Confucian China and its Modern Fate

Volume One: The Problem of Intellectual Continuity

Joseph R. Levenson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136572524
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Asia

First published in 1958These volumes analyze modern Chinese history and its inner process, from the pre-western plateau of Confucianism to the communist triumph, in the context of many themes: science, art, philosophy, religion and economic, political, and social change. Volume One includes:
· The critique of Idealism
· Science and Ch'ing empiricism
· The Ming style, in society and art
· Confucianism and the end of the Taoist connection
· Eclecticism in the area of native Chinese choices
· T'i and Yung
· The Chin-Wen School and the classical sanction
· The modern Ku-Wen opposition to Chin-Wen reformism
· The role of nationalism
· Communism
· Western powers and Chinese revolutions
· Language change and the problem of continuity

Part One

THE TONE OF
EARLY-MODERN CHINESE
INTELLECTUAL CULTURE

CHAPTER I

The Abortiveness of Empiricism in Early Ch’ing Thought

IN Sung and Ming intellectual life, idealist philosophies came to the fore. Later, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to a number of Chinese thinkers, that predominance of idealism seemed a disaster, and they formally disavowed it. What does the existence of these early materialists mean? Does it indicate that the seemingly stable, traditionalistic Chinese society was likely to develop under its own power, without a catalytic intrustion of Western industrialism, into a society with a scientific temper?

1. THE CRITIQUE OF IDEALISM

In the natural world described in the neo-Confucian philosophy of Chu Hsi (1130–1200), a thing exists as a complex of li and ch’i, ideal form and mutable matter. To ch’i, which is perceptible, li is the regulative principle; to li, which is intelligible, ch’i is the medium in which it manifests itself. Li is the universal which the intellect apprehends and the senses never reach, and the metaphysical order is from universal to particular, from Being to individual things.

Already in the Sung and Ming periods, there were thinkers who saw grave limitations in Chu Hsi’s li-hsüeh. But the criticism came from the far side of idealism, from the subjective-idealist hsin-hsüeh of Lu Hsiang-shan (1139–93) and Wang Yang-ming (1472–1529). Chu Hsi was an idealist in his search for an unmoving reality behind phenomena, but in his view, at least, reality had an objective existence, outside the mind which sought to apprehend it. For the Lu-Wang school, however, mind itself was the world of truth, and intuition the key to it. According to li-hsüeh neo-Confucianism, man’s error was his failure to press on to absolutes (and finally to the Absolute, the li of li, the t’ai-chi) through phantasms of sense-experience. According to hsin-hsüeh neo- Confucianism, man’s error was his very consciousness of these phantasms, or of the illusory distinction between subject and object which is the first condition of any sense- experience at all.¹

In the seventeenth century, voices began to be raised against both these speculative tendencies to disparage the sensible as compared to a hypothetical transcendent. ‘Between heaven and earth’, wrote Huang Tsung-hsi (1610–95), ‘there is only ch’i (matter), there is not li (form, idea, “law”). The names li and ch’i are devised by man.... One really existing thing (wu) has two names, not two really existing things one essence.’ Thus, Huang considers li to be merely ming, or name, not shih, or actual fact.² Huang’s contemporary, Wang Fu-chih (1619-92), also emphasized the primacy of the tangible, concrete fact over the abstract, generic classification. Ming derives from shih, he said,³ name from fact, i.e. the general formal term from particular cognizable examples. And Li Kung (1659-1733), similarly, in a move to vindicate the earthy, observable particular thing against the idealists’ attitude of rarefied concern with higher, invisible realms, declared, ‘It is said in the Shih-[ching]: “there are things, and there are rules for them”; apart from things, where is li?’ And he charged the li-hsüeh philosophers with the error of seeking li apart from actual things.⁴

It was in such a fashion that Ch’ing critics of Sung idealism defended the metaphysical priority of the world of sense- perception. They shored up their materialistic position by asserting also that ch’i was not morally second to li, as their Sung adversaries would have it. Desire, the subjective correlative of ch’i, or matter, is good, said Wang Fu-chih, and Yen Yüan (1635–1704), and Tai Chen (1724–77). Only Buddhism, said Wang, not genuine Confucianism, separates Heaven’s Law from human desire.⁵ It is Buddhist or Taoist (and therefore wrong), said Yen, to teach that man is endowed with evil ch’i, as the allegedly Confucian Sung philosophers taught; that was what Buddha meant when he called the ears and eyes and mouth and nose ‘six villains’.⁶ And Tai agreed, condemning as Buddhist or Taoist the neo-Confucianist Chou Tun-i (1017–73), for preaching the need to annihilate physical desire.⁷

If there were men like these who attacked the li-hsüeh from a materialistic standpoint, it must, of course, follow that the hsin-hsüeh, an even more uncompromising idealism than the other neo-Confucianism, should also be attacked. Dualistic philosophers who emphasized the importance of objective matter—either explicitly, by denying the reality of forms, or implicitly, by defending subjective desire (whose object is something sensible)—naturally put under their ban Wang Yang-ming’s monistic emphasis on mind and intuition. According to Wang Fu-chih, the subjective-idealist hsin- hsüeh was ‘outside, Confucian; inside, Taoist’,⁸ or ‘yang, Confucian; yin, Buddhist’.⁹ Huang Tsung-hsi, the foe of mysticism and ‘airy vagueness’, found the fatal stain of Zen on Lu and Wang.¹⁰ Ku Yen-wu (1613–82) concurred,¹¹ and besides, in order to cite an example of one man’s changing the course of history, he arraigned Wang Yang-ming for causing, almost single-handed, the decline and fall of the Ming empire.¹²

What was the prescription of these opponents of idealism for stopping the rot? Tao and te, the Way and Virtue, are inseparable from practicality, said Huang Tsung-hsi.¹³ Recording empty words is not the equivalent of observing action, said Ku Yen-wu,¹⁴ and he said, too, that the superior man studies in order to ‘assist the world’.¹⁵ The learning of the ancients was in practical matters, said Tai Chen.¹⁶ Chinese thinkers, they all meant, should abandon world- denying quietism, and get away from abstractions and down to things.

2. SCIENCE AND CH’ING EMPIRICISM: THEIR DEGREE OF COINCIDENCE

How relevant to science are these injunctions to look without and not within, and to dwell on things and not on essences? They are relevant, we may say, in the sense that they are compatible with the development of modern science as the issue of a struggle against an anti-empirical, or rationalistic, metaphysics. The scientist must assume, like the Ch’ing denouncers of the hsin-hsüeh, that the material world is not a state of mind. And the scientist also assumes, like the Ch’ing critics of Chu Hsi’s li-hsüeh, that the way to begin to acquire useful knowledge is to characterize material instances instead of groping for ethereal Ideas. For the question as to the essence of things (in neo-Confucian terms, the question of li) can produce nothing but tautological answers; ‘Burrow down and still further down,’ it has been said, ‘and God will still be only godly, man only human, and the world only worldly.’¹⁷ But a scientific statement has a true predicate. It begins, as the anti-li-hsüeh Ch’ing materialists would begin, with the thing, and then predicates something as a quality, a property, or an attribute of the thing.

Science, it is true, does not end with this predication of qualities to individual things. Indeed, it deals as seriously as philosophical idealism with the type, and the predicate which it considers meaningful, as a contribution to logical understanding, is the one which affirms of the single instance what is true of all its kind. But the scientist’s type is his own construction, a generalization which he makes from a detailed experience of the behaviour of individual things; as a scientist, an inductive empiricist, he cannot explain that behaviour by the generalization. As Locke put it, species and genera are the ‘workmanship of the understanding’, not the mind’s discovery.¹⁸

Kant, in his Critique of Judgment, has made perhaps the clearest distinction between Platonic or neo-Confucian idealism and the empirical theory of their respective early modern opponents. The intellectus archetypus, he says, is a form of reason ‘which being, not like ours, discursive, but intuitive, proceeds from the synthetic universal (the intuition of the whole as such) to the particular, that is, from the whole to the parts’. Such a reason, according to Kant, lies outside human possibilities. The reason peculiar to man is the intellectus ectypus, which is restricted to taking in through the senses the single details of the world as such and constructing pictures of their totalities, but these pictures have only a hypothetical character and claim no reality for themselves. Our understanding has this peculiarity as concerns the judgment, that in cognitive understanding the particular is not determined by the universal and therefore cannot be derived from it.’¹⁹

By Kant’s criterion, then, of a reason possible to man, a reason that can win for man some knowledge of nature, Huang Tsung-hsi’s statement that li is ‘name, not fact’, Li Kung’s sceptical question, ‘apart from things, where is li?’—taken utterly seriously—are subsumed in any genuine expression of the scientific spirit.

3. SCIENCE AND CH’ING EMPIRICISM: THEIR NON-IDENTITY

But that is the most we can say. The empirical attitudes of these early Ch’ing thinkers, while in harmony with the scientific critique of idealism, are neither scientific themselves nor necessarily conducive to the birth of science. In European history, divergence from idealism could take the form of the pre-scientific nominalism of Peter Abelard (1079–1142) as well as the form of Francis Bacon’s (1561–1626) inductive empirical science; our Chinese thinkers seem, on the whole, more like Abelard than like Bacon.

Abelard’s nominalism (or rather, his so-called ‘conceptualism’, a somewhat disguised version of his teacher’s, Roscelin’s, nominalism) denied the objective existence of universals. Rejecting the extreme Augustinian ‘realism’, which regarded the individual material thing as simply the shadow of an eternal idea, he held that universals were created by the mind by means of abstraction, and that the true reality was the object and not the idea, not the ‘name’.²⁰ Wang Fu-chih and his Chinese colleagues said as much.

Bacon, however, said more. He went beyond simply ascribing ultimate reality to the world of phenomena instead of to a hypothetical realm of pure Being. He meant not merely to define the real world but to encroach upon it. It was not enough for him to banish abstractions, which can only be contemplated, in favour of tangibles, which can be observed, for observation was not enough. One had to observe with a method and a purpose. Bacon’s method was induction from experimentally verified ‘irreducible and stubborn facts’, his purpose the eliciting of general laws for the organization of facts into science.²¹

It has already been suggested that the Ch’ing empiricists were not so ambitious. Let there be practical action in the real phenomenal world—that was the sum of their challenge to contemplative idealists, and their practical ethic implied for them a simple epistemology, a common-sense opinion that knowledge comes to the mind when the mind is put in compresence with facts. But according to Bacon (and also, Descartes), what makes a natural scientist is not his knowledge of facts about nature but his ability to ask questions about nature; knowledge comes only by answering questions, and these must be the right questions, asked in the right order.²²

Our Chinese critics of idealism could agree with Bacon that ‘the wit and mind of man, if it work upon matter ... worketh according to the stuff and is limited thereby; but if it work upon itself, as the spider worketh his web, then it is endless and brings forth indeed cobwebs of learning ... of no substance or profit’. They might say, too, with Bacon, that their method was ‘to dwell among things soberly ... But although they might pride themselves, like Ku Yen-wu, on looking around them and ‘testing books with facts’, they rarely asked questions systematically which might make them see the essential relevance of some orders of facts to others, they never aspired, as Bacon did, ‘to establish for ever a true and legitimate union between the experimental and rational faculty’.²³ Though he might go as far as the Renaissance scientist in deprecating search for the universal, eternal form of particular things, the empirically-minded Ch’ing Confucianist had a temper predominantly nominalist, un-embarrassing to scientific spirit, but by no means its equivalent nor its guaranteed precursor.²⁴

4. PROTEST AND STABILITY: THE REMINISCENCE OF AN EARLIER AFFIRMATION

It appears, then, that the early Ch’ing empiricists need not be seen as budding scientists. This conclusion—that their thought was not necessarily a sign of any indigenous Chinese trend towards the establishment of science in its modern intellectual pre-eminence—suggests a positive corollary. We must acknowledge that these philosophers were genuinely critical of their prestige-laden Sung and Ming predecessors, critical enough so that some historians have delighted to call them scientific. But was the dissidence perhaps within the world of Chinese tradition, and witness to its stability, not a sign of its transformation irrespective of the West?

Bacon expressed his distrust of traditional authority and his faith in science in these words: ‘He that would begin in certainties shall end in doubts; but if he be content to begin with doubts and have patience a while he shall end in certainties.’²⁵ The Ch’ing empiricists expressed doubts of a sort, but they began in certainty, the traditional Chinese certainty that modern opinion, if legitimate, conforms to the truths in the classics of Confucian antiquity. There is more than rhetoric, there is serious acceptance of Confucian authority, in the reams of Ch’ing denunciation of the earlier li-hsüeh and hsin-hsüeh Confucianists (the lat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• China: History, Philosophy, Economics
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Contents
• Introduction: The Special and General Historical Quests
• Part One: The Tone of Early-Modern Chinese Intellectual Culture
• Part Two: Chinese Culture in Its Modern Metamorphoses: The Tensions of Intellectual Choice
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index