Seifert, Persons and Causes Beyond Aristotle

PERSONS AND CAUSES: BEYOND ARISTOTLE
Josef Seifert
Abstract ： While Aristotle does not consider (as Libet) the physical universe
causally closed, his understanding of causality is insufficient: 1. Aristotle does not
grasp the indispensable role of persons for the “four causes” he distinguishes:
Physical efficient causality can neither explain itself nor the entire chain of
physical events, nor is it the primary form of causality, nor sufficient to explain
personal agency. Also formal and final causality are inexplicable without persons.
Without the essential relation to persons efficient, formal, and final causes are
impossible and unintelligible. Moreover, Aristotle attributes wrongly fundamental
traits (to be the source of individual being and the ultimate subject of form and
change) to material causality as such, which is incorrect, because these traits
belong more perfectly to spiritual persons. 2. There are entirely new causes of
human acts that cannot be subsumed under the four causes encountered in
intentionality, cognitive relations to objects, human motivation and behavior etc.,
which, when reduced to efficient causes (let alone to mere brain-causes) are
entirely misconstrued. If such a reductionist causal theory were true, its truth
would destroy the cognitive value of the theory itself which advances such a causal
reductionism. Therefore a personalist rethinking of causality is necessary.
THE FOLLOWING paper has grown out of an extended research project I have
1
directed dedicated to the thesis of Benjamin Libet and some other brain scientists
who deny positive free will but maintain that we do possess some negative free will
of vetoing voluntary movements or actions. Libet and many other far more
deterministic brain scientists and many philosophers assume that, if freedom exists at
all in a causally completely or well-nigh completely closed physical universe, it can
do so only in a tiny corner of the universe, and in a restricted, almost unnoticeable,
negative and secondary way. In other words, the underlying framework of such a
philosophy is that causality exists only or at least primarily in the physical nature and
mental events and realities are effects of physical causes, brain causes and others
initiating in a big Bang or in evolutionary processes which produced what we call
“persons” and keep producing mental events through physical causes.
One possible way to criticize Libet’s and other scientists’ view and challenge to
free will is to show that it contains a complete reversal of the order of causality and
that it suffers from a “forgetfulness of the person” and of her crucial role in the order
of causes. But before showing this in relation to the merely implicit philosophy of
brain scientists, I thought it wise and necessary to tackle this question by a pure return
to things themselves, and in dialogue with an incomparably greater philosopher, the

Dr. JOSEF SEIFERT, Professor, International Academy of Philosophy Spain–Instituto de
Filosofía Edith Stein Granada, Spain. Email: [email protected].
1
For the financial support of this project (2010-2012) I am indebted to Fondecyt, the National
Chilean Endowment of Science and the Humanities.
Journal of East-West Thought
2 JOSEF SEIFERT
intellectual giant Aristotle, whose philosophy of causality I will critically examine in

this paper. In a later paper I will address the theory of Libet under this aspect.
I. Subject and Purpose of This Paper
In the history of a philosophy of causality Aristotle is no question a giant, if not even

the single most important philosopher of causality, in particular by his enlarging the
concept of causality and by his having shown that all thinkers that preceded him,
upon asking why a thing comes to be or exists, what its cause is, have referred only to
one or two of its causes, not to the entirety of four quite distinct causes that account
for the being and becoming of things and all of which have to be known in order to
answer the question why a thing is and whence it came from. Aristotle gives an
equally simple and beautiful illustration of these four different causes - a sculptor who
makes a statue: the artist (a) uses a certain matter; (b) must give it a certain form; (c)
must engage in activities through which the form is given to matter; (d) must have a
purpose for the sake of which he makes it (for example to be used in worship in a
temple or simply for the sake of its beauty). Particularly if the statue is a portrait or
represents a great hero or god, we can (e) identify the exemplar which the statue
imitates as a fifth cause (exemplary cause, which plays hardly any role in Aristotle
but a huge role in Plato and in the whole Platonic tradition of philosophy up to the
present).
Now while Aristotle, already through the example by which he illustrates the four
causes, the sculptor who makes a statue, has taken into account many aspects of the
relation between persons and causes, he has had a limited understanding of the central
significance persons play for all and particularly for some causes. Taking the classical
Aristotelian discovery of the four causes as my starting point, I will attempt to show
initially the essential connection of these causes to persons. Above and beyond this, I
intend to show that in the world of human consciousness and of volitional acts there
are a variety of other causes that cannot be reduced to the four, thus showing still
more the insufficiency of the Aristotelian discussion of causes when it comes to the
explanation of causality in the world of persons.
The question about the first principles and causes of being and change in the
world plays an overriding role in Aristotle’s and in most subsequent metaphysics.2
The Aristotelian concept of cause is far more extensive than the modern one, which
tends to reduce the complexity of causes to efficient causality alone and to a small
part thereof. It might therefore be better to use, besides the term “cause,” expressions
such as ground, principle, element, condition, etc., in order to do justice to the breadth
of the Aristotelian quest for the aitía and arché of things. 3 Aristotle means with
“cause” nothing more and nothing less than all those factors which are decisive for
the coming about and the being of a thing. Turning to “things themselves”, he makes
2
See Reale 1976: 23 ff., where one finds a brief but important summary presentation of this
theme in Aristotelian metaphysics.
3
Reale 1976: 31 ff.
PERSONS AND CAUSES: BEYOND ARISTOTLE 3
the tremendous discovery of four fundamentally different sorts of causes of being and
becoming: a) the formal cause or essence (whatness) of things; b) the material cause
out of which or in which change occurs or form is received; c) the efficient cause,
through the power of which a change is effected or a being is; and d) the final cause,
for the sake of which something is or is done. Following Plato, later thinkers added
the exemplary cause as a fifth cause, while others subordinated the exemplary cause –
the model, ideal or paradigm – to the category of a (transcendent) formal cause.
In this paper, I will try to show mainly the following things:
1) Aristotle, with most of the subsequent tradition of philosophy, does not
sufficiently realize the essential connections between the four causes discovered by
him and persons; without such an understanding, however, these four causes can only
be understood very imperfectly. An investigation into the relation between persons
and causes will show, among other things, that specifically personal acts, in particular
knowledge and free actions, can so little be explained through physical causes that on
the contrary the whole order of causality in nature and in human affairs can solely be
appropriately understood if we recognize first that none of the classical Aristotelian
causes, and in particular efficient and final causality, can be understood without
understanding their various relationships to, and ultimate dependence on, persons.
2) Aristotle mistakenly believes that there are only these four causes of being and
becoming, while on the level of persons we find many other and fundamentally
different kinds of causes which are totally irreducible to the four causes.
II. Persons and the Four Traditional Causes
A) Some Reflections on Aristotle’s philosophy of the four causes.

a) Formal Cause: According to Aristotle, the most important aitía (I often will
use this Greek term for cause because we are too much used to employing the term
cause solely for efficient causes) is the ousía, which term, understood as cause, does
not refer to substance (another meaning of ‘ousia’ in Aristotle) but to the formal
cause, i.e., the essence 4 . Aristotle believes that it is possible to reduce all other
ultimate grounds of the explanation of a being to its formal cause, which he calls the
“first cause”,5 speaking of it as the primary ground, highest and ultimate cause of all
beings, such that in the last analysis Aristotle holds that also the final cause, for the
sake of which something is or a person acts, coincides with the formal cause. 6
4
The “formal cause” can also be called the morphé and eidos, the tí eînai or the tò tí ên eînai.
See Reale 1976: 23, 34, 37 ff., 54, fn. 104. See also Aristotle, Metaphysics, Z 17, 1041 b 27-28,
H 3, 1043 b 13-4.
5
Reale 1976 rightly sees in the primacy of the formal cause in the Metaphysics a certain
influence of Platonic philosophy on Aristotle, in particular because Aristotle also uses the
expression „paradigm’.
6
See Reale 1976: 23 ff., 31 ff. Given that with the word ousía Aristotle means not only the
formal cause, but also substance, one may have some doubts about whether Aristotle means
just a primacy of substance or one of the formal cause as such.
4 JOSEF SEIFERT
If “formal cause” is to encompass the essence and intelligible structure of a

being, the formal cause undoubtedly is an absolutely elementary principle of all being
and becoming.
Unlike Plato, Aristotle sees the formal cause almost exclusively in terms of the
form in things, rejecting the timeless Platonic forms. While Aristotle, who calls the
forms eternal and seems to hold that they exist in the immovable ‘active intellect’, can
hardly be interpreted in the sense of entirely immanentizing the formal cause in things
and denying any forms transcendent to things, he nevertheless moves in this
direction.7 Now, we fully acknowledge, with Aristotle, the primacy and character of
reality which is attributable only to the essence in individual things. Still, concrete
individual things remain subjected to the “rationes aeternae”, the “eternal reasons”
which contain the essential foundations and timelessly valid and unchangeable
necessary ‘essential plans’, rules, and laws for them.
Thus there are significant reasons which would compel us to carry out a critique
of the thesis suggested in Aristotle’s sharp criticism of the Platonic doctrine of eternal
forms, that the formal cause can only exist in real particular things as their immanent
essential form.
b) Material Cause or the ‘in which’ of change–source of individuality? Aristotle
also acknowledges the material cause (hyle, hypokeimenon), for example, bronze for a
bronze statue, which is according to him particularly, or even exclusively, 8 necessary
for sensible things.
There is certainly an evident and objective distinction between the form or the
essence and the material of which a physical thing consists. Matter in this sense is not
a subject but a constituent element of material things.
Very different is the distinction between the subject that undergoes change and
essential or accidental essential determinations and changes which a given entity
undergoes, found in most every process of becoming, 9 not only in one that occurs in
the material world.
At closer inspection, Aristotle uses two entirely different notions of “material
cause”: one simply refers to the ultimate subject of essential determinations and
change, that which underlies change and in which change occurs (the hypokeimenon);
the other is the pure principle of ‘stuff’, of “matter”, the physical substratum out of
which material entities are made or by which they are, together with their form,
7
Particularly his critique of the Platonic doctrine of the Ideas. On the need for recognizing, in
addition to the formal cause as essential form in concretely existing beings themselves, essence
as eidos, as the essential intelligible ratio, which precedes all contingent beings because of its
timeless and eternal intelligible unity and necessity, see Seifert 1996: ch. 1. With his
rehabilitation of eidetic causes, Seifert introduces within the formal cause, in addition to the
form immanent in beings, the exemplary cause, and adopts thereby a Platonic or better said
Augustinian philosophy of exemplarism.
8
See the foundation of this claim of the exclusivity in this direction in Reale 1976: 24ff; 34 ff.;
50.
9
I prescind here from such changes as are involved in the movement of time itself that does not
seem to occur “in” a subject. See the discussion of time in Josef Seifert 1989, ch. 10.
constituted. At the foundation of the already formed materials (such as bronze), also
called “secondary matter” (deutera hyle), lies that pure principle of materiality which
Aristotle characterized as prime matter (prote hyle), and which (in later scholastic
terminology of the “the prime matter quantitatively distinct”, the “materia prima
quantitate signata”), according to Aristotle is the source of individual being and
essence.
To identify these two meanings of the cause which Aristotle calls material cause
contains a serious confusion. For in the wider sense of material cause as the
underlying subject of formal (essential) characteristics and change every finite being,
and therefore also a spiritual person, insofar as something happens in her, can be
considered as a “material cause,” i.e., if this is understood as any something which
can possess or receive a “form” (essence) and in which change occurs (as any “in
which”/en hoo). Aristotle recognizes this to some extent in the idea of the “second
matter” (deutera hyle), an already formed material subject of new accidents and
forms, such as the bronze which is material cause for the statue distinct from “prime
matter” and already is a material substantial thing that has a form.
Besides, Aristotle’s claim that sees the sole principle of individual being in the
material cause (prime matter) implies that solely and exclusively the material cause is
responsible for individual things and that spiritual substances are pure (non-
individual) essences. Thus Aristotle attributes on the one hand to the material cause
the tremendous metaphysical function of being the only source of individual being.
On the other hand, Aristotle attributes to both the material cause and individual being
a very limited significance, as it is according to him just needed and extant in the
material universe.
Now, in material entities matter (distinct from form) fulfills to some extent truly
the two roles Aristotle attributes to it: being the source of individuality and being the
ultimate recipient of form. But these two decisive roles of the type of cause here
considered must not at all be attributed to matter in all beings. 10 It is untenable to
derive all individuality, least of all the individual spiritual unicity and unrepeatable
and indivisible “thisness” of persons, from the pure stuff out of which material
entities are made (materia prima quantitate signata) and which – in virtue of its
extension and multitude of parts and other predicates – can never account for personal
individuality.
On the other hand, we may ask: Does not the material cause, understood as any
“in which,” as any bearer of forms, have a far deeper significance than that which
Aristotle concedes to it, by not just appearing within material reality as stuff of which
they are made, but by being a foundational principle and cause also for all spiritual
forms of becoming. For also a spiritual substance or person is the bearer, “that
wherein” essence (form) exists and change can take place. This second and far more
fundamental type of “in which” goes beyond the sphere of physical reality and should
actually not be called “material cause” but rather be designated by the more abstract
10
See Seifert 1989 a: ch. 8-9.
6 JOSEF SEIFERT
Aristotelian terms en hoo (“in which”) or “hypokeimenon” (that which underlies

change).
The confusion of these two things may have suggested itself to Aristotle by the
fact that in the material world matter to some extent really performs all of these
functions (being the recipient of form, the subject of change and form and the source
of individuality) though rather the synthetic unity of matter and form, than matter
alone, accounts for the individual thisness of material things.
c) Efficient Causality: From the formal and the material causes Aristotle
distinguishes the efficient cause, through the power and efficacy of which something
happens. With this, he has certainly fastened upon another originary kind of causality
in an indubitably phenomenological manner. He also gives a formulation of the
principle of causality, formulating it simultaneously in relation to efficient, formal
and material causes: “Everything that comes to be, comes to be through something,
from (out of) something, and as a certain something” (Metaphysics, VII 7, 1032a).
Only the first and third one of these three propositions contained in Aristotle’s
formulation of the principle have universal validity and express the ‘eternal truth’ of
the principle of causality that also underlies all natural sciences (besides being the
ground of all other explanations of human, moral, spiritual, or any other contingent
things, events, and states of affairs): “Everything that comes to be, comes to be
through something;” and; “Everything that comes to be, comes to be … as a certain
something.” The second proposition, ‘Everything that comes to be, comes to be …
from (out of) something’ relates only to the causation of material things that are made
out of some material by any (human or divine) agent and, still more narrowly
understood, to the production of things through finite agents who can never create
anything “from nothing” – which would be the most radical form of efficient
causality –, cannot create spiritual substances at all, and can make material things
only ‘out of preexisting matter’.
This causality by the power of which something happens is unfortunately again
limited by Aristotle to the sphere of sensible realities, leaving his metaphysics open to
the critical question of whether only sensible things have causes or even can
themselves be efficient causes, wherefore that pure spirit of the absolute, divine
being, according to Aristotle, only influences the world as final cause, “as the
beloved”11. While Aristotle admits at times the absolute efficient causality of free
agents and even assigns to it a primary paradigmatic character,12 Aristotle attempts
11
See Aristotle’s Metaphysics, XII, 7, 1072 a 26 ff. See also Reale 1976, 305, for an
explanation and for references to the sources of this Aristotelian doctrine.
12
Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, ed. F. Susemihl (Leipzig: Teubner, 1884). Greek online edition in
Perseus., 2.6.8-9; 1223 a 3 ff., describes free will powerfully, attributing to it that we are lords
over the being or non-being of our acts: “Therefore it is clear that all the actions of which a
man is the first principle and controller may either happen or not happen, and that it depends on
himself for them to happen or not, as he is lord over their being and of their non-being. But of
those things which it depends on him to do or not to do he is himself the cause, and what he is
the cause of is from himself. And since virtue and evilness and the actions that spring from
them are in some cases praiseworthy and in other cases blameworthy (for praise and blame are
frequently to reduce the efficient cause to the material world. At other times, he tries
to reduce the efficient to the formal cause. In such a manner the formal cause would
appear to be the fundamental principle of generation.
Admiring his tremendous discoveries, we will have to offer an incisive critique of
some of the Aristotelian theses regarding efficient causality.
d) Final causality: The final cause, the telos, is defined by Aristotle as the end of
a thing or of an action, as that for the sake of which (hou heneka) something is or
happens. This end, according to Aristotle, coincides with the good and is the
ultimately moving and most important cause in the universe, which Aristotle at times
identifies with the essences (formal causes) of things, especially in living things
which are an en-tel-echy, a being that has its end in itself as the form it is called to
actualize.13
We now proceed to the most significant section of the first part of this paper, an
examination of the personalist dimensions of the four causes which were largely
overlooked by Aristotle – to the detriment of a proper understanding of the four
causes.
B) Persons as Principles of Explanation of Aristotle’s Four Causes
The last one in particular, but also the third and in some respects even the first
two of these four causes can be understood in their ultimate specificity and efficacy
only if metaphysics is not limited to being merely a metaphysics of substance and
not given to what necessity or fortune or nature determine but to things of which we ourselves
are the causes, since for things of which another one is the cause, that person has the blame and
the praise), it is clear that both goodness and badness have to do with things of which a man is
himself the cause and origin of actions. We must, then, ascertain what is the kind of actions of
which a man is himself the cause and origin. Now we all agree that each man is the cause of all
those acts that are voluntary and purposive for him individually, and that he is not himself the
cause of those that are involuntary. And clearly he commits voluntarily all the acts that he
commits purposely. It is clear, then, that both moral virtue and evilness will be in the class of
things voluntary.” Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, 2.6.8–9; 1223a3 and following (transl. mine):
ὥστε ὅσων πράξεων ὁ ἄνθρωπός ἐστιν [5] ἀρχὴ καὶ κύριος, φανερὸν ὅτι ἐνδέχεται καὶ γίνεσθαι
καὶ μή, καὶ ὅτι ἐφ᾽ αὑτῷ ταῦτ᾽ ἐστι γίνεσθαι καὶ μή, ὧν γε κύριός ἐστι τοῦ εἶναι καὶ τοῦ μὴ
εἶναι. ὅσα δ᾽ ἐφ᾽ αὑτῷ ἐστι ποιεῖν ἢ μὴ ποιεῖν, αἴτιος τούτων αὐτὸς ἐστίν: καὶ ὅσων αἴτιος, ἐφ᾽
αὑτῷ. ἐπεὶ δ᾽ ἥ τε ἀρετὴ καὶ ἡ κακία καὶ τὰ ἀπ᾽ [10] αὐτῶν ἔργα τὰ μὲν ἐπαινετὰ τὰ δὲ ψεκτά
（ψέγεται γὰρ καὶ ἐπαινεῖται οὐ διὰ τὰ ἐξ ἀνάγκης ἢ τύχης ἢ φύσεως ὑπάρχοντα, ἀλλ᾽ ὅσων
αὐτοὶ αἴτιοι ἐσμέν: ὅσων γὰρ ἄλλος αἴτιος, ἐκεῖνος καὶ τὸν ψόγον καὶ τὸν ἔπαινον ἔχει）,
δῆλον ὅτι καὶ ἡ ἀρετὴ καὶ ἡ κακία περὶ ταῦτ᾽ ἐστιν ὧν αὐτὸς [15] αἴτιος καὶ ἀρχὴ πράξεων.
ληπτέον ἄρα ποίων αὐτὸς αἴτιος καὶ ἀρχὴ πράξεων. πάντες μὲν δὴ ὁμολογοῦμεν, ὅσα μὲν
ἑκούσια καὶ κατὰ προαίρεσιν τὴν ἑκάστου, ἐκεῖνον αἴτιον εἶναι, ὅσα δ᾽ ἀκούσια, οὐκ αὐτὸν
αἴτιον. πάντα δ᾽ ὅσα προελόμενος, καὶ ἑκὼν δῆλον ὅτι. δῆλον τοίνυν ὅτι καὶ ἡ ἀρετὴ καὶ ἡ [20]
κακία τῶν ἑκουσίων ἂν εἴησαν. In other texts Aristotle calls free will also “the first principle”,
“the cause” and “the lord of action”. See Aristotle, Magna Moralia, 87 b 31 ff., especially 89 b
6 ff.; Nichomachean Ethics, III; and Magna Moralia, 87 b 31 ff., especially 89 b 6 ff. The
moments of self-dominion, self-governance, and self-determination have also been investigated
in fine analyses by Karol Wojtyla in his The Acting Person, trans. Andrzej Potocki, ed. Anna-
Teresa Tymieniecka (Boston: Reidel, 1979).
13
See Reale 1976: 23 ff.
8 JOSEF SEIFERT
nature, but also is, or becomes, comprehended as a metaphysics of the person qua
person.
This should become particularly clear in the case of the last two causes, and I
begin therefore my exposition with their analysis: Efficient causality can only be
understood through the metaphysics of the person. This can be seen through the
following reasons:
(1) We find the most authentic embodiment of efficient causality exclusively in
personal free will. Every other efficient cause, as Augustine states in De Civitate
Dei14, receives it efficacy from without, and operates only to the extent to which it
itself is the effect of other causes (actions, processes or events). Therefore only
persons who act freely can be properly speaking efficient causes because they act
more than being acted upon.
Even plants and animals, despite their spontaneity and activity of their own,
cannot properly be considered as authentic efficient causes because their being causes
is not wholly but largely determined by preceding causes in their instincts and nature,
and by extrinsic causes to which they react. Therefore, such causes that are
determined by other causes and consequently rather are mere “transmitters” of the
force of other causes than being causes in their own right clearly never suffice to
explain human action. (Aristotle concurs with Augustine on this at times).
Free will alone can be considered an efficient cause that is essentially more
efficient cause than a causally produced effect, because only free will as the ‘principle
par excellence’ embodies the ratio of the efficient cause in the fullest sense, being
truly the origin of that which happens through it. Free will alone can in an authentic
sense be that through which something is, insofar as the origin of its efficacy lies in
the free agent himself. Free will is the only cause in the fullest sense of efficient
causality, since it alone truly originates and exerts efficient causality rather than
merely passing it on. The free act constitutes either an absolute beginning (in divine
freedom) or (in human persons) “acts more than it is acted upon” and thereby
constitutes a true, and in a limited sense even an ‘absolute’, beginning of efficient
causality that is not caused from outside the free agent. Therefore, as Augustine says
in sharpest contrast to the discussion of causality in most of contemporary brain
science and philosophy, non-personal beings and impersonal things and events cannot
even properly be considered as efficient causes at all; the existence of such causes that
are themselves determined by other causes can therefore never be the whole story
about efficient causality because, in the last analysis, they do only what free wills do
with them. (The necessarily limited sphere of their operation, which always begins in
causality through freedom, does not contradict free actions but on the contrary, these
presuppose the – limited realm and dominion of – “determined causes” under laws of
nature, which is never the principal cause of human actions but is used by them). 15
Thus the first one of all efficient causes is the person, since she alone is properly
speaking a cause rather than being a mere transmitter of the causal impact of other
causes through which she is determined.
14
Augustine, De Civitate Dei, V.
15
See Ingarden 1970.
(2) We touch thereby a second moment. All other efficient causality, with the
exception of causality in and through free will, leads us back to a principle of its
efficacy distinct from itself. Solely the free and simple initiating and setting into
motion of a chain of causes is a true beginning of a chain of efficient causes.
In fact, without free agents there would be an infinite chain of causes but, as
Aristotle Aquinas, and many others including Kant saw, there cannot be an infinite
chain in the realm of causality. Therefore, only free will is the ultimate and first
principle of explanation of all efficient causality in a contingent world, and therefore
also the absolutely first cause of the contingently existing universe, whose origin and
existence requires an efficient first cause that can only be a free cause.16
(3) We can thirdly ascertain that free will is not only the most authentic
embodiment and the only true beginning of efficient causality. Rather, in the personal
form of efficient causality there lies a radically other and higher type of efficient
causality than that which is thinkable within the sphere of apersonal beings.
Therefore, a metaphysics understood as the explanation of the highest cause of all
things must necessarily be a personalistic metaphysics. What are these new elements
efficient causality takes on solely in free will?
(a) First off, in free self-determination and in free acting lies a unique form of
efficient causality for the reason that we are dealing here with a conscious causality,
in which the effect proceeds from a conscious act such that the consciousness is a
mode of personal free agency and causation which we therefore do not call just
causing but acting or making (creating). Because a personal being, broadly speaking,
possesses his being in a fully new sense in comparison to impersonal beings, because
he is conscious of himself and consciously enacts his own being, he therefore also
possesses himself in a unique manner through free auto-determination and through
the free and creative production and constitution of things and actions in making and
acting.
(b) To free causality not only belongs consciousness but also the specifically
personal and rational consciousness as a moment inseparable from it, without which
this form of causality would be completely impossible; only the spontaneity of an
irrational animal could exist. In acting and making, new states of affairs are not
simply engendered or changed in an unconscious, mechanistic manner and not even
just in an instinctual, or in the less irrational conscious way like a dog’s saving his
master, but still without possessing rational knowledge of his life’s value. Instead, in
the intentional, object-directed acts of making and acting the person directs herself
consciously and meaningfully to that which he or she realizes, aims at the realization
of things or of states of affairs, calls them freely into being. This relation of the person
to that which is real outside of herself includes thus wholly distinct forms of relation
and efficient causality that are found only on the level of the person. To comprehend
them is necessary in order to unfold the philosophical grasp of efficient causality.
16
Plato has understood this far more clearly, particularly in his Timaios. Also Kant, if we
prescind from his skeptical and subjectivist understanding of freedom as postulate, has seen this
much more clearly – for example, in the Third Antinomy in his Critique of Pure Reason. See
Kant 1968. See also Seifert 2001.
10 JOSEF SEIFERT
Also for this reason only on the basis of a personalistic metaphysics efficient causality
can be properly understood.
(4) Free will as an immediate experience of efficient causality: Moreover, in this
free causality, as we carry out the conscious act of causation, of engendering our own
acts, in acting and making, the causal power is itself immediately and consciously
given; we are ourselves identical with the subject of this power: we experience the
flowing out of effects from the cause, at least in the engendering of free acts as such
and, in a less strong sense, also in doing and making things through mental acts and
bodily actions. Here we do not just understand or infer causal relations but experience
them immediately.
(5) Indubitable evidence of efficacy and efficient causality in engendering
(causing) free acts: The causal influence and efficacy proper to free will of bringing
into existence acting itself, research, and in particular willing itself, also represent the
classic instances in which efficient causality is given with evidence in the immediate
experience of causing acts from our own will “which would not exist if we did not
want them,” of which Augustine says that it is in a sense even more evident than our
existence. This applies also, though more weakly, to the causality found in bodily
action that is mediated by all kinds of unconscious physiological processes, but it
applies absolutely to the mode in which persons cause and engender their own free
acts since nothing lies so much in their power of causation as willing itself. And
nothing could be more evidently given in knowledge. For even if we could doubt our
very being, believing that we might be deceived in this, we could not doubt our free
will of not wanting to be deceived. And indeed we know of our freedom with the
same type of immediate and reflective evidence with which we know of our own
existence.17 The awareness of our own free will – a knowledge which is so evident
that it cannot be deception – is part of the evidence of the Cogito as unfolded by
Augustine.18 And the existence of free will in us is so evident that its evidence in a
certain sense is more primary and indubitable than that of all other evident truths
given in the Cogito. 19 For even if we could be in error about all things, which is
impossible, as Augustine sees, it would still remain true that we do not want to be in
error and of this free will we can have certain knowledge:
17
Investigating this matter more closely, we could distinguish between the evident givenness of
freedom on different levels, a) in the immediate inner conscious living of our acts, b) in what
Karol Wojtyìa calls “reflective consciousness” (which precedes the fully conscious self-
knowledge), and c) in explicit reflection and self-knowledge properly speaking in which we
make our personal freedom the explicit object of reflection, d) in the insight into the nature of
freedom, an insight which grasps the necessary and intelligible essence of personhood, which is
realized in each and every person, and e) in the clear and indubitable recognition of our
personal individual freedom, an evident knowledge which depends, on the one hand, on the
immediate and reflective experience of our being and freedom, and, on the other hand, on the
essential insight into the eternal and evident truth of the connection between freedom and
personhood.
18
See Hölscher 1986. See also Seifert 1987: ch. 4-5. See also Seifert 1998: 145-185.
19
Of course, this priority is not to be understood absolutely, for without the evidence of our
existence and thinking activity also our freedom and will could not be given.
Likewise if someone were to say, “I do not will to err,” will it not be true that
whether he errs or does not err, yet he does not will to err? Would it not be the
height of impudence of anyone to say to this man, “Perhaps you are deceived,”
since no matter in what he may be deceived, he is certainly not deceived in not
willing to be deceived? And if he says that he knows this, he adds as many known
things as he pleases, and perceives it to be an infinite number. For he who says, “I
do not will to be deceived, and I know that I do not will this, and I know that I
know this,” can also continue from here towards an infinite 20 number, however
awkward this manner of expressing it may be. 21 On the other hand who would
doubt that he ... wills...? For even if he doubts, he ... wills to be certain; ... Whoever
then doubts about anything else ought never to doubt about all of these; for if they
22
were not, he would be unable to doubt about anything at all.
The evidence of this knowledge cannot even be refuted by any and all possible forms
of self-deception because these imply or presuppose already the evidence of free
will.23 And in this indubitable evidence of free will also the causality in engendering
free acts is given.
With the free causality of our engendering our own free acts and causing them,
with the causality of free will, also another dimension of efficient causality, linked to
free will itself, becomes accessible to us: namely the way in which we freely perform
bodily actions and through them cause changes in the world, i.e., the causality of
realizing states of affairs (through acting) or things (through making) in the external
world through our free initiative. Thus with this absolutely evident givenness of our
engendering our free acts themselves, also a less absolute but still very clear evidence
of us being efficient causes of works, books, buildings and other objects and events is
accessible to us. Therefore, besides the “causality of free will itself” also “causality
through free will,” mediated through the brain and body, the freedom to act and to
change the world by our actions, is unambiguously given to us, though it is not given
with equally indubitable certainty as the causing of our willing itself. 24
We find in the ability freely to intervene in the world, and thereby to realize
things and states of affairs outside of the person, again two specifically personal and
originary types of causality, namely making (poiein) and acting (prattein), which
20
McKenna translates the infinitum numerum (wrongly, I believe) by ‚indefinite number’.
21
Augustine 1970: 480-2.
22
Augustine, De Trinitate, X, 10, 14. See also, Augustine, Contra Academicos, II, xiii, 29,
ibid., III, 23; De Vera Religione, XXXIX, 73, 205-7; De Trinitate XIV, vi, 8; ibid., XV, xii, 21;
De Civitate Dei XI, xxvi.
23
The indubitable knowledge we can gain regarding our freedom refutes also the theory of
Hume (of the non-givenness of causality), which considers almost exclusively forms of
causality given within the material, sensible world, being also wrong about them. Cf.
Hildebrand 1994: 2- 27. Seifert 1987: ch. 4-5.
24
Therefore the positions of occasionalism or of a pre-established harmony between our will
and external bodily actions (Geulincx and Leibniz), according to which our bodies are moved
“on the occasion” of our wills and harmony with them, is not a senseless, although a wrong
theory.
12 JOSEF SEIFERT
must also be considered from the point of view of a metaphysics of causality. In

making and creating, the person brings some things into existence, in various degrees
of radicality which range from producing mere technical products to creating
intellectual or artistic works. In acting, the person realizes states of affairs in relation
to already existing things.
In both cases, the person also realizes acts in herself and determines herself,
whether through the unique and direct causality by which she calls her free acts into
existence, or through the human and moral effects of these acts on herself as a person.
And this allows us to see a sixth way in which efficient causality requires the
understanding of personal beings in order to be properly understood.
(6) The free subject as a self-determining efficient cause: We see in the light of
the preceding reflections that the person herself, and thereby a spiritual being, i.e., the
human person as such in her spiritual aspects, is and can be an efficient cause and
agent of free interior acts as well as an object of efficient causality, in that freedom
with essential necessity does not merely bring into existence external objects and
processes, but also inner acts. Indeed free will has, above and beyond acts performed
by the person, the person herself as primary object, even though normally by turning
in the first intention to other persons and values outside the person, but it acts at the
same time upon the person of the free agent herself in a peculiar form of reflexivity
which is inseparable from the exercise of free will. 25 This unique case of auto-
determination and auto-causation of free agents does not happen only in the obvious
manner, such as in free decisions, for example, or in the free act of calling into
existence thinking itself, or research, and other acts and activities, but rather also in
the sense in which the person, on the basis of that which she does in her conscious
actions and of that at which she aims, also determines herself in a far deeper and
farther-reaching sense than the one in which the person can change any material being
or animal let alone the one in which animals can cause changes in the material world
or the world of plants and animals.
Self-determination is an effect of the use of free will, and thereby an absolutely
unique form of causality, in which, as the philosopher Wojtyìa profoundly explains26,
not only objects and states of affairs outside of the person are the objects of action,
but the person herself, who in her free acting gets hold of her own self, becomes good
or evil, and determines herself in a completely unique manner. In the self-
determination of the free subject or of the free substance itself lays therefore a unique
form of causality, which is unthinkable within the sphere of impersonal being and
even in the outward-directed efficient causality of the person.
The actualization of the deepest potentialities of the person cannot happen
without the free will of the person. The distance, which metaphysically speaking
separates the good person from the evil one, also gives witness to the efficacy of free
will upon its own proper subject, and this effectively contradicts the Aristotelian
limitation of efficient causality to the sensible-material world. In fact, it becomes
25
See on this Wojtyìa 1979.
26
See Wojtyìa 1979: Part I, ch. ii; Part II, ch. iii.
clear that efficient causality is not only also possible with spiritual substances, but lies
rather – in its fullest sense – exclusively in their sphere.
All of these insights of a metaphysics of the person also refute the third
Aristotelian thesis noted above, according to which efficient causality is ultimately
reducible to formal causality. This thesis turns out to be clearly incorrect. An agent
who acts freely in such a way that his act is a matter of free choice cannot possibly act
simply in virtue of his essence or nature and therefore free will as efficient cause
cannot be reduced to the essence or formal cause of the agent. 27
We can see that this is impossible both when we consider the moment of inner
self-determination and when we consider efficient causality through free will, in
which states of affairs or events outside the person, or at any rate outside of the free
acts themselves, are realized, but freely intended and realized by the subject. When
we think of that unique form of causality found in personal acting, through which
events, processes, states of affairs and causes (which for their part involve further
ends of acting) outside of the person are freely realized by the person, we understand
that if they were a mere outflow of our essence, and thus reducible to “formal
causes”, they would precisely not be free. Thus it becomes clear in this case of free
external action that the essence (the formal cause) in no way coincides with the
efficient cause. Free will as efficient cause is essentially distinct from the formal
cause and likewise from all effects and states of affairs that are realized simply
through our having a given nature. The same holds for the free creation or making of
artifacts, and above all of works of art. Here the free act of the person, which remains
immanent in the person but still possesses transeuntive efficacy, cannot possibly be
identified with the form which the material object, such as the work of art for
instance, receives, or with our own essence or that of our act. Likewise, no other
object or other state of affairs, realized through making or acting, possesses the same
essence as its efficient cause, nor do the acts that produce these things, let alone their
causal effects, coincide with the agent’s essence.
Even those effects within the moral sphere in our own person, such as the
goodness or wickedness of the person herself, effects that are far more intimately
linked with free acts than the objects produced by us, are distinct from the cause
which brings them into existence. This is shown clearly from the fact that the acts and
the actions through which someone becomes good or evil have long passed away or
can at least lie in the past, while their effects continue to remain in the person. In
addition to this, the permanent personal characteristics of evilness or goodness
possess an ontic character wholly different from the individual acts or actions from
which virtues or vices, good or evil actions, and their effects of guilt or merit arise.
B) A Metaphysics of finality must be a personalistic metaphysics as well: In the
case of the final cause it is even more immediately evident and more easily seen than
in the case of efficient causality that exclusively the metaphysics of the person can
27
Even in the case of procreation, which comes closes to coincide with the formal cause,
efficient and formal cause remain different, the (efficient) causal activity in procreation, which
is effective for a limited period of time, is not reducible to the formal cause of the progeny,
which continues to exist after the act of generation.
14 JOSEF SEIFERT
perfect the classical metaphysical doctrine of the causes. Indeed a final cause “for the
sake of which” something is or is made must remain thoroughly incomprehensible
without the metaphysics of the person. Again, we can find at least two reasons for this
dependency of all operation of final causality on personal beings:(a) If the end, as
Aristotle emphasizes with full justification, must in the first place be identified with a
good (even though the two notions are distinct and human persons can have evil
purposes for their actions), it becomes evident that the final cause cannot at all be a
cause in itself, since the goodness and value of a being are not of themselves capable
of bringing anything extrinsic to them, such as acts of persons, into existence, or of
being per se the explanatory principle of a thing or becoming. The value is itself a
‘consequential property’ of things, as Ross say, 28 and this makes it impossible to
classify it among the efficient causes, or among the natural causes at all. Rather, the
only manner in which the good (the agathon or kalón) can work is that of an efficacy
mediated through knowledge and personal acting. Only through the sphere of
conscious personal knowledge and of the free acts motivated by this knowledge can
the good become a cause.
Therefore, it is also no linguistic accident that the end and similar concepts can
be used for both the objective finality which we find in nature or technology as well
as for the goal of personal acts. To speak of the purpose of events in lifeless nature,
such as of the obviously existing finality of organs in organisms, means always to
assume an efficacy of meaning and of the good which, as becomes evident through
deeper reflection, can only happen through the mediation of personal knowledge and
freedom. And therefore an atheistic metaphysics has no justification in admitting
finality and meaning in nature, wherefore atheists like Richard Dawkins and others
fight so fiercely against any admission of a purpose and plan and final causality in
nature, though few things could be more evident than the presence of final causality
in nature and no biologist could possibly understand the function of any organ
without recognizing its purpose and function for the organism. 29
To remain within human experience, we immediately recognize when we find a
work of art or other beautiful man-made things, artifacts, machines; none of which
occur in nature, that a human agent has been at work and has acted as efficient cause
for the sake of an end.
With this we touch upon one of the greatest weaknesses of Aristotelian
metaphysics, that is, his doctrine according to which the unmoved mover (God)
attracts the whole of reality only as final cause and as the object of love, but not as
efficient cause.30 This implies on the one hand a mythologization and personification
of non-personal creation, as if it were able to know the good and realize it for the sake
of being good, and on the other hand overlooks the deepest metaphysical function of
efficient causality in the form of free will, and above all of divine creative freedom,
through which alone final causality can operate in nature. Of course, also in non-
28
See Ross 1960: 280 ff.
29
See on this Spaemann and Löw 1981.
30
Some interpreters of Aristotle, such as Carlos A. Casanova, believe, based on some texts, that
this usual understanding of Aristotle is incorrect.
personal beings certain things can objectively be the means, and others the ends.
There is no essential necessity whatsoever that would forbid that final causality, a
relation in which one thing serves another and exists “for the sake of the other,”
actually exists in impersonal machines, natural objects or irrational living beings. On
the contrary, in nature and in machines we obviously find countless means-ends
relations, which precisely must be designed by an intelligent person because neither
water nor stars, neither a plant nor an animal possess any intelligence of their own and
therefore the extremely intelligent order found in them allows us to infer that they
have an intelligent maker. The operation towards ends, be it in nature, in technology,
or in art, can only be explained by an intelligent and free efficient cause, a person
endowed with intellect who orders the means towards values and ends, or who makes
certain things for the sake of achieving others.
(b) But personal beings not only are causes and conditions necessary for the
operation of any final causality in nature or in artifacts; they also embody final
causality in an entirely new and higher form which is far more intimately connected
with, and inseparable from, personhood. For we find in the personal realization of a
goal itself, in personal acting which is related to a final telos, the most perfect and a
principally different form of final causality, which is radically distinct from the
finality that is instilled by a person upon a machine or exists in an organism. The ends
we find in the sphere of persons have a fundamentally different meaning. This is
particularly evident in the sphere of ethics, where the radical essential distinction
within finality, between the free desire to realize an end in actions through which the
person becomes good or evil, and mere natural causality and objective finality, which
as such (except as freely willed and thereby as a personal end) could never ground
moral values, is obvious.
Within the sphere of personal finality, we must still distinguish the objective finis
operis, the essential goal inscribed in a certain kind of action such as life-saving or
murder, from the subjective finis operantis, the extrinsic purpose, goal or motive of
accomplishing an act. Both objective essential ends and subjective purposes of acting
are specifically personal forms of finality which are by this very fact radically distinct
from any finality possible in nature or art. We can ponder the ethical relevance of
both the essentially objective personal end of an act and of the subjective end of the
acting subject. This distinction regards fundamentally distinct forms of specifically
personal goal-directedness and finality. Only a personalistic metaphysics sees the
dependence of final causality on persons and recognizes at the same time the fully
new way in which finality is realized in the various forms of a free and conscious
turning of the person to various ends. The personal value of this turning towards these
ends can never be measured morally speaking only in relation to consequences of
acts, which to do is the grave error of ethical consequentialism. 31
C) Formal causality as well can be understood only on the basis of personalist
metaphysics: A deeper reflection shows that also the philosophy of the formal cause
can only be completed through a reflection on personal being. It is indeed no accident
31
See Seifert 1985.
16 JOSEF SEIFERT
that Aristotle, in treating of the four causes, always draws examples in which the
person imprints a form onto some matter. He chooses the example of the sculptor,
who makes a statue out of bronze, or he speaks of the silver coin, whose form was
stamped by a person onto a piece of silver. We can see the need to complement a
philosophy of formal causality by personalist metaphysics through the following six
reasons.
The form is, in contrast to matter as such, something explicitly “spiritual”, i.e.,
something not strictly material even when it exists in material things. As immaterial
principle, it is in some ways akin to persons and has something in common with them,
and is above all ordained to be known and bestowed on matter by them. This leads us
to recognize a second relation between formal cause and person:
While form (formal cause) itself embodies another, radically different form of the
“spiritual” than personal being, it proceeds from, and is addressed to, personal spirits.
The forms are “spiritual” not by being or possessing a personal spirit but by being
intelligible and meaningful in a manner completely different from the material cause
and ordained to personal minds. “Form” is something which can only be grasped by a
mind and which, because of its intelligibility, has a specific ordination to the mind not
found in material causes (although also these can only be known by the mind): they
lend themselves to be understood by persons. This holds true of the essential forms
and formal qualities of life-less things, plants and animals. Form, even when it exists
objectively and independently of spirit in nature and more obviously when it exists in
a completed work of art after the death of the artist, is ordained nevertheless in a deep
and meaningful manner to the spirit, which alone can grasp it as such, and to which it
is addressed in virtue of its meaningfulness and articulateness, value and beauty.
Many forms do not even exist in things themselves, but only on the level of
appearances which direct themselves already as appearances, and not only in virtue
of their form, to the person and in some sense depend on the person, thus differing
from the thing in itself, i.e., from those characteristics of being and essence which
belong to a thing’s autonomous and mind-independent reality. 32 The appearance is
here the real thing, for example music is not identical with the objective waves
studied by the physicist but coincides with what only a person can perceive as music
and in its inner meaning. Some of these forms which depend on appearances are even
less part of a world of things conceived wholly apart from persons than others. The
form of a work of art or the tones of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, for example, that
constitute this work of art as a work of art, do not exist “in physical nature” in the
same sense as do air waves or the material characteristics of a sculpture or work of
architecture, even though also here the human or more generally speaking the
personal aspect of them depends on persons.
The contingent existence of eternal and necessary essences (forms) in the world
can only be caused by persons as efficient causes. Neither the knowledge of form nor
its being impressed upon the material and any sort of contingent being found in the
world, find adequate explanation without reference to the existence and the activity of
32
See Seifert 1987, ch. 5-6.
a person.33 This is even true when the form and essence of such formal principles as
numbers or the laws of space and time or of movement are necessary (still their being
concretely embodied in material things is not, but is contingent).
A special case: Temporal and eternal ‘forms’ whose laws cannot take their effect
in the physical world by mere objective essential necessities but only by freedom.
Whenever a form and a meaningful unity are realized in matter in such a way,
however, that this form is both meaningful and could be different, such as in all the
different species of plants and animals and the human body, it is even more
impossible to consider either accident or blind and non-spiritual matter, or irrational
living causes, or ideal objects and eide themselves, as sufficient grounds for the
coming into existence of such forms, which is one of the key insights expressed by
Plato in his Timaios and which renders in this respect his metaphysics superior to that
of Aristotle.34 The proof for the existence of God from the finality of nature depends
upon this same foundational knowledge that the spiritual unity of meaning and the
finality of forms within nature are such that purely accidental, material and non-
thinking causes or substances could never sufficiently explain them.
The reference of the formal cause to the person becomes even more evident when
one thinks of those forms which are not contingent and can for this reason be imposed
on material objects only by persons, but which, while being essentially necessary and
timeless, can nevertheless be realized solely by the mediation of personal freedom.
That contingent man-made or historically and culturally changing rules of taste, of
style, of conventions and customs can influence objects and become formal causes
only by the intervention of free agents is not difficult to understand. But that there are
also absolute essential necessities which can only operate by the mediation of
freedom is a particularly striking fact and leads to an important distinction within
essential necessities.35
There are some essentially necessary laws, for example of motion, which are
automatically realized in each object that falls under these laws, for example any
moving object. 36 But there are others which, while their essential and absolute
necessity renders impossible any dependence of these ultimate formal causes (eide)
themselves on the human spirit or on material and historical facts, nevertheless, in the
form of eternal laws of oughtness, exert their influence on human affairs or on the
33
See Seifert 2010, ch. 3 and 4.
34
Understanding this superior personalistic insight of Plato also excludes the common
interpretation of the demiurge as a mere symbol or allegory. See Reale 1997; 1993; see also
Seifert 2000; and the same author 2002: 407-424.
35
When we consider the dependence on free will solely within the sphere of essential
necessities, which must be distinguished from ‘contingent necessities of nature’ and from all
non-necessary and accidental essences and essential unities of such-being, another highly
significant dependence of formal causality on persons becomes clear and a significant
distinction must be drawn within essential necessities. See on this Hildebrand 1991; see also
Wenisch 1988: 107-197. See likewise Seifert 1976a; the same author1987; 2009.
36
See Reinach 1989 b: 551-588.
18 JOSEF SEIFERT
world only by the mediation of personal freedom. 37 With respect to them only the
freedom and understanding of a person, and this in a new sense, can achieve the
passage between the intelligible and the real world.
Formal causes within the world of persons: Moreover, many forms, essences and
essential structures are realized only in the person and the spirit, while they are not at
all found in the material world. Among these are the essences of all personal acts, of
personhood itself, of the good, of happiness, of love, of justice, etc. Many of these,
moreover, are pure perfections, and therefore central objects of metaphysics. 38 For
this reason also, a metaphysics of form can clearly only be brought to its completion
through a metaphysics of the person.
D) A phenomenological-personalist critique of the Aristotelian metaphysics of
the material cause as source of individuality: spiritual substances (ousia) are not
“pure forms”.
(a) The strange view of Aristotle39 (that exerted also a considerable influence on
Aquinas)40, that spiritual substances are something like species or genera is closely
bound up with his conception of matter as the principle of individuation. In the
metaphysics of Aristotle, matter is the ultimate principle of individuation.41 Aristotle
holds that the form as such does not admit of the distinction between species and
individual, and that in a purely spiritual world in which no matter exists, there could
only exist pure forms. Aristotle thus attributes to the material cause understood as
pure matter a tremendously important role as the principle of individuation, a view
that entails the thesis that spiritual substances can only be “pure forms”, and do not
allow for the existence of concrete and individuals spirits and spiritual beings, i.e.
persons.42 He is convinced, however, in stark contrast to the logical consequence of
the view that spiritual substances are not individuals, which would make them
37
In addition to absolute and essentially necessary eide, it is also necessary to admit the
existence of ideas, which can be discovered, which precede the forms in temporal things. All
individual things and the laws of nature are subordinate to atemporal ideas and necessary
essences (eide), which do not merely possess an articulation and precision of meaning, but also
belong to a intelligible cosmos which as such subsists without beginning or end, and which
Augustine 1961 saw as grounded not in a purely ideal Platonic world of ideas, but in the divine
spirit. See Seifert 2000, ch. 1.
38
See on this notion of pure perfections Scotus 1962; see also Seifert 1989, ch. 5; the same
author 2004: 65-82.
39
See Aristotle, Metaphysics, IV, 3, 1070 a 10 ff.; XI, 2, 1060 a 3 ff.; IV, 8, 206 ff.; 215 ff.; 298
ff.
40
See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 75, a. 7. To be sure, Thomas holds in other
places (which, in my opinion, cannot be brought into agreement with the many sections on
matter as principle of individuation) that the soul possesses esse as well as individuality in itself
(Quaestio Disputata de Anima, a. 3, 2 ad 5).
41
It is also the ultimate bearer of the hypokeimenon, which receives the actum primum of the
essential (substantial) form and is the origin of every other similar function of bearing
characteristics.
42
See, against this, Boëthius’ definition of the person „persona est naturae rationalis individua
substantia’, and many others. See on this also Crosby 2004; and Seifert 1989, ch. 9.
entirely incapable of experiencing or thinking, that these forms are ‘pure act’ and can
execute acts such as knowing.
In many respects, and in particular from the point of view of an adequate
metaphysics of the person, it is necessary to criticize this conception. 43
(i) First, Aristotle seems to have accepted with this position an equivocation of
the concept ‘spiritual’ which goes back to Plato, and in particular to the Phaedo.44
In this equivocation – as Duns Scotus, Suarez, Edith Stein, and Dietrich von
Hildebrand have pointed out – the personal soul, the personal spirit, comes very close
to being an abstract universal and both are considered to be similar, while these two,
though both are different from matter, are utterly distinct. And so we find also in
Thomas Aquinas the assertion that a separated soul, were it not for its ordination to
some matter which individuates it, would have to be a universal form, such as the
color white45. We have to criticize this conception, by pointing, together with Scotus
and Suarez, to the ultimate originary datum of “spiritual individuality of persons,” and
showing that the originary datum of concrete individual being is in no way restricted
to the sphere of matter, and cannot at all find its ultimate explanation in materia
prima quantitate signata. Rather, it is rooted in a far more originary and fundamental
manner in spiritual, personal being. It is not necessary to develop this critique here
extensively, but only to present it briefly, since it helps to illuminate the confusion
which underlies the Aristotelian philosophy of material causality.
(ii) Secondly, we find here the error of considering the form as such, including
that which is abstract and ultimately divorced from every plurality and concreteness
of individual being, as act, and to endow it with those characteristics which could not
subsist in universal forms as such, but can solely exist in real and concrete, individual
beings. On this point, Aristotle is overly Platonic, not too little Platonic. That is, he
ascribes to the universal principles, of which he claims that they could not possess in
any way individual existence, characteristics and a supremely real existence, which
can only belong to the concrete and individual ens realis.
43
See on this also the superb critique of Edith Stein 1962 (1986).
44
Phaedo, 79 a ff. There, it is asserted that because neither the soul nor the universal, abstract,
non-individual forms are visible, audible or in any other way perceptible through the senses, the
soul and the abstract forms must be similar to each other. From the atemporality of the
universal forms is deduced the immortality, or eternity, of the human soul. As much as this
argument of Plato’s for the immortality of the soul contains many deep truths, in particular the
truth of the reciprocal ordination of personal spirit and universal, spiritual principles of form,
there lies nevertheless a fundamental equivocation in identifying spirit in the sense of the most
concrete, most individual being with the spiritual in the sense of universal abstract forms, or
even in considering these two realities as similar.
45
See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I q. 75 a. 7. This equivocation was discovered in a
seminar held by von Hildebrand in Salzburg in 1964, and is contained in an unpublished
manuscript which is part of the collection of his unpublished works.
20 JOSEF SEIFERT
Aristotle overlooks the fact that only the concrete individual personal spirit can
participate in the abstract forms cognitively, and therefore can absolutely not itself be
an abstract form.46
The irreducibility of the explanatory principles of reality to the four causes, the
specifically personal explanatory principles of being and the person as cause.
We have already seen that a metaphysics of the aitíai and of the archaí can only
be completed through a metaphysics of the person and that a reduction of efficient
causes to material and physiological ones reverses the order of causes and is a topsy-
turvy theory of causality because it entirely overlooks personal agency as a prime
form and explication of causality. But many more questions remain. I now wish to
turn to the question of whether the Aristotelian thesis that only the four causes which
he distinguished could possibly exist is correct, or whether this thesis does not rather
show that the Aristotelian Metaphysics – despite the sublime explanation of the
unmoved mover in book XII which makes Aristotle a father of the metaphysics of
spirit and indeed of personalistic metaphysics – is overly rooted in a naturalistic
model of being, and does not do justice to the objective demands of a metaphysics of
the spirit and of the person 47 . Moreover, it is in turning to these specifically and
exclusively personal forms of causes that we will go farther beyond Aristotle than we
have done until now.
A) The intentional subject-object relation as a metaphysical relation irreducible
to any of the ‘four causes’.
We must first of all take into consideration that relation and that dependence
which we find between object and subject in intentional acts. This relation, which is
further differentiated into still more specific relations which nevertheless all share the
common moment of a subject consciously directing himself to an object, is already
insofar fully sui generis as it is necessarily conscious. Moreover, it is impossible to
characterize the object of an intentional act as the form of this act, or to characterize
the dependence which an intentional act can have on its object, through which it is to
a certain extent “formed”, as a case of formal causality. The decisive point lies
precisely in that the personal subject reaches out beyond his own act and takes
spiritual possession of the object of consciousness. Perhaps it is better not to treat of
this fundamental intentional relation in the abstract, but rather to treat of it as it is
modified in the concrete forms of dependence between intentional objects and various
intentional acts. Such an investigation will better illuminate the fact that also
46
Far from considering with Aristotle and St. Thomas that being an abstract spirit and being
free of any principle of individuation is a condition for the ability to know abstract forms, we
must say: were the knowing spirit itself abstract, it could never know the universal.
Aristotelianism likewise overlooks the fact that the person can also know unique, individual
forms and individual beings as such, something which Scotus both saw and explained with
great penetration and which is the condition for concrete conscious human life, human action
and in particular human love, gratitude, etc.
47
With regard to the reduction of all aitíai and cause to the four distinguished by Aristotle, see
his Metaphysics, A 3, 983 a 25 ff. See also Reale 1967: 25. See also Schwengler 1960, in
particular vol. II: 26.
generally speaking, the dependence between intentional object and intentional act is
of a fully unique character, and is neither reducible to material nor to final causality.
B) The irreducible transcendent relation and the metaphysical relationship of
dependence between the act of cognition and the object of cognition.
Let us first think of the cognitive relation. When a spiritual subject knows that a
particular state of affairs in fact obtains, we find necessarily in this cognitive relation
a transcendence in virtue of which more than an immanent content of the cognitive
act is realized in the subject. Rather, the knowing subject really and intentionally
reaches beyond himself and grasps reality as that which it is. Even a 3 year old girl
who understands the question and request of her grandfather to please tell her daddy
to call back on Skype after dinner, understands, and enters into a cognitive relation
with, a question and a request that are wholly different entities from her
understanding.
It is necessary to stress that in this relation there also lies a real relation of
dependence, in which the subject, or his really existing act, really depends on the
being that is known. This being, however, is in no way the formal cause or the
essence of the act, an act which rather possesses essential characteristics (such as
conscious enactment, for instance) which can in no way be predicated of the object
known (e.g. the perceived donkey or the intuited principle of non-contradiction), and
which can in fact be contradictorily opposed to the essential marks of the known
object.
If however the object which is grasped in knowing is not the formal cause or the
essence of the act which grasps it, one could be tempted to consider this relation as a
case of efficient causality. But this is also in no way satisfactory. On the contrary, if
the act of knowledge were merely the effect of the object known, let alone of brain
events which would have the role of efficient causes of knowledge, then the specific
cognitional relation as such would thereby be dissolved. In fact, if the act of
knowledge is merely determined by an object through which it is causally evoked,
then knowledge as such is in no way explained. Indeed, if the act of knowledge is
causally produced by an object, by a material thing for example, through material
processes in the body which then have this act as a result of their efficient causal
force, then the subject could never know whether this purely natural causal chain in
fact results in a content of consciousness which corresponds or does not correspond to
the real nature of things. “Knowing” would then lose its cognitive character and its
object would be just an immanent content of consciousness which has an external
cause in the material world. Moreover, its content would not be dependent on the
nature of the things that are the object of knowledge but on blind chemical and
physical causes which as such have nothing to do with the nature of the objects
known, such as a chain of chemical causes in the body bear no resemblance to the
headache they cause. A dependence of “knowledge” on a pure series of physiological
or physical natural causes could not explain knowledge at all. Just as a computer
hardware and software or archive does not allow the computer the slightest knowledge
of whether the product of the physical causes that produce its output, corresponds to
reality or not, it would be with all human cognition; there would not exist any act of
knowledge whatsoever. (Besides, the meaning of the computer output does not consist
22 JOSEF SEIFERT
in the physical signs but in their conceptual meaning which is not produced by
physical causes at all). In this way, by a materialist causal theory of brain causation of
knowledge – instead of assigning to brain events a decisive but subordinate and
merely mediating and serving role for knowledge – knowledge would not be
explained, but abolished, and a materialist brain scientist, not only when he seeks to
explain free actions but also when he seeks to explain knowledge by mere physical
causes, would destroy the entire basis of his own rational scientific knowledge which,
instead of knowledge, would be nothing but an accidental product of physical
causes.48
The authentic cognitive relation and its unique form of dependence on the object
of cognition presuppose that the reality cognized discloses itself to the knowing spirit
in a manner that is not a mere case of efficient causality, but rather a real-intentional
participation in the being itself as it is. This spiritual act is certainly really dependent
on its object, but in a specifically transcendent kind of relation and spiritual
participation, which precisely constitutes the cognitive relation as such and excludes
that cognition can ever be a mere effect of the object known, but rather is a real-
intentional participation in, and an intentional being-determined-by, the object.
That this relation cannot be one of efficient causality already follows from the
fact that many objects of knowledge are not material entities, are indeed often not at
all real beings, but either abstract universal essences or purely ideal images and
relations, or even consist merely in a lack or privation of being, as in the case of the
knowledge of nothing or of certain kinds of negative states of affairs and evils that are
mere privations of being such as total ignorance, which obviously could not be the
efficient causes of real acts such as those of knowing. 49 We can add that states of
affairs, which are a chief object of knowledge, never are efficient causes because
states of affairs do not at all have the character of things or events and their
operations.
We find then in the way in which the act of knowledge is determined by its
object a wholly unique relation, which includes a clear metaphysical dependency of
the act on its object and which therefore must be taken into account, if the
metaphysician wishes to investigate all the forms of aitíai, but which cannot be
classified as any of the four causes discovered by Aristotle.
Naturally, it would be senseless to claim that the being known is the material
cause or the final cause of the cognitive act. 50
48
See Seifert 1972: 62 ff., 67 ff., 69 ff.
49
See Millán-Puelles 1990/1996.
50
Despite any relationships of finality which may obtain between the object and the act of
cognition, we cannot conclude that the fundamental nature of the cognitive relation and of the
form in which a real being, namely the act of cognition, is dependent on another ideal, real, or
any other kind of object, is a relation of finality. It would certainly never seriously enter into
anyone’s mind to assert for instance that mathematical knowledge is a means to the realization
of mathematical laws (something which is excluded already by their eternity and necessity), or
to analogously interpret the cognitive relation as a relation of finality.
C) Motivation as a metaphysical ground of explanation sui generis of volitional

acts and the fundamental importance of metaphysics of the person for ethics.
Something similar also holds for the relation of motivation. In the sphere of
motivation, a real being, namely a free act, is in a certain way called into existence by
something else, namely, the motivating object or its value and other forms of
importance, but our acts are not caused by these motivating objects alone but as well
by the will of the subject. The specific uniqueness of this relation lies in the fact that
the object known does not from itself engender the intentional act related to it, as may
happen in the case of knowledge, but that the act is engendered both through the
motivating object and through the mediation of the free spontaneity and self-
determination of the subject, and in fact becomes the cause of the free act only if the
subject freely opens himself to the motivating power of the object. Moreover, besides
the object, the free person herself remains a decisive cause of the act.
It is one of the reductionist tendencies in ethics and in philosophical
anthropology to interpret the relation of motivation in the light of one or the other of
the four Aristotelian causes and in terms of one of the forces in a parallelogram of
forces. Thus, it is maintained that the motivating object brings the motivated act
causally into existence, through mere efficient cerebral or psychological causes. Such
determinism neither does justice to the datum of motivation nor to the evident datum
of free will. On the other hand, those philosophers who reject determinism cede easily
to the opposite temptation to explain the free act purely in terms of an unmotivated
arbitrary and senseless “pure spontaneity” of the subject, asserting that the motivating
object, or its importance, have no foundational influence on the subject and his act.
The latter view recognizes as free only wholly unmotivated, unplanned, arbitrary,
senseless and purposeless volitional acts which are also the kinds of acts, besides
urges that have nothing to do with free acts, which Libet investigates in his famous
“empirical tests of free will.” 51 On an incomparably higher intellectual level, also
Kant assumes in his ethics, in order to avoid determinism and eudemonism, that the
free act must not in any way be motivated by the object.
In reality, however, the motivating object or its motivating importance is
certainly a decisive ground that brings about our acts, but those things that motivate
our free acts cannot in any way on their own force be the cause of a free act. They can
perhaps become causes and reasons of our intentional affective experiences by their
own power, motivating these emotions of joy or of mourning in a way we cannot
resist and that does not stand within our own power. But motivating objects can
become causes or reasons for our free acts’ existence exclusively through the
mediation of the spontaneity of the free subject; even less can the volitional act be
explained through pure physiological efficient causes. Thus, the motivating object is
in an entirely new sense the cause or reason to act, which does not contradict, but
presuppose freedom of the will. On the other hand, the attempt to divorce the causes
and reasons of a free act entirely from their motivating object does not explain free
51
See —— (and Haggard, P.) 2001: 58; and Mele 2009; and Habermas 2004a: 27; Habermas
2004b: 871-890; and Habermas 2005: 155–186.
24 JOSEF SEIFERT
will but sheer arbitrariness. Only an understanding of the irreducibly new

phenomenon of motivation can overcome these two opposite errors which have the
same root: a complete misunderstanding of the kind of personal reason and cause a
motive is for human actions. The completely new relationship of the motivating
object being the reason for a free act is possible only on the level of the person,
because the object does not bring the act into existence by its own power alone but
only through its being known and additionally through the free acceptance and
cooperation of the free spontaneity of the subject with the potentially motivating
power of the object in its importance and value, to which the person has to speak an
inner free “yes” in order that the motive be allowed to become co-cause of our free
act.
D. The particularity of the specifically personal causes
Personal causal relations, at least most of them and the ones we have considered
thus far in this paper, presuppose, with absolute necessity, consciousness in its
specifically personal rational form. That these personal causal relations are not at all
conceivable within the mere material or the physiological world of brain events, while
all other four causes can be realized in non-personal nature, already shows that this
metaphysical ground of explanation for being or becoming is of a nature sui generis,
and that it does not allow its being reduced to the other four causes, let alone to mere
physical efficient causality, as Libet attempts.52
One could name many other such relations and causes which play a role solely in
the sphere of the person.53
E. The relation of ‘due relation’ as another personal causal relation
Let us consider another one of many metaphysical relations and causes. This
cause or reason contributes to the coming into existence of real personal acts, but only
on the basis of knowledge and freedom. This relation throws light on the ultimate
raison d’être of being and of the world as such. I mean that relation which von
Hildebrand more than any other philosopher has investigated, namely that of “due
relation” (Gebührensbeziehung).
Every being demands, to the extent to which it is possesses intrinsic value, a due
response, a response appropriate to the rank of its value. Every being that is a bearer
of intrinsic values deserves to be affirmed for its own sake, it deserves a response of
joy because it is objectively something gladsome, it deserves the response of
52
In the Phaedo, precisely in the context of the metaphysics of the person, Plato has clearly
pointed to the distinction between efficient causes and conditions, a distinction which is of
fundamental importance for the discussion of the body-soul problem, as has been demonstrated
in other works. See Plato, Phaedo, 99 b. See also Seifert 1973, 1989 b: 143 ff.
53
Among the other causal relationships which are not reducible to the four causes we find also
the specifically personal relation of dependence and foundation which lies in reflection, where
the act which is reflected upon and its dependence on its subject and its rational nature are the
explanatory grounds for the possibility of reflection. Likewise, that relation belongs to the
specifically personal causal relations, in virtue of which the inner structure and logic of acts
such as that of promising, brings into existence other beings, such as obligations and rights
which proceed from promises. See Reinach 1953; 1989c; see also the English translation and
commentary on this book in Reinach 1983: xxxiii-xxxv; 1-142.
reverence or respect which recognizes its own proper worth and dignity, it has as it
were a “right to” an act of affirmation in which its objective worthiness that is to be
affirmed actually finds a corresponding free affirmation on the part of the subject.
This due relation culminates in that principle which lies at the root of the
personalistic ethics of Karol Wojtyìa , Tadeusz Styczeî, and other important ethicists
of our time for whom the person merits affirmation and love for her own sake,
persona est affirmanda propter seipsam et propter dignitatem suam (the person is to
be affirmed for her own sake and for his or her own dignity). 54
That the infinite Good demands recognition and affirmation before and above all
else, indeed demands an adoring love, the call for which flows out of the nature of the
absolute Good, to whom alone the highest love and recognition must be given,
excludes any interpretation according to which this adoring love would be a mere
arbitrary act of the will or obedience to positive law.
Free persons can affirm and love the good, and through the fulfillment of this
relationship can realize a unique kind of goodness, namely that of moral goodness and
of love. No non-personal nature can fulfill this relation; no non-personal being can
bring into existence real acts that stand in such a due relation to their object. This can
be accomplished only by free and conscious subjects. Although the due relation is not
itself a conscious relation, it appeals to a conscious rational subject capable of
knowing the good and giving it the “right response.” No non-personal nature or
alleged cerebral efficient cause of volition can give the value response which is due to
goods, as Hildebrand would express it.55
It is likewise impossible to consider this relation as exclusively one of finality.
We must, precisely in order to do justice to the ultimate telos of the world, 56 free
ourselves from any interpretation of the world as a system or network of relations of
means and ends. Neither the relation of an act being due to a good nor an act of love
is an instance of a mere relation of final causality. That an act is due to a being does
not mean that it serves that reality to which it responds in the sense of being related to
it as a means. Rather, the “for the sake of,” “for the love of the other” as it is intended
in fulfilling the due relation, is a form of relation absolutely different from final
causality. In it, the reality of the act, which gives to the object a response which is
appropriate and due to it, is taken completely seriously and is not subordinated to the
object or other person as if it were a mere means, but in a very different “reverential”
way of subordination because a respect, reverence or love are simply due to a person.
The essential distinction between due relation and final causality becomes clear
above all in the fact that the good to which the response is to be given in the most
profound instances in which this due relation is realized does not at all depend on the
response for its realization. Thus, God is neither the goal nor an end to be realized in
adoration, and yet adoration still occurs above all for the sake of God himself, since
all praise and all adoration is due to Him because of his infinite holiness. It would be
fatal to assert that because God requires nothing and because human acts are of no use
54
See Styczeî 1979.
55
See Hildebrand 1978: ch. 17 and 18.
56
See on this Seifert 2007.
26 JOSEF SEIFERT
to Him, acts of adoration are performed only for the sake of human persons
themselves, and not for God’s sake. In such a position, final causality is excluded
with full justification, but it is overlooked that the far deeper sense of propter hoc in
the sense of the fulfillment of the claims of due relation demands that adoration be
performed above all ‘for the love and for the sake of God’. This shows how important
it is to avoid every reduction of due relation to final causality and every confusion of
the two meanings of propter hoc.
We touch here upon still another form of causality which classical metaphysics
and ethics generally overlooked and misinterpreted, namely, the relation of
superabundance or of superabundant finality. This relation is found in the relation
between moral goodness and happiness, or between happiness and love.
Similar to due relation, this relation is not itself a conscious personal relation, but
is nevertheless realized primarily, though not exclusively, but in an essentially
different way, in the sphere of conscious personal being. Traditional metaphysics and
ethics view also the relation between love and moral virtues to happiness in the light
of a relation of pure finality, considering love or the moral life of the human person as
a means to the end of happiness.57 In reality however, the deepest moral life of the
person and the deepest love arise for the sake of the beloved being or for the sake of
the beloved person, and is in no way a means to one’s own happiness, which Aristotle
considers as the highest good. Happiness may never be considered the end of moral
acts in such a way that the moral life and the love of the person become merely a
means to the fulfillment of one’s own subject, as Maritain holds – despite his deep
analyses of the character of Antigone and critique of eudaemonism.58
Whatever superabundantly springs out of love, namely happiness, arises only
then when love and the beloved are taken seriously and affirmed for their own sakes.
Only if we love another person for her own sake, and if our love is in no way a means
to the end of making ourselves happy, can we truly become happy. The
misapprehension of this relation of superabundance lies at the root of numerous
anthropological and ethical errors such as hedonism and Aristotelian eudemonism, a
danger overshadowing also a great part of medieval philosophy.59 Here once again the
elementary importance of an adequate metaphysics of different causes becomes
evident. It is not only indispensable for an appropriate understanding of causality but
also decisive for philosophy of the person, philosophical anthropology, ethics, and of
course for any adequate religion and theology.
In view of this short discussion of specifically and uniquely personal types of
causes we recognize the unfortunate reduction of the extent of causes which Aristotle
gave rise to by his rash judgment that his indeed fundamental distinction between the
four causes is a complete one and can sufficiently account for what occurs in the
primary kind of being, the being of the greatest dignity: the person. Not only was it a
fatal mistake not to recognize the incomprehensibility and inexplicability of the four
57
See Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, passim.
58
See Maritain 1962, ch. 9.
59
For its critique see also Scheler 1966. See also Hildebrand 2009, ch. 10. See also Seifert
1976b.
causes without doing justice to the unique role persons play in and for each of them.
Not only was it one of the most serious errors to absolutize the role of material
causality for the constitution of individual beings or to deny the unique individuality
of immaterial beings like souls or persons, and to overlook the far superior mode and
ground of the spiritual individual being of persons. But it was an equally great
mistake that has many tragic consequences for ethics and philosophical anthropology
not to recognize those reasons and causes which explain human knowledge and
action, the movements of the human mind and heart, and which can in no way be
regarded as subspecies of the four causes. Thus we have to go beyond Aristotle and to
rethink the immense complexity of causes in the light of a philosophy of the person.
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SCIENTIFIC HOLISM: CHINA MEETS WEST
Zhaolu Lu
Abstract: This paper begins with an attempt to dissolve the issue of whether
traditional China had science. It clarifies the issue as a philosophical problem
about whether Chinese culture embraces a natural philosophy—a rational and
abstract conceptual system that offers a higher order of understanding and
explanation of Nature than do empirical sciences. It dissolves the issue by
articulating Chinese natural philosophy characterized as scientific holism
consisting of law-like Dao, paraconsistent properties of Yin and Yang, and
interdisciplinary domains of Heaven, Earth and humans and by arguing that
Chinese Science, the scientific spirit that is culturally distinctly Chinese, and
Western Science, the scientific spirit that is culturally distinctly Western, will merge
at the point of scientific holism, despite of their historical differences and
contraries.
SOME YEARS ago, one of my colleagues, who was the dean of School of Natural
Sciences, asked me if I could offer science-majored students a “Chinese Science”
course. That struck me as a fascinating proposal. Though the course did not work
out, the proposal inspired me to undertake a research project concerning the following
questions. Is there such a thing as Chinese Science? Can any science be legitimately
described as distinctly Chinese? How can a science be culture-specific? These
questions converge on a problem that I am here attempting to dissolve.
I. The Problem of Chinese Science
IS THERE a meaningful way to speak of Chinese Science? This question was raised
at the time when Needham started out on his monumental work, Science and
Civilization in China. His sinological friends “doubted whether Chinese culture had
ever had any science, technology, or medicine significant for the world” (Needham
1981, 3-4). Of course, this is not a novel doubt. Early in the twentieth century Dr.
Youlan Feng, a distinguished Chinese philosophy of the 20 th century, even presumed
that China did not have science (Fung, 1922, 237). The cloud of suspicion dispersed,
however, when Needham demonstrated that “before the river of Chinese Science
flowed … into the sea of modern science, China had seen remarkable achievements in
many directions” (1981, 9). The influence of Chinese achievements in science and
technology, especially the four great inventions, on the world history is so profound
that, according to Francis Bacon, no religious movement, political operation, or
military maneuver is comparable to it (1620, vol. 4, 114). Sivin, in his earlier thought,
once argues that humanity has evolved more than one tradition of science. To think
of science this way is not to think of “science as a world phenomenon with many

Dr. ZHAOLU LU, Professor of Philosophy, Tiffin University, Tiffin, Ohio 44883, USA.
Email: [email protected].
34 ZHAOLU LU
local variants”; it is, rather, to think about science as a local and cultural phenomenon
that contributes to the formation of the river of world science (1973, xi).1
However, it has been argued that science and technology in China, which once
occupied an advanced position in the world for a long period of time, failed to
culminate in such a scientific revolution as the European one in the modern time.
Toby Huff, for example, indicates that in such fields as astronomy, physics, optics
and mathematics, which form the core of modern science, “the Chinese legged behind
not only the West but also the Arabs from about the eleventh century” (Huff 1993,
239). Huff further indicates that unlike Arabic-Islamic science, which paved the path
leading to the scientific revolution in Europe, Chinese Science was not even on the
path. According to Huff, then, there is something internal to Chinese Science that
explains its “great inertia,” that is, that the superiority of China to the West in ancient
and medieval times “was wholly of a practical and technological nature, not one of
theoretical understanding” of nature (1993, 238, italics added). Following Nathan
Sivin (1982), Huff claims that this simply technological and not scientific advantage
indicates that in ancient China “there was no overall, coherent natural philosophy
such as one finds among the Greeks, Arabs, or medieval Europeans” (1993, 244,
italics added). Once again Chinese Science is clouded with doubts.
Is there such a thing as Chinese Science? This is not an empirical question. It is
not to be answered by simply pointing out, for example, that Chinese medicine is a
paradigm of Chinese Science. The problem that Huff, following Sivin (1982), poses is
that China “had sciences but no science, no single conception … for the overarching
sum of them all” (Huff 1993, 533; italics added). Sivin explains this problem as
follows: “There is no obvious order in which to survey the Chinese sciences. There
were no fixed relations between them. Thinkers before, during and for centuries after
Han did not agree on, or even argue about, what those relations should be” (2002,
226-227). So, the problem about Chinese Science is not going to be solved no matter
how many sciences one finds in Chinese tradition. Indeed, if we look for sciences in
Chinese history from the point of view of modern science, in particular, if we look for
those theories, methods, discoveries, and inventions that directly played a role in the
emergence and development of modern science, we won’t find many if any. The
Sivin-Huff requirement for a cultural tradition to embrace science is that it must have
fostered “abstract systems of thought and explanation that give higher order to our
thinking about the natural realm” (Huff 1993, 238, italics added) or a “single
structure of rational knowledge that incorporated all the sciences” (Sivin 1995a, 169,
italics added). Over one and a half century, the intellectual history has moved forward
in some interesting manners. It took Chinese intellectuals about half a century to
discover that China did not have sciences. It is generally believed that one of the two
most significant outcomes of the May 4th Movement of 1919 was that so-called Mr.
Science was invited to China. It took about half a century for this new belief to take
root and flourish. The basic system of modern sciences in China was established
between 1920s and 1950s. And then, it took another half century for intellectuals,
1
Note that this earlier idea of Sivin’s does not deny that a science can be international or trans-
cultural. Modern natural science, for example, is the common property of all mankind.
SCIENTIFIC HOLISM: CHINA MEETS WEST 35
domestic and overseas, to rediscover that China actually had sciences and that what
she actually lacked was science—an approach to Nature. But is this belief really true?
II. Chinese Approach to “Nature”
The reasoning behind the Sivin-Huff position runs as follows:

(1) If there is Chinese Science, then it must be a theoretical framework that fosters a
general approach to nature and that framework must be distinctively Chinese.
(2) Traditional China did not have such an approach to Nature.
(3) Therefore, there has not been Chinese Science.
Needham does not agree with premise (2) and hence he does not agree with the
conclusion. His monumental work is precisely motivated by the convictions that
Chinese civilization fostered a sophisticated philosophy of Nature giving rise to
theoretical understanding of nature and that “Chinese civilization had been much
effective than the European in finding out about Nature and using natural knowledge
for the benefit of mankind for fourteen centuries or so before the scientific
revolution” (1981, 3). However, Sivin and Huff have a point and their position is
fascinating. It entails that Chinese Science is possible if Chinese approach to nature is
possible. This is exactly where Needham starts his investigation into scientific culture
of traditional China. Needham’s observation is that though “modern science had
arisen only in European culture and not in Chinese or Indian … Chinese civilization
had been much effective than the European in finding out about Nature and using
natural knowledge for the benefit of mankind for fourteen centuries or so before the
scientific revolution” (1981, 3). Thus, Needham argues that the existence of Chinese
Science is a concrete fact and not merely an abstract possibility, and it is evidenced by
Chinese approach to nature.
The claim about Chinese approach to nature is a claim about the general
framework as the common basis of discourse and activities among Chinese sciences.
This is not to deny that there existed diverse approaches to nature in Chinese culture.
Derk Bodde (1991) identifies seven of them. They are the antagonistic/indifferent
approach, the exploitative/utilitarian approach, the theistic/anthropocentric approach,
the naturalistic/analytical approach, the animistic/moralistic approach, the semi-
receptive approach, and the wholly receptive approach. But none of these approaches
served as the general framework for common discourse and activities in Chinese
sciences; and in fact, none exerted significant influence on Chinese sciences. What is
missing on Bodde’s list is a scientific holism. According to Dusek (1999), Chinese
tradition is one of the three traditions that foster a spirit of scientific holism. 2
Scientific holism “is radically different from the mainstream mechanistic image of
science” (Dusek, 1999, 1). It seems to me that this scientific holism is at heart of
Chinese scientific spirit. It is this scientific holism that provides a general framework
for Chinese sciences. It is in this scientific holism that one sees the legitimacy of
Chinese Science.
2
The other two are Western Renaissance occultist and German Romantic.
36 ZHAOLU LU
In what follows I shall offer an outline of the scientific holism that, I think,
characterizes Chinese Science. Before I proceed, I would like to make some important
notes on how I would approach to the outline. First of all, I assume, as Sivin used to
believe, that humanity has evolved more than one tradition of science. Hence, my
outline of Chinese Science characterized as a scientific holism will not start off a
particular concept of science or a set of criteria for sciences. The concept of Chinese
Science would not have made much issue had a trans-history, cross-culture definition
of science existed. Second, the problem with which this paper is meant to deal is
whether Chinese culture embraces a rational and abstract conceptual system that
offers a higher order of understanding and explanation of Nature than do empirical
sciences. For this purpose I will look into Chinese scientific spirit rather than
disciplinary sciences so as to recapture the critical dynamics that characterize the
holistic framework of Chinese Science. Hence, examining disciplinary sciences to
determine which of them qualify as Chinese Science is not relevant here. Chinese
Science—the scientific spirit that is distinctly Chinese—may exist without any
disciplinary science that instantiates it. Third, I take it to be the task of this paper to
put forth a novel perspective for viewing and understanding Chinese Science. Hence,
I shall concentrate my zeal on general characteristics of Chinese scientific holism and
will not go in great details. In fact, the components of the outline that I will offer are
all familiar to us; but their structure, relationships and significances have been
interpreted differently in different contexts. The perspective I am suggesting is that
Chinese natural philosophy may be characterized as a scientific holism consisting of
law-like Dao, paraconsistent properties of Yin and Yang, and interdisciplinary
domains of Heaven, Earth and humans. Finally, my interest is not merely in
reinterpretation of the past. Scientific holism, as opposed to scientific reductionism
that has dominated modern science for over three hundred years, has become
increasingly popular since the middle of 20 th century. Though it is still premature, its
scientific spirit, namely, the holisticity (paraconsistence, nonlinearity, synergiticity,
interdisciplinarity, intersystematicity, and parallelism) holds great promise for next
scientific revolution. I wish to show, again in an outline form, that Chinese Science,
which missed the modern train, has the ticket to the next one. This claim about the
future of Chinese Science is not as radical as Needham’s claim that the Chinese
anticipate the second scientific revolution or that the Chinese attempted to leap from a
primitive approach to nature to a postmodern science without going through modern
scientific revolution (Ronan, 1978, vol. 1, 165-166).
III. One Nomological Relation: Dao
The first component of Chinese Science as a scientific holism is the Dao or the “Great
Way” as it is usually understood in the English-speaking world. If there is anything
central to Chinese scientific thinking, then it is the pursuit of the one Dao. For
Chinese Science, to do science is to pursue the Dao.3 Insofar as the goal of science is
3
Beginning with Song Dynasty pursuit of Dao became a pursuit of Li. I shall explain this in
later part of this paper.
concerned, Chinese Science isn’t essentially different from western science for which
to do science is to discover (or to describe) laws of nature or to formulate lawful
explanations. Such a pursuit is the perennial problem and the persistent effort of
Chinese scientific thinking. Needham understands this characteristic of Chinese
Science as being grounded on “the assumption of a permanent, uniform, abstract
order and laws by means of which the regular changes in the world could be
explained” (1993, 40). That is to say, Needham takes Chinese pursuit of the Dao to be
comparable to a pursuit of law of nature. Bodde, however, takes exception, arguing
that there is no clear sense of “laws of nature” evidenced in Chinese classics (1991,
332-344). I appreciate Needham’s insight; and I am also sympathetic with Bodde’s
position. Bodde is right in saying that the notions of “the mandate of heaven,” “the
Supreme Oneness,” “the ultimate Rule,” “the Regularity” and “the Constancy” found
in Chinese classics are not sufficient to capture the essential idea of laws of nature.
What Bodde observes is the distinctiveness of Chinese pursuit of the Dao. I wish to
reconcile Needham and Bodde by arguing that Chinese pursuit of the Dao is both
distinct from and comparable to western pursuit of laws of nature. Interestingly, it
will turn out that the distinctiveness substantiates the comparability.
In pursuing Dao in the context of scientific activities,4 Chinese Science went in
quite different a direction than western pursuit of laws of nature; and running in that
direction Chinese Science eventually reached the point that while still indulged in a
dark meal she was amazed to see that western science was enjoying a candle-lit
dinner on the modern train passing by. Needham describes the dark meal in quite
positive a way: in contrast to merely mechanistic and analytical view of nature,
Chinese Science is an organic view (1981, 14). The organic feature is essential to all
versions of scientific holism; and in the context of pursuing the Dao, it exhibits in
three interrelated modes of thinking: generationism—thinking of Dao as the single
generator of myriad things, connectionism—thinking of Dao as the central radiator of
universally connecting, and unificationism—thinking of Dao as the ultimate force of
cosmic unifying. These modes of thinking are already evident in Chinese classics as
early as in Do De Jing (e.g., chapters 25, 39, 40, and 62) and they can be construed as
follows.
In contrast to ancient Greek science that focuses on the search for ultimate
constituents of the cosmic structure, ancient Chinese Science focuses on the search
for the ultimate source of cosmic generation. Hence it is a cosmic generating theory
and not a cosmoplastic element theory. Generationism is concerned about growth
and production. As growth and production always refer one to network of relations,
the thinking in the mode of generationism leads to the mode of connectionism, the
view that it is the relatedness that determines the attributes of individual things and
not the other way around. As Needham frequently argues, Chinese Science envisions
a universal, dynamic connectedness such that every phenomenon is generated through
connecting with every other. “On the Greek worldview, if a particle of matter
occupied a particular place … it was because another particle has pushed it there”;
4
Here I confine my discussion to scientific context and exclude the discourse on the Dao as
moral laws.
38 ZHAOLU LU
whereas on the Chinese view “the particle’s behavior was governed by the fact that it
was taking its place in a ‘field of force’” (Ronan, 1978, vol.1, 165-166). Since it is
through Dao that myriad things are generated and connected, Dao unifies, and
continues to unify, every system in the universe including the universe itself; and this
leads to unificationism. Needham argues forcefully and with textual evidence that this
organic philosophy of nature, consisting of generationism, connectionism and
unificationism, “was universal among Chinese thinkers” and it “helped the
development of Chinese scientific thinking” (1981, 14). One exception is Moism, the
only one among all schools of thought in the pre-Qin period that adopted analytical,
reductionistic, and experimental approaches. Moism failed to become the main
stream of Chinese Science just as Heraclitus of Ephesus, a holistic scientist, failed to
become the main stream of western science. It is not difficult to see that what Chinese
Science pursues in the name of pursuing the Dao is akin to universal and necessary
truths that operate regularly and that explains, predict and justify relevant events in
the world, the latter being considered as an essential feature of laws of nature in
modern science.
While both search for universal modality that affords justificatory, explanatory
and predicative power, western science concentrates her zeal on quantitative
dimension of laws of nature, Chinese Science seems satisfied with qualitative
dimension of the Dao. Thus, much of the development of western science consist in
the discovery of necessary relationship among magnitudes (e.g., the law of
gravitation); but much of the energy of Chinese scientific spirit is spent on the
investigation into relationships between Dao and Li and between Li and Qi. Here is
how Chinese thinking roughly goes. Dao is instantiated by multiple Li’s. “Myriad
things are made by and subject to different Li’s and the totality of these different Li’s
exhaust the Dao” (Hanfeizi, “Jie Lao”). These different Li’s are, roughly, the causal
mechanisms metaphorically imagined as the “reasons” and “grammars” of worldly
“words” (objects, events, and states of affairs). Zhuxi put the same point in more
dynamic term. These multiple Li’s are principles according to which heaven, earth
and myriad things are generated (Zhuzi Yulei, Vol. 95). From what are myriad things
generated in accordance with their Li’s? The answer is: From Qi. “What [physically
rather than metaphysically] exists under the heaven is nothing but Qi” (Zhuangzi,
“Zhi Bei You”) and “myriad things spontaneously emerge in the meeting of the Qi
from the heaven and the Qi from the earth” (Wang Chong’s Lunheng, “ziran”). Thus,
Li’s are in turn embodied in the movement of Qi (of multiple kinds). Needham
remarks that the pursuit of physical Li through experimenting on Qi is very much
wave-oriented rather than particle-oriented (Needham, 1981, 11). This is because
there are different scientific images involved in western science and in Chinese
Science. Qi is a fine, continuous, and dynamic flow that fills, penetrates, and pervades
through the universe and that can be pictorially imagined as air or imaginarily
visualized as vapor. It has the characteristics of matter, force and energy all together
conceptualized in western science. It is the idea of Qi rather than that of matter that
permeates in the Chinese physical thoughts. Discovering Li through experimenting on
Qi characterizes Chinese Science in practice.

Chinese Li-Qi relation is parallel to the Greek form-matter relation, though they
are not identical and cannot be reduced to one another. There is some degree of
dualistic and analytical flavor in the Li-Qi conception. Li is universal, multiply
realizable, and indivisible in a relevant domain, whereas Qi is particular, unique, and
divisible in the domain defined by the relevant Li. However, the Li-Qi conception is
an integral part of the generationism of Dao. It is more plausible to think of Li as
something very close to that of nomological mechanism and Qi to that which
combines the notions of wave, field, energy, and particle. Though discovering Li
through experimenting on Qi sounds familiar to and even translatable into western
science, one may argue that the notion of the Dao is still too vague and fuzzy to be
scientific. What is Li, the so-called instantiations of the Dao? It looks nothing like F =
ma or E = mc2, each being an instantiation of Law of Nature. The reason why Li’s do
not look like instantiations of laws of nature is simple; they are not quantified.
Still, notion of Dao is, in an important and significant way, comparable to the
notion of laws of nature. The comparability may be approached by dissolving a long-
standing puzzle about the Dao. It has been a puzzle how the Dao produces myriad
things and gets them all connected and unified. To this question there has not been a
philosophical answer that would make sense in scientific context. Indeed, the notion
of Dao can be as mystical as Newton’s notion of the First Mover. However,
mysticism is not the only cause of this puzzle. The following notion associated with
popular understanding of the Dao has also made significant contribution to it: The
Dao is a relationship between objects or events. On this notion the myriad things are
holding direct relation to the Dao; their coming into being, enduring changes, and
ceasing to be are all due to the manipulation of the Dao. It is hard to demystify the
Dao if we think of it as an extensional relationship between objects or events. For,
then, the Dao simply does not explain why each thing becomes what it is and why
each event happens as what it is.
Now, the puzzle about the Dao may be a puzzle about laws of nature as well.
Like the Dao, a law of nature is a universal and necessary truth. However, if we think
of it as an extensional relationship holding between objects or between events, then it
invites a similar puzzle as does the notion of Dao. It is puzzling how a universal
generalization with a strong modality would explain a particular instance if it were an
extensional relationship between objects or events. It may serve to categorize an
instance that falls in its domain; but it does not explain why the instance is what it is.
Just how would the fact that all hearts circulate blood together with the fact this thing
is a heart explain why this thing circulates blood? No, they wouldn’t! It is the
relationship between the property of heart and the property of circulating blood that
explains. A law of nature as a universal truth is essentially a necessary relationship
between properties; and in the case of these properties are quantified, it is a necessary
relationship between magnitudes—e.g., mass, force, energy, acceleration, etc. F = ma
or E = mc2 are good examples, where F, m, a, E, c are magnitudes or quantified
properties. Because the property F-ness necessarily relates to the property G-ness, this
thing must be G if it is F. The notion of necessary relationship between properties has

40 ZHAOLU LU
the explanatory power, whereas the notion of extensional relationship between objects
doesn’t.5
Likewise, much of the mystical appearance of the Dao would come off if in the
context of science it is understood as universal truth whose essential feature is
necessary relationship between properties (rather than between objects or between
events). Thus, our understanding of the relationship between myriad things and the
Dao becomes scientifically more transparent, that is, myriad things are subject to the
Dao by virtue of possessing the properties the Dao subsumes. The analysis of the Dao
in comparison with laws of nature is applicable to Li’s as Li’s are instantiations of the
Dao. In modern science whatever object or event or change that instantiates properties
subsumed by a law of nature is subject to that law; likewise in Chinese Science
whatever object or event or change that instantiates properties subsumed by a Li is
subject to that Li. This common pattern builds a sort of bridge between Chinese and
western sciences and we are thereby compelled to admit that the Dao in the context of
Chinese Science is law-like or nomological of some sort.
What are the properties that the Dao subsumes? Between what properties is Li a
necessary relationship holding? The answer is: They are Yin and Yang. The Dao in
Chinese Science is a nomological relationship between these two fundamental
properties of Qi. Myriad things are subject to the Dao by virtue of possessing the Yin-
Yang properties, and each is subject to a different Li by virtue of possessing a
particular instantiations (a special pairs) of Yin and Yang. 6 Are Yin and Yang
properties? Is the Dao in the context of Chinese science a relationship between Yin
and Yang? Can laws of nature and the Dao be translatable into one another? Next
section, which outlines the second component of Chinese scientific holism, will
answer these questions.
IV. Two Paraconsistent Properties: Yin and Yang
E Jing (I-Ching or the Book of Changes—a classic source of Chinese Science)

provides the conceptual framework for Chinese Science (Needham, v.2, 334-335) and
plays a pivotal role in Chinese technological innovation (Graham, 1989, 368-370).
The Yin-Yang conception is the key concept in the E Jing and it is the second
component of Chinese scientific holism.
In all instantiations of Chinese Science, Yin and Yang appear as the common
properties that Qi possesses, and hence they are the common properties that myriad
5
For detailed discussion on this topic, especially on laws of nature as intensional relationship
between properties or magnitudes, see Dretske 1977.
6
These two properties are sometime understood as two states of Qi (Ho 1985, 11). I am not
sure about this interpretation. But this state-based notion is consistent with the property-based
notion I just described. Just as we wouldn’t have a radically different understanding of F=ma if
the relata involved in the law (F, m and a) are construed as different states rather than
properties, so wouldn’t we run into a radically different understanding of the Dao as law-like if
Yin and Yang are construed as different states rather than properties. Next section offers more
discussions on Yin and Yang as properties.
things possess. In other words, each of myriad things embraces both Yin property and
Yang property (Dao De Jing, 42). Why should we understand Yin and Yang as
properties rather than objects or events? First of all, it had been the maneuver of
Chinese Science over a long history to generalize and synthesize physical (and
mental) properties in Yin and Yang terms. Such a maneuver commenced as early as
with the time of E Zhuan, wherein it says “a female, a Yin thing and a male, a Yang
thing.” It was developed by the Huang-Lao School during the period of Qin and Han
dynasties and popularized by the Xuan School (roughly, dark learning) during the
period of Wei and Jin dynasties. Collecting and examining all the concepts that have
been incorporated in the Yin-Yang conception at both metaphysical and physical
(including psychological) levels, one will find that Yin and Yang invariably refer to
properties—e.g., being existent/nonexistent, being covert/overt, being strong/weak,
etc., just to list a few, and they are conceived as the fundamental properties of Qi.7
Moreover, understanding Yin and Yang as properties makes significant difference
in our understanding of Chinese Science as a pursuit of the Dao. It is evidenced in
Chinese classics that the Dao and each of its instantiation (Li) is characterized as
some relationship between Yin and Yang properties. The connection between Dao and
Yin-Yang appears as early as in the E Zhuan; the most popular quote is: “Once Yin,
once Yin; and that is the Dao”, meaning that Dao is both Yin and Yang, and it is now
Yin, now Yang. The Huang-Lao School, especially the Huai Nan Zi (a famous
classic) is responsible for the initial interpretation of Dao in terms of the interaction
and transformation between Yin and Yang. “The Dao, claimed as a rule, begins with
one; but one does not give birth to things and hence it divides into Yin and Yang. The
harmonization of Yin and Yang give birth to myriad things” (Tian Wen Xun or the
Teachings of the Heaven). This is the conceptual foundation on which the author of
this classic work formulates explanations for physical, chemical, biological, social,
and mental phenomena as well as regularities of those phenomena. Although these
explanations are not consistent in treating the Yin-Yang as the most abstract concept
and sometime Yin-Yang is only listed as one of the pairs of properties that the Dao
subsumes (Dao Ying Xun or the Teachings of Dao Response), that the Dao is a
relationship between properties is clear.
I have argued that if we think of the Dao as nomological relationship between
properties rather than objects, then we can think of the Dao in such scientific terms
that particular bodies are subject to the Dao by virtue of instantiating the Yin-Yang
properties under a certain description. This argument suggests a way of making
Chinese and western sciences comparable. However, it does not advocate the view
that Chinese science and western science can be translated one into another. The
translatability problem is not that Chinese Science fails to grasp the idea of laws of
nature. The problem is rather caused by its internal logic to be explained as follows.
What we observe in Chinese scientific thinking is that self-deployment and
mutual transmutation of Yin-Yang is imaginarily visualized as wave-like behavior as
7
I don’t mean that Chinese Science reduce all properties to the Yin-Yang. Unlike western
sciences, the philosophical foundation of Chinese Sciences isn’t an analytical reductionism. It
is rather a reason holism, which I will explain shortly.
42 ZHAOLU LU
it is described in the Tai Ji Diagram where Yin and Yang appear to be opposite
properties that also exist in one another. Here “opposite” refers to either contraries or
contradictories, depending on what instantiates Yin-Yang. Thus, in the holistic
rationality of scientific thinking, for example, Qi is either Yin or Yang and each is
both; it is, as the metaphor “Qi” suggests, neither substantial nor void but both; it is
both a body and a wave but neither, and so on. These dialectic theses afford only a
holistic interpretation, which follows paraconsistent logic. Both modern science and
Chinese Science have faith in reason; but the former has faith in consistent reason and
the latter in paraconsistent reason. Perception of opposites can be found in all cultures
(Dusek, 1999, 48); however, the western tend to emphasize on the opposition of the
opposites whereas the Chinese on the unity of them. In view of this fact, an attempt to
translate Chinese Science, for example, the science in the E Jing into the consistent
logic may be an interesting logic exercise but will not capture its scientific spirit.
This is because Yin and Yang are paraconsistent properties and they are only
consistent in the cases of their being instantiated as contraries). Thus, unlike laws of
nature in modern science, which subsume consistent properties, the Dao subsumes
paraconsistent properties. Hence, it is difficult to translate the concept of Dao into that
of Laws of Nature. The latter would look awkward in the consistent logic if it had
included the nomological relation that Yin-ness universally necessitates Yang-ness
and vice versa such that if something were Yin then it would be Yang and vice versa.8
It is worth noting that as paraconsistent properties Yin and Yang are not like color
and shape, which can be static possessions of objects and events. Rather Yin and Yang
are dynamic properties, ranging over opposite activities and opposite processes. Dao
as a nomological relationship between paraconsistent Yin and Yang dictates a
dynamic approach to Nature. As I indicated earlier, ancient Chinese Science focuses
on the search for the ultimate source of cosmic generation. It is therefore not
entangled by the problem of infinite divisibility and propositional derivability; rather
it is puzzled by conceivability of generating existence from nonexistence. Dao is
understood as both a paraconsistent source of existence and nonexistence and a
dynamic source such that mutual transformation of Yin and Yang, once embodied in
Qi, manifests in five distinct and yet inter-locked modes of motion known as
Wuxing—i.e., water, fire, wood, metal and earth. The doctrine of Wuxing was once
construed as a theory of elements out of which the world is made of; however,
scholars of Chinese studies have later realized that the reductionist interpretation or
any interpretation that views Wuxing as physically distinct substances misses the
primary concern or an emphasis of the theory used in scientific and philosophical
studies in Chinese tradition (Schwartz, 1996, 81-97). Fashionable interpretations are
now diverse, ranging from five agents (Fung) to five processes or five phases of a
process (Sivin, 1987, 73, 75), etc. The fact is that in all Chinese sciences what
8
I am not arguing that the reason holism, together with its paraconsistent logic, only exists in
Chinese culture. Though it has existed in western cultures since ancient Greek as Lloyd
demonstrates (1996, chapter 6), it failed to catch the modern train of science just as did Chinese
Science. However, in contemporary world, paraconsistent logic is as odd and popular as non-
linear sciences.
Wuxing refers to are five dynamic properties rather than elements, instantiating the
paraconsistent Yin and Yang. In the doctrine of Wuxing “water,” “fire,” “wood,”
“metal,” and “earth” are metaphors for dynamic properties or modes of motion. These
properties or modes are mechanical descending (water), mechanical ascending (fire),
physical reshaping (wood), chemical modifying (metal), and biological growing
(earth).
Yin-Yang is the conceptual apparatus by means of which Chinese Science
aggregates properties, physical and mental; and the Wuxing is the conceptual
apparatus by means of which Chinese sciences aggregates modes of motion, change,
and event, whether they are physical or mental. Thus, they constitute a conceptual
schema and a common vocabulary of Chinese sciences and technological studies.
However, the entire conception consisting of Dao, Yin-Yang, Li-Qi, and Wuxing is so
vague and fuzzy that a methodological transformation of the conception becomes
extremely difficult. It is even difficult for the philosophers who accept the holistic
conception. The methodological guideline recommended by Daoism is Xunlan, i.e.,
roughly, transcendent observation from Dao’s point of view, which requires merging
of the object and the subject. No matter what the transcendent observation means,
pursuing Dao from Dao’s point of view is as paraconsistent as the concept of Dao
itself.
The methodological guideline recommended by Chinese Buddhism is Liaowu,
i.e., roughly, understanding in transcendent intuition, which requires understanding of
the object with reference to understanding of the subject—i.e., understanding the
object’s answer to the way of the subject inquiry. Transcendently intuitive
understanding may go in two forms: (1) Jiewu, i.e., roughly, understanding through
dissolving puzzles (and hence recognizing truth) in transcendent intuition during
meditation, and (2) Zhengwu, i.e., roughly, transcendently intuitive understanding
through embodied cognition of truth (during physical practice). Both Xunlan and
Liaowu blur the distinction between internal (subjective) world and external
(objective world) and both exclude empirical observation and experiment on the one
hand and rational calculation on the other. Thus, they are both as vague and fuzzy as
the conception of which they are the methodological transformations. To put this
point in a positive way, the spirit of Chinese Science indulges itself too much in
thought experiment.
The methodological guideline recommended by Confucianism is Gezhi,
shorthand for Gewu Zhizhi. It roughly means exhaustively inquiring into (Li of) things
to pursue the highest knowledge. This, though relatively articulate, is open to various
interpretations and hence it has historically undergone enormous evolution. The
problem lies in the method of Gewu. It may be either cognitive or perceptual, either
rational or empirical, either theoretical or experimental, either analytic or synthetic.
Gezhi was a methodology of the thought-experiment kind at the time when it was
advanced in the 11th century, using initially as an epistemological method for self-
cultivation. It was then gradually extended to include intellectual inquiry into physical
existences of various kinds and transformed into various methods including empirical
ones. Gezhi began to incorporate more and more natural studies in Yuan Dynasty.
Zhu Zhenheng (1282-1358), for example, titled his celebrate medical book Gezhi
44 ZHAOLU LU
Yulun and insisted that medicine be part of Gezhi. Ming dynasty (1368-1644) was
perhaps the best time Chinese Science should have caught. A part of gezhi was
known as ziran zhi xue (natural studies) and knowledge of natural studies was tested
in civil examinations. A good portion of Gezhi Congshu (Collection of Gezhi Works)
published in Ming Dynasty devoted to scientific and Technological works. The Gezhi
of Fang Yizhi (1611-71) style was even more radical; his work Wuli Xiaoshi was
exclusively a study of physical world. When history reached late Qing dynasty Gezhi
already officially embraced such disciplinary studies as geography, mathematics,
survey and mapping, mechanics, acoustics, optics, electricity, and chemistry.
Virtually, “Learning of Gezhi” had occupied the conceptual place of science
before the concept of the science was introduced (via Japan) into China in early 20 th
century. Even long after the introduction of the western concept of science, Chinese
sciences continued to be understood as studies of Li (of some Gezhi sort). In other
words, the emergence of Gezhi Learning, especially in its later evolution, makes a
significant methodological turn. It indicates, though suggestively, a way to transcend
the transcendent intuition that occupies the spirit of Chinese Science for over a
thousand years. Unfortunately, traditional political and ideological systems together
with Manchu invasion make the process of methodological evolution painfully slow.
Had the methodological turn completed at due time, that is, had it so evolved as to
include analytical, rational, and experimental approaches at both theoretical and
practical levels at due time, which was certainly possible if it was let go naturally,
Chinese Science could have culminated in modern science.
Another source of the translatability problem is that in pursuing the Dao Chinese
science has emphasized on the qualitative dimension of the Dao at the cost of losing
the sight of the quantitative dimension. Li’s, the instantiation of the Dao, are
elaborated but not quantified. The same problem occurs in the study of Yin-Yang, the
supposed properties that the Dao subsumes. 9 Needham makes it very clear that the
quantitative contemplation of Dao in Chinese Science is invariably algebraic rather
than geometric. Of course, from the viewpoint of modern mathematics, which
integrated algebra and geometry through Descartes’ work, Chinese mathematical
thought was handicapped, but so was ancient Greek. While geometry remains an
essential element of mathematics, an algebraic system has infinite capacity of multi-
dimensional representation of shapes. The quantitative contemplation of Chinese
Science tends to remain in a continuous and infinite mode. The specific mathematical
issues about quantitative study in Chinese Science need not concern us here. As the
qualitative dimension of Dao is emphasized, and in fact overemphasized, in Chinese
Science, it is plausible to claim that the problem with Chinese Science is that it fails
to produce quantitative sciences (Schwartz, 1985, 328). However, this problem helps
Chinese Science maintain her holistic position on another aspect of Chinese approach
to nature, which in turn generates a different issue.
9
There are some interesting studies on the quantitative dimension of Yin-Yang properties. Hetu
(The River Diagram) and Luoshu (Writing from the Luo River) present them in a decimal
system; and the Book of Changes presents them in a binary system. Scholars have found a
conversion between the two.
V. Three Interdisciplinary Domains: Heavens, Humans, and Earth
The third component of Chinese scientific holism is a triad of three domains of

scientific inquiry: Heavens, humans, and earth. Sivin (1973, 1980, 1995a) once
proposed the following list of disciplines that might be called Chinese sciences:
medicine, alchemy, astrology, geomancy, physical studies, mathematics, mathematic
harmonics, and mathematical astronomy. These disciplines can be described as
Chinese Science because they are circumscribed by and confined to the general
conception described above, namely, the conception consisting of the monadic Dao
and the dyadic properties of Yin-Yang. Without this conception, they would lose their
cultural identity. However, once these disciplines are put in the context of the
scientific holism, they should be more appropriately understood as endeavors and
activities of following three kinds of science: heaven science, human science, and
earth science. These three sciences are essentially interdisciplinary domains. What I
am suggesting is that whether we accept the holistic interpretation of Chinese Science
changes our view of its history. From a disciplinary point of view, the history of
Chinese Science exhibits many disciplinary studies, which may or may not be
scientific in their own right; however, from the viewpoint of scientific holism,
Chinese Science throughout its history has cultivated interdisciplinarity, which is an
essential characteristics of scientific holism and which is one of the three main
features of today’s intellectual movement (the other two being interculturality
defining cross-cultural and transcultural studies and internationality defining
globalization). One may argues that interdisciplinary study without disciplinary
studies is impossible! Yes, but then we have yet another explanation why Chinese
Science failed to culminate in modern science.
Ever since Needham it has become a popular view in the studies of Chinese
Science that Daoist thought is the root of science and technology in China. Indeed, the
permanent theme of Chinese Science is to pursue Dao; but, Dao is not a private
property of Daoism (Graham, 1989, Hansen 1992). Majority of scientists during the
Song, Ming, and Qing dynasties associated themselves with Confucianism.
Confucianism is very much responsible for developing a natural humanism, as
opposed to the anthropocentric humanism, that Chinese Science fosters in its holistic
spirit. An important feature of Chinese worldview is that it treats the world or nature
as, metaphorically, a family rather than an individual. It is an image of heaven-man-
earth. It places man between heaven and earth, and only in that sense it places man in
the center of universe. However, it envisions heaven and earth as a home for man and
not as rivals of man. Here the ancient familial model comes into play, which bestows
Chinese Science with a familial attitude—i.e., treating nature (heaven and earth) as
the home. Heaven science and earth science are developed to deal with nature as our
home, that is to say, they are developed to cooperate with nature rather than compete
and conquer it, to establish relationships with nature rather than exploit it, to value
nature rather than merely use it, and to come home to build a family rather than
merely tap resources. Tu Wei-ming (1993a, 1993b) describes this worldview as an
“anthropocosmic vision.” I would describe it as a natural humanism. A natural-
46 ZHAOLU LU
humanistic approach to nature culminates in a humanistic science for which today’s

world is hoping. Here is another point at which the holistic interpretation of Chinese
Science changes our view of its history. A science with humanistic characters does
not make much analytical sense; however, it makes perfect holistic sense in addition
to the human sense it makes. A scientific spirit doesn’t have to be analytical in
character just as a philosophy doesn’t have to be Socratic in style and logic doesn’t
have to be Aristotelian.
Under the influence of the natural humanism, the three interdisciplinary domains
of scientific studies flourished with the tendency to concentrating on human science.
Confucianism and Legalism, for example, make obvious contributions to social
studies. Even the Daoist’s contributions to medicine, chemistry and biology, and the
Moist’s contributions to logic, mechanics and optics are more human studies. Thus,
the history of Chinese Science exhibits a “life-oriented feature” (cf. Wang, 2001, 56).
As this life-oriented feature is materialized, we see the three most mature
technologies are ceramic, textile, and architecture; the four great inventions are paper,
gun power, compass, and printing; and the four most developed disciplines are
agriculture, medicine, astronomy, and mathematics. This historical phenomenon leads
scholars to characterize Chinese Science as empirical, practical and technological and
deny that there are “abstract systems of thought and explanation that give higher order
to our thinking about the natural realm” in Chinese Science (Huff, 1993, 238). This is
a salient example of failure to understand Chinese scientific holism. The failure
causes one to observe only “ge wu cheng qi” (experimenting with things to make a
device) but not “ji jin yu dao” (extending technology for an understanding of Dao)
that I explored above. Insofar as technological transformation of sciences is
concerned, life-oriented science is not unique to Chinese Science. Wasn’t ancient
western science a life-oriented science in the same sense? Wasn’t modern science a
life-oriented science in the same sense? Isn’t contemporary science a Life-oriented
science in the same sense? Technological and practical culmination of freely pursuing
truth and knowledge is always dictated by the orientation of human Life. It is a
normal historical pattern of science that “abstract systems of thought and explanation
that give higher order to our thinking about the natural realm” develops through and
parallel to the flourishing of life-oriented disciplines. Ming-Qing scientist Fang
Yizhi’s distinction between the learning of “zhi ce” (quality measure—i.e., empirical
sciences) and that of “tong ji” (universalization—i.e., theoretical sciences) is an
example of the self-awareness and theoretical expression of the historical pattern in
the spirit of Chinese Science (cf. Zheng 2001). However, the natural humanism in its
historical context did have negative effect on the realization of Chinese Science. The
overemphasized value orientation and its prioritization on inappropriate level
suppressed and limited the spirit of freely pursuing truth and knowledge. The
historical phenomenon that Moism could not manage to continue in the main stream
of Chinese intellectual movement and was pushed to the peripheral is a good
example. But Moism didn’t die as people usually assume (Bai, 1996). It continued at
the level of scientific and technological activities.

Conclusion
I have painted a simple picture of Chinese Science—i.e., as our philosophers of

science wish, a simple picture of Chinese theoretical understanding of, or approach to,
nature. It is a simple picture with a triadic structure: the monad of nomological Dao
manifested in multiple Li’s embodied in various forms of qi, the duet of Yin and
Yang properties manifested in the five basic modes of motion, and the triad of the
interdisciplinary and natural-humanistic dimensions of heaven science, human
science and earth science. The simplicity of the picture is like the simplicity of
Chinese painting. It affords a simple view of the cultural specificity and the holistic
model of Chinese Science. Yet it suggests rather complex a worldview, a view
consisting of connectionism, unificationism, reason holism, interdisciplinarity, and
natural humanism. It enables us to understand why “Chinese Science got along
without dichotomies between mind and body, objective and subjective, even wave
and particle” (Huff, 1993, 537-538) and I add, between value and fact, even between
materiality and spirituality. Was it because this scientific holism that Chinese Science
missed the modern train? Does this scientific holism suggest a different scientific
revolution?
“Chinese Science is perhaps the major alternative to Western science” (Dusek
1996, 73), but it should not insist on its cultural identity. If it does, it will miss next
train of scientific revolution. However, when Chinese Science finally got on the
modern train and obtain analyticity (in the early twentieth century), it should not
abandon its holisticity (as much as it did up to today) because that is its admission
ticket to next train. In today’s scientific world, traditional property-dualism is being
replaced by holism through interdisciplinary, intercultural and international
movements, which blur more and more traditional dichotomies in the intellectual
mind. We are in the process of aggregating properties that we used to think
irreducibly distinct. Analyticity and holisticity will eventually merge. 250 years ago
Denis Diderot, commenting on the future course of natural science, wrote: “Just as in
mathematics, all the properties of a curve turn out upon examination to be all the
same property, but seen from different aspects, so in nature, when experimental
science is more advanced, we shall come to see that all phenomena, whether of
weight, elasticity, attraction, magnetism or electricity, are all merely aspects of a
single state (Diderot, 1754, XLV, 68). That was the time of modern scientific
revolution when Diderot wrote this. It has been argued that western culture does not
lack a tradition of scientific holism (e.g., Dusek, 1999). So, Chinese Science isn’t
Chinese, and it will be recognized as Chinese Science when it is no longer Chinese.
Acknowledgement: I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their
informative, thought-provoking comments and suggestions, which were instrumental
in the development of my thoughts in the final version of this article.

48 ZHAOLU LU
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SECULARISATION, MAN AND THE ECOLOGICAL CRISIS

S. G. Nigal
Abstract: For centuries, man has been trying to understand himself and the
universe in which he lives and by which he is sustained. While striving for food
and shelter, dependent on the Nature surrounding him, the human race has
constantly been engaged in a struggle for existence and has been forced to adjust
to the inherent natural laws of Nature. But man, being rational and inquisitive, has
been making attempts to understand this system of natural governance in order to
control it. To put it more candidly, man has been trying to conquer Nature. It is
this exploitative attitude towards the environment that is directly and indirectly
creating ecological disasters. If man has the capacity to make changes in Nature,
which he has amply demonstrated through scientific and technical progress, then
he must accept liability for his varied acts and their harmful consequences to the
environment. In this way, man has a responsibility towards Nature. Man has
completely forgotten the factual truth that Nature is indispensable, he himself is in
Nature, and that he cannot exist without Nature. Thus, one can argue that the way
out lies not only in preventative measures but also corrective measures, focusing on
developing a reverential outlook towards Nature. This paper is mainly concerned
with modern Western thought, its secularization of man which subsequently has
had detrimental impacts on the environment, and how only a divine reverential
outlook towards Nature can stop the ecological crisis we face.
FOR CENTURIES, man has been trying to understand himself and the universe in
which he lives and by which he is sustained. In order to gratify his biological needs
such as hunger and thirst, man has always had to depend upon Nature and in turn has
been forced to adjust himself to Nature in his struggle for existence. But man, being
rational and inquisitive, has been making attempts to understand the natural world and
the laws governing the natural phenomena in order to control them. To put it more
candidly, man has been trying to conquer Nature. Aided by science and technology,
this desire to conquer outer Nature was immensely whetted and Nature in turn began
to suffer. As natural resources became scarce and the environment started rapidly
degrading, man too began to suffer. Thus one can see the factual truth that Nature is
indispensable for the existence of life on earth, that man himself is in Nature, and that
even today he cannot exist without Nature.

Dr. S. G. NIGAL, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Academy of Vallabha
Vedanta and Research Center, University of Mumbai, Mumbai – 400098, India. Email:
[email protected].

52 S. G. NIGAL
I. Ecology and Conceptual Environment
Today we are constantly bombarded with talk of the environment’s deterioration and
ecological problems such as global warming, deforestation, and animal extinction.
Hence, we come across slogans and phrases such as “Save Planet Earth”; “Be Clean,
Go Green”; “Plant a Tree, Save a Life.” These words of warning and wisdom suggest
that man reflects upon his own achievements and failures. Having reviewed what he
has done to the environment and biosphere, experts have aptly coined the phrase
“ecological rape” to describe the human attack on Nature.
This paper is mainly concerned with modern Western thought, its secularization
of man which subsequently has had detrimental impacts on the environment, and how
only a divine reverential outlook towards Nature can stop the ecological crisis we
face. Ecology is the scientific study of the close bond between organisms and the
natural environment. Thus we have human ecology which deals with the
interrelationship between man and the environment. Presently, there is immense
concern about the effects of human activities on the atmosphere. The most glaring
fact to be noted in this connection is the horrible incidence of pollution of air, water
and other natural resources, all of which has led to the phenomenon called global
warming. Therefore, it is rightly warned that the continued pollution of earth, air, and
water, if unchecked, will eventually destroy the fitness of this planet to support life in
general and human life in particular.
Man lives in two environments: the external physical environment, which
includes a natural atmosphere and living things such as plants and animals, and the
conceptual environment, which consists of man’s view of the universe and his attitude
towards it. One may, for instance, have a purely commercial and exploitative
orientation towards Nature, while another may have a reverential outlook towards it.
It is these thoughts that motivate man to do certain activities which ultimately affect
both the environment and himself. Hence, an analysis of these attitudes is crucial to
the study of ecology and to find out the solution of our ecological problems.
Man is not a passive being subject only to the principles of physics, chemistry
and Darwinian natural selection. He has been resisting environmental pressures since
the dawn of humanity. As a creator, he has been making tremendous progress in
scientific knowledge and technological proficiency. With this, man has not remained
a helpless victim of the original environment. Ironically, he has instead become a
victim of his own scientific achievements and innovations which harness that
environment. The human conquest of Nature appears to be moving in the direction of
the degradation of man as man. We may experience the elimination of the very
existence of human beings from this planet if he fails to pay heed to the ecological
problems. This is not to voice a pessimistic note of a prophet of doom, but man will
have to think over these issues sincerely and seriously. It will not be enough to ponder
over such problems merely from the standpoint of utilitarianism. Man will have to
take a philosophical perspective of his ecological niche in the universe and look
within to understand why exactly things have become the way they currently are.

SECULARISATION, MAN AND THE ECOLOGICAL CRISIS 53
II. A Brief Story of Western Thought
Modern science and technology were mainly developed by the West. It was Francis
Bacon, a great British popularizer of science, who once rightly said, “Knowledge is
power.” This meaningful statement became a motto for those who aspired to conquer
Nature. However, Bacon also gave a significant warning which was gradually and
conveniently forgotten. He had admonished, “Nature can be conquered only by
obeying her” (Bennett and R.J. Chorley, 1978, 14). It is the disregard of this significant
ecological warning that has today placed the very fate of human survival on this tiny
planet in jeopardy.
The conceptual environment, or the ethos, of Western society has always been
dominated by Judeo-Christian ethics, which is anthropocentric. In the story of
Genesis, the Bible advises us to fill the earth and subdue it; to have dominion over the
fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves
upon the earth (McKibben, 1990, 69). This theological model is a teleological one.
According to this scheme, Nature is ordered by the transcendent God’s design.
Furthermore, it is believed that man is superior to Nature. God created all things for
man’s sake and therefore, man should have dominion over Nature. The Earth is in the
centre of the Universe and man is in the centre of the whole creation. Descartes, a
16th century French philosopher and the father of modern European philosophy
averred: “Nature is a great machine to be manipulated by man to suit his own ends.”
According to him, animals have no soul, no minds, and therefore no feelings. Thus,
man is free to do anything necessary for his own good. Such self-centered thinking
was similarly preached during the second half of the 19th century by evolutionists
like T. H. Huxley and Herbert Spencer who put forth the doctrine of war between
man and Nature.
III. Man and Environment
As a result of the above mentioned thoughts, the relation between man and Nature has
come to be conceived of in terms of hostility and even enmity. Nature exists as the
enemy of man and therefore it must be conquered by any means. Today, we see the
results of this as wild animals are driven to extinction and forests are recklessly
destroyed. There is a virtual competition among multi-national companies to exploit
natural resources. The only goal is amassing and reinvesting material wealth.
Everybody is mainly concerned with raising the standard of living but no one bothers
about the standard of life. It is this exploitative attitude towards the environment that
is enormously creating ecological disasters. If man has the capacity to make changes
in Nature, which he has amply demonstrated through scientific and technical
progress, then he must accept responsibility for his varied acts and their harmful
consequences on the environment. In this way, man has a responsibility towards
Nature, to its flora and fauna, and also to the future generations of mankind. Hence
the questions are rightly asked: are we not bringing about a major ecological
catastrophe? Are we not heading towards mass suicide? Are we not defrauding the
54 S. G. NIGAL
future human generations? Any well-informed and responsible person will answer
these problems in the affirmative. Yes, we are responsible for the ecological
imbalance and it is in our hands to restore environmental balance. We can take two
measures in this regard: one corrective and the other preventive. Take for instance the
pollution of the river Ganges in India. Either we can make efforts to clean up the
pollution that we have added into the Ganges, or we can strive to stop the dirtying of
the river water itself.
The problem does not end here though. By thinking more deeply, we come to
realize that what lies at the root of the ecological problem is the human attitude
towards Nature. Is Nature a matter of material utility only? If the answer is yes, then
we cannot stop the mindless exploitation or rape of Nature unless we take a long-term
view of diminishing utility. Regardless of one’s standpoint, man will have to take a
more serious look at his relation with Nature and reconsider it. One thing is
doubtlessly certain—man exists in the natural world and he has no option but to live
together with Nature. Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches to this issue
reveal the intimate relationship between mankind and the environment. How then can
we condemn Nature as the enemy of man?
The horrible truth underlying this problematic attitude is that man himself is
being “thingified” or commoditized in modern society. This is the result of the
secularization of both man and Nature. According to one view, the secularization of
man is the de-spiritualization of man. It is a process of making man worldly by
separating man from his religious connection or influence. Thus, secularization of
man means making and treating man as no more than a this-worldly animal. Such a
man treats Nature as nothing more than the material for a life of pleasures. This
attitude then degenerates into an exploitative attitude towards others and more so
towards Nature.
It is true that the policy of environmental control once was, and even today in
many cases is, adopted—and rightly so—as the means of self-preservation. But the
times have changed considerably. This limited view will not suffice. Man must take
stock of what he has done to the external Nature and thereby to humanity at large.
We are not Leibnizean monads, each living in its enclosed existence apart from all
others and Nature. The basic fact about the things and events in the universe is that
they are interrelated. J. Krishnamurti’s famous quote, “To be is to be related,” seems
to be the law of existence. In this connection, Rene Debos, a microbiologist, writes,
“The fundamental law of ecology, it is often said, is that everything is relevant to
everything else” (Debos, 1976, 18). Percy Bysshe Shelley poetically expresses this
truth, “Nothing in the world is single; by the law Divine, all things mingle.” Thus, we
have to accept the fact not only of interconnectedness, but also of interdependence.
The greatness of man is that only he can understand this fact of universal
interrelatedness as well as the relevance of each to all. So the attitude of mindlessly
manipulating and exploiting Nature is dangerous and even suicidal. This truth has
been very convincingly demonstrated by the findings of biologists, ecologists and
other scientists.
So the real question then is: What should be our attitude towards external Nature
and also towards the future generations of human beings? Egoistic hedonism has no
answer to this major problem. On the contrary, the doctrine of selfish axiological
materialism (one who stresses only secular values) is creating havoc in modern
society. This situation is producing widespread cynicism. Oscar Wilde once defined a
cynic as a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. This
crassly materialistic and commercial cynical attitude must be replaced by a more
responsible, humane and even spiritualistic orientation towards oneself, others and the
whole of Nature. Anthropocentrism and the consequent arrogance of man must be
replaced by an attitude of humility, gratitude and reverence in regards to Nature. The
phrase “man’s dominion over nature” should give way to “man’s stewardship of the
environment.”
Man is great because he has the capacity to understand his responsibility towards
Nature and become its guardian. Humans therefore ought to have a self-imposed
obligation to respect animals, plants and Nature. Man will certainly have to use
natural resources, but he has no right to misuse or spoil Nature, far less to destroy it.
“Our mother is useful but she has a plus value which cannot and should not be
measured in terms of material utility,” rightly pleads Shri Pandurang Shastriji
Athawale, an Indian philosopher, social activist, and spiritual leader. Our mother, he
explains, ought to be respected even though she ceases to be useful in her old age.
She serves her children but this does not mean she should be treated as a mere useful
housemaid. Of course, even a servant must be treated as a respectable human being.
In India, even a cow is respected as a mother. Throughout the world, sane voices in
different societies have always used the language of “Mother Nature” or “Mother
Earth.” There are hymns on this theme in the holy Vedas of the Hindus and other
ancient texts of the world. It is heartening to note that once again scholars in modern
times are upholding this reverential concept of the Mother Earth. Debos very aptly
defends this perspective and writes, “Above and beyond the economic and ecological
reasons for the conservation, there are aesthetic and moral ones which are even more
compelling. The statement that the Earth is our mother is more than a sentimental
platitude ” (Debos, 1976, 118).
All these considerations demonstrate an urgent need to save the planet and to
maintain the variety in Nature and the harmony between it and man. Morally
developed human beings should gratefully recognize the debt they owe to society, to
Nature or to the “cosmic intelligence” (God) which is immanent in the universe and
also transcends it. It is only man who can appreciate and respond to the beauty and
sublimity in natural phenomena such as in landscapes, sunrises, and sunsets. Only
man praises a rose for its scent and beauty and extols certain birds for the harmonious
quality of their songs. Man has an aesthetic need which the beauty of the Earth
satisfies. It is true that man creates a second world within the world of Nature, but still
he needs Nature for his survival and his growth as a human being. Thus, human
creativity should be so promoted that the beauty in the environment is not damaged.
We should not harm the environmental health and thereby the well-being and
happiness of the humanity at large.

56 S. G. NIGAL
IV. The Way Out
There can be no two opinions about the truth that there should be a cordial and
harmonious relationship between humans and the environment. This harmony can be
maintained only if we take a reverential attitude towards both life and Nature. Such an
attitude must be rooted in a philosophical standpoint like that of Shankara’s Advait
Vedānta or that of Ishavasyamidamsarvam1; that is, the Divine Reality that resides in
me is the Reality that dwells in Nature. In the language of the Gita and devotionalism,
the Reality underlying both man and Nature is God, who may be called by any name.
This sort of philosophy engenders love for both God and the Universe, while
maintaining man’s sense of responsibility for his actions. We are free to maintain or
mar the harmony between man and Nature. The above mentioned type of outlook or
attitude is found in the way of thinking and way of living of true saints like Saint
Francis of Assisi, Saint Tukaram and a host of others. For such souls the universe is
friendly. Moreover, the world is to be understood as a series of opportunities to be
utilized for the comprehensive development of human beings. There is a note of
optimism in this outlook, for every difficulty is a sort of opportunity. This view is not
against the value of utility. But utility is only one of several values such as beauty,
love, gratitude, justice, and truth. Thus, this type of reverential attitude forces man to
take a holistic approach to the world, both human and non-human, living and non-
living. This attitude will also lead to a more fulfilling life. Understood in this sense,
Nature is not an alien and hostile entity that needs to be defeated and conquered.
Furthermore, man must also look within to enable himself to understand and
control the greed and lust that exist within. It is this greed, or what is correctly dubbed
as “greedy capitalism,” that generates the possessive and exploitative attitude in man
towards others and Nature. Self-understanding and self-control therefore are essential
to stop the dehumanization or brutalization of man. The individual man, society as a
whole, and all of the non-human existence in this universe are to be conceived of not
as concentric circles but as constituting a spiral system in which anything in the world
is continuous with the totality of things and beings in the cosmos. In this view, the
destroyer of the ecological balance can be compared to the man who cuts on the
wrong side of a branch of the tree on which he sits; it is a self-defeating activity.
Thus, the wholesale felling of trees for utterly selfish purposes is both ecologically
and practically wrong. The same can be said about the hunting of birds and wild
animals for sheer enjoyment. Regardless of whether the earth requires our existence
or not, we need the earth with all its beauty and wealth for our own existence and for
our own growth as physical, emotional, and spiritual beings. Man is neither the maker
nor the master of this planet. Yet it is his responsibility to respect and protect this rich
and beautiful earth. Even Julian Huxley, an evolutionist thinker and biologist, is not
prepared to leave the course of future development of the human species to the natural
cosmic process of biological evolution. Instead, he rightly opts for rational selection
in regard to man’s future survival. Man’s evolution, he remarks, is not biological but
1
Ishavasyam Upanishad – Verse 1. (The whole universe is pervaded by the Divine Being or the
whole universe is the abode of the Supreme Divine Being)
psychological; it operates by the mechanism of cultural tradition which involves

cumulative self-reproduction and self-variation of mental activities and their products.
Accordingly, major steps in the human phase of evolution are achieved by
breakthroughs in the dominant patterns of mental organization of knowledge, ideas,
and beliefs—ideological instead of biological or physiological organization. Further,
he writes: “Man’s destiny is to be the sole agent for the future evolution of the planet”
(Huxley, 1962, 118). This view establishes human responsibility towards Nature in
general.
Sometimes it is said that the earth is a super-organism. Thus it is argued that the
phenomenon of pollution is not a serious threat to life in general and human life in
particular on this globe. The living earth, like all individual organisms, will always
react in such a way as to restore the environment to its original state and ensure its
own survival. This view is based upon James Lovelock’s controversial Gaia
hypothesis about the earth as he discusses in his 1988 book, The Ages of Gaia. Gaia
refers to the Greek goddess of Earth. This supposition is very much similar to Greek
hylozoism. It implies that man need not worry about the damage he has done to the
environment. Moreover, it suggests that to say “we have damaged nature” makes no
sense for everything that we do is natural. But this I think is going too far. Our
historical experience of the atomic bombs in Japan, the Chernobyl nuclear plant
explosion in Soviet Russia, the Bhopal tragedy in India and countless other incidences
of the pollution of planetary resources all go counter to the above mentioned thesis.
These events clearly illustrate instead how our reckless exploitations have violated the
natural equilibrium and done irreversible damage to the environment. Ironically, it
was Lovelock himself who later on became the first scientist to measure the
persistence of chemicals in the air and had to accept the conceivable hazard that these
pollutants posed. In this way, he ultimately ended up refuting his own hypothesis.
Therefore, there is no other way out of this crisis but to develop and adopt a
philosophy of life and of the universe, which generates and promotes a reverential
attitude towards man and Nature. While practical options, such as planting more trees
and banning certain chemicals, can certainly be utilized to aid the present situation,
the permanent solution lies only within a complete transformation of mankind’s
outlook. It should neither be this-worldly nor other-worldly; it should be holistic and
integral. Religion can play a very significant role in this regard provided, as Dr. R.
Sundar Rajan has suggested, religion has remained merely a hermeneutics of soul but
should become the hermeneutics of man. In this connection, Dr. R. Sundar Rajan
writes: “A fundamental transformation of our social consciousness of the natural
world will come about only when the principle for reverence and responsibility for
non-human life becomes a moral regulative” (Bhatt, 1985, 180 ). He also mentions the
fact that some Christian theologians are trying to revive the philosophical thoughts of
Jacob Boehme (1575-1624), a German uneducated mystic, and F.W.J. Schelling
(1725-1854), a German idealist. These thinkers advocate a philosophy of Nature
which comes very close to the spiritual non-dualism, or Advait Vedānta, of The
Upanishads in general and Shankara in particular. For instance, Boehme has said: “In
all the processes of Nature, God is concealed; only in the spirit of Man is He
recognized … God is not sundered from Nature but is related to it as the soul to the
58 S. G. NIGAL
body” (Hoffding, 1855, 71). Schelling also writes, “Nature is visible spirit and spirit
invisible Nature.” At one place he remarks, “Nature herself is a great poem” (Thilly,
1955, 467). What Boehme and Schelling want to support is that Nature is not merely
the dead material substance. It is alive and it is intricately woven together by a
common thread with every other living entity in this universe, including human life.
Religion must stress the multi-dimensional Nature of man and preach the doctrine of
integral-ism in regard to empirical, social, moral and spiritual values. Surprisingly,
such a doctrine is supported by both Vedanta and Sānkhya philosophies in India.
Nature (Prakriti), according to Sānkhya, strives for both material enjoyment
(Bhogārtha) and spiritual liberation (Mokshārtha) of the individual soul. Moreover,
Vedānta asserts that the Universe is the manifestation of the Divine and is rooted in It.
So there is harmony between man and Nature. Such an attitude is called Bhakti
(Loving Devotion to the Supreme Being who supports, pervades, and permeates the
whole of the cosmos). Such pure love will not allow a devotee to sit idle when
mankind is facing an ecological crisis.
In conclusion, it can be said that man is a moral entity, for only human actions
are capable of being characterized as moral or immoral, rational or irrational. So it is
his responsibility to preserve the Earth’s fitness for his continued existence. In this
connection, it has generally been accepted by modern thinkers like Bruce Allsopp and
biologists like Julian Huxley that man has become a major force in the ecology of the
Earth. He can be either creative or destructive; and therefore has moral duty of
trusteeship for Nature. The exercise of this trusteeship depends upon his recovering
the sense of respect which has become depraved in utilitarian industrial societies.
Simply put, the ball is in mankind’s court; it is up to us to decide what we will do. It
is heartening to note that many institutions, organizations, and even eminent
individuals are engaged in the creation of ecological awareness in the minds of the
people and their leaders. There is an explosion of knowledge but what is scarce is
wisdom and although knowledge comes, it is wisdom that lingers. Global warming is
a serious and real phenomenon. If it is not dealt with immediately, man may be left to
face his own extinction. While thinking globally is good, acting locally is better. Let
us hope that man becomes wiser by experience, acts like a responsible trustee and
steward of the environment, saves this planet from man-made calamities and thereby
preserves life on this lovely planet. Let us also hope that man realizes the Divine
Truth that God helps those who help themselves.
Acknowledgement: In the process of having my article accepted by the Journal of

East-West Thought, I had many people who played an influential role in providing me
with constructive criticism that allowed me to deliver the final product. Of those
people I would like to both acknowledge and thank the three anonymous reviewers of
the Journal of East-West Thought for their recommendations as it allowed me to, in
turn, better my article.

References
Bennett, R. J., and R. Chorley. 1978. Environmental Systems, Philosophy, Analysis and
Control. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Bhatt, S. R.. 1985. Reality, Knowledge and Value. Delhi.
Debos, Rene. 1976. A God within: A Positive View of Mankind’s Future. London: Spere Books
Ltd..
Hoffding, H.. 1955. A History of Modern Philosophy, Vol I.. Power Publication.
Huxley, Julian. 1962. The Essays of a Humanist. London: Penguin Books.
Ishavashyam Upanishad Verse 1.
McKibben, Bill. 1990. The End of Nature. London: Penguin Books.
Thilly, Frank. 1955. A History of Philosophy. Ed. L. Wood. New York: Henry Holt and
Company.

WITTGENSTEIN, DEWEY AND CONFUCIANISM ON
AESTHETIC ETHICS OR ETHICAL AESTHETICS
Yuedi Liu
Abstract: As a practitioner of “Constructive-Engagement Methodological

Strategy” in comparative philosophy, I will place the Anglo-American analytic
tradition, Pragmatism and Chinese Confucianism within the same philosophical
framework so as to work out the distinct styles underlying their “common
concerns”. My hope is that this undertaking can lead to a constructive exchange
between these influential philosophical traditions: between Wittgenstein’s “Ethics
and Aesthetics are One” and Confucianism’s “Perfectly Good and Perfectly
Beautiful”, between Dewey’s aesthetics on the emotional in “an experience” and
the Confucian’s the unity of daily rituals and ordinary emotions constitutes. Based
on the discussion above, it can be argued that Wittgenstein, Dewey and Chinese
early Confucianism all move towards a living aesthetic ethics or ethical aesthetics,
or in other words, all of them are in essence an ethical-aesthetic art of living,
which is quite close to my proposal of “Living Aesthetics”. It is exactly in the
framework of living aesthetics that we try to work on a sort of aesthetic ethics or
ethical aesthetics that returns us to the life-world.
IT HAS BEEN noted that comparative study of Chinese and Western philosophy has
gone beyond traditional parallelism towards a Constructive-Engagement
Methodological Strategy（Mou, 2001, 337-364）. The fundamental agenda of this
new movement is “to inquire into how, via reflective criticism and self-criticism,
distinct modes of thinking, methodological approaches, visions, insights, substantial
points of view, or conceptual and explanatory resources from different philosophical
traditions and/or from various styles/orientations of doing philosophy (including those
from the complex array of distinct styles/orientations of doing philosophy within the
same tradition), can learn from each other and jointly contribute to the common
philosophical enterprise and/or a series of common concerns and issues of
philosophical significance. In this way, the issues and concerns under its reflective
examination are eventually general and cross-tradition ones instead of
idiosyncratically holding for Chinese philosophy alone” (Mou, 2008). As a
practitioner of this approach, I will place the Anglo-American analytic tradition,
Pragmaticism and Chinese Confucianism within the same philosophical frame so as
to work out the distinct styles underlying their “common concerns”. My hope is that
this undertaking can lead to a constructive exchange between these influential
philosophical traditions.

Dr. YUEDI LIU, Associate Professor, Institute of Philosophy, Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences. Specialties: Comparative philosophy, Chinese philosophy and aesthetics. E-mail:
[email protected].

62 YUEDI LIU
I. Wittgenstein and Confucianism
It is commonly known that Wittgenstein noticed the identity of ethics and aesthetics
in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein, 1955, 183). But as early as July
24th, 1916, he already had a famous statement in his notebook: “Ethics and aesthetics
are one” (Wittgenstein, 1961, 77). With very few exceptions, in dealing with the
relationship between ethics and aesthetics, western scholars resort to Wittgenstein’s
writings, in particular, his later works on action and intention. However, a
reconsideration of Wittgenstein from a comparative philosophical approach may lead
to new discoveries.
I.1 “Ethics and Aesthetics are One” and “Perfectly Good and Perfectly Beautiful”
In Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (§4.003), Wittgenstein touched on beauty and
goodness. He wrote, “Most propositions and questions that have been written about
philosophical matters are not false but senseless. We cannot, therefore, answer
questions of this kind at all, but only state their senselessness. Most questions and
propositions of philosophers result from the fact that we do not understand the logic
of our language. (They are of the same kind as the question whether the Good is more
or less identical than the Beautiful)” (Wittgenstein, 1955, 63). This paragraph reveals
the theme of the book: instead of being a totality of things, the “world” is made up of
“Sachverhalt” (i.e. “atomic fact”, or “state of affairs”, which seems to be a more
popular rendering). For Wittgenstein, a proposition is nothing other than a picture of
atomic facts, which is essentially “a model of reality”(Ibid., 39). In this sense,
language is the “pictures of facts” that we make to ourselves. Thus, the task of
philosophy is to conduct a logical analysis of propositions. As propositions
correspond to facts, all that is beyond the limits of language is senseless.
In the ending part of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (§6.421), Wittgenstein
made another famous statement concerning ethics and aesthetics: “It is clear that
ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one)”
(Ibid., 183).1 Since aesthetics and ethics are one (and the same), it certainly follows
that aesthetics is also transcendental. The idea that ethics is transcendental can be
traced back to as early as July 30, 1916, when Wittgenstein, in his notebook, put
down the sentence: “Die Ethik ist transcendent” (Wittgenstein, 1961, 79). It is
noteworthy that Wittgenstein was discussing a “happy life” at that time (Ibid., 78). He
pointed out that the mark of a happy life can be described, but it cannot possibly be
given a physical mark, but only a metaphysical one or a transcendental one (Ibid., 78).
Obviously, how so aesthetics was originally related to ethics in the context of “life”.
On July 24, 1916, Wittgenstein explained in his notebook why ethics is
transcendental. The reason he gave is that “Ethics does not treat of the world. Ethics
must be the condition of this world, like logic” (Ibid., 77). But in the Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus (§ 6. 41), Wittgenstein simply mentioned “that life is the
1
A more recent translation of this sentence is: “It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words.
Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.)” This translation seems
more appropriate in that it puts the stress on “words”. (Wittgenstein 1961, 86)
WITTGENSTEIN, DEWEY AND CONFUCIANISM 63
world” without further development (Wittgenstein, 1961, 73; 1955, 183). Here, what
is crucial is his conclusion: “Hence also there can be no ethical propositions.
Propositions cannot express anything higher” (Wittgenstein, 1955, 183). Wittgenstein
first asserted that “all propositions are of equal value.” He continued, “The sense of
the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as
it does happen. In it there is no value -- and if there were, it would be of no value. If
there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For
all happening and being-so is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in
the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental. It must lie outside the world”
(Ibid., 183).
Wittgenstein distinguished between the “speakable” world and the “unspeakable”
world. The former is the world of facts related to language, propositions and logic,
and is what philosophers aim to analyze, while the latter is the mysterious world of
which we must be silent, to which aesthetics and ethics belong. For Wittgenstein,
thought does not go beyond language, so the distinction between what can be thought
and what cannot be thought is simply the distinction between what is speakable and
what unspeakable. To speak of the world is to reveal the world in words; whereas, the
world depends upon words being meaningful. Therefore, it follows that ethics and
aesthetics are “transcendental” in that they go beyond the limits of the world.
Likewise, primal Confucianism also distinguished between the “speakable” and
the “unspeakable”, as is illustrated by what Confucius said, “If you understand it, say
you understand it. If you do not understand it, say you do not understand it. This is
wisdom” (The Analects, 2. 17). On the one hand, Confucius was indeed “silent” about
something. For he “would not discourse on mystery, force, rebellion, and deity” (The
Analects, 7. 20). In explaining why, Zhu Xi, a celebrated Neo-Confucian scholar,
stated it was because “the Master discoursed on the constant rather than the
mysterious, virtue rather than force, good government rather than rebellion, the affairs
of man rather than those of the unknown.” (Si Shu Jijie [Collected Commentaries on
the Four Books]) Evidences for such explanation can be found in a dialogue between
Confucius and one of his pupils, Zi-gong:
The Master said: “I wish to speak no more.”

Zi-gong said: “Sir, if you do not speak, what shall we, your pupils, abide by?’”
The master said: “What does Heaven say? Yet the four seasons revolve and a
hundred things grow. What does Heaven say?” (The Analects, 7. 19)
So, it seems safe to say that Confucius was far more concerned with constancy,
virtue, good government and human affairs. Yet this does not mean that Confucius
denied the existence of the mysterious, force, rebellion and the divine. Instead, he
said, “When offering sacrifices to the gods, he felt as if the gods were present” (The
Analects, 3. 12). And, when Confucius asked what Heaven says, he was just
suggesting that the Way of Heaven is unspeakable, and that it is all that one can do to
feel awe in silence. So Confucius was silent. However, although Confucius himself
was silent about transcendental things, he seemed to believe that “if one finds a way
for what one wants to say, then the unspoken meaning is established (Wang Fu-zhi,

64 YUEDI LIU
the “Inner Chapter” of Thoughts and Questions of Chuan Shan). That is to say, one
can grasp the unspeakable by finding a way to say what one wants to say.
In contrast to Confucius, when discussing the “unspeakable”, Wittgenstein had in
mind the basic relationship between language and world. We still remember that he
said: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (Wittgenstein, 1961,
88; 1955, 149). Of course, Wittgenstein did not deny the existence of “another
world”. This may be due to the influences he came under. As someone said, “one
must mention the following as having played their varying roles in stimulating
Wittgenstein’s mind: the writing of Schopenhauer; and as mediated through the latter,
the essential ‘message’ of Kant’s philosophy as well as that of Buddhism; the novels
of Dostoyevsky; Tolstoy’s writing and preachment in behalf of the Gospels; some of
the writing of Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish theologian and a founder of modern
existentialism; and William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience” (Munitz,
1981, 191). However, Confucius’ vision of the world was obviously different, for it
was “one that had to be felt, experienced, practiced and lived. He was interested in
how to make one’s way in life, not in discovering the ‘truth’”(Ames and Rosemont,
1988, 5). This accounts for Confucius’ suspension of the judgment of the “mystery
and force.”
In the post-Kantian tradition, the distinction between morality and aesthetics still
works. While morality is believed to involve practical purposes and activities,
aesthetics is purposeless and purely disinterested. In this way, ethics and aesthetics
are completely separated. It is clear that Wittgenstein’s view of ethics and aesthetics
as one and the same has broken away from the post-Kantian tradition, and thus, is
enlightening. At least on the surface, it is similar to Confucian doctrine’s view that
beauty and goodness are identical, notwithstanding Wittgenstein has his footing in the
mysterious, unspeakable world, while Confucius in the everyday world.
For Confucius, although beauty and goodness are distinct, they need to be united
to restore the lost tradition of “rituals and music assisting each other”. So he
advocated that which is at the same time “perfectly good and perfectly beautiful”. In
the Analects, Confucius said of Shao, a piece of dance music in praise of the ancient
sage king Shun, as “perfectly beautiful! And perfectly good!”, and said of Wu, a piece
of dance music in praise of King Wu of Zhou, as “perfectly beautiful! But not
perfectly good!” (The Analects, 3. 25) Based on his doctrine of Ren (humanity),
Confucius considered Shao to be perfectly beautiful and perfectly good because it
represented the ancient Chinese sage king Yao yielding his throne to Shun voluntarily
due to his greater worth and sagacity. In contrast, the dance music of Wu is perfectly
beautiful but not perfectly good because King Wu obtained his throne through
warfare. Obviously, there is a moral concern here. It is such a moral awareness that
enabled the earliest Confucianism to demarcate beauty and goodness, far more clearly
than any predecessors did. For Confucius, he was living in an age that witnessed the
“collapse of rituals and corruption of music.” In other words, the tradition of “rituals
and music assisting each other”, first found by Duke of Zhou, had degenerated. Music
was no longer limited by moral codes and was reduced to a sort of sumptuous, purely
aesthetic form for princes. Likewise, rituals became empty ideas that failed to
enlighten. In response to such a historical dilemma, Confucius wanted to return to the
abandoned tradition where rituals and music were harmoniously united. On this basis,
Confucius further put forth the idea of uniting goodness and beauty. Therefore, it is
justifiable to say that, what is fundamental to the unity of beauty and goodness is the
very idea that rituals distinguish that which is different, and music unites that which is
the same.
I.2 “The Beautiful is what Makes us Happy” in Contrast with “Ramble Among the
Arts” and “Perfect Yourself with Music”
Although Wittgenstein had been obsessed with the “fixed structure” of the world,
whether in his Notebooks 1914-1916 or in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he did not
cease to look for the dynamic relations between ethics and aesthetics. For example, he
said, “Art is a kind of expression. Good art is complete expression” (Wittgenstein,
1961, 83). And, “the work of art is object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good
life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connexion between art and
ethics.”(Ibid., 83) Nevertheless, who is the agent that mediates between beauty and
goodness, and art and morality? Wittgenstein’s answer seems to be based on his
wisdom of life, for he claimed that beauty is closely related to man’s happiness. He
said, “there is certainly something in the conception that the end of art is beautiful.
And the beautiful is what us makes happy” (Ibid., 86) .
In contrast, what is fundamental to Confucianism is the aspiration to “contain
beauty in the good”, and ultimately to perfect the good in beauty. This is a state of
happiness. From Mencius’ treatment of “humanity and righteousness as beautiful” to
“Confucius and Yan Yuan’s pleasant place” in Song and Ming Neo-Confucianism,
they were in essence pursuing an ideal life that integrates rituals and music, beauty
and goodness. That is to say, Confucian moral self-cultivation inevitably contains
aesthetic elements. However, for this Confucius had a rather different
recommendation. He said, “Inspire yourself with poetry; establish yourself on rituals;
perfect yourself with music” (The Analects, 8.8). This implies that, on the one hand,
the inspiration of poetry prepares one for rituals, and on the other, it is only through
music that both rituals and humanity can be perfected. As Xu Fuguan said, Confucius
meant by this to stress the importance of both rituals and music, especially the role of
music in the formation of a wholesome personality (Xu, 1987, 4). If such a reading is
correct, then Confucius had in mind the highest value of arts to man.
Confucius also said, “Aspire after the Way; adhere to virtue; rely on humanity;
ramble among the arts” (The Analects, 7.6). It is clear that, for Confucius, only the
arts, to which poetry and music belong, can offer autonomous aesthetic activities that
fully realize his aesthetic ideal. Here, beauty is not only contained in the good, but
also permeates the acts and movements of a free defined personality. As
Confucianism attaches the greatest importance to the “perfection of man”, morality
naturally constitutes the basis of aesthetic engagement, which, however, amounts to
the highest stage of morality. Perhaps, this is exactly what is meant by “rambling
among the arts” and “perfecting yourself with music”.
Some scholars believe that Wittgenstein mainly drew on ancient Greek
philosophy in his treatment of ethics and aesthetics (Dickinson, 1909). But this is not
the case. As a matter of fact, Wittgenstein was more influenced by G. E. Moore.
66 YUEDI LIU
Although in Principia Ethica Moore regarded the term “goodness” as indefinable, he

still thought of beauty and goodness as the most valuable things in life. Wittgenstein
followed Moore in understanding beauty and ethics in terms of the meaning of life.
Sometimes, Wittgenstein was also confused by questions like this: “Is it the
essence of the artistic way of looking at things, that it looks at the world with a happy
eye?” (Wittgenstein, 1961, 86) When dwelling on this question, Wittgenstein
displayed a tendency to identify beauty with goodness. He first asserted that
“aesthetically, the miracle is that the world exists. That what exists does exist” (Ibid.
86). Then he added, “Life is grave, life is gay” (Ibid., 86). While the former statement
shows that Wittgenstein described in a phenomenological sense—though within the
limits of language—the function of arts in revealing the world, the latter arises from
his understanding of life: art is different from life, and it can make us happy by being
satisfying.
I.3 “Live Happily” and “Enjoy Beauty and Goodness Together”

For Wittgenstein, it is only in the sense of happiness that ethics and aesthetics are one
and the same. Yet we still remember that for Kant “beauty is the symbol of
morality”(Kant, 1987, 228). It is clear that Kant relates beauty and goodness to
something transcendental. In contrast, Wittgenstein brings them back to life in this
world. That is to say, it is happiness that mediates between beauty and goodness, and
ethics and aesthetics. What is “happiness”? Wittgenstein explained, “And in this
sense Dostoevsky is right when he says that the man who is happy is fulfilling the
purpose of existence” (Wittgenstein, 1961, 73). I In other words, “in order to live
happily I must be in agreement with the world. And that was what ‘being happy’
means” (Ibid., 75). Here, the crucial words are “life” and “world”. Wittgenstein had
only a few words regarding life and world: “The world and life are one” (Ibid., 73). It
is clear that, on the one hand, Wittgenstein wants to stress the importance of realizing
the purpose of life, but on the other, he also wants to stress the agreement between the
realization of the purpose of life and the world as the “objective mark” of a happy
life. Yes, a happy life already justifies itself, and it is not necessary to ask what a
happy life is. The crucial point is that, the issue of life is solved once it is dismissed.
By relating beauty and goodness to life, Wittgenstein proposed that, in pursuing
happiness, we should bear in mind that the world is not subject to our will; on the
contrary, we should conform to the world. Take a literary work for example. If a
literary work X increases our understanding of the existence of this world, and to the
same extent, increases our affinity with the world, then still to the same extent, it will
increase the totality of happiness in our life. It is in this sense that we say “X is
beautiful.” After all, beauty should be something that “makes us happy.”
In advocating that which is perfectly beautiful and perfectly good, Confucius also
emphasized the harmonious unity of beauty and goodness. Xun Zi developed this
thought by saying, “when music is performed, the inner mind becomes pure; and
when rituals is cultivated, conduct is perfected. The ears become acute and the eye
clear-sighted; the blood humor becomes harmonious and in equilibrium; manners are
altered and customs changed. The entire world is made tranquil, and enjoys together
beauty and goodness”(Xun Zi, 1944, 84). Here, the “enjoyment of beauty and
goodness” together points to a happy feeling that arises from the unity of beauty and
goodness. As it is, the “enjoyment of beauty and goodness” is an extension of the
tradition of “rituals and music assisting each other”. The enjoyment brought by the
unity of beauty and goodness is in essence a sort of aesthetic satisfaction that is
imbued with human emotions. At any rate, it must be remembered that, in the
Confucian aesthetic ideal, beauty and goodness occupy equally important positions,
no more this than that.
II. Dewey and Confucianism
II.1 Empirical Naturalism and the Biological Basis of Humanity

John Dewey labels his philosophy “empirical naturalism” or “naturalistic
empiricism”(Dewey, 1958, 1). He treats experience as being “of as well as in nature.”
(Ibid., 4) That is to say, experience is within nature, on the one hand, and on the other,
it is also about nature. For Dewey, “experience” is what William James calls a
double-barreled word. It is “double-barreled”, because “it recognizes in its primary
integrity no division between act and material, subject and object, but contains them
both in an unanalyzed totality” (Ibid., 8). So, experience is a unity of “doing” and
“undergoing”, and “knowing” and “having”. “Every experience is the result of
interaction between a live creature and some aspects of the world in which he lives”
(Ibid., 43-44). Further, the pattern and structure of experience does not only consist in
the alternation between active “doing” and passive “undergoing”, but also in the
interaction of the two, where the uncertain elements of experience gradually complete
themselves through a series of events.
To be brief, Dewey’s experience is a sort of activity that does not merely exert its
influence, but also is exposed to external influences, due to the fact that human
organisms are both an agent and acted upon due to the unity of “doing” and
“undergoing”. Dewey’s conception of “experience”, for that matter, is somewhat
similar to that of classic Chinese Confucianism. Take, for example, one of the key
concepts of Confucianism: “Ren” (humanity). Confucius demonstrated his
understanding of the relation between individual experience and humanity by saying,
“If I desire humanity, there comes humanity!” (The Analects, 7. 30) It implies that, in
the experience of humanity, the individual is both an active agent and a passive
recipient. Another story: When asked to define humanity, Confucius said: “Loving
men” (The Analects, 12. 22). This amounts to placing humanity in the social
perspective of inter-subjectivity. More importantly, as in the mainstream of Chinese
thought, it has been found that Confucian ethics has a profound biological basis,
which explains the ever-lasting popularity of Confucianism. There is even research on
the biological basis of Confucianism by western scholars, represented by a well-noted
sinologist, Donald Munro, son of the famous philosopher Thomas Munro (Munro,
2005, 47-60). Donald Munro rightly points out that in contrast to the emphasis on
rationality by the mainstream of Western thought, emotions are held in due regard by
Confucianism. Nevertheless, Donald Munro’s view is still one-sided in that he fails to
see that the Confucian scholars are appealing for an encultured define practice on the
basis of natural emotions, and that the encultured practice must agree with moral
68 YUEDI LIU
principles, in particular, the principle of humanity. So, it should be remembered that

Confucian ethics places equal emphasis on sentiments and morality, and tries to
achieve a dynamic balance between them.
II.2 “An Experience” and “Consummation of Humanity”

Dewey suggests that when an experience is consummate, it becomes “aesthetic”. This
means that his Art as Experience is more than an aesthetic work. Instead, it concerns
the nature of experience itself. In defining “aesthetic experience”, Dewey invented the
concept of “an experience”. From the many examples that Dewey takes from daily
life, such as games, talks, writing and other artistic activities, it is clear that “an
experience” comes from daily life, but has its own character. As Dewey said, “Such
an experience is a whole and carries with it its own individualizing quality and self-
sufficiency”(Dewey, 1934, 35). On the other hand, Dewey insists that the unity is a
necessary quality for any experience to become “an experience”, for it gives the
experience a pervasive singleness. So, “The form of the whole is therefore present in
every member. Fulfilling, consummating, are continuous functions, not mere ends,
located at one place only” (Ibid., 56).
As a matter of fact, the experience of humanity that Confucianism advocates is
mostly a Deweyan experience. For one thing, Confucian moral experience is right in
daily life. For another, the Confucian ideal moral state has all the qualities of an
experience, such as an individualizing quality, self-sufficiency, completeness, etc.
The ethical aesthetics of Confucianism does not stop here, though. It is well-known
that Confucius offered a curriculum of “Six Arts” for the moral cultivation of the
common people. Not his own invention however “Over his lifetime, Confucius
attracted a fairly large group of such serious followers, and provided them not only
with book learning, but with a curriculum that encouraged personal articulation and
refinement on several fronts. His ‘six arts’ included observing propriety and
ceremony (li), performing music, and developing proficiency in archery, writing and
calculation, all of which, in sum, were directed more at cultivating the moral character
of his charge than at any set of practical skills. In the Chinese tradition broadly,
proficiency in the ‘arts’ has been seen as the medium through which one reveals the
quality of one’s personhood”(Ames and Rosemont, 1988, 3-4) .
As indicated above, whether it be the state of “rambling among the arts” or that
of “perfecting yourself with music”, both have amounted to the highest stage
humanity”. In Dewey’s words, both belong to “consummatory experience”. Just as
Dewey himself said at the end of Art as Experience, “art is more moral than
moralities. … Were art an acknowledged power in human association and not treated
as the pleasuring of an idle moment or as a meaning of ostentatious display, and were
morals understood to be identical with every aspect of value that is shared in
experience, the ‘problem’ of the relation of art and morals would not exist” (Dewey,
1934, 348). Similarly, the highest stage of Confucian ethics is an aesthetic life that is
made possible by long and profound artistic education.
II.3 “Emotions” in Experience and Ethical Qing

For Dewey, however, an experience itself is not necessarily an aesthetic experience.

He makes a distinction between “an experience” and “aesthetic experience”, though at
the same time connects them. He claims that an experience must have the aesthetic
quality, or “its materials would not be rounded out into a single coherent
experience”(Ibid., 54-55). It is not possible to divide in a vital experience the
practical, the emotional and the intellectual and to set the properties of one over
against the characteristics of the others. But it is clear that Dewey tries to include
“emotions” in his theory. He protests that “‘intellectual’ simply names the fact that
the experience has meaning,” and that “‘practical’ indicates that the organism is
interacting with events and objects which surround it.” Further, Dewey said, “I have
spoken of the esthetic quality those rounds out an experience into completeness and
unity as emotional” (Ibid., 41). It may follow that aesthetic experience must be
emotional. Yet, although “emotion is the directing force of aesthetic
experience”(Mathur, 1992, 389) ,an emotional experience does not necessarily have
aesthetic character. After all, emotion in a Deweyan sense is “total undergoing of the
experience” (Alexander, 1987, 205), and thus, is by no means confined within the
field of aesthetics. Dewey certainly has a broader understanding of the functions of
emotions. For example, he said, “Yes, emotion must operate. But it works to effect
continuity of movement, singleness of effect amid variety. It is selective of material
and directive of its order and arrangement” (Dewey, 1934, 69). Besides, an emotion
“reaches out tentacles for that which is cognate, for things which feed it and carry it to
completion”(Ibid., 67-68).
As “the experience itself has a satisfying emotional quality because it possesses
internal integration and fulfillment reached through ordered and organized
movement” (Ibid., 38), Dewey’s concept of emotion is essentially similar to the
concern for Qing in early Confucianism, though Qing is such a broad term as to
comprise the meanings of “sentiments”, “feelings”, “emotions” and even “affections”.
Etymologically, Qing refers to a clear and pure heart-mind. In Confucianism, it
includes such feelings as love, sympathy, benevolence, etc. that serve as the
foundation of interpersonal relations in the society. Confucian scholars also base their
knowledge and understanding of life on such “naturalistic” sentiments or emotions, as
they lead to reciprocal acts such as filial piety. For example, Mencius worked out a
unique doctrine of “Four Seeds”: “A heart of compassion is the seed of humanity. A
heart of conscience is the seed of righteousness. A heart of courtesy is the seed of
ritual. And a heart of right and wrong is the seed of wisdom. These four seeds are as
much a part of us as our four limbs” (Gongsun Chou, Book One). This paragraph is
the best testimony to the idea that Confucian ethics began with emotions.
In short, when considering the relation between aesthetics and ethics,
Confucianism displayed a line of thought similar to Dewey’s: firstly, the concept of
experience in Confucian ethics is much closer to Dewey’s; secondly, Confucian
ethical aesthetics also comprises a concept of “an experience”; and finally, the stress
of Confucian aesthetic ethics and Dewey’s aesthetics on the emotional in “aesthetic
experience” is nearly the same.

70 YUEDI LIU
III. Confucianism: Civilizing through Shen Qing (Deep Emotions)
The previous section has shown that, contrary to what many scholars have assumed,
Confucian ethical aesthetics and aesthetic ethics are both Qing-Oriented rather than
Ren-Oriented. Evidences can be found in Guodian Chu Slips, a Confucian work that
was written over two thousand years ago. For example, a piece of writing entitled
“Human Nature Derives from Mandate” goes: “Human nature (Xing) derives from the
Mandate (Ming); the Mandate comes from heaven (Tian); the Way starts with
emotions (Qing); emotions arise out of human nature.”(“Human Nature Derives from
Mandate” in Guadian Chu Slips) Here, “Qing’ is more likely to refer to the “facts”
（ Graham, 1990, 59-65; 1989, 98 ） . But how could the term “Qing” come to
designate “state of affairs”, “event instance” or “condition of things” at the same time
that it refers to the emotions that comes from within? The reason is this. Although
“Qing” mostly happened in concrete contexts, it sometimes acquired a metaphysical
sense, and came to mean something ontological, say, the contexts where emotions
arise. Here, the complex relations between Qing and other key concepts, such as Ren,
Li and Xing, come to the foreground.
III. 1 “Ren” and “Qing”

As for the connection between Ren (humanity) and Qing (emotions), there is a
reference to rituals and music in Guodian Chu Slips: “Humanity is internal.
Righteousness is external. And Ritual-Music is both (internal and external).”(“Six
Virtues” in Guadian Chu Slips) This is analogous to what Confucius said: “If a man is
not humane, what can he do with the rituals? If a man is not humane, what can he do
with music?” (The Analects, 3. 3) Yet Humanity should not be seen as the essence of
rituals and music, for both quotations only discuss the basic relationships among
rituals, music and humanity. Humanity is not singled out as something higher above
the other two. A functional approach is found in Guodian Chu Slips: “Rituals work
for the order of communicative acts, while music gives birth to humane emotions or
civilizes men.” (“Sentences Series, One” in Guadian Chu Slips) At any rate, rituals,
music and emotions cannot be said to be caused by humanity alone. Since “humanity
is born among men,” it certainly follows that emotion is also a defining element of
man.
III. 2 Li and Qing

In terms of the relationship between Li (rituals) and Qing (emotions), there are the
following points in Guodian Chu Slips: (1) “Rituals arise out of emotions and get
incited by them.”(“Human Nature Derives from Mandate” in Guadian Chu Slips) (2)
“Rituals are performed out of human emotions.” (“Sentences Series, One” in
Guadian Chu Slips) (3) “Rituals come from emotions, and obtain reverence from
rituals.” (“Sentences Series, One” in Guadian Chu Slips) All these points emphasize
that the rituals had their origin in human emotions, such as joy, anger, sorrow and

happiness. The verb “incite”, which is used as a predicate of “emotions” in the second
point, is especially revealing. For Chinese aesthetics, the most significant legacy of
Guodian Chu Slips is its reasonable treatment of rituals and emotions. This legacy,
however, was neglected in the succeeding millennia. Ever since Confucian scholars in
Han dynasty preached that “human nature is good, and emotions are bad”, human
desires and emotions had been unduly suppressed.
III. 3 Xing and Qing

Concerning the relationship between “Qing” (emotions) and “Xing” (human nature),
there are two statements in Guodian Chu Slips: one, “emotions come from human
nature, rituals from emotions;” (“Sentences Series, Two” in Guadian Chu Slips) and
the other, “truthfulness is the direction of emotions. Emotions arise out of human
nature.”(“Human Nature Derives from Mandate” in Guadian Chu Slip) That is to say,
man’s emotions are determined by his inner nature. When man’s inner nature receives
stimuli from outside, it will be externalized as emotions, which in turn will give rise
to rituals. Besides, it is also stressed that “so long as one is sincere, his mistakes are
not evil; so long as one is insincere, even his painstaking efforts will not be
appreciated; with sincerity, man does nothing to win trust”(Ibid.). It implies that only
sincere emotions can reveal men’s true nature. After all, “desire arises out of human
nature”, “evil arises out of human nature”, and “joyfulness arises out of human
nature.”(“Sentences Series, Two” in Guadian Chu Slips) In Li Ji (The Classic of
Rites), the Qing-orientation of the aesthetic ethics and ethical aesthetics in
Confucianism can essentially be summarized as follows: “When emotions are deeply
seated, the elegant display of them is brilliant. When all the energies (of the nature)
are abundantly employed, their transforming power is mysterious and spirit-like.
When a harmonious conformity (to virtue) is realized within, the blossoming display
of it is conspicuous without, for in music, more than other things, there should be
nothing that is pretentious or hypocritical.” This amounts to saying that those
emotions coming from the depths of men make possible a richer, fuller life, flowing
with rhythmical movements of music. With some variation, this paragraph was later
cited in Shi Ji (The Historical Records) for the purpose of highlighting the civilizing
function of “deeply seated emotions”, from which comes music (“Book of Music” in
Si Ma-qian, Shi Ji).
Simply put, only when emotions are deeply seated can they civilize. This is the
very motivation of both the aesthetic ethics and ethical aesthetics of Confucianism.
On the whole, the fundamental idea of Confucianism is this: emotions arise out of
human nature, and then they give birth to rituals and music. These three are in charge
of both the internal and the external aspects of men, combining to make a perfect
personality.
III. 4 The Unity of Daily Rituals and Ordinary Emotions

As early as Confucius’s age, the unity of rituals and music were the dominant trend
of thought in both Confucian aesthetics and ethics. However, ever since the
corruption of music, more importance had been attached to the unity of rituals and
emotions; more than that, more people agreed that the source of music lies in the
72 YUEDI LIU
emotions that are produced when human nature is influenced by external things. So, it
is well argued that the very cornerstones of both the aesthetic ethics and ethical
aesthetics of Confucius is nothing else but the unity of daily rituals and ordinary
emotions.
Why was music replaced by emotions? A historical explanation may be that, as
time passed by, the concept of music became too generalized to retain its importance.
But there was also a psychological answer: since emotions belong to the deep
psychology of men and thus give rise to music, they are certainly more revealing.
Such an idea owes a great debt to the findings of the Guodian Chu Slips. According to
a Chinese scholar, Li Xue-qin, of the 67 bamboo slips under the title of “Xing Ming Zi
Chu,” 36 mainly discuss “music”, while the other 30 are on “nature and emotions”
(Li, 2006, 260, 265). This discovery somewhat alters people’s traditional thinking on
the relations between music and emotions. But why is music so closely related to
emotions? The answer may lie in the prevailing idea expressed in Yue Ji (Discourse
on Music): emotions arise when human nature is influenced by external things, and it
is from emotions that music comes. So, emotions are more fundamental than music
(and rituals). This determines that the aesthetic ethics and ethical aesthetics of
Confucianism are both emotion-oriented.
Of course, just as rituals and music support each other, rituals and emotions can
also support each other. Interestingly, in reflecting on the issue of “aesthetic
experience”, some Western scholars suggest a distinction between two modes of
aesthetic engagement, namely “being” and “doing” (Cometti, 2008, 166-177). If we
adopt this suggestion, then the emotions that Confucianism advocates can be said to
both a being and a doing. That is to say, they are not only the emotions with which we
practice the rituals on special occasions, but also the most ordinary emotions one is
likely to have in daily life. In other words, instead of being special, detached aesthetic
experiences, such emotions always maintain continuity with daily, ordinary
experiences.
Conclusion
Based on the above discussion, it can be argued that Wittgenstein, Dewey and early
Chinese Confucianism all move towards a living aesthetic ethics or ethical aesthetics,
or in other words, all of them are in essence an ethical-aesthetic art of living, which is
quite close to my proposal of “Living Aesthetics”. It is exactly in the framework of
living aesthetics that we try to work on a sort of aesthetic ethics or ethical aesthetics
that returns to the life-world (Liu, 2005; 2007).
In his notebook, Wittgenstein wrote on July 8, 1916, that we should “live
happily” (Wittgenstein, 1961, 75) . He made that point again on July 29th, saying, “It
seems one cannot say anything more than: Live happily ! (Ibid., 78) As a matter of
fact, this is another key to understanding Wittgenstein’s aesthetics and ethics, for Ein
Ausdruck hat nur im Strome des Lebens Bedeutung. It is enough to repeat “Live
happily”. We do not need to say more. After all, the world of the happy is different
world from that of the unhappy. The world of the happy is a happy world (Ibid., 78) .
Likewise, Deweyan experience is mainly about “a social context and the ability to
regard themselves from the social perspective”, hence, also about a “life-world”
(Alexander 1987, xviii). Dewey’s aesthetics points to the “Art of life” (Alexander,
1988, 1-22), where beauty and goodness, aesthetics and ethics are coalesce. As is
noted, “This kind of Art of life is the goal behind Dewey’s ethics, his philosophy of
democracy, and his theory of education” (Alexander, 1987, 269). In explaining
experience itself, Dewey once said, “Because the actual world, that in which we live,
is a combination of movement and culmination, of breaks and re-unions, the
experience of a living creature is capable of esthetic quality”(Dewey, 1934, 16) . It is
clear that Dewey said it in view of the important role that the aesthetic plays in life.
Just as a critic pointed out, “The essential artistic criterion for Dewey is a heightened,
intensified, and deepened experience of the qualities of things and events”, and “make
life precious, worthwhile, and meaningful”(Mathur, 1992, 372).
By the same token, Confucianism can be seen as a form of meliorative
aestheticism. It tries to confer value on the world by making an affectionate
community. More importantly, it takes the rituals to be the basic aspect of the
interpersonal communication and interaction, while concrete emotions, which are
refined by rituals, are the locus in realizing this world (Ames, 2003). Due to its
emphasis on the unity of well-practiced rituals and daily, ordinary emotions,
Confucianism has suggested a different path to return to the life-world.
According to Wittgenstein’s well-noted account of “life-form”, “our form of life
is foundational in that it sets the scope of our various practices and yet can only be
characterized by exploring the full range of practices in which we engage” (Hutto,
2004, 28). This underlies a sort of “aesthetic life-form”, described by Wittgenstein
himself as an “everyday aesthetics itself” (Gibson and Hueme, 2004, 21-33). For that
matter, the “aesthetic life-form” constitutes in essence a “pattern of life”. If all this
taken into account, there is a “Third Wittgenstein” (Hark, 2004, 125-143) who
proposes a sort of aesthetic ethics and ethical aesthetics with a view of returning to
the “life-world” (Lebenswelt) . Therefore, it can be concluded that Wittgenstein,
Dewey and Chinese early Confucianism follow the same path in their “aesthetics of
life”. They not only advocate the ideal of returning to life on the doctrinal meaning,
but they also strive to realize it in everyday life.
Acknowledgement: I would like to express my gratitude to the three anonymous

reviewers for substantial written feedback.
Reference
Alexander, Thomas M. 1987. John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience and Nature: The
Horizon of Feeling. Albany: State University of New York Press.
——. 1998. “The Art of Life: Dewey’s Aesthetics”, in Larry A. Hickman ed., Reading
Dewey: Interpretations for a Postmodern Generation, Bloomington (Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press.
Ames, Roger T. & Henry Rosemont. 1998. The Analects of Confucius: a philosophical
translation. New York: Ballantine Books.
Ames, Roger T. 2003. “Confucianism and Deweyan Pragmatism: A Dialogue”. Journal

74 YUEDI LIU
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Cometti, Jean-Pierre. 2008. “Between being and doing: aesthetics at crossroads”, Richard
Shusterman and Adele Tomlin eds., Aesthetic Experience. New York: Routledge.
Dewey, John. 1934. Art as Experience. New York : The Berkley Publishing Group.
——. 1958. Experience and Nature. New York: Dover Publications Inc.
Dickinson, G. Lowes. 1909. The Greek View of Life. London : Methuen & Co. Ltd.
Gibson, John and Wolfgang Huemer. 2004. The Literary Wittgenstein. London and New York:
Routledge.
Graham, A. C. 1989. Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China. La Salle,
Illinois: Open Court.
— — . 1990. Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature. Albany: State
University of New York Press.
Hark, Michel Ter. “‘Pattern of life’: a Third Wittgenstein Concept’”. Danièle Moyal
Sharrock eds., The Third Wittgenstein: The Post-Investigations Works. Ashgate
Publishing.
Hutto, Daniel D. 2004. “Two Wittgenstein too Many: Wittgenstein’s Foundationalism”.
Danièle Moyal-Sharrock eds., The Third Wittgenstein: The Post-Investigations Works.
Ashgate Publishing.
Liu Yuedi, 2005. Performing Live Aesthetics. Hefei: Anhui Education Publishing House.
——. 2007. Living Aesthetics and Art Experience. Nanjing: Nanjing Publishing House.
Kant, Immanuel. 1987. Critique of Judgment. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.
Xue-qin, Li. 2006. “Guodian Slips and ‘Discourse on Music’”, A Remap of Intellectual
History, Shijiazhuang: Hebei Education Publishing House.
Xun Zi. 1994. Xun Zi: A Translation and Study of the Complete Works. vol. 3. California:
Stanford University Press.
Mathur, D. C. 1992. “The meaning of ‘emotion’ in Dewey’s Art as Experience”. J. E.
Tiles ed., John Dewey Critical Assessments. Vol.43. London and New York: Routledge.
Mathur, D. C. 1992. “A Note on the Concept of ‘Consummatory Experience’ in Dewey’s
Aesthetics”. J. E. Tiles ed., John Dewey Critical Assessments. Vol.43. London and New
York: Routledge.
Mou, Bo. 2008. “On the Constructive-Engagement Methodological Strategy in Comparative
Philosophy”, in Social Science Front, (9).
Munitz, M. K. 1981. Contemporary Analytic Philosophy. New York: Macmillan.
Munro, Donald. “The Biological Basis of Confucian Ethics: Or, A Reason Why Confucianism
Has Endured for So Long”, in Donald Munro, A Chinese Ethics for the New Century. Hong
Kong: The Chinese University Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1995. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul Ltd.
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Xu Fu-guan, 1987. The Spirit of Chinese Art. Shenyang: Chunfeng Wenyi Chubanshe.

ARJUNA: THE DEFEATED HERO
Proyash Sarkar
Abstract: The customary way of interpreting the dialogue between Arjuna and
Kṛṣṇa in the Bhagavad-Gita is to consider it merely as an expression of the fear of
the diffident Arjuna, who is depicted by almost all the commentators as being
scared of fighting the battle, and Kṛṣṇa’s ingenuous solution to it. This paper
argues that this common way of looking at the conflict leaves the central theme of
the debate unattained and unsolved. The debate can also be viewed as a statement
of the confrontation between two ethics and two notions of the self. The claim is not
that the customary interpretation is false, or that the present one is the only
possible interpretation. It rather makes a much moderate claim that it is possible to
give the text an alternative reading, which sheds some light on the nature of Indian
ethics as such. It is long debated as to whether India had ever had an ethics. This
paper claims to give some insight into the debate.
THE BHAGAVAD-GITA being the repository of the mainstream Indian ethics

deserves special attention of anyone who is interested in the subject. It is debatable
whether India had ever had an ethics, which, as it is ordinarily understood, is the
study of the norms of conduct and their justification. It tries to discover, and
sometimes invent, what is right and what is wrong, but always with some
justification. Whether or not India had an ethics depends on what counts as an ethical
justification. If mythological explanation together with testimony of reliable persons
or revelation is to be counted as a valid source of justification, then India did have an
ethics. Both in India and abroad ethics for several centuries derived its justification
from religious and mythological sources. All religious texts have an ethics in this
sense. What is written in the textbooks of Indian ethics are mostly a set of rules of
human conduct. These rules are often collected from various law books like
Manusaṁhitā, Parāśrasaṁhitā, etc. These texts provide us with some mythical story
about genesis and also about the origin of these texts, which are claimed to be
revelations to the ancient seers who percolated their wisdom, through their disciples,
for the benefit of mankind. This provides us with a ground for following the norms
stated in those texts. Once we accept this story of genesis, these norms become
compelling for us, since these norms come directly from God, who created this
universe with all its life-forms. So, it may be urged, the claim that Indian ethics does
not provide justification in support of the norms prescribed in it, does not stand. But
modern ethics after the enlightenment has never relied upon myths or revelation for
justifying the theories proposed in it. Ethics, as construed in the contemporary

Dr. PROYASH SARKAR, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Jadavpur
University, Kolkata 700 032, India. Email: [email protected].

76 PROYASH SARKAR
Western thought, is a normative study of human conduct. It studies the righteousness

and wrongness of human action and those of the norms guiding such conduct. But
what is noticeable here is that the mere study of those conducts and the norms guiding
them was never considered as ethics. It also requires some justification in support of
those norms or the criterion (or criteria) validating those norms. In this sense it can be
doubted whether India had ever had an ethics. This is not to claim that “ethics”
cannot, or does not, have any other connotation. At the same time it must also be
noted that this is one of the predominant, and philosophically interesting, senses of
the term.
Taken in a wider sense, however, as the study of human conduct, India definitely
had an ethics. The study of morality can be viewed from two different perspectives—
first from the perspective of prescribing norms and providing justification for them,
and second, from the perspective of describing the norms of the society we live in.
The second perspective assumes that we live in a justice based society and, hence, we
need not revise the norms of conduct prevalent in our society. The reason is that if
justice is there, or if it has already been established in the society, then we need not
set norms to establish or reestablish it, provided that a justice bases society is our
goal. We bring about changes in, or seek to change, our social norms, where we find
the existing norms to be deficient. On the other hand, if we confine the task of ethics
just to describing the prevalent norms of the society and claim that there is no need to
change those norms, we thereby assume that the existing norms can, at least
potentially, establish justice. If description of norms of human conduct is to be
considered as the task of ethics, then India did definitely have its ethics.
The traditional Indian society was considered to be a justice-based society,
though the concept of justice was strikingly different from that advocated by the
Western ethicists. Equality had never been a guiding principle of justice in India.
Rather, the Indian ethics can be regarded as an ethics based on the principle of
inequality. It holds that people situated differently due to their social and sexual
identity deserve to be treated differently and have different ethical responsibility from
the ethical perspective. It may not be as grotesque, as it appears to be, if we consider
that in any hierarchical social order some people within the family have more ethical
rights and higher responsibility than the other members. A naturalized from of ethics
may confine itself to merely describing those norms.
The Gītā stands at the crossroad of Indian ethics. We find in the text many things
that mark its difference from the ethical texts written earlier. Though the ethical
implications of the philosophies of the Upaniṣad-s can be discerned by any serious
scholar of the Veda-s, it is for the first time in the history of Indian ethics that we find
in the Gītā a systematic attempt of justifying ethical claims on philosophical grounds.
The Gītā raises the “why” question at the ethical sphere and tries to answer it in
metaphysical terms. Thus ethics becomes supervenient on metaphysics. Second, the
Gītā rebels against the earlier Vedic ritualism (karmakāṇḍa) and argues in support of
the need for assimilating wisdom (jñāna), action (karman) and devotion (bhakti) for
performing the right action. Vedic ritualism may be viewed as a sophisticated form of
black-magic and has very little to do with ethics as the study of social conduct of
human beings. It gives us only some imperatives for performing sacrifices (yajña-s),
ARJUNA: THE DEFEATED HERO 77
which lead to some mundane gain (abhyudaya), like having more cattle, or some
transcendental goal (nihśreyasa), viz. liberation. Such imperatives can hardly explain
why a course of action is to be undertaken within a just society. Third, as against the
consequentialist ethical practices of the Vedic cult it advocates deontologism, though
at places we find verses, which indicate toward consequentialism. Kṛṣṇa urged, “O
Conqueror of wealth (Arjuna) mere action is inferior to the practice of intelligence.
Take recourse to intelligence. Those, who perform their action for the attainment of
the desired goals, are weak (in character).”1
The Gītā rightly points out that consequentialism advocates that our ethical
practices should depend on our self-interest, and hence, it argues that it cannot be a
proper guiding force for our ethical action. It also needs to be noted that personal
liberty, which is considered to be one main objective of the entire Western ethics, had
never been on the agenda for the Indian ethicist. Personal liberty in ethics and
individualism in politics go hand in hand, one complimenting the other. The basic
presupposition is that individuals living in societies have a separate existence
conceptually prior to that of the society they live in. So, the domain of individual
liberty is sacrosanct and should not be intervened by the society. The society reserves
the right to interfere into one’s personal liberty only if the enjoyment of such so-
called individual rights hinders others from enjoying their rights. Thus on this view
the individuals are given supreme autonomy of will over and above the society. This
supreme autonomy helps the individual develop her personality and also acts as an
incentive towards the development of the society. Indian ethics, on the other hand,
takes an organismic approach to the society and the individuals living in it. Just as the
limbs of a person cannot be considered in isolation from the body the individual lives
in and for the society. The individual can enjoy autonomy only within the restrictive
and regulative norms of the society. These norms have been codified in the sacred law
books, such as Manusmṛti. The purpose of a woman’s life, for example, is to help
man attaining his mundane goal, like producing a male child to get the family lineage
going. Since she lives for the society, she is morally obliged to perform her societal
duty as a mother, or a wife. She has no right to decide what to do and what not to do.
She enjoys freedom only to the extent to which she can decide when to do it or how to
do it. Similarly, a man is obliged to perform the duties assigned to him on the basis of
the caste he belongs to and the stage of his life he is going through. Everything,
including his occupation, or the type of partner that he should take in his life, is thus
predetermined to a great extent. He doesn’t have freedom to select his mate from any
caste of his choice, though within the suitable caste he is free to select his bride,
subject to the approval of his family. Neither is he free to choose his own calling.
The type of liberty and autonomy that was presupposed in modern Western ethics
cannot be witnessed in Indian ethics, as moral agents have been ascribed only a
limited autonomy in it. Autonomy and personal liberty are thought to be subservient
to the social order in the Indian context. As we have already noted, the traditional
Indian societies were guided by social norms later on codified by various law-makers
1
Dureṇa hi avaraṁ karma buddhiyogāt dhanañjaya/
Buddhau śaraṇam anviccha kṛpaṇāh phalahetavaḥ// Bhagavdgītā, 2/49.
78 PROYASH SARKAR
including Manu, Parāśara and Gautama. According to this approach, human beings
can enjoy freedom to the extent to which the society ascribe it to them, and which has
no discord with the social order. Indian ethics believes that rights and duties should
depend on and be proportionate to one’s station and social status. Individuals have the
freedom of will and autonomy only in the restricted sense of enjoying one’s rights and
performing ones duties according to one’s social position determined primarily by
birth. This autonomy may be called as subservient autonomy as opposed to the
supreme autonomy presupposed in the mainstream Western ethics. We shall see that
the dialogue between Arjuna and Kṛṣṇa raises the question of autonomy in a
significant way.
Two types of duties are ascribed to individuals in Indian ethics—universal duties
(sāmānya dharma/sādhāraṇa dharma) and particular duties (viśeṣa dharma).
Absolute duties are those which are incumbent on the individual irrespective of
his/her sex, birth and social status. Duties like nonviolence and truthfulness are
supposed to be performed by everybody under all circumstances. Particular duties, on
the other hand, depend on the position of the moral agent in the hierarchy of the social
order depending on sex, birth and age of the moral agent. For example, the duty of a
warrior is to protect the clan and to rule it. The rights and duties of a priest are to
study and teach the Veda-s and to conduct and perform religious rites. It is noticeable
that from the later Vedic era women had little autonomy, and consequently, had a
very limited moral agency. The same is true about the other marginalized groups. The
entire edifice of the hierarchy of duties (dharma-s) follows from scriptures in the
Vedic tradition. No further justification is needed, since the scriptures are claimed to
be incorrigible. Duties in this tradition have been defined as injunctions (of
scriptures). Kṛṣṇa urged Arjuna to perform his duties. Now, which duty Kṛṣṇa was
talking about? It is noticeable that Kṛṣṇa was asking Arjuna to perform his particular
duty, i.e. his duty as a warrior, at the cost of not observing some of his specific duties,
e.g. non-violence.
The dharmaśāstra-s contained very little or no discussion of normative ethics.
They contained laws, including moral injunctions, governing all aspects of human
life. The Mahābhārata, and the Gītā in particular, is perhaps the only major work
where an explicit normative theory has been developed. The line of argumentation
with the help of which the main doctrine has been justified in the Gītā is metaphysical
in nature. However, an argument in support of the metaphysical basis on which the
main line of argumentation depends is perspicuous in its absence in the text. We have
to keep in mind that the Mahābhārata is an orthodox text. Anything that is supported
by the Veda-s needs no further justification. The argumentative part of the Gītā is thus
marked by the existence of different moral voices in the heterogeneous Indian society.
Working within the bounds of the orthodox forms of life the dharmaśāstra-s
presupposed that the existing societies to be more or less justice-based societies and
are conducive to ethical good. We will argue that the Gītā is a major departure from
this tradition.
The mainstream Western ethics presupposes a particular notion of the self. The
entire ethical tradition of the West, as well as India, is parasitic upon the notion of the
self. In the mainstream Western tradition moral agency is ascribed to an autonomous
and detached self, which can take independent decisions. By the expression
‘independent decision’ here we mean decisions that are not permeated by passions
and are not influenced by the context in which it is taken. This moral agent is a pure
form devoid of any content. No relation can move him, no emotion can touch him,
and the flesh fails in its beastly endeavor of swallowing up its unambiguous
rationality, which is so translucent that like a prism analyzing colors of a ray of light,
it separates shades of virtues from those of vices of human conduct.
Here is a story, rather a thought experiment, of an autombie and a senti. They
were not actual human beings, but looked like them. The autombie had a set of
exclusive rules to guide its conduct. It was autonomous and unlike an ordinary
zombie it was not controlled by any external agent, it was created by some external
agent though. It had the intention of following rules and could report exactly its
internal ‘mental’ states, including its intentions. The senti was a fleshy beast having
no rules of conduct. Instinctive drive and gut feeling are the sole factors with the help
of which it could assess a situation and decided a course of action. Both the senti and
the autombie worked for a humanitarian organization as medical personnel in a war
ravaged city of Afghanistan. The autombie had no facial expression of emotions. The
senti, on the other hand, was full of emotions and that was expressed in its facial
expression. The autombie used to distribute medicines among the patients of a local
hospital and senti had the duty entrusted on it of doing beds of the patients. Both of
them spent most of the money they earned on doing some good to the patients, like
buying gifts for them. The autombie did it dispassionately, while the senti lacking
reason did it by a gut feeling.
One elderly lady patient, Umbalica, loved both of them. The senti’s passionate
eyes reminded her of her twenty-two year old daughter, whom she had lost along with
her entire family in an air attack roughly one year back. Rather than resembling the
aid providers, the autombie’s expressionless face and frigid movements resembled
more closely with those of the inmates of the hospital. So, she could identify herself
with the autombie more easily than with anyone else. She would wake up early in the
morning and wait for them to come in the ward. The autombie was as punctual as was
unerring about its duties. It would approach each bed, say, “Good morning!” wait for
a reply, acknowledge it, pass the prescribed medicine on to the patient and then move
on to the next bed. This entire act would roughly take two minutes for each bed.
When the autombie is done with distributing medicines, it would return to its
chamber. Umbalica often thought of asking the autombie about the incident that she
thought had turned it into a piece of stone. The senti was often late at attending
patients. It would spend some time at each bed, talk to them, take care of their
individual needs, and then move on to the next bed. Soon it developed a personal
relationship with each of them.
The day was exactly one year after Umbalica lost her family and she was
extremely depressed. In the morning the autombie came to her bed, looked at her,
checked her temperature and, as usual, moved on to the next bed after administering
the prescribed medicine. Umbalica’s helpless eyes had no effect on it, and it couldn’t
understand her mental condition. Nor it was requires to understand that, as it was not
a psychiatrist. A little later the senti came to her. It looked into her eyes intensely.
80 PROYASH SARKAR
With its gut sense it could gauge the turmoil that was going on in her mind. It said
nothing, just sat beside her holding her hand. Umbalica asked the senti if it were
being late in attending other patients and reminded that it might be scolded by the
ward mistress afterwards. The senti politely replied, ‘Heavens will not fall if I attend
other patients a little later. I want to spend some time with you now. Besides, I’m
quite used to her scolding. You don’t have to be bothered about that. I can manage
such situations.’
It is quite clear from the story that the autombie was more dutiful than the senti
and followed the principle of equality religiously. But the question still remains who
was a better creature from the moral perspective?
Every moral agent has in herself an autombie and a fleshy beast. Depending on
their respective theories of the self Arjuna and Kṛṣṇa assessed the war situation
differently.
The Gītā deviates to a great extent from the mainstream Indian ethics in that it
clearly propagates a theory of a detached self in support of the ethical doctrines
advocated in it. The self in its pure form, as has been claimed, is devoid of all
relations and is not permeated by passions and relations that infuse the mundane
existence. Detachment of the self from its other has been proposed for the ascetic in
the Indian ethics right from the days of the Upanisad-s. Perhaps, it was for the first
time in the Gītā that it was proposed for the ordinary human beings as well. Kṛṣṇa
urged in the Gīta,
Vāsāṁsi jīrnāni yathā vihāya navāni gṛhnāti naro’parāṇi/

Tathā śarīrāṇi vihāya jīrnānyanyāni saṁyāti navāni dehī//2/22//
Just as human beings change worn-out cloths and put on others that are new, the soul
changes its abode and takes a new one after the former gets old. It can better be
explained with the allegory of a snake casting off its skin. The relation between the
self and the body is similar to that of a snake and its slough, the only difference being
unlike the serpent the self is not perishable.
Nainaṁ chindanti śastrāṇi nainaṁ dahati pāvakaḥ/

Na chainaṁ kledayantyāpo na śoṣayati mārutaḥ// (Bhagavdgītā, 2/23)
Swords cannot shred it, fire cannot burn it, water cannot drench it, nor can wind make
it dry.
At the beginning of the first day’s battle seeing his friends and relative Arjuna, on
the other hand, stated his predicament in the following verses:
Dṛṣṭvemaṁ svajanaṁ yuytsaṁ samupasthitam /

Sīdanti mama gātrāṇī mukhañca pariśuṣyati//1/28/
Vepathuśca śarīre me romaharṣaśca jayate/
Gāṇḍīva sraṁsate hastat tvak chaiva paridahyate//1/29/

“When I see my own people arrayed and eager for fight… [m]y limbs quail, my
mouth goes dry, my body shakes and my hair stands on end.”2
Kṛṣṇa interpreted Arjuna’s predicament as the latter’s fear of fighting the battle.
But if the arguments that would be presented in this paper were sound, then the
attempt of discarding his arguments as frivolous would be besieged by doubt.
Arjuna raised a few serious questions with regard to Hindu ethics. He could see
no mundane good, as attaining pleasure, in killing his rivals, who happened to be his
near and dear ones. He tried to convince that (even on the injunctions of the sacred
text) killing an assassin would still invite sin on part of the retaliator. Apparently, he
doubted the acceptability of a retributive theory of punishment, one of the principal
theoretical bases of a just war. He wondered whether an-eye for-an-eye mode of
punishment could bring about justice and the ultimate triumph of good over evil. This
appears to be a serious question, which cannot possibly be answered simply by
referring to the testimonial evidences that goes against it. Two reasons can be cited
for this claim. First, Arjuna’s position is also supported by textual evidence. As in
Udyogaparva, 38, 73, 74 of the Mahābhārata, it is said, “conquer anger by non-
anger, conquer dishonesty by honesty, conquer a miser by gifts; conquer falsehood
with truth.”3 Arjuna, however, didn’t give any testimonial evidence in support of his
claim. One reason why he didn’t quote any text in his support was probably that he
knew that an equal number of textual evidences might be cited against his argument.
And the stronger reason was that it was the very same texts whose authority he was
trying to challenge by his arguments. Quoting those very texts whose authority he was
challenging might have made his position more vulnerable to adverse criticism. He
made two points clear in his argument. First, he did not endorse the theoretical basis
of a just war and second, he thought that moral prescriptions arising out of a concept
of a related self would be markedly different from those based on the concept of an
unrelated self. It was for the first time in his life that he got the insight that the
concept of an unrelated self is a chimera, which led one nowhere, neither to his
earthly wellbeing nor to any ethical good. He used the expression “my own people”
(svajanam) four times in the first chapter of the Gītā. His arguments started at verse
28 of the first chapter of the text, where he reported that seeing his own people in the
opposite side his body ached, and his mouth went dry. This first expression was a
sudden outburst of emotion. Kṛṣṇa, who was a staunch supporter of the
reason/emotion binary, developed his main line of argument on this statement.
Seeing his beloved and respected ones on the opposite side Arjuna became full of
compassion and said, “my mind is reeling [from the path of the received knowledge
of right and wrong]. I see the act of killing my own people to be the causes of
producing results that are detrimental to good and righteousness. Nor do I see
anything ethically desirable (śreyo) can be produced by killing my own people.”
2
Radhakrishnan, S., The Bhagavadgita, HarperCollins Publishers India, New Delhi, 2004, p.
89.
3
Akrodhena jayet krodham, asādhuṁ sādhunā jayet/
Jayet kadaryaṁ dānena, jayet satyena cānṛtam// Udyogaparva, 38, 73, Mahābhārata.
82 PROYASH SARKAR
Nowhere in the Gītā was it said that Arjuna was afraid of fighting the battle
because of his own life. He was rather worried for the lives of his friends and
relatives. Instead of seeing this emotion as a virtue of his character Kṛṣṇa considered
it to be a weakness, which would lead Arjuna to the hell at the end. He (Kṛṣṇa),
rather, endorsed the path of persuasion. He himself was convinced at the fairness of
the ensuing war and was not open to any argument whatsoever. He wondered how
Arjuna, who was an Aryan, could be so emotional like a non-Aryan. He instigated the
latter to fight by saying that leaving the battle would cause him vice. Leaving the
battle by a warrior is supposed to be a vice for the kṣatriya in all Dharmaśāstra-s.
Kṛṣṇa was, perhaps, referring to that. This, however, couldn’t solve Arjuna’s worries.
For one is not supposed to refute an adverse criticism with the help of the theses
under scrutiny or by referring to the texts whose validity is the point at issue. Such
solutions are considered to be suffering from the fallacy of being question-begging
(sādhyasama-doṣa). We would see that the main strategy of the philosophy of the
Gītā is that of persuasion rather than argumentation. The text is a gem of the art of
persuasion and a literary work of equal merit.
Arjuna’s view appears to be more congruent with the mainstream Indian
approach to ethics. The Indian ethicists never took the ethical agent in isolation in
judging her conduct. Arguably, situatedness runs through the entire Indian
philosophy. It is for the first time in the history of Dharmaśāstra-s that the Gītā
advocates detachment for a non-ascetic, a move that made Arjuna all the more
perplexed. The Dharmaśāstra-s, a group of texts to which the Gītā belongs, clearly
give us the impression that when it comes to the relation between the individual and
the society, they clearly side with the latter. There is no scope for individualism and
deontologism. Individual life, as we have already pointed out at the outset, is meant
for and is directed towards the betterment of the society. The teleological or
consequentialist underpinning of the prevalent views can easily be discerned in the
texts. The ethical merit or demerit of an act depends on its conduciveness to the
societal goal. No act can be considered to be ethically good by itself. Righteousness
of an act depends on the end that it is directed to or the goal it seeks to attain. The
Gītā, on the other hand, maintains that the ethical merit of an action is intrinsic to it.
This, in turn, is justified by divine origin of the duties promoting those acts. Kṛṣṇa
advised Arjuna to follow the path of action (karma) done not for attaining any
personal goal. Arjuna’s arguments bring forth the inbuilt contradiction in Indian
ethics—absolute autonomy of the self and its situatedness cannot go together. The
poverty of the main line of argument of the text lays bare in the inarticulate questions
raised by mumbling Arjuna.
However, this was a later revelation in the story. When Arjuna presented his
arguments, he seemed to have no idea as to what Kṛṣṇa had in his mind and what type
of theory of ethics he was going to uphold to refute the former’s arguments. So, it
would be ludicrous to claim that Arjuna was refuting deontologism, though his
arguments went against it. His arguments rather stemmed from the mainstream Indian
approach to ethics.
Arjuna further urged that he couldn’t be happy killing his friends and relatives. It
is noticeable that though he argued in favor of avoiding homicide in war, yet his
emphasis was clearly on not killing his own people, his near and dear ones. He further
wondered how he could be happy in life by killing his own people. 4 Apparently, he
found no reason for fighting the battle, other than personal greed for enjoying the
kingdom. This first argument can be understood better from a theoretical perspective
of a conflict of ethics of a related and caring self with the ethics of a pure detached
self. Most of the arguments that he presented subsequently stemmed from his
practical concern, vis-à-vis moral concern, for the society he lived in. He was
concerned about the extinction of family decent and was also worried about the
treachery to his friends involved in the imminent war. He further mentioned that by
destroying the families he would be destroying the traditional values maintained and
nurtured through the family system and that destruction of those values would result
in a surge of immorality into the society (Bhagavdgītā, 1/40-41).
Apparently, the last one is a moral argument, as Arjuna was arguing that fighting
the battle would cause in a total rout of morality from the society. How far the
arguments provided by Arjuna were moral in nature is an issue of constant debate.
Commentators like Shri Girindra Shekhar Basu take much pain to show that none of
Arjuna’s arguments were moral in nature.5 He further claims that the arguments that
Arjuna provided were solely a way of self-deception on the part of Arjuna, who
either wedged the war due to personal greed without ever contemplating upon its
consequences, or got anguished at the thought that he would have to kill his beloved
ones. Aujuna repeatedly used the words “dharma” and “adharma” while in his
arguments. Basu opines 6 that these terms stand for social good and social evil
respectively and do not have any moral connotation. I don’t see why this should be
so, while Arjuna repeatedly used the terms like “dharma,” “adharma,” “śreyo” and
“pāpa” in his arguments. It is true that the terms “dharma,” and “adharma,” are often
used, in Sanskrit, to respectively stand for a social duty or that, which leads to social
good and a social obligation for refraining from doing something that leads to social
evil. However, the terms “śreyo” and “pāpa” do hardly have any such social
connotation. Furthermore, at the end of his argument Arjuna urged, “…I’m confused
about what is morally good (dharma-saṁmuḍha-cetā)…guide me” (Bhagavdgītā,
2/11). If we interpret ‘dharma’ in this statement as social good or social duty, then we
would have to claim that Kṛṣṇa’s advices, at best, contained nothing that pertained to
morality, or at worst, were totally irrelevant. The first alternative does not seem to be
acceptable to any orthodox Hindu, who thinks his moral life draws heavily on the
teaching of the Gītā. A charitable reading of the text must grant at least as much to
Kṛṣṇa as to admit that his speeches contained something pertaining to morality. The
second alternative is equally unacceptable. It is hard to believe that Kṛṣṇa, whose self-
proclaimed omniscience was virtually endorsed by Arjuna, did not have a sense of
relevance. If the latter did not put any moral question to him, and yet he started
preaching Arjuna morality while in a battlefield, then surely he lacked a sense of
relevance. Basu, however, does not address this issue.
4
Swanjanaṁ hi kathaṁ hatvā sukhinah syān mādhava/ Bhagavdgītā, 1/39.
5
Basu, Shri Girindra Shekhar, Bhagavadgītā, p. 27.
6
Ibid.
84 PROYASH SARKAR
It may be argued that though such words as “śreyo” and “pāpa” do not have any
direct social connotation, yet they imply some social aspect of human life, since all
aspects, including the moral aspects, of human life are ultimately related with the
society such beings live in. Having said this, the objector has already distracted from
her main contention that Arjuna’s arguments did not have any moral dimension.
Besides, rather than refuting the thesis of the present paper, in a way it supports one
of the claims made in this paper, that is, the Hindu ethics was developed the backdrop
of the unquestionable presupposition that the traditional Hindu society as described in
the sacred texts is a (morally) just society.7
The main stake of Arjuna’s argument was that fighting the battle would result
into the destruction of the existing social order. This and several other similar
instances in the Gītā can be cited in support of the hypothesis mentioned above.
Arjuna further mentioned that the annihilation of the societal values would make the
women of the society corrupt, which in its turn, would result in a hybridization of the
castes of that highly stratified society. He mentioned that such acts, as wedging a war,
would have a cumulative effect on the society destroying the traditional values and
the societal order by producing mixed castes, resulting in a total rout of the practice of
performing sacrifices for one’s ancestors. These things would suffice to lead an
individual to hell.
If we consider Kṛṣṇa’s speeches that he delivered for Arjuna, after the latter
submitted to him, as a disciple submits to an Indian seer, or a devotee submits to her
guru, we will find that the former endorsed the path of persuasion rather than
argumentation. As soon as Arjuna submitted to him, accepted him as his guru and
sought his advice,8 he started rebuking Arjuna, calling him a pedantic. Kṛṣṇa’s initial
reaction to Arjuna’s predicament had two reasons in its favour. First, he didn’t
consider these people deserved any pity. Secondly, Arjuna was reminded that wise
men wouldn’t think like him—the wise would not lament for those who were living,
nor would he lament for those who passed away (Bhagavdgītā, 2/11). Arjuna was also
rebuked for having compassion, for those who didn’t deserve it (Ibid) The second was
a more general objection than the first one. Not only had these people, who, according
to Kṛṣṇa, had chosen the path of vice (adharma), deserved no compassion, but
nobody in general deserved to have compassion of others. For, life and death of a
person were supposed to be predetermined in accordance with the law of karma.
Kṛṣṇa’s persuasive mood becomes all the more clear if we consider that earlier he
reprimanded Arjuna for the latter’s “unmanliness” (klaibyam) caused by his emotions
that were characteristic only of the non-Aryans. Kṛṣṇa contended that such petty
7
The two crucial terms in this statement are ‘unquestionable’ and ‘just.’ I won’t say anything
about the former. I think B. R. Ambedkar has said enough on the unquestionable nature of
Hindu sacred texts. (See B. R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste, Chapter XXI, many
editions). The presupposition that such a society is a justice-based society can be easily
discerned throughout what is called Hindu ethics from the fact that any action that seemed to be
in discord with its norms established by the sacred texts were considered to be immoral.
8
Yacchreyaḥ syānniścitaṁ brūhi tanme śisyaste’haṁ śādhi māṁ tvāṁ prapannam/
Bhagavdgītā, 2/7.
emotions didn’t suit Arjuna, who was rather known for his ability of inflicting pain
upon his enemies. Kṛṣṇa even presented arguments, the validity of which he himself
didn’t accept. Kṛṣṇa argued that Arjuna’s emotions would not lead him to heaven.
This has a strong flavour of consequentialism, which goes against the basic
contention of the Gītā. If we follow Kṛṣṇa’s main line of argumentation, then we
readily see that he left no stones unturned for rejecting consequentialism in favour of
deontologism. This shows that he had only one agendum in mind, that is, instigating
Arjuna into fight.
The general philosophical stance that the Gītā takes is that of deontologism.
Kṛṣṇa’s severe criticism of the consequentialism underlying the Vadic ritualism
shows his allegiance to deontologism. But while refuting Arjuna’s arguments he
relied on consequentialism on several occasions. For, he had to convince Arjuna by
hook or by crook. The jargon of consequentialism was known to Arjuna. So, Kṛṣṇa
found it easier to convince Arjuna in terms of that jargon. Kṛṣṇa claimed that he was
God and that if a person would think about him at the time of his death, since his
mind would always concentrate on God, he would become identical with him [God]
(Bhagavdgītā, 8/6). Arjuna was, therefore, asked to always remember him, and fight
the battle (Bhagavdgītā, 8/7). Kṛṣṇa realized that Arjuna was enjoying his long
metaphysical speech (Bhagavdgītā, 10/1) even though they were in a battlefield. He,
however, was not sure whether Arjuna was convinced by it. He left no stones
unturned to persuade Arjuna in the war. Finally, he made an emotional appeal, ‘If
[after listening to all that I have said] you are still unable to follow them, then at least
do it for my sake; you will get success.’9 However, apart from its emotional appeal,
this statement has a devotional aspect, which lies beyond the scope of the present
discussion. What is pertinent for the present purpose is that in order to bring home his
point, Kṛṣṇa relied on consequentialism in this instance as well.
In Chapter IX Kṛṣṇa described a cosmology, according to which everything that
happens or exists in this world, was caused by him. He (Kṛṣṇa) is the root cause of
what there is. However, his premises were not supported by arguments. Neither were
they supposed to depend on any argument. He relied upon persuasion rather than
argumentation, as he knew it well that persuasion was often more effective than
argumentation. But Arjuna had to be persuaded, since he had already accepted Kṛṣṇa
as his mentor and had surrendered to the latter unconditionally. In Chapter X Arjuna
accepted everything that Kṛṣṇa said so far.10 In the light of this complete submission
of Arjuna Kṛṣṇa made the appeal mentioned above.
What the present argument shows is that Kṛṣṇa’s long speeches had great
persuasive force, which could take the bereaved Arjuna under its spell, though the
arguments that he provided missed out Arjuna’s main contention, i.e. a sense of care
arising out of the concept of a related self. The ethics of the Gītā starts where reason
submits to persuasion, indoctrination supersedes ratiocination, personal liberty
subsumes under social wellbeing following the parameters set by the sacred texts and
9
Abhyāse’pysamartho’si matkarmaparamo bhava/
Madarthamapi karmāṇi kurvan siddhimavāpsyasi// Bhagavdgītā, 12/10.
10
Sarvam etad ṛtaṁ manye yanmām vadasi keśava/ Bhagavdgītā, 10/14.
86 PROYASH SARKAR
customs including scriptural injunctions act as the sole guiding force of the individual
life. It is perfectly in accordance with the mainstream classical Indian ethics, for
which human life has a purpose to serve in the design of things and is subsumed
under the social order. The type of autonomy of thought that was exemplified in
“Arjuna-Visāda-Yoga” has no scope in Hindu ethics, since Hindu ethics is a
Prasthāna-Mīmāṁsā, a mode of discourse with prior commitment.
Acknowledgement: I would like to thank the two anonymous referees for their
comments and observations on an earlier draft of the paper.

UNIVERSAL TRUTH VERSUS CHINESE EXCEPTIONISM: AN
IDOLOGICAL DILEMMA
Chongyi Feng
Abstract: This is an analysis of a moral and ideological dilemma facing the

Chinese authority, with a focus on its shifting position on so-called “particularity
of China”. Originally the Chinese communists were Universalists who rejected
their various rivals’ arguments about Chinese "particular national conditions" in
order to justify their belief in and application of Marxism in China. In those
revolutionary years there was genuine rigor in their intellectual exploration, in
spite of Marxist-Leninist dogmatism. The recent embracement of the concept of
"Chinese characteristics" and attacks on the “universal values”, however, seem to
indicate that the universalist position has been abandoned altogether to justify the
current political system in a special manner. It remains to be seen whether this
effort will succeed in establishing an enduring political ideology for a “rising
China” or otherwise quickly vanish into oblivion just as countless ideological
catchphrases before it.
I. Marxism as “Universally Applicable Truth”
IT IS AN AMUSING as well as painful irony that the Chinese Communist Party

(CCP) based on Marxism has become eulogists of the Chinese peculiarity, as
refutation of Chinese exceptionalism was an intrinsic part of the development of the
CCP itself and Marxism itself in China. Originally, as an alien political party and
alien ideology imported to China from abroad, both the CCP and Marxism had to
justify their relevance to China on the basis of universalism rather than Chinese
exceptionalism.
The birth of the CCP and Chinese Marxism was a by-product of the historical
process of “learning from the West” by progressive Chinese during the modern times,
although a combination of extraordinary circumstances led to the shift from “learning
from the West” to “taking Russia as a teacher” (Mao, 1969, 1359-1360).
The founders of the CCP and Chinese Marxism, Chen Duxiu陳獨秀（1879-
1942 ） and Li Dazhao 李大釗（ 1889 － 1927 ）， in particular, were typical
Universalists. Chen Duxun insisted that “learning by definition is an instrument of
humankind without difference between the past and the present or the difference
between China and foreign countries. Only those who understand learning in this way
are qualified to talk about learning. Precisely because there is no such a difference,
the only criterion to evaluate learning is its quality, regardless of its origin in any
country any time” (Chen, 1984, 259). In response to Goodnow’s proposal based on
his assessment of Chinese “national conditions” for the revival of the monarchy and
Yuan Shikai’s conversion from the President of the Republic of China to the emperor

Dr. CHONGYI FENG, Associate Professor in China Studies, University of Technology,
Sydney. Email: [email protected].
88 CHONGYI FENG
of China, Li Dazhao argued that Goodnow made a mistake in taking “the national
conditions of the past” as “the national conditions of the present”. According to Li
Dazhao, whereas political apathy prevailed in China during the ancient times because
the social life was centred around families and clans and facilitated by rituals and
customs, political participation and contestations for political power have become a
dominant trend in modern times because of the penetration of the state in social life
through extensive taxation, laws and regulations; whereas people submitted to
authorities during the ancient times, modern citizens in a republic have developed
their capacity to obey laws and resist tyranny irrespective of the countries in the West
or in the East (Li, 1984, 110-113) .
Mao Zedong毛澤東 (1893－1976）， and his followers promoted “Sinification
of Marxism” during the Yan-an Rectification Campaign in the late 1930s and the
early 1940s. That was a campaign to establish and consolidate Mao’s supremacy as a
spiritual as well as a military and political leader of the CCP, marginalizing those
Chinese communist leaders who had the experience as a “returned student” and better
command of the Marxist theory. However, Mao’s “Sinification of Marxism” never
challenged the universality of truth, but instead sought to faithfully put the “Marxist
universal truth” (pubian zhenli普遍真理) into practice in China. In order to make the
application of the “Marxist universal truth” more effective and easier for the “broad
masses”, Mao also practised the “Chinese style” and the “Chinese manner” in
elaborating the Marxist theory. (Mao, 1969, 500) Mao’s promotion of the “Chinese
features”, the “Chinese style” and the “Chinese manner” also served the purpose of
boosting the patriotic credential of the CCP.
Ai Siqi艾思奇 (1910－1966）, the most respected professional philosopher of
the CCP in the 1930s and the 1940s, took part in the cultural debates on the
“wholesale westernisation” during that time and thoroughly repudiated Chinese
exceptionalism. “All reactionary thoughts in China since the modern times”, declared
Ai Siqi, “shared a special tradition which can be named as the doctrine to close the
country to international intercourse. ……No matter how many times they have
changed their external forms, their basic contents are as follows: after laying
emphasis on Chinese ‘national conditions’ and Chinese ‘peculiarity’, and denying the
general laws in human history, they have asserted that social development in China
will follow the Chinese own special laws only; that China will take only its own road;
and that China’s own road is exceptional to the general laws in human history”. Ai
Siqi also pointed out that since the modern times “the thesis of Chinese particular
national conditions” was an ideological weapon essential to the traitors of the country
and the people; that these traitors, also borrowed heavily from foreign technologies
and tricks to advance their interests, actually rejected foreign thoughts and cultures
which were helpful for the Chinese to achieve progress and freedom”; that
“Sinification of Marxism is possible precisely because Marxism is generally correct,
universally valid and omnipotent”; and that “Marxism is an internationalist theory by
nature” (Ai, 1941).

UNIVERSAL TRUTH VERSUS CHINESE EXCEPTIONISM 89
II. The Chinese Communist Version of Chinese “Particular National Traditions”
Ai Siqi was certainly right in generalizing the Chinese conservative particularist

arguments of opposing progressive theories, be that liberalism or Marxism or both.
Yuan Shikai袁世凱（1859－1916），and his American advisor Frank Goodnow
were among the first to play up the particularist rationale in the 1910s for opposing
democracy and republicanism on the basis of the “national conditions” characterized
by Chinese people’s alleged lack of desire and political ability for a democratic
republic (Goodnow, 1914); Liang Shuming 梁漱溟（ 1893 － 1988 ）， was well-
known for his assertion after the 1920s that Marxist theory of class analysis was not
applicable in China simply because China was not a class-based society but an
“ethics-based society”; 1 in 1935 a group of professors issued the ‘Manifesto of
Constructing China-based Culture’ to reject “westernisation” and called for a unique
Chinese ideology to satisfy the unique needs of China; 2 Jiang Jieshi蒋介石（1887－
1975）， and his Nationalist followers claimed in the 1940s that “the ideologies of
liberalism and communism have been fashionable in China since the May 4, ……but
in reality their views and propositions are fundamentally incompatible with the
psychology and disposition of our nation” (Jiang, 1943, 145).
Ai Siqi and other Chinese Marxist theoreticians during the Republican period
would never imagine that Chinese communists would become eulogists of the
Chinese peculiarity or Chinese exceptionalism themselves. During the Mao years
from the 1950s to 1970s, despite of the fact that the nationalist project of “building
the wealth and power of China” was increasingly prevailing over the internationalist
project of “liberating the proletariat in the world”, Chinese communists were still
universalists in the sense that they maintained their belief in the universal truth of
Marxism and the theory that the Chinese Revolution was nothing but part of the world
revolution with common trajectory and objectives.
However, with the collapse of communist regimes in the former USSR and
Eastern Europe, and with the waves of democratisation sweeping across of all
cultures, including the so-called “ring of Confucian culture” in East Asia, the banner
of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” has been raised in China to reject
“Western democracy” on the basis of the particular Chinese “national conditions”.
It must be pointed that the original meaning of “socialism with Chinese
characteristics” was fundamentally different from the later connotation of the phrase.
When Deng Xiaoping 鄧小平（ 1904 － 1997 ） first introduced the phrase in his
opening speech to the 12th Party Congress in 1982, “socialism with Chinese
characteristics” meant socialism with a lower level of development in productive
1
For a thorough analysis on the thought of Liang Shuming, see Guy S. Alitto, The Last
Confucian: Liang Shuming and the Chinese Dilemma of Modernity, University of California
Press, 1979.
2
Wang Xinming, et al, “Zhongguo benwei de wenhua jianshe xuanyan [Manifesto of
Constructing China-based Culture]”, Wenhua Jianshe [Cultural Construction], vol.1, no.4.
90 CHONGYI FENG
force and productive relations, justifying the introduction of capitalist measures,

foreign capital and technologies for Chinese economic development, and the
introduction of institutions and ideas from democracies for Chinese economic and
political development (Deng, 1988, 370-373). This argument was further supplemented
by the theory of the “primary stage of socialism” put forward at the 13 th Party
Congress in 1987.
It was Jiang Zemin who summarized the ideas of Deng Xiaoping and gave the
phrase “socialism with Chinese characteristics” the new interpretation of rejecting
democratic institutions and ideas on the basis of the particular “Chinese national
conditions.” In his speech delivered at the meeting in commemoration of the 70
anniversary of the establishment of the CCP on 1 July 1991, Jiang Zemin elaborated
on the “Chinese characteristics” in a systematic way. He defined these
“characteristics” mainly from the negative perspective (bugao): not taking the
capitalist road, not carrying out privatization, not introducing Western parliamentary
system, not introducing Western multi-party system, and not introducing ideological
pluralism (Jiang, 1993, 1638-1644). By invoking the concept of “socialism with
Chinese characteristics” or the “primary stage of socialism,” Hu Yaobang胡耀邦
(1915 － 1989) and Zhao Ziyang 趙紫陽（ 1919 － 2005 ） aimed to minimise the
resistance by the conservative forces and advance the cause of reform and opening in
making up for the tasks such as developing “commodity economy” and introducing
basic democratic institutions and values. These tasks, according to the Marxist
framework, should have been accomplished through the bourgeois revolution or
capitalist development. Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang in the 1980s were by no means
liberals, but they were following the suppressed tradition within the CCP regarding
democracy and human rights as compatible with or intrinsic to socialism (Feng,
2009). Their attempts to play down dictatorship and protect liberal forces.
Within the current CCP top leadership, Premier Wen Jiabao 溫家寶 (1942－) is
closest to the liberal legacy of the Party. In last few years he repeatedly trumpeted
“universal values” and the pressing need to resume political reform. Premier Wen
Jiabao took the lead in openly embracing the universal values of freedom, equality
and human rights and calling for meaningful democratic reform. In a speech
published in 2007 Wen Jiabao wrote that “science, democracy, rule of law, freedom
and human rights are not unique to capitalism, but are values commonly pursued by
mankind over a long period of history” (Wen, 2007). In a media interview on 23
September 2008 Wen Jiabao defined the scope of democratic political reform in
China in three areas: “No. 1: We need to gradually improve the democratic election
system so that state power will truly belong to the people and state power will be used
to serve the people. No. 2: We need to improve the legal system, run the country
according to law, and establish the country under the rule of law and we need to build
an independent and just judicial system. No. 3: Government should be subject to
oversight by the people and that will call on us to increase transparency in
government affairs and particularly it is also necessary for government to accept
oversight by the news media and other parties” (Wen, 2009). In another widely
publicized interview in September 2010, Wen Jiabao summarized his objectives for

Chinese political reform as follows: “No political party, organization, or individual

should be above the constitution and the law. All must act in accordance with the
constitution and laws. I see this as a defining feature of a modern political system. I
have summed up my political ideals in the following four sentences: to let everyone
lead a good and dignified life, to let everyone feel safe and secure, to create a fair and
just society and to let everyone have confidence in the future” (Wen, 2010).
Chen Kuiyuan, president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, asserted
that in the “competition between China and the West for the commanding ground
(zhigaodian 制高點 )” in humanities and social sciences “we must establish our
confidence and eliminate blind worship [of the West]. We cannot respect Western
values as so-called universal values and cannot play down the values of our Party and
state as disputable values (linglei jiazhi 另類價值 )” (Chen, 2008). Jia Qinglin,
Chairman of the People’s Political Consultative Conference of China urged all
political parties and groups in China and Chinese people of all nationalities and all
social strata to closely follow the leadership of the CCP and “strengthen the line of
defence against the harassment by the two party system, multi-party system,
parliament system, tripartite separation of power and other wrong ideas of the West”
(Jia, 2009). Wu Bangguo, Chairman of the National People’s Congress of China,
reaffirmed in his report to the 2nd Plenary of the 11th National People’s Congress
(NPC) on 9 March 2009 that China should never copy the West and never practise
multi-party competition for power, tripartite separation of power and bicameral
parliamentary system (Wu, 2009). Again in his work report to the Standing
Committee of NPC on 3 October 2011 Wu Bangguo reiterated Jiang Zemin’s “July 1 st
Speech” in 1991 and claimed that China has completed the process of establishing a
legal system with Chinese characteristics defined by five rejections (bugao), namely
rejecting multi-party system, ideological pluralism, tripartite separation of power and
bicameral parliamentary system, federalism and privatization (Wu, 2011). Some
Chinese sociologists worry that when exceptional measures are taken to “nip
destabilizing elements in the bud” and impose artificial “stability”, progressive
elements in Chinese society can be eliminated and China is experiencing a “social
decay”, with serious symptoms such as the structural corruption and runaway power
(Sun, 2009).
Conclusion
During the revolutionary years the Chinese communists at least claimed to be true
believers of Marxism as universal truth, although they were increasingly selective in
their application of Marxism and abandoned whatever did not fit their agenda and
interests. From the 1920s to the 1940s the Chinese communists were fighting at the
forefront against Chinese exceptionalism of all shades. Apart from the theoretical
rigour of universalism, there was an imperative for the Chinese communists to
dismiss Chinese exceptionalism, simply because the Chinese communist movement
was an extension of the world communist movement originated in the West.

92 CHONGYI FENG
The practical rationale for the CCP to change from universalism to

exceptionalism is not hard to see. This change has functioned as a cushion to ease the
pressure for regime change when “brother parties” in the world have followed the
general trend to give up the communist one party rule since the 1990s. According this
rationale, China has to be an exception; otherwise there is no ground for China to
reject this powerful general trend across the entire world. However, it is hardly
possible to find a sound epistemological justification for the CCP to maintain the
communist one party rule on the basis of Chinese exceptionalism, precisely because
China (or the “Chinese value”) is not the origin of this political system. The
embarrassing dilemma is that neither universalism nor exceptionalism provides
intellectual justification for the Chinese communist rule.
In this age of globalisation and under the policy of “reform and opening to the
outside world”, China since the 1980s has embraced all aspects of modern
technology, many aspects of the market economy. This development is a conscious
choice by the Chinese ruling elite and should not be explained in line of cultural
determinism. Modern technology, the market economy and constitutional democracy
are all imprinted with a mark of the West, but all of them have drawn the experience
and accumulated knowledge far beyond the West and should be regarded as common
achievement of humankind. It is intellectually inconsistent to embrace modern
technology and the market economy as universal but dismiss constitutional
democracy as “Western”.
Country specific institutions in contemporary world are products of country
specific circumstances, especially when different countries are in different stages of
development in terms of industrialization, urbanization and democratization.
However, these specific institutions and circumstances always find their counterparts
in other parts of the world, past, present or future. Values, learning and human
capacity cannot be divided according to national or racial boundaries. There is no
cultural ground for the dichotomy of China versus West. This dichotomy was an
ignorant construct during the early encounters between Europeans and the Chinese.
There is profound complementarity of autocratic cultures in the West and the East,
just like the profound complementarity of democratic cultures in all parts of the
world. More often than not, the claims of national uniqueness or distinctiveness
against shared humanity are racist claims in one way or another.
Acknowledgement: I am very grateful to have my article published. I thank many

people who in one way or another contributed their valuable assistance in the final
completion of this article. I especially wanted to express my appreciation to the three
anonymous reviewers of the Journal for their extended professional help to further
improve this paper.
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IDENTITY AS A SERIES OF AFFECTIVE TRANSACTIONS
Yubraj Aryal
Abstract: This paper is an attempt to (re) think notions of identity through recourse
to the idea of affects. I argue that identity is not a state of representation of some
abstract concepts of ethnicity, nationality, religious and political systems but the
expression of our interior affective engagement with the world. Identity is a mode
of our expression of affects and affections produced when one body encounters
other bodies in the world. Rather than defining identity through criteria imposed
from without, I define it through a notion of self-affective interiority. The identity is
figured as unactualized affective potential proper to subjectivity rather than
external concepts which must then be interiorized.
IN THE TRADITIONALIST culturalist account, identity is often defined in terms of

race, class and gender, and so on. And we have already produced numerous
theoretical models to approach culture, politics and history, and their exercise in the
formation of identity as effects of narrative seeing history “. . . as a kind of
production of various kinds of narratives.” 1 But in this paper, I approach identity from
another standpoint: the idea of “noncultural”/“nonnarrated” reality of affect 2 from the
position of ethics of immanence3 in order to show identity as the power of activity of
the body. Here, I am trying to make a claim that the idea of our identity can be
understood in terms of affectivity of the body rather than in terms of the conceptual
abstractions of culture, history and politics. My sense of “noncultural” does not deny
culture rather it expands culture’s horizon opening new fields for individuations and
helps to analyze the content and expression of culture, which we often overlook. In so
doing, I divide the paper into two sections. In the first section, I present the role of
affects and bodies in identity formation based on the discussion of Foucault, Spinoza
and Deleuze; and in the second section, I present identity as an act of self-fashioning
one’s own self as an act of “self-affectivity,” critiquing the views of some major
philosophers such as Kant, Heidegger and Derrida on identity.

YUBRAJ ARYAL, PhD Candidate in the Philosophy and Literature Interdisciplinary PhD
Program, Purdue University. He is also the editor of Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-
Disciplinary Inquiry. Email: [email protected].
1
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak , “The Post-modern Conditions: The End of Politics?” in Post-
Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, and Dialogues, (ed) Sarah Harasym (London:
Routledge, 1990) pp.17- 34, p.34.
2
Is “noncultural”/“nonnarrated” reality of affect given by nature or is it still a sociocultural
formation? It is the later but I am suggesting that identity as a “noncultural”/“nonnarrated”
reality of affect constantly sets itself into series of becomings beyond a particular socio-cultural
form of life.
3
Ethics of immanence does not explicitly say anything on the issue of identity. But, I am trying
to apply it to the concept of identity in this paper.
96 YUBRAJ ARYAL
I. Identity as Affective Postulation of the Body
I want to start off this section with the two rhetorical questions: What is wrong with
the representationalist account of cultural identity, and how can my alternative model
of identity save an idealistic/humanistic mission for society? To start with the first
question, I disagree with the idea that who am I is limited by ethnicity, nationality, or
the political, religious and ethical systems of my origin. What I am cannot be just a
representation of the summations of these social and geographical abstractions, nor
am I mere effects of narratives under certain “regimes of power.” There is a third
dimension which complements what I am. That is an idea of “becomings” in my life
that tends to reside in a “plane of excess” or a “line of flight.” 4 My intelligible
extension is grounded in the real world where I encounter not the “clear and distinct”
ideas or causations and effects of some conceptual abstractions that we call narratives
of history, ideology, politics, and truth, but physical affects and affections5 that my
body produces with another body. I am my affective investment to the world. In other
words, the content of my identity is not the idea of some conceptual abstractions, but
rather the expressive power of my body in a new relation with the others. My body,
which largely shapes my becomings, is an immanent force that encounters other
forces in the world, shapes what is in me and can possibly causes to shape what is in
others. I am a force, a new emergence within me all the time. That emergence is a
purely organic process, and it is an affirmative will to create new individuations. I am
neither a de-organic (static) representation of any abstract stratifications that people
name “culture,” “history,” etc., nor am I effects of discursive formation, as Foucault
for instance thinks in his later writings . I am the organic body not a de-organic
formation of effects of some social production. Body is generative organism, which
creates affects and affections, which are structured around me and my surroundings. I
as an expression of the generative organism (i. e. my body), is not reducible to any
external disciplinary practices as Foucault maintains when he says: “True discourse,
liberated by the nature of its form from desire and power, is incapable of recognizing
the will to truth which pervades it; and the will to truth, having imposed itself upon us
[body] for so long, is such that the truth it seeks to reveal cannot fail to mask it”
(Foucault, 72a, 219).
For early Foucault, my body is acted upon, and some external abstraction (which
he calls “discourse”) acts upon my body. This is just what Foucault in his later works
does not believe, a point that supports my claim in this section that affective
postulations of the body largely shape our identity. My body acts upon other bodies
and be acted upon. In its active investment to the world, it either enters into
compositional or decompositional relationship with other bodies. It affects and is
affected at the same time; it shapes its individuation and affects the shape of other’s
4
Deleuze mainly in Thousand Plateaus and Kafka talks about the idea of becomings; how the
becomings occurs beyond the linear social fields, which he calls “plane of excess” or a “line of
flight.”
5
Affection is not identical with affect. It is a mode of affects. The affection is an active because
affect is its substance.
IDENTITY AS A SERIES OF AFFECTIVE TRANSACTIONS 97
individuation. All the social practices and institutions are purely organic evolution of
my body. My body is not a de-organic state that passively enters into some discursive
practices imposed from without; nor is my body effect of such practices. My body is
an “affectual self-organization,” which not only receives effects in its encounter with
other bodies but affects their nature of encounter with it. My body evolves and
emerges as well as makes other bodies evolve; it is not something passive recipient of
external agency as early Foucault claims. It is not discourse that produces and
controls my body; it is my body which produces and evolves countless discourses on
the expressive accounts of my bodies. What is active is not some external that we can
label history, truth, or language. 6 It is my body’s active formation of affectual
individuations, which give particular notions of outside such as representations. My
body not only enters into a particular prior form of culture, like what Ronald Dworkin
means in saying: “We inherited a cultural structure. . . .” (Dworkin, 1985, 223), but
also actively produces various forms of cultures within me. Culture (and history) is
not only the flow of “feelings like identification, loyalty, a sense of belonging”
(Appiah, 2005, 181) as it is for some cultural preservationists but is also becoming
others. It is not a matter of “fact-value;” it is the manner/mode of expression in or
through which we create values. It is all otherwise. For example, when Foucault was
in San Francisco with the gay community nearly forty years ago, he realized the
possibility to go beyond the prevalent culture and discourses prescribed by regimes of
truth and to create identity and social rights for the gay through recourse to body and
affectivity. He realized that the affective self-organization (i. e. practice of
homosexuality in the case of homosexual people) of the gay community can be a
resistance to the prevalent cultural practice and discourse on homosexuality. I mean
Foucault in his later career realized that subjective individuation is not, as he earlier
had believed an effect of discourse and culture but instead the activity of the
generative novelty of the body. That means, body not only receives effects of a
particular form of cultural practice but also forms a new mode of cultural expression,
shaping identity not simply as an ‘effect’ of the culture upon our bodies but the
affectivity over external bodies.
Therefore, my active emergence defines who I am through the ideas of affects
and affections, not through how my body enters into a prior form of socio-cultural-
linguistic structures. Trying to define body in terms of such structures is not only a
misunderstanding of the nature of laws of body but also, as Spinoza says, a matter of
it is having “inadequate ideas”7 of such structures. The contents of our ideas of any
6
I acknowledge that one can say these variables are not like something that makes its entry into
life from outside but they are already there insides life. I am referring to my rejection to the
concept of truth, history and language as abstractions. I believe that these stuffs are affectual
states of one’s life.
7
Spinoza calls it having “inadequate ideas,” if one does not know the laws of body in nature
and he calls it for having “adequate ideas,” if one knows the laws. For example, I drink coffee
because I know it enters into compositional relationship with my body. That means, I have
adequate knowledge of coffee. Likewise if I drink poison, it will decompose my body. My
98 YUBRAJ ARYAL
forms of life are the modes of affects. And my identity is nothing but the position of
my body–how it affects other bodies in nature and how it is affected. There exists
nothing that we can label culture, language, history and truth, which does not contain
affects and affections in my identity. In other words, the ideas of culture, history and
truth by which we define subjectivity are affective states of my body. My body is a,
non-cultural and non-narrated “bundle” of affections that it produces in its encounter
with other bodies–to affect and be affected–, and that reality gives me a different
model of being political8. These affections are not passive effects as early9 Foucault
understands them; they are my active understanding of the world. These affections are
my direct and dynamic evolvement with the world, which not only shapes my identity
but also shapes subjective positions that my affections encounter in the world.
Identity is an active, direct, engaging and affectual relationship of my body with the
other bodies. It is not effects of discourse, as for early Foucault; nor effects of
narratives, as for Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak; nor in-betweenness of cultural traps, as
for Salman Rushdie. And the ideas of culture and history that are structured around
my identity or “I” is a “mode” of affect: 10 a mode is the active and engaging
expression or position of body– that the activity of my body form in certain way; they
are not an ideological/political state constituted by some narratives (discourses,
situatedness) of cultural and historical abstractions into which I make my passive
entry.
Body in its modes of expression invents and reinvents infinite sensations in life
ever postulating new emergence in me, or as Stephen Zepke puts it: “ Subjectivation
[identity] is the ongoing emergence of new affective connections opening onto the
outside of a subjective ‘I.’ In its aleatory affectual events, identity is always coming
into being, assembling itself. . . becoming” (Zepke, 2005, 153). Therefore, the
contents of identifications are “affectual events,” not cultural fixations, which
traditional culturalists and ethnologists define in terms of misty cultural codes like
ethnicity, race, nationality, and so on, which themselves are thus nothing, I reassert,
but our affective investment to the world. In other words, the contents of our social
identifications entail the affective states of our world. Our identity, therefore, is not a
state of representation of some abstract concepts of ethnicity, nationality, religious
and political systems but the expression of our emotive engagement with the world.
And also, our affective states are not the effects of those concepts which can be
qualified good or bad in advance; rather, they are the causes which constitute
action of taking poison is my inadequate knowledge of natural laws of body. See Spinoza’s
Ethics, p. 231.
8
This is what means by affective politics, and which makes us possible to do politics or being
political beyond the given political set up. I have not discussed this topic in this paper though.
9
I make distinction between early Foucault and later Foucault elsewhere in my discussion of
Foucault. In his earlier writing like Discipline and Punish, Foucault treats identity as an effect
of the power and discourse. In his later writing such as History of Sexuality and Ethic, Foucault
changes his position of the concept of the subject and starts to talk about the “caring of the
self”–self’s relation to itself when defining the identity.
10
See Spinoza, p.123.
goodness/badness in our object of desire. Spinoza says: “. . . we neither strive for, nor
will, neither want, nor desire anything because we judge it to be good; on the
contrary, we judge something to be good because we strive for it, will it, want it, and
desire it” (Spinoza, 1955, 230). Therefore, the good or bad of our [cultural] identities
cannot be regarded as an intrinsic phenomenon. This is what opposes Charles
Taylor’s view that “it’s hard to see how we could deny it [culture] the title of good,
not just in some weakened, instrumental sense . . . but as intrinsically good” (Taylor,
1995, 142). Taylor’s view is misguided. Any pre-given judgment on the goodness or
badness of any cultural groups (e.g. Western or Nonwestern, Orient or Occident, etc.)
can have no foundation: such identifications are not “substance,” rather they are
“modes of substance.”11 Moreover, such modes do not work in generality, rather all
expressive modes behave in a unique way. All affections structured in my identity are
caused by the nature of my own body and external bodies to it. And the nature of
their interaction depends on the ideas of joyful passions and sad passions.
Thus, in so as we perceive that a thing affects us with pleasure or pain, we call it
good or evil; wherefore the knowledge of good and evil is nothing else but the idea of
the pleasure or pain, which necessarily follows from pleasurable or painful emotion. .
.; that is, there is no real distinction between this idea and the emotion or the
modification of the body, save in conception only. Therefore, knowledge of good and
evil is nothing else but the emotion, in so far as we are conscious thereof (Spinoza,
1955, 195).
Therefore the connotative postulations of our identities are affections, not
representations or ideas. And the nature of the affections rests on the power of activity
of body. The power of the activity of the body assumes expression (not static
representation) as one of the fundamental forces of our lives inasmuch as “expression
takes its place at the heart of the individual, in his soul and in his body, his passions
and his actions, his causes and his effects” (Zepke, 2005, 153). Expression invites a
constructive self-engagement and constant interaction with the other, inviting a
negation of what is given as identity and affirming what is within us–affective
potentials of becomings.
Since identity is a mode of our expression of affects and affections and our
cultural goodness depends on whether our actions bring us joyful passions or sad
passions, the idealistic mission of our intellectual inquiry for society is to teach how
to build a “compositional” relationship with other bodies so that our actions bring us
joyful passions. Our inability to recognize this aspect of identity formation leads us
into “decompositional” relationships with others and brings us sad passions.
Therefore, for the understanding of all this, we do not need any brands of cultural
viewpoint of identity and their logic of cultural violence. The immanent Spinozian
idea of body can teach us how we should live with others; the theory of affects can
teach us how to live with others when we view identity (me and other) as modes of
affects.
11
For Spinoza, substance is not a pure idea but a mode of physical affect and affection.
100 YUBRAJ ARYAL
To understand affective identities in terms of modes of affects means

transvaluing all the coordinates of traditional culturalist accounts of identity. In such
accounts, identity is being used to create othering of the otherness of others whether
culturally or linguistically, which is the expression of “sad passions” because othering
the other in any abstract terms is inviting the other into “decompositional”
relationships and producing nothing but resentment and remorse, hatred and
intolerance. This attempt suffers from a serious flaw on the parts of both those who
exclude their others and those who feel excluded. For they do not have a Spinozian
“adequate idea” about others as active participants in the maximization of pleasure
in me. They lack an art of existence which helps them to maximize happiness in
relation with the other. Those who have “inadequate ideas” of how the natural laws of
body work relate to the strangeness of others in an unfriendly way. Their inimical
stances vis-à-vis others, thus, preclude entering into compositional relationship and so
bring sad passions to other bodies and, in turn, to themselves. Therefore the
immanence (pure affective materials of the body) is a positive philosophy that teaches
us to respect and recognize the strangeness of others, to prevent any “epistemic
humility” projected into the other by the others, and to create “new affectual
individuations that are not produced by an “I” as their subjective reference point, but
produce it as a part of a wider ontological process of creation” (Deleuze, 1990b, 327). .
This is a necessary condition for a creator of a new value, a new civilization.
When we begin to recognize and honor the strangeness of the other from some
solid immanent ethical position aiming at maximizing pleasure for ourselves, we enter
into an ethico-aesthetic level where we start to treat other as friends or as an
“affectual self-organizing body” like myself whose maximization of joyful passions
rests on our ability to enter our interactions with each other into compositional
relationship, which calls for the “respect for imaginative differences and the capacity
to flesh out those differences in order to see how they might each create powerful and
dense visions of values in specific ways of responding to the world” (Altieri, 2008a,
113). The manner in which we each approach the world is very important; this is
even more important to the one who invents one’s own thoughts, feelings and actions
and thereby one’s own identity.
Then, when we recognize that “our conative expressivity entails a will to power
specifiable in terms of character and recognition. Seen as aspects of processes, the
conative drives need not be connected directly to projections about specifiable
persons [with specific historical and cultural backgrounds] or even ideal egos”
(Altieri, 2003b, 143). Especially when we recognize that identity is not a fixated state
embodying history, culture, ideology, geography, etc., but a mode in which we
express ourselves through those entities, we begin to recognize that we are eternally
self-organizing “conative drive (s)” whose liberation rests not on any given cultural
values but on creating values for ourselves, opening the immense possibilities for
joyful passions to myself and others which ultimately define us not in relation to any
“epistemic violence” or self-humiliating references of culture and politics but on the
active understanding of the emergence of my being and the role of my dynamic
understanding of the laws of body in my emergence.

Summing up, all the narratives of my identity are not the truest narratives; truest
are the “non-narrated”/”non-represented” affects and affections. My own narratives,
which define my continual emergent identities, are not only the consequential
discursive activity, but they are the fundamental forces in the emergence of my being.
And my ethico-aesthetic individuation is not a cultural relation of friend and enemy
/self and other but of creative emergence, which maximizes joyful passions for me.
Such interpersonally composed social identifications, I believe, hold a new hope for
the promise of meaningful humanity for all of us.
II. Identity as a Self-relational Interiority
Rather than defining identity through criteria imposed from without, I define it
through a notion of self-relational interiority. Here the identity is figured as
unactualized potential proper to subjectivity rather than external concepts which must
then be interiorized. A sovereign subject is its own cause; and knows how to use
“forces of the outside” to form his interiority. My main aim in this section is to take to
task the traditional philosophical practice of defining subjective individuation 12
through criteria that are external to one’s inner, subjective potentials. For, our
essential identity is a practice of self-fashioning from within these potentials rather
than a construction borrowed from some positive social or political project. Within
the tradition of Western thought, I will (re)read Kant, Heidegger, Derrida and
Foucault’s notions of subjective individuations in a very brief way for my present
purpose, in order to point out what remain problematic in their approaches to
subjectivity. I will describe subjectivity as non-subjectivity 13 and show how non-
subjectivity can be created by oneself without imagining any alterity.
Kant rejects the Cartesian model of sovereign subject which can independently
know the truth of the world without the mediation of any external set of criteria–
“universal laws.” For Kant, the autonomy of the subject depends on the self-
legislation of the moral law giving rules that one gives to oneself: “Act only
according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become
a universal law" (Kant, 1995, 30). Kant frees the subject from surrounding social
contents, but locates it in a transcendental position. Kantian transcendental self was
centered by a rational uniform set of universal principles that the subject held
independent of social stuffs. Kant’s challenge to Descartes is that subjectivity is not
self-contained but works with transcendentally imposed, and thereby external,
universal moral laws–categorical imperatives.
Contrary to this priority of the subject, Heidegger's goal is to show that there is
no subject distinct, a-priori, from the external world of things, because Dasein is
essentially Being-in-the-world. Therefore, Heidegger combines the separated subject
and object with the concept of Dasein which is essentially a Being-in-the-world.
12
I am alternatively using the terms subjective individuation, subject and subjectivity, which all
refer to identity in the present discussion.
13
Subjectivity as non-subjectivity does not mean one term cancels the other but it means that
subjectivity finds itself in a new relation with the subject.
102 YUBRAJ ARYAL
Heidegger states that Being-in the world goes unnoticed in trite everydayness, but we
are conscious of it when we are really concerned about something significant. On
these terms, subjectivity is an epistemic condition set by the exteriority. Derrida
questions the distinction between other-exteriority and me-interiority and the
impossibility of any solid essence that would make up one’s being. One’s being is an
indeterminable space of in-between-ness in the presence and absence of essence, a
space that language, for instance, cannot ultimately resolve. He remarks, “It is
because I am not one with myself that I can speak with the other and address the
other” (Derrida, 1997, 14).
The problem with these writers, as mentioned, is that they treat subjectivity as an
essence (being) rather than as an act of self-creation (becomings), giving undue
emphasis to the exteriority of constructed epistemic conditions. Foucault suggests that
the self is an externally manipulated instrument of subjection.In other words,
subjectivity is an effect of human sciences and political power. Externally imposed
power creates effects on my interiority. So, to understand my interiority there is
required an understanding of exteriority, which then functions as an epistemic
condition of self-understanding.
Descartes’ idea of the sovereign self, which regulates the body, has been the
target of much criticism. He minimizes the role of body, giving the mind autonomy in
its exclusion of body as its other. In fact, mind is not a separate entity.
Consciousness, as Damasio puts it in his Descartes’ Error, is about of “minding the
body.” All the modes in which body is affected are determined by the nature of the
body affected and the nature of the body that affects. The human body is affected by a
‘mode’ caused by external bodies, and human consciousness is constituted by an idea
of that body. All affections are caused by the nature of my own body and external
bodies to it. We do not need to relate it to any ideal ego. Subjectivity is a body’s
postulation to itself or other bodies in nature. That’s why the mind is just an idea of
body. Spinoza says, “An idea, which excludes the existence of our body, cannot be
postulated in our mind, but contrary thereto. Our mind is the endeavor to affirm the
existence of our body: thus an idea, which negates the existence of our body, is
contrary to our mind. . . .” (Spinoza, 1995, 123). Kant was right to reject the Cartesian
model of subjectivity but wrong to place the self in a transcendental position. As
Spinoza makes it clear in the above lines, the self is totally ingrained in the modes of
its affects—the body’s affectivity is (its) nature. Heidegger, too, is right in his attempt
to synthesize the subject and object separation. Yet, Heidegger misunderstands the
nature of the subject’s relation condition vis-à-vis the world. Dasein’s “Being-in-the-
World” reveals our relational to the world–our community. This relation, however, is
not of meanings but of affective states/intensities. The idea of Dasein’s “Being-in-the-
World” is problematic in the frame of my political structure of the identity in two
ways: first, it is silent about the possibility of the inventing new worlds by the self;
and second, it overlooks the affective nature of the communities shaping our
subjective individuations. Heidegger is also overlooking the self-relation to itself or
self-relational interiority as the contents of our identity overtly depending self to
others– “Being-in-the-World”. We might have asked Heidegger, can we surrender our
subjective existence to a chaotic alterity or theyness? The sense of belonging to
others, as Heidegger illustrates, makes us irresponsible to oneself [ourselves?]

because being is more about belongingness than self-affectivity. Such a passive
notion of self creates alienation, boredom and anxiety. Given this, I propose to recast
Dasein’s ontology in immediate tactile sensations (affects) that the body presents to
us. Dasein–subjective individuation–is not Being-in-the-World,” it is “Being-in-the-
body beside the world.” The manner in which my body affects and is affected by the
ontic-world determines the ontology of Dasein. Dasein does not oppose any
imaginary or real other but participate in the self-making process of its becoming.
Dasein also determines the forms of the world for me. And again I reiterate that it’s
not Being-in-the-World (because the world does not exist prior to bodily affects) but
it’s through “Being-in-the-body beside the world” that my Dasein infolds its
becomings.
Derrida assaults the traditional search for a sovereign subject as a center of
consciousness, but too often stages his critique in terms of an imperialistic and
hegemonic obedience to language. I can agree with Derrida that language works in
the system of ‘différance,’ but I reject the claim that différance can be the only
content of identity. The content of identity for me is the mode of affect and each
mode is a substance14 (not a void language created in self). Language is only one,
albeit a powerful, way these modes might be expressed. Here I go along with
Habermas who says: “Thus, Derrida achieves an inversion of Husserlian
Foundationalism inasmuch as the originative transcendental power of creative
subjectivity passes over into the anonymous, history-making productivity of writing
[language]” (Habermas, 1998, 178). I believe that without affects language cannot
give possibilities of meaning to our feelings. Affect is the most abstract experiences
because affect cannot be fully realised in language, and because affect is always prior
to and/or outside of consciousness (Massumi, Parables). The body has a grammar of
its own that cannot be fully captured in language because it “doesn’t just absorb
pulses or discrete stimulations; it infolds contexts. . .” (Massumi, 2002, 30). Lastly, I
reject Foucault’s idea of self as an effect of disciplinary society, a thesis which he
himself discarded in his later works where he adopts an aesthetic approach to self.
Foucault discusses the Greek notion of “caring for oneself” as an ethical way to the
formation of the self. On this understanding, self is not the formation of the order of
things from top (state) to bottom (people). The self can influence its immediate
surroundings without any direct relation to any larger political institutions on the top
of the ladder. In the 1980s, Foucault was aware of the nature of the ethical shift in the
power dynamics in human society. That was the reason he abandoned his idea of self
as a product of disciplinary society and embraced the aesthetic approach to
subjectivity based on the idea of self-affectivity. In sum, Foucault yields to the fact
that an independent force of our “inner nature” can find its own way of self-making,
and he conceptualizes this process of self-making in relation to given power
structures. Actually, that idea minimizes the self’s capacity to transcend the
possibility of force that resists it.
14
Spinoza says that a mode is a substance. I am implying that the style that we give to our
existence fashions what we are.
104 YUBRAJ ARYAL
It’s not exteriority that determines what I am, but my “AM” is beyond exteriority
and beyond itself. What defines oneself is intrinsic ‘passion’ or FORCE, which
always strives to actualize the potential of ‘being otherwise.’ Charles Altieri says,
“The ‘I’ that emerges . . .does not fight for its imaginary substance by opposing itself
to other people’s identifications. Rather this ‘I’ depends on its ability to adopt itself to
the various forces of perception and memory and reflection that in effect call into
existence” (Altieri, 2003b, 204). And these forces are certainly available to us in
different frameworks of [cultural] otherness, for instance, Muslim versus Christian,
West versus East, and so forth. The nature of such actualizations does not follow any
prior pattern/ knowledge of who one is. Its principle is affect, but an affect does not
follow from any postulation of our innate nature or essence. The nature of our identity
is stylistically different from ‘prior’ forms of existence, different aesthetically rather
than epistemologically.
The nature of identity as a series of affective transactions still leads us to the
further questions here in my present discussion: how can we perform ethical practices
of the bodies as a sovereign subject without the imposition of political, moral, and
hermeneutic codes in a political community? How can we transcend hermeneutics to
define identity? I contest that it is with the exercise of the intensity of constitutive
force inherent in our subjective interiority that we can create identity as singularity:
“those intentional and voluntary actions by which men [. . .] seek to transform
themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into
an oeuvre that carries aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria” shape our
identity (Foucault, 1990b, 10). This deployment of inner force enhances our capacity
to expand the possibilities lying within in our existential interiority without letting
any positive social project limiting what we can potentially be; letting identity stand
beyond “bio-politics.” On this scheme, our identity is laid open to any possible
becomings. It’s not stagnated in any fixation. Identity is always in a process of
becoming different–different from and beyond what it is. It always crosses the
fixation of ‘is’ to become ‘isn’t’. Identity is always in making/becoming different, “ . .
.always retaining the capacity to be other than what it is” (Prozorov, 2007, 55) by “a
dangerous and open-ended encounter with the outside, the ‘folding’ of the forces of
outside inside the self, whereby the free subject is formed as ‘the inside of the
outside’” (Deleuze, 1988a, 118). Each movement, from inside to outside and vice
versa, resists actualization. It always remains in movement; each movement is
singular, self-contained, an unactualized possible. This is the picture of our identity as
non-identity15. Thus the aesthetic nature of self-fashioning identity, as opposed to the
identity as a construction of a positive social project, refutes any diagrammatic
fixation of our essential identity. Identity is a movement, an unpacking the packs of
becomings–the eternal conversion and remodeling.
Such type of identity as the affective becomings can be asocial and anarchical but
it remains irreducible to any social order. A dynamic nature of identity is achieved
through transgression rather than actualized in a utopian end. Therefore, identity is
15
The two terms “identity” and “non-identity” do not negate each other. I understand non-
identity as a new way of being identified i. e. identity as becomings.
not finding our place within some traditional or ethical code rather it is found in
dissolving or changing the polities that embody our nature, and as such it is
anarchical. Our identity is not the outcome or effect of any utopian social project but
always transcends such axiomatization (or division) in order to define what it is. A
sovereign individual transgresses any actual identity that the social diagram may
impose on it. A “. . . sovereign [individual]. . .[is] the transgressor in relation to
itself. Sovereign is s/he who is simultaneously inside the space of order as the source
of its constitutive principles and outside it as something that cannot be subsumed
under these principles. . . .” (Prozorov, 2007, 84). The sovereign individual thinks its
own thought and actualizes its own conditions for new becomings. It unfolds the
affective dimensions of experience and creates its own conditions for life. For, it
expresses the particular structure of affects. Intensity and the involvement of our body
with other bodies free us from the imaginary confinement of our ego as an identity.
Identity is formed with tactile sensations of intensity; it finds its way through a
moment of “unformed and unstructured” potentials in body, i.e. affect which prepares
itself for action in a given circumstance by adding a quantitative dimension of
intensity to the quality of sensations. When your body infolds a context and another
body (real or virtual) is expressing intensity in that context, one intensity is infolded
into another. By resonating with the intensity of the contexts it infolds, the body
attempts to ensure that it is prepared to respond appropriately to a given circumstance.
In this way, subjective positions emerge and dissolve in the transmission of affects.
Without affect, contexts–social or political–cannot constitute ideas about them
because they would then have no intensity. In short, affect plays an important role in
determining the relationship between our bodies, our political environment, shaping
our very identity. Therefore, our identity is an unrolling of affective transactions
between our body and the other bodies we encounter in the world.
Acknowledgement: I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for the very
productive comments on my paper.
References
Altieri, Charles. 2003a. The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects. Cornel
University Press.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2005. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Foucault. The Athlone Press.
-----. 1990. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. New York: Zone Books.
Derrida, Jacques. 1997. Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida.
Ed. John D. Caputo. Fordham University Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1972a. Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Trans.
A. M. Sheridan-Smith. Pantheon Books.
-----. 1990b. History of Sexuality. Vol 2: The Use of Pleasure. Random House. Ronald
Dworkin. 1985. A Matter of Principle. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Habermas, Jurgen. 1998. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Trans.
Frederick Lawrence. MIT Press.

106 YUBRAJ ARYAL
Kant, Immanuel. 1995. Ethical Philosophy: Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals and
Metaphysical Principles of Virtue. Trans. James Wesley Ellington. Hackett Publishing.
Massumi, Brain. 2002. Parables for the Virtual. Durham: Duke UP.
-----.
2008b. “Idealism and Twentieth Century Literary Theory,” in The Humanities at Work:
International Exchange of Ideas in Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Literature. Ed. Yubraj Aryal.
Sunlight Publication.
Prozorov, Sergei. 2007. Foucault, Freedom and Sovereignty. Ashgate Publishing Limited.
Spinoza, Benedict. 1955. Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza. Vol.II. Trans. R. H. M. Elwes.
Dover Publications, Inc.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1990. “The Post-modern Conditions: The End of Politics?” in
Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, and Dialogues. Ed. Sarah Harasym. Routledge.
Taylor, Charles. 1995. “Irreducibly Social Goods,” in Philosophical Arguments. Harvard
University Press.
Zepke, Stephen. 2005. Art as Abstraction Machine: Ontology and Aesthetics in Deleuze and
Guattari. Routledge.

IS THERE A CHINESE SUBJECT IN CHINESE
SHAKESPEARES? READING CHINESE SHAKESPEARES:
TWO CENTURIES OF CULTURAL EXCHANGE
Suoqiao Qian
Abstract: This is a review essay on Alexander C. Y. Huang’s book Chinese

Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange. The global traveling of
“Shakespeare” and the globalization of Shakespeare studies correlate to the
advance of Chinese modernity which was very much characterized by cross-
cultural exchanges between China and the West. Prompted by Huang’s book, the
essay examines the cross-cultural issue of “Chinese Shakespeares” in three
interrelated levels: “China” in Shakespeare, Shakespeare in China, and China and
Shakespeare. After exploring the colonial legacy in Shakespearean studies relating
to China and Shakespeare’s reception in modern China, the paper applauds
Huang’s innovative attempt to go beyond the “Shakespeare in China” model by
offering a fresh look into the cross-cultural relation between China and the West
surrounding the traveling of “Shakespeare” over the past two centuries. In the
meantime, it also highlights the problematic of Chinese subjectivity in Chinese-
Shakespeare scholarship, and in Chinese cross-cultural studies in general.
I. “China” in Shakespeare
WHEN I WAS a graduate student in the department of comparative literature at UC

Berkeley in the early 1990s, I was a “Graduate Student Instructor” for several years
teaching English reading and composition courses for which I got to design the course
themes with five literary texts of my own choice. But the department set forth several
guidelines and rules for choosing the texts, two of which I remember clearly: one of
the texts must come from an “underrepresented group” which means ethnic, minority,
non-Western, a woman writer, etc.; and one of the texts must be a Shakespeare. To
insist that Shakespeare be part (one fifth) of the readings in a compulsory freshmen
course demonstrates to me a subtle and clear statement on the canonicity under
multicultural challenge. I was by no means a Shakespeare expert, but coming from
the 1980s cultural background in China, I was not unfamiliar with Shakespeare either.
At least I had some rudimentary knowledge about Shakespeare as acquired from, say,
A History of English Literature by Chen Jia.1 But the Shakespeare text I chose for my
courses had definitely taken on a Berkeley flavor—The Tempest.

Dr. SUOQIAO QIAN, Associate Professor, City University of Hong Kong. Email:
[email protected]
1
Chen Jia, A History of English Literature, Beijing: The Commercial Press, 1982. Though
offering a “rudimentary knowledge of English literature” as the author put it in “Foreword,”
this book was taken as something like a “Bible” for English-major Chinese students preparing
for graduate school examination. I am yet to see “A History of Chinese Literature” written in
beautiful Chinese by a sinologist published in England or America to be read feverishly by
undergraduate Chinese-major students in England or America.
108 SUOQIAO QIAN
The Tempest is certainly a very hot text in Shakespearean studies in the current
multicultural environment. Traditionally, The Tempest had always been read as a
“Prospero’s play” in the sense that the theme of usurpation and reconciliation
involving the dethroned Duke of Milan reveals the authorial voice and commentary
on European politics during the Renaissance period. The play was set on an “island”
where a crew of European explorers consisting of members of Prospero’s former
court were saved after a shipwreck presumably caused by Prospero’s “magic.” In the
traditional reading, the colonial relevance of the play in terms of its setting and
characters was not exactly totally ignored, in fact it was always footnoted that
Shakespeare wrote the play probably having read the Bermuda pamphlets and was
aware of Montaigne’s essay “Of Cannibals.” However, the significance of its colonial
implications was generally glossed over and taken for granted. It was not until the
1980s that race and colonialism became serious issues in Shakespearean scholarship
along with the advance of the post-structuralist and post-colonial critique. As Barker
and Hulme point out, for instance, the source criticism by providing some historical
materials for reference merely obscures the discursive meaning of colonialism as
embedded in the text. When discussing the character of Caliban, traditional reading
usually posits it as highlighting the Renaissance theme of nature vs. nurture. As such,
Caliban’s claim that “This island’s mine by Sycorax my mother/Which thou tak’st
from me” (I, ii, 333-334) is easily occluded since Caliban is after all a “savage”
whose humanity itself is very much in doubt. But the intended closure to maintain the
unity of meaning in traditional gloss still leaves unresolvable cracks in the text, for
instance, as Barker and Hulme argue, in Prospero’s sudden anger over Caliban’s
revolt, when he explains aside: “I had forgot that foul conspiracy/Of the beast Caliban
and his confederates/Against my life: the minute of their plot/Is almost come” (IV, i,
139-142). Then, as the text goes, the previous dancing nymphs and reapers “heavily
vanish.” 2 Indeed, when such cracks are taken seriously, the real significance of
colonial discourse will emerge, and traditional Shakespearean scholarship will
“heavily vanish” like the dancing nymphs and reapers in the play. 3
Since the 1980s, “Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest (1611), is the one most
widely and most controversially linked to issues of colonialism and race,” in
Loomba’s words (Loomba, 2002, 161). The text is read not only in terms of its New
World colonial experience, but also as revealing the Old World Mediterranean geo-
political histories. 4 In fact, the appropriation of The Tempest had begun earlier in
Third World anti-colonial struggles while the post-colonial critique was merely
catching up with the consciousness of the de-colonized peoples. In the anti-colonial
2
Shakespeare, The Tempest, Ed. Rex Bibson, New York: The Cambridge University Press,
1995.
3
See Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, “Nymphs and reapers heavily vanish: the discursive con-
texts of The Tempest,” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis, London and New York:
Methuen, 1985.
4
See for instance Jerry Brotton, “’This Tunis, Sir, was Carthage’: Contesting Colonialism in
The Tempest,” in Post-Colonial Shakespeares, Ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin, London
and New York: Routledge, 1998.
IS THERE A CHINESE SUBJECT IN CHINESE SHAKESPEARES? 109
struggles of African and Latin American peoples, Caliban was found to be a symbol
of their oppression and was appropriated to be a heroic figure to rebel against the
colonial domination. 5 Actually, it does not take much theoretical sophistication or
political consciousness to identify the link between the play and the issues of race and
colonialism, as well as Shakespeare’s apparent racial and colonial bias against the
European Other. I used to ask my students to do a simple exercise: just to list the
terms used in the text by various characters to refer to Caliban. And the list goes like
this: “a freckled whelp, hag-born, not honored with a human shape,” “villain,”
“tortoise,” “filth,” “vile race,” “a fish,” “beast,” “Indian,” “devil,” “savage,” “cat,”
“monster,” “a very shallow monster,” “a very weak monster,” “a most poor, credulous
monster,” “puppy-headed monster,” “a most scurvy monster,” “an abominable
monster,” “a most ridiculous monster,” “a howling monster,” “a drunken monster,”
etc. The question is: if Caliban was taken to be an “Indian,” was Caliban also a
“Chinese” in the imagination of Shakespeare and his European contemporaries? After
all, as we all know, Columbus’ original destination was India and China, and “Indian”
was thus named because he thought he had already arrived there.
To my knowledge, such “Chinese” question has never been raised in any form of
Shakespearean scholarship so far. The “Chinese” relevance in Shakespeare’s plays,
however, centers around the interpretation of the term “Cataian.” There are two
occurrences of the term “Cataian” in Shakespeare’s plays, once in The Merry Wives of
Windsor:
Page: I will not believe such a Cataian, though the priest o’ th’ towne commended
him for a true man.
And the other in The Twelfth Night:
Sir Toby: My lady’s a Cataian, we are politicians, Malvolio’s a Peg-a-Ramsey, and

“Three merry men be we.”
In the two most famous Chinese translations of Shakespeare by Liang Shiqiu and Zhu
Shenghao respectively, the Chinese readers would have no idea that “Cataian” has
anything to do with the Chinese:
佩：我不願信任這樣的一個狡詐的人，縱然教區牧師稱贊他是好人。(Liang)
培琪：我就不相信這種狗東西的話，雖然城裡的牧師還說他是個好人。(Zhu)
陶：小姐是個騙子，我們是政客？(Liang)
托比：小姐是個騙子，我們是大人物。(Zhu)
5
See Octavio Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, trans. P.
Powesland, London: Methuen, 1956; Aime Cesaire, Une Tempete, Paris: Seuil, 1969; Frantz
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann, New York: Grove Press,
1967.
110 SUOQIAO QIAN
In the first instance, the literal meaning of Liang’s translation is “a cunning person,”
while that of Zhu’s “a son of bitch,” and in the second instance, both translations
mean “a swindler.” In the first instance, Liang did offer a footnote explaining that the
word “Cataian” refers to Chinese, a derogatory term for cunning heretics, originating
from “Cataia” or “Cathay”—an archaic term for China. Chinese Shakespeare scholars
rarely pay attention to or take seriously these Chinese references in Shakespeare’s
texts. One exception is Zhou Junzhang’s “Shakespeare and Chinese,” in which Zhou
applauds the translations by Liang and Zhu for not rendering “Cataian” literally into
“Chinese,” for if so, “it would be quite misleading” (Zhou, 1994, 4). Zhou quotes
George Steevens’ annotation of “Cataian” as “a thief” or “a rogue” for his argument.
But in fact, Zhou’s claim was quite contradictory as he does not spell out why it
would be misleading. On the contrary, Zhou tries to argue that Shakespeare’s usage of
“Cataian” was very much influenced by the cultural prejudice prevalent at the time in
Europe. From Renaissance onwards, along with the development of capitalism and
colonization, Euro-centrism was the dominant mode of cultural attitude and
Shakespeare’s derogatory reference to Chinese very much demonstrates such cultural
prejudice and superiority.
In “Caterwauling Cataians: The Genealogy of a Gloss,” Timothy Billings offers a
sophisticated and illuminating reading of the meaning of “Cataian” in the exegetical
tradition of Shakespearean texts. Billings would agree that Chinese translators did a
great job for not rendering “Cataian” as “Chinese,” but Zhou’s claim was confusing
as he was apparently unaware of the genealogy of glossing the term “Cataian” in
English literary tradition. Billings’s point is that “Cataian” in Shakespeare’s time
indeed did not refer to Chinese as such, and it was not until the eighteenth century
that George Steevens established his authoritative annotation linking “Cataian” to a
derogatory notion of the Chinese and his annotation held sway in the English literary
tradition ever since. As Billings points out, Cataians at Shakespeare’s time were not
categorically represented as thieves, scoundrels or rogues in popular travel literature.
“Elizabethans’ predominant image of Cataia (Cathay, Cathaio, Kythai, etc.)—derived
from John Mandeville, Marco Polo, and Frère Hayton, and filtered through
encyclopedias and cosmographies such as those of William Watreman, Stephen
Batman, and Sebastian Münster—was of an almost utopian kingdom of abundance,
civility, craftsmanship, and stunning opulence” (Billings, 2003, 4). And the
Cathayans were actually considered as “a white kind of people,” courteous, rich and
resourceful, and clever at craftsmanship. The geographical imagination of the
Elizabethans put Cataia in an ambiguous position and there was a great deal of doubt
as to whether Cataia and China were one and the same. In fact, many maps in the
Renaissance period put Cataia and China as distinct entities. Therefore, Billings
argues that the term “Cataian” at Shakespeare’s time may not refer to Chinese or
Asians at all. Rather, they refer to those Europeans who discourse about a far-away
wonderland with unimaginable riches and exotica. Precisely because of the glaring
and hyperbolic manner in which these big-talking European travelers constructed
such a discourse of fantasy that the term “Cataian” began to take on the meaning of
someone who is subject to lying, cheating, and scheming. As Billings’s genealogy of
glossing tradition of “Cataian” reveals, it was George Steevens in the eighteenth
century who invented the racially defamatory Eurocentric “Cataian” as “Chinese.” As

such, while deconstructing Steevens’s colonial legacy in Shakespearean “China”
scholarship, Billings successfully rids Shakespeare himself of that legacy.
But I am equally interested in the racist colonial legacy as in the original
authorial intention. After all, given the veracity of Billings’s claim, the fact is that it
was Steevens’s Shakespeare that held sway for over three centuries and is still
relevant today. Using circumstantial references of his own day, Steevens pinned down
the racial character of the Chinese in his Shakespeare annotation: “The Chinese
(anciently called Cataians) are said to be the most dextrous of all the nimble-finger’d
tribe; and to this hour they deserve the same character” (Steevens, 1778, 25).
According to Billings, an important source for Steevens’s ethnocentric stereotyping of
Chinese must be the popular travelogue—A Voyage Round the World based on
George Anson’s expedition of 1740–44, where Chinese were portrayed as a race of
liars. While outlining the genealogy of the glossing tradition, Billings reminds us that
that tradition lingers even today, and he cites the annotations “Cataian” as follows:
“the 1997 New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Merry Wives: “OED suggests that,
among other things, the word was used to mean a scoundrel, and that seems the
appropriate sense here”; the 1997 Norton Shakespeare: “Chinese; but also
ethnocentric slang for ‘trickster’ or ‘cheat’” and “Chinese; scoundrel”; the 2000
Arden Shakespeare: “native of Cathay, trickster”; and the 2000 Pelican Shakespeare:
“literally, a native of Cathay (China), a jocular term of disparagement, reflecting
distrust for people from faraway countries” (Billings, 2003, 10). The caterwauling of
“Cataians” is still going on. And in that regard, the Shakespearean notion of
“Chinese” as produced and circulated today in the West is not that far from the
character of Caliban, after all.
II. Shakespeare in China
In introducing and appropriating Shakespeare into Chinese modernity, Chinese

scholars seldom pay much attention to what “Shakespeare’s China” does in the
cultural politics of Western cultural relations with its Other. This is perhaps not so
much because the reference to “China” in Shakespeare’s texts was marginal and
seemingly insignificant, but rather Chinese modernity has its own subjectivity in
terms of its cross-cultural strategies, priorities, deliberations, conflicts and
trajectories. The history of Shakespeare reception and appropriation in China is tied
up with the logics and twists and turns of the ongoing Chinese modernity project.
Like many Western novelties, the name Shakespeare was first brought to Chinese
attention via missionaries in the mid-19th century. The first Chinese to watch a
Shakespeare play was perhaps Guo Songtao (1818-1891), who attended Lyceum
Theatre London when he was a Chinese diplomat there. By late 19 th century, China’s
modernity was opened up irreversibly under Western and Japanese military
encroachment. All kinds of Western ideas and literatures were translated and
introduced to the Chinese scene. It was no coincidence that Shashibiya (莎士比亞),
the Chinese transliteration for Shakespeare, was first coined by Liang Qichao,

112 SUOQIAO QIAN
probably the most influential Chinese Enlightenment thinker of the day. But the most
important figure at the turn of the century in popularizing Shakespeare in China was
undoubtedly the eminent translator Lin Shu, who translated, with the help of his
collaborator Wei Yi, many Western classics into elegant classical Chinese. Lin did
not translate any original works by Shakespeare, but rather adapted into Chinese
Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb, itself adaptations of the stories
in Shakespeare’s plays. Entitled Yingguo shiren yinbian yanyu (英國詩人吟邊燕語)
(An English Poet Reciting from Afar), Lin’s translation played an important role in
the Chinese appropriations of Shakespeare’s plays, as his texts served as the source
scripts for many of Chinese performances of Shakespeare’s plays in the form of
“wenmingxi” (文明戲) in early Republican China.
During the Republican period, Chinese modernity was characterized in a sense
by the advance and acceptance of baihua (vernacular Chinese) as the national
language. More and more Western classics were translated into baihua Chinese.
Shakespeare’s plays began to be staged in China and his works continued to attract
wider attention. Comparatively speaking, however, “Shakespeare” as a modern
Chinese cultural phenomenon did not amount to the intellectual attention paid to such
writers as Henri Ibsen or Bernard Shaw. The lack of Chinese translations of
Shakespeare’s works even became a topic of ridicule for Lu Xun who accused
Western-trained returned scholars of not having done their job by failing to bring out
a complete translation of Shakespeare’s works. Liang Shiqiu, one of Lu Xun’s
opponents, took up the cudgel and spent thirty seven years to complete the translation
of Shakespeare’s plays. Another monumental, and perhaps more legendary,
achievement for Chinese Shakespeare studies was the complete translation of
Shakespeare’s plays by Zhu Shenghao, a somewhat obscure editor of a Shanghai
journal of a humble family origin who did and completed his arduous work of
translation under poverty-stricken and precarious circumstances during China’s War
of Resistance against Japan. However, it was not until the 1980s onward during the
Reform Era that there emerged a “Shakespeare craze” in China. Along with China’s
post-Cultural Revolution reform spirit, “Shakespeare” became a symbol for opening-
up to the world receptive of Western cultural icons. A record number of
Shakespeare’s plays were put on stage, both in huaju and traditional Chinese xiqu
forms. The First Chinese Shakespeare Festival was held in Shanghai in 1986 where
25 Chinese Shakespeare plays were staged during the fourteen-day festival. In 1994,
an International Shakespeare Festival was held in Shanghai which attracted over 500
participants including Shakespeare scholars and actors not only from mainland China
but also from Taiwan and around the world. Shakespeare studies were also being
institutionalized in China where Shakespeare Society of China, including many
regional and provincial branches, was set up and Shakespeare’s works became
standard texts in college textbooks, particularly for English major students.
A considerable amount of research has been done on the topic of “Shakespeare in
China.” Chinese-language works include, for instance, Zhongguo shaxue jianshi
(Shakespeare in China: A Brief History) by Meng Xianqiang, Zhongguo shashibiya
piping shi (The History of Shakespearian Studies in China) by Li Weimin, English-

language works include Shakespeare in China by Xiao Yang Zhang, Shakespeare in

China by Murray J. Levith, Shashibiya: Staging Shakespeare in China by Li Ruru.6
The problem with most of such research on “Shakespeare in China” so far is that
“Chinese Shakespeare” was treated as if it were a natural extension of a “global
Shakespeare” phenomenon. It just happened that Chinese cultural practices related to
Shakespeare occurred in China. This geographical location only constitutes another
province for the ever more globalizing Shakespeare vitality. Following this model, it
seems that what researchers can do is to provide and chronicle positivistic information
about Chinese cultural practices related to Shakespeare, so that such practices enlarge
the global capacity of Shakespeare studies. In fact, for Chinese Shakespeare studies to
be included in the world Shakespeare family was a most desirable goal for some
Chinese Shakespeare scholars. Meng Xianqiang, author of Shakespeare in China: A
Brief History, points out, for instance, that Shakespeare studies was esteemed as the
Olympia of international scholarship, as if the “Shakespeare craze” in post-Mao
China was like China’s holding the Olympic Games in international scholarship. 7 On
the other hand, Murray J. Levith’s Shakespeare in China was published at all because
the author claims that much of the “local” Chinese Shakespeare related information
was not available in English. Even that claim, however, was not true. In short, there is
no Chinese subject in Shakespeare studies following the “Shakespeare in China”
model.
III. China and Shakespeare
Alexander C. Y. Huang’s book Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural

Exchange attempts to surpass the “Shakespeare in China” model in Chinese
Shakespeare studies. To Huang, the primary concern is not “Shakespeare in China” as
such, but rather “China and Shakespeare.” “The scholarship that seeks to cross
borders loses its intellectual punch when it is able to consider only one perspective, or
when it merely seeks to add to, say, the already long list of Shakespeare’s global
reincarnations,” (Huang, 2009, 20) as Huang puts it. The central concern of Huang’s
book is therefore twofold to address the following two questions: “what does
‘Shakespeare’ do in Chinese literary and performance culture? Conversely, how do
imaginations about China function in Shakespearean performances, and what
ideological work do they undertake—in mainland China, Taiwan, and other
locations?” (Ibid., 3) As such, the book offers us a fascinating and fresh look into the
cross-cultural relation between China and the West surrounding the traveling of
6
See Meng Xianqiang, Zhongguo shaxue jianshi (Shakespeare in China: A Brief History), Jilin:
Dongbei shifan daxue chubanshe, 1994. Li Weimin, Zhongguo shashibiya piping shi (The
History of Shakespearian Studies in China), Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 2006. Xiao
Yang Zhang, Shakespeare in China, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996. Li Ruru,
Shashibiya: Staging Shakespeare in China, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003.
Murray J. Levith, Shakespeare in China, London: Continuum, 2004.
7
See Meng Xianqiang, “Preface,” Zhongguo shaxue jianshi (Shakespeare in China: A Brief
History), Jilin: Dongbei shifan daxue chubanshe, 1994.
114 SUOQIAO QIAN
“Shakespeare” over the past two centuries. On the other hand, however, Huang’s
pioneering work further highlights the importance of the question as to what a
“Chinese subject” entails in such cross-cultural studies.
The book consists of four parts with seven chapters entitled “Owning Chinese
Shakespears,” “Shakespeare in Absentia: The Genealogy of an Obsession,”
“Rescripting Moral Criticism: Charles and Mary Lamb, Lin Shu and Lao She,”
“Silent Film and Early Theater: Performing Womanhood and Cosmopolitanism,”
“Site-Specific Readings: Confucian Temple, Labor Camp, and Soviet-Chinese
Theater,” “Why Does Everyone Need Chinese Opera?” and “Disowning Shakespeare
and China,” respectively. Unlike previous studies based on the “Shakespeare in
China” model, Huang’s is both theoretically sophisticated and empirically enriching.
Loosely chronological in order and focusing on case studies, Huang’s discussion on
the cross-cultural topic of Shakespeare and China spans “two centuries of cultural
exchange,” involving the works of intellectuals, writers, filmmaker, theater artists,
such as Lin Shu (1852-1924), Liang Qichao (1873-1929), Lu Xun (1881-1936), Lao
She (1899-1966), Huang Zuolin (1906-1994), Li Jianwu (1906-1986), Ruan Lingyu
(1910-1935), Jiao Juyin (1905-1975), Yevgeniya Konstantinovna Lipkovskaya (1902-
1990), Stan Lai (b. 1954) and Wu Hsing-kuo (b. 1953).
Huang’s theoretical promulgations are laid out in the first chapter “Owning
Chinese Shakespeares.” On the cross-cultural practice of Chinese adaptations of
Shakespeare, the most popular question centers around its authenticity. And this
authenticity question is also twofold: whether these Chinese Shakespeares are still
“Shakespeare” or “Shakespeare” enough, or whether they are “Chinese” or in what
way they are “Chinese” and how much “Chinese.” Such (in) fidelity inquiries may
occur in both English and Chinese critical world, but the former is more likely a
discourse among Chinese reception while the latter among English reception.
Huang’s entire book is in a sense to dispel such ghost of authenticity claims and to
open up a cross-cultural conversation whereby meanings of such cross-cultural
practices must be accounted for in the specific sites of cross-cultural encounters. In
the current multicultural and post-colonial environment, “alternative Shakespeares”
have attracted much critical attention. Post-colonial critics have explored the meaning
and relevance of Shakespeare studies in relation to Latin America, Africa and India.
But Huang points out that Chinese Shakespeares don’t quite fit in with the post-
colonial model of critique either, and argues that “it is precisely by virtue of being in
an estranged, ambiguous relationship to the post-colonial question that Chinese
Shakespeares can provide rich opportunities for reexamining the logic of the field”
(Ibid., 27). Indeed, Chinese cross-cultural studies ought not to follow the logic of
post-colonial studies, and should certainly go beyond the authenticity discourse.
Chinese adaptations of Shakespeare necessarily produce cross-cultural hybridities that
contribute to and formulate meanings in Chinese modernity. To be entangled in the
question whether Chinese Shakespeares are authentic Shakespeare or authentically
Chinese merely denotes two sides of the same coin: a Eurocentric concern. The
assumption that there is a superior authentic Shakespeare for other cultural
adaptations to emulate certainly smacks of a Eurocentric essentialism, while an
obsession to look for essential Chineseness in Chinese adaptations of Shakespeare can
very well manifest Orientalist preoccupations. Either concern denies the Chinese
subjectivity in the Chinese cross-cultural practices involving the appropriation of
Shakespeare in modern China. Huang is sure to be lauded for setting out his
theoretical framework on a critique of cultural essentialism in regards to cross-
cultural studies on Chinese Shakespeares. Chinese Shakespeares “are not a binary
opposition to canonical metropolitan English-language representations that are
perceived to be ‘licensed’ and more faithful” (Ibid., p34), as Huang put it. Our critical
work is not to look for “alternative Shakespeares” as such, since “any system of
performance, like any mode of cultural production (for example, jingju), is not an
alternative to a legitimate, naturalized, mode of representation (for example, English-
language or huaju ‘straight’ performance)…it is more fruitful to pursue the question
of ‘alternative to what’ than to substantiate authenticity claims” (Ibid., p. 34).
Therefore, the critical task in Chinese Shakespeare studies should focus on the two-
way exchanges: “By two-way transactions, I mean the processes that revise and
enrich the repertoire of knowledge about Shakespeare and China” (Ibid., p. 34).
In the following six chapters, Huang examines such two-way transactions of
Shakespeare and China by focusing several case studies over the last two centuries.
While Huang’s intention was not merely to provide some insider information about
“Shakespeare in China,” the coverage of Huang’s discussions is quite extensive and
impressive, and perhaps the most up-to-date in that regard. Huang’s choice of cases
for his inquiry avoids the linear and teleological developmental model of
Shakespeare’s induction into modern Chinese cultural history, and pays special
attention to marginal appropriations, particularly Shakespeare-related rewrites, that
are usually neglected Shakespeare-in-China-like accounts. For instance, Huang
highlights the importance of the fact that it was Lin Zexu who first introduced
Shakespeare in Chinese accounts, even though it was a mere reference. Taken into
account the historical circumstances, however, the linkage between the introduction
of Shakespeare and British colonial encroachment was obvious. In Liang Qichao’s
Kun opera (kunju) Xin Luoma (New Rome) (1898), Shakespeare appears as a
character in the play. Such cross-cultural phenomenon usually did not occupy any
place in any account of Shakespeare in China, but to Huang, this deserves serious
critical attention as it carries much significance in understanding how Shakespeare,
along with other European masters, was utilized by Liang as a moral authority in that
specific historical juncture. Huang also takes Lao She’s “New Hamlet” (Xin
Hanmuliede, 1936), the earliest Chinese parody of Shakespeare’s famous character,
as “a milestone for East Asian interpretations of Shakespeare” (Ibid., p. 87). Written
in the mid-1930s, Lao She’s “New Hamlet” was a critical comment on the
contemporary Chinese socio-political life when the nation was caught in between old
and new values and intellectuals were caught in bewildering inaction in face of an
ever aggressive Japanese encroachment. I believe Huang is at his best in the final
chapter when he examines the performance and rewrites of King Lear by two
contemporary Taiwanese artists Wu Hsing-kuo and Stan Lai (Lai Sheng-chuan). Both
rewritings of King Lear demonstrated unique ways in which Buddhist motifs were
utilized with a personal touch. “Lai’s and Wu’s rewritings of King Lear are two
instances where performative conversations surrounding religious discourses and
116 SUOQIAO QIAN
personal identities take place” (Ibid., 197). If Huang’s examination of Chinese

Shakespeares in modern Chinese cultural history was genealogical in nature, his
accounts on these two contemporary Taiwanese instances are definitely affirmative
and appreciative. To Huang, Wu’s and Lai’s cross-cultural appropriations have
successfully “disowned” the authenticity discourses on Shakespeare and China, for to
these two artists, “Shakespeare” no longer carries any moral or historical allegories,
but is mainly concerned with their personal reflections upon their identity (what
Huang calls “small-time Shakespeare”), and being from Taiwan, it also deconstructs
any essential discourse on the authenticity claim of Chineseness.
Huang’s somewhat postmodern inclinations in his Chinese Shakespeares studies
provide him with theoretical sophistication to surpass the informant model of
“Shakespeare in China.” His critical sensitivity to dispel essentialist authenticity
claims on both “Shakespeare” and “China” paved way for real possibilities for two-
way cross-cultural studies. But the question still remains: what kind of cross-cultural
studies has been practiced on the issue of Chinese adaptations of Shakespeare? What
can we expect to learn, both ways, from Huang’s Chinese Shakespeares?
If we were to expect revelations and illuminations about the meanings of Chinese
Shakespeares in the formation of Chinese modernity by following Huang’s
provocative promise to investigate “what does ‘Shakespeare’ do in Chinese literary
and performance culture?” readers may find themselves somewhat disappointed.
Unlike, for instance, Chen Jianhua’s recent investigation on the discursive practices
of Napoleon in the formation of the modern Chinese discourse of “revolution,” 8
Huang’s examination on what “Shakespeare” does in modern Chinese culture is
sporadic and insufficient to allow the readers to formulate coherent understandings
about the formation of Chinese modernity as such in terms of “Chinese
Shakespeares.” Perhaps Huang would not even agree that there is such a thing as
“Chinese modernity,” because the very notion of “Chinese” has been sufficiently
deconstructed along with the authenticity claims of “Chinese.”
Huang’s theoretical framework is grounded in what he calls “locality criticism.”
In countering the Eurocentric essentialism and Orientalism in terms of their
ownership claims on Shakespeare and China, Huang’s strategy is to raise two
questions: “Whose Shakespeare is it? Whose and which China?” (Huang, 2009, 25)
That question implies that not only are there different representations of China but
also multiple “Chinas” depending on who’s talking. While Huang insightfully sees
the inapplicability of post-colonial criticism on the Chinese historical situation, as
“China was never quite colonized by the Western powers in the twentieth century. In
most parts of the Chinese-speaking world, Shakespeare has rarely been resisted as a
dominant figure of colonialism,” Huang goes on to claim that, “throughout its modern
and contemporary history, China often played multiple and sometimes contradictory
8
See Chen Jianhua, “Napuolun yu wanqing ‘xiaoshuojie geming’” (Napoleon and “Fiction
Revolution” in Late Qing), in his Cong geming dao gonghe (From Revolution to Republic),
Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 2009.
roles simultaneously, including the oppressor and the oppressed.” 9 In these politically
charged claims, Huang seems to be conflating two distinct notions of “China:” a
cultural Chinese Nation and a political Chinese State, though nation-state cannot be
totally divorced. By “Chinese Shakespeares” then, Huang does not mean any
“‘national Shakespeares’ such as India’s or PRC’s Shakespeare,” but rather “the
theoretical problems and multiple cultural locations of the ideas associated with China
and Shakespeare,” and these localities are site-specific: “‘China’ refers to a number of
ideological positions (for example, the imaginaries of China) as well as a range of
geocultural locations and historical periods that encompass late imperial China (1839-
1910), Republican China (1911-1949), Communist China (1949-present), post-1949
Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese diaspora” (Ibid., p. 39). In other words, to avoid
a teleological developmental model of accounting modern China and her adaptations
of Shakespeare, Huang treats these “different Chinas” as separate “site-specific”
entities only within which cross-cultural practices of Chinese Shakespeares can be
conversed upon.
What kind of meaning can we then expect from Huang’s reading these site-
specific local practices of Chinese Shakespeares? Certainly not in any coherent sense
that will contribute much to our understanding of “modern Chinese literary and
performance culture.” Chapter Five is entitled “Site-Specific Readings: Confucian
Temple, Labor Camp, and Soviet-Chinese Theater,” in which Huang discusses three
cases in “mid-twentieth century” China: Jiao Juyin’s production of Hamlet in a
Confucian temple in 1942 during China’s War of Resistance against Japan, Wu
Ningkun’s reading of Hamlet in a labor camp during the Cultural Revolution, and the
Soviet-Chinese production of Much Ado About Nothing before and after the Cultural
Revolution (premiered in 1957, revived in 1961, and again in 1979). At first glance,
one may marvel at the author’s daring in grouping such disparate cases together and
wonder what kind of coherent meaning can be revealed. Then one soon realizes that
disparity is precisely the coherence for Huang’s readings. Huang understands and
points out that twentieth-century China was a battleground for cultural politics, and
theater-making is no exception. Heavily entangled in ideological wars, Chinese
adaptations of Shakespeare were ideologically and politically charged, often a matter
of life and death for those involved. In historicizing the politicization of aesthetics,
however, Huang presents his observations of these three cases in their own specific
historical periods and finds them, as-a-matter-of-factly, equally interesting and
meaningful. Jiao’s Hamlet was staged in wartime China and the Shakespearean
character was appropriated to boost up national sentiment and China’s self-esteem.
“In this context, this wartime performance was already loaded with decidedly local
connotations” (Ibid., p. 133). In other words, Confucian and nationalist Chinese
appropriations of Hamlet produce “local” meaning in Huang’s locality criticism. So
does Wu Ningkun’s reading of Hamlet as recounted in his memoirs A Single Tear.
When in a labor camp Wu was persecuted and deprived of freedom, he managed to
sneak in a Shakespeare and read himself into Hamlet. So Huang comments that
9
Ibid., 26. So far as I know, there is only one instance in which China would be called “the
oppressor” in modern Chinese history, that is, by those who call for Taiwan independence.
118 SUOQIAO QIAN
“Wu’s reading of Hamlet emphasized the connection between particularities of his

locality (suffering, injustice, politics) and those of Hamlet’s” (Ibid., p. 141). In other
words, Wu’s suffering, injustice done to him and the politics involved present their
meaning no more no less as fitting his “locality.” Following that approach, one may
not be surprised to find that Huang holds an equally cool and receptive stance towards
Soviet-style Chinese production of Much Ado About Nothing first directed by
Yevgeniya Lipkovskaya in 1957, which Huang applauded as one of those “stirring
works that were enormously inspirational to the 50s-70s generations” (Ibid., p. 143).
One may wonder what constitutes Huang’s criteria in choosing his case studies
for his locality criticism. In terms of its historical significance and momentum, the
post-Cultural Revolution Reform Era was certainly a golden age for Chinese
Shakespeares. In Li Ruru’s Shashibiya: Staging Shakespeare in China, for instance,
we find only the first chapter devoted to pre-Cultural Revolution Chinese adaptations
of Shakespeare while the rest five chapters devoted to the Reform Era. But that is not
included in Huang’s cases. Huang only touches upon the “Shakespeare craze” in the
1980s with the instance of the 1979 revival of Much Ado About Nothing. For Huang,
that revival tells us something about “memory,” about “recycling productions that
created collective cultural memory” (Ibid., p. 157). This hardly says anything about
an important episode of Shakespeare’s intervention into modern Chinese cultural
politics. By contrast, Li Ruru offers us a much detailed and nuanced account on the
intricacies of cultural politics involving Lipkovskaya’s first production of Much Ado
and the consequent two revivals in quite different political contexts. When
Shakespeare’s plays were allowed to perform in China in the early 1980s, it was a
very emotional experience for the audience who felt genuine excitement and hope. It
signaled a new era and a new kind of political and cultural life. As Li put it, “The
illusion conveyed by the comedy [Much Ado] paralleled our own high spirits and the
mood of the whole nation…how we wished we might escape to ‘the golden days of
Merry England’” (Li, 2003 58-59). It is certainly not a matter of recycling collective
memory, nor a “procolonial” affirmation. As Chen Xiaomei points out, Chinese
appropriations of Shakespeare in the post-Mao China constitute very much a counter-
discourse to the dominant ideology of the Party State. When Macbeth was premiered
in 1980 in Beijing, Chinese audiences read their own Cultural Revolution experience
into the play and induce meaning from it. As Chen tells us, “No theater-goers in 1980
China could have missed the implied message. Indeed, for the majority of the
members of Chinese audiences that watched the Shakespearean world of intrigue and
conspiracy in Macbeth, it was no doubt difficult to forget their terrifying experiences
during the Cultural Revolution, a national catastrophe in which Mao and his followers
persecuted numerous Party officials, state leaders, and old ‘comrades-in-arms’” (Cen,
1997, 161). In other words, “Shakespeare” participated in modern Chinese experience
as Chinese experience it. It was so in Lin Shu’s time, all the way through the
continuous Chinese modernity project which is still unfolding today.
Given Huang’s genealogical gaze into specific sites of Chinese Shakespeares, it
seems which case gets discoursed upon does not matter that much after all, except
perhaps when he investigates Taiwanese postmodern personalized appropriations of
Shakespeare with much appreciation and affirmation. When “China” is effectively
deconstructed into site-specific “localities,” one wonders if there is a Chinese subject

in “Chinese Shakespeares.” If there is no Chinese subject in Chinese cross-cultural
studies, such investigation becomes merely conversational. And as such, one needs to
ponder: what is the effect and ethics of such “conversation” in a global environment
where “Cataian” continues to be glossed in the legacy of “Caliban”?
Acknowledgement: I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their
insightful comments.
References
Barker, Francis and Peter Hulme. 1985. “Nymphs and reapers heavily vanish: the discursive
con-texts of The Tempest,” in Alternative Shakespeares. Ed. John Drakakis, London and New
York: Methuen.
Billings, Timothy. 2003. “Caterwauling Cataians: The Genealogy of a Gloss,” Shakespeare
Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 1, (Spring 2003).
Brotton, Jerry. 1998. “‘This Tunis, Sir, was Carthage’: Contesting Colonialism in The
Tempest,” in Post-Colonial Shakespeares. Ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin, London and
New York: Routledge.
Cesaire, Aime. 1969. Une Tempete. Paris: Seuil.
Chen Jia. 2009. A History of English Literature. Beijing: The Commercial Press, 1982.
Chen Jianhua. “Napuolun yu wanqing ‘xiaoshuojie geming’” (Napoleon and “Fiction
Revolution” in Late Qing), in his Cong geming dao gonghe (From Revolution to Republic).
Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe.
Chen Xiaomei. 1997. “Occidentalist Theater in Post-Mao China: Shakespeare, Ibsen and
Brecht as Counter-Others,” in Streams of Capital: Transnational Cultural Studies. Ed. David
Palumbo-Liu and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann, New York:
Grove Press.
Huang, Alexander C. Y. 2009. Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Levith, Murray J. 2004. Shakespeare in China. London: Continuum.
Li Weimin. 2006. Zhongguo shashibiya piping shi (The History of Shakespearian Studies in
China). Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe.
Li, Ruru. 2003. Shashibiya: Staging Shakespeare in China. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University
Press.
Loomba, Ania. 2002. Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism. Oxford, New York: The Oxford
University Press.
Mannoni, Octavio. 1956. Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization. Trans. P.
Powesland, London: Methuen.
Meng Xianqian. 1994. Zhongguo shaxue jianshi (Shakespeare in China: A Brief History). Jilin:
Dongbei shifan daxue chubanshe.
Shakespeare, William. 1995. The Tempest. Ed. Rex Bibson, New York: The Cambridge
University Press.
Zhang, Xiao Yang. 1996. Shakespeare in China. Newark: University of Delaware Press.
Zhou, Junzhang (周駿章). 1994. “Shashibiya yu zhongguoren” (莎士比亞與中國人)
(Shakespeare and Chinese), in Shanxi shida xuebao (Journal of Shaanxi Normal University)
Vol. 23, No.2, June 1994.

Book Reviews
The Extended Mind. Menary, Richard. Ed. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT
Press,2010). 382 pp. Paperback, ISBN-10: 0262014033.
“WHERE DOES the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?” In their 1998 paper
Andy Clark and David Chalmers raised this question and answered it provocatively:
A cognitive system isn’t just the brain and sometimes it is extended to include
environmental entities; cognitive processes aren’t all in the head and sometimes they
are extended into the environment. Their argument has since excited a vigorous
debate among philosophers and cognitive scientists. The Extended Mind, an anthology
of 15 essays, presents a comprehensive analysis of, and the best responses to, Clark
and Chalmers’ hypothesis that if a cognitive system is extended to include
environmental entities then the relevant cognitive processes are extended into the
environment. Some of these essays clarify this hypothesis by offering further
explications; others sharpen the issues involved in the hypothesis by providing the
most recent criticisms; and still others attempt to develop the hypothesis by moving
the debate in new directions. The Extended Mind is an overview of the latest research
in the studies of the extended cognition. It serves as an introduction for those who are
not familiar with the theory of the extended mind, as a valuable collection for those
who are actively doing research on the extended mind, and as a thought provoking
text for a graduate seminar in philosophy and cognitive science.
The study of extended mind is one of the main currents in the presently
fashionable “4E+S” movement in cognitive science and philosophy of mind, where
4E+S refers to the embodied mind, the enacted mind, the extended mind, the
embedded mind, and the situated mind. The 4E+S movement has grown strong
enough to stand in sharp contrast to the reigning model of cognitive studies based on
the computational theory of cognition. The anthology Extended Mind is a valuable
contribution because it highlights two features of this intellectual movement: (1)
functionalism is a philosophical foundation of the 4E+S conception, and (2) the
enactive approach plays a pivotal role in 4E+S theorizing. Failure in recognizing or
appreciating these two features often lead to misinterpretations and/or
misunderstanding of the extended mind hypothesis and the failure have occurred in
both pros and cons in the debate about the extended mind.
As the Extended Mind demonstrates, the debate revolves around Clark and
Chalmers’ main argument for the extended mind hypothesis that runs roughly as
follows (chapter 2): If an organism and an environmental entity are coupled through
their interaction to the effect that (1) the expected behavior would unlikely occur if
the environmental entity were removed just as it would if part of the organism’s brain
were removed, and (2) that the environmental entity functions as a part which would
be cognitive were it a part of the brain, then the coupled system is a cognitive system
and the processes this system endures are cognitive ones. Most criticisms against the
extended mind hypothesis target at the coupling principle and the parity principle
apparently employed in this argument. Fred Adams and Ken Aizawa’s essay (chapter

122 BOOK REVIEWS
4) contends that Clark and Chalmers’s argument commit to the so-called coupling-
constitution fallacy to the effect that if an environmental entity is coupled with a
cognitive agent then it constitutes a part of the agent’s cognitive system. Robert D.
Rupert’s essay (chapter 14) employs something similar to Leibniz law of
indiscernibility of ‘identicals’ and argues that neuronal processes and non-neuronal
processes are not on a par because they are not sufficiently similar to be of the same
kind—cognitive kind. In response to the criticisms both Clark (chapters 3 and 5) and
Menary (chapters 1 and 10) accentuate and clarify the central commitment to
functionalism of the extended mind hypothesis. The aim of the extended mind is to
explain why some neuronal processes and some non-neuronal processes are so
coordinated through their enacted interaction that they together function as a
cognitive system. It is functionality and not location that matters when determining
whether or not a process is cognitive. If a coupled process has a cognitive function
then it does not matter where it is located—whether it is partly, or even mostly,
located in the environment. A functionalist interpretation of the extended mind is the
focus of Michael Wheeler’s essay (chapter 11), where he argues that the extended
mind is a kind of extended functionalism that takes non-neuronal entities and
processes as constitutive of cognitive processes.
However, what makes the model of the extended mind an alternative to the
reigning model of cognitive science is the enactive approach rather than the extended
functionalism as the extended functionalism alone would be an extension of, rather
than a competitor for, the standard cognitive science. Several contributors of the
Extended Mind attempt to develop the extended mind hypothesis in the enactive
direction. The key to the coupling of systems or the mechanism that creates a coupled
system that constitutes a cognitive system in its own right is what Clark and Chalmers
call “a two-way interaction” between human organism and the environmental entities.
The two-way interactive link is cognitive because it is enactive in character.
Epistemic actions enact the environment by making it aid and augment cognitive
processes. Consequently, the environment is invited to play an active role in driving
cognition. In other words, the environment is not simply waiting there to be cognized;
rather, it can be enacted to participate in the process of cognizing. Robert A. Wilson
(chapter 8) calls for the shift of focus from representations to activities of
representing. John Sutton (chapter 9) suggests the complementarity principle that
reconciles internalism and externalism and argues that internal memories and external
memories can make complementary contributions to cognitive processes. Mark
Rowlands (chapter 12) gives an account of extended consciousness on the basis of his
notion of intentionality as a form of revealing activity that run through neural, bodily,
and environmental processes. Since the enactive approach to cognition and mind
seems a key to understanding of extended mind, an account of enaction is demanded.
Such an account, however, is absent in the Extended Mind. The required account
would have to articulate two crucial aspects of enaction: (1) to enact the environment
for cognition is to make it continuously act/react on the organism and (2) to enact the
environment for cognition is to establish some lawful relationships between the
organism and its environment pertaining to cognition.

BOOK REVIEWS 123
The idea of cognitive system as a coupled system enabled by enacted interactive

link between the organism and the environment has two revolutionary implications
for cognitive science and philosophy of mind. First, it makes claim about the
elasticity of the mind—that the mind is no more permanent than waters; the mind is
fleeting and portable or “ephemeral” as Robert Rupert describes it (chapter 14). The
mind may be expanding and contracting alternately. It may expand, as in the case of
perceiving, beyond the brain and beyond the body; and it may shrink, as in the case of
self-reflecting, into the brain; all depend on the cognitive task and the system
requirements it demands. This elasticity implication appears inconsistent with the
received, reigning notion of the mind as an individual with stable, persisting, and
long-standing properties and capacities (Rupert, chapter 14). In response to this
problem, Clark (chapter 3) argues that the coupled system, though portable, is
nonetheless reliable, while Menary (chapters 1 and 10) suggest a distinction between
long-standing dispositional capacities and exercising of those capacities on various
occasions. Both have the faith in Parmenides sitting behind Heraclitus; but this faith
seems to impede any revolutionary move.
The faith in permanence embraces the belief in enduring subject. Who is the
cognizer in the case of cognitive process performed by a coupled system built on
enacted interactive link between the organism and the environment? For John Preston
(chapter 15), this is the issue of first-person authority. If a coupled system consisting
of Lu’s brain, body, and an environmental entity makes a cognitive achievement, then
according to Preston, it is Lu, the person, who makes the achievement and hence it is
the person who should be given the epistemic credit for the achievement. Extended
mind theorists split on this issue; some (e.g., Rowlands) agree with Preston while
others (e.g., Clark and Chalmers) attribute the cognitive achievement to the coupled
system. The latter is making a revolutionary move by pushing in the direction of
abolishing traditionally established conceptual distinctions between the mental and
the physical, between subject and object, and so on. Not only is the mind elastic, but
the self/person is also elastic. Thus, the coupled system is the person at the point of
coupling. There isn’t such thing as a persistent mind or self-existing as a bare
substratum. Moving from elastic cognition to elastic mind and to elastic self is not
easy; The Extended Mind is instrumental in helping the reader make these moves
smoothly.
Dr. ZHAOLU LU, Professor of Philosophy, Tiffin University, 155 Miami Street
Tiffin, OH 44883, USA. Email: [email protected].

124 BOOK REVIEWS
《中國晚明與歐洲文學: 明末耶穌會古典型証道故事考詮 (Late Ming China and

European Literature: A Philological study on the Late Ming Jesuit Appropriation
of the Classical Exemplum). By Li Sher-Shiueh (Taipei: Taipei Lianjing, 2005).
437 pp. Hardback, ISBN 957-08-2828-5.
THIS BOOK rediscovers a crucial yet often unnoticed role of Jesuit missionaries as
the earliest introducers of Western classical literature to China. The author begins his
prologue by referring to the magnum opus European Literature and the Latin Middle
Ages of Robert Curtius. Such deliberate intertextuality of the two titles signifies the
author’s respect for the scholarship and inspiring works of Curtius. The author points
out that his book is distinctive from the other in terms of research object and
methodology. Li’s monograph shares the same objective of his doctoral thesis to
“offer a re-examination of the late Ming Jesuit Chinese writing in a literary
perspective”. The leading research question of Li’s work is: “Was literature included
in the Western knowledge introduced by Jesuits to late Ming China?” His following
questions are: What is the content of such “literature”? Does it constitute a sort of
evangelical poetics or translatology? (p.i) As Li’s metaphorical use of “the
storyteller” from Benjamin’s article title (pp. 344-350) indicates, this book presents
Li’s well-documented and comprehensive investigation on three related questions:
What kind of stories was told by the Jesuits? How did they tell these stories? Why did
they tell them in this way?
The stories appropriated by the Jesuits are the classical exemplum, which is
defined by French scholar Jacques le Goff - “a brief narrative given to persuade an
audience by a salutary lesson” (“un récit bref donné comme convaincre un auditoire
par une leçon salutaire”) (p.4). In terms of their context and origin, Li further divides
exemplum into two categories: the classical exemplum and the Catholic exemplum.
The former category includes Greco-Roman stories that served secular rather than
religious ends. An influential example of the latter is Vitae patrum, stories of the
Northern African desert fathers in the 3rd century BCE. Its abridged version Legenda
aurea edited by Jacobus de Voragine became even more widely circulated in Europe.
Both versions were appropriated by the Jesuits in late Ming China. Li gives three
reasons to explain why he is so intrigued by the translated exemplum: firstly, such
appropriation marked the initial exchange between Chinese and Western classical
literature; secondly, the Jesuits’ attempts to pen Chinese written language in the form
of Apostolat der Presse (apostolate of the press) were unprecedented despite the
earlier Catholic appropriation of this pagan literature in the 2 nd or 3rd century (pp. 330-
344); thirdly, the Jesuits’ application of chreia, a sub-genre under anecdotes, is
exceptionally widely seen in the history of Catholic proselytization. Based on these
points, Li firmly argues that the significance of the Jesuit appropriation of the
classical exemplum in late Ming China should not be overlooked by anyone engaged
in literary and cultural exchange between China and the West (pp. 5-6).
In the four following chapters, Li discusses respectively four categories of
exemplum –fabula, chreia, mythos and legend. In Chapter 2, Li describes fabula as
what Isidore of Seville calls “loquendae fictae”, or “fictional speech” (p.46). Due to

BOOK REVIEWS 125
its strong allegorical characteristics, fables had been widely employed in ancient
times for public speeches until the late medieval and Renaissance rhetoricians
challenged their ambiguous functions for biblical instruction and superficial
entertainment (p.48). Li investigates how the Jesuits co-opted the Aesop’s fables from
three sources, i.e. Phaedri Avgvsti Liberti Fabvlarvm Aesoptarvm by Phaedrus (1st
century), Aesopic Fable of Bavrius in Iambic Verse, and the Augustana collection in
Greek prose. He finds two approaches of the Jesuit co-option: one retains the original
intention of the story and the other creates new meaning by changing the plot or
revising the implied moral values. In Henderson’s words, the latter approach shows
“the making of meaning” in Jesuit Chinese writing with allegoresis or spiritual
interpretation (p.54). Li makes three discoveries in this part: firstly, the fables that
were given new meanings by the Jesuits remain in the same pattern of the classical
fables (p.55); secondly, the new meanings often come from the re-configuration of the
story structure (p.55); and thirdly, these new meanings stem from three recurrent
themes in the medieval European pulpits, i.e. memoria mortis, separating fact from
fiction, and the last judgment (p.58). The first theme is addressed in Ricci’s
translation of the peacock fable in his Jirenshipian畸人十篇 (Ten pieces of the
disabled man). In his Chinese collection Kuangyi況義 (To give meaning), Trigault
illustrated the second theme in the fable of the dog, the meat and the reflection. It is
noticeable that both missionaries had used the “Three Friends” fable to demonstrate
the last judgment of God. Ricci’s version in Jirenshipian (1608 AD) gives a concise
definition of the three friends as caihuo 財貨 (wealth), qingqi 親戚 (kinsman)
anddexing德行 (moral behaviour), while Trigault’s translation (1625 AD) elaborates
on the definition with a special term degong 德功, which is the reversion of an
influential Buddhist term gongde 功德 (merits and virtues). Disregarding the
linguistic differences, Li observes that both versions present the transformed meaning
from general ethics to the ultimate concern in the secular world (pp.70-78). The
appropriated fables all served a common purpose to deliver the sometimes far-fetched
religious lessons while “re-aiming” (Harold Bloom) at the audience in a Chinese
context (p.122).
Chapter 3 introduces chreia as a sub-category under anecdotes, which embodies
the tension between history and fiction. To use Li’s words in his article on the Jesuit
use of chreia in late-Ming China, this type of moral anecdote “stands out as the most
unrelenting challenge against historical truth”. Li cites the definition of chreia by
Ronald F. Hock and parallels this subgenre with “shishuo” 世說 from Shishuo Xinyu
世說新語, a collection of stories and discourses of literati written during the Jin
period (265-420 AD) by Liu Yiqing. An apt example of the Jesuit translation of
chreia is found in Dadaojiyan达道纪言 (1636 AD), a collaborative translation by the
Italian Jesuit missionary Alfonso Vagnoni (1566-1640) and Han Yun 韓雲
(approximately1596-1649), a provincial official in Shanxi. This book is a collection
of the Western political and ethnical apothegms from ancient Greek and Latin
literature. The 356 pieces of dictum were categorized into the Confucian cardinal five
relations - that between the ruler and the ruled (158 pieces); that between parents and

126 BOOK REVIEWS
children (21 pieces); that between siblings (31 pieces); that between husband and wife
(23 pieces); and that between friends (122 pieces). To find out why a large number of
chreiai (approximately 750 pieces in total) had been translated by the Jesuits, Li
investigates its historicity, fictionality and textuality, and attributes its wide use to the
exemplum principle of decorum, or usefulness (p.180). Li concludes this chapter by
identifying how historicity suffered a twofold loss in chreia – it is lost in the figures of
speech of this genre as well as in the preaching role that chreia plays. Li finds it more
paradoxical that the readers’ perception of truth is strengthened at the loss of
historicity. This finding indicates the usefulness of a distorted “history” to convey the
universal truth (pp.186-187).
Chapter 4 discusses mythos, a category that shares the fictional feature with fable
(p.189). Despite the relatively minimized number (less than 20 pieces) compared to
the large proportion of chreia and fable, the mythos played a distinctive role in the
writings of three missionaries, namely Ricci, Vagnoni, and Portuguese Jesuit
Emmanuel Diaz. In Ricci’s Jirenshipian 畸人十篇 (Ten pieces of the disabled man),
Li finds the first Western classical myth in Chinese writings - the story of King
Midas. It is about how the hidden secret of Midas’ donkey ears was advocated by a
magic bamboo flute. This piece of bamboo grew from a hole in which the king’s
barber made a whisper out of such burning truth. Ricci omitted the genealogical
background of Midas and his enmity with Apollo, and changed a seemingly trivial
detail. In the original story and its European variations, the flute was made of reed,
but in Ricci’s version it is a produce of the celebrated Chinese botanical species
bamboo. For Li, this seemingly minor alteration not only demonstrates Ricci’s
domestication strategy but also emphasizes the allegorical meaning of natural
phenomena (pp.195-199). Further discussions are conducted on the three myths in
Vagnoni’s Chinese writings (p.236) and Portuguese Jesuit Emmanuel Diaz’s
Shengjingzhijie聖經直解 (A faithful interpretation of the Bible) (1636), in which ten
pieces of Greek myths were appropriated (pp.200-205). Three findings were drawn
from these discussions. 1) Homer and other Greco-Roman myths were “rigidly
rejected” despite the inevitable presence of mythical tradition in the late Ming Jesuits’
writings (p.237). 2) the efforts to appropriate Greek myths demonstrate the religious
syncretism in late Ming China (p.242). Thirdly, Diaz’s view of mythos resembles the
modern sense of myths, which, as Barthes defines, is a type of speech that serves our
needs by changing its form, content and usage (p.243).
In Chapter 5, Li adapts Propp’s folklorist definition of legend and analyzes the
Jesuit appropriation of three widely-spread Greco-Roman legends: “Aesop and the
Tongue”, “Damon and Pintias” and “The Sword of Damocles”. For Li, the
appropriated translation of Matteo Ricci and Martino Martini not only indicate their
sermon approach but also demonstrate the ethnical encounters of Chinese tradition
and Western ideologies (pp.246-248). He finds the last legend a typical case of Jesuit
appropriation of Western classical legends due to its wide currency in Western
civilization and the sophisticated symbolic meaning of the sword in Ricci’s version.
As Li finds, the sword was given a threefold religious sense including the divine
justice, the metaphorical Death and the secular sins of the King (pp.293-294). For the

BOOK REVIEWS 127
Jesuit storyteller, this story depicts the unequal bipolar relationship between God and
humans: the suspended sword demonstrates the wrath of God and human beings shall
consequently owe and fear God (pp.291-302). Despite the Jesuits’ endeavour to
preach in a Confucian way, this theme contradicts the core Confucian ideas of ren仁
[compassion] and tianrenheyi 天人合一 [the harmony between heaven and humans].
Ricci’s rewriting efforts did not meet his objective. For the Chinese listener, a non-
believer scholar Gong Daoli龚道立, the most impressive message in this story is the
“good and evil judgment in one’s afterlife” (p.306). To sum up, Li finds that the
Jesuits often began their preaching with anecdotes from Western history and
illustrated their points with fictional Greco-Roman legends. For Li, legend situates on
the spectrum between history and myth or between fact and fiction, but its narrative
purpose could be described according to Propp’s opinion that “[h]istorical
significance is an ideological phenomenon” (pp.308-309).
From the four categories of exemplum, Li summarizes and accentuates the
exceptional “Medievalism” (p.6) that characterizes the Jesuit appropriation of ancient
Greco-Roman stories. If we take into consideration the spatiotemporal remoteness
(China vs. Europe and Medieval times vs. Renaissance era), we find the fact that the
Jesuits from Renaissance Europe preached in classical Chinese with medieval
exemplum in late Ming China even more stimulating. It is in this sense that Li defines
such “Medievalism” with Stephen Owen’s term of “language system”, which
surpasses linguistic, cultural and tempo-spatial boundaries, and demonstrates a unique
communication between Chinese and Western literature (pp.39-40). Li’s book
demonstrates the twofold motive of such “Medievalism”. One is the cultural context
of late Ming China with remarkable linguistic heterogeneity (pp.7-23) and the
flourishing allegorical literature written by Ming literati (pp.83-85). The other is the
deep influence of Western rhetoric tradition on the Jesuit preaching method, which is
one key issue of Li’s inquiry on the transformation from language to morphology
(p.39).
This book demonstrates that the classical exempla were not faithfully recounted
but purposefully rewritten in a unique style by the Ming Jesuit storytellers. Li
incorporates the Ming Jesuits such as Ricci, de Pantoja and Vagnoni into “a particular
missionary group of authors” due to their continuation of the classical tradition by
“creating” chriic exempla of various kinds in Chinese to illustrate Christian
philosophy. Why did this group choose to “trans-write” rather than translate? That is
the key issue discussed in the concluding part of Li’s monograph (Chapter 6), where
Li scrutinizes the Jesuit self-perception of their co-option of Western classical
exemplum (p.315). From Ricci’s Chinese writings, Li observes that the Jesuits held a
Platonic attitude toward literature. For example, the epics of Homer were absent in
the appropriated Greco-Roman stories despite the intertwined relation between
Homer and Catholicism. Ricci undervalues Homer and other poets because their
poetry blurred the distinction between the Olympus Gods and “god-like” mortal
heroes (p.323). Li uses a celebrated event to prove that Jesuit appropriation embodies
their Platonic evaluation of art in human society. During his second visit to Nanjing in
1599, Ricci had a debate with the famous scholar monk Sanhuai 三淮 (1545-1608) on

128 BOOK REVIEWS
the topic of appearance and essence. The latter insisted that substantial objects could
be recreated in the speech about them. And Ricci gave his frequently cited answer: “If
I can see the reflection of the sun or the moon in a mirror, … can I simply say that the
sun or the moon is made by this mirror?” For Li, Ricci’s retort apparently directs to
the Platonic idea of mimesis (p.327).
Lastly but importantly, Li’s monograph tackles Ming Jesuit narrative identity,
which is extremely difficult to be nailed down regarding their somewhat chameleonic
behaviour. They are generally portrayed in Chinese cultural history as the first
introducers of material culture and Catholic missionaries engaged in rhetoric and
hermeneutical activities. However, their mission to convert Chinese people was far
from successful since statistics show that the converted Chinese account for only
100,000, which is rather a small percentage on the scale of the late Ming Chinese
population of 175,000,000 (p.351). They carefully distinguished themselves as
wenren xueshi文人學士 (the Chinese man of letters and scholar) and xishi (Western
scholars) or xiru西儒 (Western Confucianists) (p.315). Such hybrid identity between
China and the West was sustained also by their efforts to imitate the appearance and
attire of monks upon their arrival and adapting to the mainstream Confucian scholar
lifestyle later on (p.353). Li’s book suggests a unique perspective to portray these
Jesuits – they are above all “storytellers on the medieval altar” (p.352). By telling and
appropriating the Western classical exemplum, the Jesuit creation of “exemplum
literature” contributes to both Chinese civilization and Western tradition by enhancing
the genre resources for Chinese literature and negotiating the “ancient enmity”
between poets and philosophers described in the Republic (p.352).
Apart from its extensive scope and penetrating thoughts, Li’s book is also
noteworthy as the fruit of the author’s perseverant search crossing both linguistic and
disciplinary boundaries. The idea of this book was initiated in Li Shixue’s high school
years when he challenged the traditional view in the textbook of Chinese cultural
history-the Jesuit missionary advocated mainly Western religious beliefs and material
culture when they preached in late Ming China. Li started his first investigation
during his postgraduate studies at Fu Ren University, Taiwan. He happened to find a
series of Tian Xue Chu Han 天學初涵 [The Preliminary Ideas of Heavenly Studies]
edited by Li Zhizao 李之藻 (1571-1630 AD) in the library of the faculty of
humanities. Out of “a mysterious impulse” as Li described, he got hold of the book
and began reading it. To his delight, he found rich literary values rather than scientific
evidence in this compilation of many Aesop’s fables and some other familiar stories
translated into Chinese. After reading the whole series, Li composed his first article
on the relationship between Greek allegories and late Ming Catholic preaching in
China in a journal Chinese and Foreign Literature. Much encouraged by his
supervisor Prof. Anthony C. Yu at Chicago University, Li decided to develop this
idea in his PhD thesis. He spent thirteen and a half years in total on this research
project – nine years on the extensive learning in Chinese literature and history,
theology, medieval studies, and classical languages such as Latin and Greek; and then
four and a half years on the composition of his thesis.

BOOK REVIEWS 129
The next step of Li’s incessant Odyssey is to explore the relation between the
Jesuit translation and Chinese literature. I am confident that Li’s reappraisal will
break the perpetual principle of cultural essentialism in nationalistic literary theories
that he aims to deconstruct.
Dr. YU HUANG, Post-doctoral Research Fellow, City University of Hong Kong,

Hong Kong. Email: [email protected].

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What is the main subject and purpose of the paper according to the author?

What is the main subject and purpose of the paper according to the author?

What are the four causes that Aristotle distinguishes according to the paper?

What are the four causes that Aristotle distinguishes according to the paper?

PERSONS AND CAUSES: BEYOND ARISTOTLE

intellectual giant Aristotle, whose philosophy of causality I will critically examine in

I. Subject and Purpose of This Paper

In the history of a philosophy of causality Aristotle is no question a giant, if not even

II. Persons and the Four Traditional Causes

A) Some Reflections on Aristotle’s philosophy of the four causes.

If “formal cause” is to encompass the essence and intelligible structure of a

Aristotelian terms en hoo (“in which”) or “hypokeimenon” (that which underlies

must also be considered from the point of view of a metaphysics of causality. In

C) Motivation as a metaphysical ground of explanation sui generis of volitional

will but sheer arbitrariness. Only an understanding of the irreducibly new

Journal of East-West Thought

Hidenari, Negishi; Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Kazuhiro; Ueda, Mitsugu; Kuriyama, Komaba;

Journal of East-West Thought

Journal of East-West Thought

Journal of East-West Thought

Journal of East-West Thought

Wojtyìa , K.. 1979. The Acting Person. Boston: Reidel.

Journal of East-West Thought

I. The Problem of Chinese Science

II. Chinese Approach to “Nature”

The reasoning behind the Sivin-Huff position runs as follows:

III. One Nomological Relation: Dao

Journal of East-West Thought

Journal of East-West Thought

IV. Two Paraconsistent Properties: Yin and Yang

E Jing (I-Ching or the Book of Changes—a classic source of Chinese Science)

V. Three Interdisciplinary Domains: Heavens, Humans, and Earth

The third component of Chinese scientific holism is a triad of three domains of

humanistic approach to nature culminates in a humanistic science for which today’s

Journal of East-West Thought

I have painted a simple picture of Chinese Science—i.e., as our philosophers of

Journal of East-West Thought

Journal of East-West Thought

Journal of East-West Thought

Journal of East-West Thought

I. Ecology and Conceptual Environment

Journal of East-West Thought

II. A Brief Story of Western Thought

III. Man and Environment

Journal of East-West Thought

IV. The Way Out

psychological; it operates by the mechanism of cultural tradition which involves

Acknowledgement: In the process of having my article accepted by the Journal of

Journal of East-West Thought

Journal of East-West Thought

Abstract: As a practitioner of “Constructive-Engagement Methodological

Journal of East-West Thought

I. Wittgenstein and Confucianism

The Master said: “I wish to speak no more.”

Journal of East-West Thought

Although in Principia Ethica Moore regarded the term “goodness” as indefinable, he

I.3 “Live Happily” and “Enjoy Beauty and Goodness Together”

II. Dewey and Confucianism

II.1 Empirical Naturalism and the Biological Basis of Humanity