Some thoughts about Chinese culture

2008-4-16

Chai

    What is good or bad political institution for contemporary China? It seems something we could only figure out and take real-world action in the process of social interactions, instead of something settled down in advance according to some abstract ideation separated (and often elevated) from social contexts, such as “democracy”, “freedom”, “harmony” and “progress”, wherever these conceptions originate from, respectively. This functionalist view and contextualist perspective employed or implied in my way of thinking is a personal choice. (Frankly I do not want to impose my opinions on others, as there can be no universal and superior truth on the issue of morality, and the only thing that human beings have to do and are constantly doing is to live among differences.) I guess my moral, or philosophical points of view in seeing what the world should be, and what we should do to it are influenced by David Wong’s natural moral and political standpoints to a large extent as well as some of Berlin’s plural relativism.

    For Berlin, different moral goods are incommensurable, because they are imbedded in various cultural contexts which are themselves incomparable, according to some universal or superior standard for making judgment. Therefore do not jump to moral judgment on others when we know little about them, and the constitutes and features of their subjectivity. However, Berlin also admits that in real life human beings have to make decision and take action of their own choice, though what we should do, instead of what we should not is not the main concern in his thoughts.

    From David Wong, we got something more positive and constructive. He attempts to argue for the contextualist and functionalist way of thinking as well as a humanist value he learned from Chinese philosophies, with an emphasis not only on the necessity of existence of moral ambiguities, but also on the value of harmonious relation between individual and society. I will explain each of the two general points on Chinese culture and philosophy more concretely in the following paragraphs:

    Firstly, Chinese favor ambiguous representations. This can be seen from Chinese language, art and aesthetics and classical thoughts, such as Chinese Xiangxing character that usually carries multiple meanings, and there are multiple combinations of them being used in actual writing that are less constrained by the grammatical rules compared with that of English; Chinese Xieyi drawing that does not aim to characterize something accurately but instead, symbolically, generally and vaguely; Chinese literature, in particular poems that often describe human emotion metaphorically without mentioning words as referring to emotions at all; and for both Confucianism and Taoism, there are always numerous interpretations in Chinese intellectual history, and this is for the most part because of the literal and symbolic ambiguities in the phrasing and words employed in the original classics, something not unusual in Chinese culture. Moreover, For Chinese, ambiguities are not considered negative, but a communication strategy that provide a site of human creation and “inter-subjectivity”. In a society that values the transmission of the past as much as China, ambiguity in some sense function as a mechanism for change and initiation without bringing radical disrupter between time and place.

    Secondly, Chinese value social harmony. Many times social harmony refers to interpersonal harmony, whose value not only lies in its facilitating cooperative cooperation, but also in itself fulfilling the emotional needs of human being, of feeling secure and connected to, being liked and appreciated by, others or the group. At other times, social harmony refers to cooperation between individual and various social institutions, like family, school, nation, etc. Unlike Western individualist assumption that there exists an essentialist opposition between individual and social institution, and that the latter has a tendency to compete with or suppress the former, and therefore realization of individual potentiality and happiness could happen only if individuals are guaranteed a certain mechanism to claim for rights of their own. However, this assumed underlying tension between individual and the society is a little bit alien for Chinese, if exists, and on the contrary, Chinese think the society (family, school, nation, etc) is the condition of individual happiness, and human potential could be developed and achieved only in a harmonious social environment, which mostly consists of various human groups and social institutions. For many Chinese, traditional or modern, good social relation, no matter it is embodied in interpersonal harmony or in individual-institution harmony are in the mean time great achievement and realization for the individuals. Potter (1988) argues that Chinese think there is an “objective” social order, superior to individual idiosyncrasies. Because personal achievement idiosyncratically different from others, indifferent or even conflicting with social institutions are not recognized by most Chinese as “an achievement”, but a way to unhappiness and even abnormality. Therefore, it is almost a common sense for Chinese that individuals should adjust themselves to the social standard for achieving and realizing, which is basically the social standard for happiness in life. Considering this, it is not hard to explain why when the Western discourses claims to unravel the political “manipulation” underlying the harmony discourses in Chinese society, it is Chinese people (rather than the government, the higher classes, the “manipulators”), most of whom are the ones being “manipulated” that insist on the value of social harmony in their lives. The conception of harmony embodies a mental framework for Chinese to interpret and understand the world, to experience and feel themselves and their lives.