Introduction

New Confucianism

 
However, not everyone was prepared to completely jettison the native philosophical traditions. Some believed that although reform was indeed required to their philosophical systems in response to the challenge of Western ideas, the essentials of these systems could and should be retained. In particular, the Confucianists believed that the Neo-Confucian system could be so reformed. The result of their efforts was the emergence of a system that is called ‘New Confucianism’ (新儒家, xīn rú jiā) (in Taiwan often qualified as ‘Contemporary’ (当代, dāng dài) and in China as ‘Modern’ (现代, xiàn dài)) in which Neo-Confucian concerns are rephrased and re-argued in ways that are intended to be consistent with the rationalism and humanism that characterize modern Western thought.

Prelude to Reform

The movement is taken to have properly begun in 1921 with the publication of Liang Shuming’s ‘Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies’ (东西文化及其哲学, dōng xī wén huà jí qí zhé xué.) In this text Liang argued that culture is determined by the chosen lives of the people who make up that society, and their chosen lives are determined by their freely willed choices. Thus culture is the result of the freely willed choice of the citizenry and changes in that willing will result in changes in the culture willed – or, possibly, there can be no change in the culture without a change in the style of willing. Now, Liang identified three possible ways that the will can relate to the environment, and consequently three ways of life and three forms of culture produced collectively. The first orientation of the will is toward altering the environment in order to better fit it to the willer; the second is toward altering itself so that it does not desire to change the environment; and the third is to eliminate the will entirely thus altogether removing desires to change the world. Liang identified European culture as being the result of the first orientation of the will, Indian culture as the result of the third orientation, and Chinese culture as the result of the second orientation. China had never had the Western orientation in his view, and therefore lacked some of the techniques for worldly understanding and wealth creation that arose from the culture that the Western orientation required. It was clear that this was a lack that was disadvantaging China. Liang thought that in order to repair that lack it was not necessary to adopt the Western orientation, which would be inimical to the Chinese culture, but that it would be possible to adopt/adapt those techniques while preserving the fundamental nature of Chinese culture.

Versions of Reform

Several philosophers consciously or unconsciously followed the recommendations of Liang Shuming. We shall now look at just two of them: Feng Youlan and Xiong Shili, who attempted to reform Song-Ming Neoconfucianism to bring it into conformity with Western standards of philosophical rigour. You will recall that this Neoconfucianism came in both rationalistic and idealistic varieties: Feng’s reforms apply to the former and Xiong’s to the latter.

1. Feng Youlan

Feng Youlan (馮友蘭, 1895 – 1990) initially studied philosophy at Beijing where he met both Hu Shi and Liang Shuming before going to America in 1919 to study at Columbia under the Pragmatist John Dewey. After returning to China in 1923 he taught at several universities, including Jinan, Yenching, and Qinghua University in Beijing. Feng is actually one of the better known names amongst students of Chinese philosophy, because his book The History of Chinese Philosophy (1934, tr. Bodde 1954) and its shorter version, the Short History of Chinese Philosophy (1948, tr. Bodde) are amongst the earliest efforts to describe Chinese philosophy in terms consistent with the concepts, concerns, style, and standards of Western philosophy. These quickly became standard works, and although fashions change and later scholarship challenges certain claims, they are still valuable.

Feng’s own philosophical positions were presented in a series of works beginning with the Xīn Lǐxué (新理学, The New Study of Principles) which proposed a reform of the Lǐxué branch of Neoconfucianism associated with the names of the Song dynasty scholars Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi. (It is for that reason also called the Cheng-Zhu School.) His reform involved the analysis of certain terms important in both Neoconfucianism and Taoism according to the methods and standards of Western philosophy. He claimed, in fact, that each of these terms named an idea that was the logical consequence of the statement that ‘something exists.’ Having derived these concepts in a rationally acceptable way he could then reconstruct the core philosophy with regard to these new understandings. We shall look at the reconstruction of just two of these terms.

1. Li. You might recall that li was proposed by Cheng Yi as the cause of qi condensing into a flower in one case and leaves in another. Qi condenses into a flower ‘because’ it is ‘informed’ by the li of a flower. Zhu Xi added that the li of a flower also gives the definition, standard, or norm of that flower – how the flower ought to be – rather in the way that a mould can be taken as defining the shape of the object cast. A difficulty with all this, however, is that proposing li as an ad hoc solution to the problem of a causal gap tells you nothing about the nature of that li or whether it does exist, and arguments derived from Hume – with which Feng would have been familiar – show that we could not derive the claimed normative role from its supposed positive causal nature.

In Feng’s view, li are the ideal reality that we implicitly hypothesize or the abstractions that we implicitly create when we accept that general terms name things that exist in the real world. Because we accept that there are flowers, there must be the class of things called ‘flowers;’ there must be a characterization of that class; there must be an ideal of ‘flowers.’ In this case li is a purely formal concept and has no necessary content. The discovery of its content – if in fact there is any– is a task for empirical research. “It is the business of science to find out the content of the individual Li, using the scientific and pragmatic method.”[1] The cause of the condensation of qi into that particular instantiation of the li is equally a matter for science. Such research then takes the place of Zhu Xi’s gewu (格物,) or ‘investigation of things, an important praxis of that school, whose purpose was rather to use deep contemplation on the assumed content of the li of some experienced thing to reach a sudden enlightenment concerning the content of all li.

2. Qi. The daoxue generally accepted the view of Zhang Zai according to whom qi, originally just meaning ‘breath’ and signifying one of several kinds of influence, was taken to be the material force – the motive towards materiality of the universe – which produces the two subsidiary principles or tendencies of yin and yang which, in their turn, influence qi. Under the influence of yang qi has the property of Movement and constitutes Actuality: it condenses to form the things in the world. Under the influence of yin it has the property of Quiescence and constitutes Potentiality: when it dissipates things in the world go out of existence. There are many difficulties with this view too: For example, how are yin, yang, and qi causally related, is the circularity involved vicious, and what is the character of this qi beyond its mere relationship with yin and yang?

According to Feng, qi is no more than the logical consequence of the claim that a principle can be actualiised in matter. If that is the case, he argues, then there must be a potential for materialization and a material force to bring this about. Understood in this way – if this way can be understood – qi is no more contentful as a concept than li and remains an empty form waiting for empirical investigation to complete it. In particular, it implies nothing at all about whatever relationships may exist amongst itself and yin and yang which are, as with the case of li, relationships to be explored empirically.

Of course, this is only the beginning of the reconstruction. A more complete presentation of Feng’s system would show how these renovated concepts were used to repair the original Lixue and to justify modified metaphysical and moral claims. For our current purposes, however, the details of these developments need not concern us. It is enough to note the Western techniques (logic) underlying those modifications to the Lixue. Instead we shall look now at a second example of Western-inspired reform.

2. Xiong Shili

Xióng Shílì (熊十力) (1885–1968) was not trained in philosophy in the way that Feng Youlan was, but became a student of Buddhism in reaction to his disillusionment with the Republican revolutionary politics in which he had been an active participant. He studied under Ouyang Jingwu (欧阳境无) at the China Institute for Inner Learning in Nanjing where he began to develop an independent stance on Buddhist doctrines. Ouyang Jinming then recommended him to Liang Shuming who was seeking a scholar to teach Buddhist logic and Yogacara (or Vijñaptimātratāvāda) philosophy at Beijing University. There was an interruption due to the war with Japan war but he returned to teach at Beijing University after the Communist takeover and stayed there. Unfortunately, he suffered abuse at the hands of Mao’s willing thugs during the Cultural Revolution, and died having seen his philosophical position utterly rejected by the Communist state. Nevertheless he is now recognised as one of the greatest of the modern reformers of Confucianism.

Xiong recognised the threat that Western influences posed to the Chinese order and was concerned to modify the Confucian philosophy to meet it. His response made use of insights derived from his study of Buddhism and the classic Book of Changes (易经, Yijing) which he regarded as the heart of Confucianism. His philosophical position is outlined in the Xin Weishi Lun (新唯识论, A New Treatise on Vijñaptimātra) which is a critique of the teachings of the Mind-Only school of Mahayana Buddhism. You will recollect that according to that school our surface consciousness was underlain by a ‘Store Consciousness’ (ālayavijñāna) in which the seeds (bīja) of future experience are created by karmic power, which eventually flower as experiences passing across our surface consciousnesses.

Xiong rejected the reality-denying metaphysics of the Buddhist school, which he regarded as contributing to nihilism, solipsism, passivism, and other anti-social attitudes. His principal metaphysical claims include the following.

1. The World is Made of Substance and Function

Reality is real, not illusory, and is logically divisible into ‘substance’ (ti, 体) which he also calls ‘original reality,’ (by which he just means the fundamental ‘thing that there is’ of the world,) and ‘function’ (yong, 用). This notion of a logical division of actually indivisible elements is something we might recall from Aristotle, who declared that what he called ‘substance’ was a combination of ‘matter’ and ‘form’, where matter could never appear without manifesting some form or other, and form did not really exist except as an abstraction from some class of manifestations of matter. The form of a triangle, for example, is just an abstraction from examples of material triangles – they are the real substances in the world. In Xiong’s view, mutability and action in the ten thousand things is the expression of the function of their substances. His standard example to explain this is to say that substance is like the water of the sea and function is like the waves on the surface.  It is explained thus

1. The ocean is analogous to original reality;
2. All the water in the ocean is manifested as waves. This is analogous to original reality's manifestation as function of ten thousand things, that is, one function and another.
3. All the waves are analogous to the innumerable functions;
4. All the waves are mutually assimilable to a whole; this is analogous to the mutual assimilation of all the functions into a whole.
From the above, we can see that the metaphor of the ocean and the waves best illuminates the relation between original reality and function. [2 

2. The World is in Constant Flux

As suggested by the wave analogy above, Xiong considered that nothing in the world is stable, but everything is in a continuing state of alteration. You might recognise this from the teachings of Heraclitus, who said that the world was in a continual state of flux because its ultimate element was fire; or you might recollect that the Buddha, his contemporary, used the observation of universal impermanence to argue (or declare) that ‘impermanence’ was one of the fundamental marks of the world.

In Xiong’s case he elaborated further on the nature of the alterations: they were, he said, an alternation of ‘closing’ and ‘opening’, two terms which themselves stand in need of explication. By ‘closing’ is meant the sort of transformation by which things are formed from the unformed original reality. In closing that reality emerges into manifest reality. Closing is associated with the emergence of matter onto the world stage. Opening, on the other hand, is associated with the emergence of mind apparently distinct and separate form matter, and with the appropriate virtues of openness, strength, and vigour. Again, however, the distinction between the material realm and the mental one is rather apparent than real. Xiong holds that the two forms are not really distinct, they only manifest as being so. This is a sort of ‘double aspect’ metaphysics similar to that proposed in the West by, for example, Spinoza as a solution to the mind-body interaction problem. Nevertheless, Xiong regards the state of opening and the manifestation of ultimate reality as mentality to be the ‘true’ or at least ‘truest’ default setting for understanding ultimate reality, and is therefore able to say that since everything is a manifestation of ultimate reality, and ultimate reality is by default opening and mental, that everything is fundamentally mental . By that final statement we see that Xiong’s hypotheses are intended to repair the metaphysics proposed by the Mind-Only school of Buddhism. We should also note, however, that the pair of ‘opening’ and ‘closing’ as actions are strongly reminiscent of the actions of yin and yang in the cosmology that had been developed by the Yinyangists of the later/post-Han and adopted generally.

Reflections