CHINESE PHILOSOPHY AS A WORLD-HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

JOHN E. SMITH

CHINESE PHILOSOPHY AS A WORLD-HISTORICAL

PERSPECTIVE

One of the most momentous developments in the human odyssey since the beginnings of civilization is the emergence of the world-historical philosophical and religious traditions. These traditions stemming from China, India, Greece, the Near East, home of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and continued in Europe, are of world-historical significance in a quite specific sense. They all combine a unique perspective or angle of vision for interpreting the world and human experience, with a penetra- tion to ,those pervasive and universal questions that have commanded the attention of prophets, poets and philosophers in every civilization - the nature of human nature, the meaning of goodness and the good life, the order of the cosmos, freedom and destiny, evil and the mystery of death. The importance of this coming together of a unique perspective and the raising of universal questions must not be underestimated, nor should the plurality of these often contrasting perspectives be a source of skepticism and bewilderment. On the contrary, as Robert Neville has rightly pointed out, the plurality of world-historical perspectives is a means of enrichment since the most adequate philosophical understanding of any religious or philosophical tradition can be achieved only through an understanding of how it stands related to other world-historical perspectives. In addition, these different perspectives force us to confront the basic question whether any one of them could contain the whole truth.

Perhaps 1 can make my point most clearly by means of a brief illustration, one drawn, as is most appropriate for our purposes, from the Chinese tradition. Let us consider for the moment three distinctive

Journal of Chinese Philosophy 23 (19%) 5-20 Copyright @ 1996 by Dialogue PuMishlng Company, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA.

6 JOHN E. SMITH

characteristics of the Chinese mind - its unique perspective on things - which have often been noted as contrasting with equally distinctive features of the Western philosophical outlook. First, scholars have noted that in Chinese thought a priority is given to the word whose function it is to select some part of reality and thus guide the mind to fasten attention on that reality. By contrast, Western thought places primary emphasis, as first becomes apparent in Greek thought, on the declarative sentence composed of abstract terms and aimed at describing the nature of a thing. Second, Chinese philosophers from the beginning regarded the chief function of thought and insight to be the guidance of behavior and the determination of what is the best act to perform. In Western thought a theoretical bias shows itself in the prominent role given to the descriptive and declarative modes of language and a tendency to subordinate the practical dimension of human life. Of course, there was no lack of concern for the virtues and the good life - Socrates and Plato testify to that - but the voice of Aristotle’s “All men by nature desire t o know” nevertheless has seemed to be louder. Third, whereas in Western thought the idea of an Ultimate whether as creator of the world or the power that sustains it was invariably conceived in terms of a transcendence of all things, Chinese thought ran in the opposite direction and had no thought of an Ultimate that is not in total relation to all that exists.

My aim here is not to discuss further the nature and implications of these contrasts - they are used only for illustrative purposes - but to underscore my central point: When we study Chinese philosophy as a world historical tradition we discover what a perspective that puts the arresting word above the declarative sentence, regards the guidance of life as the supreme purpose of al l thinking and gives the priority to immanence over transcendence in depicting the Ultimate can reveal when it seeks to anwer the same basic questions that are raised in the other world historical traditions.’ To come to understand how the world and human life appear when seen from that unique perspective is a task t o be performed by all of us who are outside the Chinese tradition and thus find that our outlook h a s been shaped by the unique perspective of another world-

CHINESE PHILOSOPHY AS A WORLDHISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE 7

historical tradition. The possibility of crossing the boundary into another perspective is at the same time the enrichment that comes from a plurality of world-historical perspectives that actually exist.

A boundary between two traditions such as the Chinese philosophical tradition and that of the West initiated by the Greek thinkers, performs two functions at the same time. A boundary holds the two apart as each having its own identity and as not being the other, but it also brings them together in the sense that the two are identified as both being philosophical traditions engaged in grappling with those broad questions to which I have just spoken. The fact that these two traditions have an essential feature in common while at the same time being quite different in their shape and substance makes possible comparisons that are illuminating on both sides. To make such a comparison effectively requires crossing the boundary from each side and, in addition, what Royce called the “will to interpret” which means the will to understand in a way that would not be enlightening were it not critical, but in a way that is also neither defensive nor contentious. I like to think that philosophers can still engage in this sort of constructive dialogue across boundaries and if indeed this is so it might provide a desperately needed lesson for politicians all over the world for whom the will to interpret and to understand positions other than their own seems to have been totally extinguished!

Since an opportunity to see the will to interpret and the dialogue of understanding actually at work is far more illuminating than general descriptions of the process, 1 propose to enlist the aid of an old friend and a founding member of this Society, Chung-ying Cheng, with whom I have discussed philosophy East and West for more than thirty years and who has made an outstanding effort to interpret Chinese philosophy as a world- historical outlook in the sense previously noted. He has carried out t h i s interpretation very often using illuminating contrasts with Western philosophy, about which he knows a great deal. In view of his accom- plishments, I would like to take as the basis of my remarks a very infor- mative paper Cheng contributed to a Conference in Hong Kong several

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years ago. entitled, “Chinese Metaphysics as Non-Metaphysics: Confucian and Taoist Insights into the Nature of Reality”. This paper was published in a volume. Understanding the Chinese Mind, edited by Robert E. Allinson. 1 hope that the comments I shall make will serve to highlight Chinese thought as a world-historical tradition especially in the light of the perceptive and challenging comparisons he draws between this tradition and the standpoint of Western philosophy. Let me begin with some indi- cation of the substance and scope of Cheng’s essay which will serve as a background for understanding the significance of the key issues I shall select for discussion from the extensive body of material presented.

Considered in the broadest terms, the essay sets forth the Chinese search for cosmological becoming preserved in the two primary texts, the Yijing and the Duudejing, the former representing, in Cheng’s view, “primordial metaphysical thinking” which establishes the framework in the form of a cosmoantology for subsequent thought, while the Deodejing represents the introduction of Non-being into metaphysical thought through the Daoism of Lao-Tzu and Chuang Tzu. 1 found Cheng’s account of the three phases of metaphysical thinking in the Yving - the existential, the cosmological and the practical - connecting the individual, the world and social reaiity plus the explanation of the polarity of yin and yang, to be the clearest and most instructive interpretation of the course of Chinese philosophy I have ever read. Cheng then seeks to show that the Daoist philosophy of Non-being is both innovative and yet con- tinuous with the philosophy of the Yijing. If I understand him correctly, Cheng’s contention is that the polaristic metaphysics of the Yijing is the framework from which the Daoist philosophy of the duo emerges. In short, the metaphysics of Lao Tzu is inspired by the polaristic principle of the Yijing which also generates the notion of Non-Being. As a student of Hegel, I well appreciate Cheng’s ingenuity here in bringing together the identify of the Yijing and the Daoist philosophy through continuity, and the difference between them to be found in the innoviative or creative character of the new perspective. In addition to all this, Cheng seeks to present an hypothesis about the ultimate merits of Chinese metaphysics

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vis u vis the metaphysics of the Western philosophers in which he claims that the former is the primordial form of metaphysical thinking. I shall consider that hypothesis after I have considered two other (and closely related) key issues raised by Cheng’s several comparisons made in the course of his discussion between Chinese and Western thought.

The first of these issues is the contrast drawn between Greek as a phonetic language and Chinese as an image-language and the conse- quences that follow with respect to the different quests in the two traditions and the different way in which the sensible and non-sensible are thought to be related to each other (pp. 167 ff.). The second concerns the role assigned to knowledge in Chinese, Buddhist and Western philosophy. These are, of course, large topics and they cannot be encompassed in a brief discussion, but I believe that the comments I shall make in each case will be pointed enough t o enable us to see clearly what the contrasts are and what is to be learned from the dialogue. I should add that in approaching these issues, I believe that I understand quite clearly what Cheng is claiming and I also believe that I fully appreciate the truth there is in the criticisms he levels against what hte takes to be the main drift of Western thinking.

Let us begin with the initial question about language and the difference between the phonetic symbols of the Greek language and the image- language of Chinese. Cheng is certainly correct in saying that an image language can express the cohesion of the sensible and the non-sensible more adequately than a language like Greek that allows for abstractions capable of being thought apart from the sense objects to which they refer. In this sense, Greek as such is the more “abstract”1anguage in comparison with Chinese. This abstractness is well illustrated in a simple example. The Latin word for the moon is Lunu which has the connotation of “light” a feature readily seen; the Greek word is mene which means “measure” or an indicator of tides and seasons. Obviously, one cannot know that the moon is a measure merely by seeing it. Since, however, language and patterns of thought are closely intertwined we must not overlook an important feature in the Greek world-historical perspective,

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namely, a primary concern, even fascination, for the reason or cause of the

fact so that the understanding of principles and causes was deemed higher than the report of sensible fact.2 1 am, however, not in accord with what

Cheng wants t o d o with the distinction, he would say separation, between the sensible and the non-sensible in defining the metaphysical quest for Being in Greek thought. That is, he claims that “what is metaphysical in the Western sense is predicated upon the separation of the sensible from the non-sensible, the practical from the transcendental.” (pp. 16748) And I take this to mean that the “metaphysical” is identified with the non-sensible, by comparison with which the sensible is “more appearance.” 1 certainly cannot deny that this model fits the philosophy of Parmenides perfectly, but important as has been the distinction between the sensible and intelligible worlds (it was the subject of Kant’s lnaugural Dissertation o f 1770). i t does not adequately reflect the thought of either Aristotle or Hegel, nor should i t be used to define what was meant by “metaphysics”

in the West. To begin with, the term “metaphysics” is itself a misnomer; i t was first used by editors who found that the manuscript of what Aristotle called “first phdosophy” - an analysis of Being and Unity, chiefly - dealt with matters similar t o those tre3ted in his Physics. Hence

they placed that manuscript “with” or “after” the Physics, in Greek, “Ta mela Ta Phusika”, those works placed with or after the Physics. This misnorrner, however, has long g:ven rise to the idea that metaphysics deals with “nonempirical entities” which are “meta” or ‘quasi” physical. We cannot, however, in any tradition, define metaphysics solely in terms of one theory o i Being such as that of Parmeides’ One, since we have to account for the metaphysic of materialism in all its forms. of Aristotle who rejected Parmenides’ view insofar as i t was available to him, and of empiricists for whom “to be is to be perceived,” which is a far cry from the Being of ParmeFlLrs I shall return to this point later on; it is of LO:. -iderable importance since Cheng’s description of Chinese metaphysics 3s “non-metaphysics . is e:- tirely dependent on his identifying metaphysics with the p s i t i o n of Parmenides.

Cheng, on the other hand. is right in his contention that concen-

CHINESE PHILOSOPHY AS A WORLD-HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE 1 I

tration on the concept of Being in Greek philosophy and much later tended to give priority to the static and the f i e d as that in terms of which everything is to be understood. It is fair to say that this bias was not entirely overcome until the Nineteenth Century when the emphasis on life and the life sciences, on development as expressed in the theory of evolu- tion and on the new concern for history, not in the older sense of “ages of the world” or a succession of static stages but in history as a dynamic continuum of events accompanied with novelty and creativity. This change was well expressed by Hegel when he declared that the first concrete category is Becoming. In this, of course, he was returning to

Aristotle for whom becoming was certainly real even if compromised by the Greek commonsensical belief that what is truly knowable in any process of development is the fiied element in it, the form or Iogos that does not change. The notorious paradoxes of Zen0 make the point eminently clear; although the paradoxes emphasize different aspects of motion, they are all based on the same assumption, namely, that motion can be adequately represented by what is fixed - the points that have position but neither length nor breadth, and the instants that have a place in a succession but no duration. It was not before the last century that this assumption was shown to be false and that motion in space and time can only be regarded as irrational and unreal as long as it is represented by abstract, fixed elements such as the classical points and instants. In view of this development, Cheng is justified in calling attention to the recognition of the reality of change and becoming in Chinese philosophy from its beginnings and in his suggestion that Western thinking, determined as it was by the Greek penchant for fixed form and the inabi- lity to understand change, was condemned t o make a long detour through the wilderness of Being before it was able to give to becoming its proper place.

I turn now to my second issue which concerns Cheng’s conception of the role played by knowledge in Chinese, Buddhist and Western philosophy. Fortunately, he has summed up his view in a very perceptive and concise way - “In the Chinese philosophical tradition, knowledge is

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centered on the harmonization of self and world, whereas in the main-

stream of Western philosophy knowledge is for overcoming the world, and in the Buddhist philosophical tradition knowledge is for overcoming the

self.” (P. 172) Here 1 believe that Cheng, with one important qualifica- tion which 1 shall point out, is correct in his judgment, and 1 cannot

imagine a better point of contact for understanding the uniquc basic standpoint that characterizes each of the three world-historical traditions. A candid recognition of the differences between them on this essential point should lead t o a better self-understanding in each case and t o a better understanding across the boundaries. Cheng has shown how knowledge performs its integrative role in Chinese philosophy and why seeking the way (duo) differs from the quest forBeingin Western thought. He is, moreover, right on the mark in seeing that in Buddhism knowledge is an affair of overcoming the self, but , as 1 would put it , in a more “practical” way through the discipline of the Eightfold Path, than was true of the metaphysical knowledge of the Brahman and Atmun of the Upanishads. As I said previously, 1 believe Cheng is also right in what h e says about the Western tradition, except that the role of knowledge as overcoming the world is a much later development than Cheng realizes and in fact that view about knowledge was arrived at only by overcoming the basically contemplative view of knowledge which we find in Aristotle and in the Platonic idea that knowing a thing is parriciparing in the nature of the thing. To understand what started the development that led to the

Western belief that knowledge is power and that its function is to control

nature and human life in the world, it is necessary t o grasp what was for the Greek mind the original impetus for the pursuit of knowledge.

That impetus is summed up in one word - Wonder or a cosmic curiosity about things - including wonder a t there being any things at all - which already suggests a certain distance set up between the knower

and the world which we would today call “theoretical.” Consider the following sentences from Aristotle’s Metaphysics:

CHINESE PHILOSOPHY AS A WORLD-HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE 13

Philosophy springs from primitive wonder, and moves towards the abolition of wonder, towards understanding the world so well through and through that no room is left for wonder at things being as they are. (W.D. Ross, Aristorle, pp. 154-155)

Couple this emphasis on wonder and its overcoming with Aristotle’s well- known dictum - “All men by nature desire to know” - and you have the roots of the quest for knowledge for its own sake, that is, knowledge as the activity that has no end beyond itself and is most perfect when directed to the attainment of Wisdom or the knowledge of the first and most universal causes. Since intellect is the distinguishing feature of human nature, virtue is the exercise of that faculty in the determining of the highest knowledge - metaphysics. Consider some further sentences from Aristotle’s Metaphysics:

Highest of all comes ‘science’ (“science ’ is usually used for the Greek, episteme, which meant true knowledge or certain- ty), the pure knowledge of causes; this is highest because it is not, like art, limited in its interest by having some ulterior practical end, but is knowing for knowing’s sake. This is the last and highest product of civilization. (Ross, P. 154)

The ideal set forth here is esthetic and contemplative and gives clear expression to the exaltation of the theoretical standpoint over the practical in the sense both of art and making, and praxis or human action. Plato, of course, with his emphasis on the idea of the Good as the highest idea and Socrates’s emphasis on the virtues and on the care of the soul - recall in the Phaedrus when Socrates refuses to explain a cosmological myth about the winds, on the grounds that he cannot engage cosmological speculations when he does not yet know what sort of creature he is -both run counter to the subordination of the‘ practical. That, however, is not the point I want to stress; it is rather that this contemplative understanding of knowledge - the sheer self-fulfillment stemming from

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overcoming wonder - has no place in it for the idea that knowledge is meant to be an instrument for controlling nature. For central to the contemplative view of knowledge which was enhanced later on by Neo- Platonism and especially by Plotinus, is the idea that knowing something means uniring with the thing, participating in its nature. and that is the opposite of what 1 would call ' controlling" knowledge where there is no further concern for the thing known beyond what knowledge is needed for gaining mastery over i t . By contrast, there are passages in Plotinus where really knowing a thing is virtually being that thing. The crucial point is that the idea of a knowledge that overcomes the world - an idea that occurred t o Bacon but was most forcefully expressed by Des- cartes - became possible only after the contemplative conception of knowing was itself overcome by the idea that knowledge is an instrument or, in more sanguine terms. a weapon. The point is made with great force in Dewey's The Qucsr for Cerruinry where the contemplative ideal of knowledge stemming from the Creek thinkers is roundly attacked and the entire stage reset; knowledge is no longer a matter of our realizing the highest faculty within us by a knowledge of the highest causes, but is instcad the instrument through which we respond to problematic situations. challenges from the environment, with the aim of changing a

precarious existence into one more stable. I t is not without significance tha t in the leciures Dcwey gave in China some 75 years ago, he recom- mended this same instrumental conception of knowledge as the solution to

China's problems. Dewey had only a minimal knowledge of Chinese philosophy and my impression is that. since he was unfamiliar with its praLtical orientation, he simply assumed that he was dealing with another tradition within which the contemplative mode is uppermost.

IC we return to the comparison, is it not clear that if reflection as Aristotle claimed, is called forth by wonder and if its aim is to dispel I!M: wmdcr through an understanding that things are as they are, the , e ~ t i ! ~ t i ~ ~ ;)hilosopliy will have a tlicorctical thrust that can be satisfied wz!:, I ) ! ;I kncwiedge that has no end beyond itself. As Clieng has shown, 1ilidi:is t!ie way in the Chinese tradition, that is, the need for the indivi-


dual person in the world to gain an orientation and an understanding of the harmony between self and world, represents something quite different from the reflective process initiated by wonder. If I am correct in citing Wang-yang Ming’s idea of the synthesis of thought and action as repre- sentative of Chinese philosophy in this respect, then it appears at once that the conception of the role of knowledge involved is quite different from what it was for Aristotle. Here I am thinking especially of Wang- yang Ming’s chiding the lawyer who claims that he is too busy fulfilling his duties during the day to do more than make a cursory study of the Great Lemnmg at night. Wang-yang Ming leads him through his daily activities and shows him that ’study apart from action is worthless and that understanding the virtues goes hand in hand with manifesting them in the course of his professional activities. His fmal word to the lawyer says, in essence, when did I ever recommend studying the Great Learning in separation from the conduct of life?

I turn now to the third issue noted earlier - Cheng’s concluding remarks summing up his comparison between Chinese metaphysics and Western philosophy and setting forth his hypothesis which says that Chinese metaphysics is “the primordial form of metaphysical thinking.” (p. 205) To begin with, I think that the distinction between finding the way and the question of Being is a valid one and points to an ultimate difference in perspective as between the two traditions. The approach of the Chinese philosopher h@hghts the practical and the moral, guidance for the good life in the world and society, while the approach of the Greek philosophers, determined by wonder, curiosity and the desire to know why things are as they are, highlights understanding and the speculative thrust. These basic emphases, however, are not exclusive in either case; the Chinese thinkers saw that the duo of proper conduct demands understanding of self and world and in the West the idea of Being was invariably correlated with Truth and Good - the socalled transcendentals of the Middle Age were Venrm, B o r n , Esse which means that knowledge is not purely speculative, but embraces the virtues and the good life. Par- menides, in fact, identifies the way of Being with the way of day and not

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of night and the way of truth and not o f opinion and says that justice and right hold the keys that open both. However, in comparing these two traditions in this comprehensive way i t is necessary t o bear in mind one very significant difference in their respective courses o f thought; in the case of Chinese philosophy, there have been, as Cheng presents i t , over two millennia of commentary o n the same ancient texts and the result is a unity of outlook for which there is no counterpart in thc West. Western metaphysics has not been a running commentary o n the fragments of Parmenides, nor has it been, for all their influence, a rehashing of Plato and Aristotle neither o f whom accepted what they knew of Parmenides’ thought. True, Whitehead has called Western philosophy a series of foot- notes to Plato, but the dramatic point he is making is understood and no one takes i t literally. Not only have different answers been given to the question of Being, but the question itself has been subject t o more than one interpretation. For example, as the result of modern empiricism and skepticism about the possibility of metaphysical knowledge, Being was supplanted by existence and then the question was - What is the nature of existence? And in our time, Being has come to mean “my” Being and expressed in the form of Existence or Dasein. To make the matter even more complicated, Western philosophy in the era initiated by Descartes saw the conception of philosophy itself undergo significant changes what was then called “natural philosophy ’ was indistinguishable from natural science, or cosmology, while human nature and right conduct became the subjects of “moral philosophy.” As Cheng points ou t , Hegel and , later, Whitehead and Heidegger, recovered the question of Being in the classical sense and I would say that Hegel and Whitehead did so by making becoming, process, and development the ultimate categories (Heidegger represents a special case in that he transformed Being into Dasein, the individual, but he nevertheless retained the primacy of becoming by adopting Kant’s idea that time is the form of experience and the medium of human existence). 1 would not , however, agree that , because of a tailure to cocstrue non-Being adequately, these thinkers had to return t o the position of Parmenides. On the contrary, Hegel and Whitehead both

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profited from the conception of Aristotle that becoming requires two ingredients - something that is; and something which that something now is not, but which it can become. The lack or privation is, so to speak, what makes “room” for the potentiality to be realized. This is certainly no retum to the doctrine that change is illusory and true Being is static.

As Cheng is well aware in citing Heidegger, he belonged to the powerful reaction against Hegel’s rationalism - a revolt of existence - in which the individual existing being became the focus of Being in the form of Dasein and Exisfern. It is noteworthy that both Heidegger and Sartre retain the term Being but understand by it ”my being. ’ I agree with Cheng that both thinkers cannot consistently find place for communities and societies, and that is a serious shortcoming.

Cheng repeatedly insists that Western philosophers have but two alternatives: either accept an ultimate dualism between reality and appearance, or reject metaphysics altogether. My response to this unhappy pair of options is to deny that the Parmenidean paradigm is the only positive possibility, and as for the other alternative, I do not think it is possible to reject metaphysics - I believe Cheng would agree with me here - despite the claims of positivists and skeptics to have done so. There is implicit and hidden metaphysics in every philosophical outlook. To take a grand example, Hegel claimed that Kant, for whom the critical philosophy sat like a judge who is on neither side of a conflict, ceased being critical and became dogmatic in Kant’s own sense when he declared that empirical science is the final arbiter of all truth. Peirce made a similar point when he claimed that most modem philosophers have been nominalists and believe that whatever is, is singular, and hence that there is no place for the general, the indeterminate and the vague.

In closing, I come to Cheng’s metaphysical hypothesis which is, as he states it, “that Chinese metaphysical thmking is the primordial form of metaphysical thinking” and that it is primordial in both the historical and the philosophical senses. From the historical standpoint, Chinese philosophy predates Greek thinking and its quest for Being, and from the philosophical standpoint, Chinese metaphysics is primordial as the natural

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beginning of human thinking and of a thinking based on the primordial human experience of existence and the world. @p. 205-206) This is

indeed a large and provocative hypothesis and it expresses the sort of claim that literally forces us across the boundary and into reflection upon our own phdosophical tradition. The issue is obviously too huge to engage

at any length and, in any case, it takes me beyond my initial proportions - I had hoped to highlight Chinese philosophy as a world-historical perspective, but now I am asked to view it as the world-historical perspective. Chinese philosophical thinking obviously predates the Greek quest for Being which, as we have seen, Cheng wholly identifies with the position of Parmenides despite the fact that it was challenged by Aristotle especially and to a lesser extent by Plato in the ancient world, and com- pletely overturned in Western thinking since Hegel. In any case, however, being primordial historically cannot ips0 fact0 be translated into being primordial philosophically, if for no other reason than the fact that in no process or development known to us has the perfect form appeared at the beginning. The idea, moreover, that the earliest form of thinlung is the “natural” form has its own difficulties. Why is the wonder with which Greek philosophy began, less “natural” to human beings than the Chinese search for the way that harmonizes polar opposites? Despite these problems, I well understand what Cheng has in mind when he puts the good question, ‘Why did the Parmenidean split between reality and

appearance not manifest itself in Chinese philosophy?” His answer takes us back to the conceptual, abstractive thinking characteristic of the Greek thinkers as compared with the concrete and existential approach of the Chinese thinkers. It is as if Chinese thinking never experienced the fatal “fall” so to speak into the Western pattern and all its problems.

The matter of abstraction, however, is important and may serve as a touchstone for comparison. Cheng says in describing Chinese philosophy, and I think he well supports this contention, ‘Wuman knowledge is based on the practical concerns of man and, no matter how abstract human knowledge becomes, it always has a practical relevance and repre-

sents a practical interest in man.” (P. 173) I would agree with this claim


which is the reason 1 have called attention t o the aims which NeoCon- fucian thought shares with Pragmatism properly understood. But there are problems associated with abstractions which are not easily dealt with. To begin with, the expression “abstract thought” is in an obvious, but often neglected, sense, redundant all thought is abstract, since obviously the idea of a horse is not a horse. There are, however, types and degrees of abstraction and we must distinguish valid from vicious abstraction. Both Whitehead and Dewey made this into a central philosophical task and both insisted that the flight of thought from direct or primary experience through the concepts and principles needed to understand it must end with a return to direct experience, but on a higher level. Here I believe that I can illuminate Cheng’s thesis in this regard: he is right to see that, on the whole, the Greek philosophers invested too much in abstractions in the sense that they saw that geometrical forms, for example, can be exhibited quite apart from their embodiment in fields, houses and artifacts of all sorts. Whitehead maintained that this sense that the separable or “pure” form is more “perfect” than a form embodied, is the reason that the Greeks were less successful in “applied mathematics” than some other ancient peoples. There is, however, the other side of the coin; while it is true, as Cheng says, no matter how abstract, knowledge is always relevant to human concerns, it is also true that much of what we know has not been attained with that relevance in view and in many cases the relevance was determined only after the fact. In order to emphasize the importance of inquiry determined only by the concern for truth and without regard for relevance, Peirce liked to call this “the pursuit o f useless knowledge.” Who will say that we do not need this attitude as well as the concern for relevance?

Perhaps the recognition at this point of the need for both the world-historical view represented by Chinese philosophy with its concre- teness and the Western view with its premium on abstractions may point us in the direction of asking the basic question: Is any one world-historical view, taken all by itself and without supplement from any other, capable of resolving all the questions and problems faced by all in a world

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community? 1 believe the answer is No, and that is why conferences of this kind are not a luxury, but a necessity.

YALE UNIVERSITY, NEW HAVEN

NOTES

1 . 1 d o not suppose that the basic questions I have cited are understood in

exactly the same way in each tradition, but the continuities in experience are

sufficient for the identification of the proper correlative questions across

boundaries.

It is noteworthy that Whitehead saw the overthrow of the medieval cosmo-

logy inherited from Aristotle by the rise of modern science as the triumph of

fucr over reason.

2 .

CHINESE PHILOSOPHY AS A WORLD-HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

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