[Editor’s Note:] Professor Thomas A. Brennan graduated with M.A. from California State University in San Francisco, CA., and Ph.D. in English Literature from Tulane University, New Orleans, LA. He had been teaching in the Department of English, University of South Alabama, Mobile, Al. until his retirement in 1999. He served as Editor-in-chief for The Harbinger on the USA campus. His area of specialty is English poetry, especially John Milton, and Shakespeare. He is interested in Taoism and Ch’an Buddhism, practicing meditation and the t’ai ch’i. His new work, Commentaries on the Bhagavad-Gitā, is available on the internet: tbrennan@jaguar1.usouthal.edu.

It takes only a little familiarity with the work of Thomé Fang to recognize that he had an extremely high regard for poetry. The most noticeable indication being the numerous quotations from poets of many nationalities—with Goethe and Shakespeare receiving the most attention. Why did Thomé Fang esteem poetry so highly? In part, the answer can be traced to his early family training in Confucian ideals which doubtless instilled in him a love of the Shih Ching (The Book of Poetry). But, while this early training may be the original foundation, it hardly accounts for the premier role poetry plays in relation to his total view of life. To understand the importance of poetry in Thomé Fang’s philosophy, we shall have to see in detail exactly what place poetry occupies his cosmic scheme of things, and we shall have to see what role it plays in the on-going process of creating what he calls "Chinese mind" or "Chinese mentality."[1]

In the preface to his book, The Chinese View of Life: The Philosophy of Comprehensive Harmony, Professor Fang singles out the English poets, Chaucer and Cowper, as two poets who, had they known it, would have recognized "Chinese Mind" as a kingdom infinitely rich in spiritual resources. "The point is not just that these two poets were especially adept at recognizing such a kingdom, as they surely were in their own sphere, but that as men gifted with a talent for insight and a talent for poetry, they ventured inward piercing the surface of things, and thus retrieved in their verbal art some of the riches of that realm inaccessible to ordinary ways of knowing. Here, then, is Professor Fang’s main claim for poetic through the insight and verbal art of the poet, poetry languages that which is inaccessible to the language or ordinary ways of knowing. He values poetry so highly for the same reason he values philosophy so highly, namely because it reveals or makes known the spiritual resources of "Chinese mind," and that is, for Fang, of paramount importance.

Thomé Fang’s loudest complaint is voiced in opposition to those who have stayed on the surface of "Chinese mind," considering only "the mere trappings of knowledge, erudition, arts, elegant traditions." The real depth of Chinese mind remain, as he puts it, "a kingdom of perpetual night . . . to those who, in their modes of thought and feeling, have no real sympathy for it."[2] In this judgment, he includes western scholars "not well versed in the Chinese language," and also "native ‘evyll birds’ that defile their own nest by mocking at the legacy of China."[3] The failure to mine the spiritual resources of Chinese mind is, Professor Fang believes, a matter of the utmost importance. He says, "the loss of Chinese mentality is too serious a blow to us Chinese as well as the rest of the world. We are paying the penalty for it in tears. And the world, likewise, will suffer the consequence."[4]

At the time he was composing these thoughts, in the Spring of 1937, the Japanese invasion of China was only two months away. But that imminent event was only a symptom of a general failure to understand the kind of thinking that it has been the genius of the Chinese to express as a way of being and knowing that Thomé Fang calls "Chinese mind." The evolution of Chinese mind took centuries, and inasmuch as it is still a creative process, it is on-going. But this unique process of an evolving cultural mentality, in and of itself, is not the crucial thing, The crucial thing in Thomé Fang’s view is the distillation of the process into the language of philosophy and poetry which he calls the philosophy of comprehensive harmony—the philosophy of the Confucians, the Taoists, and the Mahāyanic Buddhist. Because he fervently believed that the entire world could benefit from imbibing the spirit of that distillation, he devoted a lifetime to the task of making the product of "Chinese mentality," the philosophy of comprehensive harmony, more widely available to those who wish to know it as it essentially is.

In an effort to requite the honor given to me as an invited contributor to this symposium, I have made it my task to do some distillery work of my own in order to place Thomé Fang’s views on poets and poetry in relation to his overall view of the philosophy of comprehensive harmony, the essence of "Chinese mentality." I believe that what Thomé Fang says about poets and poetry brings the philosophy of comprehensive harmony sharply into focus as the most important product, what he calls "creative creativity,"[5] that is, as the product of poetic creativity functioning at its most sublime level. It is only at " level of imaginative freedom and cultural transformation that man can be redeemed from his tendency to spin, spiderlike, the entire universe from his own entrails, from his own egocentric selfhood.

Thomé Fang repeatedly indicates in numerous statements, defining comprehensive harmony, that Chinese mentality is mind cultivated to harmonize comprehensively, creating unison "with which man and life in the world can enter into a fellowship in sympathetic unity." This unity, dynamized from within by the trans-empirical, the primordial source of all unity, namely the Tao, is productive of the "bliss of peace and well-being (that) may be enjoyed by all."[6] When and while man achieves the great achievement of "sympathetic unity," "man and the universe are never hostile, never contradictory, but exhibits congenial congruence, everywhere and everywhen."[7] Elsewhere he definitely links the sympathetic unity of man and universe to the "artistically cultivated," that is, to those who become "well versed in poetical language;" they, he says, will know how to enter into fellowship in sympathetic unity with the inmost essences of Nature and man."[8] And those men who achieve the sympathetic unity of comprehensive harmony in its creative dimension are Superior men. To make this point, Professor Fang quotes from Wang Fu-Chih’s Extensive Commentary on the Book of Odes:

So at the heart of this conception of comprehensive harmony is the placement of the poetically cultivated man (a cultivation which includes artistic cultivation in general) in an existential and creative relation to "the great beauty of the universe" which consists in the confluence of universal life in its continuous process of creation."[10] But it is in his creative relation "to the great beauty of the universe" that man performs his important poetic activity. Comprehensive harmony for its "actual working, depends on the principle of creative creativity,"[11] that is, it depends on man and universe working harmoniously and creatively in process together to augment value, Professor Fang puts it this way: "The Universe represents for us the perpetual augmentation of value. The meaning of human life consists in the exaltation of value. The Universe and human life are the concurrent processes of creative values."[12] In effect, Thomé Fang ,suggests that if you want to know what human beings are really good for and good at, then look to those poetic spirits engaged in the work of cultural transformation, expressing self and universe as the augmentation of value. In his chapter on "Chinese Wisdom," Professor Fang says of man:

Preeminently, these integrators and creators of value, Professor Fang believes, are poets, and because their "illuminant minds, in congruence with Tao, transcend all categories, he implicitly refutes Liu Hsieh’s dictum that literature can be dichotomized neatly into "refinements" (wen) and "utility" (pi).[15] Utility, for professor Fang, is subsumed in the refinements of creative creativity.

In an address given at the Second World Congress of poet, held in Taipei in 1973, professor Fang declares that the members of the audience "are poetry." And he means that quite literally not just because many of the people in the audience are practicing poets. He means that they are "poetry" by virtue of the kind of transformative role they play in the creative processes of man and the universe. He suggests they are poetry in process because they are and have been "the standard-bearers of cultural values." That is, if one’s poetical cultivation rises to the level of "creative creativity," then the level of engagement with life is a life which Professor Fang calls poetry. Poetry is not just a matter of words and poets are not just makers of poems (though they may be only that); poetry is an orientation of the spirit and its activity is spiritual, and he states in his lecture that it is his duty to bring home to the audience "some features of Chinese culture in respect of the poetry of life, or what amounts to the same thing, the life of poetry."[16] In effect, then, culture as an exfoliation of "creative creativity" is ultimately a poetic transformation and poets are, therefore, ultimately responsible for the genesis and evolution of culture.

The conflation of poetry, life, and the transformation of culture into one ongoing creation goes hand in hand with Professor Fang’s concept of the "combined personage," or what F. M. Cornford has called "the combination prophet-poet-sage." Combined personages are those men, not just in Chinese culture, but who in all cultures, more or less, perennially take "upon their shoulders the important task in the advancement and glorification of artistic, intellectual, as well as social culture."[17] In this class, Professor Fang includes as the most eminent Chinese exemplars: Laotzu, Confucius, Mo-ti, and Chuangtzu. And he cites Chuangtzu as presenting the best description of the "combined personage;" Chuangtzu says:

In response to Chuangtzu’s synoptic view of the "superior man," Professor Fang exclaims that "the great philosophers perfectly exemplify the combined personages of prophet-poet-sage!" Of these, be sees the mode of thought of the Taoists philosophers, especially poetical inspirations,"[19] and he believes it is the "Taoist temper of mind which cites the best of Chinese Poetry as an expression of inspiration."[20] And he praises Chuangtzu for his "great genius representing the best type of the poetic-philosophic mind."[21]

These "poetic-philosophic mind(s)," or "combined personages" typically used the fables and metaphors of poetry to bring human understanding more or less up to the level of their own creative creativity. In the verbal art of the "combined personage," poetic inspiration is one manifestation of creative creativity, and its expression in language often takes form which comes to be categorized as religious expression. Summarizing and quoting George Santayana, Professor Fang says that according to Santayana, religion and poetry are essentially the same whenever "the natural world is made to depend upon a supernatural import." For Santayana, moreover, this interdependence finds its expression in poetry and fable: "Christ on the cross was ‘a new poetry, a new ideal, a new God.’ ‘The moving power was a fable’." and it is the moving power of the fable, Santayana believes, that carries "the imagination into a new sphere." That new sphere for Christian imagination "was eminently a field for moral experience; moral ideas were there objectified into supernatural forces . . . The system was a great poem . . . It was an epic, containing the . . . moral autobiography of man.’ ‘The idea of Christ becomes something spiritual, something poetical’."[22]

By raising the Christian story to the level of poetry, Santayana, in effect, undercuts Christian provincialism, and instead, aligns Christian inspiration with the rhythms and value-directions of the universe as a whole, as those value-directions are expressed, have been expressed, and will be expressed through the creative creativity of combined personages in many cultures and in many places. The Christian story, seen as one among many similar stories, is thereby freed from slavish interpretations of the "facts of history" which, with their literal strictures, tend to the belittlement of humankind. Professor Fang believed that such low uses of imagination also transforms culture, but for the worse.

Imagination raised to its highest pitch of inspiration is philosophical as well as religious, and together they reach beyond the mundane level of ordinary interpretation. Professor Fang quotes Alfred North Whitehead’s remarks that "Philosophy is akin to poetry," suggesting that their point of contact resides in mysticism, in their preoccupation with giving insight into depths unspoken: "In each case there is reference to form beyond the direct meanings of words. That is, Whitehead says, "both of them seek to express that ultimate good sense which we term civilizations." Or as he suggests: "the direct insight of mysticism is the basis of all rationality."[23] Taken together, these remarks of Santayana and Whitehead delineate the province of poetry in its largest sense, its transformative sense that Professor Fang sees as its primary cultural function.

Professor Fang believes that an the cultures of the world have been perennially imbued with spiritual import, and that the three transformative vehicles for this process are religion, philosophy, and poetry."[24] He suggests that the main likeness shared by poets proper and the poets of religion and philosophy has less to do with the kind of language they employ, since they have recourse to poetic language in varying degrees, than with the fact that they are all grounded in mysticism. With regard to Chinese civilization, Professor Fang cites Richard Kröner (in Culture and Faith) as pointing out that

The Chinese who attain "poetical imagination," attain a synoptic view of things; they are congregationists, and not segregationists, in the assessment of cultural values."[26]

Nevertheless, poets proper and all other kinds share in common the poet’s love of metaphor’, it is indispensable for accommodating human understanding to cosmic fact. Of himself Professor Fang says that as a "philosopher-poet he cannot go without metaphor and imagination in dealing with the subject of poetry and life."[27] To make this point about the power of metaphor, he tells a story about a boy flying a kite in the form of a butterfly, illustrating how the "free soul of the philosopher, nay... the exhilarated soul of a poet" soars to spiritual heights, partaking of "inspiring ideals so as to save the barbarous appearances of the world," or chooses to spend most of its time "hovering in the open, lofty empyrean with levity and freedom and strength as if to marshal all features of Nature into a gladdened order of comprehensive harmony, . . ." [28]

As true amphibians at home in the continuum of matter and spirit, Chinese poet-philosophers, whether they express themselves primarily as poets or philosophers, see the phenomenal as the noumenal and make no "vicious bifurcation" between them. But more important, this ability to swim in the sea of matter or fly equally well in the empyrean of spirit determines the nature of the paths Chinese philosophers have sought to follow. In his lecture on "Poetry and Life," Professor Fang speaks of Chinese poets as "philosophers" singing three choruses: the Confucian chorus including poets such as T’ao Ch’ien, To Fu, and numberless others; the Taoist chorus including poets such as Ch’u Yuan, Ts’ao Chih, Yuan Chi, Li Po, etc.; and the Mahāyanic Buddhist chorus including Aśvaghosa, Nāgārjuna, and the Ch’an poets Han-shan and Shib-teh, etc. All three choruses, of course, take their origins from the three great “combined personages”: Laotzu, Confucius, Śākyamuni. In singing these choruses, Chinese poets are "co-workers in divine transformation,"[29] and so to do the work of poetry is to participate in "divine transformation."

Participation on this level epitomizes, in Professor Fang’s view, the function of poetry and the work of poets. The function of poetry, interfused "with the spirit of sound philosophy and religion, is to dream the dream of life at its best, and it is the poets as such, irrespective of difference in nationalities, who have dreamed the dream of life most beautifully."[30] The three great dreamers who have dreamed the dream of Chinese culture most beautifully are Laotzu, Confucius, and the Buddha--the latter as he is expressed through the Ch’an Buddhists and the Neo-Confucians.

With regard to Western culture, Professor Fang believes the West has been dominated by a different kind of dreaming, a vision of man as a maimed amphibian, a dream which holds "man in esteem and in disdain at the same time."[31] That is to say, that while not lacking either poetry or philosophy, the West has not developed its own philosophy of comprehensive harmony and therefore larks a mentality equivalent or analogous to Chinese mentality. But while them is no equivalence, there are many instances in the works of individual poets in the West who expressed ideas similar to Chinese mentality. Thomé Fang found this to be especially so in the works of Shakespeare, Goethe, and Wordsworth and the romantic poets generally.

Nevertheless, a different mentality has dominated the West, one which Huston Smith has labelled the "Modem Western Mindset."[32] According to Smith this mindset emerges from the scientific worldview of the West. He does not attack science or the methods of science, but rather, attacks attitudes which the scientific worldview too readily encourages: control, empiricism, naturalism, and alienation. These attitudes, Smith believes, form a kind of mental cataract, occluding the visions of transcendence that could lead the West to its own philosophy of comprehensive harmony, though he does not use that phrase. The alternative that Smith sees replacing the "Modem Western Mindset" is comprised of the very elements that make up the philosophy of comprehensive harmony; they are: participation, intuitive discernment, transcendence, and fulfillment.[33]

Though Professor Fang’s analysis of the Western mindset is considerably different from Smith’s, he does see Western man as "a complete contradiction, nay, inherent self-contradiction."[34] And man as such "is a vicious bifurcation of the integral human nature." [35] By this "vicious bifurcation" a number of oppositions and hostilities are set in motion, creating, as it were, a poetry of dualism (though he does not call it that):

Professor Fang characterizes this bifurcated state as a kind of "life-devouring Demonry," which he believes Chinese culture has thus far avoided because the Chinese "know how to enter into a spiritual fellowship in unity with the great Tao."[37] He quotes extensively from Laotzu and Confucius to show that "this ethical culture of ours" has as its guide-rope "the fundamental principal of comprehensive harmony in light of which the demonical force, so prevalent in other cultures, is here completely subdued."[38] Rooted in the descriptive metaphysics of Taoism and Confucianism, Chinese culture is the product of that dream, just as Western culture is the product of a dream rooted m the doctrine of original sin and the justificatory dogma that goes with it. Professor Fang believed that such doctrine and dogma belittles man:

"Real Chinese" have not been corrupted by a bifurcated view of things; for them, Professor Fang says: "the entire universe is . . . a coalescence of matter and spirit, namely, transmuted realm wherein matter and spirit tend to take a higher form of perfection which may be called exalted life… And the pivotal point that must be affirmed if Chinese philosophy is to be properly understood, Fang believes, is the idea that "our ideal world is just the actual world transmuted by the magic of spiritual exaltation. Our vir- tues are just the enthusiastic endeavors actually accomplished in this real but idealized world."[40]

"Real Chinese," then, are those people for whom the actual world is a theatre for transmuting actual into ideal. Expressed in terms of the metamorphosis of nature into spirit, nature and human nature are not in conflict, not antithetical, but work together for the perfection of both. There is no "gulf between Nature and human nature inasmuch as human life is interpenetrating with the cosmic life as a whole."[41]

This interpenetration expresses itself historically through "man’s mission of cultural creations (that is, his mission as a philosopher-poet), in different realms of art, literature, science, religion, and social institutions."[42] "History," in Professor Fang’s view, is the "unfolding of the fine spirit of culture." From the standpoint of the Tao, history "is Tao in perpetual creative advance."[43] From the standpoint of Nature, history "is a continuous process of creation and men are con-creators within the realm of Nature."[44] When history is viewed as a realm in itself, men are the "masters of their own creations," gathering and directing the forces of Nature into the channels of culture. So, "history, as a process of realization of cultural ideals, is Nature writ ever more beautiful."[45] Moreover, culture not only frees man from the need to imitate Nature, but even allows for man’s revolt against Nature when that revolt enables man to aspire to a higher level of spirituality. Spirit is awakened and cast into the form of culture. Nature untransformed by culture "may simply consist of a set of mechanical activities. . . . energizing and expressing the rude primary emotions."[46] To characterize human behavior untransformed by "the magic of culture," Professor Fang quotes from Shakespeare’s Macbeth:

For professor Fang, life as a drama is no mere figure of speech. The dream of life is enacted on the stage of the world, with the universe itself as the theatre of man’s action, and as noble players in it, men must fit their actions to this cosmic theatre. "Should it be otherwise, then human beings would be long estranged from their natural abode."[47]

On this note, I think we can say in summation that Thomé Fang’s representation of the philosophy of comprehensive harmony has as one of its main aims the reduction of estrangement, and hopefully its dissolution, as the path to human freedom; at least, that is, I assume, the main message for Western men. Condensed to its essentials, the message can be summed up thus: it is the poetically cultivated man and woman in existential harmony with the creative processes of the universe who creates and deepens the path of freedom freedom, the path of genuine civilization. "We meet, in poetry," he says, "with a literal metamorphosis of the human soul into an inspired spirit of imaginative freedom."[48] And it is that "inspired spirit of imaginative freedom," expressing itself in the combined personages of philosopher-poet-sage that brings the rest of humankind more or less in alignment with that realm of our original total consciousness which Laotzu and Chuangtzu call the simple and unhewn. Thomé Fang would, I believe, agree that attunement to this realm is the wellspring of all creativity, and thus the wellspring of all civilization as a beautiful dream,

How well Chinese mind and Chinese culture, as we have it now, reflects this dream is a question I am not at all prepared to answer. Others participating in this symposium will, I hope, address this question—lest we too like certain "evyll birds" stay on the surface of things and mock the legacy of China!