梁漱溟与宏观历史
日期:04-03
艾恺
美国芝加哥大学
摘要
本文聚焦于 20 世纪早期中国的宏大历史叙事和梁漱溟的东西文化及其哲学。我所说的宏观历史是指在历史中找寻范式的“宏大叙事”这一路向。这种路向将历史诠释为整体历史,比如马克思、黑格尔、斯宾格勒和汤因比。本文详细比较了梁漱溟与五位 20 世纪西方宏观史学家的著作:斯宾格勒的《西方的没落》、汤因比的《历史研究》、德日进的《人的现象》、弗朗西斯·福山的《历史的终结》,以及亨廷顿的《文明的冲突与世界秩序的重建》。出人意料的是,与梁漱溟的作品最具共性的是德日进。
Liang Shuming and Metahistory
Guy Salvatore ALITTO
The University of Chicago
Abstract
This paper focuses upon early 20th century China’s major metahistorical work, Liang Shuming’sEastern and Western Cultures and their Philosophies (Dong Xi wenhua jiqi zhexue, 东西文化及其哲学). What I refer to as Metahistory is the genre of the “grand narrative” that searches for patterns in the historical past, that interprets History “as a Whole,” such as the works of Marx, Hegel, Spengler or Toynbee. The paper compares in some detail Liang’s work with five other 20th century Western Metahistories: Spengler’s The Decline of the West, Arnold Joseph Toynbee’s A Study of History, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man, Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History, and Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.
It draws the surprising conclusion that Liang’s work most resembles that of Teilhard de Chardin.
This paper explores some 20th century “metahistorical” analyses (or metahistorical speculations)1 throughout human history and compares them to Liang Shuming’s Eastern and Western Cultures and their Philosophies (东西文化及其哲学, 1921).The goal is to understand better the nature of Liang’s metahistorical speculation, which is approaching its 100th anniversary.
From the birth of consciousness of time, sundry metahistorical constructions have attempted to explained what History with the Capital H has in store for humans. Metahistories provide a basis for anticipating the future. Great social and political convulsions in history seem to intensify the craving for metahistorical speculation and prediction, because during and after them, humans naturally yearn for an indication of where they are going. Such endeavors, due to increased specialization in the
historical profession, fell out of fashion, especially among professional academic historians, by the late 1960s, giving way to what might be termed “microhistories.Today, some scholars look favorably at the Metahistorical enterprise, partly because of the greater availability and capacities afforded by the computers and electronic dates, the continued advance of natural science, which increase the possibilities of creating a single historical continuum. 2
Pre-modern European religion-based metahistorical theories of Divine Providence inherent in the Bible were continued from St. Augustine through to Teilhard de Chardin.The first Western Metahistory, City of God by St. Augustine (begun in 413) was
unambiguously in response to the first sacking of Rome in 410 A.D. by the Visigoths
1I must emphasize that what I am referring to as Metahistory is the genre of the “grand narrative” that searches for patterns in the historical past, that interprets History “as a Whole,” such as the works of Marx, Hegel, Spengler or Toynbee. I do not mean the term in Haden White’s sense, as in his famous 1973 work Metahistory: the Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe, in which he emphasizes the influence of fiction on historical thinking. That is, the historian merely utilizes past events in fashioning a story.
2A good example would be History, Big History, & Metahistory, Krakauer, David C., Gaddis, John, and Pomeranz, Kenneth, eds. SFI Press, Santa Fe, 2017. The majority of authors contributing to this volume are generally positive about such possibilities.
under Alaric, an event which shocked all of Europe and led some Romans to believe that it was punishment for abandoning the traditional gods for Christianity. Thus, in response, St. Augustine brought forth an analysis that saw human history as an unrelenting struggle between God (The City of God) and the devil (the Earthy City), which would end with a final victory of the former over the latter.
As in the case of St. Augustine and the fall of Rome, later Metahistories seem to be written (or popularly read) at junctures during which deep changes took place in European consciousness. Up through the seventeenth century, Christian thinkers
such as Jancques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704) maintained an interpretation of history not unlike that of St. Augustine. By the eighteenth century, however, history, as a story of Divine Providence with its final goals of good triumphing over evil and union with God, had weakened substantially. Newton's discoveries made history something that perhaps God had begun but then was left primarily to the actions and decisions of humanity.
The upheavals throughout Europe following the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era, and the near universal acceptance among intellectuals of “progress” and Reason, (and the concomitant decline in the power of Christian myths), set the stage for Hegel, who combined both the Newtonian and the Christian constituents: humans have freedom but this freedom can only be fulfilled through overcoming obstacles, so that progress takes place toward their ultimate destiny through struggle and conflict. Yet at one level the complex and ambitious Hegelian philosophy of history is a secular version of Judeo-Christian eschatology. Cunning Reason replaced God and the Geist realizing itself became surrogate Redemption.3 Hegel thought that the end of history
politically was the development of the rational legal state, exemplified by Prussia.
3Fukuyama tends to believe that the Hegelian vision of history was not religious; Hegel, in my opinion, combined the old Judeo-Christian Metahistory with the idea of dialectical development.
Hegel did not emphasize the political products of human consciousness (such as staterule by law) as much as the artistic and religious products.
Post-Hegelian metahistorical speculators of the 19th century had to present themselves as not merely rational but as "scientific." Marx, a Hegelian intellectual progeny, created the only teleological speculation that exercised strong influence over twentieth century historians. His was perhaps the most coherent metahistorical theory (among many) in response to the cataclysm of the rapid industrialization of European society in the first half of the 19th century.
In the twentieth century five metahistorians have made a mark on public remembrance -- Oswald Spengler,4 Arnold Toynbee5 and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin6 enjoyed popularity in the decades following the unprecedented disasters of the two world wars. In the 1990s Francis Fukuyama7 and Samuel Huntington8
came into prominence.
Liang Shuming
Liang Shuming’s grand teleological theory of human cultural evolution was first put forth in the 1921 book Eastern and Western Cultures and their Philosophies, Dong
4Oswald Spengler’s (1880-1936) The Decline of the West is the first Metahistory of the 20 th century, a work which I think was written at least partly in response to the catastrophe of World War I. The first volume of Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Gestalt und Wirklichkeit (Munich, 1918) had been revised in the definitive Munich edition of 1923. The second volume, Welthistorische Perspektiven, was been published in Munich in 1922. References to it in Chinese do not seem to appear until the late 1920s. The first English translation appeared several years later as The Decline of the West. New York, A. A. Knopf, 1926-29.
5A Study of History (published 1934-1961, ten volumes) is generally regarded as the most important work of the enormously prolific Arnold Joseph Toynbee’s (1889-1975). He wrote dozens of books on topics ranging from the Armenian genocide to life after death.
6The reverend Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s (1881-1955) most important work perhaps is Le Phenomene humain, (Paris 1955), translated by Bernard Wall as The Phenomenon of Man, New York, 1959. Le Phenomene humain was completed in Beijing in 1946, but the Vatican refused to allow him to publish any of his works. All of his philosophical writings were published posthumously.
7Fukuyama’s article "The End of History?" (The National Interest, Summer 1989) did indeed create a worldwide sensation, but recent trends in world events have since tended to confound Fukuyama’s pronouncement.
8Huntington’s article "The Clash of Civilizations? (Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993) like Fukuyama’s, became a global sensation.
Xi wenhua jiqi zhexue, 东西文化及其哲学). The enthusiastic reception and popularity of the book in China at the time was comparable to that of Spengler’s book in the West and Japan, but due perhaps to somewhat different upheavals. In addition to the First World War, the uniquely Chinese cataclysms of the rise of popular nationalism, the New Culture- May Fourth movements, and the newly heightened consciousness of imperialism.
Liang’s book is in many respects a Buddhist view of History, but unlike the Hindu traditions of metahistorical thinking that gave Buddhism birth,9 it is not cyclical, but rather a progressive, cumulative, unilinear view of human development. Liang’s theory is not based on a biological metaphor, as are Toynbee’s and Spengler’s works. I would go as far as to say that Liang’s metahistorical design may offer some predictive value, as I will discuss below, its ingenious and insightful character compares well with other 20th century metahistorical speculations.
Liang's historical process was a version of the evolutionary, unilinear, progressive pattern that dominated in the 19th century metahistorical theories in the West. After 1900 Darwinian and Spencerian ideas of progressive evolution itself were immediately and widely accepted by the Chinese intelligentsia and seemed to have unconsciously regarded as the new "scientific" Way (Dao) of the cosmos. By the 1920s, the progressive unilinear vision of history was almost universally accepted by Chinese intellectuals.
In Liang's book, all life was an expression and objectification of the World Will,
9Buddhist, Hindu and Jainist theories of history are cyclic, not progressive and cumulative. There are a few modern minor exceptions, such as the Indian metaphysician Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) who radically changed traditional Hindu theology by introducing the concept of progressive unilinear evolution. He implies that the evolutionary process did not stop with the emergence of Homo Sapiens, but rather would soon produce "supermen," or "Gnostic beings" which will transform completely all human social and cultural life. See his massive The Life Divine (New York, 1949). Another exception would be the Hindu philosopher Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, (1888-1969) who sees the historical world process as evolutionary, but his "end of history" (unlike that of Aurobindo) is the dissolution of time into eternity, similar to the Christian and traditional Hindu conceptions. See Paul Arthur Schilpp, ed. The Philosophy of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (New York, 1952).
in the sense used by Schopenhauer. It was this blind force that ultimately drove humankind forward through stages of evolution. On one level it was ironic that this progressive view of history was metaphysically similar to Schopenhauer's pessimistic reaction to Enlightenment progressivism; indeed, Schopenhauer's work was a complete denial of the possibility of human progress and the perfectibility of man. Schopenhauer saw humans as doomed to an eternal round of torment and misery. Because Liang's own fundamental view of the cosmos was ultimately Buddhist (which considered humankind already in such a predicament) progress and perfectibility are reconcilable.
Although Liang’s book promoted a revival of Confucianism, in the final analysis he argued that the ultimate destiny of humanity was to achieve "enlightenment" in the Buddhist sense. "I know that, no matter what, humankind cannot achieve salvation unless it destroys the two fundamental holdings [or illusions, erzhi, holding to the reality of self and to the reality of the world],'' he stated. Thus, human evolution was the story of humanity's gradual enlightenment to the unreality of the self and the cosmos, proceeding through evolutionary stages by dialectical necessity, similar to Hegel's or Marx’s. He insisted that the changes in world culture he anticipated would be forced upon humankind by “objective things” or “facts” (shishi).
The life process, then, becomes an unending sequence of problems presented to individual expressions of the Will. Culture--"'a way of life” --is the aggregate response of humans to the obstacles presented by the environment. Cultural differences are due to differences in the ''direction'' of the Will--or the way the Will attempts to deal with the environmental obstacles.
Liang posited three cultural ideal types 10 --expressions of three distinct directions
10Liang’s formulating of these three paradigms is not unlike Max Weber’s ideal-types, which Weber used as tools for historical analysis.
of the Will--which, in turn, are responses to different ways in which the problems of the environment are perceived (or different kinds of contradictions between the Will and the environment). These three responses of humanity to its environment should have succeeded one another in a fixed order. The first type, represented by Western culture, might be the “normal” direction of the Will - forward; it is a response to the basic problems of human survival as an animal: the need for food, shelter, and procreation. The Will goes in a forward direction to conquer the environment and satisfy these primal desires. All the modern characteristics and products of Western culture, such as science, democracy, and power over nature, have developed naturally from this direction of the Will.
The second direction of the Will can take is "sideways," to compromise and harmonize with the environment and so achieve a balance between the demands of the Will itself and the environment. This cultural type deals with the problems of having an emotionally satisfying life and thus achieves greater inner contentment and joie de vivre. It is represented by China. The third type is represented by Indian Buddhism; the Will turns backwards upon itself seeking its own negation.
One would deduce that the archetypal Westerner resolves the contradiction between the Will's demand for shelter and the environmental obstacle of a dilapidated house by completely demolishing the house and building a new one. The archetypal Chinese will repair the old house, and the Indian will attempt to extinguish the desire for housing. Each of the directions should succeed the other at the appropriate stage of evolution.
After people have satisfied their material needs, they become conscious of the problem of achieving emotionally rich, satisfying lives- -- of truly enjoying their material acquisitions and of taking joy in life itself. After achieving this state of both interior contentment and exterior comfort, they are still confronted with a consciousness of the truly eternal problems: the world's impermanence and their own inevitable death.In the third stage, humankind frees itself from the illusions of the existence of both the inner self and the outer world, and finally achieves the ultimate joy of Nirvana.
In its first stage of evolution, humanity aggressively fulfills its material needs through intellectual calculation and effective collective organizations based on the principle of individual rights. In modern times, Western culture wedded its two fundamental tendencies of self-interest and rational calculation with its Promethean will to possess and conquer the environment, and so developed modern industry. Humanity's first evolutionary stage, then, inevitably produced Science and Democracy, the two words symbolizing Western culture for the Chinese intelligentsia of the May Fourth era. Democracy—a system Liang praised for allowing both maximum personal freedom and maximum collective action - was based on the individual's rights. Positively, it guaranteed opportunity to develop oneself; negatively, it guaranteed freedom from interference from society or other individuals within a defined sphere of action. The other side of the same coin was the development of the individual's social nature. Democracy provides for effective organization and at the same time protects individuals from having their individuality smothered by the organization. At the same time, individual freedom and consciousness of self are valuable not just to the individual, but also to the collective, for they allow for the release of individual energies that in turn allows for a more powerful corporate body. 11 Without this unleashed “selfishness,” the West's economic development would have been impossible. Without the active participation of the individual in society, "pubic spirit" and democracy
11Release of individual energies to create a more powerful group (i.e. nation) is a common theme among Chinese intellectuals from the 1890s through to the 1920s. It is an important component of the thought of nationalists Tan Sitong (谭嗣同) and Liang Qichao (梁启超),as well as that of May Fourth era thinkers such as Chen Duxiu (陈独秀).
would have been impossible.
Because humanity was in the first stage in human evolution, Liang acknowledged that Western culture was becoming the world culture, What dialectic would impel the world culture to evolve to the next "Chinese" stage? The attitudes of life which had been responsible for the West's conquest of nature and its democratic organization contained within themselves the seeds of their own destruction. As a consequence of the affirmation of the self and the inclination towards intellectual calculation, Westerners viewed the natural world only in terms of satisfying desires, as an object for utilization and conquest. This attitude informed their whole outlook on the world and their attitude toward fellow human beings. The price for scientific knowledge, economic growth, more comfortable conditions of life, was existential suffering and vitiated spirituality. Habitual calculation for individual profit has ''cut [them] off and alienated them from the cosmos, placing them in conflict and contradiction with it, so that [they are] without emotion and weary unto death.'' Westerners can obtain no spiritual solace from their fellows either because "the divisions between man and man are so clearly drawn" and each individual's calculations are so important, that each is split off from, set in opposition to, and put in competition with others. It is as though each feels that only he himself [really] exists. All others [are] aliens or enemies. Even the family itself is not immune to this mean-spirited haggling."
Within Liang's attitude is an normative irrationalist element similar to that of many 19th and 20th century critics of their respective contemporary "modern" societies. The following paragraph from Liang's book, for example, might well have been written by dozens of such European critics:“Intellect is a tool for life, for convenience in arranging and calculating and for
creating the [imaginary] hypothesis of dividing life. But to take such a division as real is not merely a mistake' but a gravely dangerous one. Life is a whole. If you divide it into segments and make one contingent on another, then it loses its delight and relish. When life's integrity is maintained, all parts have their own inherent meaning or interest. If this attitude [of calculation] is taken, the individual moments of life all become means. Living in a house becomes an action merely for the sake of eating and sleeping [in it], and eating and sleeping, in turn, become merely a means to the end of reproducing and consuming, and gradually a person's whole life has meaning only in something external to itself. The enjoyment of living would no longer be in the living itself, but for some other purpose extraneous to it. In reality, life has no ulterior ends, but is for its own sake. Each moment of life is an end in itself, and not for the service of another moment' and does not derive its significance from some later phase of life. Intelligent people are especially prone to make this mistake' and [consequently] find the flavor of their lives
drying up. Then they start searching for life’s meaning, its significance, its value, and so on, so much so that their emotions and will are shaken, convulsed, and broken.”
The effects of modern life, because of the dehumanizing potential of the division of labor on which it is based, Liang hinted, were responsible for the characteristic social problems of modern societies: crime, substance addictions, suicide, anomie, and decline of the family. Mass culture is the same. Leisure amusement are just other kinds of suffering, for the workers could find pleasure only in stimulating the most vulgar corporal desires. "In all cases, if it is not lewd and excessive, then it will not be pleasurable." This aspect of Western popular culture (which through electric media has become in effect world popular culture) has intensified since the 1920s. In all respects modern Western society compelled men to act against human nature. In its basic elements, Liang's critique of modern Western culture, is not that different from those of the many critics of modernity, Western and Non-Western, in the past two centuries -- from the Europeans, the Russian Slavophiles, the French Vitalists, the Indian critics such as Gandhi, Iqbal and Tagore, or the Japanese such as Watsuji Tetsuro (和辻哲郎) or Nishida Kitaro (西田几多郎 ).12
How would Confucian culture solve the problems inherent in modern life? The very existence of Chinese culture had to be explained. Liang looked back to the early geniuses or sages of the Chinese and Indian cultures, who were prophetic in their insights into life and the cosmos. Western culture had grown of the insights of the Western sages -- the ancient Greek philosophers and the Judeo-Christian sages; they saw only the immediate problems that confronted humankind, and so set the direction that would, millennia later, result in the modern Western world.
The prescient Indian and Chinese ancient sages, who had set their respective cultures on their courses, had somehow managed to anticipate the problems of the second and third stages before the problems inherent in the first stage had actually manifested themselves. Therefore, Chinese and Indian cultural patterns were set to solve the problems of the second and third stages long before the first stage of evolution was completed. Because China had never completed the first stage of evolution it had never been able to realize the Confucian ideals upon which its culture was based. It was in a limbo between the two stages. Consequently, Liang urged that Science and Democracy be wholeheartedly adopted by China, but at the same time China must not abandon its own culture, as it would become the world culture of the second stage of evolution.
Confucianism was a way of life based not on the calculating intellectual faculty
12I have extensively explored this phenomenon in Guy Alitto (艾恺) 世界范围内的反现代化思潮 ; 论文化守成主义( Anti-modernization thought trends in a world-wide perspective: On cultural conservatism Guiyang,Guizhou Provincial Press, 1999
but upon intuition which came closer to the truth of the eternal flux of the cosmos. The Chinese attitude of harmony and compromise had kept Chinese from mastering nature but enabled them to achieve true inner satisfaction and happiness. Rather than being in opposition to nature, this attitude harmonized with and rejoiced in it. Instead of stimulating desires (as Westerners do) or repressing them (as Indians do), Chinese take the middle way and so achieve contentment.
The fundamentals of Chinese culture were the basic Confucian institutions of filial piety, ancestor reverence, and the core ethical relationships of Confucian culture– lun 伦). Confucius, according to Liang, had only two devices by which to institutionalize his way of life—ritual and music (li 礼 and yue 乐). Confucius used intellect to design these institutions to achieve the blending of intellect and emotion, or to modify and adjust the raw instincts of humankind. Confucian rites and music create an emotional and spiritual stability for human life. Confucianism, Liang said, performs the functions of a great religion without the flaws of religion (such as superstition and other worldliness). To achieve its goals Confucianism used aesthetics. The Confucian system, which ''is like a religion and yet is not a religion not art and yet is art'' would be able to create social order and discipline without relying on laws and punishments because, by its nature, it ''trained the instincts. ''
Chinese cosmology was based on the Classic of Changes (Yijing 易经), which describes the world as in incessant flux. Thus, Confucius' Intuitionism and its corollary, indeterminacy, had important implications for the concrete expression of this "religion that is not a religion." If Confucianism was based on an intuitive grasp of the constant flux of reality, then it could have no fixed objective rules of conduct (which in themselves were attempts to classify experience into inflexible categories of intellect).Thus, conventional Confucian morality as practiced for millennia has been antagonistic to the true spirit of Confucius and all the formal moral codes and rules of behavior throughout the two thousand years of Confucian Chinese history have actually been anti-Confucian.
Thus, conventional Confucian morality (lijiao mingjiao 礼教名教) has been really antagonistic to the true spirit of Confucius; and all the formal moral codes and rules of behavior throughout the two thousand years of Confucian Chinese history have actually been anti-Confucian. Therefore, the Confucian culture that would spontaneously arise in the world in response to the innate contradictions in the first stage was only approximated by historical China; rather it was the true Confucian philosophy of life and Confucian ethics.
What Liang was suggesting, it would seem, was that the general emphasis in Chinese culture on human relationships, on the inner life, on subordination of self to community, on an ethical system without a religious basis (in the Western sense), and on joy in activity itself (rather than goal oriented activity) would take shape spontaneously in response to the inevitable human problems post-industrial societies created. Liang envisioned that Confucianism, a system of ethics that had emotional and intuitive basis, would become a substitute for religion, holding society together and providing for a more "natural" rich emotional life for all.
This vision led him to predict that after the first stage of evolution, a world culture similar to the Chinese ideals would develop. So Chinese culture would realize itself only after humanity had built the economic and technological foundations. The birth of Chinese culture had been premature. Historical Confucianism and Chinese culture, based only on ''dregs'' and ''inflexible doctrines," had succeeded only in bringing forth a dim shadow of itself.
Liang's own advice for China at the time was to "completely" and "unconditionally" accept science and democracy (including the concepts of human rights and civil rights) while "critically reappraising and bringing forth anew China's original attitude."
Oswald Spengler
Liang's work has certain resemblance's to Oswald Spengler's famous book, The Decline of the West, which was published around the same time as Liang's Eastern and Western Cultures. (Since his work was not available to Liang and Liang's not available to Spengler, there is no possibility of influence.) The greatest resemblance is that, like Liang, Spengler’s analysis uses a comparative morphology of cultures as a basis for predicting the future, and that, like Liang, Spengler represents cultures as a spiritual phenomena. In Spengler's definition, culture the spiritual orientation of a group of people who have achieved some unitary conception of their world which informs all their activities—their art, religion, and philosophy, their politics and economics. Unlike Liang, however, the "prime symbol" for a culture is not their thought or philosophies, but rather in a distinctive concept of the space in which those of the culture are to live and act.
The greatest difference is that Spengler's theory is cyclical. Cultures are born, age and die through the succession of the four seasons: an agricultural and heroic spring; an aristocratic summer in which towns emerge; an autumn in which cities grow, absolute monarchies subdue aristocracies, and philosophy and science flourish; then finally comes a winter of plutocracy and political tyranny, made possible by advanced technology and public administration. The cycle should take around a millennium but after having reached the Winter stage, the culture develops no more. For example, in Spengler’s terms, had been “dead” for a millennium but its corpse remained in existence.
Arnold Toynbee
Arnold Toynbee's theory of historical development13 is in some respects an
13See, for example, History, Big History, & Metahistory, pp. 16, 84, 98, 235. As Murray Gell-Mann states, “One
amplification and elaboration upon Spengler’s The Decline of the West. Toynbee distinguished twenty-one known civilizations, which he allotted to three generations; primary, secondary, and tertiary. Of the eight surviving in the present century, five are tertiary (Western, main Orthodox Christian, Russian Orthodox Christian, Iranic, Arabic), and three are secondary (Hindu, main Far Eastern, Japanese Far Eastern). Each of the five tertiary civilizations is affiliated to one of two extinct secondary civilizations, the Hellenic and the Syriac, both of which are affiliated to the same primary civilization, the Minoan. Each of the three surviving secondary civilizations is affiliated to one of the two extinct primary ones: the Sinic and the Indic. In addition, there are four extinct primary civilizations: two of them perished without issue; and the other two each had two secondary offspring, all of which perished without issue. Finally, Toynbee counted ten other civilizations that were not only barren but necessarily so, being either abortive,or arrested, or fossils.
His classifications of “Sinic” and “Indic” of primary civilizations are similar to Liang's. Moreover, a civilization, in Toynbee's scheme, comes into being when a society responds successfully to a challenge thrown down by its physical or human environment, similar to Liang's challenge-response model. Toynbee's model, however, is, like Spengler's, cyclical: a civilization grows as long as it continues successfully to respond to the new challenges to which every successful response must lead. Each civilization follows a predictable path of growth and decay analogous to that exhibited in the evolution of particular living organisms. So, fundamental differences with Liang’s model are clear: Liang’s is linear and cumulative, while Toynbee’s is
should certainly mention Arnold Toynbee's ambitious attempt to describe and compare the rise and fall of more than 20 civilizations... And in such a far-ranging work he undoubtably made a number of mistakes that horrified experts on the various cultures he considered but as a first attempt was it really so bad that one should not build on it?
cyclic; Liang’s model uses “ideal-types” that limit world cultures to three, whereby Toynbee’s massively detailed work distinguishes dozens of unique cultures.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Teilhard de Chardin, 14 French Jesuit philosopher and paleontologist, spent most of his professional life in Beijing, where he wrote his major philosophical work Le Phenomene humain. His Christian metahistorical theory resembles Liang's and to a surprising degree more resembles Buddhist historical speculation more than it resembles Spengler's or Toynbee's.
Strictly speaking, Teilhard's theory is evolutionary more than historical, in that it describes the evolution of the entire universe, not just that of humanity. In fact, the appearance of humankind marked one of three eras in the history of the universe. In his vision, the entire universe, that is the cosmic material stuff itself -- was undergoing irreversible changes toward greater and greater complexity of organization. It was progressing through three separate stages: Cosmogenesis (in which the matter of the universe evolved more and more complex forms, such as life, and so to the stage of a biosphere); anthropogenesis (in which the most advanced and most complex form, humans, appeared, creating the noosphere, a collective human consciousness superimposed on the biosphere) and the final Christogenesis, or Point Omega, in which Man would be eventually be gathered up into the Body of Christ; in the final and direct union with God humans would reach their final, the Omega point of perfection.
Humans are undeniably made up of matter, but from within themselves each is a conscious being. Teilhard de Chardin identifies consciousness as spiritual energy, which is within all parts of the cosmos. The human brain has a heightened,
14 He was known in China through his Chinese name De Rijin 德日进.
concentrated form of spiritual energy, and this is the most advanced stage that evolution has reached thus far, but this is not the end of human evolution. From a paleontological point of view, humankind was still in its infancy, and so would have millions of years in which to further develop, as the concentration engendered by this "thinking layer" - the noosphere -- will make human consciousness evolve forward into a single world-culture. The various cultures around the globe are converging into one; the noosphere too is converging into a common human consciousness, which Teilhard de Chardin saw in the worldwide complex of transportation and communication. Of course, transportation and communication especially had indeed been moving rapidly toward a collective human consciousness. The final end will be a single world culture, a single consciousness and a melding of each individual consciousness into a Hyperpersonal Consciousness, the terminal phase of evolution, or God.
This is, remarkably enough, quite similar to the various Buddhist and Hindu metahistorical theories, which are undeniably cyclical but in which the individual souls are climaxed in the Grand Unity, the escaping from individual egoconsciousness by a melding into the One, the Ultimate Reality. In another sense, it is similar to Hegel's joining of the Christian myth with his developmental dialectic. The individual human being's final goal is his realization of his identity with the Absolute.
Liang’s telos, the ultimate Buddhist enlightenment of humanity, and Teidhard de Chardin’s Omega Point of humanity’s final union with God, would appear to be parallelteloi, the former Nirvana and the latter the rapture of Heaven. The crucial difference between the two prognoses lie in their “timetables.” Teidhard de Chardin’s Metahistory begins literally with the beginning of the world (the Big Bang?) and ends with a point that might well be thousands of years in the future. Liang’s prediction of a world cultural change is “relatively” imminent, in that he perceived certain trends in the latest Western thought (exemplified by thinker such as …) as indicating that advancement to the second “Confucian” stage of evolution is already on the way. This variance is perhaps due to the Paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin’s historical canvas of millions of years, and would-be revivalist of Chinese culture Liang’s of three millennia. Liang’s major purpose in his book, moreover, was to persuade Chinese to not completely abandon their traditional culture in favor of the West’s, a crucial matter for the Chinese intelligentsia at the time. Teilhard de Chardin, on the other hand, presented no advocacies or arguments and made no predictions of imminent transformations; the matter he addressed was not a burning contemporary issue, as was Liang’s.
Francis Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama’s principal message that startled the world in 1989 15 was that History as a Whole had arrived at its telos in the form of liberal democracy; evolutionary forces existed that would ensure that other societies will eventually converge to this single point. The article seemed to suggest that American liberal democracy was the only viable alternative left after the demise of world Communism. Assaulted by critics worldwide, Fukuyama then amplified and modulated this original bold claim with a 1992 book 16 in which he met these criticism (and possible future criticisms) with thorough, detailed responses while still claiming, albeit somewhat equivocally, that there was “a remarkable consensus concerning the legitimacy of liberal democracy as a system of government” in that there were no viable alternatives to it. Following Hegel (as interpreted in Alexandre Kojeve’s 17 elucidation of Hegel’s Philosophy of the Spirit ), Fukuyama implicitly appealed for a reassessment of
15"The End of History?" (The National Interest, Summer 1989) set off a global discussion.
16The End of History and the Last Man, (New York Free Press, 1992)
17Alexandre Kojevchnikoff (1902-1968), better known as Kojeve) gave a series of lectures in Paris’s Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, later published in English as Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit.
Metahistory, which at the time was out of academic fashion.
He sees History as driven forward by two mechanisms, technologically based economic development (which assures History’s cumulative linear nature), and the struggle for recognition (of Man as Man). Human desire is both for meeting primal needs – food, shelter, sex, comfort – and for gaining recognition from others. Liberal democracy (and Capitalism) provides both but does not portend a paradise because society then becomes an anomic collection of self-satisfied seekers of creature comforts, security and consumer goods.
Fukuyama's vision is similar in some respects to both Teilhard de Chardin’s and Liang Shuming's. That is, a universal and homogenous human consciousness is in effect; it is liberal democracy joined by highly developed technology. In other words, Teilhard's Noosphere is developing at high speed, and spiritual energies and evolutionary lines are converging visibly. In Liang's vision of the first level of evolution, science and democracy encapsulate the Western first stage of human evolution. Fukuyama also hints that it is possible that, having achieved this stage, world culture might well go off in a different direction; that is similar to Liang’s second Confucian stage of evolution.
Samuel P. Huntington
Immediately after publication of Fukuyama’s book, Samuel Huntington published a refutation “The Clash of Civilizations.”18 A few years later he amplified his argument in book.19 Like Fukuyama’s article, it triggered a world-wide discussion. Huntington saw a very different approaching twenty-first century. He observed that the
18Samuel P. Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations? "(Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993)
19The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, 1996.
democratic revolutions throughout the world in the 1990s had probably exhausted themselves and would possibly retract. Like Spengler, Toynbee and Liang Shuming, he took culture or civilization as the meaningful unit in history and human affairs, not Fukuyama’s forms of state. He argued that during the last century an evolution has been taking place, from an era of conflict among nation-states to one of conflict among ideologies and to cultural conflict.
Huntington perceives civilizational "fault lines" and future conflicts among Hindu,Muslim, Slavic, Orthodox, Japanese, Confucian, Latin American and "Western" civilizations. The import of the book is essentially for the West to get its own act together, as other civilizations are getting theirs together. The interactions among peoples of different civilizations are increasing, and they intensify civilization-consciousness.20
Conclusion
The ideas presented here are yet too superficial and facile to merit any firm conclusions. I wholeheartedly welcome any criticisms or comments. Prima facie, the paper would suggest that, of the metahistorical works compared, Liang’s is closest to that of Teilhard de Chardin’s. Toynbee’s and Spengler’s visions of history were cyclic, and Fukuyama’s concerned primarily with the evolution of political forms. Huntington’s vision is perhaps the most different from Liang’s model in that it predicts imminent worldwide conflict among cultures, rather than a coming unity.
20The world economy and ever accelerating speed and ease of communication and mass media, however, would seem to have certain unifying effects as well. This is especially clear in popular youth culture (movies, music, TV, social media, etc. through the World Wide Web), where it would appear a true world “village” has developed.
This paper focuses upon early 20th century China’s major metahistorical work, Liang Shuming’sEastern and Western Cultures and their Philosophies (Dong Xi wenhua jiqi zhexue, 东西文化及其哲学). What I refer to as Metahistory is the genre of the “grand narrative” that searches for patterns in the historical past, that interprets History “as a Whole,” such as the works of Marx, Hegel, Spengler or Toynbee. The paper compares in some detail Liang’s work with five other 20th century Western Metahistories: Spengler’s The Decline of the West, Arnold Joseph Toynbee’s A Study of History, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man, Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History, and Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.
It draws the surprising conclusion that Liang’s work most resembles that of Teilhard de Chardin.
This paper explores some 20th century “metahistorical” analyses (or metahistorical speculations)1 throughout human history and compares them to Liang Shuming’s Eastern and Western Cultures and their Philosophies (东西文化及其哲学, 1921).The goal is to understand better the nature of Liang’s metahistorical speculation, which is approaching its 100th anniversary.
From the birth of consciousness of time, sundry metahistorical constructions have attempted to explained what History with the Capital H has in store for humans. Metahistories provide a basis for anticipating the future. Great social and political convulsions in history seem to intensify the craving for metahistorical speculation and prediction, because during and after them, humans naturally yearn for an indication of where they are going. Such endeavors, due to increased specialization in the
historical profession, fell out of fashion, especially among professional academic historians, by the late 1960s, giving way to what might be termed “microhistories.Today, some scholars look favorably at the Metahistorical enterprise, partly because of the greater availability and capacities afforded by the computers and electronic dates, the continued advance of natural science, which increase the possibilities of creating a single historical continuum. 2
Pre-modern European religion-based metahistorical theories of Divine Providence inherent in the Bible were continued from St. Augustine through to Teilhard de Chardin.The first Western Metahistory, City of God by St. Augustine (begun in 413) was
unambiguously in response to the first sacking of Rome in 410 A.D. by the Visigoths
1I must emphasize that what I am referring to as Metahistory is the genre of the “grand narrative” that searches for patterns in the historical past, that interprets History “as a Whole,” such as the works of Marx, Hegel, Spengler or Toynbee. I do not mean the term in Haden White’s sense, as in his famous 1973 work Metahistory: the Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe, in which he emphasizes the influence of fiction on historical thinking. That is, the historian merely utilizes past events in fashioning a story.
2A good example would be History, Big History, & Metahistory, Krakauer, David C., Gaddis, John, and Pomeranz, Kenneth, eds. SFI Press, Santa Fe, 2017. The majority of authors contributing to this volume are generally positive about such possibilities.
under Alaric, an event which shocked all of Europe and led some Romans to believe that it was punishment for abandoning the traditional gods for Christianity. Thus, in response, St. Augustine brought forth an analysis that saw human history as an unrelenting struggle between God (The City of God) and the devil (the Earthy City), which would end with a final victory of the former over the latter.
As in the case of St. Augustine and the fall of Rome, later Metahistories seem to be written (or popularly read) at junctures during which deep changes took place in European consciousness. Up through the seventeenth century, Christian thinkers
such as Jancques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704) maintained an interpretation of history not unlike that of St. Augustine. By the eighteenth century, however, history, as a story of Divine Providence with its final goals of good triumphing over evil and union with God, had weakened substantially. Newton's discoveries made history something that perhaps God had begun but then was left primarily to the actions and decisions of humanity.
The upheavals throughout Europe following the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era, and the near universal acceptance among intellectuals of “progress” and Reason, (and the concomitant decline in the power of Christian myths), set the stage for Hegel, who combined both the Newtonian and the Christian constituents: humans have freedom but this freedom can only be fulfilled through overcoming obstacles, so that progress takes place toward their ultimate destiny through struggle and conflict. Yet at one level the complex and ambitious Hegelian philosophy of history is a secular version of Judeo-Christian eschatology. Cunning Reason replaced God and the Geist realizing itself became surrogate Redemption.3 Hegel thought that the end of history
politically was the development of the rational legal state, exemplified by Prussia.
3Fukuyama tends to believe that the Hegelian vision of history was not religious; Hegel, in my opinion, combined the old Judeo-Christian Metahistory with the idea of dialectical development.
Hegel did not emphasize the political products of human consciousness (such as staterule by law) as much as the artistic and religious products.
Post-Hegelian metahistorical speculators of the 19th century had to present themselves as not merely rational but as "scientific." Marx, a Hegelian intellectual progeny, created the only teleological speculation that exercised strong influence over twentieth century historians. His was perhaps the most coherent metahistorical theory (among many) in response to the cataclysm of the rapid industrialization of European society in the first half of the 19th century.
In the twentieth century five metahistorians have made a mark on public remembrance -- Oswald Spengler,4 Arnold Toynbee5 and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin6 enjoyed popularity in the decades following the unprecedented disasters of the two world wars. In the 1990s Francis Fukuyama7 and Samuel Huntington8
came into prominence.
Liang Shuming
Liang Shuming’s grand teleological theory of human cultural evolution was first put forth in the 1921 book Eastern and Western Cultures and their Philosophies, Dong
4Oswald Spengler’s (1880-1936) The Decline of the West is the first Metahistory of the 20 th century, a work which I think was written at least partly in response to the catastrophe of World War I. The first volume of Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Gestalt und Wirklichkeit (Munich, 1918) had been revised in the definitive Munich edition of 1923. The second volume, Welthistorische Perspektiven, was been published in Munich in 1922. References to it in Chinese do not seem to appear until the late 1920s. The first English translation appeared several years later as The Decline of the West. New York, A. A. Knopf, 1926-29.
5A Study of History (published 1934-1961, ten volumes) is generally regarded as the most important work of the enormously prolific Arnold Joseph Toynbee’s (1889-1975). He wrote dozens of books on topics ranging from the Armenian genocide to life after death.
6The reverend Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s (1881-1955) most important work perhaps is Le Phenomene humain, (Paris 1955), translated by Bernard Wall as The Phenomenon of Man, New York, 1959. Le Phenomene humain was completed in Beijing in 1946, but the Vatican refused to allow him to publish any of his works. All of his philosophical writings were published posthumously.
7Fukuyama’s article "The End of History?" (The National Interest, Summer 1989) did indeed create a worldwide sensation, but recent trends in world events have since tended to confound Fukuyama’s pronouncement.
8Huntington’s article "The Clash of Civilizations? (Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993) like Fukuyama’s, became a global sensation.
Xi wenhua jiqi zhexue, 东西文化及其哲学). The enthusiastic reception and popularity of the book in China at the time was comparable to that of Spengler’s book in the West and Japan, but due perhaps to somewhat different upheavals. In addition to the First World War, the uniquely Chinese cataclysms of the rise of popular nationalism, the New Culture- May Fourth movements, and the newly heightened consciousness of imperialism.
Liang’s book is in many respects a Buddhist view of History, but unlike the Hindu traditions of metahistorical thinking that gave Buddhism birth,9 it is not cyclical, but rather a progressive, cumulative, unilinear view of human development. Liang’s theory is not based on a biological metaphor, as are Toynbee’s and Spengler’s works. I would go as far as to say that Liang’s metahistorical design may offer some predictive value, as I will discuss below, its ingenious and insightful character compares well with other 20th century metahistorical speculations.
Liang's historical process was a version of the evolutionary, unilinear, progressive pattern that dominated in the 19th century metahistorical theories in the West. After 1900 Darwinian and Spencerian ideas of progressive evolution itself were immediately and widely accepted by the Chinese intelligentsia and seemed to have unconsciously regarded as the new "scientific" Way (Dao) of the cosmos. By the 1920s, the progressive unilinear vision of history was almost universally accepted by Chinese intellectuals.
In Liang's book, all life was an expression and objectification of the World Will,
9Buddhist, Hindu and Jainist theories of history are cyclic, not progressive and cumulative. There are a few modern minor exceptions, such as the Indian metaphysician Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) who radically changed traditional Hindu theology by introducing the concept of progressive unilinear evolution. He implies that the evolutionary process did not stop with the emergence of Homo Sapiens, but rather would soon produce "supermen," or "Gnostic beings" which will transform completely all human social and cultural life. See his massive The Life Divine (New York, 1949). Another exception would be the Hindu philosopher Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, (1888-1969) who sees the historical world process as evolutionary, but his "end of history" (unlike that of Aurobindo) is the dissolution of time into eternity, similar to the Christian and traditional Hindu conceptions. See Paul Arthur Schilpp, ed. The Philosophy of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (New York, 1952).
in the sense used by Schopenhauer. It was this blind force that ultimately drove humankind forward through stages of evolution. On one level it was ironic that this progressive view of history was metaphysically similar to Schopenhauer's pessimistic reaction to Enlightenment progressivism; indeed, Schopenhauer's work was a complete denial of the possibility of human progress and the perfectibility of man. Schopenhauer saw humans as doomed to an eternal round of torment and misery. Because Liang's own fundamental view of the cosmos was ultimately Buddhist (which considered humankind already in such a predicament) progress and perfectibility are reconcilable.
Although Liang’s book promoted a revival of Confucianism, in the final analysis he argued that the ultimate destiny of humanity was to achieve "enlightenment" in the Buddhist sense. "I know that, no matter what, humankind cannot achieve salvation unless it destroys the two fundamental holdings [or illusions, erzhi, holding to the reality of self and to the reality of the world],'' he stated. Thus, human evolution was the story of humanity's gradual enlightenment to the unreality of the self and the cosmos, proceeding through evolutionary stages by dialectical necessity, similar to Hegel's or Marx’s. He insisted that the changes in world culture he anticipated would be forced upon humankind by “objective things” or “facts” (shishi).
The life process, then, becomes an unending sequence of problems presented to individual expressions of the Will. Culture--"'a way of life” --is the aggregate response of humans to the obstacles presented by the environment. Cultural differences are due to differences in the ''direction'' of the Will--or the way the Will attempts to deal with the environmental obstacles.
Liang posited three cultural ideal types 10 --expressions of three distinct directions
10Liang’s formulating of these three paradigms is not unlike Max Weber’s ideal-types, which Weber used as tools for historical analysis.
of the Will--which, in turn, are responses to different ways in which the problems of the environment are perceived (or different kinds of contradictions between the Will and the environment). These three responses of humanity to its environment should have succeeded one another in a fixed order. The first type, represented by Western culture, might be the “normal” direction of the Will - forward; it is a response to the basic problems of human survival as an animal: the need for food, shelter, and procreation. The Will goes in a forward direction to conquer the environment and satisfy these primal desires. All the modern characteristics and products of Western culture, such as science, democracy, and power over nature, have developed naturally from this direction of the Will.
The second direction of the Will can take is "sideways," to compromise and harmonize with the environment and so achieve a balance between the demands of the Will itself and the environment. This cultural type deals with the problems of having an emotionally satisfying life and thus achieves greater inner contentment and joie de vivre. It is represented by China. The third type is represented by Indian Buddhism; the Will turns backwards upon itself seeking its own negation.
One would deduce that the archetypal Westerner resolves the contradiction between the Will's demand for shelter and the environmental obstacle of a dilapidated house by completely demolishing the house and building a new one. The archetypal Chinese will repair the old house, and the Indian will attempt to extinguish the desire for housing. Each of the directions should succeed the other at the appropriate stage of evolution.
After people have satisfied their material needs, they become conscious of the problem of achieving emotionally rich, satisfying lives- -- of truly enjoying their material acquisitions and of taking joy in life itself. After achieving this state of both interior contentment and exterior comfort, they are still confronted with a consciousness of the truly eternal problems: the world's impermanence and their own inevitable death.In the third stage, humankind frees itself from the illusions of the existence of both the inner self and the outer world, and finally achieves the ultimate joy of Nirvana.
In its first stage of evolution, humanity aggressively fulfills its material needs through intellectual calculation and effective collective organizations based on the principle of individual rights. In modern times, Western culture wedded its two fundamental tendencies of self-interest and rational calculation with its Promethean will to possess and conquer the environment, and so developed modern industry. Humanity's first evolutionary stage, then, inevitably produced Science and Democracy, the two words symbolizing Western culture for the Chinese intelligentsia of the May Fourth era. Democracy—a system Liang praised for allowing both maximum personal freedom and maximum collective action - was based on the individual's rights. Positively, it guaranteed opportunity to develop oneself; negatively, it guaranteed freedom from interference from society or other individuals within a defined sphere of action. The other side of the same coin was the development of the individual's social nature. Democracy provides for effective organization and at the same time protects individuals from having their individuality smothered by the organization. At the same time, individual freedom and consciousness of self are valuable not just to the individual, but also to the collective, for they allow for the release of individual energies that in turn allows for a more powerful corporate body. 11 Without this unleashed “selfishness,” the West's economic development would have been impossible. Without the active participation of the individual in society, "pubic spirit" and democracy
11Release of individual energies to create a more powerful group (i.e. nation) is a common theme among Chinese intellectuals from the 1890s through to the 1920s. It is an important component of the thought of nationalists Tan Sitong (谭嗣同) and Liang Qichao (梁启超),as well as that of May Fourth era thinkers such as Chen Duxiu (陈独秀).
would have been impossible.
Because humanity was in the first stage in human evolution, Liang acknowledged that Western culture was becoming the world culture, What dialectic would impel the world culture to evolve to the next "Chinese" stage? The attitudes of life which had been responsible for the West's conquest of nature and its democratic organization contained within themselves the seeds of their own destruction. As a consequence of the affirmation of the self and the inclination towards intellectual calculation, Westerners viewed the natural world only in terms of satisfying desires, as an object for utilization and conquest. This attitude informed their whole outlook on the world and their attitude toward fellow human beings. The price for scientific knowledge, economic growth, more comfortable conditions of life, was existential suffering and vitiated spirituality. Habitual calculation for individual profit has ''cut [them] off and alienated them from the cosmos, placing them in conflict and contradiction with it, so that [they are] without emotion and weary unto death.'' Westerners can obtain no spiritual solace from their fellows either because "the divisions between man and man are so clearly drawn" and each individual's calculations are so important, that each is split off from, set in opposition to, and put in competition with others. It is as though each feels that only he himself [really] exists. All others [are] aliens or enemies. Even the family itself is not immune to this mean-spirited haggling."
Within Liang's attitude is an normative irrationalist element similar to that of many 19th and 20th century critics of their respective contemporary "modern" societies. The following paragraph from Liang's book, for example, might well have been written by dozens of such European critics:“Intellect is a tool for life, for convenience in arranging and calculating and for
creating the [imaginary] hypothesis of dividing life. But to take such a division as real is not merely a mistake' but a gravely dangerous one. Life is a whole. If you divide it into segments and make one contingent on another, then it loses its delight and relish. When life's integrity is maintained, all parts have their own inherent meaning or interest. If this attitude [of calculation] is taken, the individual moments of life all become means. Living in a house becomes an action merely for the sake of eating and sleeping [in it], and eating and sleeping, in turn, become merely a means to the end of reproducing and consuming, and gradually a person's whole life has meaning only in something external to itself. The enjoyment of living would no longer be in the living itself, but for some other purpose extraneous to it. In reality, life has no ulterior ends, but is for its own sake. Each moment of life is an end in itself, and not for the service of another moment' and does not derive its significance from some later phase of life. Intelligent people are especially prone to make this mistake' and [consequently] find the flavor of their lives
drying up. Then they start searching for life’s meaning, its significance, its value, and so on, so much so that their emotions and will are shaken, convulsed, and broken.”
The effects of modern life, because of the dehumanizing potential of the division of labor on which it is based, Liang hinted, were responsible for the characteristic social problems of modern societies: crime, substance addictions, suicide, anomie, and decline of the family. Mass culture is the same. Leisure amusement are just other kinds of suffering, for the workers could find pleasure only in stimulating the most vulgar corporal desires. "In all cases, if it is not lewd and excessive, then it will not be pleasurable." This aspect of Western popular culture (which through electric media has become in effect world popular culture) has intensified since the 1920s. In all respects modern Western society compelled men to act against human nature. In its basic elements, Liang's critique of modern Western culture, is not that different from those of the many critics of modernity, Western and Non-Western, in the past two centuries -- from the Europeans, the Russian Slavophiles, the French Vitalists, the Indian critics such as Gandhi, Iqbal and Tagore, or the Japanese such as Watsuji Tetsuro (和辻哲郎) or Nishida Kitaro (西田几多郎 ).12
How would Confucian culture solve the problems inherent in modern life? The very existence of Chinese culture had to be explained. Liang looked back to the early geniuses or sages of the Chinese and Indian cultures, who were prophetic in their insights into life and the cosmos. Western culture had grown of the insights of the Western sages -- the ancient Greek philosophers and the Judeo-Christian sages; they saw only the immediate problems that confronted humankind, and so set the direction that would, millennia later, result in the modern Western world.
The prescient Indian and Chinese ancient sages, who had set their respective cultures on their courses, had somehow managed to anticipate the problems of the second and third stages before the problems inherent in the first stage had actually manifested themselves. Therefore, Chinese and Indian cultural patterns were set to solve the problems of the second and third stages long before the first stage of evolution was completed. Because China had never completed the first stage of evolution it had never been able to realize the Confucian ideals upon which its culture was based. It was in a limbo between the two stages. Consequently, Liang urged that Science and Democracy be wholeheartedly adopted by China, but at the same time China must not abandon its own culture, as it would become the world culture of the second stage of evolution.
Confucianism was a way of life based not on the calculating intellectual faculty
12I have extensively explored this phenomenon in Guy Alitto (艾恺) 世界范围内的反现代化思潮 ; 论文化守成主义( Anti-modernization thought trends in a world-wide perspective: On cultural conservatism Guiyang,Guizhou Provincial Press, 1999
but upon intuition which came closer to the truth of the eternal flux of the cosmos. The Chinese attitude of harmony and compromise had kept Chinese from mastering nature but enabled them to achieve true inner satisfaction and happiness. Rather than being in opposition to nature, this attitude harmonized with and rejoiced in it. Instead of stimulating desires (as Westerners do) or repressing them (as Indians do), Chinese take the middle way and so achieve contentment.
The fundamentals of Chinese culture were the basic Confucian institutions of filial piety, ancestor reverence, and the core ethical relationships of Confucian culture– lun 伦). Confucius, according to Liang, had only two devices by which to institutionalize his way of life—ritual and music (li 礼 and yue 乐). Confucius used intellect to design these institutions to achieve the blending of intellect and emotion, or to modify and adjust the raw instincts of humankind. Confucian rites and music create an emotional and spiritual stability for human life. Confucianism, Liang said, performs the functions of a great religion without the flaws of religion (such as superstition and other worldliness). To achieve its goals Confucianism used aesthetics. The Confucian system, which ''is like a religion and yet is not a religion not art and yet is art'' would be able to create social order and discipline without relying on laws and punishments because, by its nature, it ''trained the instincts. ''
Chinese cosmology was based on the Classic of Changes (Yijing 易经), which describes the world as in incessant flux. Thus, Confucius' Intuitionism and its corollary, indeterminacy, had important implications for the concrete expression of this "religion that is not a religion." If Confucianism was based on an intuitive grasp of the constant flux of reality, then it could have no fixed objective rules of conduct (which in themselves were attempts to classify experience into inflexible categories of intellect).Thus, conventional Confucian morality as practiced for millennia has been antagonistic to the true spirit of Confucius and all the formal moral codes and rules of behavior throughout the two thousand years of Confucian Chinese history have actually been anti-Confucian.
Thus, conventional Confucian morality (lijiao mingjiao 礼教名教) has been really antagonistic to the true spirit of Confucius; and all the formal moral codes and rules of behavior throughout the two thousand years of Confucian Chinese history have actually been anti-Confucian. Therefore, the Confucian culture that would spontaneously arise in the world in response to the innate contradictions in the first stage was only approximated by historical China; rather it was the true Confucian philosophy of life and Confucian ethics.
What Liang was suggesting, it would seem, was that the general emphasis in Chinese culture on human relationships, on the inner life, on subordination of self to community, on an ethical system without a religious basis (in the Western sense), and on joy in activity itself (rather than goal oriented activity) would take shape spontaneously in response to the inevitable human problems post-industrial societies created. Liang envisioned that Confucianism, a system of ethics that had emotional and intuitive basis, would become a substitute for religion, holding society together and providing for a more "natural" rich emotional life for all.
This vision led him to predict that after the first stage of evolution, a world culture similar to the Chinese ideals would develop. So Chinese culture would realize itself only after humanity had built the economic and technological foundations. The birth of Chinese culture had been premature. Historical Confucianism and Chinese culture, based only on ''dregs'' and ''inflexible doctrines," had succeeded only in bringing forth a dim shadow of itself.
Liang's own advice for China at the time was to "completely" and "unconditionally" accept science and democracy (including the concepts of human rights and civil rights) while "critically reappraising and bringing forth anew China's original attitude."
Oswald Spengler
Liang's work has certain resemblance's to Oswald Spengler's famous book, The Decline of the West, which was published around the same time as Liang's Eastern and Western Cultures. (Since his work was not available to Liang and Liang's not available to Spengler, there is no possibility of influence.) The greatest resemblance is that, like Liang, Spengler’s analysis uses a comparative morphology of cultures as a basis for predicting the future, and that, like Liang, Spengler represents cultures as a spiritual phenomena. In Spengler's definition, culture the spiritual orientation of a group of people who have achieved some unitary conception of their world which informs all their activities—their art, religion, and philosophy, their politics and economics. Unlike Liang, however, the "prime symbol" for a culture is not their thought or philosophies, but rather in a distinctive concept of the space in which those of the culture are to live and act.
The greatest difference is that Spengler's theory is cyclical. Cultures are born, age and die through the succession of the four seasons: an agricultural and heroic spring; an aristocratic summer in which towns emerge; an autumn in which cities grow, absolute monarchies subdue aristocracies, and philosophy and science flourish; then finally comes a winter of plutocracy and political tyranny, made possible by advanced technology and public administration. The cycle should take around a millennium but after having reached the Winter stage, the culture develops no more. For example, in Spengler’s terms, had been “dead” for a millennium but its corpse remained in existence.
Arnold Toynbee
Arnold Toynbee's theory of historical development13 is in some respects an
13See, for example, History, Big History, & Metahistory, pp. 16, 84, 98, 235. As Murray Gell-Mann states, “One
amplification and elaboration upon Spengler’s The Decline of the West. Toynbee distinguished twenty-one known civilizations, which he allotted to three generations; primary, secondary, and tertiary. Of the eight surviving in the present century, five are tertiary (Western, main Orthodox Christian, Russian Orthodox Christian, Iranic, Arabic), and three are secondary (Hindu, main Far Eastern, Japanese Far Eastern). Each of the five tertiary civilizations is affiliated to one of two extinct secondary civilizations, the Hellenic and the Syriac, both of which are affiliated to the same primary civilization, the Minoan. Each of the three surviving secondary civilizations is affiliated to one of the two extinct primary ones: the Sinic and the Indic. In addition, there are four extinct primary civilizations: two of them perished without issue; and the other two each had two secondary offspring, all of which perished without issue. Finally, Toynbee counted ten other civilizations that were not only barren but necessarily so, being either abortive,or arrested, or fossils.
His classifications of “Sinic” and “Indic” of primary civilizations are similar to Liang's. Moreover, a civilization, in Toynbee's scheme, comes into being when a society responds successfully to a challenge thrown down by its physical or human environment, similar to Liang's challenge-response model. Toynbee's model, however, is, like Spengler's, cyclical: a civilization grows as long as it continues successfully to respond to the new challenges to which every successful response must lead. Each civilization follows a predictable path of growth and decay analogous to that exhibited in the evolution of particular living organisms. So, fundamental differences with Liang’s model are clear: Liang’s is linear and cumulative, while Toynbee’s is
should certainly mention Arnold Toynbee's ambitious attempt to describe and compare the rise and fall of more than 20 civilizations... And in such a far-ranging work he undoubtably made a number of mistakes that horrified experts on the various cultures he considered but as a first attempt was it really so bad that one should not build on it?
cyclic; Liang’s model uses “ideal-types” that limit world cultures to three, whereby Toynbee’s massively detailed work distinguishes dozens of unique cultures.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Teilhard de Chardin, 14 French Jesuit philosopher and paleontologist, spent most of his professional life in Beijing, where he wrote his major philosophical work Le Phenomene humain. His Christian metahistorical theory resembles Liang's and to a surprising degree more resembles Buddhist historical speculation more than it resembles Spengler's or Toynbee's.
Strictly speaking, Teilhard's theory is evolutionary more than historical, in that it describes the evolution of the entire universe, not just that of humanity. In fact, the appearance of humankind marked one of three eras in the history of the universe. In his vision, the entire universe, that is the cosmic material stuff itself -- was undergoing irreversible changes toward greater and greater complexity of organization. It was progressing through three separate stages: Cosmogenesis (in which the matter of the universe evolved more and more complex forms, such as life, and so to the stage of a biosphere); anthropogenesis (in which the most advanced and most complex form, humans, appeared, creating the noosphere, a collective human consciousness superimposed on the biosphere) and the final Christogenesis, or Point Omega, in which Man would be eventually be gathered up into the Body of Christ; in the final and direct union with God humans would reach their final, the Omega point of perfection.
Humans are undeniably made up of matter, but from within themselves each is a conscious being. Teilhard de Chardin identifies consciousness as spiritual energy, which is within all parts of the cosmos. The human brain has a heightened,
14 He was known in China through his Chinese name De Rijin 德日进.
concentrated form of spiritual energy, and this is the most advanced stage that evolution has reached thus far, but this is not the end of human evolution. From a paleontological point of view, humankind was still in its infancy, and so would have millions of years in which to further develop, as the concentration engendered by this "thinking layer" - the noosphere -- will make human consciousness evolve forward into a single world-culture. The various cultures around the globe are converging into one; the noosphere too is converging into a common human consciousness, which Teilhard de Chardin saw in the worldwide complex of transportation and communication. Of course, transportation and communication especially had indeed been moving rapidly toward a collective human consciousness. The final end will be a single world culture, a single consciousness and a melding of each individual consciousness into a Hyperpersonal Consciousness, the terminal phase of evolution, or God.
This is, remarkably enough, quite similar to the various Buddhist and Hindu metahistorical theories, which are undeniably cyclical but in which the individual souls are climaxed in the Grand Unity, the escaping from individual egoconsciousness by a melding into the One, the Ultimate Reality. In another sense, it is similar to Hegel's joining of the Christian myth with his developmental dialectic. The individual human being's final goal is his realization of his identity with the Absolute.
Liang’s telos, the ultimate Buddhist enlightenment of humanity, and Teidhard de Chardin’s Omega Point of humanity’s final union with God, would appear to be parallelteloi, the former Nirvana and the latter the rapture of Heaven. The crucial difference between the two prognoses lie in their “timetables.” Teidhard de Chardin’s Metahistory begins literally with the beginning of the world (the Big Bang?) and ends with a point that might well be thousands of years in the future. Liang’s prediction of a world cultural change is “relatively” imminent, in that he perceived certain trends in the latest Western thought (exemplified by thinker such as …) as indicating that advancement to the second “Confucian” stage of evolution is already on the way. This variance is perhaps due to the Paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin’s historical canvas of millions of years, and would-be revivalist of Chinese culture Liang’s of three millennia. Liang’s major purpose in his book, moreover, was to persuade Chinese to not completely abandon their traditional culture in favor of the West’s, a crucial matter for the Chinese intelligentsia at the time. Teilhard de Chardin, on the other hand, presented no advocacies or arguments and made no predictions of imminent transformations; the matter he addressed was not a burning contemporary issue, as was Liang’s.
Francis Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama’s principal message that startled the world in 1989 15 was that History as a Whole had arrived at its telos in the form of liberal democracy; evolutionary forces existed that would ensure that other societies will eventually converge to this single point. The article seemed to suggest that American liberal democracy was the only viable alternative left after the demise of world Communism. Assaulted by critics worldwide, Fukuyama then amplified and modulated this original bold claim with a 1992 book 16 in which he met these criticism (and possible future criticisms) with thorough, detailed responses while still claiming, albeit somewhat equivocally, that there was “a remarkable consensus concerning the legitimacy of liberal democracy as a system of government” in that there were no viable alternatives to it. Following Hegel (as interpreted in Alexandre Kojeve’s 17 elucidation of Hegel’s Philosophy of the Spirit ), Fukuyama implicitly appealed for a reassessment of
15"The End of History?" (The National Interest, Summer 1989) set off a global discussion.
16The End of History and the Last Man, (New York Free Press, 1992)
17Alexandre Kojevchnikoff (1902-1968), better known as Kojeve) gave a series of lectures in Paris’s Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, later published in English as Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit.
Metahistory, which at the time was out of academic fashion.
He sees History as driven forward by two mechanisms, technologically based economic development (which assures History’s cumulative linear nature), and the struggle for recognition (of Man as Man). Human desire is both for meeting primal needs – food, shelter, sex, comfort – and for gaining recognition from others. Liberal democracy (and Capitalism) provides both but does not portend a paradise because society then becomes an anomic collection of self-satisfied seekers of creature comforts, security and consumer goods.
Fukuyama's vision is similar in some respects to both Teilhard de Chardin’s and Liang Shuming's. That is, a universal and homogenous human consciousness is in effect; it is liberal democracy joined by highly developed technology. In other words, Teilhard's Noosphere is developing at high speed, and spiritual energies and evolutionary lines are converging visibly. In Liang's vision of the first level of evolution, science and democracy encapsulate the Western first stage of human evolution. Fukuyama also hints that it is possible that, having achieved this stage, world culture might well go off in a different direction; that is similar to Liang’s second Confucian stage of evolution.
Samuel P. Huntington
Immediately after publication of Fukuyama’s book, Samuel Huntington published a refutation “The Clash of Civilizations.”18 A few years later he amplified his argument in book.19 Like Fukuyama’s article, it triggered a world-wide discussion. Huntington saw a very different approaching twenty-first century. He observed that the
18Samuel P. Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations? "(Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993)
19The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, 1996.
democratic revolutions throughout the world in the 1990s had probably exhausted themselves and would possibly retract. Like Spengler, Toynbee and Liang Shuming, he took culture or civilization as the meaningful unit in history and human affairs, not Fukuyama’s forms of state. He argued that during the last century an evolution has been taking place, from an era of conflict among nation-states to one of conflict among ideologies and to cultural conflict.
Huntington perceives civilizational "fault lines" and future conflicts among Hindu,Muslim, Slavic, Orthodox, Japanese, Confucian, Latin American and "Western" civilizations. The import of the book is essentially for the West to get its own act together, as other civilizations are getting theirs together. The interactions among peoples of different civilizations are increasing, and they intensify civilization-consciousness.20
Conclusion
The ideas presented here are yet too superficial and facile to merit any firm conclusions. I wholeheartedly welcome any criticisms or comments. Prima facie, the paper would suggest that, of the metahistorical works compared, Liang’s is closest to that of Teilhard de Chardin’s. Toynbee’s and Spengler’s visions of history were cyclic, and Fukuyama’s concerned primarily with the evolution of political forms. Huntington’s vision is perhaps the most different from Liang’s model in that it predicts imminent worldwide conflict among cultures, rather than a coming unity.
20The world economy and ever accelerating speed and ease of communication and mass media, however, would seem to have certain unifying effects as well. This is especially clear in popular youth culture (movies, music, TV, social media, etc. through the World Wide Web), where it would appear a true world “village” has developed.
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