I began this post a few months ago, which since languished as an abandoned draft. All that was there was:
The nauseation continues, this time in a major reference tool, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, to wit:
Chinese philosophy by David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames
This site http://texttribe.com no longer exists. The Wayback Machine captured only 7 pages, not this one.
However, Routledge itself offers for free its article on Chinese philosophy:
HALL, DAVID L. and ROGER T. AMES (1998). Chinese philosophy. In E. Craig (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge. Retrieved December 29, 2011, from http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/G001
I assume, then, that this is the same thing. See also:
AMES, ROGER T. (1998). East Asian philosophy. In E. Craig (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge. Retrieved December 29, 2011, from http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/G218
Hall and Ames, whom I have blogged about numerous times, are deplorable examples of the toxic combination of legitimate scholarship and ideological mystification.
In the article on Chinese philosophy, the authors emphasize and attempt to explain the alleged historic Chinese indifference to abstract cosmological speculation and logical argument. The see Chinese philosophy as overwhelmingly concrete and practical and obsessed with social harmony as opposed to the quest for truth. The propensity towards the harmonization of differences is exemplified, so the authors claim, in the Neoconfucian synthesis of Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism. The authors contrast Chinese and Western conceptions of order, claiming that Chinese philosophy is oriented toward ‘the art of contextualizing’ and ‘correlative thinking’. Science and objective knowledge take a back seat to social relations. If Plato defines Western philosophy, ‘all of Chinese thinking is a series of commentaries on Confucius‘.
In the section on Confucianism, the whitewashing of Chinese history becomes more evident. For example:
Excellence or virtue (de) achieved by members of the community empowers them as likely models of propriety for succeeding generations. Because the authority of community so constructed is internal to it, the community is self-regulating, dependent for its effectiveness upon authoritative leaders rather than the application of some external apparatus such as law and punishment.
And:
The distinction between a society of principles and a society shaped by models of propriety helps us to understand the distinctly ‘aesthetic’ quality of Confucian morality.
And:
The failure to understand the aesthetic character of Confucian ethics has reinforced the tendency for Western philosophers to understand Confucian ritualization (li) as the imposition of external guides to conduct, mere forms imposed upon one from outside. Hegel’s depiction of China as a culture without Geist in his Philosophy of History is representative of interpretations by the best minds of Europe and America. This truncated reading has in turn perpetuated the stereotypical opinion of Confucius as a purveyor of trite moral truisms, rather than as a founder of a social order which, by its dependence upon the sort of balanced complexity associated with aesthetic creations, has lasted longer than any other on the face of the planet.
The dishonest and propagandistic apologia presented here is truly brazen, as if the sanitized self-conception of ideologists explained the real character of a society. This nonsense could only have passed without scorn on account of a century or more of retooling and reframing Eastern philosophy for Western consumption.
The section on Philosophical Daoism adds little understanding. The section on The ‘Hundred Schools’ is unwittingly humorous:
Granted the disposition on the part of the Chinese to promote a harmonious narrative of China’s cultural development, a closer look at the actual events yields a slightly greater sense of conflict.
A hilarious understatement. The authors ponder why the logical methods developed by Mohism and the School of Names did not prevail. Their explanation is in the absence of urbanization and the presence of a common written language as the engine of the civilizing process. Again, we see the germ of a social analysis cut short by arbitrary presumptions.
You can see how their historical analysis plays out in subsequent sections: 7 Xunxi and rationalized Confucianism, 8 First millennium syncretism, 9 Neo-Confucianism: Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming. In this last period, Chinese metaphysics reaches its apogee. But the trend towards abstraction, which one is tempted to think retrospectively alarms the authors (threatening the ‘art of context’), does not last. They conclude:
Historically, the speculative, cosmological turn in Chinese philosophy came under formidable attack with the founding of the Qing dynasty in the seventeenth century. Evidential research (kaozhengxue) brought with it an attempt to get behind the ‘empty’ commentaries of neo-Confucianism and a return to the philologically-centered historical scholarship of ‘Han learning’ (Hanxue). On the premise that new problems require new solutions, the abstract theorizing and universalistic tendencies of Song–Ming ‘dao learning’ gave way to the analysis of particular historical events and cultural artifacts as a resource for finding answers to the specific issues of the day. Thinkers such as Wang Fuzhi and Dai Zhen recovered and reaffirmed the correlative and interdependent relationship between historical event and the principles of order. Once again, it can be seen how the pragmatic concerns of most Chinese intellectuals militate against the exercise of philosophical speculations that move too far afield from the concrete problems of human beings, or which could conceivably serve to introduce contentiousness among intellectuals.
Finally, we come to The modern period. Here we find the Western influences of Russell, Dewey, and Marxism. But lest we think that Marxism westernized Chinese thought:
The Chinese transformation of Marxist into Maoist thinking in contemporary China reveals the inertia of Chinese tradition. The single most distinctive change that Mao made to Marxism was a commitment to particularity and site-specificity.
Contemporary China retains its original Confucian contours. The authors’ conclusion more than confirms their wholly reactionary perspective:
As a ritually-constituted society, without grounding in the objective principles associated with reason or natural law, contemporary China is defined by the exemplars of its tradition. The members of the society are themselves possessed of their ‘humanity’ not as a gift from God or a common genetic inheritance, but as created by ritual enactment. The Chinese have no inalienable rights. Citizens have been deemed to possess only those rights granted by China’s various constitutions. The Chinese would see the Enlightenment insistence upon the universality of certain values and principles as an instance of ethnocentric dogmatism. Chinese ethnocentrism is, perhaps, more consistent than its Western counterpart since it is grounded in the self-conscious insistence upon the centrality of its peculiar ethos, defined by racial and linguistic identity.
China remains a culture grounded in the model of the family which cultivates filial dependency. Thus, the Chinese have no means of cultivating that ‘healthy suspicion’ of governmental power which we take for granted without undermining the community of affect that binds ruler and people. As a rational means of organizing social and economic interactions, the technology so prized in the West cannot but erode the ritual grounding of interpersonal relationships. One of the catchwords of the Tiananmen protests in 1989 was ‘democracy’. But, in a society where individualism remains a symptom of selfishness and license, and freedom of speech must be qualified by the Confucian understanding that not only saying but thinking involves a disposition to act, Chinese democracy must certainly take on an unfamiliar form. Indeed, the inhibition of individualism and freedom of speech is not a modern invention of Chinese communists but a persistent feature of a Confucian society in which ideas are always dispositions to act.
One can hardly look closely at the intellectual culture of contemporary China without coming to respect the power of China’s traditions. The intransigent sense of ‘Chineseness’ which coalesced in the Han dynasty continues to determine the shape of Chinese intellectual culture. For good or ill, the Chinese remain the people of the Han.
Not only has Marxism, even in its degenerate Maoist configuration, been defanged, but the ruthless, repressive state capitalist regime of the present has been whitewashed.
One will have to go elsewhere to find the evidences of how seriously contentious and unharmonious ideas in the history of China have been, and to find serious ideology critique and sociohistorical analysis. A serious historical sociology of philosophy would at least begin with the attempt to correlate the nearest equivalent of what we call ‘philosophy’ with the state of scientific and technical knowledge and the social organization of the time. China was, until the scientific revolution in the West ultimately leaped ahead, the world’s most advanced scientific and technological civilization. How do logic, mathematics, science and philosophy relate to one another in this scenario, especially considering the marked differences from Western development? How are these relationships undergirded by the structures of social institutions and communication? The authors, emphasizing harmony, apparently are not impressed by the history of warfare, exploitation, and class conflict endemic to China. In this they are entirely consistent with the historically dishonest retooling of ‘Eastern philosophy’ for Western consumption.
The authors glamorize the worst tendencies of Chinese philosophy, but even with its serious limitations, it is not as horrendous as this general portrayal unwittingly makes it out to be. These authors, like so many of their predecessors, deploy the duplicitous comfort language of ‘harmony, ‘stability’, and ‘context’ to cosmeticize the repugnant, oppressive, and ideologically bankrupt.
Chinese philosophy: Hall & Ames at it again