Does Hegel appreciate China's philosophy?

At the beginning of the section "Oriental Philosophy" in the first volume of Lectures on the History of Philosophy, he said: "The first thing to talk about is Oriental philosophy ... We want to mention it just to explain why we don't talk more" (see page 1 15 of this book, translated by Lin He and Wang Taiqing, Commercial Press,/. Because in his view, the history of philosophy began in the East, which is the low-level stage of the development of philosophy. Strictly speaking, it is not a real philosophy, but a kind of "religious philosophy" (ibid., p. 1 15).

When talking about the Book of Changes, Hegel said: "They also reached the consciousness of pure thoughts, but they did not go deep and only stayed in the shallowest thoughts." (page 120) "They start with ideas, then flow into emptiness, and philosophy also falls into emptiness." (Page 122)

Therefore, it is definitely not as someone on the Internet said: "In his autobiography, he admitted that the positive and negative dialectical logic laws he created were inspired by the Book of Changes." How can he get inspiration from the Book of Changes, which he despises so much? There is no evidence that its dialectical logic has anything to do with the Book of Changes. (What needs to be clarified here is that Hegel never wrote any autobiography. )

For the Tao Te Ching, Hegel introduced some contents, especially the paragraph "Unknown, the beginning of heaven and earth, famous, the mother of all things", saying, "But what have we learned from this lesson?" (page 127) means that these statements are meaningless.

In another place, after introducing some of Laozi's statements with dialectical thinking, Hegel commented: "This is also very clumsy." (Page 129)

His overall evaluation of China's philosophy is as follows: "Here, in China, in Chinese religion and philosophy, we encounter a very special and completely prose-like rationality ... China people's imagination is different: national religion is the expression of their imagination. But the philosophy related to religion is abstract, because the content of their religion itself is boring. These contents have no ability to create a category for thought. " (page 132) That is to say, China's philosophy has not become a system at all, but only some scattered views, which stay on the surface and fail to reach the advanced spiritual form-concrete thinking (in Hegel's view, abstract thinking is low-level thinking).

2. Hegel's view of China.

Hegel's view of China mainly lies in his Philosophy of History (translated by Wang Zaoshi, Shanghai Bookstore Press, 1999). The following are some representative views:

"History began in China and the Mongols" (see Philosophy of History, page 1 19). According to Hegel, the primary stage is the most primitive, simple and barbaric, and the more advanced stage is the more civilized. The whole journey of world history begins in the East and ends in the Germanic world, because the Germanic world is the most civilized and advanced stage. His criterion for measuring the degree of civilization is the degree of personal freedom: in the East, he only knows the freedom of one person-that is, the freedom of the emperor; In ancient Greece and Rome, he knew the freedom of some people-the freedom of nobles and some citizens; In the Germanic world, it is the freedom of all.