Kant-Studies in
the Hong Kong Philosophical Context
Prof. Stephen Palmquist, D.Phil. (Oxon)
Department of
Religion and Philosophy
Hong Kong
Baptist University
Hong Kong might seem at first sight to be just about as far away from the
interests of Western philosophy as possible. But underneath the façade of
materialistic business-mindedness and apparently superstitious religious
tendencies lies a depth of interest in philosophy that has barely been
acknowledged outside the territory.[1] So Westernized is Hong
Kong's approach to doing philosophy that the task of giving an account of
Kant-reception in Hong Kong is not very different from that of describing
Kant-reception in say, Buenos Aires—or even Memphis, for that matter!
While there may be certain individuals living in such regions who have devoted
a significant part of their career to Kant-studies of one sort or another, they
have done so with such constant interaction with scholars outside the region
that the region itself would seem to be irrelevant. Indeed, most of the
philosophers to whom I will refer are either not indigenous to Hong Kong or
have done a significant amount of their work outside the territory.
I will begin with a brief overview of the general state of philosophy in the
city of the "Fragrant Harbour",[2] after which I will focus
on the work of four philosophers now living in Hong Kong whose research
interests include Kant. Not having the ability to read Chinese, I must limit my
attention almost exclusively to works written in English. However, I will
conclude with a brief discussion of a philosopher who is generally regarded by
those familiar with the Chinese side of Hong Kong philosophy as the most
significant Chinese interpreter of Kant alive today. The works of this
philosopher, Mou Tsung-san,[3] are discussed so
frequently in Hong Kong that even a person with only second-hand knowledge of
his writings (most of which have not been translated from Chinese to English)
is capable of making some intelligible comments on them.
Despite appearances to the contrary, philosophy is alive and well in Hong Kong.
Of seven tertiary institutions, three have well-established Philosophy
Departments (one combined with Religion), and one of the others has a
Humanities Division that includes an M.Phil. in Philosophy. (The other three are more polytechnic-style
institutions, where philosophy is taught only as a relatively minor component
of other classes.) Regular departmental seminars in philosophy are held at
Hong Kong University and Hong Kong Baptist University. The former institution, as well as Chinese University of Hong Kong and Hong
Kong University of Science and Technology, regularly sponsor visiting
lectureships. These seminars and lectureships often attract prominent
philosophers from overseas, including in recent years philosophers such as
Richard Rorty, Thomas Nagel, and the North American
Kant Society's own Arnulf Zweig—just
to mention a few. Starting in 1984, Hong Kong University also supported an
extra-mural B.A. in Philosophy under the London University extension program,
by offering evening classes on a variety of philosophical topics. These were
generally well-attended by devoted students who would come in after a full
day's work to study philosophy, until the classes were discontinued a few years
ago.
Another significant arena for doing philosophy in Hong Kong is the Hong Kong
Philosophy Society, an organization supported as much by non-academics as by
those employed in tertiary education. The society conducts most of its monthly
meetings in Cantonese, with a few meetings in English each year. The current
President and co-founder of the Society, Cheung Chan-fai,
is currently editing a book (with Man Si-wai) to be
entitled Philosophy in Hong Kong, which will be published next year in
conjunction with the celebration of the Society's tenth anniversary. The range
of interests covered by the titles of the essays being written for this book
reflects the breadth of meaning given to the term "philosophy" by the
Society's membership. The titles range from fairly standard topics, such as
"Continental Philosophy" (Kwan Tze-wan),
"Analytic Philosophy" (Laurence Goldstein), and "Political
Thought" (Joseph C.W. Chan), to highly practical or "applied"
issues, such as "Economic Thought" (Tsang Shu-kei),
"Green Thought" (Chung Shan-shan), and
"Sexual Ideas" (Chow Wai-shan). The latter
set of topics is "philosophical", according to the society's
President, "in the widest possible meaning" of the term, whereby
"philosophy" is equated with "systematic thought".[4]
Let us turn now from the general philosophical context to the status of Kant-studies
as such, beginning with tertiary education, where Kant classes are or have been
taught in at least four institutions. At Hong Kong University, Alan Griffiths
and Colin Davies teach classes on the first Critique and on Kant's moral
philosophy, respectively. At Chinese University, the person mainly responsible
for teaching Kant is Kwan Tze-wan, who teaches classes on the first Critique and on Kant's
moral philosophy, as well as a graduate seminar on the third Critique.
Lee Shiu-chuen and Chan Te also do some teaching on
Kant. At the new University of Science and Technology no classes specifically
on Kant have yet been taught, though Kim Bock-ja's
specialization on Hegel makes her naturally interested in Kant-studies as well.
At Baptist University I have taught a class on Kant, as well as interjecting
Kantian ideas into most of my other classes, and three of my colleagues (Gerhold Becker, Lo Ping-cheung,
and Tsang Lap-chuen) have also published and/or
taught extensively on Kantian themes. And HongKongUniversity'sextra-muralphilosophyprogramhasoffereda50-hourcourseofin-depth
classes on Kant's philosophy,which
I have had the pleasure to teach on two occasions.
For the remainder of this paper I will highlight the main ideas of the four scholars
currently living in Hong Kong who have published the most substantial works on
Kant. Due to the summary nature of this report, I will in most cases merely present the ideas in question, without making
any serious effort to criticize them. I will treat them in inverse
order of their apparent influence on Kant-reception in the Hong Kong
philosophical context (based on length of time they have been teaching in Hong
Kong, together with extent of their publications on Kant). I should say before
I begin that there are several important Hong Kong Kant scholars, such as Chan
Te, Lao Sze-kwang, and Tang Chun-i
whose work I will not be able to discuss here, because as far as I know it has
not been published in English.[5]
Lo Ping-cheung [pclo@hkbu.edu.hk]
Lo Ping-cheung's main area of specialization is
Christian ethics. But before doing a second doctorate in this field, he did one
in philosophy on Kant's ethical theory. In recent years he has not been doing
active research on Kant, though he continues to use Kant in his teaching of
ethics. His two publications on Kant both relate to ethics. The 1981 article
(published in Ethics after winning a nationwide prize for the best essay
by a graduate student) is a valuable contribution to the literature aiming to
dispel the myth that Kant's ethical theory is one of "empty
formalism". His approach is noteworthy in that it aims to defend Kantian
ethics by taking the second formulation of the categorical imperative,
rather than the first, as Kant's richest and most substantial ethical
principle. Whereas the first formulation (universalizability)
does have something of a formalistic slant, the far less commonly discussed
second formulation (treating persons as ends) is explicitly teleological, and
is therefore the proper focus for any attempt to refute the charge of
"emptiness". Lo further argues that the standard passages in the Groundwork
are too sketchy, and must be supplemented by an examination of the relevant Doctrine
of Virtue passages, if the grounds for the second formulation are to be
fully appreciated. These passages support a radically teleological
interpretation of Kant's view of duty—one that differs in several
important respects from the old, "empty formalism" interpretation.
Lo's 1987 book, Treating Persons as Ends, extends and expands on the
foregoing defense of Kantian ethics. He begins by explaining the teleological
character of Kant's theory of non-moral action. This then serves as a backdrop,
against which the teleological aspects of his moral philosophy can be
understood. Distinctions such as hypothetical/categorical and heteronomous/autonomous might appear to correspond to the
means/end or teleological/non-teleological distinctions. But Lo flatly rejects
this interpretation as unfaithful to Kant's text, particularly in the Doctrine
of Virtue, where ethics is defined as a system of ends of pure
practical reason. Hypothetical and categorical imperatives are distinguishable
not by virtue of presence versus absence of an end, but by the different source
of their respective ends (as stemming from our desires or from practical
reason, respectively). The specific, non-formalistic ground of all
"teleological-categorical imperatives" is human personhood,
which Lo understands as meaning
"individuated humanity in each person" (§§35-36). He defends Kant's
conception of human beings as ends in themselves by clarifying the meaning of
the apparently paradoxical notion of a "self-existent" end, and by
interpreting the former as implying that we are "to treat the essential
ends of human beings as ends in themselves" (§30, emphasis added). He
then provides an account of how Kant thinks specific duties can be derived from
the second formulation of the categorical imperative, demonstrating that it is
teleological without being consequentialist or
hypothetically-based, and arguing that it provides a helpful strategy for
dealing with the problem of conflicting duties. An Appendix explains how the
admittedly formalistic aspects of the second Critique are compatible
with the interpretation presented in Lo's book.
Like many Hong Kong-based philosophers, there is nothing particularly Chinese
about Lo's approach to philosophy or to Kant (at least, not in his English
publications). Such approaches to Kant-studies in Hong Kong are, as I suggested
earlier, not different in kind from how Kant-studies might be approached
anywhere else. Lo and the next two interpreters both provide ample evidence of
how the Western tradition of Kant-interpretation informs most English-language
work on Kant in Hong Kong. However, there is a strong tradition (mostly in
Chinese) of attempts to compare Kant with various Chinese
philosophers—most notably, Confucius.[6] The fourth Kant-scholar,
discussed below, is one of the leading participants in this tradition.
Pong See-fun (Stephen Palmquist)
[stevepq@hkbu.edu.hk]
I began working on Kant well before moving to Hong Kong, but have now spent
more time as a Kant-scholar in the East than I have in the West. Although it
has never been my intention to develop an explicitly "Chinese"
interpretation of Kant, the wheels of fate seem to have destined me to produce
something along those lines—an interpretation that is at least compatible
with certain tendencies evident in some Oriental systems of thought. (Indeed,
it is my conviction that certain key aspects of Kant's approach to philosophy
are in some sense "Chinese".[7])
In Kant's System of Perspectives (and its forthcoming sequels), as well
as in a number of articles (many of which represent early versions of chapters
later (to be) incorporated in one of these books), I am attempting to set forth
a thorough-going interpretation of the entire Critical System, with special
emphasis on its systematic (architectonic) structure. My claim is that, by
paying careful attention to the different "perspectives" Kant
defines, and by mapping out their interrelationships according to patterns
fixed by the logical structure of analytic and synthetic relations, many of
Kant's apparently difficult or contradictory ideas can be shown to be not only
self-consistent, but also powerfully descriptive of the way things are. The
basic line of argument in each Critique (with the possible exception of
the third) turns out to follow the same, twelvefold
pattern (viz., the pattern of the categories). Three sequels to Kant's
System of Perspectives will demonstrate how this interpretive method
greatly facilitates our comprehension of the metaphysical implications of
Critical philosophy: particularly with reference to religion (cf. the idea of
God), science (cf. the idea of freedom in the world), and political history
(cf. the idea of the immortality of the soul), respectively.
Those articles of mine that have not been and will not be included in the
above, four-volume project, range over topics such as Kant's doctrines of time
(as synthetic), mathematics (critiquing Phillip Kitcher),
analyticity (critiquing Kripke), cosmogony
(critiquing Jaki), duty (critiquing the common view
that duty is a motive), and the categorical imperative (comparing it with
three moral principles taught by Jesus). My other book-length projects on Kant
include the following: a computer-generated Index to Kemp Smith's
translation of the first Critique, as well as a corresponding Concordance;
an edited translation of four of Kant's minor essays (originally translated
anonymously by John Richardson in 1798-99), together with "An Exhaustive
Bibliography of English Translations of Kant"; and a textbook for my
Introduction to Philosophy classes, The Tree of Philosophy, that includes
three chapters on Kant (one for each Critique).
Kwan Tze-wan [twkwan@cuhk.edu.hk]
Kwan Tze-wan, who studied under one of the two most
influential Kant-scholars of the older generation, Lao Tze-kwang,[8] is the most active
Chinese Kant-scholar currently living in Hong Kong. He has published widely on
various aspects of Kant's philosophy, ranging from his epistemology and moral
philosophy to his aesthetics and philosophy of religion. In 1985 he also translated
into Chinese Richard Kroner's Von Kant bis Hegel and Kants
Weltanschauung .
Although most of his work is in Chinese,[9] he has published a number
of articles in English (see the Bibliography), as well as a few in German. In
the following I will give a brief survey only of those works he has published
in English.[10]
The first of Kwan's two early articles on Kant's theology and philosophy of religion
argues for a radically "anthropocentric" and "humanistic"
interpretation of Kant's position (see (1983), pp.95-98). By such terms Kwan
means to designate the view that God is "a mere product of the
intellectual activity of mankind", and that "religion's genuine
object is never God himself, but rather man's notion or idea of God."[11] He supports this
interpretation by appealing to three characteristics of Kant's theory: (1)
religion bridges the gap "between the world of nature and the world of
morality, in such a way that the three together answer the question "What
is man?" (pp.97-98); (2) religion is not an end in itself, but a
means or "vehicle" in relation to the end of morality; and (3)
religion is a duty to oneself rather than to God. Kwan then examines
"the problem of ‘Willk§r' ",
explaining how Kant's usage of this term refers to a power that is truly
"arbitrary": it is fully determined neither by practical reason nor
by sensibility, though it is always influenced by both (p.106); the
human "propensity to evil" is therefore rooted in Willk§r.
Kwan concludes with some reflections on Kant's reasons for maintaining the usefulness
of religion, despite (or indeed, because of) its basically reductionistic
character.
In his second paper on this subject (1984/1987) Kwan touches upon some of the
same issues, but focuses more on the theological aspects of Kant's position.
After explaining Kant's division between the different types of theology, he
introduces the "Antinomy of Practical Reason", and explains at some
length how the postulates of God and immortality are meant to solve it.
Unfortunately, in the course of expounding Kant's views, he repeatedly interjectswordssuchas"nothingbut"and"mere"(seeespeciallypp.51-52)intowhatappears to be a faithful
reporting of Kant's own words and ideas. As a result, the view of God that
comes out—a God who is supposedly nothing but a merely man-made symbol,
to the extent that "only our own practical reason" should be "the
ultimate object of our worship" (pp.53-54)—isfarmorereductionisticthan
I believe Kant himself ever intended (see above, note 11).
Three of the
papers Kwan has published in English are related only tangentially to Kant. His
1984 paper mentions Kant only briefly, in connection with Heidegger's criticism
of the subjectivist distinction between mathematics and philosophy (pp.50,62). His 1990 paper includes several interesting
suggestions regarding the Kantian roots of various aspects of Husserl's philosophy—most notably, Kant's
much-neglected anticipation of the significance of "horizon" (pp.361,370-3,387,389,393-4,396,398-9). Kwan also includes a short
but highly significant section on the perspectival
implications of any talk of horizons (p.384)—significant, at least, in
light of my own perspectival interpretation of
Kant. And his 1995 paper, which sketches the history of categorial thinking both in Western and in Chinese
philosophy, includes a significant section explaining how Kant served as a
middle step between the Aristotelian and Heideggerian
approaches to the categorization of thought.[12]
These latest publications might seem to indicate that Kwan has in recent years
moved away from Kant towards a study of more contemporary German philosophers.
Indeed, one of his current research interests is to apply von Humboldt's
philosophy of language to certain aspects of the Chinese language. Moreover, he
has also been devoting a considerable amount of energy to developing and
running the computing and internet resources located at Chinese University.
Despite these shifts of interest, however, Kwan continues to teach Kant and retains
a strong interest in Kant-studies—to the extent that he is completing a
book which is to be entitled An Introduction to the Philosophy of Kant.
I think the world of Kant-studies has yet to hear the last from Kwan.
Mou Tsung-san
The name "Mou Tsung-san"
is almost synonymous with "Chinese Kant-studies in Hong Kong", so
unanimous is the attestation of his influence by those who know the Hong Kong
philosophical situation. It is therefore appropriate to conclude this survey
with a slightly more lengthy discussion of his ideas. In addition to
translating and commenting extensively on all three Critiques,[13] Mou
has put forward a widely discussed array of interpretive arguments relating to
various aspects of Kant's philosophy. Unfortunately for our purposes, his
prolific writings have been published almost entirely in Chinese,[14] so I will only be able to
scratch the surface of his complex and wide-ranging ideas.
Mou's career can be divided into two stages. The
first stage runs up to the late 1960's, while the second runs from the early
70's to the present. (Professor Mou, now in his 80's,
is currently retired and living in Hong Kong.) His first book on Kant,
published in the early 50's, focused on the first Critique. In it, he
attempted to reconstruct some of Kant's ideas along the lines of Russell and
other contemporary Western philosophers. Of particular interest is his
rejection of what he took to be Kant's view, that the transcendental conditions
(space, time, and the categories) are seen as determining the phenomenological
world ontologically, not merely epistemologically. Such a position must
be revised, he claimed, so that the transcendental conditions are regarded as
determining only our understanding of the world. According to his
reconstructed version of Kant, space, time, and the categories perform a merely
regulative, rather than a constitutive, function. (It is worth
noting here that some Western Kant-scholars, such as Prauss,
Allison, and myself, have argued more recently that an epistemological reading
of one sort or another need not be regarded as revisionary,
but may have actually been what Kant had in mind in the first place.)
The second period of Mou's career began in 1969 with
the publication of his book, The Substance (or Reality) of Mind and the
Substance (or Reality) of (Human) Nature.[15] This was followed a few
years later by Intellectual Intuition (or The Intuition of Noumenal Reality) and Chinese Philosophy, and
again in the mid-70's, by his book on Phenomena and Noumena.[16] In these books, Mou turns around and accepts the previously rejected
ontological interpretation of transcendental philosophy. Indeed, he takes it a
step further, claiming that Kant's insistence on the unknowability
of the thing in itself makes his theory radically
untenable as it stands. In its place Mou appeals to
the wisdom of traditional Chinese philosophers—particularly those known
as "Neo-Confucianists". His reason for
making such a dramatic change was related to his increased interest in Kant's
moral philosophy. Kant's ethical theory is so similar in many respects to
various Neo-Confucianist ideas that it has become a
commonplace in comparative philosophical studies to call attention to this
fact.[17] Kantian conceptions such
as moral duty, the categorical imperative, and the primacy of practical reason
have clear parallels in Chu Hsi,
Mencius, and even Confucius himself. What disturbed Mou was his conviction that, by separating the realm of
morality and practical reason so sharply from that of knowledge and theoretical
reason, Kant had developed a notion of the moral realm that was simply too
weak to perform its important function.
The solution to the problem of Kantian transcendent unknowability,
according to Mou, can be found in the Neo-Confucianist tradition that regards mankind's moral nature
as being rooted in what Mencius called
"conscience" (liang-chi).
Through a detailed discussion of the Transcendental Deduction, Mou concludes that some type of "intellectual
intuition", or "intuition of noumenal
reality" (chih te chi-h-chueh) must be
possible after all. By failing to recognize that the human capacity to know
right from wrong is itself a form of intellectual intuition—albeit, of a
type rather different from that which can be attributed only to God—Kant
ends up defending a moral system which, despite his protestations to the
contrary, cannot be regarded as being as real as the world of empirical
knowledge. Without the stronger claim that human beings can have an intuition
of the noumenal world, Mou
thinks any claim to know anything about the moral realm is vacuous. By
providing an alternative view of moral intuition, the Neo-Confucian tradition
can fill a gap left by Western philosophy (which Mou
more or less identifies with Kant).[18]
This is a direct challenge to Western philosophers in general, and to
Kant-scholars in particular. Does our moral nature provide us with a
kind of knowledge that is equal in both its objective and subjective
certainty to that of our empirical knowledge of nature? If so, can Kant's view
of the moral law, and of freedom as the one "fact" of practical
reason, be interpreted in such a way as to do all the work that Mou thinks must be performed by his moral version of
"intellectual intuition"? Or are we constrained to agree with Mou's view of the superiority of Chinese philosophy over
Western philosophy? If, on the other hand, Mou is
wrong, and Kant is right to distinguish sharply between theoretical knowledge
and practical "knowledge", then how exactly can the latter provide us
with a sufficient grounding in the noumenal world to
justify belief in its reality?
Bibliography
of English Works on Kant
Relevant
to the Hong Kong Philosophical Context
I. 45 English works on Kant by scholars living in Hong Kong
Kwan, Tze-wan,
"The Doctrine of Categories and the Typology of Concern", Analecta Husserliana
46 (1995), pp.243-302.
————, "Hussurl's Concept of Horizon: An Attempt at
Reappraisal", Analecta Husserliana 31 (1990), pp.361-399.
————, "Heidegger's Quest
for the Essence of Man", in Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka
(1984), pp.47-64.
————, "The Idea of God in
Kant's Moral Theology", Dialogue & Alliance 1 (1987), pp.41-57.
Also in Tunghai Journal
25 (1984), pp.261-286.
————, "On Kant's
Real/Problematic Distinction between Phenomena and Noumena"
(long English abstract of an article in Chinese), Tunghai
Journal 26 (1985), pp.209-210.
————, "On Kant's Problem
of Willk§r", Proceedings of the
International Conference on the Role of Christian Higher Education in Asia
(Taichung: Tunghai
University Press, 1984), pp.261-288.
————, "Kant's
‘Humanistic' Conception of Religion", Tunghai
Journal 24 (1983), pp.95-118.
Lao, Sze-kwang,
"On Understanding Chinese Philosophy: An Inquiry and a Proposal", in Allinson (1989), pp.265-93.
Lee, Shui-chuen,
"A Confucian Critique of Kant's Theory of Moral Cultivation", Comparative
Studies of Eastern and Western Philosophy, Taipei: Chinese Culture
University, 1989), pp.881-902.
Leung, In-shing, "From Kant to Chinese Philosophy: Mou Tsung-san's Construction of
moral metaphysics" (an unpublished paper, presented to the Third
International Conference in Chinese Philosophy, 1988).
Liu, Shu-hsien,
"The Problem of Orthodoxy in Chu Hsi's Philosophy", in Chan Wing-tsit
(1986), pp.437-60.
————, review of Mou Tsung-san's Hsin-t'i Y§ Hsing-t'i
[Mind and Human Nature], Philosophy East and West 20 (1970),
pp.419-22.
Lo, Ping-cheung, Treating Persons as Ends: An
Essay on Kant's Moral Philosophy. Lanham: University Press of America,
1987.
————, "A Critical
Reevaluation of the Alleged ‘Empty Formalism' of Kantian Ethics", Ethics
91 (January 1981), pp.181-201.
Mou, Tsung-san, Keynote lecture given at a 1989 conference in
Taipei, Taiwan. Tr. Paul Jiang,
"Professor Mou Tsun-san's
Speech", Comparative Studies of Eastern and Western Philosophy,
Taipei: Chinese Culture University, 1989), pp.25-30.
————, lectures given to graduate
students at the National Taiwan University, Taiwan, in the 1970's. Tr. Clapton Chan, Fourteen Lectures
on the Intercommunication between Chinese and Western Philosophy(in progress).
Palmquist, Stephen R., The Tree of Philosophy3. Hong Kong: Philopsychy Press, 1995.
————, "‘The Kingdom of God is at Hand!' (Did Kant
really say that?)", History of Philosophy Quarterly 11:4
(October 1994), pp.421-37.
————, Four Neglected Essays
by Immanuel Kant. Hong Kong: Philopsychy Press,
1994. Also includes an "Exhaustive Bibliography of English Translations of
Kant".
————, "Triangulating God:
A Kantian Rejoinder to Perovich", Faith and
Philosophy 11:2 (April 1994), pp.302-10.
————, "How Chinese Was
Kant?" An unpublished paper, presented to the March 1994 meeting of the
Hong Kong Philosophy Society.
————, Kant's System of
Perspectives: An architectonic interpretation of the Critical philosophy.
Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993.
————, "Studying
Religion—Kantian Style", Opening 2 (March 1993), pp.9-12.
————, "Kant's Theocentric Metaphysics", Analele
Universitatii Din Timisoara
4 (1992), pp.55-70.
————, "Does Kant Reduce
Religion to Morality?", Kant-Studien 83:2 (1992), pp.129-148.
————, "Kant's
‘Appropriation' of Lampe's God", Harvard Theological Review
85:1 (January 1992), pp.85-108.
————, "Kant's Theistic
Solution to the Problem of Transcendental Theology", Rodica
Croitoru (ed.), Kant and the Transcendental
Problem (Bucharest: University of Bucharest Faculty of Philosophy, 1991),
pp.148-178.
————, "Four Perspectives
on Moral Judgement: The Rational Principles of Jesus
and Kant", The Heythrop Journal 32:2
(April 1991), pp.216-232.
————, "KantonEuclid: GeometryinPerspective", PhilosophiaMathematica
II5:1/2(1990), pp.88-113.
————, A Complete Index to
Kemp Smith's Translation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (distributed
privately, 1987). Also published on floppy diskettes as "Kant-Index for
Kemp Smith", Philosophy & Theology Disk Supplement, number 3
(1989).
————, "The Syntheticity of Time: Comments on Fang's Critique of Divine
Computers", Philosophia Mathematica II 4:2 (1989), pp.233-235.
————, "Kant's Critique of
Mysticism: (2) Critical Mysticism", Philosophy & Theology 4:1
(Fall 1989), pp.67-94.
————, "Kant's Critique of
Mysticism: (1) The Critical Dreams", Philosophy & Theology
3:4 (Summer 1989), pp.355-383.
————, "ImmanuelKant: AChristianPhilosopher?", FaithandPhilosophy6:1(January1989), pp.65-75.
————, A Complete
Concordance to Kemp Smith's Translation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
(distributed privately on microfiche, 1987).
————, "A Priori Knowledge
in Perspective: (II) Naming, Necessity and the Analytic A
Posteriori", The Review of Metaphysics 41:2 (December 1987),
pp.255-282.
————, "A Priori Knowledge
in Perspective: (I) Mathematics, Method and Pure Intuition", The Review
of Metaphysics 41:1 (September 1987), pp.3-22.
————, "Kant's Cosmogony
Re-Evaluated", Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 18:3
(September 1987), pp.255-269.
————, "Knowledge and
Experience—An Examination of the Four Reflective ‘Perspectives' in
Kant's Critical Philosophy", Kant-Studien
78:2 (1987), pp.170-200.
————, "A Kantian Critique
of Polanyi's ‘Post-Critical Philosophy'", Convivium
24 (March 1987), pp.1-11.
————, "Is Duty Kant's
‘Motive' for Moral Action?", Ratio 28:2 (December 1986),
pp.168-174. Also published in a German version, tr. Joachim Schulte, as "Ist die Pflicht Kants ‘Triebfeder' des sittlichen Handelns?", Ratio
28:2 (December 1986), pp.152-158.
————, "The Architectonic
Form of Kant's Copernican Logic", Metaphilosophy
17:4 (October 1986), pp.266-288.
————, "Six Perspectives
on the Object in Kant's Theory of Knowledge", Dialectica
40:2 (1986), pp.121-151.
————, "The Radical Unknowability of Kant's ‘Thing in Itself'", Cogito 3:2 (March 1985),
pp.101-115.
————, "Faith as Kant's
Key to the Justification of Transcendental Reflection", The Heythrop Journal 25:4 (October 1984), pp.442-455.
II. A selection of other
English works relating to Chinese Kant-studies or to philosophy in Hong Kong
Allinson, Robert E. (ed.), Understanding
the Chinese Mind: The Philosophical Roots. Hong Kong: Oxford University
Press, 1989.
Ames, Roger T. and Callicott, J. Baird (eds.), Nature in Asian Traditions
of Thought: Essays in Environmental Philosophy.
Albany: State University of New York, 1989.
Ames, Roger T. and Hall,
David L., Thinking Through Confucius. Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1987.
Axinn, Sidney, "The
Philosophy of History in Confucianism and in Kant", Comparative Studies
of Eastern and Western Philosophy, Taipei: Chinese Culture University,
1989), pp.789-806.
Berthrong, John, All Under
Heaven: Transforming Paradigms in Confucian-Christian Dialogue. Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1994.
Brière, O., Fifty
Years of Chinese Philosophy 1898-1950, tr. Laurence G. Thompson. London: Allen & Unwin, 1956.
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(1984), pp.187-202.
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Cheng, Chung-ying, New Dimensions of Confucian and Neo-Confucian
Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991.
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"Chinese Ethics and Kant", Philosophy East and West 28 (1978),
pp.161-72.
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H., The Chinese View of Life: The Philosophy
of Comprehensive Harmony Taipei: Linking Publishing Co., 1980.
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the ‘One Thread' of the Analects", Journal of the American Academy of Religion Thematic Issue
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"Philosophy in Hong Kong", Cogito (Autumn 1990), pp.192-197.
Hansen, Chad, A Daoist Theory of
Chinese Thought: A Philosophical Interpretation. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992.
Li Zehou,
"Some Thoughts on Ming-Qing
Neo-Confucianism", in Chan Wing-tsit (1986),
pp.551-69.
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and Tradition: The Interpretation of China's Philosophical Past: Fung Yu-Lan 1939-1949. Hong
Kong: Ricci Institute, 1985.
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Footnotes
[1]Part of the reason for
this unfortunate fact is the dearth of quality academic publications based in
Hong Kong. The Hong Kong market caters more towards a magazine-style,
popularized approach to philosophical issues, so those who wish to publish more
serious articles in professional philosophical journals are forced to turn
elsewhere—most often to Taiwan for Chinese writings or to the West for
those in English.
[2]"Hong Kong"
means "fragrant harbour" in Cantonese.
[3]Throughout this paper I
adopt the Chinese convention of putting the surname first, followed by
the given name(s). According to the Western convention, Mou's
name would be "Tsung-san Mou".
[4]Cheung Chan-fai, in an interview held on 23 February 1995. He added
that the goal of most Chinese philosophers in Hong Kong is to assimilate as
much as can be learned from Western philosophy, but to focus on its application
to the Hong Kong situation.
[5]Lao (1989) mentions Kant
in passing several times (pp.267, 273, 290), but does not elaborate on his own
interpretation of Kant as such.
Before proceeding I would like to express thanks to the following people for
providing me with some invaluable information, without which this paper would
have been considerably less informative: Cheung Chan-fai,
Laurence Goldstein, Kwan Tze-wan, Lee Shui-chuen, Lo Ping-cheung, Tsang
Lap-chuen, and Yip Kam-ming.
Naturally, they should not be held responsible for any errors that might appear
in the paper.
[6]See
e.g., Moore (1967), pp.86, 321 and Li (1986), 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 examine in
"How ‘Chinese' Was Kant?" the extent to which Kant matches
up to Chinese culture and its philosophical tradition.
[7]See my unpublished paper,
"How Chinese Was Kant?".
[8]The other scholar in this
pair is Mou Tsung-san,
whose ideas will be discussed below. Although Lao wrote a substantial work on
Kant's epistemology some 30 years ago, and lectured regularly on Kant, his
views will notbediscussedbecauseincomparisontoMou(1) hisinterpretationofKant,asfarasIknow,playedalesssignificant
role in his overall approach to philosophy, (2) less information is available
on his ideas in English, and (3) his most influential successor (Kwan) has
published far more in English (than the students of Mou).
Lee Shui-chuen (one of Mou's
most prominent students) has published extensively in Chinese on Kant and
numerous other subjects. Unfortunately for our present purposes, only one of
his articles on Kant is written in English. In this (1992) paper, Lee utilizes
various notions from the Neo-Confucian tradition to assess Kant's views on
"moral cultivation". He elaborates and defends Mou's
suggestion that Kant's moral theory in some senses "lies between Mencius' and Chu Hsi's" (p.300). Nevertheless, he concludes that,
because it distinguishes too sharply between "wille,
willk§r and moral feeling", "Kant's
theory is so ... off the target as to be quite useless for moral
cultivation" (301). Mencius and Chu Hsi, by contrast, are
superior because they united these three powers into one (hsin,
or "mind") or two (hsin and hsing, or "human nature"), respectively.
[9]Kwan's Chinese papers
include studies of the Transcendental Deduction, the third Critique, and
Kant's concept of philosophy in general. These, however, are beyond the scope
of the present discussion.
[10]One of these articles,
"On Kant's Problem of Willk§r"
(1984) was unfortunately not available to me at the time of writing this paper.
However, Kwan deals with this same problem as part of his 1983 paper.
[11]Kwan
(1983), p.95. Kwan's 1985 paper also assumes Kant's support for such a reductionistic position: "In Kant's eyes ... [God] is to
the last analysis itself nothing but a Problema"
(p.210). I have argued against such a reductionistic
interpretation in my articles, "Does Kant Reduce Religion to
Morality?" and "Kant's Theocentric
Metaphysics". Since Kwan's 1985 paper is mainly in Chinese, with only an
abstract in English, I will not comment further upon it here, except to say
that in it, Kwan interprets Kant's concept of a "noumenal"
realm in the Heideggerian terms of "the reality
of human existence or of the Phänomen des Daseins" (p.210).
[12]Unfortunately, Kwan assumes
throughout this (1995) paper that categories are nothing but "cultural
manifestations" (see especially pp.250, 293). His resulting reflections
on the cultural differences involved in various systems are often interesting
and instructive. But he never seems aware of the need to treat Kant's
categories as transcendental and therefore as acultural
(or perhaps, transcultural).
[13]As far as I know, Mou is the only translator of Kant's work living in Hong
Kong. Several translations of the Critiques, as well as
translations of most of Kant's other writings, have been published by
Chinese scholars on the mainland. These, however, are all in simplified
Chinese characters, so they are not widely used in Hong Kong. Unfortunately,
most scholars agree that Mou's translations (based as
they were on Kemp Smith's English, not on Kant's German) are rather unfaithful
to the original text, and can be rather misleading at times. Some have accused
him of translating in such a way that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish
between what is Kant's original ideas and what
is Mou's interpretations.
[14]The only two exceptions I
know of are a short speech he made at a 1989 conference in Taiwan, and a course
of lectures he gave in the 1970's. The latter is currently in preparation by
Clapton Chan [chancl@nevada.edu] of the University of Nevada.
[15]Liu (1986) discusses the
arguments Mou develops in this book (see pp.450 and
458). See also Liu (1970).
[16]A good (though rather
brief) English account of Mou's interpretation of
Kant can be found in Metzger (1977), pp.30,57-8,248-9.
Masson (1985) groups Mou with T'ang
Ch§n-i as two of the key figures in post-1949
non-communist-oriented Chinese philosophy (p.244). They share a "quest for
meaning", the main purpose of which "was to keep alive a tradition"
in the face of the communist threat. Theirs, he says, was an apologetic
"faith-in-exile", emphasizing "the religious dimension of neoconfucianism" (pp.244-5). See also Ames and Hall
(1987), pp.204-206, Chan (1984), pp.187-8ff, and Goldstein (1990), p.195.
[17]For helpful discussions of
Mou's interpretation of Chu
Hsi, see Liu (1986) and Ts'ai
(1986), especially pp.464-5,474,476-77n. Li (1986) says Neo-Confucianism and
Kant are similar insofar as for both the "basic characteristic is to
raise ethics to the status of ontology" (p.551; see also pp.553-4,557-8).
In other respects, however, they differ (p.557): "Chinese practical
thought never separates noumenon and phenomenon and
seeks noumenon from phenomenon." In discussing
the Neo-Confucian usage of the term "Tao", Mou
coined a termtranslatedas"onto-cosmological
"to describe this aspect of Confucian moral metaphysics (Ts'ai[1986],p.476n).
[18]Mou provides a brief summary
of this view of the relation between Kantian philosophy and Chinese tradition
in the speech (1989) published in English. He claims (p.25) that "the
classical meaning of philosophy" (as "love of wisdom"), though
supported by Kant, is now dead in the West, but "can still be found
well-preserved in the Chinese tradition". Thanks to Kant, the West has
excelled in the realm of phenomena (science); but when it comes to "the
transcendental world ... Kant is neither thorough nor mature in his treatment,
when compared to the Chinese" (pp.26-27). Mou
suggests (p.29) that "in the West, man cannot possess what I call
intellectual intuition for the simple reason that man and God are separate....
[In] the Western tradition, ... to transform man's
discursive understanding into transcendental wisdom [chih]
is not only impossible, but inconceivable.... This is because, according to
Kant, God only creates thing-in-itself, but not phenomenon, which presents
itself only to man. (Logic, time and space, and number are irrelevant to
God.)" It is interesting that, whereas Kant's Western critics tend to
chide Kant for relying too heavily on the reality and significance of
the noumenal world, his Neo-Confucian critics
complain that he relies too little on it. Perhaps there is something to
be said for here for the "golden mean"!
Although he was not from Hong Kong, it is worth mentioning another very
influential Chinese philosopher, Fung Yu-lan, who was also influenced by Kant. Fung
had a rather more sympathetic view of Kant than Mou's,
inasmuch as he viewed the "unknowable" as "the object of
metaphysics" (quoted in Masson [1985], p.205). If anything, he thought
Kant was too affirmative with respect to the transcendent realm (p.206).
Interestingly, Fung (like Hansen [see above, note
6]) regarded Kant's philosophy as being much more in line with Taoist
ideas than with Confucianist or Neo-Confucianist approaches (see Masson [1985], pp.206-7n).
This etext is based on a prepublication draft of the published
version of this essay.
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