Wasted Innocence: Children and Childhood in Cao Xueqin's Dream of the Red Chamber

Cao Xueqin's Dream of the Red Chamber is a classic Chinese novel dating back to 1792. This article investigates the formative experiences of the representative children from the book's four distinguished households against the unique historical and sociocultural context of premodern Chinese Confucian adulthood with all its rules for rigid regulatory order. We argue that a gap needs to be filled in the understanding of the premodern conceptions of children and childhood in Chinese literature through a detailed case study of Dream. Moreover, the novel's representation of childhood innocence as a form of resistance that draws its force from a dialectic of nature and culture provides an important alternative perspective on the Western Romantic conception. While the book is universally acknowledged as the pinnacle of traditional Chinese fiction, it should also be fully recognised as one of the most important precursors to modern and contemporary Chinese children's literature.

The City as Museum: Guwahati’s Biodiversity Heritage as an Urban Opportunity

Between the dialectic of nature and human intervention, we often discover ourselves being stuck between extremes. To see human intervention as either completely good or bad is a reductionist view which the author challenges through her work. She accepts that concepts like climate change are slow processes, invisible in short time spans, hence difficult to grasp by humans. Her work strives to bring observation of change through positive reinforcement of small human actions which can have a beneficial ecological impact. Using this method to encourage seeing as a tool to believing, the author has developed a relatability model which has proved effective in her work, so far. In this article, she presents the model in the context of a pilot project conducted in Guwahati, Assam. The project documents a few endangered and common animal species in the city, hoping to highlight the coexistence of these as a form of natural heritage.

Vol. 72, No. 6 (November 2020)

Today, two hundred years after his birth, Frederick Engels can be seen as one of the foundational ecological thinkers of modern times. Engels's contributions to our understanding of the overall ecological problem remain indispensable, rooted in his own deep inquiries into nature's universal metabolism. It is because of the very comprehensiveness of his approach to the dialectic of nature and society that Engels's work can help clarify the momentous challenges facing humanity in the Anthropocene epoch and the current age of planetary ecological crisis.

Denkyemmireku: A Usable Past for A New African State

In Ghana – The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (1971), Nkrumah recounts the deliberations within the United Gold Coast Convention on J. B. Danquah’s proposal for adopting the Akan art motif Funtummireku Denkyemmireku (Denkyemmireku, for short), the proverbial two-headed crocodile, as emblem for the emerging nation of Ghana. Dismissing it as a “hideous monstrosity” that symbolizes selfishness, it was never adopted. Yet, the art motif, a kind of jeremiad that says pity that poor crocodile, whose two heads cannot stop fighting over food, even though they share one stomach, is a recognition of the dialectic of nature as one of unity in diversity, the very essence of the hallowed African monistic thesis of matter. This paper posits that Denkyemmireku embodies a potent philosophical and ideological symbol capable of serving as a usable past for a much-needed reconstruction of a more legitimate African state. ______________________________ 1 Some aspects of this article have been previously published in the Journal of Black Studies by the author. See, Kwasi Boadi, “The Ontology of Kwame Nkrumah’s Consciencism and the Democratic Theory and Practice in Africa – A Diopian Perspective.” Journal of Black Studies, Volume 30, Number 4 / March 2000, 475–501.

Nature and the Dialectic of Nature in Hegel's Objective Idealism

When the Ideal is understood as ontologically fundamental within the framework of an idealistic system, and the Real, on the other hand, as derived, then the first and foremost task of a philosophy of this kind is to prove the claimed fundamentally of the Ideal. This is immediately followed by the further demand to also substantiate on this basis the existence of the Real and particularly of natural being. These tasks have been understood and attempts made to solve them in very different ways in German Idealism - about which I cannot go into more detail here. Let me say this much: that Fichte and Schelling, it appears to me, already fail at the first task, ie. neither Fichte nor Schelling really succeeds in substantiating their pretended ideal as an absolute principle of philosophy. Fichte believes he has such a principle in the direct evidence of the self. However, as this is of little use for the foundation of a generally binding philosophy because of its ultimately private character, Fichte already replaces it with the principle of the absolute self already in his first Wissenschaftlehre of 1794. As a construction detached from the concrete self, this of course lacks that original direct certainty from which Fichte started in the first place, in other words: because the construction of an absolute self can no longer refer to direct evidence, it must be substantiated separately, something which Fichte, I believe, nonetheless fails to do. The same criticism can, in my view, be made of Schelling, who ingeniously substitutes constructions for arguments. His early intuition of an absolute identity which simultaneously underlies spirit and nature, remains just as thetic and unproven as that eternal subject on which he based the representation of his system in, for example, the Munich lectures of 1827.