You have expressed a very Daoist perspective.
Baudelaire's Les Fleur du Mal, first published 1857 when B. was 36, enlarged in 1861 and 1869, 2 year after B's death, was the only volume of his poems published in his lifetime. It was publicly condemned as obscene and six of the poems were supressed. One English translation entitled: The Flowers of Evil, always struck me as being distortively problematic in conveying the inner despair of B. Several meanings in English are offered for the French word mal in the dictionary: evil; ill; harm; pain; ache; sickness, hardship; misfortune; trouble; repugnance. As you can see, any of the other words beside evil would give a very different spin to the title. Critics have identify the main theme of B's work as the inseparable nature of beauty and corruption. Believing criticism to be a function of the poet , B. wrote perceptive appraisals of his contemporaries. That view has parallels in Chinese poetry. B.'s life was marked by debts, misunderstanding and excess. His erratic life was influenced by his strong attachment to his mother, not a very Chinese sentiment.
I would like to hear more about your comaprison of 1859 France and 1998 China.
1859 would place France 11 years after the February Revolution of 1848 and the publication of The Communist Manifesto which marked the birth of Marxism, and 7 years after the establishemnt of the Second Empire, by overwhelming publicite, with Napoleon III as Emperor. Under imperial dictatorship, France made rapid material and institutional progress and imperialistic conquest during this decade. Finance capitalism flourished, and new capitalists were created, (more speculators than true capitalists actually) in a period of bourgeois political revisionism, of vulgar extravagance in social manners, of greed and scandal and of merveilleuses (women known for their underdressed overdressing in public), an extreme excess in the tradition of the Thermidorian Reaction. Railroad and cannel building, slum clearance were carried out and the French investment bank was established. 1859 was the eve of the "liberal empire" phase of the reign of Napoleon III. The French-British joint expedition against China took place from 1857-60. 1859 was the year war broke out in Italy between France and Austria for the glory of France and the unification of Italy. The Paris Commune took place in 1871, 12 years after.
I would like to hear your impression of 1998 China that strikes you as having familarities to 1859 France. To me China today is still highly equalitarian, and while there is wide-spread corruption of a Confucian nature, robber barons/speculators types have yet to be popular role models.
Henry C.K. Liu
Dennis R Redmond wrote:
> On Sat, 21 Nov 1998, Henry C.K. Liu wrote:
>
> > It would not be an exaggeration to hypothesize that the introduction of
> > linguistic sex equality would demolish the fundamental structure of
> > Chinese language, rendering it incapable of expressing abstract thought,
> > particularly those dealing with concepts of evil.
>
> So much the worse for the concept of evil, that essential scapegoat
> without which no repressive ideology could possibly exist. Baudelaire's
> Les Fleurs du Mal (and France's social structure circa 1859 has quite a
> few similarities with China 1998) put it best: in the poison lies the
> salvation.
>
> -- Dennis
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