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Adventures in Philosophy |
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by Fung Yu-Lan
China is now at a present that is not the natural growth of her past, but something forced upon her against her will. In the completely new situation that she has to face, she has been much bewildered. In order to make the situation more intelligible and to adapt to it more intelligently, she has to interpret sometimes the present in terms of the past and sometimes the past in terms of the present. In other words, she has to connect the new civilization that she has to face with the old that she already has and to make them not alien but intelligible to each other. Besides interpretation, there is also criticism. In interpreting the new civilization in terms of the old, or the old in terms of the new, she cannot help but to criticize sometimes the new in the light of the old, and sometimes the old in the light of the new. Thus the interpretation and criticism of civilizations is the natural product in China of the meeting of the West and the East and is what has interested the Chinese mind and has constituted the main current of Chinese thought during the last fifty years. It may be noticed that the interpretation and criticism of the civilizations new and old, within the last fifty years, differ in different periods according to the degree of the knowledge or of the ignorance of the time regarding the new civilization that comes from outside. Generally speaking there have been three periods. The first period is marked with the ill-fated political reformation with the leadership of Kan Yu-wei under the Emperor Kuang-su in 1898. Kan Yu-wei was a scholar of one of the Confucianist schools, known as the Kung Yang school. According to this school, Confucius was a teacher with divine personality. He devised a scheme that would cover all stages of human progress. There are mainly three stages. The first is the stage of disorder; the second, the state of progressive peace; and the third, the stage of great peace. In the state of disorder, every one is for one's own country. In the stage of progressive peace, all the civilized countries are united in one. In the stage of great peace, all men are civilized and humanity is united in one harmonious whole. Confucius knew beforehand all these that are to come. He devised accordingly three systems of social organization. According to Kan Yu-wei, the communication between the East and the West and the political and social reformations in Europe and America show that men are progressing from the stage of disorder to the higher stage, the stage of progressive peace. Most, if not all, of the political and social institutions of the West are already implied in the teaching of Confucius. Kan Yu-wei was the leader of the New Movement at his time. But in his opinion, what he was doing was not the adoption of the new civilization of the West, but rather the realization of the old teaching of Confucius. He wrote many Commentaries to the Confucian classics, reading into them his new ideas. Besides these he also wrote a book entitled The Book on The Great Unity, in which he gave a concrete picture of the utopia that will become a fact in the third stage of human progress according to the Confucianist scheme. Although the nature of this book is so bold and revolutionary that it will startle even most of the utopian writers, Kan Yu-wei himself was not an utopian. He insisted that the program he set forth in his book cannot be put into practice except in the highest stage of human civilization, the last stage of human progress. In his practical political program he insisted to have a constitutional monarchy. One of the colleagues of Kan Yu-wei in the New Movement of that time was Tan Tse-tung, who was a more philosophical thinker. He wrote a book entitled On Benevolence in which he also taught the Confucianist teaching of the three stages of human progress. According to him although Confucius set forth the general scheme of the three stages, most of the teaching of Confucius was for the stage of disorder. It is the reason why Confucius was often misunderstood as the champion of traditional institutions and conventional morality. The Christian teaching of universal love and the equality of men before God is quite near the Confucian teaching for the stage of progressive peace. The teaching that is near the Confucian teaching for the last stage of human progress is Buddhism which goes beyond all human distinctions and conventional morality. The main spirit of this time is that the leaders were not antagonistic to the new civilization that came from the West, nor did they lack appreciation of its value. But they appreciated its value only in so far as it fits in the imaginary Confucian scheme. They interpreted the new in terms of, and criticized it in the light of, the old. It is to be noticed that the philosophical justification of the Revolution of 1911 with the result of the establishment of the Republic was mainly taken from Chinese philosophy. The saying of Mencius that "the people is first important, the country the second, the sovereign unimportant" was much quoted and interpreted. The teaching of the European revolutionary writers such as Rousseau also played its role, but people often thought that they are right because they agree with Mencius. The second period is marked with the New Culture Movement which reached its climax in 1919. In this period the spirit of the time is criticism of the old in the light of the new. Chen Tu-siu and Hui Shih were the leaders of the criticisms. The latter philosopher wrote An Outline of the History of Chinese Philosophy, of which only the first part was published. It is in fact a criticism of Chinese philosophy rather than a history of it. The two most influential schools of Chinese philosophy, Confucianism and Taoism, were much criticized and questioned from a utilitarian and pragmatic point of view. He is for individual liberty and development and therefore he found that Confucianism is wrong in the teaching of subordination of the individual to his sovereign and his father, to his state and his family. He is for the spirit of struggle and conquering nature and therefore he found that Taoism is wrong in the teaching of enjoying nature. In reading his book one cannot but feel that in his opinion the whole Chinese civilization is entirely on the wrong track. In reaction there was a defender of the old civilization. Soon after the publication of Hui Shih's History, another philosopher, Lu Wang, published another book entitled The Civilizations of the East and the West and their Philosophies. In this book Liang Shu-ming maintained that every civilization represents a way of living. There are mainly three ways of living: the way of aiming at the satisfaction of desires, that at the limitation of desires and that at the negation of desires. If we choose the first way of living, we have the European civilization; if the second, the Chinese civilization; if the third, the Indian civilization. These three civilizations should represent three stages of human progress. Men should at first try their best to know and to conquer nature. After having secured sufficient ground for their place in nature, they should limit their desires and know how to be content. But there are certain inner contradictions in life that can not be settled within life. Therefore the last resort of humanity is the way of negating desires, negating life. The Chinese and the Indians are wrong not in the fact that they produced civilizations that seem to be useless. Their civilizations are of the first order and in them there are some things that humanity is bound to adopt. The Chinese and the Indians are wrong in the fact that they adopted the second and the third ways of living without living through the first. They are on the right track but at the wrong time. Thus the defender of the East also thought there must be something wrong in it. His book therefore is also an expression of the spirit of his time. The third period is marked with the Nationalist Movement of 1926 with the result of the establishment of the National Government. This movement was originally undertaken with the combined force of the Nationalists and the Communists. Sun Yat-sen, the leader of the Revolution of 1911 and of this movement, held the communistic society as the highest social ideal. But he was not a communist in that he was against the theory of class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat. He thought that the ideal society should be the product of love, not that of hatred. The Nationalists and the Communists soon split. With this movement the attitude of the Chinese towards the new civilization of the West takes a new turn. The new civilization of the West as represented in its political and economical organizations, once considered as the very perfection of human institutions, is now to be considered as but one stage of human progress. History is not closed; it is in the making. And what is now considered as the final goal that history is achieving, the peace of the world and the unity of man, looks more congenial to the old East than to the modern West. In fact, if we take the Marxian theory of human progress without its economical explanation of it, we see that between it and the teaching of the Kung Yang school as represented by Kan Yu-wei there is some similarity. Indeed Tan Tse-tung, in his book On Benevolence, knowing nothing about either Hegel or Marx, also pointed out what the Marxists may call the dialectical nature of human progress. He pointed out that there is some similarity between the future ideal society and the original primitive ones. But when we attain to the ideal, we are not returning to the primitive, we advance. Is the spirit of this third period the same as that of the first? No, while the intellectual leaders of the first period were interested primarily in interpreting the new in terms of the old, we are now also interested in interpreting the old in terms of the new. While the intellectual leaders of the second period were interested in pointing out the difference between the East and the West, we are now interested in seeing what is common to them. We hold that if there is any difference between the East and the West, it is the product of different circumstances. In different circumstances men have different responses. If we see the response with the circumstances that produce it, we may probably say with Hegel that what is actual is also reasonable. Thus we are not interested now in criticizing one civilization in the light of the other, as the intellectual leaders of the first and the second periods did, but in illustrating the one with the other so that they may both be better understood. We are now interested in the mutual interpretation of the East and the West rather than their mutual criticism. They are seen to be the illustrations of the same tendency of human progress and the expressions of the same principle of human nature. Thus the East and the West are not only connected, they are united. The same spirit is also seen in the work in technical philosophy. The Chinese and European philosophical ideas are compared and studied not with any intention of judging which is necessarily right and which is necessarily wrong, but simply with the interest of finding what the one is in terms of the other. It is expected that before long we will see that the European philosophical ideas will be supplemented with the Chinese intuition and experience, and the Chinese philosophical ideas will be clarified by the European logic and clear thinking. These are what I consider to be the characteristics of the spirit of time in the three periods within the last fifty years in Chinese history. If we are to apply the Hegelian dialectic, we may say that the first period is the thesis, the second the antithesis, and the third the synthesis.
Excerpted from Proceedings of the Eighth International Congress of Philosophy, 1934. |
Selected Philosophical Writings of Fung Yu-lan
A Short History of Chinese Philosophy
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