INTRODUCTION

George F. McLean

            This volume presents the work of the second joint colloquium of the Philosophy Department of Peking University and the Council for Research in Values and Philosophy. The first, held in 1987 at the University in Beijing, focused upon "Man and Nature" -- the term "man" being taken, of course, in its generic sense. This was published in 1989 under that title in Chinese by Peking University Press and in English by the Council for Research in Values and Philosophy. The second step of this joint collaboration took place in 1991 in Hong Kong and focused on the problematic relationship of "The Human Person and Society". This work is presented here.

            The volume is structured to bring out the dynamics of the issue itself and the multiple levels of work thereupon.

            - Part I concerns the nature and problematic of society. It presents the range of related philosophical theories in the history of Chinese thought; considers the present problem of violence in social life at all levels, local, national and international; and raises the issue of universal equality and personal freedom. This generates the agenda for the remainder of the volume, each part of which delves more deeply into the common theme.

            - Part II looks at the sciences which are at our disposal and the dimensions of meaning to which they relate. Especially in our inform-ation age, unless they are well understood and effectively interrelated the sciences are capable not only of responding to needs, but of them-selves creating problems.

            - Part III focuses this upon efforts to understand the properly social character of human beings.

            - Part IV goes still deeper to the metaphysical level in order to look into the nature of reality itself and remove the obstacles to under-standing society caused by erroneous presuppositions, to take up the social problematic, and to set this in a more holistic context. Let us look at this in greater detail.

            Part I begins with two chapters describing the major con-trasting positions in the Chinese tradition regarding society. Chapter I by Professor Zhu Bokun of the University of Peking focuses upon the Confucianism as well as Mohism and Legalism. These stress moral norms, obedience, hierarchy and patriarchy. In contrast, Chapter II by Professor Pan Hungchao of the National University of Singapore fo-cuses upon Daoism and its emphasis upon the indivi-dual. He relates this to the strain of individualism in Mill and in Anglo-Saxon thought generally. There is here a keen sense of tolerance, but it is based upon a perceived inability to understand other persons. This negative basis for tolerance invites more positive philosophical work on this topic in our day.

            Chapter III by Professor M. Sastrapratedja of Indonesia on "Vio-lence, Justice and Human Dignity" delves more deeply into the patho-logy of contemporary society. It identifies its three sources: poverty as negation of the human need for subsistence; repression as negation of the human need for growth, and alienation as negation of the human need for transcendence.

            In response Chapter IV by Professor Zhen Li provides a major review of society as both benefit and limitation. He appreciates the Greek contribution to understanding how a person’s social nature is rooted in his or her reason and points out, with Xun Zi, how this be-speaks today’s universally felt need for equality. This si related this to the sense of social responsibility and hence to the importance of Marx’s concrete approach. He concludes with the twin challenge guiding the search for progress in all societies today: to recognize and realize both a universal equality within and between nations and the proper human dignity of each person.

            In this noble but challenging task what role can philosophy play? Three roles emerge here and define the division of the succeeding parts: to reflect on the methods of the sciences as means for under-standing, to search for a direct understanding of the social nature of the human person, and to look into the deeper metaphysical issues which can open the way for progress in resolving the classical social problems of human freedom and meaning.

            Part II takes up the issue of the sciences. Chapter V by Pro-fessor Jin Xiping provides an overview of the types of research on the social nature of humankind. He reaches back to Aristotle in ancient Greece to underline the stress there upon individuals as they are related both biologically and as political animals. This retains its found-ational importance while being complemented by the work both of Marx on the physical substructures of human life and of the pheno-menologists on human consciousness.

            Chapter VI by Professor Xu Junzhong of the University of Peking analyses more closely Marx’s theory of collectivism. He is concerned that this notion not be reduced to a suppression of the individual and an exaltation of a central authority. To avoid this he points out the his-torical and dialectical character of Marx’s effort to develop a scientific notion of collectivism. While reacting against the bourgeois indivi-dualist sense of community, Marx built upon individuals, but saw them as having a highly enlightened self-consciousness and hence as being members of a community.

            The implications of this are developed further by Professor Zhu Dasheng, Chairperson of the Philosophy Department of Peking Uni-versity, in Chapter VII on the relation between the natural and the social sciences. As he acutely points out, the natural sciences are structured to take account of the objective and necessary order of nature. Thus, if one is to make room for the ideals and values of truth, goodness and beauty, it is necessary to pay special attention to the distinctive character of the object and methods of the sciences intended to be properly human and social. Indeed, when this is not done the very meaning of human freedom is degraded, and along with this both human dignity as a goal and the means thereto. This points to the need to develop the distinctive cognitive approaches which make it possible to take full account of these values, and hence to appreciate the ways in which freedom can be more than a means to the ends of consumer society.

            The social crises of our day require that this enriched range of the cognitive abilities of the sciences be applied appropriately to the various dimensions of our issue, namely, to the nature or essence of social life and its existential realization. Thus Part III concerns the social nature of human beings, while Part IV concerns what it means for humans to exist socially.

            Professor Shi Defu of Peking University in Chapter VIII begins the study of this social nature by charting the history of this issue. In chapter IX Professor Woo Kun-Yu of National Taiwan University es-tablishes the personal character of human beings, showing them therefore to be essentially both unique and related. This interpersonal relatedness should point beyond alienation to solidarity and require the development of the related virtues.

            Professor Lou Yulie of Peking University in Chapter X agrees on the need to ground human sociality. This must not be left merely as an issue of ethics, detached from reality, floating unstably in the air, and hence subject to ideological manipulation. Thus, he points up the importance in the Chinese tradition of Wei Jin metaphysics which looks, beyond any legal or ethical code, to the reality of human nature as characterizing what is distinctively and concretely human in each person. This foundation must be reflected in any ethical code; it constitutes both the real basis and the norm of righteousness in social life; and it can be appealed to for motivation.

            This theme is taken considerably further in Chapter XI by Pro-fessor Shu-hsien Liu, Chairman of the Philosophy Department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He reflects the work of the neo-Confucians, especially Professor Mou Tsung-san who drew upon both Kant and Confucius. Mou was not satisfied either with the ethics and moral philosophy which could be developed after the manner of Con-fucius, or with the intricate but unstable combination of phenomena and thing-in-itself possible after the manner of Kant. Instead, he deve-loped a moral metaphysics based upon hsing (nature) and hsin (mind-heart) and concerned with personal participation in the Way. This enables human beings to be co-creators with Heaven in shaping social reality.

            Going further, as a personal contribution, Professor Shu-hsien Liu adopts the formula "li-i-fen-shu" (metaphysics) in order to wed tra-dition and creativity. He builds a moral metaphysics upon commitment to the dignity of the concrete human person in contrast to the Western more abstract notion from which the provisions of a moral life are deduced a priori. Shu-hsien Liu’s concrete metaphysics is charac-terized by the equal participation of all in a process constituted through their creative personal freedom.

            Part IV takes the issue beyond the social nature of human beings to the classically metaphysical issue of the basis for the actual exercise of this nature, that is, for living socially. The character and importance of this section can be seen from a brief passage in the chapter of Professor Shu-hsien Liu noting a particular limitation of Kant’s philosophy. It stems from the fact that he wrote within the Protestant Christian perspective, marked by Luther’s exclusive sense of "faith alone". This means not only that salvation is due to faith in distinction from both charity and good works, but that reason needed to be restricted in order to leave room for faith. As a result Kant’s conviction regarding free will lacked solid philosophical grounds inasmuch as it needed to be based on a transcendent principle which, however, could be attained not by reason, but only by faith. Ultimately, such a metaphysics could only be theological for it was based upon faith understood in direct contrast to reason. Mou’s step was to re-affirm confidence in human reason as able to relate to the transcen-dent and thereby to enable a properly philosophical foundation for human freedom and sociality. This position has characterized the long Catholic tradition in philosophy from the early days of Christianity till today.

            The chapters of Part IV are not inhibited by Kant’s limitation of reason, but reflect the longer Western tradition that creation by God ensures the competency of human faculties, including reason as man’s most distinctive power. The result is an approach to philosophy which provides not only an ethics based upon the nature or essence of humans, but a metaphysics of human beings as existing and living freely. This makes possible philosophical work on the implications of human transcendence and hence on the social creativity for which Professor Zhu Desheng called in Part I.

            Indeed there are important implications for almost all the issues with which this volume has been struggling:

            - the origin and basic purpose of human sociality,

            - the importance and liberating character of attention to the tradition,

            - the essential mutuality of independence and sociality,

            - the levels of human freedom and creativity in society,

            - the values and virtues in terms of which these can be lived, and

            - the foundation, at once immanent and transcendent, for the sense that all men have been created equal and are endowed with their proper dignity, and that this must be respected.

            In Chapter XII Tomonobu Imamichi, Professor Emeritus of Tok-yo University and Director of the International Center for the Study of Comparative Philosophy and Aesthetics, begins his work with a most suggestive step. All the previous chapters had either supposed or left unquestioned Marx’s Darwinian supposition that the primordial state of human beings was the result of forces of nature, which joined with others entirely on the basis of externally imposed necessity and hence for simply utilitarian purposes. In consequence, though man might be said to be by nature social, this remained always an imposi-tion. Even in the basic instance of family, this has been understood as a form of slavery which it is the work of history to attenuate. This remains the understanding of the basic character of human reality by modern ra-tionalisms, whether materialist or liberal. No matter what rationali-zation be put upon the human social dimension, no sublimation can enable human beings effectively to escape the pressures of Xu Junzhong’s historical vice: an exaltation of the central authority, on the one hand, and the suppression of the individual, on the other.

            Professor Imamichi illustrates deftly, however, that in fact both ancient myth and present practice contradict this Darwinian supposi-tion. If primacy is given to one’s presence in the clan this is because the clan and one’s presence therein are understood to be divinely given. This is reflected in the almost universal household and clan rituals honoring ancestors. Indeed, Africans criticize Christianity for its comparative weakness in this precise regard.1

            To this corresponds, as Professor Imamichi shows, the need for cultural and religious remembrance (or nostos) which modern ration-alisms everywhere have tried to eradicate in their process of educa-tional and political secularization. Professor Woo suggests in Chapter IX above that at a deep level the erotic union of male and female is an effort to reestablish the earlier total unity. Similarly, it should be said that today’s spontaneous, if chaotic, effort to recall the cultural traditions and hence the basic identity of peoples is no less natural and inevitable.

            Tragically, modern rationalism and its abstract universalism which characterize modern times are insensitive to this; they prevent cultures from exercising their healing potential upon human alienation. If this originating sociality is not integrated as an authentic and indis-pensable basis for social reconstruction it can only create conflict, be subject to suppression, or both in one of those vertiginous spirals we seem expert in creating.

            Chapter XIII by Professor Ellen M. Chen of Shanghai and St. John’s University, New York, returns to the Chinese tradition to un-cover a similar metaphysical horizon in order to revalue many of its elements and to point out ways in which they have been endangered and are in need of transformation.

            One of the most interesting -- indeed exciting -- sections of her chapter is its introduction of the thought of the late Medieval/early Renaissance thinker, Cardinal Nicolas of Cusa. He was able to draw upon, while exercising independence from, both the Platonic and the Aristotelism lines of Greek philosophy. This enabled him to appreciate that the Transcendent was beyond any quantitative comparison on which a hierarchy might be based, and that for the same reason the Transcendent was equally present to all persons in whatever place or time. By Cusa’s logic of the coincidence of opposites "God is both the Absolute-Greatest and the Absolute-Smallest, everywhere and now-here, at the center as well as the circumference, the infinitely above as well as most intimately within." Because all creatures as finite beings are equally distant and equally near to the infinite God, hierarchy collapses and makes room for equality and democracy.

            Under Cusa’s democratic vision, Aristotle’s conviction that "the rule of many is not good; one ruler let there be" and the Confucian belief in the emperor as alone the "son of heaven" lose their cogency. But importantly this is done not by a reductionism either to matter which radically undermines human dignity or to spirit which equally undermines one’s uniqueness. Rather, each human creature is as much a child of heaven as is anyone else, commanding 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 human dignity and equality, for which Professor Zhen Li called, regain thereby their absolute warrant in a Transcendent which is as much inner as outer. This constitutes a true basis for a democratic society in which the social character of human persons--their bond with nature and with each other--is fully synchronized with their shared dignity.

            Finally, chapter XIV by Professor George F. McLean brings together a number of other basic themes. By identifying a series of levels of freedom he shows that society can destroy man not only by suppressing all freedom, but by focusing restrictively upon a lower sense of freedom to the exclusion of higher ones, thereby destroying the human person’s dignity and restricting his or her goals. Thus, freedom often is taken at a first level to mean only an ability to choose among material objects or things. This condemns the person to a slavery to physical objects or to ease, in the service of which one is willing to do all -- even kill if this be but thinly veiled by euphemisms. A second, deontological level of freedom is found in Kant’s second criti-que and its sense of being able to will as one ought. As is deftly indi-cated by Professor Shu-hsien Liu, being bereft of an ontological found-ation, such freedom is unstable for it lacks both direction and motiva-tion for its application.

            But an even greater danger to this freedom lurks in its rationalist context. Kant’s first critique concerning reason at work in the physical order showed it to be coordinated exclusively by universal and ne-cessary laws. As a result the freedom identified in his second critique, if it reaches out beyond the human heart, finds itself in an alien, necessitating universe. The contradiction between the physical and the human worlds would condemn freedom ultimately to being entrap-ped and entombed within the human heart. This is but a replay of Professor Zhu Dasheng’s dilemma in Chapter VII, namely, that creative human freedom is confronted by the aggressive power of the natural sciences and the forces they describe as objective but unfree. This led Kant to develop another set of categories, namely, his third Critique of Aesthetic Judgment.

            There may be a suggestive parallel to this in earlier Chinese efforts at modernization. If Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy have settled in only partly and with difficulty it may be that, like Kant’s first two critiques which they closely reflect, they need a third, aesthetic, di-mension. This would integrate the properly free human project with the physical universe, enabling the former to be realized not only ac-cording to necessary laws -- whether objective as in the first critique or subjective as in the second -- but in terms of that awe before beauty which attracts and inspires, moves and directs.

            It is just such a sense of moral or social harmony which the above chapters concur in identifying as most properly Confucian and Chinese. This suggests that many problems cited here in realizing a modern social life may come from the fact that in the 1919 movement Confucius was ushered out unceremoniously just when he was most needed. His sense of harmony enables him uniquely to serve as the gracious host ingeniously coordinating all for the visit of the two Magi from the West so that they might in fact accomplish the good awaited of them. Indeed, who ever heard of only two Magi; or who would be more capable of integrating them than Confucius and his long tradition of the Chinese wisdom of harmony? To do so, however, harmony must be read not in terms of strict obedience to authority as came to be the case with the neo-Confucians of the Song Dynasty, but in its original open and integrative sense.

            The second part of George McLean’s chapter takes up issues of truth, goodness and beauty which were cited as in need of reflection by Professor Zhu Dasheng. This makes note of some factors developed in the long tradition of philosophical metaphysics for which Shu-hsien Liu, after Mou Tsung-san, would call. Indeed, this can be expected from the Catholic philosophical tradition. It is set in the context of the Trinity of divine persons and parallels the Hindu tradition centered upon the divine attributes of sat-cit-ananda -- existence, conscious-ness (truth) and bliss (good). The Catholic tradition contains a wealth of reflection upon truth, goodness and beauty, as well as work on their relation to modern social developments.

            This points as well to the need recognized by Mou to found Kant’s hypothetical structure -- according to which thought must pro-ceed "as if" there is an outer Transcendent -- upon a rational and pro-perly philosophical basis, for in order to render effective help in real social life, the Transcendent principle itself must be real.

            From this overview it can be seen that the present volume, The Human Person and Society, takes us to the richest resources of our cultures East and West and to the most anguished problems of our times. It was the intent of joining the philosophical resources of the Philosophy Department of the University of Peking with those of the Council for Research in Values and Philosophy to make a studied effort to respond creatively to present problems with the broadest range of philosophical insight. The authors of this volume can rightly rejoice in the outcome of their work.

NOTES