The
And Its Philosophic Imports[*]
Suncrates
Although the well-known Crocean
definition of aesthetics as “the science of expression and general linguistics”
is a definition that seems to have been outdated and commands no serious
attention nowadays, nevertheless it serves one important purpose for our dis cussion here: It suggests an important clue to our
understanding of certain characteristics in Chinese and Oriental philosophy in
general. The Chinese thinkers, as a rule, are all “expressionists” (in the Crocean sense). For
them the important thing is the formation of “aesthetical” ideas in the mind,
not their externalization through language, which they regard as secondary, and
what is worse still, inadequate and misleading. This section, therefore, is
devoted to an investigation of certain distinctive features in the typical
Chinese way of thinking and expression, which can be described at the outset as
primarily aesthetical in character, and as such is found to be pervasive
throughout every phase of Chinese cultural life. As George Rowley puts it, “The
Chinese way of looking at life was not primarily through religion, or
philosophy, or science, but through art.”[1]
Early in 1925 Whitehead wrote in Science
and the Modern World:
The more we know of Chinese art, of
Chinese literature, and of the Chinese philosophy of life, the more we admire
the heights to which that civilization attained. For thousands of years, there
have been in
The above passage is quoted here not primarily to show how
Chinese art, Chinese literature, and the Chinese philosophy of life are highly
appreciated and admired in the West by a great mind like Whitehead. Rather, it
is quoted to point out a pertinent question: Is it true that science, and
together with it, logic, epistemology, aesthetics (as a science), etc., are the least developed branch of studies among
things Chinese? If so, why? And our
answer to this question will help us to see Chinese philosophy in a better
light.
The first part of the
question cannot be answered by a simple yes or no. It still remains an open question, to which
both pros and cons can be and have been made. For example, those who agree with
Whitehead will naturally tend to believe that “the Chinese science is
practically negligible,” while, on the other hand, we have Joseph Needham, the
eminent British bio-chemistry scientist, who has presented his monumental
research project Science and Civilization
in China, in volume after volume ever since 1954, as a best answer to those
who think that China has no science and is therefore a scientifically
undeveloped or underdeveloped people. It
has been argued that even up to the seventeenth century
Nevertheless, it is
still undeniable that what accounts for China’s greatest contribution to the
bulk of world civilization is not in the field of science (in spite of her
seniority in the invention of much that is important for the discovery of the
new world), because her predominant interest lies elsewhere, such as in ethics,
politics, philosophy, religion, art, and eminently in what E. A. Burtt calls “the art of living wisely.” What characterizes the Chinese spirit is that
they care for life so much ever since the ancient time, that they have never
developed the habit of “knowledge for its own sake”; what they favor is
“everything for life’s sake.” On this point, the popular writer Lin Yutang’s humorous witty remark deserves a hearing and
serves as a good point of departure for our discussion:
Chinese philosophy may be briefly
defined as a preoccupation with the knowledge of life rather than the knowledge
of truth. …the Chinese philosophers clutch at life and ask themselves the one
and only eternal question: ‘How shall we
live?’ Philosophy in the Western sense seems to the Chinese eminently
idle. In its preoccupation with logic,
which concerns itself with the method of arrival at knowledge, and epistemology,
which poses the question of the possibility of knowledge, it has forgotten to
deal with knowledge of life itself. That
is so much tomfoolery and a kind of frivolity, like wooing and courtship
without coming to marriage and the producing of children, … The German
philosophers are the most frivolous of all; they court truth like ardent
lovers, but seldom propose to marry her.[4]
It seems that the
question why
To look deep into the
matter, we must explain all the phenomena by reference to certain
characteristic features in the Chinese mentality and language habits; these
two, being inter-conditioning and inter-conditioned, are inseparable one from
the other. For expediency of exposition,
let us proceed systematically under the following five headings: (A) The Will against Clarity and Certainty;
(B) The Will against System; (C) Keyserling on
Chinese Language; (D) Art and Philosophy; (E) Keyserling
and Russell on Eastern and Western Culture.
A. The Will against Clarity and
Certainty
What accounts for the essence of science in the Western sense
is the tendency for classification, definition, and systematization. And all these are something that is least
appealing to the Chinese mentality and the Chinese way. As the great exponent
of Zen Buddhism, D. T. Suzuki, has well put it, “The Chinese people are not
stargazers.”[5] Both Fong Youlan
and Jin Yuelin agreed that “Chinese philosophers were
all of them different grades of Socrates!”[6]
Moreover, traditionally, the Chinese people have shown little inclination for
the “definite” or the “systematical,” and definitions and systems are the
things they care least about, because they, more or less under the spell of
their ancient philosophers like Laozi and Zhuangzi, have been disillusioned or rather, “enlightened,”
about the inadequacy of words and languages as the tool of thought and the way
of communication.
This is best exhibited in their way of philosophical
expression. Speaking generally, the
Chinese philosophers tend to have their thoughts and ideas expressed in the
form of insightful aphorisms, fragmentary remarks, or epigrammatic sayings;
they seldom have their mature thoughts presented in the form of a systematical
treatise, as the western philosophers have done, starting with definitions of
concepts, and following them out step by step by way of logical arguments. In this connection, for the sake of analogy,
we may almost say that the typical Chinese way of philosophical expression
comes very close to the views adopted by the ancient Pre-Socratic thinkers, and
by Pascal, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Bergson, Keyserling, and the later Wittgenstein in modern
times. The common feature of all these
philosophical writers may be summed up in one word: suggestiveness (instead of
definiteness). These writers, as well as their Chinese counterparts, have all
cared for the immediate and the qualitative character of concrete life
experience; they are so fully aware of the function and limits of human
language that, in the main, they prefer to express their thoughts, their ideas,
their feelings, their life experiences, by way of concrete images and
suggestive metaphors. It is on this account that Plato was said to be of all
great philosophers “the least dogmatic and the most suggestive.”[7] From the Oriental standpoint, suggestiveness
is the mark of true greatness for poets, artists, and philosophers alike.
Recently Joseph S. Wu
characterizes the common trend underlying the major currents of Western thought
as “the spirit of searching for clarity and certainty,”—a spirit which “was
initiated in Greek thought, sharpened by the medieval thinkers, developed
rapidly with modern philosophy, and has been reaching its climax in the
analytic philosophy of the contemporary world.” On the other hand, what is most
typical of Oriental thought, whether Hinduism, Buddhism, or Daoism, or Confucianism,
can be characterized as “the spirit of searching for (the depth of) vagueness
and uncertainty.”[8] “While logic
is so important to Western philosophy, direct
experience is valued in Oriental thought,” thus comments the quoted
author. As a result, the Western
attitude turns out to be one of criticalness, and the Oriental, one of
tolerance. This is because Oriental philosophers, as a rule, are well aware of
the fact that “all philosophical systems are different modes of expressing
one’s direct experience of the totality of the vagueness and uncertainty of the
universe:
The problems in the mainstream of
Western philosophy center around Nature. … The main problems in Oriental philosophy
center around Life. The whole history of Chinese philosophy is a history of the
philosophy of life, both social and individual. … for Chinese philosophers,
metaphysical systems are but a series of footnotes to the philosophy of life.[9]
Joseph S. Wu’s remarks
of what is typical of the Eastern as contrasted with the Western modes of
thought are but an explicit way of expressing the contrast between two types of
philosophical temperaments, namely, the “simpleminded” type of Russell on the
one hand, and the “muddleheaded” type of Whitehead on the other. Indeed, both of these two types are found to
have been existent in Eastern as well as in Western philosophies, though
differing in degrees of predominance. We
may roughly say what is an exception for the one proves the rule for the other. On this issue, we find Professor Thomé H. Fang’s observation quite insightful and
stimulating:
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.[10]
B. The Will against System
In the light of the
above elucidation, another feature we find conspicuously lacking in the Chinese
way of thinking and expression is the tendency for theorizing and
systematizing. To borrow Jasper’s
phrase, we may say that the Chinese philosophers are distinguished by “the will against system.” For the
Chinese, as for the existentialistic philosophers, like Kierkegaard and
Nietzsche, the system is a detour from reality and is, therefore, lies and
deception. The will to system, for Nietzsche, is a sign of the impoverishment
of mind, and “a lack of honesty.”[11]
In
this connection, another strong and eloquent witness for the virtues of the
Chinese way of thinking and expression can be found in the writings of Hermann Keyserling. For
example, in Creative Understanding he
says, “I do not intend to offer a complete theoretical system, I want to give
living impulse.” And the method of his
Conversation
Is only agreeable with one who by mere allusion knows what is meant. And this must
be so if communion is to be possible at all. … These considerations inevitably
lead to the result that spirits must be able to communicate in some direct way,
beyond and, as it were, in spite of the means of utterance. …
Plato’s teaching was: It is not the eyes
that see. Bu we see by means of the eyes. … Just so we can understand new ideas
although we know only what we possess; Just so, though only knowing our own
language, we can get to understand, on the basis of it, a foreign language.
… This never depends on the means of
communication as such, it only depends on the person who makes use of them.”[13]
Naturally
will one agree with Keyserling on this point if one
recalls what Plato said two thousand and four hundred years ago on the
cultivation of wisdom of the highest order, philosophical or political, and why
he refused Dionysius I’s request to have his thoughts
put into a neat system assuming the textbook form: In his “Seventh Letter” (341d), Plato made
his point quite clear:
The
acquaintance with it (i.e., wisdom) must come rather after a long period of
attendance on instruction in the subject itself and of close companionship,
when, suddenly, like a blaze kindled by a leaping spark, it is generated in the
soul and at once becomes self-sustained.[14]
Indeed, the findings of our modern linguistic psychological
research do not add much that is new to this insight of Plato’s; perhaps it is
merely the mysterious touch in Plato’s way of expression that is replaced by
some scientific or psychological terms, because the main thrust of all these
considerations is that communication is ultimately a matter of “intersubjectivity.” The ancient Chinese thinkers— Kongzi, Laozi, Zhuangzi, except perhaps Mozi—are
well aware of the character of intersubjectivity in
communication. This accounts partly for the fact that generally the Chinese
philosophical writings are never so “systematic,” never so “definite,” as
compared with the western philosophical style. Yet, they are quite suggestive.
Nevertheless, it is
far from being the case that all the Chinese philosophers emphasize only
suggestiveness and even silence, rather than articulateness and speech. In Tang Junyi’s
recent studies Treatise on the Origins of
Chinese Philosophy we find there discussed four types of semantical awareness in Chinese philosophy of language in
relation to philosophical thought, namely, Daoistic, Moistic, Confucian, and the Legalist schools, each
representing a different attitude towards the nature and function of language.[15]
Let us take only the
first three. The Daoistic school, represented by Laozi and Zuangzi being fully
aware of the limits and uselessness of words or speech in grasping the Tao,
therefore stresses the importance of silence as a means of transcending the
limits of language. On the other hand, the Moistic
school, represented by Mozi and his followers, from
which came the ancient
If you have something to
say, yet you say it to a wrong person, you miss your words; on the other hand,
if to a person whom you can talk with, you keep silent on what you should say
to him, you miss the right person. A wise man should miss neither the right
words, nor the right person.[16]
The same idea was also
expressed by Xunzi: “Speaking rightly is a sign of
wisdom, so is keeping silent at the right moment. To know the art of keeping
silent is as important as knowing the art of speech.”[17] It is to be noted that the spirit of Zen Buddhism
is derived from both the Confucian and Daoist method
of “living improvisation at the right moment.” In this respect, Zen Buddhism,
as D. T. Suzuki has rightly pointed out, is “one of the products of the Chinese
mind after its contact with Indian thought.”[18]
And it can be developed only in a country like
C.
Keyserling on Chinese Language
Basically, such
tendencies in the Chinese way of expression are due to the symbolic character
of the Chinese language in writing. It is a well justifiable principle in
linguistic anthropology that the language pattern of a certain people and the
thought pattern of that people are closely inter-related and inter-conditioned.
Keyserling’s keen observations on the
symbolic character of the Chinese language and its relation to Chinese thought
are worth quoting at length:
The Chinese method of expression is
not objective or exact, but suggestive, and presupposes a sympathetic hearer or
listener, in the same way as the figurative method of expression of women. This is in many ways an inconvenience. . . .
This disadvantage expresses itself particularly in philosophy, whose intrinsic
problem it is to render clear what everybody may surmise only indistinctly.
Accordingly, scientific recognization can only be
represented imperfectly in Chinese writing. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake
to accuse it ... of the feminine method of expression. For ideograms are means of expression of a
different kind from words or from our writing: they are comparable with
mathematical formulas. They may be
described as insufficient by the man who is simple enough to demand that they
shall define in themselves every particular result whose law they
determine: in reality they are more
precise than any version of language could be, and they embrace, moreover, a
great deal more besides.[19]
Only people who have never produced a
profound thought assert that we know how to say exactly what we mean in all
circumstances; the language does not exist which could make this marvel
possible. … What about that which goes beyond
all possible forms of expression, and yet is the most real portion of
reality—the objects of metaphysical thought and of the innermost religious
experience? These things simply cannot
be rendered in our languages. But they
can be represented in Chinese writing.
It is possible to place symbols . . . side by side in such a way that
they include, as well as qualify, the infinite, just as an open angle defines
infinite space.[20]
One of the direct consequences of the symbolic character of
the Chinese language is the Chinese notion of thought as an independent
autonomy of essentially symbolic meanings or significance. To use a Fregean
phrase, the Chinese, and the Orientals generally, are more concerned with
“Sinn” (sense) than with “Bedeutung” (reference); or
to use a Wittgensteinian phrase, the Chinese are more
interested in what can only be “shown” than in what can be “said”: As the Chinese proverb puts it, “One showing
is worth a hundred sayings.”[21]
Let us consider what Keyserling says about oriental
thought:
Oriental thought, as far as it does
not coincide with ours, generally does not aim at all at the explanation of an
object; it gives immediate expression to a Meaning, independent of the outer world. We, on the contrary, whatever the problems be
that we attack, aim at the grasping of an object in the objective sense. …
There is no doubt that one can convey to a person of understanding what one
means by an apparent untruth, just as well as or even better under certain
circumstances than by an exact and correct statement of the case. Women and diplomatists know this well enough
in the West, and they act accordingly. …
Thus we Westerners even ask the
question, which to every Oriental philosopher must appear absurd—whether God
has an ‘objective1 existence, .... Thought, for the typical Occidental, has no
autonomous meaning.[22]
….Wherever thought in our Western
sense is in question, the Orientals are inferior to us. To them thoughts are independent forms of
life of essentially symbolic significance.[23]
D. Art and Philosophy
In the light of the
above observations on the symbolic character of the Chinese language, Keyserling proceeds to comment on the relations of poetry
and philosophy, saying, “It is typical of the West that its poets are
profounder than its philosophers, even where these must be recognized as
deep.” Because
Poets under every circumstance give
immediate expression to the powers which sway them, whereas it is typical that
our philosophers penetrate to the inside from without and thus are not able to
give immediate expression to things inward. The metaphysical reality is
something essentially and purely inward, to be understood from within only. The
West has never quite clearly been aware of this.[24]
Here Keyserling is echoing
Santayana in Three Philosophical Poets
(Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe). “The philosopher, in his best moments, is a
poet,” and Irvin Edman in Arts and the Man concerning the relation of philosophy to poetry in
their fundamental aspects. Take
Santayana first:
In philosophy itself investigation
and reasoning are only preparatory and servile parts, means to an end. They
terminate in insight, or what in the noblest sense of the word may be called
theory, qewria—a steady contemplation of
all things in their order and worth.
Such contemplation is imaginative. No one can reach it who has not
enlarged his mind and tamed his heart. A philosopher who attains it is, for the
moment, a poet; and a poet who turns his practiced and passionate imagination
on the order of all things, or on anything in the light of the whole, is for
that moment a philosopher.[25]
Here
Santayana is echoing Matthew Arnold’s often cited dictum on Sophocles, “He saw
life steadily and saw it whole.”[26] Next, we turn to Irwin Edman
on the relations of art and philosophy.
The artist when he ceases to be
merely a gifted and trifling craftsman turns out to be, in his very choice of
themes, in his selection of materials, in his total and residual effect, a
commentator on life and existence; in his immediate and imaginative way he is a
philosopher. The philosopher,
constructing through the apparatus of definition and demonstration, or of
discovery and synthesis, a complete vision of life and existence, is making a
canvas of the whole of experience, composing an intellectual symphony, and
fabricating a poem, however much his language be prose. ‘Philosophy,’ Socrates is made to say by
Plato, ‘is a finer kind of music,’ and like serious music, however unmoved the
mind that went to its making, it is moving.[27]
Josiah
Royce’s view that “Artists are often unconscious philosophers, but great
philosophers, … are never more than consummate artists”[28]
is further elaborated by Edman with a Deweyan overtone:
Latterly thinkers as different as
John Dewey and Havelock Ellis have come to conceive of experience itself as an
art, and art as simply a generalized name for intelligence.
There are, finally, two senses in
which the business of philosophy and that of art in their major conceptions flow
into each other. All art is, in the first place, a creation and
construction. So, too, for all its other
claims, is philosophy.[29]
The philosopher, like the artist, is at once selective and
constructive.[30]
It thus becomes evident that all great philosophers East and
West, in their best moments, are great artists or poets. In this highest sense, Confucius as well as
Goethe, Zhuangzi as well as Plato, are at once great
philosophers and great poets as well.
Chinese philosophy is primarily a philosophy of vision, and Chinese
metaphysics a metaphysics of experience.
Indeed, it is based on a vision of the world through immediate
experience; its meaning or significance can only be grasped, in Keyserling’s phrase, “from within,” rather than “from
without.” Keyserling’s philosophy of culture, like Cassirer’s, is essentially a philosophy of significance or
symbolic meaning. All great philosophers
in East and West have been aware of the importance of “the inward,” yet the
Orientals have never been so much engaged, as the Westerners have, in the
search for “the outward.” The search for “the outward” and the tendency of
“penetrating the inside from without,” turn out to be so typical of Western
tradition that the carings for the “inward” remain
the business of a silent minority, such as of artists, of religious thinkers,
or of mystics. For the Orientals, on the
contrary, the pole of emphasis is just reversed. This is what we mean by saying that what is
only the exception for the West proves to be a rule for the Oriental, and vice
versa. For Oriental thinkers, nothing
seems to be further from the truth than the so-called “referential-theory of
meaning,” because, from the very beginning, they have a totally different
notion of thought. As regards this
different notion of thought in connection with meaning, Keyserling
observes:
The Oriental notion of thought
doubtless relates to something real. Now
this reality can only be defined in abstract as Meaning, as Sense, as
Significance. Every symbol as such is a
material thing, to whatever plane of matter it may belong; for sounds, words,
notions and ideas, viewed as formations, are phenomena in exactly the same
sense as solid bodies. But significance
in itself cannot be understood within the frame of an empirical category;
Significance alone is what we must call spiritual. This is true of the meaning of a thought in
contradistinction to its embodiment, of Significance of a dream, of a myth, of
a work of art in contradistinction to its actual facts. This ‘Significance’ is demonstrably the
creator of its expression. It follows
that the Oriental notion of thought as an independent and autonomous power is
well founded in principle as well as in fact.[31]
E.
Keyserling and Russell on Eastern and Western
Culture
On the basis of the distinction between the Eastern and
Western notions of thought, with their emphasis on the “inward” and the
“outward,” respectively, Keyserling draws his insight
into the distinction of two types of culture:
the Being-culture of the East, and the Ability-culture of the West. The Western culture, he argues, is a culture
of Ability, aiming always at the conquest of Nature, while the Eastern culture
is a culture of Being, aiming always at the complete fulfillment of one’s own
Being through self-realization.
Consequently, the Western world has created more “civilized savages”
than the East. “If mankind wishes to
attain a higher stage of insight,” thus concludes Keyserling,
“it must get beyond both the East and the West.”[32]
It is of interest to note that what Keyserling
has said about the essential difference between the Eastern and Western types
of culture goes in parallel with Russell’s insightful observation on “Chinese
and Western Civilization Contrasted” in The
Problem of China (1921), though
each attacks the same problem from different angles and speaks in different
terms. The Being-type of culture of the
East for Keyserling, as developed out of the creative
impulses, has been characterized by Russell in terms of “creation without possession;
action without assertion; development without domination.” The Ability-type of
culture of the West, as developed out of the possessive impulses, is for
Russell a colossal example of the blind drive (avidyā) for “possession,
assertion, and domination.”
Whereas Keyserling says “If mankind
wishes to attain to a higher stage of insight, it must get beyond both the East
and the West,” Russell declares: “In
fact, we have quite as much to learn from them as they from us.” and “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.”[33] Russell even succeeds in trying to sum up in
one phrase the main differences between the East and the West by saying that
the East, in the main, aims at enjoyment; while the West, at power. One accounts for the possibility of the
Being-type of culture of the East; the other leads to the Ability-type of
culture of the West. And the distinctive
merit of the Being-culture is best expressed in the spirit of their art, and
above all, in what E. A. Burtt calls “the art of
living wisely.”
The above observation may seem to be unfair to the
Westerners, because Lord Russell and Count Keyserling
have merely provided us with a sharp contrast between what the latter calls the
Unwisdom of the West with what is the Wisdom of the
East. A reversed contrast of course can
be made, and was made, for example, by John Dewey’s disciple Hu Shi nearly a century ago (during the May-4th Movement in
China, 1919), but that is beyond the scope of this dissertation. To sum up, we
may conclude by saying with Russell: In
art, the Chinese aim at being exquisite; in life, they aim at being reasonable;
and in the art of living wisely, they aim at being both.
F.
Réumé;
Northrop on Eastern and Western Cultures
In the foregoing discussions, we have started with
Whitehead’s statement on the underdevelopment of science in China in contrast
to her high achievement in art, in literature, and her philosophy of life;
also, we have tried to locate the problem by reference to the Chinese will
against clarity and certainty; the will against system; the notion of thought
as an independent autonomy of significant meaning; and the mental habit of
“grasping the inside from within,” as opposed to the Western tendency of
“penetrating the inside from without.” All these are intended to outline the
contrast between what Keyserling calls the Being-type
of culture of the East and the Ability-type of culture of the West. In this section, however, we are to sum up
the findings of previous discussions, in more specific terms, by reference to
Northrop’s observation in The Meeting of East and West: that the Western culture
is primarily logico-intellectually oriented, while
the Eastern culture is found to be basically intuitive-aesthetically oriented
in character. Apparently, this is a too broad and over-generalized distinction,
to which objections may well be raised from both sides of East and West. However, if taken as a general
characterization, it proves to be sound and helpful.
In The Meeting of East and West, Northrop
discusses in detail the “Aesthetical Character of Oriental Culture,” taking the
“intuitive aesthetic character” as the unity of Oriental culture. For brevity’s
sake, we shall concentrate our comments on two points in Northrop’s
treatise; (a) the “character of
fluidity” as reflected in Chinese psychology; and (b) the “immediately apprehended
aesthetical continuum,” where, according to Northrop, lies the “genius of the
East.” Both are due to the peculiar character of Chinese language.
(a)
The Character of
“Fluidity” of Chinese Language
as Reflected in Chinese Psychology
What is of particular interest in Northrop’s book is his
account of the relation of Chinese language to Chinese psychology. He speaks of
the “superlative degree of fluidity” in the Chinese language which expresses
itself in some aspects of Chinese psychology (or mentality):
Each stroke and character having its
own independent, purely denotative, immediately experienced referent, and these
strokes and their compounded characters being associated merely as direct
experience in a given particular instance happens to associate them, the Chinese
language gains a superlative degree of fluidity, a capacity to convey the
unique particularity, nuance, and precisely refined richness of the specific,
individual experience which probably no other mature language in the world
today achieves. This shows itself also
in the Chinese psychology. It is
doubtful if any other people have such capacity as have the Chinese, having
visited, lived with, and immediately experienced the culture and psychological
reactions of another people, to put themselves in the intuitive standpoint of
that people. A Chinese student, after
living a brief period upon the
Northrop’s
observation, as quoted above, is generally correct and sound, with the
exception perhaps of the present author himself.[35]
(b) The Immediately
Apprehended Aesthetical Continuum
As noted before,
“grasping the inside from within” is a mental habit so characteristic of the
Chinese way that it finds its expression in the spirit both of Chinese
philosophy and Chinese art. As reflected
in art, it represents the Chinese will against verisimilitude. As a rule, all
great Chinese artists in their creative activities are motivated by a sort of
“expressionist urge.” Typical of this attitude and tendency is the remark made
by the famous Painter Ni Zan (1301-1374), one of the
four great masters in the Yuan dynasty:
“The bamboos I painted are expressions of the blithe spirit of my life
out of the depth of my soul.”[36] And throughout the whole Chinese art
tradition, realism is never favored with enthusiasm,—which accounts partly for
the apparent lack of perspective in most of Chinese painting, in which, as with
Picasso, there is always a sort of deliberate distortion. As the poet-painter
Su Dongpo (1036-1101) puts it, “To judge a painting
by its verisimilitude shows the mental level of a child.”[37] Both George Rowley and Stephen C. Pepper call
attention to the use of “moving focus” in Chinese painting in contrast to the
“static focus” as distinguishing the Chinese from Western art.[38]
On the other hand, as
reflected in the spirit of Chinese philosophy, this tendency of “grasping from
within” expresses itself both in the theory of meaning and the criterion of
truth. As has been said before, the Chinese has never favored any “referential
theory of meaning.” And the most approximate equivalent to the Chinese view
would be Kierkegaard’s “subjectivity criterion of truth.” All these can be
explained as ultimately a matter of aesthetical attitude cultivated out of an
artistic habit, which, according to Northrop, is the habit of enjoying “the
immediately apprehended aesthetical continuum,” and is largely due to the
ideographic symbolism of the Chinese language.
… instead of beginning, as
does a student of painting in a traditional Western art school, with the
laborious copying of the three-dimensional, geometrical casts of Greek statues,
and then passing on to the three-dimensional living human figure in the nude,
to master the use of perspective which the Western postulationally
formulated science of geometrical optics has defined, the Oriental painter
starts with the elementary brush strokes used in the writing of countless
symbols of the Chinese language. Since
these symbols often merely put on paper in an immediately apprehended form
certain characteristics of items of direct experience, it is an easy and natural
transition for the painter to pass from the mastery of the strokes used in
constructing the symbols of the Chinese language to the painting of the richer,
more complete, immediately experienced aesthetic materials which these symbols
frequently denote and from which, often, they have been abstracted.[39]
What Northrop has said above about the making of Chinese
artists equally applies to the making of Chinese thinkers, because for them, as
for the artists, the first thing they must acquire “is the capacity to grasp
the immediately apprehended aesthetic factors in the immediately experienced,
aesthetic continuum in their purity and all alone.”[40] The ideographic symbolism of Chinese language
in writing has a great fashioning and shaping effect upon the development,
unconsciously as it were, of the sensitivity of creative minds. In this respect, the mentality of Chinese
thinkers is shaped essentially in the same way as their artist brethens. In both
cases, there is always the spirit of symbolic expression at work,—in philosophy
as well as in art. In most fundamental
aspects, one is indistinguishable from the other. Though this character of symbolism is
something peculiar to the Chinese language, it would be an over-exaggeration to
say that this tendency for symbolism is confined to the Chinese alone. Indeed, symbolism is the mark of all great
works of art in all great cultural traditions At best, however, we can say that
the writing form of the Chinese language is peculiarly favorable to the
development of such a tendency in Chinese artists and thinkers. Pepper says:
The Orientals are particularly deft
with . . . narrative movement of lines.
The flexible brush they habitually use is the most sensitive of all
drawing instruments to the movements and emotions of the hand. It spreads in thickness with the pressure of
excitement, thins to a thread at the thought of tenderness. . . . The Chinese
and the Japanese have much to teach the West on the use of line.[41]
Taken
merely at its face value, the above statement of Pepper’s sounds like a sort of
technical advice addressed to students of art alone. But, if we look more
deeply into the matter, it tells us a great deal about the secret of Oriental
wisdom. In this brief statement is epitomized not only the gist of Northrop’s
lengthy discourse on “the aesthetical character of Oriental culture,” but also,
what is of direct importance to our study in this dissertation, an enlightening
clue to the understanding of the temperamental affinity between the Chinese and
Whiteheadean world views. Interpreted symbolically, each stroke, each
line by the brush, in so far as it is immediately apprehended, represents a
sense of “vivid value,” and, as with Whitehead, “The habit of art is the habit
of enjoying vivid value.” Art in its general sense is “any selection by which the concrete facts are so arranged as to elicit
attention to particular values which are realizable by them.” As Whitehead uses
it, “the sense of value,” “the sense of importance,” is but another name for “wisdom.”
And wisdom is “the fruit of a balanced development of individuality” (of both
intellect and intuition), which, in its proper sense, is an “aesthetic
growth.” Yet, to be sure, what is most
wanted in modern education is “the appreciation of an infinite variety of
values achieved by an organism in its proper environment.” He argues, “When you
understand all about the sun and all about the atmosphere and all about the
rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset. There is
no substitute for the direct perception of the concrete achievement of a thing
in its actuality.” In The Aims of Education he argues for “the
sense of value” most eloquently:
The ultimate motive power, alike in
science, in morality, and in religion, is the sense of value, the sense of
importance. It takes the various forms of wonder, of curiosity, of reverence,
of worship, of tumultuous desire for merging personality in something beyond
itself. This sense of value imposes on life incredible labours,
and apart from it life sinks back into the passivity of its lower types. The
most penetrating exhibition of this force is the sense of beauty, the aesthetic
sense of realized perfection. This thought leads me to ask, whether in our
modern education we emphasize sufficiently the function of art.[42]
To put the matter more
explicitly, we may say with Whitehead, that the most penetrating, the most
magnificent, and the most sublime exhibition of this force, consists in
suggesting a bold, comprehensive world hypothesis, which is the exhibition on a
grand scale of one’s sense of value, of beauty, of importance. Indeed, “Art concerns more than sunset.”[43] So does philosophy. This is no less true of Whitehead than of
Chinese metaphysics at its core: In
either case, we find a value-centric system of Weltsanschauungen as Lebensanschauungen,
viz., as something to live by and for.
[*] Editor’s Note: First presented to the
Symposium on “Ways of thinking: East and West,” Society of Asian &
Comparative Philosophy in conjunction with the American Philosophical
Association,
[1] George Rowley, Principles of Chinese Painting (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1947), p. 3.
[3] Bertrand Russell, “Chinese and Western
Civilization Conttrasted,” selected in Robert E. Egner and
Lester E. Denonn (eds.), The Baisc Writings of Bertrand Russell
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961), pp.
551-552.
[6] Fong Yu-lan, A Short History of Chinese Philosophy
(New York: The Macmillan Co., 1962), p. 10.
Jin Yuelin was Professor of Logic at
[8] Joseph S. Wu, “Contemporary Western
Philosophy from an Eastern Viewpoint,” International Philosophical Quarterly,
Vol. VIII, No. 4 (December, 1968), 491.
Cf. Abraham Kaplan, The New World
of Philosophy (New York: Randon House, 1965), p. 58:
“... more and more philosophers are asking whether clarity and precision
are enough and, even more, whether the gain in philosophic knowledge
compensates for the loss in philosophic wisdom.”
[10] Thomé H. Fang,
“The Alienation of Man in Religion Philosophy, and Philosophical Anthropology,”
Proceedings of the 5th
East and West Philosophers’ Conference, Honolulu, Hawaii, July, 1969; included
in Fang, Creativity in Man and Nature: A
Collection of Philosophical Essays (Taipei:
Linking Publishing Co., Ltd., 1980), p. 85.
[11]Karl Jaspers, “Existenzphilosophie,”
see Walter Kaufmann (ed.), Existentialism
from Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York: Meridian Books, 1968), p. 164.
[12]”
[13] Herman Keyserling,
Creative Understanding (New
York: Harper & Harpers Publishers,
1929), pp. 4-5.
[14] Plato, “The
Seventh Letter,” Plato, the Collected
Dialogues, trans. by L. A. Post and ed. By
[15] Tang Junyi, Original Teachings of Chinese Philosophy (Hong Kong: Young Sun Publishing Co., 1966), 2 Volumes, Vol. I, Chapters VII-VIII, pp. 203-277.
[17]Tang, op. cit., p. 208; translation, the present author’s.
[19] Hermann Keyserling,
The Travel Diary of a Philosopher,
trans by J. Holroyd Reece (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1925), Vol. II,
pp. 32-33.
[21] Alan Watts, The Way of Zen (New York: Vintage Books, 1957), p. 9.
[25] George Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets (New York: A Doubleday Anchor Book,
1938), pp. 17-18.
[26] Cf. G. T. W. Patrick, Introduction to Philosophy (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co. Inc., 1928), p. 2.
[28] Josiah Royce, The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (New
York: Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1896), p. 175.
[29] Edman, Arts and the Man, p. 148.
[31] Keyserling, Creative Understanding, p. 19. The phrase “Being-culture” as used here by Keyserling may sound abstruse; it may, however, be interpreted
in terms of what Chung-ying Cheng calls “Intrinsic
Humanism,” what Joseph S. Wu calls “Human centrality,” in their recent studies
in Chinese philosophy. See Inquiry, Vol.
14, Nos. 1-2 (Summer, 1971), 8, 130, and what Master Fang calls “miiao xing” (self-fulfillment,
self-realization).
[32]Ibid., p. 23.
[33]Russell, “Chinese and Western Civilization
Contrasted,” p. 347.
[34] Northrop, The Meeting of East and West, pp. 318-319.
[35] The present author, however, may surprise Northrop by saying that in spite of all his foreign studies and experiences, his forty-five years’ stay in the U. S., he still remains hopelessly a Chinese; he is passionately Chinese just as it was admitted by Russell himself that after all he was passionately English (see B. Russell, Autobiography, III, p. 18).
[37] Cf. Lin Yutang, The Chinese Theory of Art (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1967), p. 92.
[42] Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education (New York: The
Macmillan Co., 1967), pp. 62-63.
[43] Cf. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, pp. 198-200.