儒家实用主义的晚清呈现:重释“文学救国论”

A Reinterpretation of the Nation-saving Function of Literature:A Manifestation of the Confucianist Pragmatism in Late Qing Dynasty

在“救国”与“载道”、“有用”与“无用”的话语角逐中,晚清文学功能观历经“文无所用”与“文学兴国”的两歧分流,最终汇流于“文学救国论”的强势话语。从他者资源的译介上看,晚清“文学救国论”这种常识上的“功利主义”,其论思形式具有鲜明的实用主义色彩,可称为“无意识的实用主义”。从内在理路剖析,可追溯到儒家“经世致用”的实用主义文学观,要言之,“文学救国论”可以解读为儒家实用主义的晚清呈现。然而,“文学救国论”依然因循二元对立思维模式,也未能摆脱“以反载道始,以载道终”的固有思维窠臼。“文学救国论”这一儒家实用主义文学观当代价值的再阐释,需要引入新儒学与新实用主义的思想资源,在对二元对立的解构中重构文学张力,实现“文学自主论”与“文学工具论”的互济对话。

During the discussion whether literature serves to save a nation or conveys the Tao, and whether literature is useful or useless, the opinions concerning the function of literature in Late Qing Dynasty underwent two divergences between the lament that literature is useless and the belief that literature can help to make the country prosperous, finally reaching a convergence, a forceful conclusion that literature should serve to save a nation. From the translation works of other foreign scholars, it can be discerned that the nation-saving function of literature in the Late Qing Dynasty, utilitarianism interpreted in the light of common sense, has some distinct elements of pragmatism in terms of its themes and the reasoning forms, namely, an “unconscious pragmatism”. By analyzing the theory reflected, that the statecraft ideology should be practical and useful for the country, the pragmatic literary view of Confucianism, can be traced. In a word, the nation-saving function of literature can be interpreted as a Confucianist pragmatism manifested in the Late Qing Dynasty. Nevertheless, the nation-saving function of liteature still follows the binary oppositional mode of thinking, and neither can it get rid of the stereotyped thinking cliché that writings start with anti-Tao-conveying but end with Tao-conveying. The reinterpretation of the nation-saving function of literature, the pragmatic Confucianist view of literature, for its contemporary values, needs to bring in the thinking resources of Neo-Confucianism and Neo-pragmatism, reconstructing the literary tension in the binary opposite deconstruction, in the hope that the reciprocal discourse between the proposition that literature should be independent from other interferences and the opinion that literature is but a tool could be achieved.