A Survey of the History of Chinese Ancient Metaphysics
"Hegel said Chinese ancient philosophy was merely the wise counsels of sages. He said so because he didn't understand Chinese history—particularly its history of philosophy—taking the partial for the whole."
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Introduction
Hegel said Chinese ancient philosophy was merely the wise counsels of sages. He said so because he did not understand Chinese history, particularly the history of Chinese philosophy—taking the partial for the whole. There is no doubt that the development of Chinese ancient philosophy was also an ascent through continuous sublation. Feng Youlan divides Chinese ancient philosophy into the age of the Masters and the age of classical learning, but I would further subdivide it: following Hegel’s three ascending stages of the World Spirit, I divide the history of Chinese ancient metaphysics into the age of the Masters, the age of classical learning, and the age of Neo-Confucianism.
The Age of the Masters
The age of the Masters that Feng Youlan describes is the Axial Age from the Spring and Autumn through the Warring States to the Han dynasty—the great explosion of pre-Qin philosophy. Admittedly, as Hegel rightly observed, most of it was political and practical philosophy, with little metaphysics proper.
Confucius, the primary target of Hegel’s criticism, spoke mainly about ethics and morality. Yet the Analects does contain a small number of reflections on being. Confucius’s conception of Heaven’s decree differed from the dominant Zhou-era worldview: abandoning the worship of ghosts and spirits, he posited the existence of an abstract, transcendent Heaven.
Laozi was the most philosophically rich of all the Hundred Schools. The Tao Te Ching not only articulates an ontology in which Being arises from Non-being and the Tao generates all things while abiding within them, but also emphasizes the importance of reflection, touches on the tension between the signified and the signifier in language, and inspired later metaphysical transformations of Confucianism.
Xunzi enriched the logical rigor of Confucian thought. Xunzi and Mencius debated primarily the nature of human existence, exploring the goodness of human nature versus its evil. Mencius merely projected human moral norms onto the natural world—dogmatically. Although neither analyzed the structure of the spirit, Xunzi proposed that human nature is driven by desire; that life has meaning only in this world; and that the essential nature of the world lies in the “body of benevolence”—an abstract motion necessarily tending toward the good. This bears a striking resemblance to Schopenhauer.
Liezi discussed the infinity of existence: through a kind of primitive and clumsy induction, he argued for the existence of time and space and the divisibility of matter—what Kant would call the First and Second Antinomies. Through this contradiction, Liezi emphasized the poverty of rational speculation.
Zhuangzi’s main contribution was to establish the isomorphism of life and death—placing them on equal footing—thereby arguing for the ontology of spirit: “mind” as the subject of all things.
We can see that in this age, metaphysics was fragmentary—indicating that people’s spirit was still in a state of being-in-itself.
The Age of Classical Learning
Just as in the West, after the splendid Axial Age, philosophical speculation entered a trough. If Scholasticism was a recovery of ancient Greek philosophy—discussing metaphysics under the guise of divinity—then Han and Tang classical learning was the theologization of Confucianism.
The central idea of Han Confucian metaphysics was the doctrine of the correspondence between Heaven and humanity. From antiquity, philosophers generally believed that the laws of nature correspond to the laws of social operation, from which moral judgments can be derived. Dong Zhongshu adopted the Yin-Yang school’s doctrine as the metaphysical basis for this correspondence, emphasizing moral education—the elevation of the spirit—to bring it in alignment with Heaven and Earth. This is in fact equivalent to the Christian idea of obtaining salvation through Jesus Christ: proving one’s existence through something external. In Dong’s case, that external thing was social order—ritual propriety.
Xuanxue was fashionable in the Wei-Jin period. The dialectical arts of the Logicians Hui Shi and Gongsun Long were revived; people were keen on discussing the relation of names and reality. People had already become aware of the self and the spirit—as shown in the liberation of individual nature by the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove. Guo Xiang’s commentary on Zhuangzi discussed the universal relationships among all things and the self-sufficient being of each thing.
Buddhist learning also began to spread in China at this stage. Buddhism held that the five aggregates are all empty, and that the essence of the world is emptiness. Through its analysis of the seven consciousnesses, Buddhism essentially established a phenomenology of spirit. And more remarkably, the Buddhist pursuit of emptiness is not nothingness but an original nature—inspiring the Song Confucians in their spontaneous ontological reflection.
Han Yu attempted to unify the Three Teachings and establish the doctrine of the lineage of the Way. In On the Origin of the Way, he emphasized the inner qualities of the human being. But this attempt failed.
In this age, people came to know the self through phenomena—internalizing the external into spiritual existence. The Absolute Spirit entered a stage of positive self-assertion.
The Age of Neo-Confucianism
The age of Neo-Confucianism spans the period from Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism to Wang Yangming’s philosophy of mind, marked by the slogan “the Six Classics are my footnotes.”
Among the Song Confucians, the four great masters are representative. Shao Yong, Zhou Dunyi, and Zhang Zai expounded cosmogonies that described the origin of the world, and in doing so completed the distinction between the human self and nature. Zhou Dunyi interpreted the Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate, arguing that the world arises from the movement of the Taiji; Shao Yong further held that arising and perishing simultaneously coexist within any single entity.
In Hegel, the ascent comes through negation and negation-of-negation. But from Laozi to Shao Yong, negation and affirmation merely revolve in cycles. In Feng Youlan’s view, this is a characteristic of agrarian-society philosophy.
The theories proposed by the Cheng brothers are called respectively ren (benevolence) and li (principle). Cheng Hao’s ren is a kind of life-tendency in all things, similar to the will to life. Cheng Yi’s li derives from the Daoist concept of the Tao—the primordial “One” of all things, being itself.
The two Chengs and Zhu Xi distinguished between the metaphysical and the physical, the eternal and the temporal, the transcendent principle and the material vital force. They placed emotion in the phenomenological realm, treating it as an objective phenomenon, analyzing its arising and passing away, and holding it should not be identified with the self. Zhu Xi expounded the investigation of things and extension of knowledge, distinguishing between the phenomenal world and the intellectual world.
In Zhu Xi’s cosmogony, principle and vital force coexist from the start, so there is no First Cause problem. Principle is transcendent—outside of time—and since existence is ultimately principle, the infinity of existence is proven.
If in Zhu Xi’s view there are two worlds—one abstract and one concrete—then in Lu Jiuyuan’s view there is only one world: the world of mind. Lu held that mind is principle, the very essence of the world. By “mind” he meant the human spirit. Wang Yangming went further: all human moral judgments must be mediated through the spirit; the movement of “investigation” that Zhu Xi spoke of ultimately has as its substance the mind of the person doing the investigating.
In Wang Yangming’s world, the universe is a spiritual whole. There is only one world: the concrete, actual world of our experience; all feeling is within our minds. This reveals the Absolute Spirit’s differentiation from and grasp of the external—the Absolute Spirit’s negation of the self.