In 1919 it was suggested -- indeed vehemently declared -- that in order for Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy to be introduced to the history of China it would be necessary for Confucius to bow out. This paper explores the opposite thesis, namely, that in order for Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy to be introduced, Confucius is needed as their host.

In the context of the search for modernization and for appropriate standing among the nations of the world there seems to be not doubt that science is needed. Certainly, necessary and universal laws have made it possible to interpret and predict natural forces, and the development of an objective and mathematical spirit has enabled humankind to manage the forces of nature. Together these have provided the ability to project and realize the great accomplishments needed in order to support the quantity and enhance the quality of human life -- and, by implication, that of nature as a whole.

Much -- very much -- has been accomplished in this direction; but there are reasons to fear that these accomplishments have been so single-minded as to place in question the broader context of human life, its meaning and dignity.

In the history of philosophy brilliant new creative openings often degenerate into reductivist efforts to absorb all other meaning. This perverse dynamism is found in no less central a personage than Plato who inverted Parmenides’ relation of thought to being into a reduction of reality to what was clear to the human mind. Thus, he invited the mind to soar, but where it met his limits -- as in taking account of concrete realities and the exercise of human freedom -- he generated the classic blueprint for a suppressive communal state.

Such temptations of all-controlling reason are characteristic as well of modern times, beginning from Descartes’ requirements of clarity and distinctness for the work of reason. The effect in his own philosophy was to split the human person between the extended substance or body and the nonextended substance or spirit. Much as he tried for a unity of these in the human person, this could not be done in the clear and distinct terms he required. As a result philosophers and then whole cultures proceeded according to either body or spirit, and modern thought polarized between the atomism of discrete sensations and the ever greater unities perceived by spirit.

What is particularly frightening is the way in which theoretical philosophical experiments in either of these isolates were carried out by a fairly mechanical pattern of reason and then translated into public policy. It is fine for a thinker to give free range to the constructive possibilities of his or her mind by saying with Hobbes: let’s suppose that all are isolated singles in search of survival and then see what compromises and what rules will make survival possible. Over time we may have become so accustomed to that game that we have forgotten Hobbes’s identification of the wolflike basic instincts by which it is played, but we should listen to others from all parts of the Southern hemisphere when they perceive the resulting system as predatory, brutish and mean.

Similarly, it could be helpful for a thinker to hypothesize that all is matter and then see how its laws can shed light on the process of human history. But when this was done by Marx and Lenin society began to repress the life of the spirit and term irrational everything except scientific historicism; the freedom of individuals and of peoples was suppressed and creativity died.

Both are parallel cases of theoretical axioms becoming metaphysical totalities even while, or perhaps especially due to, denying such a thing as metaphysics. It is not surprising that the result for this century was a bipolar world armed to the hilt and subsisting by a reign of mutual terror. What is surprising is that the internal collapse of Eastern Europe in 1989 should have given popular credibility to the notion that the parallel road taken by the other partner, namely, the West, can be followed now without fear -- that the wolf has been transformed into a lamb for lack of a mirror in which to observe the effects of its own root problems.

This suggests that it is necessary to look for additional dimensions of science beyond reductive analysis and universal and necessary laws. While there is much to be discovered here which will be, and indeed has been, very helpful, it is important to recognize not only what is common but what is unique and distinctive in reality. Though true that without the necessary and the universal life would be chaotic, it is no less true that without the unique and different there would be neither life nor progress: all would be static, rather than emergent.

In this world logos must be realized in the concrete and unique. This points to events with their radical novelty. In human life this is the reality of promise and creativity, of uniqueness and freedom, of sharing and love. Surprisingly perhaps, it may be Confucius who can help to see how these can be not only juxtaposed to science and its offspring, technology, but enable technology to be integrated into Chinese culture and receive thereby the full force of this culture’s creative power. For Confucius to help it is necessary that technology and culture not be placed on the same level or considered as alternatives one to the other. To see how they can be positively related, indeed how Confucius is needed for the introduction of science and the technological transformation of China, the threefold structure of Kant’s critiques can be instructive

Kant provides an example of the requirement to move beyond an atomic reductionism in the direction of synthesis in his first and third critiques. In the former his problem is how, in the face of Hume’s empiricism science could have universal and necessary laws.

It is unfortunate that the range of Kant’s work has been so little appreciated. Until recently, the rationalist impact of Descartes directed almost exclusive attention to the first of Kant’s critiques, The Critique of Pure Reason, which concerned the conditions of possibility of the physical sciences. Its rejection of metaphysics as a science was warmly greeted in materialist, empiricist and positivist circles as a dispensation from the need for any search beyond what was reductively sensible and phenomenal in the sense of being inherently spatial and/or temporal.

Kant himself, however, quite insisted upon going further. If the terms of the sciences were inherently phenomenal, then his justifi-cation of the sciences was precisely to identify and to justify, through metaphysical and transcendental deductions respectively, the sets of categories which enable the phenomenal world to have intelligibility and scientific meaning. Since sense experience is always limited and partial, the universality and necessity of the laws of science must come from the human mind. Such a priori categories belong properly to the subject inasmuch as it is not material.

We are here at the essential turning point for the modern mind, where Kant takes a definitive step in identifying the subject as more than a wayfarer in a given world to which one can but react. He shows rather that the subject is an active force engaged in the creation even of the empirical world in which one lives. The meaning or intelligible order of things is due not only to their creation according to a divine intellect, but also to the work of the human intellect and its categories. If, however, human beings are to have such a central role in the constitution of their world, then certain elements will be required, and this requirement itself will be their justification.

In sum, it is the task of the reproductive imagination to bring together the multiple elements of sense intuition in a unity or order capable of being informed by concepts or categories of the intellect with a view to making a judgment. On the part of the subject, the imagination here is active, authentically one’s own and creative. Ultimately, however, its work is not free, but necessitated by the categories or concepts as integral to the work of sciences which are characterized by necessity and universality.

In his second Critique, that of practical reason Kant proceeded to recognize and provide a separate basis for human freedom. But how realistic is this talk about freedom? Do we really have the choice of which so much is said in the West? On the one hand, we are structured in a set of circumstances which circumscribe, develop and direct our actions. This is the actual experience of people which Marx and Hegel articulate when they note the importance of knowledge of the underlying pattern of necessity and make freedom consist in conforming thereto.

On the other hand, we learn also from our experience that we do have a special responsibility in this world to work with the circumstances of nature, to harness and channel these forces toward greater harmony and human goals. A flood which kills thousands is not an occasion for murdering more, but for mobilizing to protect as many as possible, for determining what flood control projects need to be instituted for the future, and even for learning how to so construct them so that they also can generate electricity for power and irrigation for crops. All of this is properly the work of the human spirit which emerges therein. Similarly, in facing a trying day, I eat a larger breakfast rather than cut out part of my schedule; instead of ignoring the circumstances and laws of my physical being, I coordinate these and direct them for my human purposes.

This much can be said by pragmatism. But it leaves unclear whether humans remain merely instruments of physical progress and, hence, whether their powers remain a function of matter. This is where Kant takes a decisive step in his second Critique.

For if the above were the total explanation of science one might claim to explain necessary and universal laws, but this would not explain its creative dimension. On the contrary, human creativity would be suppressed in the search for the laws of necessity: freedom would be unwelcome, initiative would be suppressed and stagnation would follow.

It was well along in the so-called "critical decade’ in which Kant wrote his three critiques, and only after writing the first two, that Kant was in position to discover -- indeed, was forced to recognize -- what at the beginning of that decade he had not thought possible. Whereas he had once looked upon the human spirit only in order to uncover the universal and necessary laws at work therein, and considered the imagination only instrumentally as the power for reproducing in an ordered manner what was perceived, he now became aware of a new, productive, indeed creative function of the imagination.

When we attempt to act in this world or to reach out to others, must all our categories be universal and hence insensitive to that which marks others as unique and personal? Must they be necessary, and, hence, leave no room for creative freedom, which would be entrapped and then entombed in the human mind? If so, then public life can be only impersonal, necessitated, repetitive and stagnant. Must the human spirit be reduced to the sterile content of empirical facts or to the necessitated modes of scientific laws? If so, then philosophers cannot escape forcing upon wisdom a suicidal choice between either being traffic directors in the jungle of unfettered competition or being tragically complicit in setting a predetermined order for the human spirit. Freedom would, indeed, have been killed; it would pulse no more as the heart of humankind.

Before these alternatives, Kant’s answer is a resounding No! Taking as his basis the reality of freedom -- so passionately and often tragically affirmed in our lifetime by such revered figures as Ghandi and Martin Luther King -- Kant proceeded to develop his third Critique of the Faculty of Judgment as a context within which freedom and scientific necessity could coexist, indeed, in which necessity would be the support and instrument of freedom. Recently, this has become more manifest as human sensibilities have opened to the significance of culture and to awareness that being itself is emergent in time through the human spirit.

There is something similar here to the Critique of Pure Reason. In both, the work of the imagination in assembling the phenomena is not simply to register, but to produce the objective order. As in the first critique, the approach is not from a set of a priori principles which are clear all by themselves and used in order to bind the multiple phenomena into a unity. Rather, under the rule of unity, the imagination orders and reorders the multiple phenomena until they are ready to be informed by a unifying principle whose appropriateness emerges from the reordering carried out by the productive imagination.

In the first Critique, however, the productive work was done in relation to the abstract and universal categories of the intellect and carried out under a law which dictated that phenomena must form a unity. The Critique of Pure Reason saw the work of the imagination in assembling the phenomena as not simply registering, but producing the objective order. The approach was not from a priori principles which are clear all by themselves and are used to bind the multiple phenomena into a unity. Rather, in the first Critique, under the rule of unity the imagination moves to order and reorder the multiple phenomena until they are ready to be informed by a unifying principle on the part of the intellect, the appropriateness of which emerges from the reordering carried out by the reproductive imagination.

Here in The Critique of the Aesthetic Judgment, the imagination has a similar task of constructing the object, but not in a manner necessitated by universal categories or concepts. In contrast, here in working toward an integrating unity, the imagination is not confined by the necessitating structures of categories and concepts, but ranges freely over the full sweep of reality in all its dimensions to see whether and wherein relatedness and purposiveness or teleology can emerge and the world and our personal and social life can achieve its meaning and value. Hence, in standing before a work of nature or of art, the imagination might focus upon light or form, sound or word, economic or interpersonal relations -- or, indeed, upon any combination of these in a natural environment or a society, whether encountered concretely or expressed in symbols.

Throughout all of this the ordering and reordering by the imagination can bring about numberless unities. Unrestricted by any a priori categories, indeed it can integrate necessary dialectical patterns within its own free and therefore creative production, and scientific universals within its unique concrete harmonies. This work is properly creative. More than merely evaluating all according to a set pattern in one’s culture, it chooses the values and on that basis orders reality. This is the very constitution of the culture itself.

It is the productive, rather than merely the reproductive, work of the human person as living in his or her physical world. Here, I use the possessive form advisedly. Without this capacity the human person would exist as another object in the physical universe, not only subject to its laws but restricted and possessed by them. He/she would be not a free citizen of the material world, but a mere function or servant. In his third Critique Kant unfolds how one can truly be master of his/her life in this world, not in an arbitrary and destructive manner, but precisely as creative artists bringing being to new realization in ways which make possible new growth in freedom.

Developing the level of aesthetic sensitivity enables one to take into account ever greater dimensions of reality and creativity and to imagine responses which are more rich in purpose, more adapted to present circumstances and more creative in promise for the future. This is manifest in a good leader such as a Churchill or Roosevelt -- and, supereminently, in a Confucius or Christ. Their power to mobilize a people lies especially in their rare ability to assess the overall situation, to express it in a manner which rings true to the great variety of persons, and, thereby, to evoke appropriate and varied responses from each according to his or her capabilities. The danger is that the example of such genius will be reduced to formulae, and thereby become an ideology that excludes innovation. In reality, as personable, free and creative, and understood as the work of aesthetic judgment, their example was inclusive in content and application as well as in the new responses it continually evokes.

Kant’s third Critique points in another direction. Though it integrates scientifically universal and necessary social relations, it does not focus upon them, nor does it focus directly upon the beauty or ugliness of concrete relations, or even directly upon beauty or ugliness in themselves. Its focus is rather upon our contemplation of the integrating images of these which we imaginatively create, that is, our culture as manifesting the many facets of beauty and ugliness, actual and potential. In turn, we evaluate these in terms of the free and integrating response of pleasure or displeasure, the enjoyment or revulsion they generate most deeply within our whole person.

Confucius probably would feel very comfortable with this if structured in terms of an appreciation or feeling of harmony. In this way, he could see freedom itself at the height of its sensibility, not merely as an instrument of a moral life, but as serving through the imagination as a lens or means for presenting the richness of reality in varied and intensified ways. Freedom, thus understood, is both spectroscope and kaleidoscope of being. As spectroscope it unfolds the full range of the possibilities of human freedom, so that all can be examined, evaluated and admired. As kaleidoscope, it continually works out the endless combinations and patterns of reality so that the beauty of each can be examined, reflected upon and chosen when desired. Freely, purposively and creatively, imagination weaves through reality, focusing now upon certain dimensions, now reversing its flow, now making new connections and interrelations. In the process the creative human freedom of a person or people manifests not only the scientific forms and technological possibilities of the first critique and the potential forms of social and democratic interrelations of the second critique, but their interrelation in way that evoke our free response of love and admiration or rejection in hate and disgust.

In this manner freedom becomes at once the creative source, the manifestation, the evaluation and the arbiter of all that imaginatively we can propose. It is goal, namely to realize life as rational and free in this world; it is creative source, for with the imagination it unfolds the endless possibilities for human expression; it is manifestation, because it presents these to our consciousness in ways appropriate to our capabilities for knowledge of limited realities and relates these to the circumstances of our life; it is criterion, because its response manifests a possible mode of action to be variously desirable or not in terms of a total personal response of pleasure or displeasure, enjoyment or revulsion; and it is arbiter, because it provides the basis upon which our freedom chooses to affirm or reject, realize or avoid this way of self-realization. In this way, freedom emerges as the dynamic center of our human existence.

There is much in the above which evokes the deep Confucian sense of harmony and the role of the gentleman in unfolding its implications for daily life. This uncovers new significance in the thought of Confucius for the work of implementing, in a mutually fruitful manner, Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy in our times. Looking to the aesthetic sense of harmony as a context for uniting both ancient capabilities in agriculture with new technology and industrialization and for applying these to the work of building a democratic nation is a task, not only for an isolated individual, but for an entire people. Over time, a people develops its own specific sensibilities and through the ages forms a culture and a tradition which, in turn, constitute the human capital for such a project. In this sense, one can look to the Confucian cultural heritage for its aesthetic sense of harmony as a way to carry forward technological development for the authentic progress of the Chinese people in our day.

The Confucian sense of harmony is not a rationalist law whose unfolding would suggest an attempt to read all in an a priori and necessitarian manner. Its sense of life and progress is not that of a scientific view of history after the dialectic of Hegel and Marx. Rather, Confucianism understands humans as bringing their lives together in relation to other persons and in the concrete circumstances of everyday life. In this sense, it is not massively programmatic in the sense of a rationalist scientific theory of history. This may be very much to the good, for it protects against efforts after the manner of an ideology to define and delimit all beforehand -- which indeed surpasses human capacities.

Further, one must not underestimate the cumulative power which the Confucian sense of harmony and resonance can have when it brings together creatively the many persons with knowledge of their circumstances in an effort to provide for life in its many modes. This extends from those farmers who know and love their land intimately and are committed to its rich potentialities (and analogously for all phases of productive economic life), to family members and villagers who love their kin and neighbors, to citizens who are willing to work ardently for the welfare of their people and nation. If the exercise of freedom is a concrete and unique expression of the distinctive reality of its authors, then the task is not how to define these by abstractive and universal laws which stifle personal initiative, but how to enliven all persons actively to engage the new technology and scientific structures in the multiple dimensions of their lives.

In this context, the philosophical importance of the Confucian attitude becomes more evident. For if harmony and resonance enable a more adapted and fruitful mode of realization for the human being, then the identity and truth, dynamism and goodness of being are thereby made manifest and proclaimed. In this light, the laws of nature and the technology they enable emerge, not as desiccated universals best read negatively as prohibitions or intrusive machines, but as rich and unfolding modes of being and actualization best read through an appreciation of the concrete harmony and beauty of their active development. This, rather than the details of etiquette, is the deeper Confucian sense of the gentleman and sage; it can be grasped and exercised only with a corresponding aesthetic, rather than the merely scientific or pragmatic sensibilities.

Nor is this beyond people’s experience. Few can carry out the precise process of conceptualization and definition required for the technical dialectics of Platonic and Aristotelian reasoning. But all share an overall sensibility to situations as pleasing and attractive or as generating unease or even revulsion. Inevitably, in earlier times, the aesthetic Confucian mode lacked the scientific precision which is now available regarding surface characteristics of physical phenomena or the technological prowess this makes available. But, in its sense of harmony, it possessed the deep human sensibility and ability to take into account and integrate all aspects of its object. This is essential for the contemporary humanization of our technical capabilities for the physical and social implementation of our world.

This is foundational for integrating with this scientific and technological age the democratic practice and cultural traditions without which the creative life atrophies and progress ceases and dies. A strong indication of the importance of this, and of the fact that its principles are found in the Confucian tradition is that without physical resources Japan has become so great a world productive and economic power. If in China the problem is not with willingness to change and initiative, but with how to harness the needed technology so that progress can be not only rapid, but authentically Chinese, then the Confucian sense of aesthetic harmony endows it with the crucial means for integrating and implementing the needed technological means. It is with -- not without -- Confucius as host that Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy can enter and truly help.

1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N.K. Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), A 112; cf. A 121.

2. Ibid., A 121.

3. Donald W. Crawford, Kant’s Aesthetic Theory (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1974), pp. 87-90.

4. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 192-93.

5. Crawford, pp. 83-84.

6. Cf. Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroads, 1982), Part I, pp. 1-2, pp. 39-73; and W. Crawford, espec. Ch. 4.

7. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J.H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1968), pp. 205-339.

8. Ibid., pp. 37-200.

9. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N.K. Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), A112, 121, 192-193. Crawford, pp. 83-84, 87-90.

10. See Kant’s development and solution to the autonomy of taste, Critique of Judgment, nn. 57-58, pp. 182-192, where he treats the need for a concept; Crawford, pp. 63-66.

11. See the paper of Wilhelm S. Wurzer "On the Art of Moral Imagination" in G. McLean, ed., Moral Imagination and Charac-ter Development (Washington: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1998) for an elaboration of the essential notions of the beautiful, the sublime and taste in Kant’s aesthetic theory.

12. Immanuel Kant, First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, trans. J. Haden (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965).

13. William James, Pragmatism (New York: Washington Square, 1963), Ch. I, pp. 3-40. For notes on the critical hermeneutics of J. Habermas see G. McLean, "Cultural Heritage, Social Critique and Future Construction" in Culture, Human Rights and Peace in Central America, R. Molina, T. Readdy and G. McLean, eds. (Washington: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1988), Ch. I. Critical distance is an essential element and requires analysis by the social sciences of the historical social structures as a basis for liberation from determination and dependence upon unjust interests. The concrete psycho- and socio-pathology deriving from such dependencies and the corresponding steps toward liberation are the subject of the chapters by J. Loiacono and H. Ferrand de Piazza in The Social Context and Values: Perspectives of the Americas, G. McLean and O. Pegoraro, eds. (Washington: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1988), Chs. III and IV.