The task of analysis is much easier than the labor of redefinition. As empirical analysis is helpful but insufficient, this work adopts the critical reflections of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and Jurgen Habermas (1929-),1  who have brilliantly treated the question of crisis. Like them, we believe that the crisis of Confucian values cannot be explained from a single aspect. Nor can we rely on Western scientific criteria alone (as do most modern scholars) to understand the nature of the crisis. The naive attitude of the members of the May-Fourth Movement who regarded Confucianism in terms of anti-scientism, as well as of those who have refused to accept the role of science in modern China, has not helped us to grasp the real nature of the crisis of Confucian values. To make sense of our point, we will proceed first to the notion of crisis, and then with some specific characteristics and forms to the devaluation of Confucian values. Finally, we will present some theses which might be of use for our discussion.

In The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl has related the crisis of science to the danger of losing the meaning of life,2  i.e. the danger of falling into the sort of nihilism identified by Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), or even, the negative nihilism described earlier by Fyodor Mikhailovsky Dostoevsky (1812-1881). According to Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), nihilism has two different stages: devaluation (Entwertung) and revaluation (Umwertung). Devaluation means a total refusal of all traditional values, as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) sketched in his program; revaluation is a project of building new values completely upon human foundation.3  The radical character of Nietzschean devaluation lies in his vision that traditional values are no more than instruments constructed by non-human beings to deny humans the meaning of life. Such a view is shared by Heidegger, and also held by Karl Marx (1818-1883) who criticized bourgeois society as so alienated that one cannot recognize one’s own self-consciousness.4  That is, in some cases people pursued an external, estranged value and as such denied themselves access to authentic human values. The main question here is how Husserl has detected in the crisis of science the crisis of human life. The limit of space will not allow us to go into this question in detail. Rather, we would link some arguments of Husserl on the relation between life and science with the description of Habermas on the legitimation crisis, and elucidate the point that even scientism is a form of alienation.

First, Husserl sees the progress of science understood in terms of technological advance as not necessarily reflecting the progress of humankind.5  His suspicion was in many ways justified by the nightmare of World War II, and the later specter of an even more catastrophic total war appearing inevitable. Even today, the sword of Damocles hangs menacingly in the form of highly developed weapons. Decision-making relies on technological know-how, which arrogantly claims the role of rationality. The cruelty of wars which Husserl regarded as the logical and legitimate child of technology is the most eloquent confirmation of his pronouncements. Actually, what Husserl attacked is scientism which has gone far beyond its limits and claims the role of the creator and dictator of human polity and history.

Second, Husserl clearly acknowledges that it is the fault not of science as such, but of a misunderstanding of the nature of science.6  Encouraged by the triumphs of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) and Isaac Newton (1642-1727), scientists have wanted to monopolize nature and even human fate. The point is, Husserl does not complain about science itself, but about the view that science is „all that is," and against the unreflective arrogance of empiricism.

In view of this, Husserl seeks to redefine the meaning of science and, more importantly, the relation between science and human life. Like Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951),7  Husserl holds the view that our life-world has a certain relation to science and vice-versa. Thus, he calls for a restoration of the balance between the subject and nature, between the subject and other subjects. Science is born in and from this relational activity.8 

On a macro-level, social disorder, mainly in the form of lawlessness, amoral behavior, etc. can be explained in terms of the loss of balance between traditional norms and modern life, basic structure and newly imported life-styles, and of the over-domination of the newly imported values. These crises can be explained best as economic, rationality, legitimation and motivation crises. Religious and moral decline, for example, is due to the identity (legitimation) and motivation crises which are born primarily from the crisis of such basic structures as economics and jurisprudence. Habermas describes crisis as "an objective force that deprives the subject (or collective subject) of some part or major part of his or their normal sovereignty."9 

This external, objective force has been identified by Husserl as scientism, by Gyory Lukacs (1885-1971) as the process of uncontrolled objectification best seen in the phenomenon of reification.1 0 Earlier it was been diagnosed by Hegel and then later by Marx as the process of "Verdinglichung" in Phanomenology of Spirit and Grundrisse respectively.11  Habermas makes a forceful synthesis of all these insights, and goes on to elaborate a theory of crisis worthy of attention. According to him, a crisis occurs when: (1) the external, objective force occupies the dominant role and tries with force to change the basic structure or fundamental norms in accordance with its own criteria; (2) when the force of resistance breaks down and surrenders. This kind of crisis may be aggravated further and become more complicated at a higher level after a long process of rationalization as Max Weber has predicted. In any case, no crisis happens accidentally and alone. The vicious circle lies deeply hidden in each crisis.

TABLE 112 

Crisis Tendencies Proposed Explanations

TABLE 213 

Formation Organization Integration

The emergence of the Chinese revolution was not motivated purely by ideology. It is true that Sun Yat-sen, the founder of modern China, embraced the slogan "Down with Ching and Up with Ming," however, this does not mean that he was for a pure race, nor for a simple nostalgia for Ming. The real fact is that Sun was motivated much more by the desire to restore China to its healthy state lost at the hands of the late Ching emperors who were responsible for the sickness of China such as economic backwardness, corruption, injustice, and political humiliation. Such motivation was, of course, fortified by other no less important cultural factors: Sun had absorbed some democratic ideas (from his stays in Honolulu and London); he had witnessed the collapse of the military power of the Ching in the face of the much more advanced arsenals of the invaders, and he had learned that any progress in politics and science must be also accompanied by economic progress. That is to say, the cause of the Chinese revolution was found in the crisis of the Ching, a macro or total crisis. The furor of youth during the tumultuous days of the May-Fourth demonstrations reflected the same crisis. When the students of Peking University marched in the streets to demand an equal treaty between China and Japan, their aim was far reaching: a total change of social structure.14  This time, the crisis surfaced in a more rational way: it was a rationality crisis and a legitimation crisis. This crisis is by no means a thing of the past, but is even more visible today. We will briefly examine these four types of crisis to defend our thesis that the confusion in values and ethics is a total crisis, and that the ideological crisis mistakenly taken to be primary is, in fact, only one aspect of a hidden, total crisis.

Note that Habermas uses the expression "requisite quantity" to refer to the extent, quality, and temporal dimension of the respective system performance.15 

The bankruptcy of the Ching economic machine can be explained from different, but related facts: (1) the imbalance between production and over consummation (the needs to play war games, to maintain a luxurious life, etc.); (2) the explosive increase of population versus a stagnant or decreasing production; (3) an administration that, due to ignorance, fails to provide new possibilities to counter this trend, or relys on false solutions to cope with modernization and its by-products;16  (4) in recent years, the ideological rhetoric could no longer generate its effects. Ideology succumbs to reality. Both governments on the two straits have aggressively and unreflectively taken the capitalist road with all of its main principles of output and input, more production and more consumption, market-expansion, strong individual initiative, etc. Despite this new approach, a new crisis seems to be already at the front door of the nation, namely that of capitalism, state-capitalism and advanced capitalism. We will examine some points relevant to this type of crisis:

1) Though the Chinese (Taiwanese) government adopted the main principles of capitalism, it still tended to control the state as in the past. The intervention of the state in supports, production and control has both advantages and disadvantages. The state capitalist system, through central planning, may keep the economy in balance, and as such avoid excesses and a widening of the gap between classes. But the strong intervention of a Confucian state does not allow the market mechanism to function normally. The crisis begins when the decision-making of the state is wrong, slow, or obsolete. A classic example in Taiwan is the extinction of small businesses and firms which were the corner stone of Taiwan’s economic miracle. A sudden alteration in monetary and trade policy due to the demand for high technology changes the market-mechanism. As a result, family-size industries and small businesses collapse, and high-profit but less-or-non-productive trade, land-speculation and service-sector businesses blossom. Consequently, millions of workers have to change their job or be laid off. The tight-control of the state, combined with a belief in the dogma of capitalism gives birth to a new ideology: surplus at all cost. However, a surplus that does not stimulate production and consumption (use-values) is just as unhealthy and ephemeral. The huge sum of almost 0 billion US dollars sitting idle in reserve, boastfully praised by the Central Bank of Taiwan, could not make Taiwan richer. In contrast, such a tight monetary policy hinders economic progress.17  The huge sum of money, sitting idle, reflects the inertia of capitalist belief. This fact confirms that primary economic zones and priorities often are sacrificed for non-productive, consumer interests.

2) It is true that the Confucian state does not exactly copy the capitalist economic system. Coerced by the irresistible forces of capitalism and liberalism, Taiwan has modified its economic policy or strategy to allow more freedom in such sectors as marketing and market expansion, though there is still an effort to keep this in line with its ideology. The fact that the government reluctantly gives up its authority in some fields, does not mean that it follows the market rule. It is done only because of a sense that the old policy may endanger the state apparatus. A midway position between traditional authoritarian Confucianism and liberal capitalism may be adopted, but this midway position does not resolve the crisis-ridden economy, and may transform it into a new kind of global crisis, as Claus Offe has predicted. He designates three tendencies which indicate that the propagation of elements hostile to the system is systematically inevitable. These concern the spread of orientations that make it difficult to sustain behaviorial control which conforms to the system.18 

The three tendencies are: (1) higher management must adopt political patterns of evaluation and decision, instead of strategies fixed a priori; (2) radical professionalism indicates that professional work in the areas of the public sector, science, educational systems, etc. can be detached from private career patterns and market mechanism and can be oriented to concrete goals; (3) the inactive proportion of the population grows vis-a-vis the active population.19  These groups may develop patterns similar to those in concrete labor context. That is to say, the economic crisis is shifted to an administrative crisis, because of the unavoidable deficit of rationality in administrative planning.

Thus, we can say with Habermas that the concept of rationality crisis is modeled after that of economic crisis.20  When the administration plunges into a crisis, when the central planning system is in disarray, when the contradictory steering imperatives assert themselves through the purposive-rational actions of members of the administration, then it is no longer a simple matter of economic crisis, but a more profound stage: it is a rationality crisis which threatens the integration of the system, and consequently endangers social integration. This point can be elucidated as follows:

Confucian society was primarily constructed on a kind of inter-subjective-communicative rationality I have called reasonableness.21  The shift to scientific rationality as the new principle of economics and then of life so reduced the Confucian value system that it had to admit its incompetence and impotence in dealing with the modern world. This crisis results from an ignorance of the fact that scientific rationality cannot provide us with the last word, because it is constructed on totally neutral and external natural phenomena. Thus, to ignore Confucian reasonableness is to put in question the legitimacy of traditional values. The rationality crisis is inseparable from the legitimation crisis.

By legitimation we mean the process of knowing and accepting something as a real and unavoidable fact, e.g. the process of legalisation, moralisation, etc. The term "legitimation" expresses the common act of tacit recognition and acceptance. Legitimation could be either de jure or de facto. Hence, legitimation crisis means that a law, habit, moral code, or certain value is no longer recognized or accepted. The crisis in education in Taiwan is one of the best illustrations of this fact. On the one hand, children are taught to live up to the Confucian standards, but on the other hand they are encouraged and pushed to achieve material success. The result is as clear as tragic: students and their parents sacrifice Confucian values for the sake of their own material benefits. However, the legitimation crisis comes into form only if there is no harmony between moral values and material interests. The Confucian state, notorious for its casts and rigidity, being unwilling to accept cohabitation with utilitarianism and individualism faces an inevitable crisis. Habermas notes that only a rigid socio-cultural system, incapable of being randomly functionalized for the needs of the administrative system, could explain a sharpening of legitimation difficulties into a legitimation crisis. He explains: "A legitimation crisis can be predicted only if expectations that cannot be fulfilled either with the available quantity of value or, generally, with rewards conforming to the system are systematically produced."22 

However, a legitimation crisis is connected not only with a rationality crisis, but is based on a motivation crisis, that is, on "a discrepancy between the need for motives declared by the state and the motivation supplied by the socio-cultural system."23 

According to Habermas, a motivation crisis occurs when "the socio-cultural system changes in such a way that its output becomes dysfunctional for the state and for the system of labor."24  The present Taiwanese society tends toward what has already happened in advanced-capitalist societies—namely the syndromes of civil and familial vocational privatism. Civil privatism is a tendency toward an interest in the steering and maintenance of the administrative system, with little participation in the legitimizing process: the structure of a depoliticized public reality. On the other hand, as Habermas explains, familial vocational privatism consists in a family orientation with developed interests in consumption and leisure, and in career orientation. This second privatism corresponds to the structure of educational and occupational systems of competition regulated through achievement.25  While civil privatism is not yet well-developed, its presence has been noticed. The flux of talents to the private enterprises, the increasing growth of the power of the business class confirms this trend. In the second case, the familial vocational privatism is most visible in the Taiwanese educational system, for almost all students’ first choice in education conforms with market need: the motivation is simply wealth and more wealth.

1. First, we do not think that a radically total re-evaluation (Umwertung) proposed by Nietzsche can solve our crisis. Indeed, the crisis might become worse, in the sense of nihilism, homelessness or rootlessness.26

2. That is to say, even if economics undergoes drastic change, and even if the social structure is transformed, and even if new ideologies are in permanent transition, then the traditional values implicit in Confucian ethics cannot simply be dismissed. We join Hans-Georg Gadamer in saying that a reevaluation is impossible without traditional values.27  We would explore Hegel’s thesis that the process of crisis can be overcome only if it is self-understood in the process of Aufhebung, in which all three characters of abrogation, conservation and transformation (elevation) appear equally. Thus, we are not wholly satisfied with the May-Fourth Movement, but are sensitive to Bertrand Russell’s advice to Chinese intellectuals to be cautious in adopting new imported values.28 

1 Cf. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, German original: Die Krisis der europaischen Wissenschaftenund die transzendental Phanomenologie (Del Haag, 1954); Cf. Jurgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, Trans. Thomas McCarthy, (Beacon Press, 1975).

2 Edmund Husserl, ibid., part 1.

3 See Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, II, pp. 31 ff.; Friedrich Nietzsche, Wille zu Macht, note 713 (1888); note 708 (1887/1888).

4 See for example the writings of the young Marx, notably The German Ideology; Theses on Feuerbach; Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, etc. in Marx-Engels Werke (Berlin: Marx-Lenin Institute, 1956 ff.). Hereafter as MEW.

5 Edmund Husserl, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 316, in a lecturer entitled "Die Krisis des europaeischen Menschentums und die Philosophie," (Vienna, 1935)

6 Edmund Husserl, "Realitaetswissenschaft und Idealisierung - Die Mathematisierung der Natur." (Lecture, 1928) in Die Krisis, vol. 2., p. 279.

7 Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E .M. Anscombe (London: Basil Blackwell, 1958).

8 Edmund Husserl, op. cit., vol. 1.

9 Jurgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, p. 1.

10 Georg Lukacs, History and Class-Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1979, 6th ed.), pp. 83 ff.

11 G. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), part l; Karl Marx, Die deutsche Ideologie (1845/46), MEW 3, 33; Grundrisse (1857/58), MEW 64 f.; Zur Kritik der politischen Okonomie (1859), MEW 13, 21; Das Kapital (1861) MEW 25, 838.

12 Jurgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, p. 50).

13 Jurgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, p. 24.

14 Cf. Chow Tse-tsung, The May-Fourth Movement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960) pp. 46, 48; See also Immanuel C. Y. Hsu, The Rise of Modern China (Hongkong: Oxford University Press, 1983, 3rd. ed.), p. 493 ff.

15 Jurgen Habermas, op. cit., p. 49.

16 Immanuel Hsu, op. cit., chapters 18 and 19, pp. 419 ff.

17 Report of the Central Bank of Taiwan (1991). In 1992, the reserve rose up to ca. U.S.$. 85 billions. As result, the U. S. A. and the international market pressured the Central Bank to reevaluate the Taiwan dollar. However, with the strong Taiwan dollar, Taiwanese products became expensive, and consequently, they could not compete with cheap foreign products.

18 Clauss Offe, Tauschverhaltniss und politische Steuerung, p. 27 (quoted by Habermas, op. cit., p. 65.

19 Jurgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, p. 66.

20 Jurgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, p. 68.

21 Cf. Tran Van Doan, Reason, Rationality, Reasonableness (1989) (Washington, D. C.: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2001).

22 Jurgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, p. 68.

23 Jurgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis , p. 74.

24 Ibid.

25 Jurgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, p. 75.

26 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, op. cit., vol. 1.

27 Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Method, (Tubingen, 1960).

28 Bertrand Russell, The Problem of China (London, 1922), pp. 81-82; Immanuel Hsu, op. cit., p. 506.