How "Chinese" Was
Kant?
Prof. Stephen Palmquist,
D.Phil. (Oxon)
Department of Religion and Philosophy
Hong Kong Baptist University
When Nietzsche called Kant the "Chinaman of Königsberg",[1] were his mental capacities already beginning
to slip, or was he just looking for laughs? Kant, after all, was German.
He was born in the then bustling Prussian port city of Königsberg
(now called Kaliningrad), lying on the Baltic Sea, about 75 miles northeast of
Gdansk, across the Gulf of Danzig. Königsberg is over 5000 miles from Beijing, and even
further from the now bustling Chinese port city of Hong Kong.[2] Kant claimed his paternal grand-father
had immigrated from Scotland,[3] but there is no parallel evidence to
suggest that any of his ancestors were Chinese. Moreover, he could not have had
more than a minimal, second-hand knowledge of China, since he never travelled more than about thirty miles from his birthplace.[4] Aside from reading, his only contact with
anything Chinese would have been through the relatively large minority of
Oriental merchants who lived in Königsberg.[5] This did not stop him from writing
about Chinese philosophy and culture on several occasions.[6] But it is a far cry from his actually being
Chinese. Withsuchconclusiveevidencesoreadilyathand,itmightseemasiftheanswertoourquestion
can be given here in the first paragraph: Kant, born into what was arguably the
most "Western" of all eras in the history of Western culture, the Age
of Enlightenment, was not at all Chinese, and any suggestion to the
contrary would be foolhardy at best, unless it were intended to be merely a
joke - albeit, in bad taste.
Of course, Nietzsche himself was not thinking of the sort of historical facts
and influences mentioned above. He was rather alluding to a deeper level on
which Kant himself was in some sense "Chinese". Although he
never provides a clear explanation of just how his now famous epithet ought to
be interpreted, a clue might be drawn from his general attitude towards Eastern
cultures. In general Nietzsche tends to view them as mediocre, self-satisfied,
and rigidly moralistic. Thus, when he wishes to convey the notion that modern
European man has ceased striving for greatness, he says: "we suspect that
things will continue to go down, down, to become thinner, more good-natured,
more prudent, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent, more Chinese,
more Christian ..."[7] Most of Nietzsche's books
are speckled with such cryptic references to Chinese/Asian culture. For
example, in The Will to Power, he refers to "Chinese
ossification" in socio-political matters, and later asks: "is our
morality - our modern sensitive European morality, which may be compared with
the morality of the Chinese - the expression of a physiological
regression?"[8]
Such attitudes would seem at first to indicate that Nietzsche's habit of
calling Kant "Chinese" - joke or no joke - was motivated by a desire
to deprecate Kant in the eyes of his readers. But a closer look at Nietzsche's
methodology, with its emphasis on perspectival reversal, reveals that it may be more appropriate
to interpret such
comments in a
positive light.
In Ecce Homo, for example, Nietzsche confides that those at whom he pokes
the most fun are often the closest to his heart. He specifies four principles
upon which his attacks are based: (1) "I only attack causes
that are victorious"; (2) "I stand alone"; (3) "I never
attack persons"; and (4) "attack is in my case a proof of good will,
sometimes even of gratitude."[9] For a person who follows
these guidelines, the habit of calling a German philosopher
"Chinese" could actually be considered as a compliment!
Indeed, it turns out that most of Nietzsche's references to China or the
Chinese are not as negative as the remarks quoted earlier might cause us to
expect. Elsewhere in The Will to Power, for instance, he groups the
Chinese not only with the Jews, for whom he expressed some admiration, but also
with his favorites, the Frenchmen, as all sharing the quality of
"spirit"; for he maintains that"the
Chinese is a more successful type [of human animal], namely more durable, than
the European."[10] Again, in Beyond Good
and Evil, he refers to "Asia's superiority in the instincts",
with its strong influence on ancient Greek culture, and depicts orientals in general as effecting
a deep "reversal" of Western values.[11] Moreover, in the
concluding section of the book (¡±296), he actually applies the adjective
"Chinese" to his own writing, in a rather self-critical
reflection: "Alas, what are you after all, my written and painted
thoughts! ... What things do we copy, writing and painting, we mandarins with
Chinese brushes, we immortalizers of things that can be written - what
are the only things we are able to paint?"
Given the ambiguity of Nietzsche's references to things "Chinese", a
more helpful clue as to the intentions of his epithet might be found by
recalling that he saw himself as a psychologist at least as much as a
philosopher (or more appropriately, an anti-philosopher). If Nietzsche
was serious in suggesting we picture Kant with a Chinese face, he may well have
been thinking as much of his personality as of his philosophical
disposition. If so, it might be helpful to consider what meaning can be given,
from a psychological point of view, to the notion of being "Chinese".
In order to explore this possibility, I will briefly sidestep philosophical
issues in order to make use of insights from a recent book, called Beyond
the Chinese Face, written by Michael Harris Bond, a Western psychologist
who has lived in Hong Kong for many years. However, I should point out here at
the beginning that the term "Chinese", as used in this paper (i.e.,
whenever it appears in quotations marks), does not necessarily describe any
particular Chinese person, but rather serves as an ideal generalization that
sums up the characteristics or tendencies psychologists have found in most
Chinese people, or (later in the paper) those interests and ideas that have
tended to characterize most Chinese philosophers.
Bond uses a simple graph to illustrate the fallacy of treating such ideal
generalizations as if they were universally applicable to all cases in a
cross-cultural study. Similarly, the two curves in Figure 1 can represent any
two cultures, as they relate to each other on a given characteristic.[12]
Figure 1: The Distribution
of Introversion in Two Cultures
The key insight to be gained from the graph is that
some individuals in Culture A will actually possess the characteristic being
compared (in this example, introversion) more strongly than the average
member of Culture B, while some individuals in Culture B will actually possess
this characteristic less strongly than the average member of Culture A.
Bond calls such people "deviates", inasmuch as they deviate so
significantly from the norm of their culture that they surpass even those many
"average" people in the opposing culture who fall on or near the mean
in their possession (or lack) of the characteristic in question. If we could
not see the face of a certain deviate from Culture A, we would probably assume
he or she to be a member of Culture B. This shows how generalizations can be at
one and the same time verifiably true (as descriptions of the majority) and yet
dangerous to assume (as a necessarily valid description of any particular
person). As long as we keep this in mind in our assessment of the extent to
which Kant exemplified a "Chinese" disposition (in both his
personality and his philosophy), we can explore the question at hand more
deeply than in the first paragraph of this paper, yet without running into the
absurdity of changing the historical facts of Kant's life.
Bond neatly summarizes the socialization process for the typical Chinese child
as being governed by five key concerns:
The Chinese child is
brought up to regard home as a refuge against the indifference, the rigours, and the arbitrariness of life outside. This feat
is achieved by indulging the infant, restraining the toddler, disciplining the
schoolchild, encouraging the student to value achievement, and suppressing the
divisive impulses of aggression and sexuality throughout development.[13]
There is no need to
repeat here the many interesting points Bond makes with respect to each of
these tendencies in Chinese parenting. And in any case we do not know enough about
Kant's childhood to make any detailed comparisons. Nevertheless, what we do
know is sufficient to suggest that this pattern of pampering the child at a
young age, then gradually emphasizing the requirements of duty and increasing
the severity of discipline as the child grows up, also describes Kant's
upbringing to a significant extent. His infancy and early childhood seem to
have been characterized, more than anything else, by a warm relationship with
his mother, of whom he always spoke very highly. For instance, he once told his
friend Jachmann that "she planted and tended the
first seeds of good in me. She opened my heart to the impressions of nature;
she awakened and widened my ideas, and her teachings have had an enduring,
healing influence on my life."[14]
Yet life grew increasingly harsh for young Immanuel, the second of nine
children. Not only did four of his siblings die in infancy, but his mother
herself passed away when Kant was only thirteen.[15] A good deal of pressure also came from
the school to which his parents sent him. From age eight, he began attending a
special Pietist school set up by the king, called
"Collegium Fredericianum".
Discipline was so strict there that Kant "later told his friend Hippel, that looking back on that enslavement of youth
filled him with terror and dread."[16]
The contrast between the early establishment of security at home and the harsh
realities of discipline at school must have been enough to match the
experiences of many Chinese children today. In this sense, then, his upbringing
provides at least some initial, tentative grounds for thinking of Kant as being
somewhat "Chinese".
The success of this kind of upbringing in Chinese cultures, even in their
modernized forms, is to a large extent due to the people's deep commitment to
"filial piety" - indisputably one of the hallmarks of any Chinese
culture. Filial piety is the duty to respect and be affectionately devoted to
the members of one's extended family, and especially those in any position of
authority; it serves as the "glue" that holds together the complex
social hierarchy. Filial piety is so strong that it often survives well after
the death of one's grandparents, parents, aunts, and uncles, in the form of
ancestor worship. Even in Hong Kong, one of Asia's most modern and
technologically advanced cities, two public holidays are set aside each year
solely for the purpose of fulfilling the duties of filial piety - though for
most Chinese the obligations of filial piety extend well beyond these two days,
even to every day of the year. At first sight it might seem that we have here
hit upon a typical characteristic of being "Chinese" that does not
apply in the least to Kant, whose reputation has never been that of a family
man. But let us look at the evidence.
Kant's parents raised their children in a simple, pietist
form of life, encouraging an upright and close-knit family. This enabled Kant
to claim later in life: "Never, not even once, have I had to hear my
parents say an unbecoming word, or do an unworthy act.... No misunderstanding
ever disturbed the harmony of the household."[17] When their mother died, the siblings'
relationships began to drift apart, and the gap widened still further after the
death of their father just nine years later. In short, Kant's adult
relationships with his siblings do not seem to have been characterized by much
affection.[18]
Nevertheless, in spite of the gap that inevitably opened up between him and his
siblings, perhaps largely as a result of his academic and scholarly career (but
see notes 19 and 20), Kant always held firmly to a surprisingly
"Chinese" sense of his own duty as the eldest brother to look after
the needs of his younger siblings. For example, at the age of 67, Kant wrote a
letter (dated January 26 1792) to his brother, Johann, then aged 56, saying
that in spite of his infrequent correspondence "I have thought of you
often and fraternally - not only for the time we are both still living but also
for after my death"[19]
- a reference, no doubt, to the fact that he had included his brother in the
will he had recently drafted. He then goes on to convey explicitly his own
sense of duty toward the family:
Our two surviving sisters, both widowed, the older of whom has 5 grown
and (some of them) married children, are provided for by me, either wholly or,
in the case of the younger sister, by my contribution to St. George Hospital,
where provision has been made for her. So the duty of gratitude for
our blessings that is demanded of us, as our parents taught us, will not be
neglected.[20]
Admittedly, we have
no reports from Kant's neighbors that he was ever seen burning incense to his
deceased parents during his daily walks after lunch; in this literal sense it
would be absurd to regard Kant as being even a closet Chinese. Yet it
would be just as inappropriate to deny completely the surprising resonance
between the deep Chinese commitment to filial piety and Kant's own profound
sense of duty to his family - a duty to which he held fast even when the
inclinations of his own happiness might have tempted him to disown them.[21]
The most these initial reflections on Kant's personality can do is to provide
good grounds for taking this argument a step further, into the realm of Kant's
own private beliefs and philosophical dispositions - provided we walk with
care. In traditional Chinese societies the commitment to filial piety is
intimately bound up with a belief in ghosts: the reason the deceased must be
worshipped is precisely that their ghosts are still lingering around,
and must therefore be provided for, pleased, and (if necessary) appeased, just
as much as when their bodies were still alive. Kant's private beliefs are
extremely difficult to talk about, because he himself rarely committed them to
writing. He says in 1798 that, just as he has always recommended to others
"a conscientious sincerity in not professing or obtruding on others, as
articles of faith, more than they are themselves sure of", so also in his
writings he has exercised the utmost care to express only what he can affirm
with certainty.[22]
In the first Critique he distinguishes between knowledge, belief, and
opinion by saying the first requires objective and subjective certainty,
the second only subjective certainty, and the third neither objective nor
subjective certainty.[23]
Kant says plenty in his works about his own claims regarding knowledge and belief,
but very little about opinion - especially his own private opinions on
"speculative" matters. Opinions can attain the stature of beliefs
only if we see them as directly necessitated by the moral law in our heart. For
instance, the question as to whether or not God exists is a question that
surpasses all possible human knowledge; yet one's own personal answer
should be more than a mere opinion, because God's existence is intimately bound
up with our ability to see the moral law itself as ultimately rational. The
question as to whether or not ghosts exist, by contrast, is quite independent
(in Kant's mind, at least) from the rationality of the moral law. Hence, he is
content for the most part to keep his opinions on this issue silent - for the
most part, but not entirely.
In his younger days Kant went through a period of being openly attracted to
ideas about the spirit world, especially those put forward by the mystic,
Emanuel Swedenborg (1689-1772). This period of
several years during the mid-1760s is actually something of an anomaly for the
traditional, "two-part" account of Kant's life, as falling neatly
into a "pre-Critical" dogmatism (before 1770) and a
"Critical" period (from 1781 onwards), with a "silent
decade" sandwiched in between. Biographers tend to treat the mid-1760s as
a temporary conversion to Humean skepticism, in spite
of the fact that Kant's interest in the spirit world during these years bore
little if any resemblance to anything Hume would have countenanced. What is
never adequately explained is how Kant passed from this sudden state of being a
converted skeptic into the silent decade, sparked off by his
"proto-Critical" Inaugural Dissertation of 1770. In this work he had
presented for the first time, supposedly out of thin air - for it certainly did
not come from Hume! - what he was later to call his
"Copernican hypothesis": namely, the basic assumption that, when it
comes to epistemology, objects conform to our mind rather than our mind
conforming to objects.[24]
What the conventional account ignores is that the mid-1760s were for Kant
anything but a skeptical "hiccup"; rather they were marked by an
internal struggle between the Swedenborg who
enticed Kant with his mystical visions and the Hume whom Kant would later
confess "first interrupted my dogmatic slumbers and gave my investigations
in the field of speculative philosophy a quite new direction".[25]
The outcome of this struggle is nowhere more visible than in Kant's 1766 book, Dreams
of a Spirit-Seer, Elucidatedby Dreams of Metaphysics,
which can be regarded as setting the tone for his entire mature philosophical
System. Embarrassing and unbelievable as it may be to Kant-scholars who see
their mentor as the arch-enemy of anything that smacks of mysticism, there are
good reasons to believe, as I have demonstrated elsewhere,[26] that it was Swedenborg
far more than Hume who gave Kant the key inspirations for constructing his
Critical System. In particular, Kant's reading of Swedenborg's
writings was the true source of the amazing "Copernican" insight,
first set forth by Kant in 1770.[27]
Of course Kant transformed Swedenborg's ideas in many
ways, adapting their speculative-mystical emphasis to suit his
Critical-practical preferences. One of the key differences, for example, is
that what Swedenborg attributes to the "spirit
world", Kant translates into the "noumenal
world". And in Kant's hands this world becomes far more than just a
dwelling-place for ghosts: it becomes the kingdom of reason itself, the true
home for all rational beings.
Once again, it is necessary to emphasize that Kant's secret sympathy for Swedenborg, and the subtle influence of Swedenborg's
ideas on Kant's mature thinking, do not imply that Kant held the opinion that
ghosts exist in this world. Even though he probably never experienced the
slightest fear that he was being haunted by the ghosts of his ancestors, it is
generally accepted that Kant held some sort of private belief in a world
of real spirits. That doesn't make him Chinese (see note 21); but it does bring
his general world view much more closely in line with the traditional Chinese
world view than it is normally believed to be. In other words, we can say Kant was
"Chinese", to the extent that he felt a strong sense of filial piety
and believed in a world inhabited by spiritual beings; but unlike most Chinese
people, his belief in "real spirits", or ghosts, however
firmly or weakly he may have held such an opinion privately, did not inform in
any way his own public understanding of his moral duties.
In this sense, the most influential of all Chinese philosophers, Confucius,
actually shares more with Kant than with the average member of most Chinese
cultures. For Confucius had a surprisingly
"Kantian" attitude toward private beliefs in ghosts and spirits.
He never categorically denied their possibility; rather, he consistently
emphasized their moral emptiness. In the Analects, for example, when Chi
Lu asked about serving the spirits of the dead, Confucius responded: "'While you are not able to serve men,
how can you serve their spirits?' Chi Lu added, 'I
venture to ask about death.' He was answered, 'While you do not know life, how
can you know about death?'"[28]
We have now seen several respects in which we can say Kant was
"Chinese", even though he certainly was not Chinese. There are
at least three other respects in which typical characteristics of Chinese
people can be detected in Kant's psychological and/or philosophical
disposition. They relate to his emphasis on duty, to the systematic character
of his mature philosophy, and to the kind of logic he employed. Let us
now briefly consider these in turn.
Chinese Kant-scholarship has long recognized a basic similarity between Kant
and the major school of Chinese philosophy, neo-Confucianism. Confucius, along with
most of his interpreters down through the centuries, largely ignored the
metaphysical and epistemological questions that have generally taken center
stage in the West. Instead, Chinese philosophers tend to emphasize the
importance of acting on principle (or, according to the rites,
called li in Chinese), with the result that
most Chinese people value a person's collective duty as a member
of society far above one's individual rights as a human being.
Western philosophers, in stark contrast, have typically emphasized rights over
duties, with both playing second fiddle to questions of reality and knowledge.
Whereas Chinese philosophy tends to define personhood in terms of the duties
placed on an individual by his or her position in the social hierarchy, Western
philosophy tends to define personhood in more abstract terms of the rights
accorded to any human being simply by virtue of being human. Kant actually
talks a great deal about both duties and rights; but he clearly gives
priority in his System to duty. He put himself in the minority among
Western philosophers by arguing not only that rights are an epiphenomenon of
duty, rather than vice versa,[29]
but also that "practical reason" has priority over "theoretical
reason".[30]
Both of these tendencies appeal to Chinese philosophers, because, quite simply,
they are inherently "Chinese" tendencies. Comparisons of Confucian
ethics and Kantian ethics have, consequently, served as the springboard for
much cross-cultural dialogue, especially from the Chinese side.[31]
For example, one of the most influential Chinese Kant-scholars in this century,
at least among Neo-Confucians, is Mou Tsang San. In
addition to translating and commenting extensively on the first Critique,
Mou has put forward a widely discussed argument to
the effect that Neo-Confucian philosophy fills a gap in Western philosophy left
by Kant's rejection of the possibility of intellectual intuition.[32] However, his attempt to defend
intellectual intuition in terms of moral knowledge is based on a gross
misunderstanding of Kant's exclusively theoretical notion of
intellectual intuition. If the latter were allowed to apply to our moral life
as well as to theoretical knowledge, then Kant's own insistence on the properly
basic factuality of the moral law could be regarded in much the same way.
Moreover, if the filling of gaps is the reason for comparing traditions, it
would be more legitimate to regard Kant's first Critique as filling a
gap in the Chinese traditions, left by their tendency to neglect metaphysical
and epistemological issues.
Kant's attractiveness to Chinese philosophers becomes even less surprising once
we take note of the "Chinese" character of his emphasis on reason's
"architectonic" structure. In the last few pages of his book on
Chinese psychology, Bond lists five basic characteristics of any distinctively
"Chinese" culture. The first and foremost of these is "a belief
in the naturalness, necessity, and inevitability of hierarchy."[33] One could hardly ask for a better
description of Kant's concept of "architectonic", except that the
Chinese see hierarchy as nature's way of structuring social relations,
while Kant sees it as nature's way of structuring rational relations.
Without going into detail here, it will suffice merely to provide a brief
glance at the basic backbone supporting the complex hierarchy of relations that
constitutes Kant's architectonic.[34]
Despite common assumptions to the contrary, Kant's first Critique does
not occupy the highest position in the hierarchy of his overall Critical
System. The Critique of Pure Reason is the longest and most influential
of the three Critiques not because the theoretical reason examined
therein takes precedence over all other uses of reason, but because Western
philosophers had traditionally taken it as such; Kant therefore needed
to expend far more effort to demonstrate and refute the numerous errors into
which philosophers had fallen.
Once it is properly understood, Kant's view of the role of theoretical reason
can be likened to the role of the "younger brother" in the typical
Chinese family: an important member indeed, but not one having the authority to
make the truly significant decisions. The "older brother" in Kant's
System is, as we have seen (cf. note 30 above), the practical reason
expounded in his second Critique. Most Kant-scholars are well aware of
Kant's view that the disputes inevitably arising between practical and
theoretical reason must ultimately be solved by the former - not unlike the
responsibility the older brother has to clear up quarrels between himself and
his younger brother(s). What few interpreters (Chinese or Western) have fully
appreciated is the fact that neither practical nor theoretical reason is for
Kant the ultimate authority governing the Critical System itself. On the
contrary, the third Critique (and, it could be argued, Religion
within the Bounds of Bare Reason) reveal, as it were, the
"father-figure" who ultimately has the last word: judgment,
the application of reason in real-life experiences. This, Kant says, is the
standpoint of "Critique" as such.[35]
Rather than straying into a discussion of the many implications of these hierarchical
relations, we can use the following diagram to summarize the basic analogy
being proposed here:
Figure 2: Reason's "Family
Hierarchy" in Kant's Critical System[36]
A noteworthy fact
about the analogy summarized in Figure 2 is its lack of any reference to the
role of women in the family. This is appropriate inasmuch as women play an
explicitly subordinate role in both traditional Chinese culture and Kant's own
understanding of male-female relations[37]
- yet another respect in which Kant was more "Chinese" than modern. However,
traditional Chinese women do have important functions, even though they enjoy
little or no authority; and in the same way there are substantive
elements in Kant's System that are never accorded anything like an equal status
to the aforementioned "masculine" members of Reason's family. The
mother could be likened to logic, inasmuch as the whole structure of
reason's architectonic springs forth from her womb. And the sisters could be
likened to the lowly faculty of sensibility (for the first Critique) and
to inclination (for the second Critique). Of course, such analogies are
fanciful and of only limited value. Nevertheless, the ease with which Kant's
conception of the structure of reason can be translated into the hierarchical
relations of the Chinese family, together with his frequent emphasis on such
relations being natural and inevitable, clearly sets Kant apart
as one of the West's more "Chinese" thinkers.
Still more evidence for such a conclusion can be found by turning now from the
masculine (hierarchy) to the feminine (logic). Of the many interesting
psychological aspects of Chinese culture discussed by Bond, the one that is
perhaps most helpful in discerning a "Chinese" side to Kant's philosophical
disposition is his treatment of the relative importance of what could be called
"synthetic logic" and "analytic logic". The latter is based
on the laws of identity (A=A) and noncontradiction
(A¡Ú-A), whereas the former is based on the opposite laws of nonidentity (A¡ÚA)
and contradiction (A=-A). Without quite using these technical terms, Bond gives
clear evidence of the psychological preference for synthetic logic in Chinese
culture, as opposed to the emphasis put on analytic logic in Western cultures.
In commenting on the results of Rorschach ink-blot and other psychological
tests on children, he says:
Apparently the stimulus as a whole has more salience for Chinese; the
parts of the whole for Americans.... The Chinese were ... more likely to pair
objects on the basis of similarities in the total appearance of objects ... The
American children, by contrast, preferred the analytic style of grouping ... In
short, the Chinese tend to perceive on the [synthetic] basis of the
overall pattern uniting the objects, Americans on the [analytic] basis
of a characteristic shared by the objects. American children join the objects
after decomposing them into parts; Chinese children join the objects after
considering them as wholes.
Kant's writings abound with examples of synthetic relations, which he employed
much more fully than most other Western philosophers have. Synthetic relations
are detectable by the fact that they are typically expressed in sets of three,
as opposed to the divisions of two or four characteristic of
analytic relations. Each of the categories, for instance, is divided into three
"moments", in both the first and second Critiques. The fact
that there are a total of four such synthetic relations in each table of
categories shows that Kant was not merely interested in synthetic logic
- i.e., he was not "Chinese" in an extreme sense - but sought for a balance
between the two kinds of logic available to human rationality. Similar
resonances could also be explored in the third Critique, where Kant
appeals to "common sense" as a collective basis for judgments
of beauty, emphasizes "purposiveness without a
purpose", and makes various other paradoxical claims. The latter would not
need to be stretched too far in order to see them as compatible with the
Chinese Daoist emphasis on the "Way" that
cannot be expressed.[38]
We have now seen ample evidence for identifying Kant as a Westerner with some
distinctively "Chinese" characteristics and tendencies, thus lending
some qualified approval to Nietzsche's reference to Kant as the "Chinaman
of Königsberg". Clearly, we have not found
enough evidence to merit labelling Kant as a
full-blown "deviate". His influence on Western thought and culture
has been far too strong to make that claim plausible. But we have had
sufficient reason to conclude that Kant stood on the borderline between
these two ideals: that is, he appears to be something of a synthesis of
the generalized, and perhaps to some extent fictional, conceptions of the
typical "Chinese" and "Western" personality types.
Returning to Bond's model, mentioned near the beginning of this paper, we can
therefore conclude our investigation by placing Kant just at the point where
Chinese and Western tendencies cross (see Figure 3).
Figure 3: Kant's Position
on the Boundary between Two Cultures
This is an
inevitably tentative hypothesis. But it enables us to give a plausible answer
to the question with which we began. How "Chinese" was Kant? Not very "Chinese", really. But he was
"Chinese" enough to serve as the basis for some potentially
meaningful cross-cultural dialogue, dialogue that can give us a glimpse of one
world, where all philosophers - indeed, all humanity - can strike
the transcendental balance he struck between theory and practise,
between rights and duties, between the empirical and the transcendent, between
East and West.
Stephen R. Palmquist
Hong Kong Baptist University
NOTES
[1]See e.g., Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, tr. Walter
Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966), ¡±210.
[2]Suggesting a possible comparison between Königsberg
and Hong Kong might appear to be outlandish at first. But in
a recent article in Newsweek (May 23, 1994), entitled "Free-Trade
Zone or Fortress?" (p.40), Andrew Nagorski
raised just such a possibility. His conclusion, that modern-day
Kaliningrad does not deserve such a comparison, does not rule out the
possibility that the Königsberg of Kant's day
did.
[3]See e.g., Kant's letter of October 13, 1797, to J.A. Lindbolm,
in Kants gesammelte Schriften (Berlin:
Königlich Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften,
1922), volume XII, p.206 [tr. Arnulf Zweig, Kant: Philosophical Correspondence 1759-99
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p.237]. The standard, Academy
edition of Kant's works will be referred to hereafter as "Ak.", with references to translations following
in square brackets. In the letter cited above Kant says: "I have known for
quite some time that my grandfather, who lived in the Prussian-Lithuanian city
of Tilsit, came originally from Scotland, that he was
one of the many people who emigrated from there, for some reason that I do not
know, toward the end of the last century and the beginning of this one."
For a detailed account of Kant's Scottish ancestry, see William Wallace, Kant
(London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1901), pp.8-11.
[4]In Ak. VII.169
[Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View] Kant mentions the
seasickness he experienced during a short voyage to Pillau,
a small town northwest of Königsberg, where the
Peninsula joins the Baltic Sea. (See also Ak.
IX.195.16 [Lectures on Physical Geography].) This is the furthest Kant
is known to have travelled from his home during his
entire lifetime. His determination to avoid travelling
whenever possible seems to have been based on a maxim not unlike that suggested
by the Chinese proverb: "A thousand days at home, peace. A moment abroad, trouble."
[5]Willibald Klinke, in Kant for Everyman,
tr. Michael Bullock (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), says the population of Königsberg during Kant's life "included many Eastern
races" (p.15). This, no doubt, is because Königsberg
was situated on a main trade route between Western Europe and the East. Kant
himself refers to these merchants on at least one occasion: as an example of
"truthfulness" in Ak.
VIII.422 [Proclamation of the Imminent Conclusion of a Treatise of Permanent
Peace in Philosophy, tr. Gabriele Rabel, Kant
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), p.289], he cites "those Chinese
shopkeepers who write in golden letters over their shops: 'No Cheating
Here'."
[6]A rare reference to Chinese philosophy can be found in Kant's essay,
"The End of All Things" (Ak. 335-6
[tr. Lewis White Beck, Kant On History (New York: Bobbs-Merrill,
1963), p.79]), where he cites it as an example of how speculative philosophy
can lead to an unhealthy preoccupation with mystical experience. He states
wryly that "Chinese philosophers strive in dark rooms with eyes closed to
experience and contemplate their nihility." (Had Kant never heard of
Confucius?) A similar identification of Chinese philosophy with a caricature of
the Buddhist tradition comes in his Lectures on Philosophical Theology,
tr. Allen W. Wood and Gertrude M. Clark (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1978), p.86, where Kant lumps together "the mystical self-annihilation of
China, Tibet, and India". See also Ak.
II.252 [Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime] and
II.437,439 [OntheDifferentRacesofMen].
[7]On the Genealogy of Morals, tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House,
1967), ¡±I.12.
[8]The Will to Power, tr. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale
(New York: Random House, 1967), ¡±¡±127, 395; cf. ¡±¡±143, 745. Very brief,
passing references to Asia(ns)/Orient(als) in general
or to China(dom)/Chinese in particular also appear in
¡±¡±91, 129, 191, 216, 274, 866, 1050, and in Beyond Good and Evil,
¡±¡±32, 50, 52, 56, 188, 208, 245, 267.
[9] "Why I am so Wise", Ecce Homo, tr. Walter Kaufmann
(New York: Random House, 1967), ¡±7. See also ¡±1 for some good examples of
Nietzsche's dependence on perspectival reversal. Eberhard Scheiffele explores
Nietzsche's use of perspectival reversal in some
detail in "Questioning One's 'Own' from the Perspective of the
Foreign", Nietzsche and Asian Thought, tr. and ed. Graham Parkes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991),
pp.31-47. Parkes' book contains three essays on
Nietzsche and China; unfortunately, they all focus on how Nietzsche has been
used and interpreted by Chinese scholars, and say little or nothing about what
Nietzsche himself thought of Chinese culture. (For the most notable exception,
see p.40 of Scheiffele's essay.) Walter Kaufmann is
one of the few commentators on Nietzsche who says anything significant about
his view of the Chinese. He calls attention to Nietzsche's account of the
influence of oriental religion on Greek culture [Nietzsche: Philosopher,
Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974),
pp.152-4], and later adds: "In the Dawn [¡±206], Nietzsche persists
in his gigantic scheme for a future mixed breed and considers the advantages of
an ingredient of Chinese blood" (p.293).
[10]The Will to Power, ¡±¡±864, 90.
[11]Beyond Good and Evil, ¡±¡±238, 46.
[12]Figure 1 is adapted from Michael Harris Bond, Beyond the Chinese Face
(Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1991), p.3. A number
of other recent books have provided similar psychological and/or philosophical
comparisons of Chinese and Western ways of thinking. Bond himself, for
instance, has written a more in depth study, The Psychology of the Chinese
People (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1986). The limitations of space
placed on the current paper unfortunately preclude a thoroughgoing treatment of
all the available works; so I am taking Bond's work as a representative study
and using it as the primary springboard for answering the question at hand.
More philosophical approaches can be found in: Charles A. Moore (ed.), The
Chinese Mind: Essentials of Chinese Philosophy and Culture (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 1967); Thomé H. Fang, The
Chinese View of Life: The Philosophy of Comprehensive Harmony (Taipei:
Linking Publishing Co., 1980); Robert E. Allinson, Understanding
the Chinese Mind: The Philosophical Roots (Hong Kong: Oxford University
Press, 1989); and Chad Hansen, A Daoist Theory of
Chinese Thought: A Philosophical Interpretation (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992); see also the works listed in note 31, below.
[13]Bond, p.6.
[14]Quoted in Klinke,
p.16.
[15]Klinke, pp.15-16, 56-59; see also
Wallace, pp.11-16.
[16]Klinke, pp.18-19. In a small
treatise on education Kant refers to youth as "the most troublesome"
years of life: "for we are then under strict discipline, can seldom choose
our friends, and still more seldom have our freedom." Quoted in Roger Scruton, Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1982), p.2.
[17]Quoted in Wallace, p.11, emphasis added. An emphasis on harmony is one
of the main characteristics of Chinese culture. See e.g., Fang, pp.i-ii and passim.
[18]See Klinke,
pp.56-59.
[19]Ak. XI.320
(Zweig, p.185). Johann Heinrich Kant
(1735-1800) had been raised by Kant's uncle (Klinke,
p.56), and was now a pastor in Altrahden; he had not
seen his older brother since 1758 (Zweig, p.31).
[20]Ak. XI.320 (Zweig, p.185), emphasis added. See also the letter of
December 17, 1796 (tr. in Klinke, p.58). As evidence
of the intellectual gap between Kant and the rest of his family, Zweig notes the fact that his sister's children
"signed Kant's will with X's", indicating that they "must have
been illiterate" (Zweig, p.31).
[21]Kant's "filial piety" was, of course, rooted in the Christian
tradition, so it does not in any way prove that Kant actually experienced any
historical Chinese influence. But proving such influence is not the point of
this essay. The point is to note those areas of resonance that might cause us
to mistake Kant for a Chinese, if we could not see his true (historical)
"face".
[22]Ak. VII.9 [tr. Mary J. Gregor, The Conflict of the Faculties (New York: Abaris Books), p.17]. Kant adds: "I have always
pictured this judge as standing at my side to keep me not only from error that
corrupts the soul, but even from any careless expression that might give
offense."
[23]Ak. III.848-59
[tr. Norman Kemp Smith, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (London:
Macmillan, 1929), pp.645-52]. (References to the first Critique
will cite, as here, the original pagination of the second German edition, given
in the margins of Ak.
III.) A fourth epistemological category could be added to complete this list: ignorance
(in the sense of error) is the affirmation of (supposed) truth
characterized by objective "certainty" and subjective uncertainty.
[24]See Ak.
II.387,398-406 [On theFormandPrinciples of the
Sensible andIntelligibleWorld, tr. G.B. Kerferd and David E. Walford, Selected
Pre-Critical Writings and Correspondence with Beck (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1968), pp.47, 62-74] and III.xvi-xviii
[Kemp Smith, pp.22-3]. See also my book, Kant's System of Perspectives
(Lanham: University Press of America, 1993), pp.67-9.
[25]Ak. IV.260
[tr. Lewis White Beck, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1950), p.8].
Beck suggests in a footnote (p.8n) that it was not until roughly 1772 that this
"new direction" actually began to take shape in Kant's writings.
[26]See my pair of articles entitled "Kant's Critical Mysticism".
The first in this series, subtitled "The Critical Dreams" [in Philosophy
& Theology 3:4 (Summer 1989), pp.355-83], gives a detailed summary of
Kant's main argument in this 1766 book on Swedenborg's
mystical visions, and shows how it reveals a significant degree of sympathy on
Kant's part for the mystic's general world view (though not for Swedenborg's practical application of that world view, in
the form of psychic communications and cultic religion).
[27]Once we see the close
connection between the new insight of 1770 and the Copernican Revolution fully
developed in 1781, and once we recognize that, far from being a sudden discovery,
Kant's threefold "Critical" method of doing philosophy can be seen
operating throughout his writings, from the earliest works to the latest, it
seems reasonable to suggest that the two periods of Kant's life be renamed
"pre-Copernican" and "Copernican". I develop this argument
further in "Kant's Critical Mysticism: The Critical Dreams".
[28]James Legge (tr.),
The Chinese Classics (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960),
volume 1, pp.240-1. See also p.201. Reading this in connection with Kant's metaphorical
distinction between the empirical "land of truth" and the
"stormy ocean" of speculation (Ak.
III.294 [Kemp Smith, p.257]) makes it interesting to note that the Chinese have
never had much of a navy!
[29]See Ak.
VI.203-372 [Part I ("The Doctrine of Right") of The
Metaphysics of Morals], especially 239-42.
[30]Kant devotes an entire section to this theme near the end of his Critique
of Practical Reason. See Ak.
119-21.
[31]This paper is not the place for a discussion of the many forms this dialogue
has taken. But further discussions of the key issues concerning Kant can be
found in numerous books and articles, such as: Wing-tsit
Chan (ed.), Chu Hsi
and Neo-Confucianism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1986),
especially Li Zehou's chapter, "Some Thoughts on
Ming-Qing Neo-Confucianism", pp.551-69; Herbert Fingarette, "Following the 'One Thread' of the Analects",
Journal of the American Academy of Religion Thematic Issue XLVII:3S
(September 1979), especially pp.379-82, 395; and Kirill
O. Thompson, "Li and Yi as Immanent: Chu
Hsi's Thought in Practical Perspective", Philosophy
East & West 38.1 (January 1988), pp.30-46. In most cases, these
and other comparative studies focus primarily on the task of showing the extent
to which the Chinese (especially Neo-Confucian) tradition can match up to the
Western (especially Kantian) tradition (see e.g., Moore, pp.86, 321, and Li,
pp.551, 553-4, 557-8). In A Daoist Theory of
Chinese Thought, Hansen claims the only true similarity between Kant and
Confucius is that both reject utilitarianism (p.389); he takes the novel
approach of emphasizing their differences (pp.123, 165-6, 353, 415) and
suggests some qualified similarities between Kant and Daoism (pp.284, 298). In
contrast to both of these approaches, I am here examining the extent to which Kant
matches up to Chinese culture and its philosophical tradition.
[32]See Mou's Chih-te
chih-chüeh yü Chung-kuo che-hsüeh (The
Intuition of Noumenal Reality and Chinese Philosophy).
A rare account in English of Mou's interpretation on
Kant can be found in Thomas A. Metzger, Escape from Punishment:
Neo-Confucianism and China's Evolving Political Culture (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1977), pp.30, 57-8, 248-9.
[33]Bond, p.118.
[34]The details can be found in
Kant's System of Perspectives, which is a thoroughgoing interpretation of
this aspect of Kant's philosophy.
[35]See Ak. V.211
[Critique of Judgment]; cf. Kant's System of Perspectives, p.355.
[36]This diagram is formed on the basis of the mapping rules set forth in Kant's
System of Perspectives, pp.76-91, and in my book, The Tree of Philosophy
(Hong Kong: Philopsychy Press, 1993), pp.69-83. It is
important to note that, although synthetic relations can generally be expressed
in terms of threefold distinctions, and hence mapped
onto a triangle (as in Figure 2), the synthetic component in such
relations is only the third term. Traditional Chinese philosophers are not fond
of making threefold distinctions in the manner of Kant
or Hegel. But as we shall see, they are fond of using synthetic logic,
understood as the logic of paradox. For a more detailed examination of the
differences between analytic logic and synthetic logic, see The Tree of
Philosophy, Chapters 9-12.
[37]See e.g., Ak. II.228-43 [Observations on the Feeling of the
Beautiful and Sublime, section III], and VI.276-84 [The Metaphysics of
Morals].
[38]Lao Tzu's Chinese classic, Tao
Te Ching [tr. H.G. Ostwald
from Richard Wilhelm's German edition (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1985), p.27], opens with the lines:
"The dao [Way] that can be
expressed is not the eternal dao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name." The resonance between
the Daoist world view and that expressed by Kant in
the third Critique, the apex of his Critical System, would be worth
exploring in more detail.
This etext is based on a prepublication draft of the published
version of this essay.
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