted to his thought “honored” Hu Shi a label of the “Whole Westernization School”. With newly-discovered materials, both Hu’s English articles and other historical data, this paper re-examines Hu Shi’s thought of “whole westernization” and compares it with Chen Xujing’s and others’ viewpoints, based on which comes up with a conclusion that Hu Shi’s so-called “whole westernization” is essentially a problem of “change between the ancient and the modern”, rather than “debate between the East and the West”.