【Editor’s
Note: On April 5, 2005, at the invitation of
Dr. John Cobb, Jr., a Seminar on Thomé H. Fang was
held at the Center for Process Studies.
The following supplementary materials were provided for reference, which
we believe can be shared with our global community of readership. Grateful acknowledgement is due to both Dr.
John Cobb, Jr., Director of the Center,
and Dr. John Quiring, Program Director, for their
invitation and hospitality.】
[Supplementary
for References]
Why
Thomé H. Fang?
----
A Great Eastern Ally
of
Process Thought
Presented
to
Thomé H. Fang Seminar
Center for Process Studies
School of Theology
Claremont, California
April 5, 2005
Suncrates
President
Thomé H. Fang Institute , Inc.
Mobile, Alabama , USA
www.thomehfang.com
*******************
CONTENTS
I.
Introductory
(1)
Resume
……………………………………………………..1
(2) Thomé H. Fang, the Man and His
Career …………….2
(3)
Bibliography ………………………………………………11
II. Creativism as World Philosophy
A Ninefold Characterization
...…………………………………14
III. A Prelude to Fang’s Thought:
“Three
Types of Philosophical Wisdom: Greek, European,
and Chinese
…………………………………………………….19
(1) Translators’
Introduction ………………………………….20
(2) Author’s
Preface ……………………………………………26
IV. An Epilogue:
An
Outline: Ideals of Life and Patterns of
Culture ----
Prolegomena to a Comparative Philosophy of Life
(or, Four Types of Philosophical Wisdom: Greek,
European,
Chinese, Indian) …………………………………………………80
V.
Philosophical Anthropology: Ernst Cassirer,
Max Scheler,
and Thomé Fang
…………………………………………………85
VI. Architectohnics for a Philosophy to
Come (Diagram) ……..89
VII.
A Glimpse of World Appraisals ……………………………90
*******************
RESUME
Name: Thomé H.
Fang (Fang Hsun;
personal name: Dong-mei)
Birth Date: February 9, 1899 (Lunar Calender)
Birth Place: Tongcheng, Anhui Province, China
Education: (1) First Tongcheng Middle School, Tongcheng, Anhui, China
(2) B.A. in Philosophy, Jinling University, now Nanjing University (1917-21),
Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, China
(3) M.A. in Philosophy, University of Wisconsin (1921-22), Madison, Wisconsin
(4) Graduate Studies, Ohio State University (1922-23), Columbus, Ohio
(5) Ph.D. in Philosophy, University of Wisconsin (1023-24), Madison, Wisconsin
Master Thesis: “A Critical
Exposition of the Bergsonian Philosophy of Life”
(1922);
Director: Evander Bradley McGilvary
Doctorial Dissertation: “A Comparative Study of the British and American
Neo-Realism” (1923);
Director: Evander Bradley McGilvary
Early Mentors: Clarence Hamilton,
John Dewey, J. A. Leighton, Evander Bradley McGilvary, …
Working Experience:
(1)
Associate Professor, National Wuchang University (1924-25), Wuchang, Hubei Provinve, China;
(2)
Professor, National Southeastern University (1925-27), Nanking, Jiangsu Province, China;
(3)
Professor, Central Institute of Political Sciences (1927-36), Nanking;
(4)
Professor, University of Nanking (1927-32), Nanking;
(5)
Professor, National Central University (1929-48), Nanking
& Chungking ;
(6)
Directors, Institute of Advanced Studies in Philosophy, National Central University (1938-48), Chungking;
(7)
Professor, & Chairman, Philosophy Department, National Taiwan University (1948-49). Taipei, Taiwan, ROC;
(8)
Professor (1947-69), Research Professor (1969-73), Philosophy Department,
National Taiwan University;
(9)
Chair Professor, Philosophy Department, Fu Jen Catholic University (1973-77);
(10) Visiting Professor, Philosophy
Department, State University of South Dakota (1959-60);
(11) Visiting Professor, Philosophy
Department, University of Missouri (1960-61), Columbia, Missouri;
(12) Mead-Swing Lecturership,
School of Theology, Oberlin College, Ohio (1960).
(13) Distinguished Visiting
Professor, Philosophy Department, Michigan State University (1964-66), East Lanson, Michigan;
International
Academic Conferences:
(1) Participating in East-West
Philosophers’ Conference on “The World and the Individual” (1964), University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI;
(2) Participating in East-West
Philosophers’ Conference on “The Alienation of Man” (1969), University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI;
(3) Participating in the 5th
Centennial Symposium on Wang Yang-ming (1972), University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI.
Awards:
Twice awarded “the Medal of Distinguished Service
Professor” by Ministry of Education, Republic of China, 1956 & 1964.
Date
of Passing: July
13, 1977,
Taipei, Taiwan, ROC.
*******************
THOMÉ
H. FANG, THE MAN AND HIS CAREER
---- A PROFILE
Suncrates, 1978
On
being asked about the philosophical affiliation he belonged to by some curious
Westerners at the 1964 East-West Philosophers’ Conference, Honolulu, Hawail,
our philospher replied with the above cited
self-portrait. “How is it possible?”
asked again the enquirer. ‘That is a fact!”
Thus, he answered, so laconically.
Indeed, it is.
1. Family Background
Born on
February 9, 1899 (according to the Lunar Calendar) of an illustrious family in
Tong Cheng, An-hui, China, that has produced a galaxy
of eminent scholars, thinkers, and men of letters in Chinese classics,
including several Royal Tutors at the Imperial Palace during the Ming and Qing Dynasties (such as Fang Gongcheng,
Fang Guanchen, etc.), Thomé
H. Fang -- whose official name was Fang Xun. personal
name: Dong-mei, meaning thereby “Eastern Beauty”-- is
the sixteenth generation descendant of Fang Bao
(1668-1749), a towering figure in the literary world of the seventeenth century
China, founder of the famous Tong Cheng Movement in
the history of Chinese literature.
Yet
another even greater figure among his ancestors was Fang Yizhi,
his fourteenth ancestor, one of the Four Young Lords of the late Ming Dynasty,
son of Fang Kongzhao, Defence
Minister at the time. Fang Yizhi was a pioneer in modern science; he was acquaintanced with several eminent Catholic missionary
figures, such as Rev. Methew Rici. Yi-zhi was truely a full-personality: he was thoroughly versed in
Chinese classic scholarship, versatile in the fine arts, too, e.g., in poetry,
calligraphy, painting, music, phonetics, philology, and even martial arts and
military strategy. He played a leading role in the Renovation Society (Fu Shê), organized by the brilliant and rebellious Imperial University students in campagin
against the corruption at the court. A
youth friend with Zheng Cheng-gong, the national hero
who defeated the Dutches for recovery of Taiwan to the territory of China, as modern historians found
out, he had taken part in the movement of Restoration for the Ming
Dynasty. For twenty years he served as
Abbot of the Qing Yuan Temple, continuing the direct linkage
of the Chan (Zen) Sect established by the Six Patrarch
Hui-neng in the Tang Dynasty of the 7th
century. But as “the most wanted” for
Emperor Kang Xi, he ended up by suicide.
His works and thought are still assidiously
studied in Japan as subjects for many doctorial
dissertations. He is remmembered
both as a pioneer scientiest of inter-relativity and
a pioneer philosopher of Comprehensive Harmony (“quan
jun,” in his own words), a grand theme fully taken up
and developed by his ablest great descendant, our philosopher today.
Early in
his tender age, Thomé was deeply immersed in the
studies of Chinese classics; he was such a precocious boy that he could learn
by heart the entire Book of Odes while he was only three! Besides the
family cultural heritage in which he was brought up, Thomé
enjoyed the special advantage of being educated at several leading universities
both at home and abroad--an advantage which none of his illustrious forefathers
had ever enjoyed.
2.
Student Days and Activities
At sixteen he
attended the University of Nanking, a most advanced Christian
missionary institution in the capital of China. Far from being a merely
contemplative mind dwelling in the “ivory tower,” Thomé
was very active and deeply involved in the current issues and world affairs.
Even early in his student days, he was the founder of the CPS (Chinese
Philosophical Society) and became its first President. When John Dewey visited Nanking in 1920, he was the one who
gave the Welcome Speech on behalf of the Society. During the May-Fourth
Movement in 1919, he played the key-role for initiating the student movements
in Nanking and Shanghai that was soon to spread across
all Southeastern provinces of China and to spell a new shock for
the young China throughout. At the University of Nanking, Dewey became his first teacher
of the History of Western Philosophy: the ancient period. At first Thomé was
much interested in Dewey as a scholar of history of ideas, but he soon found
himself unable to appreciate Dewey’s pragmatism. Divergent in temperaments,
eventually each went his own way.
In
1918—one year before the May-Fourth Movement—when he was barely over nineteen,
along with a group of brilliant young men, such as Huang Zhongshu,
Zuo Shunsheng (who
after-wards became the President of the Chinese Youth Party), Thomé joined the Young China Association founded by Dr.
Wang Guangqi (who later became a professor of History
of Music at the University of Bonn, Germany, and died there in 1936).
Paradoxically, this Young China Association, composed of 108 members drawn from
the flower of Chinese youth in the early 20s, and intended to be a non-political
organization devoted to the cause of China modernization through social reform
rather than political revolution, turned out to be the meeting ground for all
the future leadership of various political parties that have played decisive
roles in the political scene of China ever since: for instances, Zuo Shunsheng and Lee Huang for
the Chinese Youth Party; Lee Dazhao and Mao Zedong for the Chinese Communist Party; and
a host of others for the Democratic Socialist Party founded by Dr. Carson
Chang, and the Nationalist Party formed by Dr. Sun Yat-sen.
With his literary brilliance, Thomé was elected Chief
Editor of the two journals published by the Association, The Young China and
The Young World, until 1921 when he set out for the United States for advanced studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Throughout his life he
remained non-political and non-partisan, true to the spirit and ideals on which
the Association was founded. As such he
was esteemed as its perfect member to be modelled
after.
His
coming to the United States marked a turning point in the
course of his intellectual development as a result of a crisis that might have
ended regrettably but for the generous intervention of his teacher, Dr.
Clarence Hamilton at the University of Nanking. The story runs roughly as
follows:
Brilliant
yet non-conformist at school, Thomé was so
dissatisfied with the educational policy of the University that he was
outspoken in criticism—which really irritated some of the conservative
missionary authorities. Consequently, a case was brought against him in the
faculty meeting and he was designated for dismissal or honorable withdrawal
from the school; for he was caught right on the spot as reading some Chinese
romantic novels instead of The Holy Bible during the Sunday
ceremony. Fortunately, present at the
meeting was Dr. Clarence Hamilton, who protested by proposing an alternative,
that the whole University be closed rather than have such a brilliant young man
dismissed for merely a minor breach of the school rules. For, without a sound
university educational policy, he argued, the University itself had lost all
its raison d’être! The case immediately caught the attention of University President,
Dr. Baldwin on campus, who arranged an interview with this young man, and was
so impressed with his ability and audacity, his judgment and insight, that
instead of having him dismissed, he accepted his criticism, put into practice
his suggestions after due consideration, and decided to recommend him for
advanced studies in the United States after graduation. So Thomé went to
study in the United States, first at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, then at Ohio State University at Columbus, Ohio, and finally back again to Wisconsin. His three years stay in the United States (1921-24) left a permanent
deposit in his own intellectual lore as it laid down a solid foundation for his
training in Western philosophy and culture. Forty years later—in the early
60s—when he was invited by the State Department to visit 37 of American
universities in a series of lecture tours, he did not forget to pay a visit to
his former mentor, Dr. Clarence Hamilton, then above 80, living in retirement
at home in Oberlin, OH.
Two
anecdotes that took place during his stay in the United States are worth mentioning, both
having something to do with Bertrand Russell. After his China trip in 1920-21, Russell was
invited to give a lecture at the University of Wisconsin. Thomé
and several other Chinese students paid him a visit at the hotel where he
stayed. They were so enthusiastically
engaged in discussions on various aspects of the so called “China problem,” philosophical and
otherwise, that Russell forgot the lecture appointment entirely, thus leaving
the audience waiting in the lecture hall in vain! Another event was due to Russell’s harsh and
unsympathetic criticism of Henri Bergson. During this
period Thomé was much fascinated by neo-realism that
was just in vogue; but mentally he was so conditioned that the more critical
people were of a certain figure, the more curious he became, and determined to
make a thoroughgoing study of that figure under the fire of criticism. Paradoxically, just because of Russell’s
unsympathetic criticism of Bergson, Thomé has become a passionate lover of the great French
process philosopher ever since. He presented “A Critical Exposition of the Bergsonian Philosophy of Life” as his Master Thesis to the
Philosophical Faculty at Wisconsin. One of its readers,— so the
story goes, according to his old friend Dr. Xu Guang (Ziming) — Professor Evander Bradley McGilvary, who
was an expert on Hegel, Bergson, Whitehead, and
biological sciences as well, showed it to the Graduate Faculty with the remark:
“I am wondering how many American graduate students have even his excellent
command of English, to say nothing of the substance of this brilliant study!”
The philosophical atmosphere at Wisconsin at the time was predominantly
neo-realistic and anti-Hegelian. It had been said that Professor McGilvary was once pressed so hard to give a course on
Hegel that he had to turn down the very idea by saying, “One cannot make the
same mistake twice!” This puzzled Thomé so much that
he decided to leave Wisconsin for Ohio State University, with the sole purpose in mind
to study more of Hegel under Professor J. A. Leighton, promising that he would
return as soon as he had satisfied his intellectual “itch” for
Hegelianism. In fact, he did. After one
year’s stay at Ohio State, he kept his promise by
returning to Wisconsin and completed his Doctorial
Dissertation “A Comparative Study of the British and American
Neo-Realism.” His early acquaintance
with Bergson and Hegel had provided him with a new
perspective in light of which he was in a position to see the main streams of
Chinese philosophy as a form of organicism in the
process tradition. Furthermore, his familiarity with Whitehead, especiaily the Whiteheadian
insight that ultimately philosophy is akin to poetry, had provided him with an
excellent apparatus of all the necessary terminology in terms of which he was
enabled to formulate the ultimate principles, i.e., ideas or notions of
ultimate generalities, in Chinese metaphysics, as exemplified by his middle
work The Chinese View of Life: A Philosophy of Comprehensive Harmony (1957). It appeared as a result of certain
challenging suggestions made by Sarvepalli Radharkrishnan, the chief exponent and spokesman of Indian
philosophy to the West, during his visit to Chungking, the wartime capital of China, in 1939-40. Radharkrishnan
urged Thomé to do the same for China as he was doing for India by serving as the spokeman for their respective cultural heritages.
2.
Teaching Career
In 1924, as urged by his family and friends at home, Thomé
returned to China; at twenty-five, he was male
Associate Professor of philosophy at the National Wuchang University in central China, and reassumed the Chief
Editorship for The Young China and The Young World. While teaching at Wuchang,
he was eyewitness to the first bloody split between the Nationalists and the
Communists, the rightists and the leftists, with friends on both sides. A compassionate
and warm-hearted person, he was extremely agonized and almost torn apart
within; for the first time in his life he had tasted the bitter experience of
the dirty business of Real-Politik. For the rest of
his life, he had deliberately stayed away from the hot-water of politics in a
spirit of detachment, yet nonetheless with profound compassion and deep concern
for the destiny of China and that of the whole world.
In April 1937, on the eve of the Japanese invasion of China, just three
months before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, Thomé
delivered a series of lectures as a national address to the Chinese people
broadcast nation-wide through the CBS (Chinese Broadcasting Station), titled Essentials
of Chinese Philosophy of Life, which is comparable in many aspects to Fichte’s “Address to the German Nation,” yet superior in
grandeur and sublimity.
His teaching career covers a span of over half a century 1924-77 (See
“Brief Resume” for reference). From 1937 to 1945, Thomé
had spent eight years in agony and anguish with keen awareness of the
existential sense of anxiety, sorrow and suffering. Besides his regular
teaching duties at the National Central University, he had managed to put himself
up with a farm house in the countryside in order to escape the heavy bombing
during the Japanese air raids. He applied himself, whenever possible, to the
composing of poems (nearly 1000 of them were thus produced during the wartime)
and the perusal of thousands of Buddhist Sãtras, especially the Avatamsaka (Hua Yen) School of Chinese Mah~y~naic Buddhism,which
he borrowed from a nearby Buddhist Temple. After World War II, he
returned to Nanking where he taught for about three
years at the Central University until 1948. He was made the
first Chairman of the Philosophy Department and Director of Graduate Studies in
Philosophy at the National Taiwan University following the Island’s restoration to China after fifty years of Japanese
occupation. In 1948-49, on the eve of the Communist take-over of China mainland, he proposed to save
as many as possible of the Chinese intellectuals on the mainland. Hundreds of
application letters came daily from various Chinese leading Universities.
Unfortunately, his project failed to materialize in time, victimized to the so
called academic politics in the higher educational circle. Thus numerous
distinguished scholars, e.g., Professors Liang Shuming, Shiung Shihli, Tang Yongtong, Zhu Guangqian (then Dean of Liberal Arts, National Peking
University), had to remain on the mainland, hence to suffer a series of purges
and public castigations of all sorts, especially during the terrible “Cultural Revolution”
period. Thomé was so frustrated and upset with the
whole situation that, in protest, he resigned at once his chairmanship and
directorship in the department, to be succeeded by his former student Professor
Ludwig Chung-huan Chen, the eminent Aristotelian
scholar.
3.
At the East-West Philosophers’ Conferences
In 1964 Thomé
was invited to participate the Fourth East-West Philosophers’ Conference at Honolulu, Hawaii, heading the Chinese delegates
as a substitute for Hu Shih, the famous Dewey
disciple in China. Thomé
presented “The World and the Individual in Chinese Metaphysics,” which had won
great admiration from men like D. T. Suzuki; and his dramatic Chan styled
debate with Professor J. A. Findlay from England cut, as it were, quite a spicy
anecdote for the whole conference.
After the conference, D. T. Suzuki (then above 93) sent his greeting card
through his personal secretary Miss Mihoko Okamura to
Thomé at the hotel. These two great minds of the East
met, for the first and the last time as well, at the Academy Museum of
Honolulu, enjoying the beauty and charm of the Japanese-styled garden there.
Suzuki told Thomé that he was working hard on the
translation with commentaries of some classical works of the Hua Yen (Avatamsaka) School of Mah~y~na Buddhism; perhaps he would not
die until he had completed the task. After his return to Taipei, Thomé often received words of greetings from Suzuki through
some Chinese graduate students (e.g., Rev. Chang) studying at the Otani University, Kamakura, Kyoto, Japan, until 1966 when
Suzuki dropped him the brief message on a post card that his task had been
nearly finished. These few words sounded so symbolic that, on first hearing, Thomé was stuck by a shock that ran through his whole
being, “Does this mean that he is going to leave ... the world?” A few days
afterwards, his apprehension was perfectly confirmed: Dr. D. T. Suzuki passed away at the age of
95.
In addition, Thomé attended both the 5th
East-West Philosophers’ Conference in 1969 on
“the Alienation of Man” and the Fifth Centenial
Anniversary Symposium in 1972 on Wang Yang-ming
sponsored by Department of Philosophy, University of Hawaii, to which he
presented respectively ‘The Alienation of Man in Philosophy, Religion, and
Philosophical Anthropology” and “The Essence of Wang Yang-ming’s
Philosophy in an Historical Perspective.”
5. Retirement
In the
summer of 1973 Thomé retired from the National Taiwan University after an unbroken record of
fifty years of distinguished service as a university professor: He had taught
five generations of Chinese philosophers and intellectuals alike. In the memory
of those who attended his lectures, spellbound by his magnetic personality and
erudite scholarship, he has remained always as a powerfully inspiring teacher:
comprehensive in perspective; thoroughgoing in treatment; elegant in
expression; penetrative in insight; and synoptic in vision. As a philosopher,
he exemplified the Spinozistic ideal: simple living
and noble thinking. As a person, he is a man of perfect sincerity and integrity
dedicated to the principle that politics should follow the ideals of culture,
not the other way around.
Professor Charles Moore of the University of Hawaii said in 1964, “Never until now
do I know who is the greatest philosopher of China.” According to O’brien Briere, the contemporary
French historian of ideas, in his Fifty
Years of Chinese Philosophy: 1898-1950, Thomé Fang will be
remembered by posterity even for his short essay “Three Types of Philosophical
Wisdom: Greek, European, and Chinese” (alone)!
In the words of Professor Lewis E. Hahn, formerly Dean of the Graduate
School, Washington University at St. Louis, Missouri, Director of Graduate
Studies in Philosophy, and Editor for Library of Living Philosophers, Southern
Illinois University, Carbondale, IL, “Any one who has exchanged just a few
words with Thomé Fang will recognize him as a great
scholar, no matter how much or how little he has published!”
A
candlelight farewell party was given in his honor in 1973, attended by hundreds
of his former pupils in Taipei. In a slightly dry and low
voice, with tears in his own eyes along with those of the young faces, in the
glow of the candleights, he said, “I have none of my
own children to pass on the torch that is in my hand; I have only my
intellectual heirs.”
Four
years later, on July 13, 1977, he passed away after seven
months of the most painful suffering caused by cancer in the lungs and liver.
His body was cremated, in acconlance with his Will,
and his ashes and bones contained in a marble urn were sunk