The Collective Destiny and life Dilemmas of the Wei-Jen Intelligentsia and Examination Centering Round Shishuoxienyu

• Main Authors: Peng Wan Hui, 彭婉蕙
• Other Authors: 高大威
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2002
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/28721491080869093851

碩士 === 國立暨南國際大學 === 中國語文學系 === 90 === This thesis deals with the complicated recognition of life and the pursuit of self among the Wei-jen intellectuals. Wei-jen was an age of contradiction and instability. War and its resultant chaos inflicted unprecedented destruction on social order and triggered off a repulsion between the old value system and the new. In the face of the upheaval, the intelligentsia would arguably lament both the insignificance of human existence and their own anachronistic, displaced predicament. However, this age also evoked a peculiar living style and a consciousness of self of the knowledge elite. It is this lamentation and awakening that will come into the focus of the thesis. This research may be viewed as a twofold project. Revolving round the individual self, outwardly, it extends the examination to the intellectual''s affiliation and his interaction with the collective self; inwardly, it scrutinizes the nuanced changes of the inner self. Since the pursuit of self often turns out to be a process of impediments and conflicts, this thesis will naturally address the ways through which the intellectual comes out of aporia into the final stability. This thesis is divided into six chapters. Besides the treatment of research purposes and methodology, the first chapter concerns itself with the terminology regarding the concept of self (such as societal self and societal status). The second chapter is an attempt to explore the ways in which Confucianism and Taoism established the relation of the individual to the collective. It also epitomizes the background against which the Han and Wei intellectuals shaped their personality with an balanced emphasis on Confucianism and Taoism. In terms of group and affiliation, the third chapter starts to discuss the manifestation of the Wei-jen intellectual''s group-self relationship, depicting in detail the interaction process between the individual and society with the help of the sociological terminology such as societal self and identity. The Party Disaster of late East-Han led the intellectuals into an reflection on affiliation. Whether to be sociable or to hold oneself aloof became a subject hotly debated but left with no conclusion, a fact articulating the vicissitudes of old and new values in Han and Wei. It is under this precarious social milieu that the consciousness of self was molded, an intricate network of human interaction organized, and a richly suggestive picture of collective self structured. Because of the awakening of self, the affiliation for the Wei-jen intellectuals became increasingly personal. What they had in mind might be called a consciousness of fraternity, a main concern of next chapter. Drawing on materials from Jen-shu and Shishuoxienyu, the fourth chapter elaborates the development of the fraternity consciousness. The fifth chapter is a further elaboration of the Wei-jen intellectual''s dilemmas and his ultimate harmony. Here we have three sections: conflicts of Confucian and Taoist values; conflicts of self in its own right; conflicts of actual life exemplified in Tao-gian''s "Drinking Poem." The final chapter enumerates the means by which the intellectuals attained to their harmony. These means include regimens like drug addiction, ranting and drinking; a variety of sorrow-distracting activities; and an imagination of carefree, traveling immortals and Arcadia in poetry. More strikingly, the Wei-jen intellectuals not only practiced drug addiction, ranting and drinking with great readiness, but they also endowed these activities with abstract, aesthetic implications. In addition to a search of immediate health and pleasure, therefore, the Wei-jen intellectuals aspired after a kind of beauty, creativity and afflatus. We may say that they actually built their peacefulness on such aesthetic experience. Finally, in discussing the Wei-jen intellectual''s collective destiny, life dilemmas and ultimate harmony, this thesis may serve to open up a new horizon and a different interpretation for the relevant studies to come.