"It is only through contact and comparison that the relative value or worthlessness of the various cultural elements can be clearly and critically seen and understood"
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Value becomes visible when cultures meet and measure themselves against one another. Hu Shih ties cultural judgment to experience rather than to metaphysical certainty: the worth of customs, institutions, and ideas emerges through the friction and testing that contact and comparison provide. Isolated traditions cannot easily see their own blind spots; encounter creates the mirror that makes self-knowledge possible.
That stance grows from Hu Shihs pragmatism. Trained under John Dewey, he pushed early 20th-century China toward experimental thinking: boldness in hypothesis, care in verification. For him, culture is not a sacred relic but a set of working hypotheses about how to live. To compare is to experiment. By putting Confucian ethics alongside liberal constitutionalism, classical prose alongside vernacular writing, ritual authority alongside scientific method, one can ask which practices solve concrete problems, which inhibit growth, and which can be reformed.
The point is not blind Westernization or reflexive traditionalism. Hu Shih advocated selective borrowing and continuous self-revision. Contact rescues a society from complacency, while comparison prevents uncritical imitation. Both move evaluation from inherited prestige to practical consequences. The same logic applies in reverse: Western institutions, when seen against Chinese experience, can be judged for suitability rather than assumed universal.
He also implies a moral discipline for cross-cultural exchange. Comparison should be reciprocal, fair, and historically aware. Power imbalances can distort judgment, turning comparison into domination. Yet withdrawal is worse; without exposure, cultures become self-enclosed and sentimental, overrating their virtues and ignoring their harms.
Hu Shih wrote during the New Culture and May Fourth movements, when China sought pathways to modernity. His counsel remains timely in a globalized world: let ideas travel, test them against alternatives, keep what works, revise what fails, and allow the encounter itself to sharpen judgment. Culture lives by learning, and learning requires others.
That stance grows from Hu Shihs pragmatism. Trained under John Dewey, he pushed early 20th-century China toward experimental thinking: boldness in hypothesis, care in verification. For him, culture is not a sacred relic but a set of working hypotheses about how to live. To compare is to experiment. By putting Confucian ethics alongside liberal constitutionalism, classical prose alongside vernacular writing, ritual authority alongside scientific method, one can ask which practices solve concrete problems, which inhibit growth, and which can be reformed.
The point is not blind Westernization or reflexive traditionalism. Hu Shih advocated selective borrowing and continuous self-revision. Contact rescues a society from complacency, while comparison prevents uncritical imitation. Both move evaluation from inherited prestige to practical consequences. The same logic applies in reverse: Western institutions, when seen against Chinese experience, can be judged for suitability rather than assumed universal.
He also implies a moral discipline for cross-cultural exchange. Comparison should be reciprocal, fair, and historically aware. Power imbalances can distort judgment, turning comparison into domination. Yet withdrawal is worse; without exposure, cultures become self-enclosed and sentimental, overrating their virtues and ignoring their harms.
Hu Shih wrote during the New Culture and May Fourth movements, when China sought pathways to modernity. His counsel remains timely in a globalized world: let ideas travel, test them against alternatives, keep what works, revise what fails, and allow the encounter itself to sharpen judgment. Culture lives by learning, and learning requires others.
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| Topic | Knowledge |
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