The Horizon of Modernity: Subjectivity and Social Structure in New Confucian Philosophy

412 Pages·2016·2.231 MB·English

by  Ady Van den Stock

The Horizon of Modernity
Modern Chinese Philosophy
Edited by
John Makeham (La Trobe University)
VOLUME 11
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/mcp
The Horizon of Modernity
Subjectivity and Social Structure
in New Confucian Philosophy
By
Ady Van den Stock
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Van den Stock, Ady, author.
Title: The horizon of modernity : subjectivity and social structure in new
 Confucian philosophy / by Ady Van den Stock.
Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2016. | Series: Modern Chinese
 philosophy, ISSN 1875-9386 ; Volume 11 | Includes bibliographical
 references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016016758 (print) | LCCN 2016017825 (ebook) | ISBN
 9789004301092 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9789004301108 (E-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Neo-Confucianism—China. | Philosophy, Chinese.
Classification: LCC B5233.N45 V36 2016 (print) | LCC B5233.N45 (ebook) | DDC
 181/.112—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016016758
issn 1875-9386
isbn 978-90-04-30109-2 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-30110-8 (e-book)
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Abbreviations viii
Introduction: Modernity as a Horizon 1
1 Aims and Approach of the Present Study 1
2 Chapter Outline 19
1 History and Historical Consciousness in Contemporary China: Political
Confucianism, Spiritual Confucianism, and the Politics of Spirit 23
1.1 Introduction: Enter the Ghost of Confucius 23
1.2 Confucianism in Contemporary China: Between Historical Value and
Present Interest 29
1.3 Excursus on Zhang Xianglong 44
1.4 Political Confucianism, Spiritual Confucianism, and the Politics
of Spirit 51
1.4.1 Jiang Qing’s Constitutional Reordering of Confucianism 51
1.4.2 Jiang Qing on Political vs. Spiritual Confucianism 54
1.4.3 The Institutional Dimension of Spiritual Confucianism 58
1.4.4 The Politics of Spirit: Tang Junyi and Mou Zongsan Encounter
Hegel and Marx 65
1.4.5 The Subject as Spirit, and Its Modern Discontents 81
1.4.6 Concluding Remarks 100
2 New Confucian Thought in the Context of Twentieth-Century Chinese
Intellectual History: Historical (Dis)continuity and Philosophy 104
2.1 Introduction: Culture and the Semantics of (Dis)continuity 104
2.2 New Confucianism and May Fourth: Spirit Against
Discontinuity 126
2.3 Modernity, Philosophy, and the Inheritance of Abstraction 144
2.3.1 Feng Youlan’s China’s Road to Freedom and his Method of
Abstract Inheritance 144
2.3.2 The New Confucian Critique of (Communist) Modernity 152
2.3.3 Philosophy and the Inheritance of Abstraction 180
vi CONTENTS
3 Science, Philosophy, and Wisdom: The Modern Recategorization of
Knowledge and Conceptual Tensions in the Thought of Xiong Shili and
Tang Junyi 197
3.1 Introduction: The Differentiation of Science and Philosophy in the
1923 Debate on Science and Metaphysics and Its New Confucian
Aftermath 197
3.2 Conceptual Tensions in the Thought of Xiong Shili and Tang
Junyi 215
3.2.1 Husserl on Science, Philosophy, and Wisdom 215
3.2.2 The Tension between Identification and Differentiation in
Xiong’s and Tang’s Outlooks on Science (Knowledge) and
Philosophy (Wisdom) 221
3.2.3 Lopsided Identities in the Philosophy of Xiong Shili 234
3.2.4 The Sense of Transcendence and the Place for Spirit in the
Philosophy of Tang Junyi 247
4 The Philosophical Consequences of Modernity: Faultlines of History in
the Thought of Mou Zongsan 267
4.1 Introduction: Preliminary Remarks on Mou Zongsan’s Oeuvre and
His Relation to Kant 268
4.2 Mou’s Early Work on Logic and Epistemology: Criticism of Dialectical
Materialism and the Strategic Distance between Being and
Thought 276
4.3 Mou’s Double-Leveled Ontology: The Transcendental Distance
between Fact and Value in the Light of the Tension between History
and Thought 299
4.3.1 Mou and Wittgenstein on the Limits of the Sayable 299
4.3.2 Kant, Heidegger, Mou: Transcendental Subjectivity, Finitude,
and the Value of the Thing-in-Itself 304
4.3.3 The Dialectical Logic of Self-Negation in Mou’s Political
Philosophy: Social Mediation and the Formalization of the
Subject 328
Conclusion 348
Bibliography 357
Index 400
Acknowledgments
I am better at writing apologies than conveying thanks, but here goes. First
of all, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Bart Dessein at Ghent
University, under whose supervision I completed the doctoral dissertation at
the basis of this book. Without Professor Dessein’s encouragement, I would
never even have thought of beginning the research for this study in the first
place, and without his continuous efforts to keep me on track, I would almost
certainly never have made it beyond some preliminary and underdeveloped
speculations. His courses on Buddhism, Chinese philosophy, society, and poli-
tics were a great source of inspiration for me during my studies. He has always
been and continues to be very supportive of my scholarly endeavors, for which
I owe him a lot more than these few meager sentences can convey. I would also
like to acknowledge my great indebtedness to Christian Uhl. His challenging
and stimulating classes, which I attended as an undergraduate student, made
me think about the world and about the philosophical mode of thinking about
the world in a completely different way, and, since I was reading too many
postmodern philosophers and did not have a clue what to do with Marx at the
time, in a way got me thinking to begin with. My sincere thanks goes out to
Hans-Georg Moeller for his constructive feedback on my dissertation in prog-
ress and his insightful, encouraging, and generous comments. I feel obliged
for his having introduced me to the work of Luhmann, which made drafting
this book more complicated, but, for me at least, a whole lot more interest-
ing. I would also like to thank everyone at the Department of Languages and
Cultures at Ghent University for their encouragements and their company
during my time as a Ph.D. student. A special word of thanks to Li Man 李漫
for his help in translating difficult passages, and for allowing me to repeatedly
take advantage of his encyclopedic brain. I sincerely thank Thomas Fröhlich
and the two anonymous reviewers for their critical comments and helpful sug-
gestions and Qin Higley, Victoria Menson, and Judy Pereira at Brill Publishers
for their invaluable aid. The debt I owe to my loving parents Anne and Albert,
as well as to my family and friends, exceeds what academic convention allows
me to express. Veronique, Magda, Niels, Boris, Katia and Joris, Ludo and Maria,
Kevin and Sarah, Jan and Erika: thanks a lot for your support and companion-
ship. Thank you Wannes for having read through the manuscript with monkish
patience and for our many talks throughout the years, which seem like one
big ongoing conversation between two people who are not sure whether they
agree, disagree, or simply enjoy disagreeing about their agreement. This book
is dedicated to my wife Shannah, with love, gratitude, and admiration.
Abbreviations
Note: numbers in between square brackets refer to the original date of publica-
tion. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations throughout this study are the
author’s.
Works by Mou Zongsan
DD Moral Idealism (Daode de lixiangzhuyi 道德的理想主義), [1959] vol. 9
of MJ.
MJ The Complete Works of Mou Zongsan (Mou Zongsan xiansheng quanji
牟宗三先生全集), 32 vols., Taibei: Lianhe jiaoxi wenhua jijinhui,
Lianjing chuban gongsi, 2003.
SS Impressions of the Times (Shidai yu ganshou 時代與感受), [1984] vol. 23
of MJ.
SSXB Supplements to ‘Impressions of the Times’ (Shidai yu ganshou xubian
時代與感受續編), vol. 24 of MJ.
SW The Learning of Life (Shengming de xuewen 生命的學問), Taibei:
Sanmin shushe, [1970] 2013.
WW Late Essays (Wanqi wenji 晚期文集), vol. 27 of MJ.
ZW1 Early Essays 1 (Zaoqi wenji 早期文集—上), vol. 25 of MJ.
ZW2 Early Essays 2 (Zaoqi wenji 早期文集—下), vol. 26 of MJ.
Works by Tang Junyi
RW The Reconstruction of the Humanist Spirit (Renwen jingshen zhi
chongjian 人文精神之重建), Taibei: Xuesheng shuju, [1955] 1974.
TJ The Complete Works of Tang Junyi (Tang Junyi quanji 唐君毅全集),
30 vols., Taibei: Taiwan xuesheng shuju, 1989.
ZB Supplements to ‘Chinese Humanism and the Contemporary World’
(Zhonghua renwen yu dangjin shijie bubian 中華人文與當今世界
補編), 2 vols., Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 2005.
ZJ Chinese Humanism and the Contemporary World (Zhonghua renwen yu
dangjin shijie 中華人文與當今世界), Taibei: Taiwan xuesheng shuju,
[1974] 1975.
Introduction: Modernity as a Horizon
For every problem one can always find a solution. My only fear is that we do
not take problems to be problematic at all. It is the same with illnesses that
make us feel pain, which can always be treated, whereas chronic afflictions
which do not cause any suffering are truly impossible to cure.1
一切的問題總可以設法解決。只怕我們根本上不把一問題當作問題。  
猶如痛癢的病總可醫，不知痛癢的病，才真是不可救藥的痼疾。
Tang Junyi
∵
1 Aims and Approach of the Present Study
It is usually assumed that generalizations are dangerous, and this sentence is
probably no exception. In academic texts, prefaces and introductions, as well
as conclusions, are the places where one is most likely to encounter these
treacherous procedures, or at least where they are usually reflected on in a
more self-conscious manner than throughout the main body of the text. Such
generalizations often serve to provide a justification for the inescapable par-
ticularity of the subject matter in a book submitted to scholarly scrutiny. I have
the impression that research into Chinese, or non-Western philosophy in gen-
eral, is for the most part exceptionally sensitive to these two entwined issues
of generalization and justification. An average monograph on the thought of a
canonical Western thinker, such as Kant or Hegel for example, can more easily
get away with diving straight into the thing itself without having to provide a
sometimes almost apologetic string of explanations and reasons why one has
deemed it necessary to devote a whole study to these philosophers and why it is
important for us to commence or continue engaging with them. Additionally,
one does not need to spend quite as much time explaining what is specifically
“Western” about them, let alone specifying how they differ from their Chinese
counterparts, if the latter are granted to exist to begin with. This only becomes
a real issue in the context of comparative approaches. It is hard not to notice
1  “Attitudes towards Culture which Our Compatriots Should Change” (Guoren dui wenhua ying
gaibian zhi taidu 國人對文化應改變之態度), [1936] in ZB, p. 41.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/978900430��08_00�
2 Introduction
that things stand rather differently in the case of a book on figures such as Mou
Zongsan 牟宗三 (1909–1995), Tang Junyi 唐君毅 (1909–1978), or Xiong Shili
熊十力 (1885–1968), who will be the three thinkers most often referred to and
drawn upon in the course of my study. Usually, one is already forced to come
up with elaborate strategies of justification before even being able to begin a
research project, that is to say (to put things in a positive light), one is enjoined
to reflect on the relevance and the use of presenting and commenting on their
ideas. Because they are approached, marketed, and perceived as quintessen-
tially Chinese philosophers, and not just as philosophers tout court, their cul-
tural particularity immediately announces itself as a problem to be addressed
and accounted for.2 The following question is therefore bound to impose
itself: what do these philosophers, who point towards the past almost every
time they are confronted with a conceptual problem or a problematic state of
affairs in the modern world, still have to say to us today? Not everyone will be
swayed by the argument that China’s economic “miracle” has made it highly
pertinent and urgent for us to gain a better understanding of Chinese culture,
even through the unwieldy medium of intricate philosophical theories if nec-
essary. Even when one assumes that it is China’s economic and geopolitical
“rise”3 which has contributed a great deal to the renewed surge of interest in
(the reinterpretation of) traditional ideas, it is not immediately obvious what
the latter have to offer in return or have contributed to this “rise” begin with. Of
course, demands to offer proof of relevance and usefulness are not unique to
research in the field of Chinese studies or comparative philosophy, and in their
absence as firmly institutionalized requirements, questions of relevance and
2  See Rey Chow’s acute observations in “Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical
Problem”, in Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a
Field, edited by Rey Chow, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000, p. 3. I person-
ally do not see why specialists in non-Western thought should feel pressured into furnishing
proof for how their subject matter can, as the title of a discussion between Daniel A. Bell,
Bai Tongdong and Joseph Chan recently quizzed, “save the world” (“Can Confucianism Save
the World? Reflections by Three Contemporary Political Thinkers”, May 15 2014, Singapore,
Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy). Like their colleagues in Western philosophy, scholars
and students of Chinese thought should have the freedom to engage in “useless” academic
debates about seemingly trifling details in the work of different schools and thinkers as an
end onto itself, without having to feel forced to live up to such unreasonable demands as hav-
ing to “save the world”.
3  For a critical rejoinder to the much-vaunted idea of “China’s rise” see Bruce Cumings, “The
‘Rise of China’?”, in Radicalism, Revolution, and Reform in Modern China. Essays in Honor
of Maurice Meisner, edited by Catherine Lynch, Robert B. Marks, and Paul G. Pickowicz,
London: Lexington Books, 2011, pp. 185–207.