【Editor’s Note: The following essay is a revised version of
the author’s presentation to the First International Conference in Sinology,
1980, Academia Sinica, Taipei, published in its Proceedings, Section of Thought and Philosophy, Vol. I,
pp. 117-182, 1981. It in turn was an
expanded version of his paper presented to the First Conference on Whitehead
and Chinese Thought, 1976, co-sponsored by the Center for Process Studies,
Claremont, CA. and Colorado Women’s College, Denver, CO. Grateful acknowledgement is due to Dr. John
Cobb, Jr. and Dr. Antony Yu in
A
METAPHYSICS, RELIGION, AND
PHILOSOPHICAL
ANTHROPOLOGY:
THE
CHINESE-INDIAN-WESTERN ENCOUNTER ON
CREATIVITY
從大易生生之理看中西印思想在形上學
宗教與哲學人性論上之
高峰統會
Suncratesa
Thomé H. Fang Institute, Inc.
Mobile , Alabama , USA
Originally Presented to
The First International
Conference on Sinology
Academia Sinica, Taipei
1980
Contents
Prologue 1
I.
Introduction 2
1. The Hartshorne Thesis Revisited:
It is Time to Complete the Circle 2
2.
“Seeking the Other Half!” 6
3.
To Become? or Not To Become?
-- the Question for the
Indians 8
4.
An Archimedian Point in Comparative Philosophy 12
II.
The Status of
Creativity in the Chinese, Indian, and Western Traditions 13
III.
Creativity and
Its Religious imposts 30
1.
Is Confucianism Theistic? 32
2.
Process Theology and Its Meaning to the East 35
3.
Creation and Evolution 39
4.
The Chinese Precocious Postmodern Mentality 41
(a)
Creative
Humanism: A Ninefold Characterization
42
(b)
Value-Pervasiveness 45
(c)
A Threefold View
of Creativity: I-Ching and Whitehead 46
(d)
Creativity as
the Ultimate Category
-- A Fourfold Characterization: 48
(1)
Ontologically 48
(2)
Cosmogenetically 49
(3)
Phenomenologically 50
(4)
Charactereologically 51
(e) The Dipolar Conception of God and
Creativity
IV.
Creativity and
Its Philosophico-Anthropological Imports
57
1. Whitehead and Kang as a Point of Departure 58
2. Max Scheler & the Chinese Philosophical
Anthropology 59
3. Value, Man, and Culture 62
4. Three Ways of Approaching God 68
5. Towards a Spiritually Exalted World Community 70
Prologue
“To Be? or Not to Be?” That is the question for Hamlet and men of the West in general;
“To Become? or Not to Become?” That is the question for the Indians, Hinduists and Buddhists alike;
“To Be is To Become!”
That, for the Chinese, is not a question at all, but a conviction,
inspired by the “Vision of the Whole.”
Much of this study results
from reflections upon three theses of Charles Hartshorne and one from Max
Scheler, all to be critically clarified in the pages that follow. In both comparative philosophy and religion
it is necessary to realize that due recognition of similarities and sympathetic
appreciation of differences are equally important. As Plato once said, even the wolf deserves a
hearing; for Whitehead, contrast is the mode of synthesis. Mere difference in details, however, should
not blur our vision of unity of experiences and aspirations, nor obscure our
insight into the most feasible meeting ground for the East and West which can
be located in the multi-dimensional concept of Creativity and surveyed from
metaphysics to religion, and from religion to philosophical anthropology in
light of a world perspective. Many of
our findings will focus attention on a rich and precious common heritage of
mankind which we hope will serve as a solid basis for the construction of what
Scheler calls “a spiritually exalted world community”[1]
for ages to come.
When, after climbing a mountain in a mist, one reaches the
summit, the mist suddenly clears, the vista of the vast area below becomes
visible, and the commanding view all-around is identical in every
direction. At the beginning of this
century the well-known travelling philosopher Herman Keyserling had already
strongly advocated the importance of “Getting beyond the East and West.”[2]
But, “How?” One wonders.
That is the question -- for all of us today!
I.
Introduction
1. The Hartshorne Thesis Revisited: It’s Time to Complete the Circle!
Perhaps the best approach to the main
contentions of this paper is by way of a brief review of the Hartshorne thesis
as enunciated in two of his essays, “The Development of Process Philosophy” and
“Personal Identity from A to Z.”[3]
Such an attempt, I believe, will
yield illuminating results that will justify both the theses maintained in this
study and the calling for such a “summit meeting.”
In the first essay, Professor Hartshorne
has treated the process tendency in human thought in a historical perspective,
hence providing as an excellent point of departure for our discussions at this
Conference.
It is universally recognized that Hartshorne has not only
distinguished himself as an eminent Whiteheadian scholar, but has also played a
leading role in the initiation of a new thought movement since the 50s known as
the “process movement” in theology and philosophy. It is impacting areas such as sociology,
anthropology, aesthetics, comparative religion, psychotherapy, ecology,
futurology, postmodernism, etc. It just
may create a new intellectual climate in the West. His unique contribution to this movement
deserves high credit and commands our heartfelt admiration and
appreciation. This whole movement of
process thought, through further development, may be a great step for-ward
towards what the late Professor Charles Moore has justly called a “world
philosophical synthesis.”[4] Of such a great prospect few process
philosophers in the West have become fully aware.
In a certain sense, “The Development of Process Philosophy”
may well be regarded The Processist
Manifesto of our century, because its author has quite impressively
presented the case of process thought in human history as a whole, bringing to
light its full philosophico-religious imports for our modern age. His scope of vision stretches from the
ancient times down to the present and from the East to the West. The essay reveals the tendency of process
thought as a common theme and heritage for all humankind; it has been, and will
continue to be, shared by thinking people the world over. According to
Hartshorne, process philosophy is nothing new; or, as William James put it, but
“a new name for some old ways of thinking.”
It is a grand old idea whose origin can be traced way back to the
ancient
I refer, of course, to the leading philosophical tradition
of
That
Hartshorne has neglected such a great tradition of process philosophy in the
East despite its striking similarity with the Whiteheadian system is
unfortunate and regrettable. Recently,
Hartshorne had spoken on “Some Process Themes in Chinese Thought” at the
Conference on “Whitehead and Chinese Philosophy,”
It is noteworthy that both
Indian and European traditions are characterized notably by a
substance-oriented tendency that has preceded and accompanied process themes
for thousands of years; whereas Chinese thought, on the contrary, has from time
immemorial persisted most impressively as a grand tradition of typical process
philosophy, through and through, beginning with I-Ching: The Book of Creativity, notwithstanding that it also has
as Prelude an archaic ontology in the
form of a proto-philosophy of eternity as embodied in the symbolism of “The
Great Centricity” (“f” hence the
symbolic character “中”) in The Book of Ancient History.
We may therefore safely
maintain that, ever since the founding of the Zhou Dynasty in the 12th century
B.C., non-process philosophies have remained no more than a non-existence in
the leading trends of Chinese thought, and that the shift from the totem
of “f”
(“Great Centericity”) to that of “[” (the
“Ultimate Ultimacy,” well known as “taiji”) signifies resolutely, “Farewell, Non-process
philosophies!” This predominantly
process-oriented tendency in Chinese outlook Professor Thomé H. Fang has
attributed to the basic difference between the Western and Oriental modes of thought. Most Western philosophers, as a rule, seem to
have inhereted from their forebearers a sort of change-phobia in their
“metaphysical mood.” Thus observes Fang:
“Philosophers in the West, whenever they speak
of Being, usually posit it as some-thing given beforehand. Anything not thus given is susceptible of
falling into nothing, which is somehow a sign of dread. This metaphysical mood
tends to make ontology static.
Especially the Greeks, to whom any change would be for the worse, could
not tolerate any drift into nothing. This led most of them to the denial of
temporality in the constitution of Being, and to the dislocation of Nothing in
the world of reality together with its appearances. Let Not-Being drop into the pit of illusion! Even in the modern period the duration of
time, reduced by mathematical physics to a series of specious successions of
timeless instants, cannot really account for the continuity of change and
becoming. It is the Aristotelian
shifting “now” torn into invisibly tiny bits of nothingness. Similarly the
Hegelian macroscopic philosophy of dialectical history, dogmatically affirmed
in the form of systematic developedness, is
deprived of authentic historicity. There
is no genuine becoming in any being which has been laid out beforehand.”[8]
With regard to the process vs. non-process
tendency prevailent in philosophies East and West, the case can be summed up as
chiefly a matter of “rule and exceptions”:
“The reason for all this is
that Western ontology has been grounded on a formal logic fixed in formulas of
static identity. Plato in later
dialogues, especially in the Sophist, Bergson
in Creative Evolution, Whitehead in Process and Reality, and Heidegger in Being and Time are exceptions. These exceptions, however, prove the rule
which always applies in Oriental philosophy.”[9]
In this sense, the
independent development of a typical process philosophy by great Chinese minds
in the past is quite a unique and remarkable phenomenon in history of human
thought, in terms of homogeneity, continuity, and massiveness. Let us take a further look into the case by
reference to Hartshorne’s recent article “Personal Identity from A to Z.” At the end of this article he concludes thus
emphatically: “I repeat: it is time to join the Buddhist tradition, the most
subtle of all very old international philosophical-religious traditions.
Buddha’s insights were appreciated by his disciples, while Plato’s were half
lost immediately.”[10]
Echoing
this call of Hartshorne’s, there seems to be heard a voice as if coming from
the wilderness in the image of a tender care “that nothing be lost”; “Thou
shalt not forget the Chinese tradition!”
Here we have every good reason to believe that one would be just as
happy to see that Whitehead’s insights, no less than Buddha’s, are to be duly
appreciated by his followers. For it is
expressly stated in Whitehead’s Process
and Reality: “In this general
position the philosophy of organism seems to approximate more closely to some
strains of Indian, or Chinese, thought, than to Western Asiatic, or European
thought.”[11]
Obviously here the connective “or”
is used in the conjunctive, rather than the disjunctive, sense of the
term. In place of Hartshorne’s
statement, we venture to declare forthrightly:
“For all process philosophers in the West, it is time to join both the
Chinese and the Buddhist traditions, the two most impressive of all very old
international philosophical-religious traditions. Process philosophers all over the world,
Unite!”
2. “Seeking the Other Half”
It is
apparent, therefore, that Hartshorne’s thesis on Ikhnaton of Egypt as the
earliest process theologian and on Buddhism as the earliest process tradition
needs be revised. At any rate, however,
the honor of seniority must be duly accorded the Chinese philosophical
tradition for its approximately five to seven millennia of continuous
development, beginning with I-Ching: The Book of Creativity.
Apart
from observations on the affinity between Whitehead and Eastern thought in
general, I propose to point out specifically:
Firstly, that whitehead’s position of organism is closer to the Eastern
than the Western; secondly, that as far as its relation with Indian thought is
concerned, his process outlook is closer to Buddism than to Hinduism or
Brahmanism; and thirdly, that as far as its most fundamental aspects are
concerned, his philosophy as a whole is more congenial with the Chinese than
the Buddhist views. In brief, we
maintain: It is more Eastern than
Western, more Buddhist than Hinduist; and, above all, more Chinese than
Buddhist.
To
substantiate the first claim, one needs only refer to the Eastern vs. Western
contrast drawn by Whitehead himself in his statement “For one side makes process ultimate; the other side makes fact ultimate.”[12]
With regard to the second claim, the case
has been well settled by Hartshorne and Kenneth Inada in two publications
comparing the Buddha’s ‘anatman’ with Whitehead’s ‘actual entity’ or ‘actual
occasion.’[13]
Moreover, the Whiteheadian concept of God in terms of universal relativity
(especially in Hartshorne’s revised version, which defines God as “divine
relativity”)[14]
parallels the later Mahāyānaic concept of ‘Buddha-Nature’ in terms of
universal immanence via mutual ingression and mutual prehension characterizing
the dharma-dhatu origination. Both the
Whiteheadian and the Buddhist conceptions stand in sheer contrast to the
Hinduist view of Brahman as the Ultimate Reality in terms of eternity and
permanence. Here again, the main
difference hinges on the process vs. substance contrast: for one side makes process or Becoming ultimate; the other side makes substance or Being ultimate,
as acutely observes Whitehead.
But
when we come to consider the third claim, that fundamentally Whitehead’s main
position is nearer to the Chinese than to the Buddhist standpoint, the case
does not seem to be so obvious as in the former two, and is likely to create
more issues than it settles. For instance,
how is one to justify that Whitehead is found to be more Chinese than Buddhist,
since all these three systems have evidently one great theme in common, in that
they are all remarkably process-oriented in general outlook? Is it true that, for Buddhism as for the
other two systems, the concept of “creativity” is also one of crucial
importance and has always occupied a prominent position in their respective
theoretical schemes?
Here
we seem to be facing a sort of the Gordian Knot, if not a deadlock. And as such, it must be cut through -- with a
sure and determined hand, such that all the seemingly baffling puzzles may be
cleared up and the case seen in its true light.
A clue, however, can be found in Buddhism both as a philosophy and a
religion at once. As a philosophy,
Buddhism espouses a creativity perspective in cosmology and cosmogony, while it
adopts at the same time a nīrvāna perspective in ontology and
meontology primarily for religious reason.
We may now proceed to distinguish one persepctive from the other. By thus disentangling the hybrid character
inherent in Buddhism and contrasting it with the homogeneity of the Chinese and
Whiteheadian systems wherein the ultimate is the ground-concept of Creativity
throughout, we succeed in cutting through the Gordian knot at one stroke.
Moreover, the above
“creativity vs. nīrvāna” distinction provides us also with another
clue to the main difference between the Chinese and the Indian Buddhist way as
reflected in their value orientations and life ideals. For typical Confucian philosophers such as
Wang Chuanshan (1619-1692) and Xiong Shili (1889-1969),b the Chinese
way is characterized by (I) reverence for life as creativity in contrast to
seeking for nirvāna; (2) elucidation of Being as distinct from indulgence
in Nothingness; (3) dynamic mode of activity in stead of static mode of
inaction; (4) following human nature rather than denial of the will and curbing
of desires; added to these by Xiong is (5) great illuminancy as the alpha and
the omega of creativity in contrast to avidya as the origin of things.[15]
Such a fivefold characterization of two types of life ideals and lifestyles
marks the Chinese way as much closer to Whitehead, one of whose favorite themes
is: “Advance or decadence!”[16]
3. To Become or Not
to Become? That Is the Question for the
Indians:
The overcoming of the
traditional “nīrvāna vs. creativity” contrast begun in Buddhism by
fusing these two perspectives into a higher (indeed the highest) unity remains
a great feat for the Chinese to accomplish.
Their accomplishment in this regard was hailed by D. T. Suzuki as “one
of the wonderful intellectual achievements performed by the Chinese mind” and
was held to be “of the highest importance to the history of world thought.”[17]
I propose to dwell on this topic
at some length for both its intrinsic importance and its direct relevance to
the present study, in the hope of closing one of the greatest koans in world comparative philosophy:
namely, the case of the Chinese-Buddhist-Western convergence on Creativity. To
begin with, let us differentiate it into four salient points for further
consideration: (I) that both the Chinese and the Western process philosophies
are fundamentally alike in that they are all grounded on Creativity as the
Ultimate in the metaphysical and religious sense as well; (2) that in view of
the hybridness of Buddhism which, especially in its early form, has adopted a
“creativity” perspective in cosmology and cosmogony while committing itself to
a “nīrvāna” perspective in ontology or even meontology for religious
reason, it is nevertheless the religious concern that precedes over any
speculative or metaphysical interest in the system as a whole, as a matter of
emphasis or value, so to speak, and noticeably there is the Buddhist tendency
to transcend from the conditioned to the unconditioned, from the realm of
creativity to that of non-creativity, that is, from the realm of Becoming to
that of Being, thus orientating towards the ideal of nīrvāna as the
Buddhist “Summum Bonum.”[18] This marks Buddhism from the Western process
philosophy on the one hand and from Chinese philosophy of creativity on the
other, in spite of the process themes they share in common; (3) that since
Buddhism embodies not only a philosophy of temporality, change, and becoming in
cosmology and cosmogony, but also a philosophy of eternity, being, and
permanence in ontology or even meontology, the question of how to bridge over
the temporality vs. eternity, flux vs. permanence polarity in the evolution of
Buddhism for a millenia since the death of the Buddha sheds great deal of light
not only on this perennial issue itself, but also on what follows from it as a
corollary thesis more radical in character to be set forth in (4), that were
Buddhism to be put on equal par with the Chinese and Western process position
it must be made Chinese enough! as is best exemplified in the case of two
distinguished Chinese Schools of Buddhism, the Tian Tai and Hua Yan (the
Shadhama-pundarika and the Avatamsaka).
This last point leads to the realization that a world philosophical
synthesis as Charles Moore envisaged is possible: The necessary groundwork for this feast is to
be located in the trinity of the Chinese-Buddhist-Western insights and
reinforced by other related existential-phenomenological themes in modern philosophy. On the basis of such a solid groundwork some
important break through in world philosophy is seen to be highly feasible. Let us examine these observations each in
turn.
First
of all, let us focus on the category of the ultimate as involved in each of the
three systems. “In every philosophical theory,” says Whitehead, “there is an ultimate. In the philosophy of organism,
this ultimate is termed ‘creativity.”[19]
This is precisely the case with
Chinese philosophy. The same, however, can
hardly be said of Buddhism without due qualification. Neither the Whiteheadian
nor the Chinese system is a religion in the ordinary sense of the term, though
profoundly religious in character and key-note, with Creativity as the supreme
metaphysical principle in both.
Creativity for Chinese philosophy, as for process thought in the West,
is both the ultimate category in metaphysics and the “ultimate concern” in
religion, to use Paul Tillich’s language.
In the Chinese philosophical classics, because of the symbolic and
flexible character of the language, it is termed interchangeably ‘sheng’
(creativity), ‘sheng sheng’ (creative creativity), ‘Tian’ (Heaven), ‘Dao’ (the
Way), ‘Tian-Dao’ (the Way of Heaven), ‘Qian-yuan’ (principle of creative
origination), ‘cheng’ (authenticity itself), ‘xin’ (mind), ‘xing’ (nature), and
the most troublesome Confucian concept, ‘Ren,’c which defies any
literal translation and is to be grasped ontologically in terms of Creativity
Itself and axiologically as the Confucian Summum Bonum, as dynamically and
creatively conceived in the process view of Reality as Goodness in the
making. In sum, “Ren” represents the
supreme principle of the axiological and ontological unity in Chinese philosophy,
characterized by its value-centric tendency in ontology, caIled doctrine of
continuation of Goodness for fulfillment of Nature (“ji shan cheng xing” in
Chinese).d
Whitehead’s
view of Creativity sounds so congenial to the Chinese mind that much of what he
has said about this ultimate principle may well be adopted as the fittest and
finest rendering of the Chinese insights into the elegance of his Victorian
English. On the other hand, much of the
great insights in Chinese process philosophy cloaked in the peculiarly
“elusive, vague,” symbolic, non-technical, natural language, paradoxically, can
all be rendered intelligible and explicit in light of such an allegedly
“muddle-headed” system as Whitehead’s.
The task of formulating the essentials of Chinese metaphysics in the
Whiteheadian terminology has been admirably accomplished by Professor Thom¾ H.
Fang in his earlier book The Chinese View
of Life: The Philosophy of Comprehensive Harmony (1956) to be succeeded by
his posthumous opus magnum, Chinese
Philosophy; Its Spirit and its Development (1981). The Chinese-Whiteheadian affinity on
Creativity, to be sure, is not a matter of parallel notions in letter, but in
spirit, that is, in mentality (mind-set) and world perspective. Cassirer seems to have underrated his case
when he states that “the real difference between languages is not a difference
of sounds and signs, but one of world perspectives (Weltansichten).”[20] This enlightening
remark of Cassirer’s should be borne in mind by any comparative philosophers on
cross-cultural problems.
To
indicate the similarity between the Chinese and the recent Western process
views of Creativity, I may paraphrase in the Whiteheadian language some archaic
key notions in the Confucian Commentaries on Appendices to I-Ching and compare them to statements
in Process and Reality as follows:
For the ancient Chinese sages, Reality is seen “in light of the perpetually
Creative Creativity, which manifests Itself in the alI-encompassing process of
cosmic transformation in due measure and proportion”; and is to be conceived
“under the image of a tender care,” “enabling all things to complete and fulfil their own nature,
such that nothing be lost”; thus functioning as the supreme unifying principle
of all existences in the universe in dynamic operations.”(“sheng sheng zhi wei
yi”; “fan wei tian di zhi hua er bu guo; qu cheng wan wu er bu yi”; “tian xia tong gui er shu tu, yi zhi er bai lu”; or “tian xia zhi
dong zhen fu yi”; or with Wang Pi, “Tong zhi you zung; hui zhi you yuan.”)e The same ideas can be found in Whitehead’s
words as follows:
“Creativity is the
universal of universals characterizing the ultimate matter of fact. It is that
ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively,
become the one actual occasion, which is the universe disjunctively. ... The
ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction,
creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction.”[21]
“The
process of creation is the form of unity in the universe.”[22]
While
maintaining that “Creativity is without a character of its own,”[23]
Whitehead, without realizing it, is stating a typically Chinese theme as
emphasized in the forementioned Confucian Commentaries:
“Creativity is without a substance of its own, of no simple location in
space, its functioning is confined to no particular directions whatsoever”;
(“shen wu fang; yi wu ti”; “yi wu si; wu wei.”)f While describing the nature of God as an
exemplification of Creativity to be conceived only under the images of (l) “a
tender care that nothing be lost”; or (2) “infinite patience.” “He does not
create the world, he saves it; or, more accurately, he is the poet of the
world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and
goodness”;[24]
again unaware to himself perhaps, Whitehead is restating the Chinese conception
of the Way of Heaven as embodied in the I-Ching,
and the Book of Odes, for
instances, “qu cheng wan wu er bu yi” in the former case, and “wei tian zhi
ming, wu mu pu yi”g in the latter.
In neither case is there any need for translation, for the same ideas
have already been excellently “translated” by Whitehead himself, and could not
be put any better otherwise. The grasp
of the nature of Heaven in light of the image of a tender care or infinite
patience, rather than that of a creator, is a great poetic vision from which
derived all the Confucian metaphysical wisdom,[25] charged with religious imports crystallized into profound
insights, e.g., insight into the “creatively creative creativity”as the “really
real reality” in face of the “mysteriously mysterious mystery,” the mystery of
Creativity Itself.
So
much for the Chinese-Whiteheadian comparison in respect of the concept of
Creativity and its fundamental status both as the ultimate metaphysical
principle and the ultimate concern in its full religious implication. May this clarification serve as a clue to the
claim made above as regards the Chinese-Whiteheadian similarity in the most
fundamental aspects.
4. An
Archimedian Point in Comparative Philosophy
The translation
of “I-Ching” into “The Book of Changes” indeed is quite as
unfortunate as the labelling of the typically Whiteheadian position as “process
philosophy,” because in either case the title fails to convey the full import
as intended and creates instead the somewhat misleading impression that is
often associated indiscriminately with all process philosophers. For example, I have heard it said in the
academics that the process philosophers are those for whom everything comes and
goes, and nothing stays and holds, hence no “Truth” in the sense of what is
permanent and holds always. This may be
said of process philosophers of the Heraclitean type, certainly not of the
Whiteheadians, nor even of Plato in his later Dialogues. The inadequacy of
labels in this particular case is due to “deficiencies of language” rather than
“weakness of insight.”[26] For the moment, suffice it to point out that,
properly understood, “I-Ching”should
be rendered by “The Book of Creativity,”
just as Whitehead’s Process and Reality, should
read “Process as Reality.” Get rid of this ugly word “and” and replace
it with the beautiful “as.” “And,” “and,” how many evils (e.g., vaious kinds of
vicious bifurcations) have been done in thy name in the entire history of
Western thought! Whatever reservations
this may provoke, let us bear in mind above all that one of Whitehead’s great
insights lies in the notion of “prehensive unification”in terms of ingression
of “eternal objects” into actual occasions in the realm of events and the
superjective aims of each actual individual entity towards the realm of reason
(and from there towards the Most High).
This parallels the Chinese doctrine of interpenetrative unification by
mutual prehensions. (“xiang ji xiang ru, hu che jiao rong, pang tong tong guan.”) h With
the titles of the I-Ching and Process and Reality thus clarified so as
to suggest the central notion of Creativity
as Reality for one and Proces as
Reaslity for the other, we will be in a better position to appreciate what
Professor David Hall meant by “the meeting of the twain,”[27]
to rid of the cliche of Kipling’s, which has been resounding in the
Western ears for almost a century. But,
in my opinion, such as encounter on Creativity between the East and West could
be further dramatized as “the seeking for the other half” in the Platonic sense
(The Symposium), though “the meeting
of the twain” indicates an experience that indeed is thrilling enough in
itself, yet nevertheless it may not be so productive or inducing as the Platonic
metaphor with all its suggestiveness. We
have now located for the first time perhaps an “Archimedian Point” in the world
of comparative philosophy.
II. The Status of Creativity in The Chinese, Indian, and Western Traditions
In
approaching Buddhism one must, as hinted earlier, adopt two distinct yet
related perspectives: the creativity perspective and the nīrvāna
one. Also we have mentioned that were
Buddhism to be put on equal par, in terms of degrees of similarity, with the
Chinese and Whiteheadian process philosophies in the most fundamental aspects,
it must be made Chinese enough. In this
section we attempt to justify this claim by reference to the status of
Creativity in these three grand traditions.
Needless to say, the sinicization of Buddhism is a story far too long to
be retold here, and we must cut a long story short. A clue, however, is available: How can the
creativity perspective and the nīrvāna one be fused into one seamless
whole? And this is precisely what has
actually happened in China, to the effect that Buddhism is made not only to
speak Chinese, but even with a Chinese accent and, in addition, with a
Whiteheadian accent if rendered properly into English!
In
fact, the problem of the polarity between the two perspectives, or put differently,
between the one and many, temporality and eternity, flux and permanence,
becoming and being, etc., is a moot problem in the philosophical traditions of
the East and West alike (e.g., the problem of Chorismos for Plato). But,
Have we been aware that, if thought out and thought aright, it proves at most a
pseudo-problem of one’s own making! Let
us first take a closer look at the case of Buddhism in its early development.
The
multifarious nature of Buddhism is well recognized in the West: it has been
differently characterized by different viewers.
For instances, Whitehead sees in Buddhism “a most colossal example in
history of applied metaphysics.” “Christianity took the opposite road. It has always been a religion seeking a
metaphysics, in contrast to Buddhism which is a metaphysics generating a
religion.”[28] In
the words of Theodore de Bary, Buddhism is “essentially a metaphysical system
linked to a method of applied psychology.”
For Edward Conze, it is “dialectical pragmatism with a psychological
turn.”[29] Its great psychotherapeutic insights have
impressed Western psychologists, such as Carl lung, Erich Fromm, and Abraham
Maslow, etc., to mention a few.[30] Each of the above characterizations
throws light on our understanding of certain essential aspects of Buddhism in
general. But it is important to
recognize that Buddhism persists primarily as a religion. It is a religion, but more than a mere system
of rituals and dogmas; a philosophy, but more than a mere system of
concepts. It is the embodiment of both,
thus making poasbile the way of self-fulfillment by self-cultivation, that is,
self-education, par excellence. It aims primarily and ultimately at the
teaching of a certain way of life, an enlightened way of life, so to speak,
inspired by compassion and love and guided by wisdom and commitment. The ethical motivation, psychological
insights, philosophical outlook, dialectical method, the paradoxical and even
“bizzare” techniques as employed in the Chan (Zen) Sect, are all to be taken
into account as what the Chinese Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi calls “the bait
for the fish.”[31] Once you get the fish, forget about the
bait! To the question why, in addition
to the “creativity” perspective as adopted in cosmology and cosmogony for a
world theory, is there the need for the “nīrvāna” perspective in
religion? The answer from the Buddhist
standpoint, I assume, would be: “Man cannot live on a world theory alone.” And
the tendency to transcend from the realm of becoming to that of being, from the
changing world of flux to the eternal world of permanence, from here to
eternity, as we might say, is more pronounced in Buddhism than in any other
religions of Asia, and perhaps throughout the world. As Whitehead has put it, “Buddhism, like
Christianity, teaches a doctrine of escape.”[32]
-- though a statement that may provoke controversies. But, philosophically
considered, this demand for a pure ontology of eternity for religious reason
creates one of the biggest problems in metaphysics -- the same problem that has
so bafflingly faced Plato, namely, the problem of Chorismos (separation) between the phenomenal and the noumenal
worlds. The threefold mark of Buddhism indicates clearly the Buddhist tendency
towards relief: (1) impermanence (anitya) of all events; (2) no-self
(anātman) of all existences; (3) universal suffering (duhkha) of all
constituents of being; added to these is the fourth aspect, (4)
“nīrvāna,” thus making the fourfold mark of the position genuine of
Buddhism.i The concept of
“nīrvāna”is tied up with that of
“duhka.” And the doctrine of
pratītya-samutpāda (dependent or Relational origination) implies and
is implied by the doctrine of anatman, both pointing to the notion of
sūnyāta (emptiness or opennes).
It is seen that the notion of “pratītya-samutpāda” as the
Buddhist equivalent to the Whiteheadian “creative process” is set in contrast
to the notion of “nīrvāna.”Hence the dualist view of the realm of
samskrita dharmas vs. the realm of asamskrita dharmas, that is, the realm of
Creativity vs. the realm of Non-Creativity, within the early Buddhist
framework, in spite of the Buddha’s original insights as embodied in Primordial
Buddhism, especially as enunciated in the Avatamsaka
Sūtra (The Flowery Splendor Sūtra; or The Flower Ornament Treatise),j which is said to be
beyond the comprehesion of the majority of his immediate disciples.
Since
the introduction of Buddhism into China in the first century, the development
of the Buddhist speculative metaphysics in confluence with the Chinese
philosophical tradition, especially the Confucian and Taoist schools, has
within the span of five hundred years issued in splendid results due to the
ingenuity of several distinguished Chinese monks. Notably, Dao-sheng (374-434),
Seng Zhao (348-414), Hui Yuan (523-592) , and Du Shun (557-640),k
the first founder of the Hua Yan School.
Seng Zhao’s great contribution was his interpretation, from the
perspective of Taoist metaphysics, of the philosophy of supreme wisdom as
formulated in four doctrines presented in the famous Zhao-Treatise. They are: (1) the correlative view of motion and
rest; (2) the unitary view of being and nothingness: (3) the supreme wisdom
(prajñā) as knowledge of no-knowledge, and (4) the namelessness of
nīrvāna.l They exemplify to a superior degree the
typically Chinese trans-dualistic mode of thought. Dao Sheng surprised his religious comrades by
anticipating the Buddha’s doctrine of universal participation of Buddha-Nature
even before the Mahā-pārinīrvāna
Sūtra was translated into Chinese.
His bold assertion that all sentient or non-sentient beings participate
in Buddha-Nature (not excepting even the “icchantika,” the infidel) was
perfectly confirmed by the words of the Buddha himself as stated in the Sūtra itself translated a few years
later, while he arrived at this insightful comprehension purely on the basis of
the Confucian teachings on the perfectibility of human nature, especially
Mencius’ doctrine of sagehood.
Hui
Yuan is of crucial importance for the development of Mahāyāna
Buddhism in China. For almost a thousand
years since the death of the Budhha, the tension between the
nīrvāna-oriented and the creativity-oriented perspectives has remained
unsolved, even within the Mahāyānaic theoretical framework. The nīrvāna view, however, is
emphasized in defiance of the creativity one by opposing the world of process
to that of reality. This
nirvana-oriented tendency is represented by what may be called the Mahāpari-nīrvāna system,
based mainly on the Mahāpārinīrvāna
Sūtra and the Saddharma-pundarīka
Sūtra,m whereas
the creativity-oriented tendency in gradually refined versions is represented
by what may be titled as the Tathāgata-Garbha
system (Teaching “the matrix of the
Thus-Come”), supported by a host of important classic Sūitras as taught
especially in the Yogācāra (the Consciousness-Only) Sect, including
the Yogācāra-Bhumi Sūtra, the
Mahāyāna-Sampārigraha
Sūtra, the Lankāvatāra
Sūtra, the Sūndhi-Nirvo-canna Sūtra, the Srimala Sūtra, the Madhyānta-Vibhanga, the Vijñāpti-Siddhi, the Vi-jñāpti- Matrata-Vimsika, the Vijiiapri-Marrara-Trimsika, etc. The gap between these two systems, however,
was bridged over by the appearance at this juncture (the 5-6th centuries) of
the Awakening of Faith in the
Mahāyāna Doctrine;n its authorship and translatorship,
according to tradition, were attributed to Asvaghosa (ca. 100 A. D.) and
Paramartha (in 554) respectively. But
the authenticity in both cases turns out to be highly questionable on the
grounds (1) that, stylistically considered, it reads so fluently and
beautifully Chinese with no traces of the clumsy style so typical of any other
translation works done by the same “translator,” Paramartha; (2) that there had
been found no Sanskrit version in India until many years later when the great
Chinese monk Xuan Zhuang (596-644) , at the request of the Indian Buddhists,
undertook the task of translating it into Sanskrit under the title of the Mahāyāna-sraddhi-utpadda.[33]
It is evidently a forgery, but a
masterpiece, unique of its own kind.
Philosophically considered, the great significance of this masterpiece
of forgery (whose real authorship still remains unknown) lies in the fact that
it shows the Chinese genius of harmonization has reasserted itself in
appropriation of the Buddhist thought by recasting the latter in a typically
Chinese mould and fusing various streams into one unified whole the two
persistently antagonistic traditions in the Mahāyānaic Buddhism at
the sacrifice of neither: the philosophy of eternity as represented by the Mahāparinīrvāna tradition
on the one hand and the philosophy of creativity (pratītya-samutpāda) as represented by the Tathāgata-Garbha tradition on the
other. Both the nīrvāna perspective and the creativity perspectives
are equally affirmed in terms of importance and are treated as two aspects of
one and the same True Reality (Bhūtatathatā) called the Comprehensive
Realm of One-Truth or One-Mind as seen in light of what is typical of the
Chinese way of looking at the world, the dynamic (process) view of reality and
the functional view of substance. Here
the key notion is that of manifestation: The relation between process and
reality, function and substance, is interpreted in the Buddhist’s favorite metaphor
as one between the waves and the sea itself.
Just as the waves are said to be the manifestation of the sea itself, so
is process said to be the manifestation of reality itself, functionally considered, of course.
Apart from the sea there are no waves; and apart from the waves there is
no sea to be seen at all. Hence, the
solution or dissolution at one stroke of the moot problem of the One and the
Many. In The Awakening of Faith it is stated thus:
In the One Mind we may
distinguish two aspects, The one is the Mind as thusness (tāthāta),
the other is the Mind as life-and-death (utpadanirrodha). Each in itself
constitutes all things, and both are so closely interrelated that one cannot be
separated from the other.
What is meant by the
Mind as Thusness (i. e. , Reality) is the oneness of the totality of things,
the great, all-including whole, the quintessence of the doctrine. The Mind as birth-and-death comes forth (as
the law of causation) from the Tathāgāta’s womb. But the mortal (i.e., birth-and-death) and
the immortal (i.e., Thusness) coincide with each other.[34]
This
passage abounds in germinating ideas that are to characterize the subsequent
developement of Mahāyāna Buddhism on the Chinese soil. For instances, “interrelatedness,”
“all-inclusive ness,” “the oneness of the totality of things,”
“constitutiveness or interpenetrativeness of flux and permanence,” etc. It points to anew direction. Yet how
Spinozistic in approach and Whiteheadian in tone! Just replace “Mind” by “Creativity,” “two
aspects” by “eternal objects and the actual occasions,” or more specifically,
“the pole of mental prehension and the pole of physical prehension.”
The Awakening of Faith, in the truest sense, is a work that has awakened the best
philosophical minds of China and India from their dogmatical slumber either in
the nīrvāna-oriented or in the creativity-oriented traditions. It awakens a new faith, a new hope. A greater
break-through along this line of thought is made by Hui Yuan who, on the basis
of the enlightening insights derived therefrom, undertook to revise radically
the traditional doctrine of relational origination in all its previous forms as
taught in the Yogācāra tradition, and instead he proposed the
doctrine of universal relational rrigination (pratītya-samutpāda by Bhutathatā or dharmakaya. There are four types of the doctrine of
relational originationo all together: (1) relational origination by
karmatic causation; (2) relational origination by alāya-Vijñāna
(i.e., transformation through the store-consciousness); (3) relational
origination by the Tathāgāta-Garbha (i.e., transformation through the
matrix of the Thus-Come); and finally, (4) universal relational origination by
the Bhutathatā. Thus the original
separation between the realm of the samskrita dharmas vs. that of the
asamskrita dharmas is seen in a new light as perfectly integrated. That the limitations of the doctrines of the
first three types must be broken down thoroughly is the main idea which Hui
Yuan has advanced in his “Exposition of the Meaning of Mahāyāna”
(Chapter XX). From the aII-comprehensive
perspective, the original one-sided process philosophy in traditional Buddhism
must be reconstructed.
This
new doctrine of universal relational origination initiated by Hui Yuan has
become the real point of departure for the Hua Yan School founded by Du Shun,
“developed by Zhih Yan (602-668), elaborated by Fa Zang (643-720), and further
expounded by Cheng Guan (760-820) and Zong Mi (d. 841).”[35]
Du Shun calls it “doctrine of
infinite relational origination (wu-jin yuan-qi),p which may be
subtitled in the Whiteheadian language as “doctrine of infinite
co-prehension.” This is the Chinese
philosophy of infinitude, originating in I-Ching:
the Book of Creativity and developed by Zhuangzi, in Buddhist dress. Du Shun is such a great philosophical mind
with synoptic vision that he is able to stand on the shoulders of his
precedessors, particularly Hui Yuan. The great significance of his contribution
to Chinese Buddhism lies in (a) relegation in proper order of the essentials of
various doctrines into a well organized comprehensive system and (b) three
grand views of the dharma-dhatu. As
regards the former program of proper relegation of Buddhist doctrines through
critical classification, we need only mention that ten tenets are subsumed in a
masterful fasion under five principles:[36]
(1) the existence of dharmas (events) and the non-existence of atman
(substantive self-nature), corresponding to the teaching of the
Hināyāna School (which includes six tenets) ; (2) samsara as
nīrvāna, i. e. , samskrita as asamskrita (process as reality),
corresponding to the fundamental teachings of the Mahāyāna School;
(3) interpenetrativeness of reason and dharmas (events), corresponding to the
consummatory teachings of the Mahāyāna School; (4) transcendence beyond
words and contemplation, corresponding to the abrupt teachings of the Chan
(Zen) Sect of the Mahāyāana School; (5) the Hua Yan samadhi
(meditation on the coalescence of subject and object as the consummate wisdom),q
corresponding to the round (perfect) teachings of the Mahāyāna
School. Thus it is seen that on the
basis of these five categorical principles Du Shun has relegated into proper
order all the essentials of Buddhism, both of the Hināyāna and the
Mahāyāna Schools, and that the Hua Yan position is characterized by
all those “fundamental, abrupt, consummatory, and round, i. e. , perfect”r
phases of Mahāyāna Buddhism.
In sum, the Hua Yan School represents theoretically the culminating
unification of the entire Buddhist tradition.
The
true greatness of Du Shun as a chorismatic founder of a new sect in Buddhism
lies not so much in his establishment of the Hua Yan School in China that
opened up a new path in philosophy and religion as in his being able to
formulate synoptically his far reaching insight and great vision into a few
key-premises whereby the entire course of the subsequent movement of this
school is charted out and its central themes defined accordingly. As J. Takakusu well observed, “The foundation-stone
of the Kegon (Hua Yan) doctrine was laid down once for all by the famous Du
Shun.”[37] This very foundation-stone is none other than
the “three grand views of dharma-dhatu”as Reality-in-ltself: namely, (1) the
true void as the ultimate reality-in-itself; (2) the interpenetrativeness of reason
and events and (3) the dovetailing of all events in the form of comprehensive
co-inherence and universal co-prehensions.
The subsequent progress of the Hua Yan School consists of further
elucidation and elaboration of the insights implied in Du Shun’s three grand
views, particularly by his immediate successors, Zhi Yan, Fa Zang, Cheng Guan,
and Zong Mi. It is therefore no
exaggerating to say that the entire tradition of the Hua Yan system consists of
but a series of footnotes to Du Shun, its progenitor, whose towering stature in
the world of speculative philosophy remains unsurpassed. As regards the theoretical scheme of the Hua
Yan philosophy, such as the doctrine of the fourfold realm of dharmas (events),
doctrine of perfect harmony of sixfold characteristics of all events, and the
ten tenets on profound mysterys (as the subdivisions of the five
principles mentioned above), no detailed account will be attempted here. To illustrate the striking similarity between
Whitehead and the Hua Yan system, one may take as an example the doctrine of
the fourfold realm of dharmas. The whole
universe, according to this doctrine, is a fourfold realm of events by virtue of
co-inherence and co-prehension: It involves (a) the differential rearm of
events; (b) the intergrative realm of reason; (c) the interpenetrative realm of
reason and events; and (d) the interlacing realm of all events.t In the main, the differential realm of events
corresponds to the Whiteheadian world of physical objects by way of physical
prehension. The integrative realm of reason corresponds to the Whiteheadian
world of eternal objects by way of mental prehension. The interpenetrative
realm of reason and events corresponds to the Whitehedian world of actual
occasions. And the interlacing realm of
all events corresponds to the Whiteheadian world of the nexi of actual
occasions mutually prehending through concrescence and integrated into higher
synthesis?[38]
Both in Whitehead and Hua Yan philosophy,
the tendency towards the organismic whole by co-prehensive unification is
evident, and in both cases, the grand presupposition is the principle of
Interpenetration of all events (functionally considered); the principle of
mutual ingression of all events (substantially considered); hence the
ontological principle, “Apart from events, no reason”(shih wai wu li),u or as Whitehead puts
it, “No actual entity, then no
reason”; and, above all, the principle of One-Many: for Hua Yan, it is the idea
of “One as Many, and Many as One” (by mutual ingression, “xiang
qi”),v and of “All in One
and One in All” (by mutual prehension or interpenetration, “xiang ru”;w whereas, for Whitehead, it is the ultimate principle of
Creativity “by which the Many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the
one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively.” A remarkable difference, however, exists between Whitehead
and the Hua Yan system. The former is asymmetrical whereas the latter is
symmetrical in the doctrine of prehension, as pointed out independently by
Professors Hartshorne and Thomé H. Fang.[39]
In regard to Du Shun’s three
grand views of dharma-dhatu, a student of Whitehead and process philosophy may
perceive immediately that of all the three grand views, even the first one, on
“the true void as the ultimate reality-in-itself,” is no less Whiteheadian than
the other two. In the theoretical scheme
of Hua Yan philosophy, this cardinal principle of the “true void” is further
elaborated to show:[40]
(a) that the worlds of
physical properties can be dissolved into the nature of the void, just as the
phenomena are transmuted into the noumena; (b) that the void as the ultimate
reality is constitutive of, and identifiable with, the assemblage of purified physical
phenomena; (c) that the void and the physical are mutually congruent; and (d)
that eventually, after the inpenetrable inerita of the physical is explained
away in terms of the efficacy of mental and spiritual transmutations and
through the insinuation of the ontic essence -- the true nature of the void --
into the physical all one-sided characterizations in respect of the physical
and the void are transcended in the highest integral truth of the Middle Path.x
Bearing
this passage in mind, we may now turn to Whitehead for further confirmation. We
find that the above fourfold characterization of the true void as the Ultimate
Reality is, to an amazing degree, well echoed by passages in Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas, where he relates
Epicurus’ doctrine of “The Great Void” to Plato’s doctrine of “The Receptacle.” It is only to be noticed
that what Plato terms “The Receptacle” and what Epicurus terms “The Great
Void,” Whitehead terms “Process”-- which is but another name for “Creativity.”
And just a few lines later he directs attention to the “Space-Time”in modern
mathematical physics, concluding emphatically:
“At the present moment, physical science is nearer to it (Plato’s
doctrine) than at any period since Plato’s death.”[41]
To sum up: the Platonic “Receptacle,” the Epicurean “Great Void,” the
Whiteheadian “Creativity,” as well as the Buddhist “True Void,” the Confucian
“Yu-Zhou,” and the Taoist “Way,” are just different names used to designate no
more and no less that great unifying principle of the Uni-Verse (conceived as a
harmonized and harmonizing whole) , whose function “is the imposition of a
unity upon the events of Nature.”[42]
For the present, we may just lay down the
following approximations: The “True Void” (Du Shun) = The “Great Void”
(Epicurus) = The “Receptacle” (Plato) = “Process”or “Creativity” (Whiteheadian)
= “Space-Time” (in modern mathematical physics since Planck and Einstein) =
“Yu-Zhou”y (“Cosmos” in Chinese) = “Xuan Bin”z (the
mysterious matrix of creativity in the imag of the Great Female, Par
Excellence” in Laozi). Both Plato’s
and Eplcurus’ doctrines are said to be “emphatIc assertions of a real
communication of ultimate actualities.”
“This communication,” remarks Whitehead,
“is not accidental. It is part of the essential nature of each
physical actuality that it is itself an element qualifying the Receptacle, and
that the qualification of the Receptacle enter into its own nature. In itself, with the various actualities
abstracted from it, the Receptacle participates in no forms, according to
Plato.”[43]
Yet
while speaking of the Receptacle in Plato’s metaphorical language as, e. g.,
“the fostermother of all becoming,” “a natural matrix for all things,” “the
matrix for all begettings,” “invisible, formless, and all receptive,” “bare of
all forms,” etc., Whitehead points out,
“It receives its forms
by reason of its inclusion of actualities, and in a way not to be abstracted
from those actualities. The Receptacle,
as discussed in Plato’s Timaeus, is
the way in which Plato conceived the many actualities of the physical world as
components in each other’s natures.”[44]
In
short, “It is Plato’s doctrine of the immanence of Law, derived from the mutual
immanence of actualities. It is Plato’s
doctrine of the medium of intercommunication.”
“We
speak in the singular of The Universe, of Nature, of fusiV which can be translated as Process. There is the one
all-embracing fact which is the advancing history of the one Universe. This community of the world which is the matrix for all begetting, and whose
essence is process, with retension of connectedness, this community is what
Plato terms The Receptacle. .... The space-time of modern mathematical physics,
conceived in abstraction from the particular mathematical formulae which
applies to the happenings in it, is almost
exactly Plato’s Receptacle. .... Thus, as Plato declares, space-time in
itself is bare of all forms.”[45]
The
above quotation from Whitehead is enlightening indeed, although the reader may
well safeguard himself against any possible Whiteheadian twist of Plato, if he
so wishes. But that is not our chief concern here. At any rate, it sounds quite an Adventure of Ideas, as the title of the
work properly indicates. He has
unknowingly adventured into the intellectual kingdom of the
(1) The principle of the ‘True Void” in the Hua Yan School is
interchangeable with the Whiteheadian “Creativity” as well as Plato’s
“Receptacle,” in the sense that they have all espoused the idea that “The
process of creation is the form of unity of the Universe.”
(2) The Buddhist “Middle Path” can be related to the
Platonic-Whiteheadian “Medium of Intercommunication”; also the same can be said
of the Chinese notion of “the Great Concentricity as the Grand Norm as well as
the Ultimate Ultimacy”aa (as first set forth in the Book of Ancient History); it is to be
noted that all these, the “Middle Path,” the “Medium of Intercommunication,” and
the “Great Concentricity” are notions that suggest the idea of “the principle
of the unity of the Universe” and, as such, must be taken in their full
methodologico-cosmologico-axiologico-ontologico-meontological sen-ses. Hence, the proper name of “
(3)
The key-notion in all these cases is the idea of the immanence of Law and that
of mutual immanence: between the phenomenal and the noumenal, the physical and
the conceptual, the realm of flux and the realm of permanence, the physical
properties and the ontic essences, there is always the medium of intercommunication, which accounts for the unity of
polarities, whether called the Void in the Buddhist-Epicurean terms, or the
Receptacle in the Platonic terms, or Process or Creativity in the Whiteheadian
terms.
(4)
Such a Whiteheadian adventure of ideas can be extended to both the Confucian
and the Taoist realms of thought: for instances, the notion of “Space-Time” in
modern mathematico-physical sciences is equivalent to the Chinese notion of “yu
zhou” (literally, “Space-Time” as a unified field of the Cosmos) ; and the
Platonic notion of the Receptacle as “the fostermother of all becoming,” “the
natural matrix for all begetting,” “invisible, formless, and all-receptive,”
“bare of all forms,” imposing “a common relationship on all that happens,” yet
without imposing “what that relationship shall be,” is precisely a twin-concept
to the Taoist “Xuan Bin” (in the image of “the Great Female, par excellence” described in The Works
of Laozi)[46] as “the invisible, inaudible,
intangible,” “the Great Form without forms,” “the great Shape without shape;”
“the Great Natural Matrix,” “the Root of Heaven and Earth whereby all things in
the Universe are begot,” appearing as if “the all-receptive,” yet “the
all-completing,” characterized by “creation without possession, action without
self-assertion, development without domination”;ac but, for lack of
a better term, it is termed “The Way” (“Dao” in Chinese); nevertheless, “Dao”
or its other equivalents such as the Confucian “Ren” or the “Way of Heaven,”
are all interchangeable terms for the ultimate metaphysical principle of Life
designated as “Creative Creativity.”ad
(5)
While characterizing the entire tradition of European thought as “consisting of
a series of footnotes to Plato,”[47] Whitehead, whose own system is no
exception to it, refers particularly to the Platonic cosmology as discussed in
the Timaeus, and his Process and Reality, therefore, can be
said to consist essentially of a series of footnotes to that “obscure and
difficult” notion of Plato’s, termed “The Receptacle,” which means for him
quite an inexhaustible source of inspiration.
(6)
It is to be further noted (a) that, on the one hand, he seems to have found in
Plato’s “Receptacle” a proto-theory of the dipolar nature of God in embryo
which he develops into its full-fledged form as the consummatory phase of his
cosmology and, on the other hand his own theory of “Personal Identity”[48]
(a phrase no less obscure and difficult than “The Receptacle”) is Plato’s
“Third-Man” in modern dress.
(7)
By thus providing a series of footnotes to Plato, Whitehead has also provided
an excellent series of footnotes to Confucius, Laozi, and the Buddha, for
reasons indicated above. In addition,
the Whiteheadian terminology characterized by elegance and technical precision
may serve as an ideal linguisitic vehicle for expressing to the West the
essence of Chinese thought and Buddhism as well, neither of which could possibly
be rendered more adequately and intelligibly than it might otherwise have been,
without doing violence to the original ideas so richly contained in its and
philosophical religious classics.
(8)
While siding in cosmology with Plato, Epicurus, and (with certain
qualification) Leibniz in contrast to Aristotle, Galileo, and Newton in the
opposite camp, Whitehead has made statements about the Space-Time in modern
mathematical physics as nearer to Plato’s position than at any previous period
of time in history, and what he has said in this connection applies equally
well to the great sages in the I-Ching, and
Confucius in particular.
To
return from excursion in the Whiteheadian adventure of ideas. By locating the highest degree of affinity
between Whitehead and the
“the meditation into
which the Buddha entered before he preached the Avatamsaka doctrine was the
Samadhi of Sea Impression (Sagaramudra)
in which all the doctrines that were to be preached during his life time and
all beings that were to be converted during fifty years of his career were all at
once reflected just as all images are reflected in a quiet sea.[49]
The Avatamsaka wisdom, therefore, is
taken to be above the head of the common run of the people, i.e., beyond the
comprehension of the average laymen and the monks alike; for more than a millenium
the Buddha’s great insight had been obscured by a long tradition of a merely
half-way or one-sided process philosophy in the form of three less
sophisticated types of doctrines of relational origination until Du Shun and
his precursor, Hui Yuan, and a host of other eminent Chinese monks developed it
into a new school of thought in Mahāyāna Buddhism, by taking a bold
step forward and breaking down all the limitations involved in the previous
doctrines. Apart from its religious
importance, the founding of the Hua Yan School in China is itself a rare
phenomenon of enormous significance to the history of world thought: It has restored the teachings of the Buddha
in their true form, and it has represented the monumental expression of the
Chinese metaphysical genius nourished in the Chinese soil as a natural matrix
in its great and long cultural and philosophical tradition, without which it is
highly questionable whether such a feat of the Hua Yan School would be made
possible. It is true that it is a synthesis,
but one that is at once creative and critical in character. As Oswald Spengler has keenly observed:
“There
was no movement of “Buddhism”from India to China, but an acceptance of part of
the Indian Buddhists’ store of images by Chinese of a certain spiritual
tendency,” that fashioned out a new mode
of religious expression having meaning for Chinese and only Chinese Buddhists.
.... Even though Indians and Chinese in
those days both felt as Buddhists, they were spiritually as apart as ever. The same words, the same rites, the same
symbol, but two different souls, each going its own way.[50]
The
Hua Yan School is but one of the typical Chinese schools of Buddhism, the other
two being the Tian Tai and Chan (Zen).ah Apart from the Chan tradition, the great D.
T. Suzuki has spoken highly of Zhi Yi and Fa Zang, founders of the Tian Tai and
Hua Yan Schools:
“Zhi Yi was a great
Buddhist philosopher, and Fa Zang was still a greater one. The latter marks the climax of Buddhist
thought as it developed in
This
passage justifies perfectly the claim made at the outset: that, were Buddhism
to be put on equal par with the philosophical affinity between the Chinese and
Western process positions, it must be made Chinese enough. The phenomenon of the very existence of the
Hua Yan and
In concluding this section we may add
that, by thus sinicizing Buddhism, the Chinese genius has rendered the
Mahāyāna Buddhism all the more Mahāyānaic and the Hua Yan
(literally, the “‘Flowery Splendor”) School all the more splendid, in the sense
that it is made closer to the original teachings of the Buddha himself. The Chinese genius of synthesis or creative
appropriation has helped consummate Buddhism and has charted out a route to the
goal of a world philosophical synthesis at the same time. Perhaps Suzuki may not be fully aware of how
right his judgement was when he said that Zhi Yi and Fa Zang were minds of the
highest order not only in
III.
Creativity and Its Religious Imports
D. T. Suzuki remarked in one of his early works that
Buddhism is a religion without
a God,
without a soul, and we may add, even without a Bible. Hartshorne quoted Suzuki as saying that he
was not certain whether Buddhism is nontheistic.[54] Confucius was even heard to have thus advised
on religious matters: “Respect the spiritual beings, but keep them at a
distance.” Quotations such as these tend
to give rise to questions about the religosity either of Buddhism or
Confucianism. Are they religions? One wonders. Of course, not in the same sense
as one understands the term in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Two pertinent questions, however, deserve our
particular attention: (1) What is meant
by religion? (2) In what sense are Confucianism and Buddhism said to be
religions? Such puzzles can be well
brushed aside by redefining “religion” in terms of the “ultimate concern,” as
with Paul Tillich, or of the “ultimate commitment,” as with Henry Wieman.[55] That both Confucianism and Buddhism are
religions can be established beyond doubt by the simple fact that the ultimate
concern for the Confucians, as well as for the Daoists and Mohists alike, is
Dao or the Way of Creativity Itself, whereas for the Buddhists, it is
Nīrvāna. While Tillich defines
“God” as “the ground of being,” the Chinese rather define “God” or “Heaven” as
“the ground of Becoming,” to rid of such ontologically substantative
implication as involved in notions of “Being” or “beings.” We may answer the second question thus
briefly: Confucianism has undergone a series of transformations in its
religious outlook and has evolved from polytheism and monotheism, to
pan-pene-theism ever since the pre-Confucian period that can be historically
dated at least to Duke Zhou in the 12th century B.C. The culminating phase of Buddhism as
represented by the
As scanned in a broad
perspective, the concept of Creativity has a role to play, in various degrees
of ultimacy, almost in all major religions of the world: From the Vedic Hymns
to Buddhism and Vedantism in India; from Ikhnaton and Heraclitus to the
Whiteheadian process thought in the modern West; from the early dawn of Chinese
civilization as traceable to the Book of
Ancient History and I-Ching: The Book of Creativity, to the leading
trends of thought in the form of Creative Humanism throughout the history of
China down to the present. As regards
the status of Creativity in each case, we have noted in the fore-going
discussions that the Whiteheadian position proves closer to the Buddhist than
to the Hinduist; moreover, even closer to the Chinese than to the Buddhist, by
grounding our views on the fundamental status of Creativity in the respective
systems. Although there is the “Hymn to Creation” in the Hindu literature, yet
it ends unmistakably with a touch of agnosticism :
“The sages searching in their hearts with wisdom
Found out the bond of being in non-being. Their ray extended across the
darkness: But was the One above or was it under?
Creative force was there, and fertile power:
Below was energy, above was impulse.
Who knows for certain? Who
shall here declare it?
Whence was it born, and whence came this
creation? The gods were born after this world’s creation? Then who can know
from whence it has arisen?
None knowth whether creation
has arisen.
And whether he has or has not produced it: He
who surveys it in the highest heaven, He only knows, or haply he may know not.”[57]
At any rate, however, Hinduism
is predominantly Brahman-oriented and has therefore espoused a substance-view
of Reality, in contrast to Buddhism which has espoused a philosophy of Becoming
in cosmology and cosmogony. The Buddhist doctrine of Relational Origination has
been found to be comparable (with qualification, of course) to the “Categories
of Explanation” in Whitehead’s Process
and Reality.[58]
But in Buddhism as primarily a religion, the nīrvāna perspective
always outweighs the process or creativity one as a matter of emphasis or
value. By thus delimiting our scope of
comparative survey through gradual elimination in terms of the increasing
degrees of similarity, we are further justified in maintaining the thesis on
the twin-character between the Whiteheadian and the Chinese positions in
process thought.
1. Is Confucianism
Theistic?
In this section we shall focus
on some parallel insights in respect of the religious imports of Creativity as
developed in the Chinese and Whiteheadian systems. As the truism goes, that
philosophers and theologians tends more likely to disagree among themselves on
religious issues than on anything else, I am fully aware of the controversial
character of this subject and the theoretically intriguing subtleties and
complexities involved. For example, let us take
another Hartshorne thesis in this case (on Confucianism) as a point of
departure. In “Theism in Asian and
Western Thought,” Hartshorne states, “With Herlee Creel, I take Confucianism to
be vaguely theistic, but with the focus on ethics, not on theology.”[59]
Partly true, partly not. Unfortunately,
it is difficult to see, for lack of documented source, whether Hartshorne has
misread Creel or been misled by him into such a misimpression about
Confucianism in its religious aspects.
As it stands, Hartshorne’s statement is hardly free from the charge of
over-generalization and over-simplification.
For the phrase “vaguely theistic” itself is vague enough and, moreover,
inadequate. It applies neither to
Confucianism nor to Mohism, which has cherished unmistakably, a theistic
belief, emphasizing on the tenet of “identification upward with the Will of
Heaven” (“shang tong tian zhih” in Chinese)aj
Ironically, the fittest
characterization of Confucianism as a religion derives from “panentheism,” a
term coined by Hartshorne himself for Whitehead’s as well as his own position
in process theology; but more specifically, it is pan-pene-theism. Just as the Chinese philosophy of Creativity
is predominantly process-oriented, so the Chinese view of “God” (in the sense
of “Creativity Itself”) is pre-eminently and unmistakably pan-pene-theistic,
and has a long tradition that is traceable at least back to 1121 B.C., since
the founding of the Zhou dynasty as a turning-point in Chinese history both
politically and intellectually, when King Wen and Duke Zhou, two great
pre-Confucius interpreters of I-Ching had
succeeded in transforming the previous monotheistic concept of God the
Overlord, the Most High (“huang yi shang di, “ or “hao tian shang di” in
Chinese)ak into a philosophical or moral God of Supreme Wisdom,
Virtue, and Love termed symbolically “the Way of Heaven.” Thus the early Zhou period marks the
transition from mystic religion to rational philosophy in milieu of the
historical setting of an ethio-centric culture in ancient China and has laid
down, once for all, the foundation-stone for Creative Humanism as the leading
trend of Chinese thought that has persistently continued down to the present
age. In this sense, both King Wen and
Duke Zhou, whom Confucius greatly admired, can be said to be the pre-existent
Confucians in the wake of the sage emperors
Why, with its focus on ethics
rather than on theology? as Hartshorne observes--rightly, I think. Rightly, for
it is not only a good point that he has just made, but in his very looking
askance at the case of Confucianism as a religion, he has unawares perhaps got
to the whole point. Although one has
every legitimate right to one’s preference of a theology to any ethics, yet the
truth is that from the Chinese ethio-centric and value-centric viewpoint,
ancient or modern, religion is not separated from morality, or vice versa. For the essence of religion is morality,
emphasizing the unity of moral and religious experiences. Hence, the ethico-religious characteristics
of Chinese thought. The Confucian
theology, if there is any, approximates quite closely to the “moral theology” associated
with Rant. In this sense, what Nietzsche
has said of Kant as “the great Chinese of Konigsberg”[62]
should not be mistaken for a mere joke or witticism; rather, it must be taken
seriously. For both Kant and the
traditional Chinese thinkers as a rule, in so far as their religious views are
concerned, never hesitate to endorse to the possibility and necessity of a
moral theology. In this connection
Richard Kröner’s keen observation is enlightening enough to clarify this piece
of the “Chinese puzzle”: Seeing the
fundamental antipathetic duality deeply rooted in the Western mode of thought,
Kröner says emphatically:
“Ours is a world of oppositions anyway”;
“It is the most radical opposition we can think
of”;
“We confront them in whatever realm of
experience or thought we may move; whereas in Asian civilization all the cultural
divisions are still embedded in the total stream of life, so that one cannot
speak about art as if it were detached from religion; about religion as if it
were detached from speculative thought; about this thought as it were detached
from mystic feelings; or about these feelings as if these were detached from
moral and political wisdom.”[63]
“To the Westerners, it indicates a defect of
logic; to the Chinese, it is, however, a penetration of insight.”[64]
This kind of insight, this sort of wisdom,
moral, religious, and political, results from what Professor A. W. Levi terms
“The Vision of the Whole,”[65]
while characterizing in epitome Whitehead’s philosophy of organism (or
organicism). It is precisely true of the Chinese way of doing philosophy,
religion, morality, art, etc., which, too, is inspired by what Joseph Needham
calls “an organismic vision” as typical of the Chinese way. For the Confucians in particular, it is only
natural that theology implies and is implied by ethics! Both are inspired by such a metaphysical
vision. Their religious views on God as Heaven or the Way presupposes a
philosophical cosmology inseparably conjoined with a philosophical
anthropology. More on this later. For the moment, suffice it to mention in
passing that the Confucian philosophico-religious outlook in general
concentrates on three chief problems of Heaven, Man, and Men’s cultural
achievements in the cosmos, by merging the three Ways of Heaven, of Man, and of
Nature (called “Earth” in Chinese) into an organismic unity vindicated by the
“doctrine of concordance of heavenly and human virtues” in I-Ching, yet explicable in terms of the Renaissance doctrine of
harmonic correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm[66]
-- a topic to be further discussed in connection with the metaphysical concept
of man.
2.
Process Theology and Its Meaning to the East
Now let us turn to the Western
side for a while. I believe the spiritual comrades on both sides of the East and
West are facing the same challenge: namely, how to reconcile the conflict of
Faith and Culture as a result of science and technology? The rise and
development of process theology in the modern West presents here a good case
study that can be held up as a mirror for Oriental thinkers in general,
especially in their persistent attempts to reinterpret creatively those great
visions and insights in their philosophico-religious tradition that can be ren
meaningful and relevant to the modern life. “The term ‘process philosophy’ used
by I do not know whom, perhaps my friend Bernard Loomer” is pointing to a
profound change which has come over speculative philosophy (metaphysics) in the
modern period in
“Submerged throughout much of
Western history, process theme of the nineteenth century with increasing
sharpness and impact. Hegel’s comprehensive vision of the dynamic
unfolding of history, was transformed into a dialectic materialism. In contrast to the rational continental
thought, Americans such as Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John
Dewey developed process themes in the context of an empirical pragmatism. Alfred North Whitehead combined both rational
and empirical elements in his philosophy of organism.”[68]
But so far, this merely touches upon the
intellectual aspect of its story, deeper, broader, and far more threatening
historical and cultural context remains to be sought after. It is not far to
seek, nevertheless, as pointed out by the same writer:
“In analyzing the impact of culture on
theology, we could easily conclude two major forces shaping theology in the
twentieth century have been science.”[69] War and science, and together with it,
technology and de-humanization with their combined full impact on human life
indeed marks our predicament in the modern world. “To be? Or Not to Be? -- that
is the question! It is merely a question
for Hamlet alone? or for all of us who happen to be thrown unto this tiny speck
called the Earth in the solar system?
Nowadays we are far less concerned about how to live, than about whether
it is still possible for men to live at all, with the spectre of
destructiveness of war and war-machineries looming large in the mind and heart
of every thinking person in the present day world: A-Bombs, H-Bombs, N-Bombs, and the
‘God-know-not-what’ kinds of man-slaughtering and world-destroying new devices
and new dirty tricks threatening to come in the train of their
predecessors! As for the intellectual
impact of sciences on process thought, there are two leading doctrines to be
noted above all: Einstein’s relativity-theory and
A fuller and more specific
account of the modern “genesis” of process theology has been drawn by W. Norman
Pittenger, who has attributed its originating sources to: “(1) the
existentialist analysis of subjective human experience; (2) the view that the
meaning of history is found not so much in a catalogue of ‘fact’ (although
these are essential) as in interpretation and living experience of fact in a
community; and (3) the contribution of psychology, especially the
‘depth-psychology’ associated with Freud and Jung.”[70] Added to these is (4) evolution theories from
Henri Bergson, C. Lloyd Morgan, Samuel Alexander, to Teilhard de Chardin.
As seen in light of Toynbee’s
“challenge and response” formula on the survival of human civilizations, the
process movement in Western theology can be viewed as consisting of a series of
“responses” to the “challenges” resulting from the impact of war and science on
human situation in the modern age. It aims to take a new outlook the Christian
faith. The process theologians, as a rule, are all Christian in their cultural
and religious background, yet deeply convinced that the dynamic image of a
living and loving God, perpetually self-creating and self-surpassing in the
on-going process of the cosmic advance is closer to the Biblical view in the
Judaeo-Christian tradition than the Hellenized static concept of God as the
Absolute, Eternal Being, the “Unmoved Mover” of Aristotle. Their project, if
completely successful, will amount to “the Copernican Revolution” in the field
of theology comparable to that of Kant’s in the field of philosophy about two
hundred years ago. Needless to say, to
accomplish such a feat in theology is far more difficult than the Kantian
enterprise in philosophy. Modern process
thinkers nevertheless are prepared to undertake a considerable reinterpretation
of some fundamental ideas, such as “original sin, “ “redemption, “
“incarnation, “ etc. , in the theological framework of the Western tradition,
to the effect that there are callings for the de-Hellenization and de-mythologization
of the Christian faith. From the process
perspective, the orthodoxy Christian view of “incarnation” is criticized as
typical of “excessive christ-centricism”; the doctrines of “original sin” and
of “redemption” are both to be reinterpreted, rather than adhered to or
abandoned altogether, and are to be imparted with new meanings and insights
derivable from a broader context of human experiences of history and culture.[71]
Basically, they are trying to reconcile the tension and conflict that have tenaciously
existed between faith and culture, with a view to bringing forth some feasible
way out as alternatives for the dilemma inherent in modern man’s existential
predicament, as Paul Tillich remarks on the mission of his Theology of Culture.[72] According to Pittenger, the traditional
concept of “sin” is to be reinterpreted in terms of “deviation of aim and
failure of achievement, “ and the old idea of “redemption” is to be seen in a
new light as a matter of “fulfillment” through participation in what Hartshorne
calls “reality as an on-going social process.”
“Precisely because they see the world and man
within it as dynamic processes, driving towards fulfillment through increasing
integration and by the mutual expression of love, they are enabled to see
redemption in a much wider context and to understand man’s sinfulness more in
terms of deviation of aim and failure of achievement-that is, in failure of
love--than in terms of a radical evil, “in the sense of rooted in man’s very
nature as such.”[73]
Despite the common cause and
heritage for the process thinkers and theologians, they differ widely among
themselves, either in essentials or in details as the case varies. Apart from
the apparently unbridgeable gulf between the process and the orthodoxy views within
the Christian context on the interpretation of the Nature of Deity or Divinity
Itse1f, there are noticeable divergences among the processists themselves: For
examples, Hegel vs. Marx on the spiritualistic vs. materialistic interpretation
of the development of history; Wieman vs. Tillich on the empirical vs.
ontological approaches in contemporary theology; Whitehead vs. Hartshorne on
the temporality and atemporality of God; Morgan Alexander vs. Teilhard de
Chardin on emergent vs. organic evolutionism; and the Teihardians vs. the
Whiteheadians on the “Omega patterned” vs. the unpatterned open-ended mode of
process of the cosmic advance, etc., to mention a few.
During the last three decades
the major generating force of the process movement in theology is often
associated with the University of Chicago and the Process Center at Claremont,
California, USA, with Charles Hartshorne, Henry Wieman, Bernard Loomer, Bernard
Meland, Shubert M. Odgen, Walter E. Stokes, Daniel D. Williams, W. N.
Pittenger, John Cobb, Jr., etc. as its chief exponents and representatives, all
being profoundly inspired by Whitehead.
In
But, how far -- if ever -- will
this process-evolutionary perspective be accepted by the orthodoxy and even
neo-orthodoxy Christian theologians is a question which we better leave for
them to answer. Considering the span of
time and the progress ever made, anyone sympathetic with the process motif will
think highly of its multi-dimensional achievements and contributions. Certain signs are encouraging enough: At the
Conference on American Philosophy during the 74th Annual Meeting of the APA (American
Philosophical Association) 1976, it was concluded that the leading trends of
American thought for the next century to come would tend towards neither theism
nor atheism, but rather towards the process position. The hour will come when man no longer feels
it necessary to speak of the “East and West” at all. For both sides there is the lure for
perfection illumined, as it were, by the “Vision of the Whole.”
3. Creation and
Evolution
Professor Fang has contrasted
three types of creation theories in world thought to evolutionism of the recent
times, whether of the emergent or organic type, and finally maintained that the
world in evolution is the world of divine creation, seen as the two sides of
the same coin, -- a theme to be elucidated in light of the Whiteheadian
“ingression” and the Confucian “uplifting” perpetually operative in what the
Buddhists call the “dyadic track.”
(1) The theory of personal or
impersonal creation can be diversified into three trends:
(a) The Judaeo-Christian
religion set out a creation of the world out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo) by
the almighty personal God, to be argued about by later philosophical
theologians ontologically, cosmologically, or teleologically;
(b) Plato started a theory of
creation by way of the Demiurge, transposing the absolute values, already
subsistent in the transcendental realm, into the crude material domain, so as
to make it orderly.
(c) Earlier than Plato
Confucius elaborated a theory of perpetual creation through the primal power,
inherent in Heaven, insinuated into earth to be shared by man, with a view to
bringing out the grandeur and magnificence of the all-pervasive life throughout
the universe. The creative power is cosmic rather than personal.[75]
(2) The theory of superabundant
emanation is “exemplified in the Daoist system, followed by the systems of
Neo-Confucianism, and in the philosophy of Plotinus.
(3) The third type of creation
theory is represented by the Hua Yen School of Buddhism, based on the Avatamsaka Sūtra, which is both a
philosophy and a religion, par excellence.
As a religion, it sees the
archetypical Buddha-Vairocana as the infinite ontic substance, manifesting its
function in the wondrous wisdom of Manjusri, issuing in the purest deed-acts of
Samantabhadra. The wondrous wisdom and the excellent conduct together issue in
the perfection represented by Maitreya, the expected Buddha of the future. This
exuberant light of Vairocana, radiant throughout the entire universe,
constitutes the dharmakaya of the Buddha and comes into the intrinsic nature of
man as such, making it a unique center of spontaneous inward enlightenment.[76]
In contrast to the previous
three types of creation theories, in which it is asserted that all beings have
their origin from above in the Divine (susceptible of being variously
interpreted), the evolutionist account of the cosmic genesis starts from the
bottom up, ranging from the lowest from 0£ existence, matter, to the
ever-ascending levels of life, mind, and spirit, culminating in the Teihardian
“Omega-Point …. What Teilhard calls the “noosphere” Fang has regarded as “the
ever-creative cultural order continuously enriched with superabundance in
efficacious value-ideals.”[77]
The line of evolution exhibited
in the higher species of life culminating in active and thinking man is most
dynamic and creative in answering the call of the Holy. Mere life is elevated
into spiritual life having its fulfillment in superabundance of values and the
powerful ideals of values. This life is transformed into mind, ceaselessly
enriched by the supremacy of the spirit. This is the advent of the spiritual
life of man, forever aspiring to be intimate with the original creativity of
God. The world in evolution is the world
of divine creation.[78]
Comparing the Confucian type of creation theory to the
Western process theology in respect of its originating sources mentioned above
in Pittenger’s account, we may notice some important points of similarity and
difference as well. Like its counterpart in the West of the recent times, the
classic Chinese process view is also inspired by such existential themes as
Care and Concern and imbued profoundly in a historico-cultural consciousness,
corresponding to the existential view of subjective human experience and
experiential interpretation of the meaning of history. But unlike the Western
process theology, it is based neither on the Freudian and Jungian
‘depth-psychology,’ nor the ‘flat-psychology’ associated with the behaviorists;
rather it is energized by the ‘height-psychology exemplified in the various
versions of Doctrine of Exaltation of Personality implied in such classic works
of Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism as Commentaries
on I-Ching: The Book of Creativity, Doctrine of the Mean, Works of Mencius, and
the Philosophy of Mind of Wang Yangming, etc.
Such a ‘height- psychology,’ anticipating the Schelerian thesis of
self-realization as self-deification, can be related and compared to N.
Hartmann, Max Scheler, Karl Jaspers, Erich Fromm, Abraham Maslow, etc., in the
West. Moreover, it is charged with
axio-ontological insights into Value as the ground of being, comprehended only
by what Tillich calls the “ontological reason,” rather than influenced or
reinforced by any evolutionary theories.
4. The Chinese
Precocious Postmodern Mentality
What has been just said in the
fore-going section provides a relatively full context against which the Chinese
precocious postmodern mentality may be seen in a better light. How up-to-date
are the great vision and far-reaching insights one may find in the ancient
Chinese philosophical classics when compared especially to such a modern
tendency in Western thought as the Whiteheadian system! Both are inspired by the organismic “Vision
of the Whole”; both are firmly situated in a fourfold meta-philosophical
foundation: (1) trans-dualistic mode of thought, (2) intrinsic reasonableness
(regarded by Whitehead as the “final
court of appeal” for any philosophizing, (3) Value-pervasiveness in
outlook, and (4) threefold view of Creativity; both culminate in a dipolar view
of Divinity Itself, called the “Nature of God” for the westerners and the “Way
of Heaven” for the Chinese; both have developed a system of
philosophico-religious doctrine of the exaltation of human personality,
expressed in terms of the “subject-superjective aim” for the whiteheadians and
the “uplift of the Great Center in man towards the supreme height of Heaven”
for the Confucians (“sheng zhong tu tian”).[79]
It would take bulky volumes to
have these common themes fully elaborated.
For brevity’s sake, we may concentrate only on certain points of
similarity as fair samples of the Chinese-Whiteheadian affinity, such as the
value-centric outlook, the threefold view of Creativity, the fourfold
characterization of Creativity as the ultimate category in metaphysics as well
as the ultimate concern in religion, and the dipolar view of God or the Way of
Heaven, as the Chinese call it. However,
before we proceed to discuss on these points, it would be helpful to outline
the characteristic features of Chinese philosophy as a tradition of Creative
Humanism or, to put simply, Creativism.
(a) Creative Humanism: A Ninefold Characterization. In spite of the striking similarity between Whitehead and
Chinese philosophy, one should not be led to go so far as to identify the one
with the other. Though the emphasis in
this study is laid on similarity rather than on difference (which quite
deserves a separate study), the following Ninefold Characterization of the
essentials of the Chinese views is provided for the purpose of general
reference, whereby one may perceive certain clues to further investigations by
comparison/contrast between Chinese philosophy and even some other major
figures in the West.
(1) Cosmologically, the Chinese
Creative Humanism espouses a dynamic, process-
view of the world, taking Creativity as Reality,
or to put more dramatically, taking the
creatively creative creativity as the really real reality.
(2) Ontologically, it is
value-centric, implying a functional view of substance, and the axiological
commitment to value as the ground of being.
(3) Methodologically, it is
synthesis-oriented, anti-bifurcational, trans-dualistic, hence reasonably dialectical in that it is
free from the Hegelian formal rigidity (which Whitehead calls “childish”) and
the Marxist dialectical tendency gone mad that over-emphasizes contradiction,
opposition, and conflict as the essence of nature, while minimizing the
importance of harmony for life, to say nothing of comprehensive harmony at all.
(4) In philosophy of Existenz, to borrow a term from Karl
Jaspers, it is existential through and through in spirit in that the problem of
the “Elucidation of Existenz” (ming xing明性, in Chinese) constitutes the central concern for Chinese
philosophers since Confucius, who calls the authors of the I-Ching “men of profound care and concern” (you huan 憂患 in Chinese).
(5) In Philosophy of Action, it is full of the
pragmatic spirit as exhibited particularly by the Confucians in their emphasis
on the unity of knowing and acting; knowing by Doing, and “realizing the
Heavenly Reason in every actual occasion of life.”
(6) Epistemologically, it
emphasizes the intuitive and experiential, rather than the conceptual and
theoretical. as away of knowing and takes the “experiential immediacy” (ti yan 體驗 in Chinese) as an approach to, and a criterion of, truth
and meaning.
(7) In religion, it
represents pan-pene-theism (wan you tong shen lun, 萬有通神) , a position it has adopted since the 12th century
B.C. as a twin position to pan-en-theism (wan youzai shen lun, 萬有在神論); it regards creativity as the ultimate concern
(Cf. Paul Tillich). Instead of conceiving God as Creator, it has conceived God
as Creativity-in-Itself pervading the entire cosmos throughout, emphasizing on
the relationship between God and Nature-All as one of interpenetration, rather
than identification or inclusion, as is the case with pantheism or panentheism.[80]
(8) In aesthetics, it
adopts a “quality-oriented” position (氣韻 “qi-yun”).
Formulated by Xie Hê in the 5th century, 氣韻生動 (“qi-yun sheng-dong”) has remained the master principle in the
art of painting. Like the German term “Geist,” it defies translation—literal or
otherwise. Most close to this notion is Stephen C. Pepper’s
principle of “vividness of quality.”[81]
(9) In ethics it is
“empathy-sympathy” oriented. Confucius
has anticipated Jesus’ great teachings embodied in “What you don’t want the
others to do to you, don’t do to them,” by five hundred years. The love of this
platinum rule is not confined to the Christians alone. In Learning
of Greatness it is formulated as the fair square for human conducts, known
as the reciprocity-principle.[82]
From the above characterization,
it can be seen that some strands of Chinese philosophy can be related to its
counterparts in some Western thinkers, for instances: Karl Jaspers and the
Confucians on the philosophy of Existenz; Martin Heidegger and the Daoists on
fundamental ontology and meontology; Jean Paul Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and the
Neo-Confucians and Chinese Buddhists on perception and consciousness; the
Chinese vijñāna-padians (Xuan Zhuang and Kui Ji) and Husserl on the method
of reduction in transcendental phenomenology; Paul Tillich and the Confucians
and Neo-Confucians on “Ultimate Concern”; Nicolai Hartmann and the Confucians
on teleology of values or, as we call it, axiological idealism; Max Scheler and
the Chinese sages on the metaphysical nature of man in philosophical
anthropology. The above is merely
suggested as a sort of mapping for further investigations by interested
comparative philosophers. But few other
philosophers in the west, to my knowledge, have developed a system that as a
whole can be compared with the Chinese viewpoints on various aspects in such a
strikingly similar manner as has Whitehead.
The term “creative humanism” or simply “creativism” is deliberately
chosen to emphasize the core concept of creativity in the Chinese philosophical
tradition. It is on account of this
creativity-oriented tendency and the trans-dualistic mode of thought that the
Chinese metaphysical position is one of the transcendent-immanent type. The above outlined frame of referent reveals
also certain points of difference fundamental to Whitehead and the Chinese
position, to be here sketched briefly without elaboration:
Firstly, the Whiteheadian
affirmation on value as the ground of being is not so pronounced as the Chinese
position when it declares in the opening paragraph of I-Ching: The Book of Creativity:
“Great indeed is Qian the Creative, to which everything under Heaven owes
its origination. The principle of creative origination is the supreme ground of
all that is good. It harmonizes the whole world of beauty and the sublime.” I-Ching is thus grounded on an
intrinsically value-centric ontology whereas Whitehead primarily adopts a
cosmological approach in which its axio-ontologico-existential insight is at
most implicit rather than explicit.
Secondly, I-Ching begins with the affirmation not only of Process as Reality,
as is parallel to Whitehead, but also Goodness as Reality characterizing
Creativity Itself as Goodness in the making.
Thirdly, for Whitehead value is
generally related to the consequent nature of God in the sense that he treats
Peace as the Harmony of Harmonies, whereas for I-Ching value is always related to the primordial nature of the
Creative, taking the Creative Origination itself as Value at work.
Fourthly, the existential theme
of care and concern permeates the entire book of I-Ching throughout, which,
as interpreted by Confucius and his followers, should best read The Book of Creativity: Care and Concern, whereas
in Whitehead’s Process and Reality such
an existential tendency is not so evident or fully pronounced; at best it is
implicit.
Putting aside such differences
in details or fundamentals, we must recognize the twin-resemblance of these two
systems of process philosophy in the world.
(b) Value-Pervasiveness That both the
Whiteheadian and the Chinese philosophical outlook are essentially
value-centric in key-note is an observation that can be firmly established. In
treating his relation with Chinese philosophy, what strikes us above all is the
concept of “beauty” or “value-in-general” as pervasive in nature. This
value-centric outlook of the universe is central and basic in both systems: For
example, whereas the Chinese conceive of everything in nature as charged with
value, Whitehead maintains that “value is inherent in actualities”; or again,
whereas Chinese philosophers like Zhuangzi characterize the sage as “one who
comprehends the reason of all things in nature on the basis of cosmic beauty,”
Whitehead speaks of beauty as “a quality which finds its exemplification in
actual occasions.” Zhuangzi’s statement,
if put in our modern language, may be paraphrased thus: “The philosopher is one
who, on the basis of the pervasive aesthetic quality in nature, is able to
construct a world hypothesis in terms of which every item of our experience can
be interpreted.” (i.e., one who, on the basis of the all pervasive cosmic
beauty, can comprehend the reason of all events.”) And the whole secret of the way the Chinese
interpret their experience is betrayed by Professor Fang when he says, ‘The
Chinese are artists before they become philosophers.[83]
Thus, it is clear that in
grasping the idea of beauty (in its general sense) as the central concept, one
grasps the core both of the Chinese and the Whiteheadian meta-physics as a
world hypothesis, because aesthetic quality is the alpha and the omega in both
systems. And in Whitehead, the typically
anthropomorphic concept “feeling” is, for the first time in the West perhaps, given its cosmic dignity. His Process
ani Realily, subtitled as “An Essay in Cosmology,” should read “A Critique
of Pure Feeling.” To be is to be
prehended as beautiful; and to be a value is to be a quality felt!
(c) A Threefold View
of Creativity in I-Ching and
Whitehead One of the unfavorable impressions about
the process position in general, an impression which is by no means uncommon,
is that process philosophers are concerned only with the “here and now, “ or
just “what comes and goes” in the flux of Change. Seen in light of the fore-mentioned
trans-dualistic mode of thought, or what I choose to call the polarizational
theory of unity of dualities, this rather unfair charge fits more suitably with
the process philosophers of the Heraclitean type than with those of the more
sophisticated Platonic-Whiteheadian-Chinese type. The main problem in
metaphysics that faces Plato, Whitehead and the ancient Chinese philosophers
alike is the moot problem of the polarity of Change and Permanence. From the Chinese standpoint, the clue to the
solution, or dissolution, of this problem, consists in the “functional view of
substance,” which, again, is an application of the trans-dualistic
outlook. The functional view of
substance is of such crucial importance to the Chinese process philosophy that
apart from it the doctrines of mutual immanence, of interpenetration, and other
related themes and these would remain difficult to understand. The main concern of the sophisticated process
philosopher, to put in Whitehead’s language, is with “intuition of permanence
in fluence and of fluence in permanence,” thus to the neglect of neither, while
aiming at the unity of both, a dialec-tical unity implied in the polarizational
view of dualities.
To see a World in a grain of sand;
And a Heaven in a wild flower.
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand;
And Eternity in an hour!
This is the poetic expression
of process philosophy in epitome. How
can one be expected to understand this type of philosophy without being able to
appreciate William Blake? “It is typical of the West that its poets are profounder
than it’s philosophers.”[84]
In the Chinese philosophical
classics, the concept of “yi,” i.e., “Creativity,” is said to comprise three
aspects of the process of creative creativity: namely, (1) “bian-yi” (change or
flux) ; (2) “bu-yi” (permanence) ; and (3) “yi-jian,” that is, the yang and
ying as two modes through which Creativity manifests Itself. Notice the variation in the word order in the
third case of “yi-jian.” Oversight on
this subtle variation in the word order will lead one to take it at its face
value, meaning “simple and easy.” This
simple-minded mistake is committed by most of the I-Ching translators in the West, from James Legge to Richard
Wilhelm. Philosophical concepts must be
philosophically grasped before one can expect to translate them properly. Numerous instances in the Confucian Commentaries on I-Ching suggest the idea
of opposing the pair-concepts of “yi-jian” to those of “yang-yin” and
“qian-kun,” thus “yi-jian” must be taken to mean symbolically the
intercomplementary attributes of yang and yin, qian and kun, in the sense of
the “creative” or “active” for one, and the “pro-creative” or “receptive” for
the other as the two modes of Creativity manifesting Itself in the cosmic
process of transformation. The idea of
co-relating “yi-jian” to “yang and yin” and “qian and kun” is fully elucidated
by “Kong Yingda” (547-648) in his “Preface” to The Rectification of the Meaning of I-Ching on the basis of ideas
contained in the Confucian Commentaries (not to be detailed here). The proper interpretation of this central
concept “Creativity” in I-Ching can
be best illustrated in terms of Whitehead’s doctrine of prehension. For brevity’s sake, a schema is provided as
follows:
|
The Chinese: “Yi” |
The Whiteheadian: “Events” or “Process” |
|
(I) “bian-yi”--
All changing phenomena are manifestations of: (2) “yi and
jian”-- successive interactions of Yin
and Yang in in accordance with: (3) “bu-yi”--
the constant Way, denoted by li
(reason) and shu (numbers) |
All events or actual
occasions are “concrescence of prehensions” which can be analyzed into: (i)
the prehending subject (ii) the datum prehended (iii)
the subjective form
(as the mode of prehension) guided bythe Eternal Objects |
It is mainly because of the
similarity in their views on this central concept that the Chinese and the
Whiteheadian positions are properly seen to be of twin-character, Every thing
else follows automatically, as it were, in a series of parallel concepts and
theories.
(d) Creativity as the Ultimate Category: A Fourfold
Characterization The whole enterprise of process theology
is inspired by Whitehead’s revolutionary concept of “God” as “the chief
exemplification of Creativity.” The
concluding chapter on “God and the World” in Process and Reality is a classic in process theology under the
disguise of “a cosmology.” As he
maintains,
“The theme of Cosmology, which is the basis of
all religions, is the story of the dynamic effort of the World passing into everlasting
unity, and of the static majesty of God’s vision, accomplishing its purpose of
completion by absorption of the World’s multiplicity of effort.
Philosophy may not neglect the multifariousness
of the world-the fairies dance, and Christ is nailed to the cross.”[85]
The various ways in which Whitehead speaks of
God and Creativity, in the last analysis, fit in perfectly well with the
Chinese views in light of a fourfold scheme of characterizing Dao as the Way of
Heaven, to be elucidated specifically as follows:
(I) Ontologically, Dao is
regarded as the principle of primordial unity in various schools of Chinese
speculation whereas speaking of the problem of the One and Many, Whitehead
declares Creativity to be the “the universal of universals characterizing the
ultimate matter of fact. It is the
ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively,
become one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively, ..., the
ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction,
creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction.”[86]
In l-Ching it is expressly stated: “The great virtue of Heaven and
Earth is called Creativity”; “Creative Creativity is what we mean by Change”;
“It all-encompasses never amiss the entire process of cosmic transformations”;
“The dynamic operations of the cosmic Life are all to be conformed by this
principle of primordial unity”; “Diversities of approaches consummate in
identity of the highest end; multiplicities of effort culminate in the unity of
aims”;[87]81
or, with Laozi, Dao is “the fathomless unity of all things”; “the primordial
One having ingression into all forms of beings”; or, with Wang Bi, the
celebrated commentator both on l-Ching and
Laozi, “comprised in the form of
unity and consolidated by the power of origination, all things are orderly and
unmistakable despite their variance and multiplicity.” To sum up, “The entire
Universe is permeated with life,” every form of which, while partaking of the
original One, comes to achieve the specific oneness of its own. Thus the
manifolds of the specific ones, taken in summation, constitute a system of the
many, namely, pluralities which, through the ingression of the original One and
by the mutual implication of essential relativity among the many, must
ultimately enter into the enriched form of a higher unity.”[88]
(2) Cosmogenetically, the
Chinese and Whiteheadian positions are strikingly similar even in their views
on the mode of cosmogenetic functions. For Whitehead, the cosmic dynamic
operations are described in terms of the successive interaction of “ingression”
(downwards), the “subject-subjective aim” (upwards), and the “objectification”
between any two actual occasions in the process of concrescent prehensions
(interpenetration), whereas for the Chinese, the function of the Dao is dyadic
in track: “Progressively, the fundamental Nothingness in the Dao gives rise to
the Being of all forms in the world, whereas, regressively, the immanent Being
in the whole world depends upon the Nothingness of the transcendental Dao for
the performance of adequate function.”[89]
It is asserted that what is endowed by Heaven from above is the destiny of
Nature, while the upward tendency of Nature towards Heaven is the way of its
fulfillment. The Whiteheadian concept of “subject-superjective aim” parallels
to the “uplifting tendency towards the supreme height of Heaven” for the
Confucians; the “reversal of procedure of the Dao to the transcendental realm of
Nothingness” for the Daoists; the “self-transcending, self-surpassing tendency
towards the Dharmadhātu or Bhūtatathatā” for the Buddhists; and
the “identification upward with the Will of Heaven” for the Mohists. The
Whiteheadian concept of “objectification” [90]
also finds its parallels in I-Ching, such
as the doctrine of “universal interpenetration through cosmic feeling” (“pang
tong qing ye” in Chinese),al hence the principle of “extensive
connection” both for Whitehead and for Chinese Philosophy of Creativity.
Implied in both systems is the organismic conception of a universe of
interconnectedness.
(3) Phenomenologically,
Whitehead describes Process or Creativity in terms of the Platonic “Receptacle”
as “bare of all forms”; “without a character of its own”; “invisible, formless,
all receptive,”[91]
whereas in l-Ching it is maintained
that “Creativity is without any substantive being of its own; its function is
confined to no particular directions whatsoever”; “without consciousness,
without activity, all receptive and repose, yet once stimulated, it responses
and penetrates through feelings into all things in the universe.”[92] More specifically, when Whitehead speaks of
the “Receptacle” metaphorically as “the foster-mother of all things”; “the
natural matrix of all transitions of life”; “the matrix for all begettings”;
“its sole function is the imposition of a unity upon the events of Nature,”[93]
he is simply describing a theme that is typically Daoistic in key-note :
We look at it and do not see it; Its name is The Invisible.
We listen to it and do not hear it; Its name is The
Inaudible.
We touch it and do not find it; Its name is The Intangible.
These three cannot be further inquired into, And hence
merged into One.
Infinite and boundless, it cannot be given any name; It
reverses to Nothingness.
This is called The Great Shape without shapes; Great Form
without forms.
It is The Vague and Ellusive.[94]
In other words, it is called
“the Mysterious Receptacular Matrix” (literally, the “Profound Womb of Mother
Nature,” par excellence), wherein
lies the root of Heaven and Earth, infinite in function, continuous, and
everlasting.”[95]
(4) Charactero1ogica1ly,
Whitehead describes God in various ways, e,. g. , as “the chief exemplification
of Creativity”; “the principle of Love”; “The principle of Concretion” ; “the
lure for feeling” ; “the infinite ground of mentality” ; “the unity and plenum
of conceptual prehensions”; “the primordial source of super-jective aims”; “the
poet of the world, with the tender patience leading it by his vision of truth,
beauty, and goodness” and “the great companion--the fellow-sufferer--who
understands,” to be “conceived under the image of tender care that nothing be
lost, or under the image of infinite patience”; “he is not the creator of the world;
he saves it.” Compare these words to the
poetical vision as embodied in The Book
of Odes: “Great indeed is the destiny of Heaven! leading the whole universe
with tender care and infinite patience towards Itself as the lure for
perfection.” Or compare these to I-Ching:
“Creativity completes with loving care all things in Nature such that
nothing be lost.” Laozi even speaks of
the Sage as the Dao concretely exemplified in the world “who is an expert in
saving man and all things such that neither man nor anything be deserted.” The highest Confucian ideal of Empathy and
Sympathy; the highest Daoist ideal of Compassion and Kindness; the highest
Mohist ideal of Universal Love and Benefit; the highest Buddhist ideal of
Compassion and Wisdom, are all seen to be convergent on the same great vision
that man should approximate to the highest ideal of the Divine, the Most High,
as the chief exemplification of Cosmic Love, whether conceived in the personal
or impersonal order. The
pan-pene-theistic sentiment can be expressed by the following “Hymn to the Most
High”:
Great indeed is the Most High!
Of Creativity the chief exemplification;
Of Cosmic Love the chief manifestation.
But for Thee, the Most High,
Who hath all these exemplified?
Yet, by what and by whom,
Art Thou, the Most High,
In turn so well qualified?
Whether personal or otherwise?
---- That is a question
To be best argued by him, the most wise,
With the eloquence of silence,
Who in the Vision of the Whole comprehends
Things all in Nature
as Life, and identifies
Their oneness with
Thee, the Most High!
(e) The Dipolar Conception of God and Creativity Our
Chinese-Whiteheadian comparison culminates in the concept of the dipolar nature
of God and Creativity. Some words of clarification,
however, are needed. From both the
Whiteheadian and the Chinese standpoints, Creativity is the ultimate category.
Whereas Whitehead speaks of God as the chief exemplification of Creativity, and
treats it in terms of the dipolar nature, the primordial and the consequent,
the Chinese just refers to Creativity Itself and speaks of its dipolar nature
in precisely the same way as Whitehead speaks of God. This is because of the Chinese process view
of Reality as Creativity Manifesting Itself.
In both cases, the doctrine of the dipolar nature whether of God as with
Whitehead, or of Creativity Itself as with the Chinese, is an application of
the polarizational unity of dualities in religious outlooks. The Chinese position, substantially the same
as Whitehead’s, only differs in the way of expression, because of the
multi-dimensional character of the Chinese language. The troublesome concept is
that of “Heaven,” not of “Creativity.”
The dipolar aspects of Creativity are expressed in terms of “qian” and
“kun” as the principle of creative origination and the principle of
pro-creative completion, respectively, symbolized in the natural language
simply by “heaven” and “earth.” In this
sense, “qian” or “heaven,” when used in conjunction with “kun” or “Earth,”
designates only one aspect of Creativity, i.e., its primordial nature, with
“kun” as the correlative concept designating its consequent nature. But due to the flexibility of the language,
“Heaven” in Chinese is sometimes used interchangeably with “Creativity.” This is the general sense in which it is
used, in contrast to the specific sense designating the primordial aspect of
Creativity differentiated into “qian” and “kun.” Further, we notice that at least on one point
the Chinese position proves superior to Whitehead’s, in that it entails no such
tension, or opposition, between temporality and atemporality as is involved in
Whitehead’s, who is always haunted by “the conceptual,” “the Eternal Objects, “
etc. The Chinese position, in the main,
is thorough-goingly process-oriented.
Hence, it espouses a thorough-going version of the process view of God
as Creativity Itself. In fact, in light
of the trans-dualistic principle in general outlook and the
transcendent-immanent type of metaphysics it generates, Eternity in Chinese
philosophy is seen as immanent in Temporality. The tension is thus eased
out. Furthermore, the Chinese concept of
“Heaven” or “the Heavenly” is also used in the axiological as well as ontological
sense. It designates the supreme
principle of the axiological and ontological unity, dynamically and
functionally considered. As an
axiological concept, it is used as the symbol not merely for the conceptual or
the aesthetical values, but for all values integrated -- conceptual, aesthetical,
moral, religious -- in the sense of the “creative goodness” as
conceivable. There is one point on which
the Chinese and the Whiteheadian views converge: The conceptual in the sense of
Reason. But for the Chinese, it is the
Reason of Heaven, or the Heavenly Reason, it is the Reason of Value, of Ideal
(primarily moral and religious in character).
It suggests the idea of what may be termed, in Hartshorne’s phrase, “The
Logic of Perfection.”
Generally speaking, there are
three senses in which the Chinese use the term “Heaven”: (1) in the physical
sense, as the “sky” or “space”; (2) in the theistic sense, as “Overlord” in the
image of a Personal God (as mentioned above, the Chinese people have also
undergone through the period of monotheism in their early religious
experience); and finally, (3) in the axiologico-idealistic sense, as “the
supreme principle of the axiological and ontological unity.” “Heaven” in the third sense is emphasized
particularly by the Primordial Confucian School and fully developed by
Confucius and his disciples and followers in the entire Confucian
tradition. In the most fundamental
aspect, the Whiteheadian concept of God proves to be so close to the Chinese
view of the Way of Heaven and Earth that much of what is said in the concluding
and consummatory chapter on “God and the World” in Process and Reality may well be regarded as the Confucian version
made articulated in the elegance of the Whiteheadian Victorian English. Putting asides Whitehead’s portraiture of God
in all his romantic and poetic exuberance as mentioned above, let us dwell on
the essentially theoretical aspect: God as related to the world and His dipolar
nature. This relational view of God, as
well as its implication of the His dipolar Nature as both Primordial and
Consequent, is typical of the Chinese conception and can be well documented
from the Confucian classics.
As Professor Fang points out,
all the three major philosophical traditions in China, Confucianism, Daoism,
and Mahayana Buddhism, converge on three doctrines: (1) doctrine of pervasive
unity; (2) doctrine of the Dao; and (3) doctrine of exaltation of the
individuals.[96]89
In the doctrine of Dao or the Way, the Confucians emphasize the establishment
of the Unity of three Ultimacies: the
Way of Heaven, of Earth, and of Man; the Daoists emphasize on the way of
spiritual liberation; while the Buddhists, on the Way of Bodhi. Within the Confucian framework, the
above-mentioned three Ultimacies, put in the adjectives, the heavenly, the
natural, and the human, represent three dimensions in one, that is, the unity
of the axiological (or idealistic), the naturalistic, and the humanistic
dimensions. Creativity as the Ultimate
Reality is to be considered functionally, as C=f (a, n, h), or what amounts to
the same, R=C=f (H, M, E). Confucius is
even heard to remark emphatically, “It is man that makes the Way great; not the
other way round.” This statement is Creative Humanism in a nutshell! But if one interprets Confucius in the
context of his philosophy as a whole, reads between the lines, and interprets
it in light of the spirit rather than the letter, then this statement must be
revised thus: “It is man that makes the Way great, just as it is the Way that
makes man great,” in the sense of mutual enrichment. To show that there is
unmistakably the tendency towards a dipolar view of God in Confucian
philosophy, one needs only refer to the Confucian hermeneutics expressed in the
Commentaries on I-Ching, especially
in the part called Duan (Judgment) on the Hexagrams of Qian and Kun. Qian the Creative is characterized in terms
of “origination, interpenetration, harmonization, and consummation (“yuan,
heng, li, zhen” in Chinese),am whereas Kun the Pro-Creative is
characterized in terms of “completion by virtue of receptivity.” A clue is found both in Whitehead and the
Chinese classics in light of the polarizational unity of dualities: For Whitehead it is called “activity” and
“passive capacity” (“receptivity”); for the Chinese, “Qian” and “Kun”:
“The initial situation includes a factor of
activity which is the reason for the origin of that occasion of experience.
This factor of activity is what I have called ‘Creativity.’ The initial
situation with its creativity can be termed the initial phase of the new
occasion. It can equally well be termed the ‘actual world’ relative to that
occasion. It has a certain unity of its own, expressive of its capacity for
providing the objects requisite for a new occasion, and also ‘expressive of its
conjoint activity whereby it is essentially the primary phase of a new
occasion. It can thus be termed ‘real potentiality.’ The ‘potentiality’ refers
to the passive capacity, the term ‘real’ refers to the creative activity, which
the Platonic definition of ‘real’ is referred to. This basic situation, this
actual world, this primary phase, this real potentiality-however you chara-
cterize it-as a whole is active with
its inherent creativity, but in its details it provides the passive objects
which derive their activity from the creativity of the whole. The creativity is the actualization of potentiality, and the
process of actualization is an occasion of experiencing. Thus viewed in
abstraction objects are passive, but viewed in conjunction they carry the
creativity which drives the world. The process of creation is the form of unity
of the Universe.”[97]
I have quoted Whitehead at
length merely to use this passage to testify as an eloquent witness to what has
been said on the two aspects Creativity in the Confucian Commentaries on I-Ching, where they are called “Qian Yuan” the
Principle of Creative Origination and “Kun Yuan” the Principle of Pro-creative
Completion: “Great indeed is the Way of
Qian! whereby all things in the universe are originated, hence the pervasive
unity for all things under Heaven.”[98] “Perfect indeed is the Way of Kun! to which
all things on Earth owe their Life and Growth, and which receives and sustains
the Creative Activity of Heaven.”[99]92
In both cases, the crucial point is the idea of Creativity as a Whole with its primordial and Consequent
Nature represented in Whitehead, by the “real” or the “creative activity” and
the “potential” or the “passive capacity,” and in the Chinese, by Qian the
Principle of Creative Origination and by Kun the Principle of Pro-creative Completion. When Confucius says, “It is man that makes
the Way great, not the other way round,” it is the consequent nature of the Way
as Creativity that he is emphasizing. For a fuller account of the two aspects
of God in Chinese views, the Primordial and the Consequent, one needs only
refer to the Doctrine of Concordance in Virtue between Man and Heaven stated in
the Commentaries on the said Hexagram
of Qian. There is ample evidence to support this interpretation. It maintains:
“The great man accords in his character with
heaven and earth; in his brilliance, with the sun and moon; in his consistency,
with the four seasons; in the good and evil fortune that he creates, with gods
and spirits. When he acts in advance of heaven, heaven does not contradict him.
When he follows heaven, he adapts himself to the time (i.e., timing or
timeliness) of heaven. If heaven itself does not resists him, how much less so
do men, gods, and spirits!”[100]
Perhaps this is the earliest,
and most eloquent piece of philosophical literature on the Dipolary Nature of
God throughout the world! While the
Confucian philosophers, undoubtedly inspired by Confucius himself, speak of the
two aspects of Heaven in terms of “in advance of Heaven” (where the consequent
nature is referred to) and “follows Heaven” (where the primordial nature is
referred to), Whitehead expresses the same view by maintaining: “But God, as well as being primordial, is
also consequent. He is not the beginning in the sense of being in the past of
all members. He is the presupposed
actuality of conceptual operation, in
unison of becoming with every other creative act.”[101]
With.respect to the relational
view of God and the world, no other Western thinkers: have approximated more
closely to the Chinese tradition than has Whitehead. On this issue, there is an
important piece of study made by Professor Tang Junyi in The Spiritual Values of Chinese Culture. Tang has made a survey of
all the representative schools of thought on the nature of God and man’s
relation to Him, from Aristotle to Spinoza and Hegel, from Brahmanism,
Buddhism, Mohammedanism, to Christianity, and has found that none other
position is so near to the Chinese view as Whitehead’s. Both conceive of God in
terms of Creativity; both conceive of God and the World to be interrelated,
interdependent, interpenetrating, inter-complementary, of mutual immanence, of
mutual requirement; and of mutual enrichment:
The world needs God, no less than God needs the World. Tang concludes, “Of the entire Western
tradition, Whitehead’s Dipolar Theory of the Nature of God proves the nearest
to the typical Chinese position. What a sagely worthy we find in Whitehead, who has such a wondrous intuitive grasp of Divinity!”[102]
IV.
Creativity and Its Philosophico-Anthropological Imports
In the final section of this
study we shall treat Creativity and its full imports and implications for a
philosophical anthropology that may have some important messages for the modern
man. On this point one may take some minor issues with both Hartshorne and Max
Scheler as well. For in “Theism in Asian
and Western Thought” Hartshorne has this to say:
“Western theism has exalted our species in
comparison to the rest of nature. In Asia, especially China. there was never
the hard arid fast line between human and subhuman that was drawn in the West.
This is one reason for the prevalence of vegetarianism in much of Asia,
compared to Europe. The West is more appreciative of this aspect of the Orient
now than it used to be. In general the Chinese sense of the naturalism of man,
and of the general wisdom of nature, is congenial to a process philosopher, as
is the focus upon becoming rather than mere being.”[103]
Scheler has distinguished three
types of knowledge corresponding to three types of civilization, classifying
the Chinese civilization together with the Greek as representing knowledge of
culture in contradistinction to knowledge of salvation in the Hebrew and Indian
traditions on the one hand, and knowledge of work and technology of the modern
West on the other. He finds the Chinese civilization to be lacking in knowledge
of the highest type, i.e., of salvation.
As for both Hartshorne and Scheler, I admire them as much as I disagree
with them: Admiration, for the
contributions they have made to the modern development of process thought and
philosophical anthropology in the West; disagreement, for their failure to have
taken a deeper look into the Chinese case under consideration. Hartshorne’s is
quite an over-statement with a touch of the Western chauvinism, yet without
being duly qualified. Hartshorne seems to have confused the Chinese in general
with the Indian or Buddhist vegetarians!
Although the Chinese concept of man emphasizes the leveling up of all
beings in nature, this by no means implies that it draws no hard and fast line
between human and subhuman. One should
see the cattle and sheep in the eyes of man, not the other way round, as the
eminent monk Zhi Yi, founder of the Tian Tai School, says. I would like to point out that what
Hartshorne calls “contributionism” as central to the process position is a
typical Chinese theme, known as “Cosmic Participationism,” especially in the
Confucian philosophy of man, which has exalted human personality to such
heights as is not even permissable from the Western Judaeo-Christian orthodxy
standpoint, because it emphasizes the metaphysical concept of “man” as capable
of forming a “Trinity with Heaven and Earth,” participating in the cosmic process
of transformation as a co-creator with the Divine in the course of creative
advance. To be fully human is to become Divine. Can the same be said of any form of theism in
the entire Western tradition? One
wonders.
On the other hand, the thesis
of “self-realization as Self-deification” proves to be no less Chinese than
Schelerian. This being the case, how can
there be in the Chinese religio-philosophical tradition anything lacking in the
so-called knowledge of salvation? For it
implies an autonomous rather than heterogeneous salvation.
To get these two points properly clarified
constitutes the main contentions of this section, -- nay, even of the whole
piece of this comparative study.
1. Whitehead and Kant as a Point of Departure
Whitehead is not a mere cosmologist, nor
a mere metaphysician, nor a mere Platonist. “But I do mean more,” says he,
“I mean if we had to render Plato’s general point of view
with the least changes made necessary by the intervening two thousands years of
human experience in social organization, in aesthetic attainment, in science,
and in religion, we should have to set about the construction of a philosophy
of organism. In such a
philosophy the actualities constituting the process of the world are conceived
as exemplifying the ingression (or ‘participation’) of other things which
constitute the potentialities of definiteness for any actual existence.”[104]
The consummatory phase of his philosophy of organism, I
think, is to be found not in Process and
Reality, but rather in Adventures of
Ideas, wherein are embodied a philosophy of history, a philosophy of
civilization and, above all, a philosophy of man, with full imports for a
philosophical anthropology. There is a
whole system of philosophical anthropology implied in his process outlook
“mutely appealing for an imaginative leap,” as he would say, on the part of any
sympathetic sensitive reader. I tend to take his system of cosmology set forth
in Process and Reality and Adventures of Ideas as essentially a
philosophical anthropology in disguise.
Just imagine the host of anthropomorphic notions one can finds there,
such as “feeling, “ “aim, “ “enjoyment, “ “satisfaction,” etc. His Process and Reality is a critique of pure feeling in the cosmic
sense, where the “subject-superjective aim” contains all the germinating ideas
for a full-fledged philosophy of man.
What is Man? This
question Kant has posed to himself as the last of the four main questions he
undertakes to answer in the order: (1) What can I know? (2) What ought I to do?
(3) What may I hope for? and (4) What is man? One cannot expect to be able to
answer satisfactorily any of the first three questions until one has acquired
some adequate understanding, or ways of understanding, of the last one. These four questions are reborn for us today,
and are to be reinterpreted in the context of man’s experience in the world.
“In
the word ‘man’ alone, is the reality which is accessible to me. Here is
presence, nearness, fullness, life. Man is the place at which and through which
everything that is real exists for us at all. To fail to be human would mean to
slip into nothingness. What man is and can become is a fundamental question for
man.”[105]
On this fundamental question, nevertheless,
Jaspers refers our attention to the Eastern:
“At
the present moment, the security of coherent philosophy, which existed from
Parmenides to Hegel, is lost. This does
not prevent us from philosophizing from the single foundation of man’s being on
which was based the thinking of those millenia in the Occident which are now,
in some sense, concluded. To become
aware of this foundation in yet another way, we are referred to India and China
as the two other original paths of philosophic thought.”[106]
Fortunately, we find parallel
insights into the essential nature of man developed side by side, for example,
by Max Scheler (1874-1928) in the modern West and the Confucians in ancient China.
2. Max Scheler and the Chinese Philosophical Anthropology
“In no other period of human
knowledge has man become more problematic to himself than in our own days. We have a scientific, a philosophical, and a
theological anthropology that know nothing of each other. Therefore we no
longer possess any clear and consistent idea of man. The ever-growing
multiplicity of the particular sciences that are engaged in the study of men
has much more confused and obscured than elucidated our concept of man.”[107]
Scheler’s words as quoted
above, echoing the time-honored Socratic dictum on self- knowledge, deserves of
course a hearing. As will be seen shortly, although the position of Scheler’s
“new philosophical anthropology based on as broad a foundation as possible,” [108]
outlined in Man’s Place in Nature (Die
Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos, 1928), strikes a somewhat peculiar note to
the Western ears, it nevertheless sounds so congenial to the Chinese mind that
one is inclined to think that Nietzsche’s witty remark on Kant as “the great
Chinese of Konigsberg” must be revised.
Before presenting his new
metaphysical concept of man, Scheler has examined briefly three types of
anthropology in the Western tradition-theological, philosophical, and
scientific – represented respectively by the Jewish-Christianothe Greek, and
the modern scientific tradition. In his
own words:
“The first is the Jewish-Christian tradition of
Adam and Eve, including creation, paradise and fall. The second is the Greek
tradition in which, for the first time, man’s self-consciousness raised him
into a unique place on the ground that he is endowed with ‘reason.’ The third idea is that of modern science and
genetic psychology, which also has a tradition of its own. According to this
view, man is a very recent product of evolution on our planet, a creature
distinguished from its antecedents in the animal world only by degree of
complexity of energies and capacities already present on a subhuman level.
These three ideas are not compatible with each other. Thus we have a
scientific, a philosophical and a theological anthropology in complete
separation from each other. We do not have a unified idea of man.”[109]
To fill up such a gap is
precisely what Scheler intends to accomplish. Thus, obviously, his new
metaphysical concept of man is presented as an advancement beyond the
above-mentioned three traditional types of anthropology. Such a tour de force is made possible by a
clarification of the ambiguity as involved in the word, ‘man.’ “The same word,
‘man,’ in ordinary language and among all civilized peoples, means something so
totally different that it is difficult to find another word in our language
with the same ambiguity,” thus remarks Scheler,
“In one sense, it signifies the particular
morphological characteristics of man as a subclass of the vertebrates and
mammals. Yet, the same word ‘man’. ...in
the second sense, signifies a set of characteristics which must be sharply
distinguished from the concept ‘animal’-- including all mammals and
vertebrates. Let us call the second
concept the essential nature of man
in contrast to the first concept defined within the context of natural
science.”[110]
The main theme of Scheler’s essay is, as he puts
it,
“to inquire whether this second concept can be
justified, that is to say, whether we can assign to man unique characteristics not
comparable to those of any other species.
I want to raise only a few issues and suggest a few conclusions that
deal with the nature of man in relation to animal and plant and with man’s
unique metaphysical place in the universe.”[111]
This passage is of crucial importance for our
present purpose, for it has not only defined, quite expressly, Scheler’s
position in general and the direction he is tending towards; it has also
indicated precisely where the Schelerian-Chinese affinity (in spirit, if not in
letters) is to be located, namely, in the concept of the essential nature of
man and man’s unique metaphysical place in the universe.
If we put Scheler’s position
side by side with the Chinese views with respect to the essential nature of man
and man’s metaphysical place in the cosmos, some amazing similarity will at
once present itself. The Chinese tradition of Creative Humanism, grounded on
the concept “Creativity” as the ultimate category in metaphysics and the
ultimate concern in religion as well, is at once organismically-oriented,
homo-centric, and, above all, value-centric.
Its concept of man differs from the traditional Western view in that man
is conceived as an exemplification of Creativity Itself, as a creative being, a
co-creator with Heaven and Earth, rather than as a mere “creature,” let alone
“a featherless biped”, a concept that has been allegedly attributed to Plato;
and as such, the vocation of man consists in his participating in the ever
on-going cosmic process of creative advance with Heaven and Earth, and the
meaning of life, in the creation and augmentation of value. The whole process
of humanization or self-realization, in Scheler’s term, is a process of
“self-deification”.
“Man and the Cosmos are harmoniously
interrelated, individual human beings among themselves are systematically
interlocked, and men and other things are set in well-balanced order, all of
these tend to converge on one pivotal point, namely, the creation of
value. The Universe represents for us
the perpetual augumentation 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.”[112]
Thus, Creativity is regarded as
the ultimate ground of both existence and value. Such a process-metaphysics,
once established, generates at once a value-centric philosophical cosmology and
philosophical anthropology. The value-centric tendency in the philoso- phical
concept of man and of the world is most pronounced in the Confucian school. Its
ontology is also a general theory of value; its metaphysics as well as
cosmology is but a philosophical concept of man generalized and a practical
ethics in disguise. Whereas Kant speaks of the foundation of the metaphysics of
morals, the Chinese stress on the moral (i.e., ethico-axiological) foundation
of metaphysics.
In light of the above
elucidations, it is only natural that from the Chinese standpoint an ethics
without ontology (as defined in the above context) is not only a mistake, but a
“contradiction in term.” It is
precisely because of one’s sense of cosmic identification, one’s awareness of
the ontic essence in human being, one’s consciousness of man’s place in the
cosmos, and, above all, one’s sympathetic feeling of fellowship in unity, that
man’s status as a moral agent in the Universe is firmly established.
In this respect, Martin
Heidegger’s words on the relation of Being to men’s essential nature, is worth
quoting: “Every philosophical -- that
is, thoughtful -- doctrine of man’s essential nature is in itself alone a doctrine of the Being of beings (i.e., what it
means for a being to be). Every doctrine of Being is in it self alone a doctrine of man’s essential nature.”[113]
3.
Value, Man, and Culture
It has been pointed out, in the
main rightly, that the “Chinese culture is ethio-centric, and for this reason
the traditional Confucian form of government is even termed “ethiocracy” (a
term coined by Baron von Holbach for “government by virtue”). This is chiefly because the Chinese culture
as well as the ethical way of life is based on the philosophical concept of
man, which in turn is generated by the Reverence for Life. The Chinese culture
is essentially a philosophical culture in character; the Chinese philosophy is
essentially a philosophy of culture throughout, from Confucius down to Wang
Chuanshan (1619-1692) and the contemporary thinkers, such as Xiong Shihli
(1885-1969), Thomé H. Fang (1899-1977), Tang Junyi (1909-1978), Mou Zongsan,
etc. The three chief problems in Chinese philosophy, as mentioned above, are
Nature, Man, and Men’s cultural achievement in the cosmos. This is quite
understandable if we bear in mind the philosophical concept of man, not as a
mere man, the featherless biped, but “as a moral and cultural being, that is, a
value-creating and value-realizing animal. The process of self-realization is
one of cultural growth. The development
of man is a cultural development. The great Chinese philosophers, ancient or
modern, have, as a rule, committed themselves to the ideal of the realization
of “Ren” as the “Summum Bonum” (i.e.,
“Creativity out of Love,” or “Creative Goodness,” for lack of a better term),
to be actualized through human effort in the process of the cultivation of the
total being of man.”[114] Such a value-centric conception of man is
generated by the dynamic process-view of reality as embodied in the central
philosophic theme of I-Ching: “The universe, as it is, represents an
all-comprehensive Urge of Life, an all-pervading Vital Impetus, not for a
single moment ceasing to create and procreate and not in a single place ceasing
to overflow and interpenetrate.”[115]
Two main tenets as enunciated
in the Confucian Commentaries on I-Ching prove
to be the fountainhead of the Chinese tradition of Creative Humanism: (1) “Continuation
of Dao by the Supreme Good for fulfillment
of Life” (ji shan cheng xing); (2) “Completion of the Cosmic Process through
Human Culture as Creative Development” (jen wen hua cheng).ap The first
suggests the value-centric view of reality; and the second contains germinating
ideas for man’s cosmic feeling, the awareness of his cosmic status as a moral
and cultural being participating in the whole process of creative advance. From the first we derive (a) the idea of
Creativity in the sense of the Supreme Good as the principle of initiation and
continuation, the alpha and the omega of the whole Universe, as it were, and
(b) the idea of Nature in the sense of Life as the principle of consummation
and completion. From the second we
derive the humanistic conception of culture as fundamentally a ‘creative
development” from a twofold perspective:
Microcosmically, culture is the “growth to become man” by fulfillment of
man’s essential nature; macrocosmically, it is the “continuous attempt of
self-deification,” as Max Scheler terms it, by participation in the perpetually
self-creative process of cosmic transformation gradually approximating towards
what Teilhard de Chardin calls the “omega-point” of the universe as the
consummatory unification of the Primordial and Consequent natures of God as the
Divinity Itself at work, to rephrase Whitehead. As to the first tenet of “ji
shan cheng xing,” that is, the process-view of Reality as Goodness in the
making, let us quote from the original text:
“What is called Dao operates incessantly with
the rhythmic modulation of the dynamic change and the static repose, thus
continuing the creative process for the attainment of the Good and completing
the creative process for the fulfillment of Nature, which is
Life. It manifests itself in the
rational sentiment of humanity but conceals its great function unawares,
propelling all beings in a swing of vitality without inciting the anxieties of
the Holy. Its richness of virtue, its
grandeur of enterprise, is of all things the most sublime. Superabundance is
what is called the deed-act; forevermore creativeness is what is called the
supreme value.”[116]
On the other hand, the idea of
“jen wen hua cheng,” i.e., the cosmic implication of human cultural activities,
is further elaborated by Kong Zhi (Zisi), Confucius’ grandson, into
participationism in the Doctrine of the
Mean, whereby it has laid down the cornerstone for a full-fledged
philosophical anthropology. It is stated thus:
“Authenticity is the Way of Heaven, whereas to
have oneself fully authenticated is the way of man. ....
“Only those who have to the utmost authenticated
themselves can fulfill their own nature; being able to fulfill their own
nature, they can help fulfill the nature of others; being able to help fulfill
the nature of others, they can help fulfill the nature of all things; being
able to help fulfill the nature of all things; they are said to participate in
the cosmic process of creative advance with Heaven and Earth; those who have
thus participated in the cosmic process of creative advance are forming a sort
of trinity with Heaven and Earth as co-equals.”[117]
In spite of the archaic style
in expression, the above passage ranks with the world literature of the first
order in philosophical anthropology; it contains ideas that anticipate in
insight and vision much of what has been developed in the modern age by the
process thinkers and the phenomenological and existential philosophers as well.
That is what we mean by saying that Hartshorne is simply restating a central
theme in Chinese tradition when he maintains that “process philosophy, fully
thought out, is creationism” and “to be is to be available for future
prehensions.” It is a central theme in
philosophical anthropology, typically Confucian in spirit, originating in I-Ching, taught by Confucius, further
develoyed and eloquently defended by Mengzi, and clearly formulated in The Book of Propriety and Doctrine of the Mean, where it is called
“Participationism.” How strikingly similar it is to the Renaissance doctrine of
harmonic correspondence between micro-scosm and macrocosm!
“To speak in Renaissance symbolic language: man
occupies a middle position in the cosmos, comprising within himself the whole
range of creation from mass and matter, through plant life and animal
sensation, on to the highest cognizance of spirit and intellect, aspiring even
toward communion with the God-head. He thus has an advantage even over the
angels: he is the only one of God’s creatures who is able to comprehend within
himself, in epitome, the totality of creation”[118]
The main thrust of the Chinese
position is that man in his process of self-realization is constantly inspired
by a cosmic feeling of his status in the cosmos. Similar themes have also been
developed by Jaspers and Scheler, for instances, as exemplified in the former
case by the Doctrine of Elucidation of Existenz,
and in the latter case by the entire body of the existential-phenomenological
studies on the nature of Sympathy, on Love, on Fellow-Feeling, on the Person as
the “ontic entity of actions.”[119]
According to Scheler,
“philosophia” in the truest sense of the term, is “the Love of Essence.”[120] To supplement our observations in this
connection, we may turn to Scheler’s works for further confirmation. First of all, what is the essence of culture?
“Culture
is a category of being, not of knowledge and experience. Culture is the result of molding, of shaping
this total being of man. It is not the kind of molding and shaping of
a material substance which takes place when a statue is formed, but that of a
living entity within the order of time, a
unity which consists only of developments, processes, and acts. This cultural
being of the person corresponds in each case, to one specific world, to a ‘microcosm, an entity in itself.”[121]
By quoting the Aristotelian
proposition that “The human soul, in a certain sense, is- everything,” Scheler
goes on to argue:
“‘To strive for culture’ means to try, with
loving fervor, to participate ontologically and to take part in all aspects of
nature and history which are essential to
the world, and not just fortuitous existence and circumstance. This implies the
desire to be a microcosm like Goethe’s Faust. Such concentration of the world
at large, of the ‘macrocosm,’ into the particular spiritual center of one
individual, the ‘microcosm, ‘ or such expansion of one human being who, in love
and insight, grows into a world-these are merely two inverse manifestations of the same fundamental creative
development which we call culture. The fountainhead of this process is man’s
love for the world. It is. .... Indeed the love of the true Plato, ever and insatiably thirsting for poetic reunion and
sympathy with all aspects of world essence. .... It is a strange love.”[122]
In sum, “Culture is both the growth
to become man as seen from the level of subhuman nature, and, simultaneously, as part of the same
process, the continuous attempt of self-deification
as seen by all superhuman and infinite things which exist and are demand
our veneration.”[123]
On the basis of the ontological
and epistemological imports of Love, the gist of Scheler’s idea may be thus
summed up in one phrase: “1 love, therefore I am.” and “You love, before you
know.” Both of these are typically
Chinese in key-note, if not in source. It is Confucius who, on being inquired
of the meaning of “Ren,” replies, “The essence of Jen consists in loving (the
whole world).”[124] The fore-mentioned participationism is often
stated as “ai tzan hua yu”aq in Chinese, which simply means “participating
ontologically in the creative development of the cosmic Life, as inspired by
Love.” In short, it means “Creative
participation out of Love.”
Fine as a product of the
European tradition as he is, Scheler has not been able to free himself
completely from the haunting ghost of the dualistic mode of thought, or as
Whitehead terms it, the fallacy of vicious bifurcation of Nature, to which he
still falls victimized. For, although it is said that “Spinoza’s pantheism and
Bergson’s creative evolution fuse in Scheler’s concept of the
‘self-deification’ of man”; although he believes that “God is constantly
‘becoming’ in man to the extent to which mankind realizes its spiritual
potentialities or transforms natural resources and vital energies into products
of the spirit,” he has been long agonized by the conflict of the two
antagonistic principles in nature, Spirit vs. Life (or Drive). For him, “the paradox is not resolved in a
theoretical context, but by an existential leap.”[125] From the Chinese standpoint, however, as seen
in light of the principle of continuity implied in the ultimate category of
Creativity as the all-encompassing Whole, no such an “existential leap” is
necessary. Life (even in the sense of
Drive or Vital Impetus) and Spirit form an unbroken “Great Chain of Being.”
Apart from such minor discrepancy between Scheler and the Chinese views, much
of what has been said in Man’s Place in
Nature serves as an excellent series of footnotes to the great insights of
the ancient Confucian and Daoist philosophers: Whereas Mengzi declares that in
so far as the ontic essence is concerned, “All things are complete within me”
and Zhuangzi proclaims, “The whole Universe and I concresce together; all things and I are one,” Scheler advances his
doctrine of self-rcalization as self-deification and maintains that in both
cases the locus is man.
“The locus of this self-rea
lization, or let us say, self-deification, for
which the Being in itself strives and for the sake of which it pays the price
of the world as ‘history’ -- this locus is man, the human self and the
human heart. Here is the only place
where the deification is accessible to us, but it is a genuine part of .the
transcendent process itself. For,
although all things emerge in the process of continuous creation from the
Ground of Being, from the functional unity of the cooperative interplay between
spirit and drive, these two attributes of the Being in itself that are known to
us are related to each other solely in man as a living unity. Man is the locus where they intersect.”[126]
Similarly, as stated in The Book of Propriery, “Man is the heart
and mind of Heaven and Earth.” It is of
interest to note that the above dramatic tension between Drive and Spirit has
also annoyed certain Neo-Confucian philosophers, notably, Zhu Xi (1130-1200),
where the contrary terms are called “qi vs. li” (in the sense of life-force and
the Heavenly Reason), yet ultimately fused in to an organismic unity by way of
interpenetration as treated by Wang Yangming (1472-1529), particularly in his
Philosophy of Mind.
4. Three Ways of
Approaching God
Another important idea
derivable from the above-stated Schelerian theme on the process of
self-realization as one of self-deification points to the third way of approaching
God, besides the two as mentioned by Paul Tillich in Theology of Culture: (1) the way of overcoming estrangement and (2)
the way of meeting a stranger. Tillich seems to have “forgotten to mention the
most important third way in which man discovers God through himself,” according
to the Chinese viewpoint,
“God is NOT a stranger as in the second
way. Man in discovering God has not
discovered something from which he is estranged. God is in no way a thing; He is a power, a
creative force; He is a spirit, the very spirit of infinite love, merging all
beings in a wave of love. Man is the medium or mirror of God, disclosing the
greatness of God’s perfection in the greatness of human personality, which is
unique and individual and which is capable of being universalized into the
general type of humanity.”[127]
This third way of discovering
God is no less Chinese than Schelerian. It is thus noteworthy that in the main,
Scheler’s insight into the homo-centric view of Being or, as the Chinese prefer
to call it, of Creativity in Itself, sounds strikingly similar to the Confucian
homo-centric conception of the world which generates the value-centric
conception of man as culminating in axiological idealism or, in Nicolai
Hartmann’s term, “the teleology of value,”[128]
the gist of which, as enunciated in the Daoist doctrine of cosmic
identification and the Confucian version of participationism in the Doctrine of the Mean, is fully echoed by
the concluding paragraph of Man’s Place in
Nature:
“The logos according to which the world comes
into being becomes in man an act in which he can cooperate. Thus according to
this view, the birth of man and the birth of God are, from the outset,
reciprocally dependent upon each other. ...
I have heard it said that it is not possible for
man to endure the idea of an unfinished God, or a God in the process of
becoming. My answer is that metaphysics is not an insurance policy for those
who are weak and in need of protection. It is something for strong and
courageous minds. Thus it is understandable that man reaches the consciousness
that he is an ally and co-worker of God only in the process of his own
development and growing self-knowledge. ... One can take part in its life and
spiritual actuality only through participation, through an act of commitment or
active identification.
Yet, there is a kind of ‘support’ even for us.
This is the support provided by the total process of realizing values in world
history in so far as this process has moved forward toward the making of a
‘God.’ But we must not wait for
theoretical certainties before we commit ourselves. It is the commitment of the person himself
that opens up the possibility of ‘knowing’ this Being in itself.”[129]
An eloquent witness in modern voice to the
Confucian insight into the ontological status of man in the cosmos! The Chinese
philosophical anthropology, properly under- stood in its classic sense, is
termed “sheng-xue” or “dao-xue,” that is, “sageology” or “daology” (for lack of
abetter nomenclature), which approximates quite closely to the Schelerian view
of “philosophia” as “Love for Essence,” in the sense of being constantly
inspired by the ever creative urge onward and upward towards the ontic essence
of Being as inherent in the universe, yet with its locus in man, the human self
and the human heart. It is precisely
here that Scheler and the Chinese thinkers (Mengzi, for instance) are meeting
on the same ground. For both Scheler and Mengzi have committed to the “logique du coeur.” On the basis of the “logique du coeur” Mengzi has not only defended his well-known
doctrine of the intrinsic goodness of human nature, but also charted out what
may be titled as an architectonic structure for Chinese philosophical
anthropology, the chief tenet of which parallels almost exactly to the
Schelerian thesis of the process of self-realization as one of
self-deification. In The Works of Mengzi it is eloquently
stated:
“What is desirable is called Goodness; what is
inherent in the ontic essence in human nature as the intrinsic goodness is
called Authenticity, which is one’s True Self; what is to be further developed
out of one’s Authentic Being into a solid and full personality is called
Beauty; Beauty to be magnificently manifested and shone forth into splendor is
called Greatness; Greatness to be further transformed and transmuted is called
Sageliness; Sageliness to be further developed into the consummatory phase of
the Most High as both unfathomable and ineffable is called Divinity in Itself
(i. e. , Deus Absconditus ).[130]
The above-quoted Mengzi thesis of Human Greatness, ranging from (1) the good man; to (2) the authentic man; (3) the man of beautiful character; (4) the great man; (5) the sage; until finally (6) the holy man approximating to the Most High, corresponds to ideas expounded in Confucius’ Dialogue with the Duke Ai of the State of Lu as recorded in the Book of Propriety.[131] Attached below is a Diagram provided by Professor Fang on “The Correlative Structure of Men and the World” for purpose of further reference. It embodies important insights as distilled from millenia of philosophical and religious experiences of mankind as a whole in a world perspective.[132]
Click here to see enlarged diagram
5. Towards a Spiritually Exalted World
Community
What particularly interests us
is Scheler speaking as a philosopher of comparative culture, by distinguishing
human knowledge into three types: (1) knowledge of salvation (i.e., “knowledge of ultimate metaphysical reality”); (2)
knowledge of culture; and (3)
knowledge of work of experimental,
specialized science, with the civilization of India, of China and Greece, and
of Modern Europe as the chief representatives, respectively. It is regrettable, he maintains, that each
great civilization has developed the three kinds of knowledge in a one-sided
fashion. The hour has come for mankind to be aware of the importance and
feasibility for the culminating unification of these three types of knowledge
in an inter-complementary manner so as to form what may be called a spiritually
exalted world community upon which is dependent the future of human
culture.” In the past,” says Scheler,
“Each great civilization has developed the three
kinds of knowledge in a one-sided fashion. India has cultivated knowledge of
salvation and the vitalistic, spiritual technique of achieving self-control.
China and Greece championed knowledge of culture. The Occidental, since the
beginning of the twelfth century, has emphasized the knowledge of work of
experimental, specialized science. However, the hour for adjustment has come
and these one-sided directions of
spiritual development must begin to supplement
each other. The future of human culture will be marked by such adjustments
and additions, not by the biased rejection of one kind of knowledge to favor
another, nor by the exclusive preoccupation of each civilization with what is
historically ‘peculiar’ to it.[133]
In respect of the one-sided
development of knowledge of work of experimental, specialized science, as
exhibited particularly in the civilization of the modern West, Scheler points
out its potential danger:
“It is, indeed, possible for man to attain an
ideal perfection in the methods of experimental science and to remain
absolutely empty as a spiritual being. Man
may even sink back to a kind of barbarism, compared with which all so-called
primitive peoples would seem like cultured ‘Hellenes’! Knowledge of work,
devoted to the capabilities of man as a vitalistic being, must, in the last
analysis, be subservient to knowledge
of culture. The growth and transformation of physical nature must serve the growth of the profound center of man,
his spiritual person. All learning of
working techniques must be subservient to the attainment of cultural knowledge
and must not dominate it. A systematical and scientifically supported barbarism
would indeed be the most terrifying of all imaginable barbaric conditions.”[134]
Such a systematical and scientifically supported
barbarism will only lead to the so- called ‘civilized savages.’[135] The way out, according to Scheler, consists
in an axiological orientation whereby the three types of knowledge are properly
relegated in the form of a hierarchical structure of value: knowledge of work
or technology, in the last analysis, must be subservient to knowledge of
culture, which in turn, finally, must be subordinated to knowledge of
salvation. However, even the
‘humanistic’ idea of knowledge of culture,
in Germany most nobly personified by Goethe, must further be subordinated
to the idea of knowledge of salvation and
must serve it in its ultimate
purposes; for all knowledge, in the final analysis, is from God and for God.[136] In respect of knowledge of salvation, India
may be said to have gone too far, and the modern West has not gone far enough,
whereas China (as represented in her traditional civilization) is somewhere in
between. Yet, all in all, these three must go hand in hand in concrescent
integration for the spiritual development of mankind as a whole. Scheler’s
observation is insightful and thought-provoking, indeed. But, as the present writer
sees it, his comment on the civilization of China is not completely fair to the
case. For, although China is marked by her achievement in the humanistic ideals
of culture, it is not lacking in the imports for knowledge of salvation. There
is ample insight into knowledge of the last and highest type implied in the
Chinese philosophical classics mutely appealing to an imaginative as well as
“spiritual” leap. Take for instance The Works of Laozi, wherein it is
expressly stated: salvation consists “in successively identifying the Way of
Man with that of Earth, the Way of Earth with that of Heaven, the Way of Heaven
with Dao, and Dao with Nature, which, after all, is the spontaneous Way of
Creativity Itself.”[137] Laozi has described the operation of Dao as “Creation
without possession; action without self-assertion; development without
domination.” Russell admires this
passage so much that he has not only adopted it as a epigraph on the title page
of his Roads to Freedom (1918); he
has also advocated its adoption as “a just conception of the ends of life,”
both nationally and individually. The
road to freedom is also the road to salvation.
But without such a just conception of the ends of life, how is salvation
(of any kind) to be possible? The
operation of Dao as the Way of Heaven is precisely what is to be modeled after
as the proper way of life for man. It is
the Way of Love, or more explicitly, the Way of Creativity out of Love. It is the Heavenly Way phenomenologically
described in human terms. This is what we mean by saying: “To be fully human is to become divine!” In The
Problem of China Russell declares:
“I think one could derived from these words a
just conception of the ends of life as reflective Chinese see them, and it must
be admitted that they are very different from the ends which most white men set
before themselves. Possession, self-assertion, domination, are eagerly sought,
both nationally and individually.”[138]
This, according to Russell, is simply because
“we (of the West) have to kinds of morality side by side: one which we preach
but seldom practice; another which we practice but seldom preach.”[139] The high ideal of morality as embodied in the
golden (or platinum) rule laid down by Jesus has been resounding in the Western
ears for almost two thousand years merely as a matter of preaching. Yet, “In practice, our effective morality is
that of material success by means of a struggle; and this applies to nations as
well as to individuals.” Russell further
observes:
“The Chinese have discovered, and have practiced
for many centuries, away of life which, if it could be adopted by all the
world, would make all the world happy. We Europeans have not. Our way of life
demands strife, exploitation, restless change, discontent and destruction. Efficiency
directed to destruction can only end in annihilation, and it is to this
consummation that our civilization is tending, if it cannot learn some thing of
that wisdom for which it despises the East.
The distinctive merit of our civilization, I
should say, is the scientific method; the distinctive merit of the Chinese is a
just conception of the ends of life. It is these two that one must hope to see
gradually uniting.”[140]
Also it must be admitted that
when Russell states “We have two kinds of morality side by side,” and “The
Chinese do not adopt either our theoretical ethic or our practical ethics,” he
is speaking in revolt chiefly as a critic of Western civilization; he may,
therefore, not be fully aware of the underlying implications of the judgments he
has made. What is it that makes possible the Chinese way of life? why the
Chinese do not adopt either the Western theoretical or practical ethics? To questions such as these no satisfactory
answer can be given without reference to considerations on a more fundamental
level, i.e., on the ontological and axiological grounds for justification. For all the Chinese philosophers, be they
Confucian, Daoist, and Mohist, their ethics is their ontology applied to the
concrete state of human affairs; their ontology is but their ethics in
disguise. The above-mentioned doctrine
of Heaven maintained the intrinsic goodness of human nature is deeply grounded
on the ontological presupposition of Creativity as Goodness in the making. As
the ground of value, “Creativity” in the Chinese usage is the cognate for
“Life.” This is why it has always been
stressed in Chinese cultural tradition that Reverence for Life is the
foundation of morality; in fact, it is the point of convergence for the
metaphysical, religious, aesthetical, and moral experiences crystallized into a
philosophical anthropology.
Recently, some thinkers in the
West who, echoing to the Whiteheadian insights into the fallacies, especially
of the vicious bifurcation of Nature as a Whole, and consequently of axiological neutrality (value-free), have
located the current major crisis in ‘value- blindness.’ They have undertaken to re-evaluate and to
revise radically their traditional misconception of the relationship of Man and
Nature. For instance, on this issue Richard
L. Means has argued that disregard of the value of Nature is “not just bad
economics” but “basically an immoral act” in itself:
“Man’s relation to nature is in the last
analysis a moral crisis because it involves man’s history and culture and has its
roots in our religious and ethical views of nature, which have been perhaps
relatively unquestioned in this context.
The fact that it is a moral issue makes it
particularly strange that contemporary writers on ethics by and large avoid a
careful analysis of man’s relation to physical and biological nature. Even some
of our wisest and most exciting social critics become quite traditional in
avoiding the moral implications of the man-nature issue. Perhaps they fear the
charge of anthropomorphizing or spiritualizing nature. Or perhaps the refusal
to connect the human spirit to nature reflects the traditional thought pattern
of Western society wherein nature is conceived to be a separate substance,
material, mechanical, and (in a metaphysical sense) irrelevant to man.
It seems to me that it is much more fruitful to
think of nature as part of a system of human organization, a changing condition
that interacts with man and culture. If this is so, justification of a
technological arrogance toward nature on the basis of dividends and profits is
not just bad economics; it is basically an immoral act. And our contemporary
moral crisis cuts much deeper than a que-stion of political power and law,
urban riots and slums; it may, at least in part, reflect American society’s
almost utter disregard of the value of nature.”[141]
The Chinese perspective, on the
contrary, has conceived Cosmos, Nature. Life, History, and Culture as an
integrative Whole tending towards creative unity, with its emphasis on the
fulfillment of human nature through the cosmic process of creative advance,
which in turn is consummated by way of the human cultural achievement. Such a
wholesome relational outlook on Life in the sense of Creativity in Man and
Nature is apt to serve as an anti-dote corrective for the one-sidedness
involved in the tendency of the technological civilization of the West, and
particularly of America. Again, scholars of the present generation, like John
Miller, have just started a “Humanism in the New Age,” stressing the on humanization
of science and technology, organismic conception of Nature as alive, a
philosophic temperament encompassing East and West, education via the
atmosphere of Love, etc.
The Creed of the “New Age
Humanism,” reminiscent no less of the Whiteheadian than of the Chinese way in
tenor, may be highlighted as follows:
“With the New Age comes a new humanism,
.... The value and dignity of man are
very much the focal point, with man as the measure of reality and human nature
the proper study of mankind. Man is viewed as part of both Nature and History,
and the importance of the liberal arts education is not to be underestimated as
man develops those capacities and powers which elevate him above the animals.
The humanist of the New Age will not be narrowly
parochial in his religious beliefs. Rather his will be an expansive,
experiential, experimental religion, more like a philosophy in its temperament,
encompassing East and West, .... Perhaps
a new Gnosticism will emerge, emphasizing the power of man, rather than
reliance on the gods or God. Man’s salvation will be his own problem, and a
savior will be one who shows the way, not one who takes the burden for one.
Such a faith is universal, consistent with Buddhism and Judaism, Hinduism and
Daoism: it is the universal faith expressed in the ancient teachings, even in
our own Christian tradition. ..
The New Age science will be decidedly
humanistic, with its emphasis on man, on his health, both physical and
psychological, mental and spiritual, and on his relation with Nature. Thus it will be an ecological and
environmental awareness: science will be understood in a holistic way. ....
Rather, science will be expanded; and the laws
of nature will be seen to include man as an individual, not merely man as a
member of this or that class. ....
Finally, in education, all these above-mentioned
values will be taught in an atmosphere and environment of love. Love will be
understood and practiced as non-attachment, acceptance, unconditionally and
irrespective of the individual to be loved. Love will be both the method and
the message of education, providing a climate in which the individual may grow
to self-actualization. This is the view of those psychologists whom one would
label generally “humanistic,” Erich Fromm, Albert Ellis, Abraham Maslow, Rollow
May, Frederick Perls, and Carl Rogers among others. It is also the view of the Oriental gurus
whose concern is for the humanity of man.”[142]
The aims of the “New Age
Humanism,” as well as Scheler’s thesis that “the growt and transformation of
physical nature must serve the growth of the profound center of man, his
spiritual person” (the “nucleus of
our soul”), will be fully endorsed by, and echoed from, all the leading Chinese
thinkers, from Confucius, Zisi, Mengzi, down to Lu Xiangshan (1139-1192) and
Wang Yangming (1472-1529). Lu boldly
declares, “The Cosmic affairs are my own affairs, and vice versa.”[143] Wang even takes a step further by
proclaiming: “Apart from my mind, there
is no event.” and “Apart from my mind, there is no reason,” thus he succeeds in
identifying “successively Mind with Nature, Reason, Dao, and Heaven.”[144]
For all these Chinese
philosophers, as for Scheler, and the New Humanists, “the profound center of
man” is believed to be “the focus and locus of Heaven.” As is well said by Scheler, our knowledge of
God is knowledge through God; and with Meist Eckhart, “the eye by which we see
God is the same by which God sees us.”[145]
To conclude: (1) As repeatedly
stressed by philosophers and historians deeply concerned with the plight of
humankind, history is the record of gigantic mistakes; if we have not learned
the lessons from history, we are going to repeat the same mistakes again. Whitehead’s insightful formulation of the fallacies
especially for the modern period since the Renaissance best serves as an
excellent pathological diagnosis for the modern man; the Chinese-Whiteheadian
philosophy of creativism offers a wholistic perspective as prescription. (2)
The tragic plight of the majority of humankind, China included, is a powerfully
eloquent testimony to the viciousness of bifurcation in variant forms of
stupidism or avidya, e.g., expansionism, colonialism, imperialism, militarism,
racialism, dehumanism, etc. Yet,
nonetheless, we have every good reason to be encouraged by the enlightening
remarks of John A. Hutchison in Path of
Eaith: “To men with mind to learn, traditional China still has much to
teach”; and “Students of Chinese history also know that the Chinese anvil has
outworn many hammers.”[146]