Comparative Approaches to Chinese Philosophy

Bo Mou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351950084
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This anthology explores how Chinese and Western philosophies could jointly and constructively contribute to a common philosophical enterprise. Philosophers with in-depth knowledge of both traditions present a variety of distinct comparative approaches, offering a refined introduction to the further reaches of Chinese philosophy in the comparative context, especially regarding its three major constituents - Confucianism, philosophical Daoism, and the Yi-Jing philosophy. This book examines various issues concerning philosophical methodology, ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and logic, and investigates both the living-spring source of Chinese philosophy and its contemporary implications and development through contemporary resources. The balanced coverage, accessible content, and breadth of approaches presented in this anthology make it a valuable resource for students of Chinese Philosophy, Comparative Philosophy, and other related courses.

Part One
Identity of Chinese Philosophy and Its Modern Studies

CHAPTER ONE
Emergence of the History of Chinese Philosophy*

Antonio S. Cua

This essay is an inquiry into the constructive challenge of Western philosophy to the development of the history of Chinese philosophy. The discussion focuses on the methodological aspects of three major works that appeared from 1919 to 1982. These works are remarkable, not only for illustrating the different Western philosophical assumptions and backgrounds of these writers, but also for their importance in Chinese philosophical education and discourse. As preliminaries, in the first part, I consider the idea of Chinese philosophy and samples of the critical-historical spirit of ancient Chinese thought. In the second part, I turn to three major works on the history of Chinese philosophy, that is, works of Hu Shih (Hu Shi), Fung Yu-lan (Feng You-lan), and Lao Sze-kwang (Lao Si-guang), and conclude with some remarks on the contributions of a few recent works to the study of the history of Chinese philosophy.

Preliminaries

The idea of Chinese philosophy

It is common today for a teacher or scholar in Chinese philosophy to encounter the query “What is Chinese philosophy?” Sometimes this query is a disguise for expressing doubt as to whether there could even be such a thing as Chinese philosophy. There is a terse answer to the question: as philosophy is a Western term, Chinese philosophy is an invention of Western-trained Chinese scholars. This answer, however, is not helpful. A better answer would be a reminder that, from ancient times to the present, ethics is a recognized branch of Western philosophical inquiry, and ethics has its counterpart in ancient Chinese thought. Both Socrates and Confucius were preoccupied with basic questions of normative ethics, questions about the manner of life that best befits humanity and about the ideals of human excellence and well-being. These questions were brilliantly pursued by Plato and Aristotle. We find comparable achievements in the works of Mencius and Xun Zi (Hsün Tzu). Xun Zi’s writings, moreover, reveal significant interest and insights into some basic problems of moral epistemology, e.g., the problems of ethical language and justification as a form of argumentative discourse.¹

Of course, the word “philosophy” has no equivalent in Chinese before translations of Western philosophical works in the nineteenth century. Yan Fu (1823–1921) was the first to translate Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics into Chinese in 1898.² Later, Yan Fu translated some works of John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and Montesquieu. In the early 1960s, Wing-tsit Chan wrote:

At the turn of the century, ideas of Schopenhauer, Kant, Nietzsche, Rousseau, Tolstoy, and Kropotkin were imported. After the intellectual renaissance of 1917, the movement advanced at a rapid pace. In the following decade, important works of Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, James, Bergson, and Marx, and others became available in Chinese. Dewey, Russell, and Dreisch came to China to lecture, and special numbers of journals were devoted to Nietzsche and Bergson. … Almost every trend of thought had its exponent. James, Bergson, Euken, Whitehead, Hocking, Schiller, T. H. Green, Carnap, and C. I. Lewis had their own following. For a time it seemed Chinese thought was to be completely Westernized.³

In Taiwan and Hong Kong today, we also find followers of Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Maritain, Gilson, Quine, Pepper, Gadamer, Derrida, and different philosophical schools of thought. If one visits any Taiwan or Hong Kong university today, he or she is likely to find a department of philosophy with a wide offering of standard subjects and courses such as Chinese Philosophy, Indian Philosophy, Buddhistic Philosophy, and Comparative Philosophy. In the People’s Republic of China, there are still followers of Marx and Lenin, as well as specialists in logic, philosophy of science, and aesthetics.⁴

The translation of Western philosophical concepts and doctrines provided an impetus to the development of Chinese philosophical discourse. In perusing a Chinese dictionary of philosophy, first published in 1925 (Zhe-Xue-Ci-Dian),⁵ we find a few Chinese translations of philosophical subjects and terms, e.g., ethics, logic, ontology, essence, accident, substance, attributes, and reason. These terms still have currency today. In fact, “logic” appears as a transliteration that becomes part of Modern Chinese. It is instructive to note how some translations of standard Western philosophical terms represent an effort of Chinese and Japanese scholars to find functional equivalents in Chinese. Consider the word “philosophy”. An ingenious Japanese scholar’s translation of “philosophy” as zhe-xue is a good example. Nishi Amane, in his Hyakuichi shimron [Bai-Yi-Xin-Lun] (1874), appeared to be the first scholar to use “zhe-xue” as a translation for the Greek “philosophia” and “philosophy”. For justification of this translation of “philosophy” as “zhe-xue”, Nishi Amane appealed to Zhou Dun-yi’s notion of xi xian-xue or xi zhe-xue, that is, “to aspire to the learning of a worthy person” or “to aspire to the learning of an intelligent, knowledgeable person”. This is an interpretive translation, for Nishi explicitly appealed to a brief remark of Zhou Dun-yi (Zhou Lian-xi, 1017–1073) in Tong-Shu (Chapter 10): “The sage aspires to become Heaven, the worthy aspires to become a sage, and the gentleman [junzi] aspires to become a worthy.” Zhou’s remark was interpreted as “to aspire and pursue, through learning, in order to acquire the wisdom of the worthy and the intelligent, knowledgeable person”.⁶

In Chinese, the first character or graph “zhe” means wisdom. An alternative term for wisdom is “zhi”, often used interchangeably with its homophone, meaning “knowledge” and/or “capacity to acquire knowledge”.⁷ Given its primarily practical orientation, ancient Chinese thinkers were, for the most part, preoccupied with ethical questions about right conduct and the best conception of human life. The good human life is commonly envisaged by the Confucians as a life of ren, an affectionate concern for the well-being of one’s fellows in a community, society, or state governed by a wise and virtuous ruler.⁸ “Xue” is learning. “Philosophy” translated as “zhe-xue” means in Chinese “learning to become a wise and knowledgeable person”. As learning and practice can be a delightful experience, the student may come to love the subject.

Interpreting philosophy as the love of wisdom reflects the Confucian concern with practice or application of learning. Confucius once remarked: “Is it not a delight to apply one’s learning at an appropriate time?”⁹ For the Confucian, learning is important because of its relevance to resolving problems of human life. It is the acquisition of practical, not theoretical knowledge. This translation of “philosophy” as “zhe-xue” seems to be a very good attempt to find a functional equivalent in the Chinese language prior to the careful study of Western philosophy. Indeed, the translation of “philosophy” from the Greek, on one interpretation, is closer to the ancient Chinese conception. John Passmore remarks: “The Greek word sophia is ordinarily translated into English as ‘wisdom’, and the compound philosophia, from which ‘philosophy’ derives, is translated as ‘the love of wisdom’. But sophia has a much wider range of application than the modern English ‘wisdom’. Wherever intelligence can be exercised – in practical affairs, in the mechanical arts, in business – there is room for sophia.” Passmore goes on to discuss different conceptions of philosophy – a topic familiar to philosophy majors today.¹⁰ The Chinese translation, though an interpretive adaptation, at least captures part of the meaning of philosophia. The term “zhe-xue” is now a standard Chinese term.

However, if one thinks of philosophy as the construction of grand systems of thought as exemplified in Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes, Kant, or Hegel, the person may find the idea of Chinese philosophy problematic. Arguably, the works of Zhu Xi may be considered an embodiment of a grand system. Setting aside this essentially contestable issue and focusing on ethics as a basic or even the basic subject of philosophical inquiry, the history of Chinese thought is replete with examples. As translation is an interpretive task, the Chinese translation of “ethics” as “lun-li-xue” perhaps illustrates best the concern of the Confucian tradition. Read independently of its being a translated term, “lun-li-xue” may be explained as an inquiry concerning the rationales of human relationships – one principal concern of Confucian ethics. For those impressed with the recent Western emphasis on personal relationships, they will find an ancient Confucian precursor for their ethical and/or political theory.¹¹

Since a translation is an interpretive adaptation of an idea in a foreign language, it should not be a surprise for a Western philosophy student or scholar to have difficulties with the existing translations of some Chinese texts. For many Western philosophers, Wing-tsit Chan’s A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy is not a very helpful introduction. While it is an impressive contribution to Sinological scholarship, his use of English words for translating key Chinese concepts is not always perspicuous to Western philosophers, in spite of Chan’s painstaking effort to explain them. For example, when “li”, “yi-li” and “tian-li” are rendered as “principle”, “moral principle”, and “principle of nature”, one can be puzzled about what these English terms mean. Absent an explanation of the uses of “li”, the translation of “li” as “principle” unavoidably leads to such misleading questions as: What are the principles of Chinese or Confucian ethics? If such principles exist, do they serve as premisses for derivation of moral rules? Are Confucian principles universal or relative? The selected texts do not provide clear answers to the question of how one goes about formulating the so-called principles.¹²

Moreover, though perhaps unavoidable, use of such labels as “idealistic”, “naturalistic”, and “rationalistic” for certain tendencies of Chinese thought may be misleading in implying that these tendencies are the Chinese counterparts of those in Western philosophy.¹³ Unless they are carefully defined, even in Western philosophy today, these labels are useful largely as convenient pedagogical and/or mnemonic devices. I must note that, to a certain degree, a philosophical bilingual would face similar difficulties in reading Chan’s book, while admiring his marvelous achievement.

Ancient history of Chinese thought

While the idea of the history of Chinese philosophy is a Western importation, the importance of critical exposition of prevailing “winds of doctrine” is recognized in some works in ancient Chinese thought. Somewhat reminiscent of book alpha of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Chapter 33 of the Zhuang Zi gives a critical account of Zhuang Zi’s contemporaries or predecessors.¹⁴ While acknowledging that there are many thoughtful persons in the world concerned with dao (Way), the writer asks: “Where do we find what the ancients called ‘the arts of tao (tao-shu)’, the arts for pursuing tao [or the ideal of the good human lifer I say that dao pervades everything that exists in the universe.” In this essay we find an extant, critical statement of Mo Zi, Shen Dao. and Hui Shi, a famous proponent of such logical paradoxes as, e.g., “I set off for Yiieh today and came there yesterday”, “The southern region has no limit and yet has a limit”, and “Fire is not hot.” This chapter in the Zhuang Zi praises Lao Zi and Zhuang Zhou (i.e., Zhuang Zi), showing the author’s ethical commitment. Notably, Zhuang Zi has a holistic moral vision of the unity of humans and other things in the universe: “Heaven and earth were born at the same time as I was, and the ten thousand things are one with me.”¹⁵ In Chapter 2, Zhuang Zi offers a brilliant critique of the Mohists and the Confucians. Among other things, Zhuang Zi maintains that there are no fixed meanings of words, nor neutral, external standards for deciding correctness or incorrectness, truth or falsity of their claims. The best course is to transcend the dispute and maintain clarity of mind (ming). Says Zhuang Zi, “The torch of chaos and doubt – this is what the sage steers by. So he does not use things but relegates all to the constant. This i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Transcription
• Contributors
• Editor’s Introduction
• Part One Identity of Chinese Philosophy and Its Modern Studies
• Part Two Yi-Jing Philosophy
• Part Three Confucianism
• Part Four Philosophical Daoism
• Part Five Logic-Related Concerns
• Index