Late in the evening of June 4, 1989, government tanks rolled into Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, the symbolic center of China, to clear the square of protesters. Snapshot: Scorching lights advancing across the square reduce everything to outline as a tent is caught and half-flattened beneath the treads of a tank steamrolling its straight line across the square. Snapshot: A terrified young soldier with rifle still hot and smoking is being dragged from a jeep by faceless arms into the maw of a frenzied crowd. Snapshot: Three students stand atop a tour bus that has been detained and searched, and as proof that its civilian occupants are People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers, the students hold up an automatic weapon and two helmets for the crowd to see. Snapshot: The plaster Goddess of Democracy lies broken in several pieces. A heavy armored vehicle has pulled it from its wooden stand, and it has toppled through the many institutional flags that still fly around its base. Snapshot: A student turns back with contorted face as he sees the young woman in a pink dress running beside him reel and fall face forward onto the pavement. Snapshot: The stiff, charred body of a PLA soldier, naked except for his hat and shoes, is kept upright against the shell of a burned-out bus by taut wire wrapped around his neck; “He killed four people” is written with masking tape on the bus beside him.
Unfortunately, we have become increasingly familiar with scenes such as these over the past generation. The news media have provided vivid accounts of events apparently similar to the Tiananmen incident: protesters with placards and loudspeakers exhorting liberal reforms and proclaiming certain victory for their cause; soldiers, in helmets and khaki uniforms, firing upon their fellow citizens.
Were we to look at Tiananmen through Chinese eyes, however, would we really see an event explicable in the terms used to explain student protests in our own country or, for that matter, the broader acts of governmental violence in the Middle East, South Africa, or Eastern Europe?
Instinctively, we believe that pain and the brutality that causes it are the same around the globe. But much of what we are coming to understand about China and its people tells us that there is an otherness about the Chinese sensibility which defies immediate understanding in either the terms of our common sense or the terms of the abstract categories and principles associated with the sort of intellectual analysis philosophers are apt to attempt.
For example, how are we to interpret the incident at Tiananmen as a democratic revolt if in our democracy there is a prevailing conception of personhood that entails natural rights, free choice, independence, autonomy, and so on, while in China such values, far from being self-evident and normative, have traditionally been regarded by even the sagest Chinese as sociopathic?
Of course the rhetoric of a democratic society such as ours must insist that the dictum “all men are created equal” applies to all human beings and that, therefore, the Chinese are fundamentally the same as us, differing only in such incidentals as their use of chopsticks, the shape of their eyes, and so forth. Such rhetoric was responsible for the blithe, clichéd interpretation assumed by much of the American news coverage of Tiananmen: An unpopular and tyrannical government crushes young George Washingtons.
Yet this belief in a “common humanity” is belied by the xenophobic stereotypes that have become part of our understanding of things Chinese. The most familiar associations of the word Chinese in our popular discourse are “puzzling,” “confusing,” “absurd.” There are many examples of this sort of understanding. A perplexing puzzle that is found to have no solution is called a “Chinese puzzle.” When someone does mischief to himself to spite another, he has taken a “Chinese revenge.” A “Chinese flush” in poker has only the same color to recommend it. “Chinese screwdriver” is Australian slang for a hammer. A “Chinese fire drill” is a college prank in which, while stopped at a traffic signal, students leap from an automobile, run around in circles, and reenter the car just as the light changes. Finally, to end this rather ignoble litany, there is a familiar expression: Someone or something has a “Chinaman’s chance”—that is, practically no chance at all.
The sense of difference is, if anything, even more profound on the side of the Chinese. More often than not, Westerners have been characterized as barbarians who, though obviously possessed of superior military technology, are physically unfit for battle because of their straight legs, rigid waists, and extremely poor night vision. Visitors from the West have been depicted for the Chinese people, the vast majority of whom would never have the chance to see one for themselves, as demons—grotesquely hairy monsters, with beaks and claws. Even today, the phrase “foreign devil” is commonly used among Chinese to refer to Western individuals. And though the connotation of this term has lost most of the sense of physical monstrosity, the epithet still evokes an understanding of Westerners as clumsy, tactless, and vulgar. A popular saying in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries captured this impression of the intruding foreigner as unmannered and graceless: “The sage fears nothing in this world, save for one thing only: the foreign devil attempting to speak Chinese.”
Of course, not all recognitions of difference are grounded in bigotry and suspicion. Lin Yutang’s claim that “the reason why the Chinese failed to develop botany and zoology is that the Chinese scholar cannot stare coldly and unemotionally at a fish without immediately thinking of how it tastes in the mouth and wanting to eat it”1 expresses this sense of difference in a wry, humane, even humorous manner.
From the sixteenth to the close of the eighteenth century, European opinion of China as reflected in the literature of this period was usually quite high. The Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1551–1610) found the Chinese to be a humane and eminently civilized people. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europeans idealized China as a remarkable and “curious land” requiring the utmost scrutiny.2 Individuals such as Leibniz and Voltaire often proclaimed the knowledge and virtues of the Chinese to be superior to those of Europeans.
Things changed markedly in the nineteenth century. G.W.F. Hegel was typical of nineteenth-century Western thinkers in his unsympathetic interpretation of Chinese civilization:
Its distinguishing feature is, that everything which belongs to spirit—unconstrained morality, in practice and theory, heart, inward religion, science and art properly so called—is alien to it. . . . While we obey, because what we are required to do is confirmed by an internal sanction, there the law is regarded as inherently and absolutely valid without a sense of the want of this subjective confirmation.3
The engine of the industrial revolution had added another dimension to this negative evaluation. Europe and America, marching under the banner of scientific and industrial progress, lost all esteem for China. The earlier visions of an exotic Shangri-La plummeted from “Cathay” idealizations to the depths of disaffection for the inertia of a culture cast as backward-looking and moribund.
How are we to approach the question of Chinese philosophy against the background of this general recognition on the parts of both China and the West of vast cultural differences? In the first place, we had better not overload the term philosophy with its Western connotations. What serves as “philosophic thinking” in China is significantly different from that with which most of us are familiar. Second, we must be prepared to understand the differences between Chinese and Western thinking as both cause and consequence of those broader cultural differences perhaps more easily observed.
The religious writer Gerald Heard once characterized the civilizations of Europe, India, and China in terms of a fundamental question presumably asked by the thinkers and seers of each tradition. For the European that question was “Where am I?” Curiosity about the nature of the external world led to the development of the natural and social sciences. Indians asked the question “Who am I?” and as a consequence discovered subtle techniques of spiritual self-examination and articulation. The Chinese, claimed Heard, asked the question “What am I?” This question was answered in terms of rituals and roles establishing the parameters of one’s identity as a social being.
Granted the simplistic character of Heard’s suggestions, there is something to be gained if we realize that we in the West have oriented our interests principally toward discovering the objective nature of things. This is reflected in the traditional interests of philosophers: Metaphysicians search out the being of things, epistemologists most often ask how we come to know the reality that lies behind appearances, and so forth. But the overriding concern of the Chinese has always been the establishment of harmonious relationships with their social ambience. Their “philosophic” thinking is always concrete, this-worldly, and, above all, practical. Keeping in mind this contrast between Chinese and Western interests will prevent us from too readily believing that the Chinese thinkers whom we might wish to call philosophers are somehow ignoring the most important philosophical issues.
William James said that philosophy is nothing other than the uncommonly stubborn attempt to think clearly. That’s not a bad conception with which to begin, though we might wish to supplement it with the equally fruitful definition provided by the contemporary American thinker Wilfred Sellars: Philosophy is the attempt to discover how things, in the most general sense, hang together, in the most general sense.
On first approach, seeking to think clearly about the Chinese seems to give us the sense that things just don’t “hang together” in any way that we recognize as stable, rational, or appropriate. We must presume that our puzzlement is caused by the difficulty of adjusting to a cultural sensibility so utterly distinct from our own. Of course, part of this difficulty is due to the fact that we cannot be prepared to appreciate the Chinese ways of thinking unless we have a reasonably articulate grasp of the beliefs and desires that shape our own sensibility.
There is a Chinese expression:
I do not know the true face of Mount Lu
Simply because I’m standing on top of it.
We must begin to see the face of our own Mount Lu before we shall be able to make out the contours of the Chinese mountain.
We have just said that Western thinkers observing the Chinese may experience a frustrating perplexity when trying to make sense of the order of things Chinese. Jorge Luis Borges advertises just such perplexity by his well-known citation of “a certain Chinese encyclopedia” in which the category “animals” is divided into: (i) belonging to the Emperor, (ii) embalmed, (iii) tame, (iv) sucking pigs, (v) sirens, (vi) fabulous, (vii) stray dogs, (viii) included in the present classification, (ix) frenzied, (x) innumerable, (xi) drawn with a very fine camel-hair brush, (xii) et cetera, (xiii) having just broken the water pitcher, and (xiv) that from a long way off look like flies.4
Borges’s parody of the Chinese manner of organizing things will appear somewhat less extreme if we consider the following parable of the fourth-century B.C.E. Taoist thinker Chuang Tzu:
The Ruler of the Southern Ocean was Shu (Heedless), the Ruler of the Northern Ocean was Hu (Sudden), and the Ruler of Center was Chaos. Shu and Hu were continually meeting in the land of Chaos, who treated them very well. They consulted together how they might repay his kindness, and said, “Men all have seven orifices for the purpose of seeing, hearing, eating, and breathing, while this (poor) Ruler alone has not one. Let us try and make them for him.” Accordingly they dug one orifice in him every day; and at the end of seven days Chaos died.5
The means of organizing the world through the senses, the very basis of a reasonable sense of order, destroys kindly Lord Chaos. James Legge, the translator of this passage, advertises the Western bewilderment with the Chinese conception of order in his footnote to his translation of this text: “But surely it was better that Chaos should give way to another state. ‘Heedless’ and ‘Sudden’ did not do a bad work.” Unquestionably, it is better that confusion and disorder give way to harmony, but Chaos (Hun-tun) is not for Chuang Tzu identified with pernicious disorder but rather with the innocent spontaneity and harmony of the “original condition” before things received artificial and deadening organization.
This story about Lord Hun-tun could be considered a cosmogonic myth—a story of how the world comes into being. But it certainly isn’t like the myths of origins with which most of us are familiar. Our traditional sense of order is grounded in cosmogonic myths that celebrate the victory of Cosmos over Chaos. Chaos is a “yawning gap” and a “gaping void.” It is an emptiness or absence, a nothingness; it is a confused mass of unorganized surds. And however conceived, Chaos is the enemy of order. Hesiod’s Theogony tells how the yawning gap of Chaos separating Heaven and Earth was overcome by Eros—love thereby creating harmony. The Book of Genesis tells how, from a “dark formless void,” order was created by Divine Command. In the Timaeus, Plato’s Demiurge “persuades” the disorganized, intransigent matter into reasonable order—“a victory of persuasion over necessity.”
In accordance with the profound influence of our cosmogonic tradition, Western understandings of the way things hang together rest on the presumption that order and harmony must be vigilantly maintained by appeal to a creative agent or objective rules, laws, and principles.
Classical Chinese culture was little influenced by any sort of cosmogonic myth that contrasted an irrational Chaos with an ordered Cosmos. The relative unimportance of cosmogonic myths in China accounts for the dramatically different intellectual contexts from which the Chinese and Western cultural sensibilities emerged.
In the Western tradition, thinking about the order of things began with questions such as “What kinds of things are there?” and “What is the nature (physis) of things?” This inquiry, which later came to be called metaphysics, took two principal forms. One, which the scholastics later termed ontologia generalis (“general ontology”), is the investigation of the most essential features of things. General ontology seeks to uncover the Being of beings. A slightly less abstract mode of metaphysical thinking, scientia universalis (“universal science”), involves the attempt to construct a science of the sciences, a way of knowing that organizes and accounts for the various ways of knowing the world about us.
Both general ontology and universal science serve to interpret the order of the cosmos advertised by the cosmogonic myths. Both suppose that there are general characteristics—the Being of beings, or universal principles—that tell us how things hang together.
Neither of these forms of metaphysical thinking was ever influential in China. One important reason for their unimportance is reflected in the character of the Chinese language. The usual Chinese equivalents for “being” and “not-being” are yu and wu.6 But the meanings of these terms are markedly different from their uses in Indo-European languages. The Chinese yu means not that something “is” in the sense that it exists; it means rather that “something is present.” “To be” is “to be available,” “to be around.” Likewise, “not be” means “not to be around.” Thus, the Chinese sense of “being” overlaps with “having.” A famous line from the Taoist classic The Tao Te Ching, often translated as “Not-Being is superior to Being,” may as easily be translated “Not-having is superior to having” (or, as a Marxist-inspired translator has rendered it, “Not owning private property is superior to owning private property”).
The Chinese language disposes those who employ the notions of yu and wu to concern themselves with the presence or absence of concrete particular things and the effect of having or not having them at hand. Moreover, the practical, concrete disposition of Chinese thinkers is not merely a consequence but, just as important, a cause of the Chinese meanings of yu and wu.
Were we asked to come up with a name for the most general “science” of order in the Chinese tradition, we might offer the term ars contextualis. The Chinese seek the understanding of order through the “art of contextualization,” which does not presume that there are essential features, or antecedent determining principles, serving as transcendent sources of order. The art of contextualization seeks to understand the manner in which particular things present to hand are, or may be, most harmoniously correlated. The reason the classical Chinese were disinclined toward the creation of myths accounting for the origin and structure of the cosmos is that they found harmonious interrelations among the particular things around them to be the natural condition—a given that requires no external principle or agency to explain it.
Our contrast of Western and Chinese senses of order has provided us two distinctive understandings of the term. The dominant meaning of order in the West is associated with uniformity and pattern regularity. In its most general sense, this “logical” or “rational” ordering is expressed in terms of the structure, or logos, of the cosmos. The Chinese understanding of order is one in which the natural and social worlds comprise concrete particulars whose uniqueness is essential to any context to which they belong. Aesthetic order emerges from the way in which these details are juxtaposed and correlated. As such, the order is resolutely immanental. This is true not only of social order but of “natural” order as well: The striations in stone, the coloration that differentiates the various layers of the earth, the veins in the leaf of a plant, the wind piping through the orifices of the earth—all are understood in the same manner as are the rituals and roles that constitute a communal grammar.
Our two senses of order may be illustrated in the following way: Think of the contrast between mathematical objects such as a triangle or a circle and art objects such as J.M.W. Turner’s painting Slave Ship. What are the relevant differences? An important difference is that almost anyone can construct a triangle, but only Turner could have painted that particular work of art he named Slave Ship. Further, a triangle may be constructed from ink, chalk, or string, or elements of our imaginations. As a mental scheme or concept, the triangle is indifferent to such construction. All our individual constructions are imitations of “triangularity” as conceptually defined. With respect to Turner’s painting, only that particular canvas and those particular pigments can comprise it. There is no antecedent pattern that Turner wishes to imitate. The work of art comes into being as a function of its unique particular elements. Few would believe that an imitation, a copy, of Slave Ship could ever be valued as much as the original.
In the West, the objective, formal character of mathematical order has been deemed nearest to perfection. In China, a notion of order that abstracted from the concrete details of this-worldly existence would be seen as moving away from relevancy. The crucial difference between these two senses of order is that in the one case there is the presumption of an objective standard which one perforce must instantiate; in the other, there is no source of order other than the agency of the elements comprising the order. The claim that the Chinese create order aesthetically rather than by recourse to logical or rational operations of the sort familiar to Western metaphysical thinkers requires us to reevaluate our most common stereotypes. Through the persuasion of our most popular sources on China, we have become accustomed to thinking of China as a stagnant society paralyzed by inertia, almost wholly inflexible, defiantly resistant to entering the modern world—if no longer a slumbering, certainly a lumbering, giant.7 Can it really be true that the country identified with cultural continuity, intractable tradition, and the most provincial intolerance toward other civilizations illustrates an aesthetic understanding of order?
This seeming paradox may be resolved if we pursue the analogy with art. In painting there are the “greats,” the innovators who create and master a style or manner, influencing their successors to emulate and augment the style and technique of the master. In China, the “Sage-Kings” such as the Emperors Yao and Shun, and exemplary figures such as Confucius, Lao Tzu, and Chuang Tzu, are the creators, the innovators whose contributions help to shape the ritualistic practices that order the present. But it would be a mistake to label as imitators those who practice rituals that they themselves did not create. For the proper effect of ritual practices is to liberate rather than to stultify the feelings of the participants in them. Those who play a musical instrument know very well how liberating technique can be. Once we master the scales and chords and gain sufficient dexterity in the use of our fingers, we can play the piano in such a manner as to release our aesthetic feelings. This inner ecstasy of performance is open to those who practice ritual as well. Ritual, like artistic technique, is not a tyrant but a liberator.
Rational order depends on the belief in a single-ordered world, a cosmos. Aesthetic order speaks of the world in much less unitary terms. In China, the cosmos is simply “the ten thousand things.” The claim that the things of nature may be ordered in any number of ways is the basis of philosophical thinking as ars contextualis. Rational order, on the other hand, is based on the notion that this world is one, rendered coherent by laws guaranteeing its rationality.
Each of these understandings of order existed at the beginnings of both Western and Chinese cultures, and both persist as interpretative options in the two cultures. It so happens that in the course of their respective histories the two cultures made distinctly different choices, which led to the dominance of alternative understandings of the grounding of cosmic, social, and personal order.8
Confucians are often distinguished from Taoists by the observation that though both seek aesthetic harmony, the Taoists seek harmony with nature whereas Confucians are concerned with harmony in the social sphere. “Nature” (“the ten thousand things”) and “society,” as contexts, are both aesthetic products whose order is a creation of the elements of the contexts. In the Taoist texts, the central notion of tzu-jan (self-so-ing) means that each of the ten thousand things comes into being out of its own inner reflection and that no one can tell how it comes to be so. The Confucian version of this claim is that “it is the person who extends order in the world (tao), not order that extends the person.”9 Later on, with the penetration of Buddhism into China, a rich vocabulary permitting an articulation of the inner life of the individual will be added to the Chinese cultural resources. Thus, the introduction of Indian Buddhism brought with it a conception of human inferiority that neither early Confucianism nor Taoism provided.
The Chinese exercise of the naming of persons is a good illustration of how one ritually “extends order in the world.” The process of naming is a correlative procedure that has its most familiar illustrations in totemic classifications. In an Amerindian tribe, the name Running Deer may suggest to the person so named how he or she is to behave toward others of the tribe, as well as indicate to others how they are to behave toward him or her. The ordering of attitudes, actions, and expectations through the act of naming does not create an objective, rational order; nonetheless, real social harmony can result from such ordering.
In something like this fashion, the giving of proper names in the Chinese tradition provides a disposition to act on the part of the individual named and a disposition to treat the named one as his or her name indicates. As dispositional, a name is a ritual form. Thus, the Chinese proper name An Lo-che (“contented in philosophy”)10 advertises a wish to fulfill the promise of the name. If, in turn, family and associates respond in however small a manner to the name as more than a mere “tag,” there is support for the philosophical life of An Lo-che. Thus, a family may be a society of names that, as dispositions-to-act, define the character of the beliefs and desires of the family.
As a harmony of names, the family is determinate and focused at the center, but becomes increasingly vague as it stretches out both historically in the direction of one’s own lineage, one’s clan, one’s surname, and as a present community immediately transformed into “uncles” and “aunties” as soon as social contact is made. The family is radial, articulated in terms of a ritual “wheel” of social relations that “ripple out” in a field of “discourse” to define the person as a network of roles.11
To speak of the relationship of the Chinese to their various social contexts, we must avoid language suggesting the relation of “part” and “whole.” It is better to speak of the relation of a “focus” to the “field” it focuses. Thus, the togetherness of heaven and man suggests that the particular human being is focus and that “heaven” or “the ten thousand things” are the field focused by that person. The culture is the field and its exemplary models—the Sage Kings, Confucius, Lao Tzu, and so forth—are foci. The political order of any given epoch is field and the present ruler is the principal focus.
Although the family, the society, the state, or the tradition itself as the most extended context is vague as a grouping, this vagueness is focused and made immediate through its embodiment by the particular father, the communal exemplar, the ruler, the historical model. This is but to say that the meaning of the group is made present in “supreme personalities”: one’s own father, one’s teacher, one’s Confucius, and one’s Mao Tse-tung. Although the concreteness and immediacy of the center preclude any but the vaguest and indeterminate definitions of “Chineseness,” this notion comes alive to a particular historical person in his or her image of a Tseng Kuo-fan or a Yang Yu-wei.12
Clearly the Chinese sense of social order cannot be understood in terms of Western individualism. None of the principal ideas undergirding individualism in the West had much influence in China. That is to say, neither the idealist conception of the human being as possessed of a unique soul that serves to individuate him or her from other ensouled beings, nor the materialistic, atomistic understanding that identifies the person with his or her body, only extrinsically related to other such bodies, nor, for that matter, the existential interpretation that identifies the individual with the creative exercise of will played much part in the formation of Chinese cultural resources.
Chinese society cannot be interpreted as a complex of distinct and autonomous individuals protected by natural rights, living in a society ordered by codes of law backed by power and sanctions. One confronts dramatic evidence of the inappropriateness of individualism in the Chinese context when attempting to translate the rhetoric of liberal democracy into the Chinese language. The English sentence “Liberalism rests on individualism under the supremacy of law” would read to the Chinese something like this: “The doctrine of spontaneous license (tzu-yu chu-yi) rests on the doctrine of self-centeredness (ko-jen chuyi) under the supremacy of administrative regulation (fa-lü).”13
The defect of individualism from the Chinese perspective is its challenge to a ritually ordered society in which the boundaries of the self may be only vaguely delineated. The Chinese “self” is a complex of roles and functions associated with the obligations to the various groupings to which one belongs. One is son, father, brother, husband, citizen, teacher. Subtract each of these roles from him and nothing constituting a coherent personality remains: no soul, no mind, no ego, not even an “I know not what.”
The sense of personal identity is determined in part by tension with others. Without at least a tacit conflict between self and others, the distinctive character of the self becomes vague and diffuse, difficult to distinguish from its various social contexts. Ritual actions significantly decrease the occasions on which one would experience tension with others.
The phenomenon of the individuated self was in fact a rather late development in our own tradition. At the beginning of Greek culture, the tribal character of social organization effectively precluded a strong sense of otherness.14 This sense increased markedly with the growth of cosmopolitan cities. In fact, as the word suggests, “civilization” in the West was a process of “citification.”
Attendant upon the rise of cities and of the commercial relations with foreign peoples that sustained these urban centers, the Greeks enforced a strong distinction between the private and the public spheres. This separation of the intimate relations of the family from the more impersonal relations of public life further enhanced the possibility of a sense of self-identity. The family became a training ground for public life.
Things went quite differently in China. Ancient China overcame the threat of the tensions and conflicts attendant upon ethnic and cultural pluralism by the device of employing the language itself, rather than the process of urbanization, as the medium for transmitting the culture. A class of literati developed; a canon of classical works was instituted along with a commentarial tradition that served to perpetuate the doctrines of these classical works; an examination system based on these texts was introduced in the early Han dynasty.15
Further, the Chinese never stressed a distinction between private and public realms. Because the family was the model of all types of relationship, including the nonfamilial relations among subjects and between ruler and subjects, there was no effective public sphere. One can hardly overestimate the importance of these contrasting developments in determining Chinese and Western attitudes toward individual autonomy.
Our contrast between the Chinese and Western understandings of order appears to challenge the conviction that the West surely prizes novelty and spontaneity more than do the traditionalist Chinese. But, on reflection, it becomes clear that the profound concern for creativity in the West is a response to the realization that any presumption of an objective reality providing the standards for the world of appearance leaves very little room for the production of novelty. In China, by contrast, where the standards themselves are created through the activity of the agents comprising society or the “ten thousand things,” novelty is the norm. Tradition-based models available in the culture ensure that novel contributions will not lead to disharmony.
In China, the phrase “the togetherness of man and heaven” (t’ien-jen ho-yi) has been construed to mean that personal, societal, political, and cosmic order are coterminous and mutually entailing, and that, from the human perspective, this order is emergent in the process of one’s own self-cultivation and articulation. If we think of the various contexts that are to be harmonized as so many concentric circles, we can see that there is an interdependence between one’s self-realization at the center and cosmic order at the outer extreme.
Classically, this is expressed through the notion of the Sage as exemplar of both tradition in its broadest sense and “the Will of Heaven,” that is, the specific environing conditions that set up the viable possibilities in a particular social situation or historical epoch. This is the sense of Mencius’s (ca. 380–289 B.C.E.) assertions that “all of the myriad things are complete here in me” and “one who applies exhaustively his heart-and-mind realizes his character, and in thus realizing his character, realizes the whole of nature (t’ien).”16
The “myriad things” is an expression denoting the natural world as a complex of particular elements. It lacks the suggestion of unity or coherence carried by the term cosmos, which is thought to be organized in terms of natural laws characterizing causal relationships among things. Its order is a shifting set of aesthetic harmonies construed from the perspective of the human world.
The Lao Tzu, the classic of the Taoist tradition, expresses this notion of harmony: “The myriad things shoulder yin and embrace yang and blend their energies (ch’i) together to constitute a harmony (ho).” The intelligible patterns created by different perspectives upon the world are all pathways that can in varying degrees be traced out to make one’s place and its context coherent. Tao is, at any given time, both what the world is and how it is. There is no final distinction between an independent source of order and that which it orders. The world and its order at any particular time is self-causing so-of-itself (tzu-jan). For this reason, explanation does not lie in the discovery of some antecedent agency or the isolation and disclosure of relevant causes. Rather, any particular event or phenomenon can be understood by mapping out the conditions that collaborate to sponsor it. Once understood, these conditions can be manipulated to anticipate the next moment.
In the Han dynasty, vast tables of correspondences were developed in order to define and organize the sorts of things in the natural and social world that were thought to provide a meaningful context for one’s life. One such set of tables, called “tables of five,” compared “the five phases” (wood, fire, earth, metal, water), “the five directions” (north, east, south, west, center), “the five colors” (green, red, yellow, white, black), “the five notes,” and so forth.
Other types of correlation employed the twelve months, the twelve pitches, the twenty-eight constellations, the heavenly roots and earthly branches. Such classifications include body parts, psychophysical and affective states, styles of government, weather, domestic animals, technological instruments, heavenly bodies, and much more.17
One of the important devices employed in Chinese correlative thinking is the contrast of yin and yang. Given the uniqueness of each thing and the continuity that exists among things, each phenomenon is thought to be bound to every other thing in a pattern of interchanging hierarchical relationships. The old teacher Lao Tzu is wiser than his young student, and hence overshadows him in this respect. Lao Tzu is yang and the student is yin. The student, however, is stronger physically than the old master; hence in strength, the student is yang to Lao Tzu’s yin. It is when these various strengths and weaknesses that define the relationship can be balanced to maximum effect that the relationship is most productive and most fully harmonious.
The contents of many of these correlative schemes are apparently the same as the subject matters of the Western natural sciences. But there is a crucial difference in the manner in which they are treated. In China, correlations were not undertaken as a means of dispassionately investigating the nature of things. Rather, in accordance with the query “What am I?” correlative schemes oriented the individual in a very practical manner to the external surroundings. Thus, the Chinese were concerned less with astronomy than with astrology; they were far more enthusiastic over the development of geomancy than over the development of geology.
In China, social order was construed as a harmony achieved through personal participation in a ritually constituted community. Thus the ideal of social order could not be realized by appeal to law. Such appeal, far from being respected as a legitimate resource for adjudicating social conflicts, was seen as an admission of communal failure. This attitude was so much a part of the Chinese character that the profession of the lawyer, thought to be a potential source of dissension among citizens, was discouraged. Judges often acted as the sole arbiters of legal disputes.
It is the emphasis on social harmony achieved through personalized ritual relationships (li) that most dramatically distinguishes the Chinese ritual community from the Western society of laws. The term most often translated by the English “society” in modern Chinese is she-hui, which, taken literally, refers to the traditional practice of gathering around the sacred pole erected in the center of the community.18
The characteristic of ritually shaped order that distinguishes it from the more legalistic rule-based order is the personal cultivation of a sense of shame, and the self-rectification that ensues from it. Confucius compared these two alternative models of communal order in the following terms:
Lead the people with administrative policies and organize them with penal law, and they will avoid punishments but will be without a sense of shame. Lead them with an example of excellence and organize them with ritual practices, and they will have a sense of shame and, moreover, will order themselves harmoniously.19
This sense of the self-attuning harmony of society led Confucius to claim that “the various Chinese states without their rulers are better than the barbarian tribes with them.”20
Ritual has broad compass in the Chinese social and political order. It is the performance of any formalized, meaning-invested conduct, role, or institution that serves to organize particular human beings in community. Thus, ritual spans everything from table manners to court ceremony, from living familial relations to observances for the dead.
One of the well-known generalizations concerning the Western intellectual tradition is captured by Whitehead’s apothegm: “All of Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato.” The Chinese version of this sort of claim has equal force: “All of Chinese thinking is a series of commentaries on Confucius.” The validity of this assertion is dependent upon historical developments occurring within the period of the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.−220 C.E.). It is these developments that have led the Chinese to call themselves “the People of the Han.”
The first volume of the Cambridge History of China describes the career of the Han empire from its emergence under Liu Pang to its gradual disintegration three and a half centuries later.21 In this volume, Yü Ying-shih uses the “five zones” (wu-fu) theory of submission as a device for describing the dynamics of the Han world order:22
According to this theory, China since the Hsia dynasty (2205–1766 B.C.E.?) had been divided into five concentric and hierarchical zones or areas. The central zone (tien-fu) was the royal domain, under the direct rule of the king. The royal domain was immediately surrounded by the Chinese states established by the king, known collectively as the Lords’ zone (hou–fu). Beyond the hou-fu were Chinese states conquered by the reigning dynasty, which constituted the so-called pacified zone (sui-fu or pin-fu, guest zone). The last two zones were reserved for the barbarians. The Man and I barbarians lived outside the sui-fu or pin-fu in the controlled zone (yao-fu), which was so called because the Man and I were supposedly subject to Chinese control, albeit of a rather loose kind. Finally, beyond the controlled zone lay the Jung and Ti barbarians, who were basically their own masters in the wild zone (huang-fu) where the sinocentric world order reached its natural end.
This hierarchical system, with patterns of deference sustaining a central authoritative focus, seems pervasive in Chinese society. These concrete, functioning patterns of deference contribute in varying degrees to, and are constitutive of, the authority at the center, shaping and bringing into focus the standards and values of the social and political entity.
The full spectrum of Han peoples—some under traditional hereditary houses, others organized religiously, yet others under clan or tribal regulation—was suspended in the Han harmony, with each contributing in greater or lesser degree to the definition of Han culture. This transition from contending diversity in the latter years of the Chou dynasty to unity in the Han is best expressed in a language of incorporation and accommodation.
Three and a half centuries later, well after the establishment of social and political unity, the center of the Han court weakened and the political order gradually dissolved into a period of disunity. Contending forces precipitated out of the harmony to reassert themselves. What had been their contribution to the center became the energy of contest among them. What was a tightening spire in the early Han became a gyre, disgorging itself of its disassociating contents.
Broadly, then, the disintegration of social order in the Chinese context is occasioned by a weakening of the center that is both cause and consequence of corruption among those responsible for the order. Because the political ruler is also a moral exemplar, any hint of corruption can lead to demoralization on the part of the people. If the ruler cannot institute proper reforms, he will suffer a loss of filial respect on the part of the people, who will claim that he has lost “the Mandate of Heaven” (tien-ming). With increasing demoralization, what was a participatory authoritative order becomes impositional and authoritarian.
The order discernible in the constitution of Han dynasty China is precisely that captured in the Confucian concept of ritually ordered community, where ritual, defined at the center by the authority of the tradition, not only demands personalization and participation but reflects the quality of its specific participants. There is an immediate analogy between an official’s participation in an order defined by the court and a person’s performance of those roles and rituals that define the tradition.
To this point we have been speaking about the notion of order and harmony in such a manner as to suppress suggestions of intellectual differences and conflicts. This is in keeping with the Chinese disposition to tell a story of the harmony rather than of the conflict of ideas.
It is generally recognized that Confucian orthodoxy, which came to dominance in the Han dynasty, is a river that over time was fed by three powerful streams: Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. A typical Chinese, even into the modern period, might be heard to say, “With respect to family and society, I am Confucian; with respect to Nature I am Taoist; and with respect to things beyond the world of Nature and society, I am Buddhist.”23 The stress here is on the harmony of the three traditions. There is no suggestion that one separates family from nature or from “things apart from nature.” Though Confucianism remains dominant, the three sensibilities provide distinct foci in accordance with which one can construe one’s life.
The distinguished interpreter of the Chinese tradition Wing-tsit Chan refers to the story of Chinese philosophy as “an intellectual symphony in three movements.”24 In the first movement the diverse themes introduced by the various schools were harmonized by Confucianism. In the second movement, from the Han synthesis until approximately the tenth century C.E., strong Buddhist chords provided counterpoint to the Confucian themes. The third movement, from the eleventh century to the modern period, again resolved all thematic tensions in what has come to be called Neo-Confucianism. Throughout these three movements it was the Confucian themes that provided the harmonic unity.
Granted the disposition on the part of the Chinese to promote a harmonious narrative of China’s cultural development, a closer look at the actual events yields a slightly greater sense of conflict. In the approximately one hundred years between the death of Confucius and the birth of Mencius, a complex variety of philosophical schools developed. In the Taoist work the Chuang Tzu, this growth in diversity is referred to as the period of the “Hundred Schools.” Far from seeing in this a healthy pluralism of opinion, Mencius, a representative of the Confucian tradition, described this phenomenon in the most negative of terms: “Sage-kings have failed to arise. The feudal lords do whatever they want and scholars who are not employed in government are quite ready to pronounce on affairs.”25 This sort of contentiousness is thought to be destructive of the Confucian order.
The period of the conflicting schools of thinking began when Mo Tzu, the founder of Mohism, called Confucian ideas into question. Mohist thinking, generally associated with a kind of utilitarianism, constituted a significant challenge to the ritually grounded traditionalism of Confucius. Legalism, associated with Han Fei Tzu (ca. 280–233 B.C.E.), differed from both Confucianism and Mohism by beginning its social thinking not with the people but with the laws and sanctions presumed to be devices necessary to bring order to the people. With the Legalists came at least the adumbration of a theory of rational political order. During the succeeding centuries, until about 200 B.C.E., a plethora of alternative schools emerged, and court-sponsored academies were established in different parts of the empire.
In the beginning, the competing schools engaged primarily in debates about doctrine. Conservative Confucians who sought the meaning of life by appeal to family and social obligations were opposed by those Taoists who sought a hermit’s retreat from the social world.26 There were fierce debates among the Confucians, Taoists, and Legalists (among many others) concerning the original goodness or evil of human nature. Soon, however, issues became procedural and logical rather than substantive. Thinkers began to argue about the meaning of argument itself. Mohism and the School of Names developed complex paradigms of logical thinking and puzzled over the linguistic paradoxes that advertise the limits of language. Thus, as was the case in the history of early Greek thinking, rationalism developed in China primarily as a means of adjudicating doctrinal conflict.
But interest in logic and rationality, along with the analytical and dialectical modes of discourse attendant upon these, very soon faded into the background of Chinese intellectual culture. China emerged as a culture grounded in the immanent aesthetic order of a ritually grounded society that precludes rational conflict. Attendant upon this emergence was the rapid decline in the importance of the Mohists, the Legalists, the School of Names, and so forth, and the rise of Confucian orthodoxy.
That this orthodoxy did not lead to the eradication of other important strains, principally those associated with the Buddhists and Taoists, is testimony to the flexibility of a ritually based society.
The Buddhist influence is most obvious in the magnificent landscape paintings of the Sung dynasty (960–1279 C.E.), and the spare, imagistic poetry produced during that same period. With respect to the landscapes, the only avenue of understanding is to envision oneself moving through the landscape to enjoy the world as construed from perspectives within the painting. And the economy of the poetry requires a proportionate interpretive response. Likewise, Taoist contributions such as herbal medicines and acupuncture have helped to form the character of what we know as “Chineseness.” Nonetheless, by the beginning of the first century B.C.E. Confucianism had become the permanent victor over all contending forces—in large measure because of its ability to accommodate within a ritually grounded society the most profound elements of Taoism and Buddhism, as well as many other lesser movements and sensibilities.
With the dominance of Confucian orthodoxy came a new method of adjudicating doctrinal conflict. Beginning in the early Han, commentaries on Confucian texts would be produced and would vie for proximity to the center defined by the canon. The authors of these commentaries were almost never interested in overthrowing the traditional authority in favor of their own ideas, but they sought to enrich the authority of the classic by claiming to better understand its original meaning.
Further, since tradition was the sole ready resource for principles and doctrines, critics of a particular doctrine depended as much as did proponents on a shared cultural repository. This is evidenced in the frequent canonical allusions employed to focus one’s criticisms. The appeal to canonical authority is again a way of reinforcing a sense of shared community, and stands in sharp contrast to dialectical arguments that depend on appeal to “canons” of reason or logic.
In our tradition we find it possible to disagree with particular opinions while remaining respectful of the person holding those opinions. But in the Chinese tradition, there is not a discernible distance between the belief or opinion and the person. Good people write good books; good rulers promulgate good policies. One would not expect to hear from a Chinese scholar anything like Aristotle’s statement “I love my teacher, Plato, but I love truth more.” Such a declaration would have been seen as indulgence in the sort of contentiousness and self-assertiveness that threatens social harmony.
Characteristic of scholarly dispute after the emergence of Han orthodoxy is a fundamental commitment to mutual accommodation.27 There is a general distaste for contentiousness and an active cultivation of the art of accommodation. In the exercise of criticism, the ritual basis of order comes into play because rituals serve as patterns of deference that accommodate and harmonize differences in desires, beliefs, and actions.
Criticism assumes a context of common concern and becomes thereby a cooperative exercise among responsible participants that proceeds to search for alternatives on which all can agree. One important constraint on self-assertiveness, as well as an encouragement to consensual resolution, is that the critic himself is always implicated in the existing context, and hence any criticism of it is ultimately self-referential. Contentiousness, by contrast, betrays a concern for personal advantage. Such self-assertion threatens to disrupt rather than reinforce or improve the harmony of the existing context. The proper goal of criticism in China, whether it be scholarly or social and political, is the strengthening of communal harmony.
The attempt to discern how, in China, things hang together in the most general sense has led us to a number of insights which, properly employed, can help us avoid some of the more serious stereotypes that threaten to besot our thinking about China. Paradoxically, the stereotypes we must avoid are not those based on a confused sense of Chinese inscrutability. Rather, the most damaging stereotypes are those which make us believe that, when all is said and done, being human has to mean being pretty much as we are.
We in the scientific, liberal democratic West must recognize that our tendencies toward universalism and the acceptance of objective ideas and values merely advertise the content of our own cultural sensibility. The West has masked its ethnocentrism by the claim that its self-understanding has universal applicability. One paradoxical element of our peculiar form of ethnocentricity is the rejection of ethnocentrism. But we do not escape provincialism simply because we make naive claims to objectivity and universality.
The comparison of Chinese and Western cultures is, therefore, the comparison of two sets of ethnocentric beliefs. Most of us who occupy a privileged place in a Western democracy consider ourselves autonomous individuals, possessing natural rights, with a faith in our ability to search out the truth of things for ourselves, generally confident that reason and goodwill can solve most of our problems. We are respectful of governmental authority when it serves to nurture freedom and autonomy for its citizens, but are perfectly capable of becoming an adversary of the government if it threatens those same values. We identify ourselves with ideas, values, and principles that we believe are reasonable and employ our religious, scientific, or political institutions as instruments for the implementation of those ideas and values. We deplore censorship and believe that free and open enquiry will result in consensus upon what is true about the needs and desires of the majority of human beings.
Above all, we believe in the ideals that emerged from the French Revolution and have found their specific instantiation in documents such as the American Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. These ideals we hold to be the guarantees of our individual autonomy, our liberal democracy, and our science and technology—all of which we believe to be the necessary vehicles of progress for all countries and peoples around the world.
Among our intellectual elites there is doubtless a great deal less naive assent to these beliefs, but the trust in objectivity lingers. The visions of natural and social scientists, and of philosophers too, still reflect the belief that there is an objective order to things and that the discovery of this order requires the responsible application of the methods of logic and science.28 This faith extends for many of us into the idea that human beings have objective natures, identifiable characteristics that make us essentially the same from one society or culture to another.
Many might believe that while it is important to reckon with the sort of differences discussed in this essay if our aim is to understand the ideas and institutions of classical China, we need not take these differences too seriously when approaching the modern period. Surely, such individuals believe, the events of the twentieth century have radically changed the character of China. The pressures of the West have been felt from without and internal revolution experienced from within. Must not China begin to adopt the principles of Western democracy and science?
These beliefs are admixtures of wishful thinking and of serious misunderstandings of contemporary China. Such is the power of China’s tradition that the longstanding meaning of “Chineseness” remains intact. If asked whether we ought still to refer to the Chinese as people of the Han, we must answer “yes.”
The relatively slight impact of Marxism on contemporary China reveals the persistence of the Chinese tradition. When the leadership of China decided to import Marxism, it solicited advice from Russia, which had just gone through its Communist revolution. Russian advisers, appalled by the absence of a proletarian class in China, in effect told the Chinese to call on them again when they had developed a proletariat! Undaunted by the absence of the “essential conditions” for the success of Marxism, Mao Tse-tung adopted that ideology as “a Western heresy with which to combat the West.” By idealizing those elements of Marxism which condemned the disharmonious effects of competition and private property, he actually increased the weight of basic Confucian values. And, however much the nuclear family was affected by Marxist ideas, the family as a model of the larger society, and the paternalistic character of rule that follows from this model, remained intact. There are all too many illustrations of this sort that demonstrate the almost incidental character of Marxism as a force for change in contemporary China.
There is little evidence to suggest that contemporary China has abandoned any significant elements of its Confucian orthodoxy. The leadership of contemporary China maintains the same characteristics that have dominated since the Han dynasty—the understanding of the nation as a “family,” the filial respect for the ruler as “father,” and the consequent sense of rule as a personal exercise.29
With respect to the personal character of rule, it continues to be the case in China that to object to the policies that articulate the existing order is in fact to condemn the ruler’s person.
In Mao’s China political deviance had been a treasonous crime far more serious than theft or homicide. It was not possible to separate policy from patriotism and tolerate a loyal opposition. Today the old Confucian tenets seem imbedded in the CCP system: that one rules by virtue of wisdom and rectitude; that theory and practice are a unity, policies a form of conduct manifesting one’s character, and attacks on policy therefore attacks on the ruling power.30
The Chinese have remained people of the Han. Contemporary China is still a ritually constituted society without grounding in the objective principles associated with reason or natural law, its order defined by the exemplars of its tradition. The members of the society are themselves possessed of their “humanity” not as a gift from God or as a common genetic inheritance, but as created by ritual enactment. The Chinese have no inalienable rights. Citizens have been deemed to possess only those rights that are granted by China’s various constitutions.
Contrary to the ethnocentricity of the West, which insists on the universality of certain values and principles, Chinese ethnocentrism is based on the centrality of a culture defined by racial and linguistic identity. Thus, ethnic pluralism is still a threat to social harmony. Foreigners as foreigners can be absorbed into the society only with extreme difficulty. China remains a culture grounded in filiality and the model of the family that cultivates filial dependency. Individualism is still a signal of selfishness and license. The Chinese have no means of cultivating what we would consider to be a healthy suspicion of governmental power without at the same time challenging the personal character of the ruler. Technology, the idol of the Western world, is a serious threat to China. As a rational means of organizing social and economic interactions, technology undermines the ritual grounding of interpersonal relationships. Further, the existence of “specialists,” “experts,” and “professionals” subverts the belief in the omnicompetence and sagely wisdom of those who guide society. It is still the case in China that not only saying but thinking as well is a kind of “doing.” The inhibition of free speech is not a modern invention of the Chinese Communists but a persistent feature of a Confucian society in which ideas are always dispositions to act.
We began this essay with a reference to the relatively recent incident at Tiananmen Square, suggesting that this event might be easily misunderstood if we did not take into account the real differences that exist between our own and the Chinese perspectives. Were we to yield for a moment our ethnocentric beliefs and look at contemporary China through Chinese eyes, we would see Tiananmen as symbolic of a struggle the causes of which have little to do with a desire for individual autonomy or liberal democracy. Indeed, when a young student at Tiananmen—asked for his understanding of democracy—said, “I don’t know what democracy is, but we need more of it,” he advertised the general level of understanding of democratic institutions in China.
The Chinese expression (min-chu chu-yi) that translates our word democracy refers, for most Chinese, to the classical Confucian tenet “taking the people as the root of government” (min-pen), where “people” must mean an interdependent family rather than a society of free, self-determining individuals. “Government of, by, and for the people” can never mean the same thing for the Chinese as for the citizens of a Western democracy.31
Asking the Chinese to recognize that they have inalienable rights is to ask them to become, per impossibile, beings with essences or natures. Wishing for increased autonomy and freedom for the Chinese people, along with access to the technologies and economic institutions that make for the Western standard of living, is to condemn the Chinese order to dissolution. And, after the deluge, there is little hope that any alternative order could be put in its place.
There is good reason to believe that the Chinese intellectual, social, and political orders are in crisis. Perhaps the rulers no longer occupy the center; perhaps they have lost the “Mandate of Heaven.” Whether China will continue to hang together in the traditional manner is a very real question. But it does seem clear that only if China chooses (or is forced by circumstances beyond its control to choose) to emulate the order of Western societies as a means of entering the “modern world” will the Chinese lose their claim to call themselves “the people of the Han.”
Yutang, Lin, The Importance of Living (New York: John Day, 1937), p. 46.
See the introduction to D. E. Mungello’s Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985) for a discussion of the interest in China on the part of the Jesuit missionaries and other intellectuals.
F. Hegel, Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956 repr.), pp. 111–12.
This passage from Borges was the inspiration for Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (a translation of Les Mots et Les Choses) (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), Preface.
The Texts of Taoism, trans. James Legge (New York: Dover, 1962), Vol. 1, pp. 266–67.
See A. C. Graham’s “Being in Western Philosophy Compared with Shih/Fei and YulWu in Chinese Philosophy” in Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature (Singapore: Institute of East Asian Philosophies, 1986), pp. 322–59, and “The Relation of Chinese Thought to Chinese Language,” Appendix 2, Disputers of the Tao (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court Press, 1989), pp. 408–12.
Paul Cohen in his Discovering History in China: American Historical Writings on the Recent Chinese Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) concerns himself with the currency of just such an image of China in the most influential historical sources that define the intellectual understanding of China and its culture in the West.
We have pursued the reasons for these differing choices in our Anticipating China: The Circle and the Square, (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995). One of the things we discuss in that work is how leading developments in contemporary Anglo-European philosophy—those associated with such thinkers as Foucault, Derrida, and the American pragmatist Richard Rorty—express a critique of the Western notion of rational order and a movement in the direction of the aesthetic understanding resident in our tradition.
Analects 15/29.
An Lo-che is, in fact, the Chinese name of one of the authors of this chapter [Roger T. Ames].
The Chinese language is organic, and a cluster of cognate terms expresses this sense of community: wheel (lun), relationship (lun*), discourse (lun**), and ripple (lun***).
Yang Yu-wei is our Taiwan teacher and surrogate “father,” and has taught our best students from his grotto in Taipei.
This illustration is from John Fairbank’s review of John Lubot’s “Liberalism in an Illiberal Age” in China Quarterly 96 (December 1983): 739.
See Alvin Gouldner’s The Hellenic World: A Sociological Analysis (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), p. 104ff, for a discussion of the development of the Greek notion of the self.
This examination system persisted in China with relatively little change for 2,000 years. It was abolished only in 1905.
Mencius 7A/4 and 7A/1.
A rather complete table of one variation of these correspondences is contained in Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954): 262–63.
For a discussion of the concentric structure of Chinese society from which Han social organization emerged, see Nishijima Sadao, “The Economic and Social History of Former Han” in The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 1, The Ch’in and Han Empires 221 B.C.–A.D. 220 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Analects 2/3.
Analects 3/5.
Denis Twitchett and Michael Loewe, eds., The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 1, The Ch’in and Han Empires 221 B.C.–A.D. 220 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Ibid., pp. 379–80.
On visiting a temple in Taipei some years ago, we received in reply to the question “What kind of temple is this?” the answer “It is the temple of this place.” Persisting, we asked, “Is it Taoist, Buddhist, or Confucian?” The reply was “It is our neighborhood temple.” And actually, the practices in the temple suggested the influences of all three sensibilities.
See Chan’s “The Story of Chinese Philosophy” in The Chinese Mind, ed. Charles Moore (Honolulu: East-West Center Press, 1967), pp. 31–76.
Mencius 3B/9.
Taoism is a complex movement in early China. There were certainly Taoists—some would argue that these were in the majority—who enjoined participation in the political order.
In his Ethical Argumentation: A Study in Hsün Tzu’s Moral Epistemology (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985), A. S. Cua provides a general analysis of the “style” of argumentative engagement in Han China. See especially pp. 6–12. In the following we shall be borrowing heavily from Cua.
As we mentioned in note 8, however, there are rapid changes in these beliefs—especially at the level of philosophic thinking. These changes could eventually lead to a somewhat greater sympathy with the Chinese sensibility. But we are still far from abandoning our sense of rational order. This is particularly so with respect to the belief in universal rights and a common human nature—the very ideas that the Chinese aesthetic understanding of order most directly challenges.
See John Fairbank, China Watch (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 83–94.
Ibid., p. 209.
See David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames, Thinking through Confucius (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), pp. 138–56, for a discussion of early Confucian attitudes toward “the people” (min). See also Roger T. Ames, The Art of Rulership (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983), pp. 157–64, for the history of the Confucian tenet “benefitting the people” (li-min).