Ethical Politics and Modern Society

T. H. Green’s Practical Philosophy and Modern China

James Jia-Hau Liu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351379359
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Conservatism & Liberalism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Ethical Politics and Modern Society introduces and critically examines British idealist philosopher, Thomas Hill Green, his practical philosophy, and its reception in China between the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.

As a response to the modernity issue in Great Britain, Green's philosophy, in particular his ethical politics, anticipated a practical solution to the individual alienation issue in modern society. Witnessing the resemblance between Green's ethical politics and classical Chinese ethical and political thought, some Chinese scholars became inclined to take Green's thought as an intellectual approach to assimilate Western modernity. While Green and the Chinese scholars both intended to articulate an ethical conception of modern politics in response to the issue of modernity, their results were very different. In this book, James Jia-Hau Liu analyses why modern Chinese scholars introduced Green's philosophy to China and why the studies of Green's philosophy in China have since faded away. Modern Chinese scholars, such as Gao Yi-Han, Chin Yueh-Lin, Tang Jun-Yi, Chang Fo-Chuan, and Yin Hai-Guang, are explored in greater detail. The contradictory standings towards modernity between Green and Chinese scholars illustrate how to understand the difference forms of modernity that can be embodied therein.

Ethical Politics and Modern Society is a valuable resource to scholars of political philosophy, political theory, history of social and political thought, British idealism, and the work of Thomas Hill Green.

1 Individual Emancipation after the Enlightenment

Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting and beautifying, the first in importance surely is man himself. Supposing it were possible to get house built, corn grown, battles fought, causes tried, and even churches erected and prayers said, by machinery – by automatons in human form – it would be a considerable loss to exchange for these automatons even the men and women who at present in habit the more civilised parts of the world, and who assuredly are but starved specimens of what nature can and will produce.

(John Stuart Mill, On Liberty).

In the preceding chapter, I have given a preliminary account of what the present book is about, namely how Green’s practical philosophy anticipates a way of life in response to the existential crisis of individuals in modern society and how this anticipation is related to the modernisation of China. Starting from this chapter, I will discuss the details of these arguments, and first, the connection between Green’s practical philosophy and the perplexity of modernity should be addressed more and clearer.

As indicated earlier, Green was living in a transformative time of the Great Britain. During the nineteenth century, the structure and institutions of British society were being through a great change, from a primarily agricultural life style to an industrial one, and plenty of innovative knowledge and technologies had agitated public beliefs and the daily life of the common people. The impact of the social transformation thus had two dimensions, institutional and ideological. For instance, while the theory of evolution challenged the moral belief of the people, the increasing number of urban factories had changed people’s way of life. New technologies and new machines helped improve the production of the manufacturing industry, although it still required workers to manipulate these devices. What this demand drove to was the increasing number of people in towns and cities. Taking London as an example, its population had grown from around 1 million to 2.4 million people between 1811 and 1851 (Schwarz, 1992: 125–128).¹ Many immigrants and out-of-towners came to the city to find a job or a place to live. However, the rapidly growing number of population in London had made the city crowded and turbulent. Not mention people had to strive against each other in order to earn a place to live. All these moral and social disturbances made Green wonder, whether the innovative knowledge and technologies had led British people to enjoy a better life or not.

On 25 March 1867, Green attended a meeting of the Oxford Reform League at Oxford Town Hall, and he addressed to the audience that, ‘we must make up our minds to the opposition of the capitalists and the educated class’ (Green, 1997: 228). To Green, when the capitalists and the so-called educated class accumulate plenty of wealth for their own, the rest majority of the people in Britain, on the other hand, have no share at all. And what makes the life situation of the common people worse is that the oligarchs of wealth not only control the government and laws but also do their best to keep the mass of the people miserable and ignorant, in order to secure their supremacy in the country. Here, by addressing these issues, Green intended to urge the common people, especially the labour workers, to fight against the rich and the few who were in control of the government and manipulated laws to accumulate their private wealth rather than the wealth of the whole country. And the group of people who were taken by Green as the privileged few were, as indicated, the capitalists and the educated class, namely the persons who own new technologies and machines and the persons who should have wide knowledge of innovative theories. So, if the purpose for humans to invent or discover new technologies and theories in general is to improve human life, what the actual situation has shown to Green in the nineteenth-century Britain was the opposite. The invention of technologies and theories had not helped improve most people’s life but made it more difficult.

As to why these innovative technologies and theories and the new institutions established upon them had not made people’s life better, for Green, it involves two factors. First, while the technologies and theories are beneficial to human life, the political structure nonetheless is in favour of the privileged few so the new institutions cannot function well, in the sense that it distributes the social and economic benefits unfairly. And this is why Green would urge people to fight against the privileged few and to support the reformation of the government. Second, while the government is in the hands of the privileged few and this causes the unfair distribution of the benefits brought by the new technologies and theories, the view of the human condition presupposed in these theories and technologies is problematic, for the view prescribes an atomic image of the modern individual and dissociates the individual from its fellows and the surrounding meaningful circumstances, and this leads the society to be full of self-centred persons.

More specifically, behind the theories and technologies it is a thought considering the universe as composed of and moved by one fundamental and indivisible unit, and this unit, since fundamental and indivisible, is supposed to be the primary essence of the universe. In the ancient Greece, this essence was called ‘Ether’, and when this concept was introduced by René Descartes into physics in the seventeenth century, a mechanic view of the universe and a dualistic view of the human condition have then been envisaged and proposed. To Descartes, the universe as the world of matter and motion operates in accordance with the nature of the primary essence indeed, but the immaterial nature of the mind and its function on the other hand cannot be dissolved and explained by the law of the nature of the primary essence. For the world of matter and motion is a world of bodies ‘which can be confined in a certain place’ and can be perceived by sight, smell, taste, touch, or hearing, but the mind is a thing ‘which doubts, understands, [conceives], affirms, denies, wills, refuses, which also imagines and feels’ and cannot be perceived through the five senses (Descartes, 1993: 52, 54). In other words, there is a fundamental distinction between the body-matter and the mind.² Thence, this Descartes’s dualistic view of the human condition has been a challenge for philosophers. While the Cartesian mechanic and atomistic view of the universe has made profound influences on the development of natural science and industrial technology, John Locke, who was taken by Green as the father of the Enlightenment, was one of the philosophers who intended to meet the challenge. However, what Locke and his follower David Hume achieved in Green’s view was not a way out of Descartes’s dualism but a far more radical version of the dualistic view of the human condition. And this radical dualistic view of the human condition, which prioritises the idea of individual emancipation, is considered by Green as one of the causes for the loss of communal spirit and class conflicts in the nineteenth-century British society, withholding the innovative technologies and theories from improving human life.

Individual Emancipation as a Modern Issue

The Reformation and the Enlightenment

For a long time, the Enlightenment has been considered as a significant historical event leading a series of intellectual and social revolutions to transform the look of Europe. Kant, for instance, once commented that the Enlightenment is ‘man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity’, indicating that a European man has come to use his own understanding to know the world without the guidance of another (Kant, 1991: 54). To be specific, what Kant indicated here is that compared with the scholastic philosophers who used their understanding in accordance with the guidance of the Roman Catholic Church, the philosophers of the Enlightenment dared to discover, to criticise, and to be independent as responsible beings, and this makes the Enlightenment ‘a momentous event in the history of the Western mind’ (Gay, 1966: 3–4). At the time figures such as Buffon, Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Helvétius, and Holbach were the major intellectuals who devoted to bring the light of reason into every domain of human activity and to fight against Christian dogma. For the dogma preached by priests had obscured the ken of Europeans and restricted the European minds to the teaching of the Church. What the Enlightenment has helped achieved most significantly, then, was throwing off the yoke of the obscure theology.

Nevertheless, the credit of this liberation does not belong to the Enlightenment alone but also goes to the Reformation of the sixteenth century led by protestant priests such as Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, and John Calvin. While the Church had been urging princes, lords, knights, and its followers to join the Crusades, the wars against Muslims and pagans, and to recover the Holy Land from Muslim rule since from the eleventh century, the need for military service and financial support for the Crusades gave rise to the notorious exchange institution in the name of ‘indulgence’. That a man who provides military service or financial aid to the Crusades will receive a temporal remission of his sins. However, in Luther’s view, the existence of this institution demonstrated the corruption of the Church. For indulgence in its original meaning is a way to help human beings to relieve temporal punishment resulting from the effect of sin and to prepare for Purgatory. While a person who believes in God will definitely go to Heaven because of Christ’s work on the cross, he or she will still have to break his or her attachments to sin, the yearnings for the sins committed, so the person will require to stay in Purgatory for purification first as nothing unclean can enter the Heaven. And, in order to spend less time in Purgatory, a person could gain an indulgence under conditions in his or her earthly life such as having the sincere intention of receiving the indulgence, making a sacramental confession, receiving Holy Communion, and praying for the Pope’s intentions.³ Put briefly, indulgence is about the communion between God and a person who seeks to receive a temporal remission of his or her sins through holy rituals, and it should not be a purchase-and-sale relationship between the Church and the recipient. Accusing the Church of abusing the indulgence, Luther then established his own congregation and claimed that each person can communicate with God through his or her prayer without mediator. For, in Luther’s view, simply by reading and listening God’s words everyone can learn to talk with God through his or her inner mind, and the work of congregations is to faithfully preach God’s words rather than to forcefully advocate dogmatic theology (cf. Moorman, 2017: chap. 4).

On 31 October 1517, Luther published his famous Ninety-five Theses and began his disputation with the Roman Catholic Church regarding to the meaning of ‘indulgence’. This disputation eventually led to a more radical breach between Luther and the Church. For Luther came to think that human beings cannot be redeemed through the sacraments and rituals of the Church; instead, the only way for human beings to be redeemed by God’s grace is to have faith in Jesus and all that alone is what requires us to be saved. Obviously, this claim of ‘justification by faith’ confronted directly with what the Roman Catholic Church established upon. The sacraments, the rituals, and the hierarchy of the Church have been what make it stand firmly on earth for more than a thousand years. In terms of the Church’s view, Luther’s ‘justification by faith’ would transform the Church and damage its foundation tremendously. With our hindsight, we know that the Church’s worries had come true. Being one of the most important creeds of the Reformation, ‘justification by faith’ was widely shared and espoused by Protestants. They chose to communicate with God through their prayers, studied the Bible devoutly, and believed that it is their faith in Jesus, not the Church’s obscure theology, that will lead them to salvation. When the philosophers of the Enlightenment came to the fore, the reign of the Roman Catholic Church had been facing a serious challenge accordingly.

Taking the Reformation as the dawn of individual subjectivity, Green appreciated the significance of the event, but he also criticised it. In his essay ‘On Christian Dogma’, Green said that,

[t]he individual, consciously or unconsciously, will formulate the Christian experience, and left to himself, will formulate it inadequately. Released from the dogma of the church, he will make a dogma of his own, which will react upon and limit the experience. His fathers, though themselves ‘ascripti glebae’, have subdued a wide region to his use; but, instead of appropriating it, he laboriously tills a little plat of his own, as much in bondage to the soil as they were.

(Green, 1906: 182)

This is to say that after the Reformation an individual no longer has to follow the dogma of the Church but his own conscience, though the individual’s conscience may be partial and bring out a subjective dogma. To be sure, what the Reformation brought to Europeans was the liberation of individual conscience indeed, but it was just the dawn of the liberation, not the end. In Green’s view, there were still plenty of obscure theological ideas lurking in the scriptures, and they needed to be clarified by the philosophical reasoning. What the philosophers of the Enlightenment engaged in was then the first attempt to make such clarification.

In his 1878 sermon on ‘Faith’ Green addressed on the relationship between faith and reason directly, and the most important part of his argument is that science and religion share the same spiritual root, namely the human self-consciousness, and this self-consciousness manifests the function of human reason as ‘[i]t is only as taken into our self-consciousness, and so presented to us as an object, that anything is known to us’ (Green, 1886a: 82). In Green’s view, when the Roman Catholic Church and Luther talked about the work of Christ’s on the cross, they were all taking it as an event once happened in the remote past, but this was the very reason why Christians had been asked to have faith in Christian dogma. For the event is historic and all the Christians, besides the Twelve Apostles and the people who were Jesus’s contemporaries, do not have personal experience of it. In a word, since the event happened in the remote past and most Christians do not have direct experience of it, they therefore can only have faith in it in order to believe it is real. However, for Green, these thoughts of the reality of Christ’s work and its meaning are misleading, as the legacy Christ left for human beings is a moral paradigm that he showed us that each individual human being has the power to abandon a carnal life and to look after a spiritual one, and the essential attribute of this power is our capability of self-consciousness. In Green’s mind, while we human beings are through the capability of self-consciousness to know the world and ourselves, this capability would also keep before us ‘an object which we may seek to become’ (ibid.: 85). As the self-consciousness presents objects to us, it is not only bringing the outer world as sensations or perceptions to us but also projecting an image of ourselves onto our inner minds, and this image of ourselves would lead us to form an ideal self urging us to achieve it. And, since we are capable of self-consciousness and can conceive an ideal self as an end to pursue, this then means that we have the potential power to formulate a different life from a carnal one. Hence, by defining reason as the capability of self-consciousness, Green held that the basis for us to know the world is also the basis for us to become a morally better person; in short, the human capability of self-consciousness is the essential condition for both scientific reason and religious faith to be possible.⁴ Nevertheless, although reason and faith, science and religion are not contradictory in Green’s view, the Enlightenment philosophy, the first philosophical attempt to clarify obscure theological ideas, rather settled its arguments precisely on the opposition between science and religion, the rational and the spiritual, and this ultimately resulted in a radical dualistic view of the human condition.

The Modern Spirit: ‘to be free, to understand, to enjoy’

It has been noted that one of the most significant, but also contingent, achievements of the collaboration of the Reformation and the Enlightenment was the liberation of the individual from obscure theology. Deeming individual conscience as the sole authority of moral maxims the Protestants and the philosophers of the Enlightenment both espoused the freedom of the individual and believed it should be free from any unauthorised interventions, as neither the pope nor a king nor any other man can legitimately impose ‘a single syllable of law upon a Christian man without his consent’ (Luther, 1959: 70). However, even though the Protestants and the Enlightenment philosophers both advocated individual freedom, they nonetheless had different perceptions of how an individual performs his or her freedom. For the Protestants, as mentioned, the faith in Jesus and the Bible is the foundation for we human beings to seek the truth inside our minds, and to read and listen God’s words through our prayers is the righteous way to perform our freedom. But, for the philosophers, the truth is not inside our mind...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Individual Emancipation after the Enlightenment
• 2 The Shadow of Metaphysics
• 3 Human Perfection and Moral Community
• 4 Ethical Politics and Sovereign Power
• 5 Green’s Practical Philosophy and Modern China
• Conclusion
• Index