CHAPTER XIII

THE DYNAMICS OF TRADITION

ELLEN M. CHEN

CHINESE TRADITION UNDER SIEGE

            The Chinese experience with the West in the last 150 years has been a series of humiliations and defeats which raised profound doubt in the Chinese mind about the value of its own tradition. Whereas the Chinese had always thought of themselves as the center of the world, the most civilized nation on earth, Western gu-ships, stationed outside the ports of China, threatened the very sur-vival of China as a nation.

            The problem of tradition and modernization is much more se-rious and disturbing for original civilizations, such as the Chinese, Indian and Islamic, than for civilizations better adapted to borrowing from other traditions. Also countries which became colonies had an alien system of thought simply superimposed upon their own. With no tutelage like India, and little borrowing experience like Japan, China’s path in the modern period has been particularly tortuous; her con-vulsions have been deep and wideranging.

            The slogan of the early reformers or "self-strengtheners",1 from Lin Tse-hsu (1785-1850) to Chang Chih-tung (1837-1909): "Chinese learning as the basis (t’i, substance), Western learning for practical use (yung, function)," was designed as a formula for clinging to China’s self-esteem as spiritually superior to the West while at the same time providing a way to revitalization. But the t’i yung rational-ization, as J.R. Levenson points out, is a fallacy:

Chinese learning, which was to be the t’i in the new syncretic culture, was the learning of a society which had always used it for yung. Western learning, when sought as yung, did not sup-plement Chinese learn ing -- as the neat formula would have it do -- but ousted it. For, in reality, Chinese learning had come to be prized as sub-stance because of its function, and, when its function was usurped, the learning withered. The more Western learning came to be ac-cepted as the practical instrument of life and power, the more Confucianism ceased to be t’i ("essence"), the naturally believed in value of a civilization without a rival, and became instead a historical inheritance, preserved, if at all, as a romantic token of no surren-der to a foreign rival which has changed the essence of Chinese life.2

            The issue of tradition and modernization has been a heavy psy-chological burden to the Chinese. Modernization seems to require that China downplay or even abandon her time-honored tradition, while clinging to her tradition would mean spurning the process of modern-ization: in a land of filial piety this amounted to a momentous decision.

            Confronted with the possibility of imminent dismemberment China’s reaction to the threat of the West resembles what J.P. Sartre describes as the emotional response of a person who, threatened by an on-coming wild animal, faints. Now to faint is a most ineffective measure, yet it seems to be the only recourse open to a desperately impotent consciousness which, in order to obliterate the enemy, ob-literates itself.3

            Marxism, through the revision of Lenin, was an attractive revo-lutionary ideology promising the liberation of the oppressed proletariat nations against the imperialistic West. Having been imprinted with the totalistic Confucian system, China groped for another one to replace it. Bacon, Descartes, and even Newton, thought that they had settled the matter once, and for all by replacing the Aristotelian system with the Copernican. Similarly, the Chinese looked upon Marxism, an all en-compassing ideology, as the solution for all the ills China suffered, both from her own past and at the hands of the imperialistic West. In Marx’s own words, Communism is "the solution of the riddle of history."4

            By adopting Marxism and closing her doors against the Capi-talistic West, China drifted into the false security of a dream state, pun-ctuated by many nightmares, and climaxed by the Cultural Revolution which aimed at obliterating all cultural memories, Chinese or Western. The anti-Confucian movement reached its frenzied peak in those years. Those nightmares were pathological symptoms of a tormented soul, acts of resentment and violence which turned against the self when the external channels were blocked. The pity was that while China in her dream was writhing in destructive self-torture, in the real world imperialism and colonialism had been fading. Even before the conclusion of the Second World War the unequal treaties began to be dismantled and the West was abandoning its pre-war plans to partition China.

THE DYNAMICS OF WESTERN TRADITION

            Among Chinese intellectuals with a passionate desire for mo-dernizing China, few had probed the spiritual depth of the Western tradition that contributed to the development of the modern world. This may be why the spirit of Western science and democracy has not so far been successfully transplanted to the Chinese soil. As Western science and institutions are the product of the Westerner’s religious and spiritual quest, Western science and democracy cannot be bor-rowed without at the same time understanding the mental and spiritual outlook, the methods and values, under which the West operates. I do not intend to present here a detailed history of the deve-lopment of modern Western science and democracy, but to illustrate the dyna-mics of the Western tradition I shall discuss how these two ideas have undergone changes in the West.

Modern Western Science and the Torture of Nature

            Historians of science generally concur that the development of modern Western science received much input from criticism by reli-gion. Butterfield shows that it was the condemnation of a large number of Aristotelian theses, such as the view that God could not create a void, or an infinite universe, or a plurality of worlds that led eventually to the downfall of the Aristotelian universe.5 From Aristotle onwards, science has been the Westerner’s yoga, while to the Christian believer scientific interest in the world was motivated by religious need.

            According to Thomas Aquinas we can have no direct knowledge of God in our present life, yet, through the study of the natural world we may acquire an indirect knowledge of God and have a glimpse of God’s mind, since God made the world according to his mind. Also, to the Christian, the divine transcends the world which was made by God and is not God. Humans, created in the image of God and given the right to dominate all creatures, can explore nature with impunity.

            In the introduction to my book on the Tao Te Ching I noted:

Modern Western science is the achievement of a mentality fostered by Western religion. . . . The Chris-tian God is not a nature deity; as the cause of nature His power is in nature, but He Himself transcends the natural world. Everywhere Christianity triumphs, the Christian God, banishing the nature gods from their niches, effects a desacralization of the universe. This desacralization has been generally recognized as ne-cessary before science can conquer6. In archaic reli-gions, the natural world was the seat of sacred and mysterious forces and not open to human experi-mentation. Later, the crosses of Jesus on mountain tops cleared away the demons and nature deities in pagan lands and opened these lands to scientific exploration.7

            Created in the image of God, by their spirituality humans also transcend the physical world -- they are in the world, but not of it. The war between the spirit and the flesh in religion, interpreted at this stage as the war between the soul and the body, is carried into the scientific arena as humans triumph over nature. Modern Western science is pre-mised on a fundamental antagonism between humans and nature -- hence modern science is the disciplining or torture of nature. "The secrets of nature," Bacon said, "betray themselves more readily when tormented by art than when left to their own course"8.

            The fact that China did not develop modern Western science, which has been a much debated topic in recent years,9 lies in a basic difference between the traditional Chinese and Western way of re-garding the natural world.

            The Chinese consider themselves organic parts of the natural world, which is the theophany of the hidden Tao. Chinese spirituality, founded on the harmony and complementarity of heaven, earth and humans, cannot produce science as the torture of nature. If science means the human overcoming of nature, it is an unholy act, not to be contemplated by a spiritual person.

            This is made clear by an old gardener who, upon the suggestion of Tzu-kung, a disciple of Confucius, that he use a labor-saving ma-chine, responds:

I’ve heard my teacher say, where there are machines, there are bound to be machine worries; where there are machine worries, there are bound to be machine hearts. With a machine heart in your breast, you had spoiled what was pure and simple; and without the pure and simple, the life of the spirit knows no rest. Where the life of the spirit knows no rest, the Way (Tao) will cease to buoy you up. It is not that I do not know about your machine -- I would be ashamed to use it!10

            To Hegel, this human solicitude toward the natural realm shows that in Chinese civilization nature terrorizes humankind. This dis-misses Chinese civilization as belonging to the first stage where only one man, the emperor despot, is free11. His famous dialectic of master and slave12 shows that in the actual social context human subser-vience to nature means the enslaving of some humans to others. The development of modern science as the disciplining of nature is thus at the same time the story of human liberation from the bondage of nature. In this light the industrial revolution has been hailed as the second greatest blessing in human history: machines, now replacing humans, provide the material condition that allows the former slaves to become free.

            The immediate result of the industrial revolution transforming Western society from a feudal into a capitalistic society was not, how-ever, the actual liberation of the workers. Not only did the workers become more alienated under capitalism, but the age of machines also created new inequalities between nations. Nations with powerful new machines soon became overlords of those without them, which then became colonies. The West’s colonization of Asia and Africa, and Japan’s invasion of Korea and China, are episodes in this stage of the development of world history.

            Amaury de Riencourt speaks of the West from the seventeenth century to the twentieth century, its transition from its medieval feudal period to its modern period, as the adolescent stage of the West. The meeting of China and the West in the nineteenth century was the con-frontation of a young aggressive civilization with an old, static, but proud civilization which had passed its adolescence 2000 years before13. Nothing could stop the expansion of the West, intoxicated with its successes in science, technology and military prowess, and surfeited with a sense of the white man’s burden.

            A redeeming feature of Western civilization is that it is dynamic and self-corrective. A mixture of four different sources: Greek, Roman, Judaic and Christian, there is no one monolithic Western spirituality; thus the dialectic of tradition and modernization has been on-going. The war between science and religion has been fought from the very inception of Christianity in its confrontation with Greek learning. It reached a climax in the thirteenth century, with the translation of Aristotle’s scientific works from Greek and Arabic into Latin.

            Since then, at every juncture of the breakthrough of science, from the Copernican revolution to the Darwinian theory, to today’s genetic research, the Western spiritual tradition has felt itself shaken to its roots, only to discover later that it still stands, perhaps a little wiser for the challenge. Christianity today is still a religion in the making--Whitehead speaks of Christianity as a religion in search of a metaphysics.14

            Hegel, who spawned both Marxism and Dewey’s pragmatism, remarked in the nineteenth century at the height of Western imperia-lism that after 19 centuries of Christianity Christians were still buying and selling slaves. This consciousness of the contradiction within Christianity unleashed the liberation movements that followed. The Christian conscience, aided by the challenge of world Communism and its declining imperialistic powers, helped in the liberation of the former colonies.

            On the other hand, the philosophy of conflict and struggle be-tween humans and the natural world, which brought the modern world, has taken its toll. The inventory of ills since the industrial revolution pours in: the creeping crises of resource and energy depletion, carbon dioxide build-up due to continued combustion of fossil fuels and the depletion of tropical forests, stratospheric ozone, the environmental over-exploitation of the biosphere, loss of soil fertility due to erosion, loss of genetic diversity, toxic chemicals, acid rain, etc.15. There are also social prices for modernization: crime, erosion of family life, low student performance, homelessness, the aids epidemic, etc.

            Today, while other traditions are trying to catch up with the West in the modernization process, the West is entering a more sober stage when thoughtful thinkers warn that if humans are going to have a future on earth, they must slow down development and radically alter their relationship with the natural world. E.F. Schumacher says:

The arising of this error, so egregious and so firmly rooted, is closely connected with the philosophical, not to say religious, changes during the last three or four centuries in man’s attitude to nature, but since the whole world is now in a process of Westernization, the more generalized statement appears to be just-ified. Modern man does not experience himself as a part of nature but as an outside force destined to do-minate and conquer it. He even talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side.16

            If in the classical and medieval periods Western thought was diametrically opposed to Chinese thought, if even 100 years ago China and the West had completely different outlooks on the relation-ship between humans and the natural world, contemporary Western spirituality, developed from within the Western tradition, has reached a vision of the world very close to that of the ancient Chinese. In its affirmation, of world and nature Chinese traditional thought, especially its philosophical Taoist thought, serves as an inspiration to today’s peace and ecological movements.

The Birth of the Modern Idea of Democracy in the West

            In their demand for science and democracy, Chinese students regarded the two as inseparable ideas, as indeed they are in the modern world. This close connection between science and demo-cracy, however, did not exist in the ancient world. Neither was demo-cracy the preferred form of government in the past. Socrates was sentenced to death during a period when Athens was under demo-cracy. Plato considered aristocracy to be the best form17, and demo-cracy to be a degenerate form18 of government. Aristotle19, and later Thomas Aquinas,20 considered monarchy, the rule of one outstand-ingly good person, backed by just laws, to be a most desirable form of government. Aristotelian science, reflecting the Greek society of his time, was hierarchical, from the lowly physical beings on earth to the spiritual hierarchy of heavenly bodies above the moon, to the one God as Cosmic Mind or Unmoved Mover.

            Intellectual conviction in favor of democracy first came to the West in the Renaissance period of Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) -- a mathematician, mystic and Cardinal -- while speculating on the pos-sibility of human knowledge of God. Scholastic theology was founded on Aristotle’s logic. Based on the principle of non-contradiction and the excluded middle, this is a logic of comparison among finite beings. Cusa discovered that the Maximum, when applied to God, is not a quantitative superlative related to a finite comparative, but a purely qualitative concept, the complete antithesis to every possible com-parison. Since Aristotle’s logic cannot be the proper vehicle for know-ledge of the infinite God, rational theology based on Aristotle’s logic loses its epistemological foundation. In the place of rational theology and Aristotelian logic, Cusa used mystical theology and the logic of the coincidence of opposites. God is both the Absolute-Greatest and Absolute-Smallest, everywhere and nowhere, at the center as well as at the circumference, the infinitely above as well as most intimately within. All creatures as finite beings are equally distant and equally near to the infinite God so that the idea of hierarchy collapses to make room for democracy.21

            Against Cusa’s democratic vision, Aristotle’s conviction that "the rule of many is not good; one ruler let there be"22 and the Confucian belief in the emperor as alone the "son of heaven" lose their cogency. Every creature is as much a child of heaven as anyone else, com-manding equal dignity and respect. Each person has direct access to God by his conscience and his mind, receiving understanding and revelation directly from God.

            The Western idea of democracy as a belief in the decency and dignity of the people is not foreign to Chinese thought. Mencius equates the mandate of Heaven with the mandate of the people, actually investing the people with the power of Heaven23. That each by the sincerity of his/her heart and mind is capable of understanding directly the deepest truth is also a basic Confucian teaching. In both the I-ching24 and the Doctrine of the Mean25, ordinary uneducated men and women are said to follow Tao unconsciously, while the sages, searching the divine all their lives, may not penetrate its secret. Still Confucianism, with its rigid hierarchy from a bygone era, never tran-slated this intellectual conviction into constitutional rights of citizens.

            Cusa’s democratic vision, as spelled out by Kant in his Critique of Practical Reason becomes the foundation of moral autonomy and the rights of all humans:

That in the order of ends, man (and with him every rational being) is an end in himself, that is, that he can never be used merely as a means by any (not even by God) without being at the same time an end also himself, that therefore humanity in our person must be holy to ourselves, this follows now of itself because he is the subject of the moral law, in other words, of that which is holy in itself, and on account of which and in agreement with which alone can anything be termed holy. For this moral law is founded on the autonomy of his will, as a free will which by its universal laws must necessarily be able to agree with that to which it is to submit itself.26

            Today the idea of democracy is being extended logically to the animal kingdom, at least the higher animals. Just as humans, out of ignorance and prejudice, once looked upon other humans as belong-ing to different species, to be conquered and exploited, today we are extending the rights of life and liberty to animals who are conscious and capable of feeling pain and suffering. The world-wide conser-vation efforts attest to a new sense of kinship towards all creatures, great or small. Here the ideals of science and democracy unite to bring the hope of a more humane and viable future for all.

THE FUTURE OUTLOOK

            The Western tradition had gone through many revolutions, one of which forced China out of her shell and produced deep convulsions in her psyche which reverberate even now. The intrinsic value of Chinese tradition had never been challenged so severely until the onslaught of Western civilization at the end of the nineteenth century.

            At this moment in history, with rapid telecommunication so that we all live in a global village (Marshall McLuhan), there is no basic conflict between tradition and modernization. We celebrate the dif-ference between cultures, as we celebrate the uniqueness of each in-dividual, and there need be no provincialism or cultural barriers. Dif-ferent cultures do not threaten us, nor need we stand in self-com-placency or self-debasement; rather, the way to defend ourselves is to be informed. Just as China’s inventions in the past quickened the pace of development in the West (Needham), she now can be on the receiving end of the West’s accomplishments.

            Perhaps the fundamental difference between the older and the modern traditions is that the former do not tolerate change. Therefore they view the problem of tradition and modernization as a choice be-tween either order with repression, or freedom with chaos. This need not be the case. In a free and dynamic society a certain amount of disorder is to be tolerated -- indeed it is the mark of a resilient society that it can accept difference and criticism. There will always be pro-blems -- when the old ones are solved, new ones will arise. We must learn not only to accept change, but to anticipate it; thus in the West today the study of the future has become a specialized field.27

            In today’s rapidly changing society, the old must become used to learning from the young who are the vanguard of progress. Margaret Mead says: "The primary evidence that our present situation is unique, without any parallel in the past, is that the generation gap is world-wide"28. "For the first time human beings throughout the world, in their information about one another and their responses to one another, have become a community that is united by shared knowledge and danger." "Whoever they are and wherever their particular point of entry may be, all men are equally immigrants into the new era -- some come as refugees and some as castaways." Mead suggests that human society has shifted from a "postfigurative" culture in which the young learn from the old to a "configurative" one in which both adults and children learn from their peers. She believes that the next stage will be the development of a "prefigurative" culture in which the old learn from the young. In a prefigurative culture the future dominates the present, just as in a postfigurative culture the past (tradition) dominated the present.

            On the other hand, one of the virtues of Chinese tradition is the veneration for the old, for even in the modern world the young still need to take counsel from the old. If one who does not know the past is condemned to repeat its mistakes, without the lessons of the past all revolutions would be condemned to futility. Tradition is our root, which supplies the lifeline for the present. But our role is not to receive pass-ively what has been transmitted, but to exercise intelligent choice in the use of the past29. Tradition is not to be regarded as a dead weight, but as living nurture -- in Whitehead’s words, "ingredient for future be-coming." There is no such thing as a finished tradition, unless it be already dead; a living tradition is always in the making, capable of changing and absorbing the new without losing its central character. This is the meaning of dialectics as the critical life of thought and cul-ture from Plato to Marx. It is also the importance of educational insti-tutions, scholarship and learning in preserving and making available the past for creative appropriation by the present.

            China must not again close her doors against the outside world. She can redeem years lost by avoiding the mistakes of the more advanced countries in modernizing without regard to human and eco-logical impact. Henceforth her tradition must not be a shackle im-peding present creative advance, but a legacy from which to a launch out into the future. By responding to the challenges of modernization successfully China can show the world how traditions, unlike individual human beings, can rejuvenate themselves and maintain their lives indefinitely.

Department of Philosophy

St. John’s University, Jamaica, New York

NOTES

            1. See Hellmut Wilhelm, "The Problem of Within and Without, a Confucian Attempt in Syncretism," in "Chinese Reactions to Imported Ideas, a Symposium," Journal of the History of Ideas, XII, (1951), 48-60. Mary C. Wright, The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism, The T’ung-Chih Restoration 1862-1874 (New York: Athenaeum, 1966).

            2. J.R. Levenson, "`History’ and `Value’: Tensions of Intellectual Choice in Modern China," in Studies in Chinese Thought, ed. Arthus F. Wright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 157.

            3. J.P. Sartre, The Emotions, Outline of a Theory, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948), p. 63.

            4. Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. T.B. Bottomore (New York: McGraw-Hill Book, 1964), p. 155.

            5. Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800 (Revised edition; New York: The Free Press, 1957), p. 21.

            6. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1925), p. 19. Christopher Dawson, Progress and Religion, An Historical Enquiry (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1929), ch. 8.

            7. Ellen M. Chen, The Tao Te Ching, A New Translation with Commentary (New York: Paragon House, 1989), p. 31.

            8. T. Butterfield, p. 112.

            9. See A.C. Graham, "China, Europe, and the Origins of Modern Science: Needham’s The Grand Titration," in Chinese Science, Explorations of an Ancient Tradition, edited by Shigeru Nakayama and Nathan Sivin (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1973), PP. 45-70.

            10. Chuang Tzu, 12:11, Watson, p. 134.

            11. G.W.F. Hegel, Reason in History, trans. Robert S. Hartman (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1953), p. 23.

            12. G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J.B. Baillie, (Second edition; New York: Macmillan, 1955), pp. 228-240.

            13. Amaury de Riencourt, The Soul of China, Revised Edition (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 251.

            14. Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (New York: Macmillan, 1926).

            15. See Harvey Brooks, Technology-Related Catastrophes: Myth and Reality, pp. 109-136.

            16. E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, Economics as if People Mattered (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 13.

            17. Republic, Bk. 5, 449a.

            18. Ibid., Bk. 8, 555b-562a.

            19. Politics, 1284a3, 1288a15.

            20. De regimine principum. See John B. Morrall, Political Thought in Medieval Times (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), pp. 77-78.

            21. See Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), pp. 7-45.

            22. Metaphysics Bk. xii, ch. 10.

            23. Mencius 5A:5.

            24. Hsi Tz’u, Pt.1, ch. 5.

            25. Ch. 12.

            26. Critique of Practical Reason, Book 2. ch. 2, sec. 5.

            27. See Edward Cornish, The Study of the Future, (Washington, D.C. 1977).

            28. Culture and Commitment.