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outdated and commands no serious attention nowadays, nevertheless it serves one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 discussion here:
It suggests an important clue to our understanding of certain
characteristics in Chinese and Oriental philosophy in general. The Chinese thinkers
are, as a rule, 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.