Transcendence and Non-Naturalism in Early Chinese Thought

Alexus McLeod, Joshua R. Brown

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350082557
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Transzendentalismus in der Philosophie

Contemporary scholars of Chinese philosophy often presuppose that early China possessed a naturalistic worldview, devoid of any non-natural concepts, such as transcendence. Challenging this presupposition head-on, Joshua R. Brown and Alexus McLeod argue that non-naturalism and transcendence have a robust and significant place in early Chinese thought. This book reveals that non-naturalist positions can be found in early Chinese texts, in topics including conceptions of the divine, cosmogony, and apophatic philosophy. Moreover, by closely examining a range of early Chinese texts, and providing comparative readings of a number of Western texts and thinkers, the book offers a way of reading early Chinese Philosophy as consistent with the religious philosophy of the East and West, including the Abrahamic and the Brahmanistic religions. Co-written by a philosopher and theologian, this book draws out unique insights into early Chinese thought, highlighting in particular new ways to consider a range of Chinese concepts, including tian, dao, li, and you/wu.

Part One

1

“Naturalism” in Western Philosophy and its Use in Scholarship on Chinese Thought

Naturalism is a difficult idea in contemporary philosophy. It’s a worldview almost everyone accepts, but almost no one understands.¹ Naturalism has increasingly become the flag under which philosophers rally in the contemporary academy (at least within certain widespread traditions), and scholars of Chinese philosophy are no different in this regard. Indeed, there is a history of looking to the philosophical and religious systems of China as alternatives to theistic or otherwise “non-naturalist” systems of thought once dominant in the West. Philosophers through much of the Western history of engagement with Chinese thought, such as Christian Wolff² and John Dewey, as well as more contemporary philosophers such as Herbert Fingarette³ and Roger Ames (among others), have looked to early China as the source of a nontheistic spirituality and ethics they deem to be associated with naturalism, in the sense of acceptance of a monistic, single-world system that rejects “supernatural” or transcendent entities.

The idea that there is something beyond what we can access through the senses is not in itself particularly problematic to many today. Much of what is established by the sciences, for example, does not refer in any way to the senses, but explains the way things are experienced in a way that posits necessary additional entities, forces, or activities.⁴ Such facts can make it unclear just what the naturalist is rejecting. Even the mystic recognizes that it is in what we cannot sense or perhaps even comprehend that the sensible world of experience is maintained. The mystic provides an explanation of our experience, just as does the naturalist. And it is unclear that the mystic’s explanation rests on any shakier a foundation than that of the naturalist, one who takes scientific method (in its current or future forms) as the basis for truth.

If we are to take such a clear stand on the issue of naturalism versus non-naturalism, then we ought to at least have a reasonably secure sense of what the distinction amounts to. However, in most cases our commitment seems to greatly outpace our understanding. Within philosophical circles, it is often the case that one is far more firm in one’s commitment to naturalism than one is confident in one’s knowledge of what naturalism is.

The moniker “naturalist,” we contend, works much more like an affiliation claim than it does like a marker of a substantive philosophical position. The naturalist/non-naturalist distinction is much more similar to the political Democrat/Republican distinction in US politics than it is to a distinction based on clear philosophical differences—such as moral realism/anti-realism (although the boundaries here can often be blurred as well). The key difference between these two distinctions, however, is that the latter generally tracks an underlying philosophical orientation whereas the former, we argue, does not. And if this is right, it makes sense of why we see a variety of different and incompatible versions of “naturalism.” Part of the reason it is so difficult to get a handle on naturalism is that so many different and incompatible things fly the banner of naturalism, of such disparate kinds, that to make sense of them all as the same kind of view, one would have to define naturalism so broadly as to be almost completely free of content. These difficulties are resolved if we understand naturalism as an affiliation claim.

The naturalism numerous scholars see in early Chinese philosophy is taken as the counterpoint to ancient and medieval Western philosophy.⁵ At the same time, it is taken to fit well with contemporary Western sensibilities.⁶ It disavows non-natural entities, supernaturalism, transcendence, and all kinds of dualism (mind–body, multiple world, etc.), according to these scholars, and thus presents us with something we can accept, unlike the mysterianism of the ancient and medieval Western philosophers, with their metaphysical systems requiring transcendent entities such as God, souls, substances, and other “naturalistically” objectionable concepts. Such non-naturalism of course is not limited to the European tradition. Islamic philosophy, Indian philosophy, and Mesoamerican philosophy, for example, are similar to ancient and medieval European philosophy in these ways.⁷

The origin of naturalism in contemporary philosophy traces back to debates that arose toward the end of the modern period, with the beginnings of modern science. Akeel Bilgrami traces this back to debates in the Royal Society in England concerning the clash between the mechanistic system of Isaac Newton and classical Christian theology.⁸ We see the slow removal of God from nature to a distant and initiative role, first with the influence of deism, in which God’s direct activity in nature is rejected in exchange for a God more akin to Aristotle’s “unmoved mover” or first cause. Bilgrami argues that contemporary naturalism can only be understood in terms of its historical origins and the debates in which it was situated. We agree with this position, and this historical bounding of the idea of naturalism is something that philosophers and other scholars, including scholars of early Chinese thought, often overlook. Bilgrami writes,

Some of the philosophical debates of our time are secular echoes, indeed secular descendants, of disputation some centuries ago that was no less intense and of measurably greater and more immediate public significance. If some of this sort of significance persists in our current debates, it is seldom on the surface. This is because of our tendency in analytic philosophy to view our metaphysical and epistemological concerns in relatively autonomous terms, unburdened by any political and cultural implication or fallout. Hence, such wider significance as still might exist can only be unearthed by paying some genealogical attention to the antecedent disputes in which the issues at stake loomed larger and more visibly in public and political life.⁹

This disenchantment of nature that entered into the scientific mindset and tradition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries precluded the possibility of a God acting in or through nature, or anything not captured by the principles of the new science in its generally material nature. Though many scientists were still happy to accept the existence of a God, this God was placed well outside of nature, and thus outside of the realm of what could be known through science, and outside of the possibility of human knowledge altogether. Nature came to be understood as inert. God was thus silenced, and as this worldview developed, the idea of God began to be discarded altogether. Once we have made the move to isolate something from any explanatory or explicit place in our philosophical system, it is a natural next step to simply eliminate it. If an entity plays no explanatory role in a complete account of the world, has no causal connection to anything in that system, and is for this reason unknowable, it becomes natural to eliminate the entity as an extraneous element of the system. What was held onto by an earlier generation because of the seeming necessity of such an idea that was so prominent in their time is easily jettisoned by later generations, who have always known the concept as an inert and mysterious addition.

Naturalism in the modern Western tradition developed in the historical context of the distinction between the natural sciences as inert and shorn of normativity and the Abrahamic conception of God as operating in the world. The primary aim of the naturalist was (and is, we argue) to reject such entities as God, soul, or nonphysical Platonic realms. The hallmark of the “non-natural” or supernatural, given this historical background, is a concept arising from the non-naturalist affiliation group, explanations that go beyond what is provided by the natural sciences. Systems other than those of Western theism, of course, will be rejected by those with such a naturalist worldview. The concept of “vitality” we find in many philosophical traditions, such as the Chinese, Mesoamerican, and African traditions, will generally be rejected, mainly because of their resemblance to the objectionable ideas of the Western tradition around which this scientific naturalism defines itself. We thus stretch the meaning and significance of naturalism when we apply it to traditions like that of early China, but it can still be done and the framing of early Chinese thought in terms of naturalism or non-naturalism can still be useful.

Naturalism, of one form or another, has become the nearly unanimously accepted philosophical worldview in most corners of academia and contemporary scholarship. The best way to make sense of this naturalism in contemporary scholarship is as an affiliation claim connected to a commitment to science and its general methods, and to ontology consistent with and limited by this science and scientific method. The idea seems to be that all that can be known is known by the methods of natural science, and that all that exists is what is posited by the natural sciences. A naturalist commitment must consist in more than simply a commitment to consistency with science and scientific method, as it turns out that anything, including explicit rejections of science, might be made consistent with science and scientific methods. Consistency with science is a necessary but not sufficient condition of naturalist worldviews. Even something seemingly as extreme as Berkeleyan idealism (or other forms), which many would contrast sharply with naturalism, can be easily made consistent with all of science. If the world is idea, these ideas still follow the observed laws of nature. The very motivation for Berkeley’s idealism was to eliminate what he thought of as empirically undemonstrated—the view that there is some thing in itself independent of our ideas that causes these ideas to be as they are. If we have access only to experience, we need no more than this to make sense of the world. Material things are not strictly necessary to explain our perception of the world, which could be just as we experience it even if nothing but ideas exist. All we ever perceive, according to Berkeley, are ideas, and objects of perception are themselves ideas.¹⁰ Nonetheless, idealism is often taken as contrary to naturalism, presumably because of its rejection of materialism. Philosopher and theologian Edgar Brightman wrote in 1933,

The only genuine opposition must be that between naturalism and idealism, and the realist, as one who believes in the real existence of a world of external objects which do not depend for their being, on being perceived, may, indeed, as he turns to metaphysics, embrace either naturalism or idealism.¹¹

We argue that part of the reason we find drastically different accounts of naturalism is that on some accounts of naturalism, only consistency with science and scientific method is taken as necessary to make a system naturalist. Scientistic affiliation carries with it a certain perceived legitimacy and prestige, and even those who want to accept or endorse views that otherwise might seem non-naturalist still want the legitimacy scientistic affiliation accords. If one’s views don’t really mesh with scientif...