Studies in a Dying Culture

See my entries under the category “Chinese philosophy” on this blog & on my old blog . . .

Chinese Philosophy in the West: Globalization Gone Bad

. . . to see what I think of Chung-Ying Cheng. And now here’s something I wrote on 17 September 2007:

Cheng Chung-Ying. Theoretical Links between Kant and Confucianism: Preliminary Remarks, Journal of Chinese Philosophy, Volume 33 Issue 1, pp. 3 – 15.

This article is pretty much hot air. Once Cheng focuses on the alleged similarities of the concept of human being in Kant and Confucianism, the author drops this stinking load:

Apart from these basic observations on these two universalities in the human person in Kant, there is a most important and significant difference between Kant and the classical Confucianism, namely, Kant has relegated the ontological and cosmological to the scientific research and sees any future metaphysics as no more than illumination of the rational structures of the human mind in his knowing and acting functions and thus refuses to speculate on the thing-in-itself beyond transcendental and practical use of reason; Confucius and his fellow Confucians have come to suggest an onto-cosmology which is strictly a unifying experience of the observational and the reflective, namely, the outer nature of the changing world and the inner nature of man. This is possible because there is the long tradition of the onto-cosmology developed in the ancient text of the Yijing which has grown out of experience and which also applies to experience. This metaphysical tradition is well maintained because the underlying vision and understanding are not transcendent entities, but a deepening and broadening interaction of the object and subject, which displays itself as a process of creative creativity of change in all things and in human affairs. The ultimate reality is the ceaseless creativity exhibited in both things and human life, which enables us to learn from experience and to move beyond our fixed ideas and categories in an ever-transcending process of self-transcendence and transcendental integration.

I think I just stepped in something. Here’s another cow pie:

It may be actually a finite process as human life is limited in time, but in the nature of the process there is always the vision of the totality and wholeness embodied in knowing and action of a person who could explain this ideal state of being and who acts in virtue of such vision to inspire others at present and in the future. Such a person is called a Sage (shengren) in Confucianism. A sage is accordingly a creative person who creates li (ritual and system of rules of organization and behavior) for the whole humankind for their self-realization and for their enjoyment of an order and harmony in which respective self-realizations of individuals become possible. In this sense the Sage can be said to know both the nature of the human person and the destiny of the human person, which is equivalent to knowing the mandate of heaven (tianming) that is knowing of the unknown. But this knowing of the unknown as a matter of fact is actually a knowing of the self as destined for realization of the ultimate as an ultimate value and end of life, which is not arbitrarily given but creatively emerging because it is seen and experienced as part of one’s nature and one’s one deep existence.

Beneath all this airy language is the moral and institutional structure of feudalism with all its superstitious claptrap, which not only has nothing in common with Kant, but which is positively inferior to him.

Another foul mound:

It is this sense we may claim that the Confucius, Zisi, Mencius, and even Xunzi may be said to come to know the thing-in-itself in a sense that they come to realize it as an end of human life and that they could see it as an end of human action.This is referred to as the thesis of the unity of heaven and man (tianren heyi). In this light we can see that whereas Kant maintains that we do not have intellectual intuition of the thing-in-itself in a context of epistemology of pure reason, the Confucians could equally maintain that we may come to have an intellectual experience of the ultimate as a result of moral cultivation and life cultivation.

Vacuous propaganda. Brazen! And this man is a scholar?