China Social Science Review

No.4, 2020

The Influence of Yan Fu’s Translations on Lu Xun’s “Middle Way” (Zhizhong zhi dao)

(Abstract)

Yu Zhaoping

In the course of studying Yan Fu’s translations and acquiring Western learning, the early Lu Xun combined Bacon’s inductive method and Descartes’ deductive method, adopting a “middle way” as the central theme of his theoretical consciousness and logical judgments. This is reflected in his review and analysis of the issues of science and the humanities, innovation and return to the past, the material and the spiritual, the masses and the individual, utility and aesthetics, etc. The middle way proposed mainly covered the theoretical reason of metaphysics; that is, it was used in the context of consciousness of academic principles. The zhongyong zhi dao (Doctrine of the Mean) that he criticized tended to be associated with the rationality of practice and involved issues such as the forms of social ideology. Lu Xun’s zhizhong is thus different from zhongyong.