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peimin ni

THE CHANGING STATUS OF CHINESE

PHILOSOPHY

Abstract

The article tries to stress the historical nature of the issue about the
“legitimacy of Chinese philosophy.” It argues that we are facing an
era in which the question will no longer be whether the thoughts of
traditional Chinese masters can be comfortably adopted by a foreign
“family”; instead, it will be whether we can make the marriage of
Chinese traditional thoughts and Western philosophy a constructive
process through which philosophy, whether Chinese or Western, can
be rejuvenated with renewed legitimacy under the title originally
coined by the Greeks, namely the love of wisdom.

At the time of celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the Journal of

Chinese Philosophy, it seems appropriate to review the status of
Chinese philosophy today with reference to its past in the last one
hundred years or so. It would be particularly interesting and reward-
ing, as it seems to me, to revisit the century-old controversy known as
the “legitimacy of Chinese philosophy,”1 because to demonstrate the
existence and value of Chinese philosophy was a major motivation
behind the creation of the Journal in the first place, and despite the
commendable achievements it has made, the controversy still contin-
ues, albeit with a different historical background now than it was
before.
It is well known that “philosophy” is a Western term unknown to
China until the nineteenth century.2 Given the obvious differences
between the thoughts of ancient Chinese masters (zhuzi 諸子) and
the archetypes of Western philosophy such as Plato, Aristotle, and
Kant, whether the former can be retrospectively called philosophy or
not became an issue. Because the original “baptism” gave the Western
world a privileged right of language to use the term according to the
way it was understood in the West, Western philosophy naturally

PEIMIN NI, Professor, Department of Philosophy, Grand Valley State University. Spe-
cialties: classic Confucianism, early modern Western philosophy, comparative philosophy.
E-mail: [email protected]
Journal of Chinese Philosophy 40:3–4 (September–December 2013) 583–600
© 2014 Journal of Chinese Philosophy
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became the “legislator” against which the “legitimacy” of Chinese

philosophy would have to be judged. While on the surface it is merely
a matter of terminology, it actually involves rich layers of factors,
including the definition of “philosophy,” the right of language, demar-
cation of academic disciplines, similarities and differences between
the thoughts of ancient Chinese masters and Western philosophy,
cross-cultural communication and dialogue, the status of indigenous
culture, the issue about “the other,” and emotions attached to national
pride.
Instead of trying to give a synoptic treatment of this complex issue,
this article tries to make a specific point within the broad parameter.
It tries to stress that the issue itself is historical in nature. It was never
an issue before it was raised and will cease to be in the future. We are
facing an era in which the question will no longer be whether the
thoughts of traditional Chinese masters can be comfortably adopted
by a foreign family, granted the right to use the name “philosophy” as
its modern shelter; instead, it will be whether we can make the mar-
riage of the two a constructive process through which philosophy,
whether Chinese or Western, can be rejuvenated, gain new momen-
tum and renewed legitimacy under the title originally coined by the
Greeks, namely the love of wisdom.

I. The Dilemma behind the “Legitimacy of

Chinese Philosophy”

From Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–1962) and Feng Youlan 馮友蘭 (1895–1990)

in the early part of the last century all the way down to the present,
generations of scholars in Chinese philosophy have made tireless
efforts to demonstrate that, like its counterpart in the West, China had
its long philosophical tradition. Through this accumulative and often
collaborative effort, Chinese philosophy has not only become a well-
established academic discipline in China, but it is also much more
visible now in philosophical conferences, college and university cur-
riculums, and philosophy publications in Western countries. Many
American universities have hired specialists in Chinese philosophy
and created Chinese philosophy courses accordingly. The employ-
ment rate of Chinese philosophy PhDs from the University of Hawaii
has been consistently at a very high end. At a time when the philoso-
phy job market is so tough that those who are luckily to get jobs
almost feel thrilled that they will even get paid, this is truly impressive.
Yet on the other hand, the majority of mainstream Western phi-
losophers remain skeptical, to say the least, about whether traditional
Chinese thoughts can be called “philosophy.”The view that there is no
 THE CHANGING STATUS OF CHINESE PHILOSOPHY 585

such thing as Chinese philosophy is ostensibly demonstrated in their

attitude toward Chinese philosophy, though it is rarely, if ever, put in
explicit arguments. Scholars in Chinese philosophy in the West are
more often housed in departments of religious studies or East Asian
studies than in philosophy departments. While one would expect the
situation to improve along with the increasing globalization of cur-
riculum, the reality sometimes shows the opposite. In 2006 a blog
article on the Internet triggered widespread resonance among schol-
ars in Chinese philosophy in the West. The article points out that after
the retirement of several professors in Chinese philosophy at Stan-
ford University, the University of Michigan, and University of Cali-
fornia, Berkeley, the positions disappeared, consequently leaving top
philosophy departments in the entire continental United States
almost blank tablets with regard to Chinese philosophy. Students who
want to pursue a PhD degree in Chinese philosophy are left with little
choice except for going half across the Pacific to Hawaii, or all the way
to Asia, where only a handful of universities offer graduate-level
Chinese philosophy courses in English. The author of the article quite
literally described the situation as a “crisis” of Chinese philosophy.3
Alerted by the blog article, the American Philosophical Association
published a newsletter report in 2008 on “Asian and Asian-American
Philosophers and Philosophy.” The statistic data reported in the news-
letter provide a more synoptic picture of the crisis. According to one
of the contributors of the newsletter, Justin Tiwald,
Of all of the U.S. and Canadian Ph.D. programs listed on the “overall
rankings” page of Brian Leiter’s “Philosophical Gourmet Report,”
there are only three specialists in Chinese thought whose primary
appointment is in philosophy. In contrast, on my conservative but
admittedly imperfect count, these same programs have ninety-nine
full-time faculty who specialize in Kant (a ratio of 33 to 1), and
fifty-eight full-time faculty who specialize in medieval philosophy (a
ratio of about 19 to 1).4

This is certainly largely due to the fact that, generally speaking,

there are profound differences between the Chinese masters and
Western philosophers. For example, thinkers like Laozi and Confucius
demonstrate little interest in offering clear definitions, logical reason-
ing, and systematic articulation for their views, and these are of central
importance to Western philosophers. Their teachings are fragmented
aphorisms, proverbs, or conversations recorded without much
context. Worse, they are often so vague that they allow multiple, or
sometimes even conflicting interpretations. Furthermore, their central
concerns appear to be different. While Western philosophy is an intel-
lectual pursuit of truth, a quest for knowledge, the Chinese masters
are primarily interested in practical matters of how to live in the
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world. They demonstrate little theoretical interest, and often appear

to be hostile to such endeavor. One can surely read the Chinese texts
philosophically, but this is different from saying that they are philoso-
phy texts, just like we can “read” sports or the media philosophically,
but that does not mean sports and the media are philosophies.
To demonstrate that China had a philosophical tradition, genera-
tions of scholars in the field of Chinese philosophy tried hard to
interpret, or more accurately, reconstruct Chinese thought through
Western philosophical concepts, with Western methodology, and
within the Western framework of problematic. While this approach
has certainly achieved some success (in the sense of convincing
people there is such thing as Chinese philosophy), the success often
comes at the cost of losing what is distinctive about the Chinese
masters (imagine that a Zen kōan is turned into an explicit argument,
a gongfu 功夫 [aka kung fu] instruction turned into a universal moral
principle, or a performative use of language turned into a descriptive
statement), and consequently, the more traditional Chinese thought is
recognized as “philosophy,” the less valuable and less Chinese it
seems. The “success” of this effort ironically blocks the accessibility of
the real spirit of traditional Chinese thought.5
To overcome this tendency, many scholars in Chinese philosophy
tried to restore what is unique and vital to Chinese philosophy. In his
works as well as public lectures around the world, Tu Weiming repeat-
edly stresses that Chinese philosophy is a “religious philosophy.” He
quotes Pierre Hadot’s work to point out that the Chinese practical
orientation is not without its counterparts in the West, as ancient
Greek philosophers also practiced philosophy as a way of life rather
than pure intellectual discourses. Chung-ying Cheng makes a contrast
between the “nonreductive naturalism” of the Chinese tradition and
the “reductive rationalism” of the West,6 and argues that although
they are very different, the former is no less philosophical than the
latter. Roger Ames and David Hall draw heavily on American prag-
matism to show that as a revolt against the intellectualist tendency
of modern Western philosophy, pragmatism shares numerous
insights with traditional Chinese philosophies. Henry Rosemont, Joel
Kupperman, Donald Munro, and Chad Hansen also stressed, in their
various ways, that characteristic to Chinese philosophical tradition,
the practical orientation toward deep life wisdom (which is not the
same as intellectual power) is exactly what makes it particularly valu-
able.7 On the other hand, some scholars are willing to restore the
distinctive features of traditional Chinese thoughts by acknowledging
that they are not philosophy in the Western sense of the word. Li
Zehou 李澤厚, for instance, says that “China had no ‘philosophy’
in the Western sense. Both Confucianism and Daoism are half-
 THE CHANGING STATUS OF CHINESE PHILOSOPHY 587

philosophical and half-religious. What they emphasize is ‘jianlü 踐履

(practice).’ [The Song-Ming Neo-Confucian saying that] ‘gongfu is
substance’ is not only a philosophical proposition; it is more an
imperative about practice.”8 But from the mainstream Western frame-
work, these emphases all look like they are showing exactly that
Chinese philosophy, if at all existed, is an immature and confusing
cluster of ideas in which theory and practice, philosophy and religion,
logos and mythos, logic and rhetoric, concept and metaphor, and
argument and narrative are not yet clearly separated.
In short, under the paradigm of the mainstream Western philoso-
phy, scholars in Chinese philosophy have been involved in a dilemma
that they either have to twist and cannibalize what is unique to tra-
ditional Chinese thought according to the Western philosophical
framework, which will ironically show that there is hardly a philo-
sophical tradition in China, or be faithful to China’s own traditions,
but end up being kept out of philosophy.
Obviously a key factor is that the expression of the “legitimacy of
Chinese philosophy” already contains a presupposition that there is
a standard against which the legitimacy is to be determined; and
because the term is of Western origin, the standard must be Western
philosophy, which is by default the lawful owner of the family name.
Whether traditional Chinese thought can bear the family name would
depend on how adequately it resembles its Western counterpart.
But is this presupposition reasonable? It is hard to say that
Heraclitus resembles Descartes more than he resembles Laozi, or that
Plato resembles Nietzsche more than Nietzsche resembles Zhuangzi.
If the Western use of the term is taken as the standard because the
term is Western in origin, then whether modern Western philosophy is
legitimate would have to be judged according to its resemblance to its
ancient Greek origin also. To see how problematic it would be, one
only has to recall, as Hadot shows, how far Western philosophy has
departed from its ancient Greek tradition in which it was more a way
of life than pure intellectual discourses. This is the strategy implicitly
behind Tu Weiming’s argument. If ancient Greek philosophy is phi-
losophy, so is Chinese, because they are both ways of lives. From here
one can go the other direction as well. One might say that like the
notion of science has changed numerous times in history and often
major changes of it are led by ideas outside of previous scientific
paradigms, why cannot Chinese philosophy be a new paradigm of
philosophy against which the modern Western paradigm of philoso-
phy will be judged? What makes one paradigm “legitimate” and the
others not? The term philosophy has never had a clear definition. In its
Greek origin, it means, quite vaguely, the love of wisdom. Like the
term science, which can either mean broadly the search for under-
588 PEIMIN NI

standing of nature, or more narrowly a relatively stabilized paradigm

of it, the term philosophy also has the original broad meaning as the
search for wisdom, and more specifically the paradigms of it emerged
in different periods of time. People often take a dominant scientific
paradigm in their age as the universal standard for science; likewise a
specific mode of doing philosophy can assume the position of being
the “legislator” for philosophy. As modern philosophy of science has
revealed quite convincingly that the legitimacy of a scientific paradigm
depends largely on its vitality in the social and even political realm,
similarly, behind the use of “philosophy,” there is what Foucault calls
the “power” that comes from the vitality of the specific philosophical
paradigm more than it does from inheritance of the original baptism.
In his discussion of this century-old issue, Chinese scholar Ge
Zhaoguang 葛兆光 says that the so-called question of the legitimacy
of Chinese philosophy “is a pseudo-question, because it may never
have an answer.” I am not sure I agree with him because it depends on
what one counts as an “answer.” If one expects a simple “yes” or “no”
answer, obviously he is right. There is so much more involved in this
question. But if dissolving a question through careful examination of
the factors involved and, as a result, obtaining a better understanding
of the nature of the problem can count as an answer, it would be a
different story. But I think the statement he makes immediately after
is very well said:
Although it seems to be a pseudo-question, hidden behind it is a real
history—because underneath the disagreements about academic
institutional system, or categorization of knowledge, or criteria of
their evaluation, etc., there attached too many complicated senti-
ments of the Chinese academic and intellectual circles ever since the
modern era about whether they should merge together with the rest
of the world or adhere to their original position.9
What this points to is that the legitimacy of Chinese philosophy is not
merely an academic issue. It is also a social-political matter that must
be examined together with the historical background upon which it
was raised. Obviously the ancient Chinese masters such as Confucius
and Laozi all the way down to their successors prior to the late
nineteenth century were never bothered about whether their teach-
ings belonged to philosophy or not. When the seventeenth-century
Western missionaries encountered the great ancient Chinese masters,
they also had no problem calling the Chinese masters “philoso-
phers.”10 The problem arose roughly around the turn of the nine-
teenth to twentieth century when the modern West overpowered
China with its military supremacy. China at that time was disengaged
with the rest of the world as well as with its own tradition. The
intellectual tradition that once served as its source of vitality were
 THE CHANGING STATUS OF CHINESE PHILOSOPHY 589

treated as doctrines that maintained rigid social hierarchy and old

customs, instrumental for resisting anything new and foreign. The fact
that China was repeatedly defeated and humiliated by Western
powers served as a demonstration that its cultural heritage had lost its
legitimacy as “the intellectual prop of a living society,” as Joseph
Levenson puts it, and became “a shade, living only in the minds of
many, treasured in the mind for its own sake after the society which
had produced it and which needed it had begun to dissolve away.”11
Even though there have been many examples in which refined civili-
zations were conquered by barbarous cultures, such as the military
Spartans subdued the Athenians, the warlords of the Goths over-
whelmed the Christian Rome, and the nomadic Mongols brought
down the entire Song Dynasty China, when the warships of European
countries invaded China in the nineteenth century, it did seem ridicu-
lous for the Chinese to respond with Confucian rituals and moral
teachings and condemn the Europeans as barbarians. The Chinese
gongfu, whether in the form of martial arts or any other forms of art,
could be like a joke when confronted with steam engine and firearms.
One only has to flip the pages of Arthur Smith’s book Chinese Char-
acteristics to realize that in the eyes of most Europeans at the time, the
cultural baggage showed exactly how pedantic and even silly the
Chinese were.12
For centuries Western philosophy has played the role of a legislator,
a teacher, or even a savior for other cultures. While some Western
philosophers have perceived the need to learn about other cultures for
the sake of the “white man’s burden,” much fewer felt the need to learn
from other cultures. It was under the pressure of the material power
from the modern West, generations of Chinese scholars from the
beginning of the twentieth century worked hard to learn from Western
philosophy and tried to fit their own intellectual tradition into the
framework set by Western philosophy. As a result, we see a prevailing
asymmetry between China and the West.You cannot find a philosophy
department in China, or the entire East Asia for that matter, that has no
professor specialized in Western philosophy, and no student in philoso-
phy major can graduate in a Chinese university without taking sub-
stantial amount of Western philosophy courses. In the West, however,
having a specialist in Chinese philosophy remains the exception rather
than the norm for philosophy departments, and not only philosophy
students, even professors of philosophy would feel no embarrassment
for knowing absolutely nothing about Chinese philosophy.
There is ignorance, for sure, and perhaps arrogance as well. But
deep behind it is the enormous material power released by the
Enlightenment rationality which served as a proof of the supremacy
of Western philosophy. This power dramatically changed the world,
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forcing all non-Western cultures to give up their own traditions as

something outdated and useless, if not harmful. For a while its sweep-
ing power made almost all brilliant Chinese minds revolt against their
own intellectual tradition. (Yet it is worth noting that among Western
philosophers, there emerged not only radical critics of the West like
Marx and Nietzsche, even Bertrand Russell, who was broadly taken as
an outstanding representative of modern Western culture, had already
in the early 1920s described the Westernized world as “the restless,
intelligent, industrious, and militaristic nations which now afflict this
unfortunate planet.”13)
The idea that the West was more advanced and China needed to
shake off its own cultural past to catch up with the West was driven
deeply into the collective subconsciousness of the Chinese. From the
famous slogan “Welcome Mr. De 德 (democracy) and Mr. Sai 賽
(science)” of the May 4th Movement in 1919 to the cry to embrace the
Western “ocean culture” in the television series released in the 1980s
titled “River Eulogy” (Heshang 《河殇》), the idea has been a per-
sistent force in the modern patriotic movement in China. The side
effects of this trend are still visible everywhere in the country. From
reversed discrimination—a discrimination of Chinese as inferior to
Westerners by the Chinese themselves—to blind worship of every-
thing produced in the West, the colonization of consciousness is even
reflected in the government-controlled media in China. “Being highly
praised by Westerners” is often used ironically as an expression for
national pride! Even in the revolt against the Western hegemony of
power, as exemplified by a popular book in the 1990s titled China Can
Also Say No! one can find peremptory reactions that ironically reflect
the lack of confidence in China’s own cultural heritage.
It was with this historical background that seeking for the legiti-
macy of Chinese philosophy became an issue. It was as if traditional
Chinese thoughts could remain relevant only through finding its way
to be recognized by a respectable Western discipline, even if that
meant to twist and filter them in order to fit the label. For some
Chinese intellectuals, getting such a label was a pride, while for others,
it was a humiliation. But in either case, the “legitimacy” was more a
sign of power than a feature of the thoughts.

II. The Legitimacy of Western Philosophy

In the recent two decades, however, some profound changes have been
taking place. Looking broadly, we find that the social-political back-
ground upon which the legitimacy of Chinese philosophy became an
issue has already been fading. Along with its fast development in
 THE CHANGING STATUS OF CHINESE PHILOSOPHY 591

economy, China is rapidly becoming a major player in world politics;

and if British journalist Martin Jacques is right, this will soon extend
to the culture realm as well.14 Meanwhile, the supremacy of the
Western world has been challenged by various deep crises, including
environmental deprivation, terrorist threats, widespread individual-
ism, consumerism, psychological illnesses, and of course, the recur-
rence of global financial crisis. The “legitimacy” of modern Western
Enlightenment ideas has been more frequently questioned around the
globe. Although the human race has undeniably accomplished a great
deal in the past two hundred years, especially in science, technology,
and modern democracy, which should be largely attributed to the
Enlightenment ideas of modern Western philosophers, the deep crises
that came along can find their roots in the same ideas as well. Under
the influence of these ideas, the natural environment became an aggre-
gate of matter without intrinsic meaning, simply there for human
control and manipulation; humans became “resources” and their
development came to be measured by nothing but economic develop-
ment and material consumption; competition replaced cooperation;
rights replaced obligation; cultural and spiritual resources became
commodities; and so forth. The scale and depth of the crises literally
caused us to wonder how sustainable our mode of living is. Many
damages we have been causing are irreversible, and many of our
“solutions” are like quenching the thirst by drinking poison—
exchanging long-term damage for temporarily relief (a typical
example is the attempt to fix global financial crisis by bailing out banks,
so that the whole economy can continue to be based on high loan and
excessive consumption). The vicious circle runs like a swerve, with
every recovery followed by a quicker return to deeper troubles.
The inherent problems of the philosophical foundation of the
modern Enlightenment West are well diagnosed in a book published
in 1996, titled After Philosophy, End or Transformation.15 With an
impressive assembly of most influential contemporary philosophers in
the West as its contributors, Anglo-American as well as continental
European, the book presents synoptic reflections on various deep
flaws of Western philosophy. In the “General Introduction,” the
editors of the book highlight the most problematic conceptions at the
very core of modern Western philosophy:
First on the list is the conception of reason, which is supposedly the
ultimate foundation for necessary and universal knowledge. Oppose
to this fictional reason the editors point to the “contingency and
conventionality of the rules, criteria, and products of what counts as
rational speech and action at any given time and place,” which are
irreducibly plural and incommensurable, irremediably “local,” contin-
gent on different “games of language and forms of life.” Next is the
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conception of the sovereign rational subject—atomistic, autonomous,

and ideally self-transparent. Oppose to this is the recognition of
“the influence of the unconscious on the conscious, the role of the
preconceptual and nonconceptual in the conceptual, the presence of
the irrational,” the recognition of “the intrinsically social character of
‘structures of consciousness,’ the historical and cultural variability
of categories of thought and principles of action, their interdepen-
dence with the changing forms of social and material reproduction,”
and the recognition “that ‘mind’ will be misconceived if it is opposed
to ‘body,’ as will theory if it is opposed to practice.” Third on the list
is the conception of “knowledge as representation, according to
which the subject stands over against an independent world of objects
that it can more or less accurately represent.” Oppose to this is the
fact that as much as “[t]he object of knowledge is always already
preinterpreted, situated in a scheme,” “the subject of knowledge
belongs to the very world it wishes to interpret.” Last but not least is
the separation of the literal, logical dimension of language from the
rhetorical and aesthetic dimensions of language, achievable only “at
the cost of ignoring or suppressing” the “strategies and elements of
metaphor and other figurative devices that are nevertheless always at
work in philosophical discourse.”16
The focus of the book’s critical reflections is exactly the fundamen-
tal assumptions and methodology of the mainstream modern Western
philosophy. These critical reflections lead the authors of the book to
the understanding that (Western) philosophy is facing either an “end
or transformation” (hence the subtitle of the book)—a situation
somewhat analogous to the dilemma that Chinese philosophers have
had since early last century.
For some, like Rorty and Derrida, this means after philosophy,
period: The Platonic tradition has “outlived its usefulness.” For
others, like Habermas, philosophy is to be aufgehoben, as Marx put it,
into a form of social inquiry. For still others, like Gadamer and
Ricoeur, it means philosophy’s continuation through its transforma-
tion into philosophical hermeneutics; or in the case of MacIntyre and
Blumenberg, into a kind of philosophical historiography. And finally,
for some, like Davidson and Dummett, philosophy continues in the
altered yet not unfamiliar form of a theory of meaning.17

Of course these philosophers do not represent all, or even most of

the professional philosophers in the West. One reason for their being
influential is, I suspect, exactly because they stand out as different
from and more sensitive than the majority. Similar to the emergence
of the issue of the “legitimacy of Chinese philosophy” which entailed
a theoretical dimension and a social-political dimension, the crisis of
Western philosophy also involves these two dimensions. Without
 THE CHANGING STATUS OF CHINESE PHILOSOPHY 593

enough pressure from social-political changes, the crisis might be

perceived but not recognized. Philosophers may feel on the one hand
a sense of being insecure, of being out of touch and left out, hence the
need for self-defense, and yet on the other hand, still not motivated to
seek for viable solutions. For many mainstream professional philoso-
phers in the West, the intellectual game would just continue the way it
has been played for centuries. An article in the Inside Higher Ed
titled, “The Crisis of Philosophy,” by Jason Stanley at Rutgers Uni-
versity shows an interesting defensiveness that is characteristic of
defenders of an old scientific paradigm facing deep crisis. Stanley
begins the article by acknowledging the widespread recognition of the
need for humanities to be sensitive “to the risks of colonialist meth-
odologies” and “advance a more sympathetic understanding of the
differing veils humans adopt.” He then moves on to admitting that

Philosophy stands apart from this emerging consensus about the

purpose of the humanities. Its questions—which concern the nature
and scope of concepts like knowledge, representation, free will, ratio-
nal agency, goodness, justice, laws, evidence and truth—seem anti-
quated and baroque. Its central debates seem disconnected from the
issues of identity that plague and inspire the contemporary world.
Its pedantic methodology seems designed to alienate rather than
absorb. Whereas humanists have transformed into actors, using their
teaching and research as political tools, philosophers have withdrawn
ever more to positions as removed spectators, and not of life, but of
some abstracted and disconnected realm of Grand Concepts.18

From this one might expect him to say that philosophy should change.
It needs to pay more attention to the real life. But to the contrary, he
claims that there is nothing wrong with philosophy. “[P]hilosophy has
not changed. David Lewis writes very differently than Nietzsche. But
the unusual figure was Nietzsche, and not Lewis. The great philosophi-
cal works have always been difficult technical tomes, pursuing arcane
arguments in the service of grand metaphysical and epistemological
conclusions.”19 To be fair, Stanley is not defending pedantry for its
own sake (i.e., not because it is out of touch with reality). He is rather
defending the value of continuing the tradition of using timeless
methods and asking timeless questions because they satisfy our child-
like curiosity. Stanley is quite right about Nietzsche, and not Lewis,
being the unusual figure, but strangely he seems to take for granted
“usual” is equivalent to “right.” Like the slaves in Plato’s allegory of
the cave, he refuses to entertain the possibility that the usual might be
the shadows in the darkness, except that in this case, the darkness
might precisely be caused by the Platonic rationality. While the “child-
like curiosity” that he defends sounds innocent enough, it would not
be so if the practice of it leads to the opening of a Pandora’s box. Even
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if the realm of the pure Grand Concepts were harmless, looking at the
global condition, we can’t say that philosophers still have endless time
to dwell in it. Of course, as individuals, they have the right to be
disinterested in anything or even everything, but in choosing to stay
insensitive to the need to transform, they are losing the legitimacy for
entitling themselves “lovers of wisdom,” which is what “philosopher”
means in its Greek origin.

III. Where Chinese Philosophy Can Display

Its “Legitimacy”

If my argument in the previous sections is sound, then the “legiti-

macy” of a philosophical tradition should be viewed not so much from
the original baptism of the term than from its vitality. We are entering
an era in which the problem of legitimacy will be more on the Western
philosophy side than it is on the Chinese side. Indeed, in the recent
two decades we have seen more and more Chinese academic institu-
tions use the term “guoxue 國學”—Chinese traditional learning—for
the study of the masters. It indicates a shift from placing the study
solely under the label of “philosophy.”There is literally a guoxue craze
in China marked by the emergence of enormous amount of publica-
tions, high–audience rating television programs, and the establish-
ment of numerous higher learning institutes dedicated to guoxue. The
label “Chinese philosophy” is still widely used there, but it is becom-
ing more an umbrella under which Chinese traditional learning
engages with Western philosophy than the name of its sole asylum.
This significant change indicates a practical arrangement for
addressing the legitimacy of Chinese philosophy. On the one hand it
restores the integrity of traditional Chinese thought by dedicating a
special category, namely guoxue, to its study. The craze for it is a clear
indication of its renewed legitimacy in the country. On the other hand,
the new system still keeps Chinese philosophy as an academic cat-
egory and institutional discipline, showing a commitment to study the
corps of Chinese classics philosophically and to engage in cross-
cultural philosophical dialogue, leaving the space in which traditional
Chinese thoughts can both contribute to world philosophy and trans-
form itself in the process. Interestingly, behind these two labels (i.e.,
guoxue and Chinese philosophy) is usually the same team of scholars,
some more oriented to what is in the West called sinology and others
more oriented to philosophy. This ambiguity may seem confusing, but
it actually allows necessary elasticity for creative energy and vitality.
In terms of the content of their studies, there is also a new trend.
During the early time of the last century, philosophical reading of the
 THE CHANGING STATUS OF CHINESE PHILOSOPHY 595

history of Chinese thought was, as Hu Shi puts it, framed as addressing

“How can we [Chinese] best assimilate modern [Western] civilization
in such a manner as to make it congenial and congruous and continu-
ous with the civilization of our own making?”20 While this continues
to be a primary direction, scholars in the field of Chinese philosophy
have become more conscientious in the direction of asking “How can
traditional Chinese thought contribute to world philosophy?”
In comparison, the West’s receptiveness toward Chinese philoso-
phy is much more passive. Granted that the attitude of the main-
stream Western philosophy toward Chinese philosophy has in general
improved over the last a few decades, it has shown little initiative in
reaching out to the Chinese side. Their limited acceptance of Chinese
philosophy remains largely due to being “politically correct” than to
genuine interest in having dialogue with the Chinese tradition. In
some cases, it is more a response to the increasing demand of the
market (students’ and readers’ interest) than to the realization that
Chinese philosophy is a rich resource for inspiration. To quote Ge
Zhaoguang again, “The arrogance of Western philosophy toward
Chinese philosophy is on the one hand a subconscious expression of
the dominant discourse of the modern West toward the East, and on
the other hand a subconscious self-enclosure for protecting the tradi-
tional Western territory called ‘philosophy.’”21 It seldom occurs to a
Western-minded philosopher that in the world today, not to include
Chinese philosophy in their resource pool can be more unfortunate
for Western philosophy than the other way around.
Looking back at the contributors of the volume After Philosophy,
we can make two relevant observations. First, we notice that while they
contributed to the deconstruction of the myth of modern Western
philosophy, they offered relatively few constructive ideas, and because
of this, their deconstruction entails the danger of slipping into “a deep
suspicion, hostility and ridicule of any aspiration to unity, reconcilia-
tion, harmony, totality, the whole, the one.”22 It leaves an abyss from
which radical relativism and nihilism will breed, and pluralism would
become not only a description of the existential condition of our age,
but also an ending mark for dialogue. If we are inevitably thinking and
living within the confinements of our cultural and religious back-
grounds, as they argue, then ethnocentrism or any other forms of
centrism would just be considered natural and inevitable.
Second, we notice that while their emphasis on plurality, contin-
gency, the inseparability of the mind and the body, the subject and the
object, the individual and the social-historical, and so forth, have led
them to explore these marginalized or neglected territories, their aims
are still mainly confined in uncovering, redescribing, or understanding
the human condition, but not in how to transform it. Their diagnoses
596 PEIMIN NI

of the problems of Western philosophy remain largely in the realm of

“knowing that” (e.g., that it fails to recognize that mind and body,
theory and practice, etc., are inseparable), but not “knowing how.” It
is as if in this regard they are wearing the same fetter that they want
to break. This reminds us of the remarks made by Hall and Ames—in
talking about the dichotomy of theory and practice, they said that the
dichotomy “has so long been presupposed in our [Western] tradition
that the philosophical categories that form the inventory of our
speculative notions are themselves construed with reference to this
dichotomy.” “[I]t is doubtful whether the resources available within
our own cultural tradition are adequate to resolve successfully the
crucial dilemmas associated with attempting to think one’s way
through to a sufficiently novel understanding of thinking.”23
In cases like this, traditional Chinese philosophy can offer construc-
tive help. Take the concept of gongfu as an example. During the
Song-Ming Period in China, the word “gongfu” was widely used by the
Neo-Confucians, the Daoists, and the Buddhists alike for the art of
living one’s life in general (for which martial arts serve as a good
example), and they all unequivocally spoke of their teachings as dif-
ferent schools of gongfu. While this may be conceived as a reason for
rejecting these schools of thought as philosophy, it is in fact the
opposite, for this is exactly a lens from which we can see how Chinese
thought can enrich Western philosophy. First, it can help us to better
define an important field of philosophical study that is yet under-
developed in the West. Beside the traditional major constituents of
philosophy, such as metaphysics, which studies humans as “beings,”
epistemology, which studies humans as “knowers,” and axiology (ethics
and aesthetics), which studies humans as “value bearers,” there must be
a field devoted to the study of humans as practitioners or agents.There
are branches of Western philosophy that study human action, such as
praxiology and action theory, but a general feature shared by these
theories is that they tend to take it for granted that human agents are
choice makers. Little attention is directed toward the cultivation and
transformation of the agent. A gongfu master does not simply make
good choices and use effective instruments to satisfy whatever prefer-
ences a person happens to have. In gongfu practices the human agent is
never simply accepted as a given. While an efficacious action may be
the result of a sound rational decision, an action that demonstrates
gongfu has to be rooted in the entire person, including one’s bodily
dispositions and sentiments, and its goodness is displayed not only
through its consequences but also in the artistic style one does it.
Gongfu also provides a perspective from which philosophical con-
cepts, ideas, theories, and even traditions can be seen as recommen-
dations or instructions rather than representations or descriptions of
 THE CHANGING STATUS OF CHINESE PHILOSOPHY 597

reality. As Richard Rorty has suggested, our theories can be “levers,”

and not merely “mirrors” (although he apparently contradicted
himself when he claimed that philosophy would no longer be useful
once the dream of seeking for objective Truth is shattered). The
perspective will allow us to see that, for example, in labeling tradi-
tional Chinese thought as philosophy, we are not merely describing a
fact, which will be judged as either true or false; we are, as J. L. Austin
would say, doing things. We are adjusting our attention, mobilizing our
energy, and setting up the aim of philosophy not only at forming
theories but also becoming masters of the art of life. From the gongfu
perspective, even John Locke’s and Leibniz’s conflicting claims about
human knowledge may serve as complementing guiding instructions.
The perspective differs from that of morality in that morality is com-
monly conceived as a matter of setting up obligations and constraints,
whereas gongfu instructions aim at enabling human agents with
abilities. From it, we can more easily appreciate the relevance of
uncodifiable style of a good life, and less likely be obsessed with
abstract universal principles. Likewise we can understand better why
the Chinese masters used ways of presentation that sometimes appear
at odds with rationality.
Furthermore, the study of gongfu as a philosophical field and the
application of gongfu perspective can lead to the development of
distinct philosophical theories, such as “gongfu ethics,” “gongfu epis-
temology,” and “gongfu philosophy of language.” Through the gongfu
lens the otherwise familiar landscapes will all look somewhat differ-
ent. It can also likely serve as a leading thread through which various
insightful new themes developed in the West may get synthesized into
a coherent constructive account—I have in mind themes such as the
therapeutic works of Nietzsche and late Wittgenstein, the revival of
virtue ethics, Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between “knowing what” and
“knowing how,” Austin’s work on speech acts, Merleau-Ponty’s study
on the body, Michael Polanyi’s tacit knowledge, Foucault’s “arts
d’existence” (aesthetics of existence) and “la technique de soi” (tech-
nology of the self), Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum’s capability
approach, and of course the practical philosophies we mentioned
earlier, namely praxiology, action theory, pragmatism, and many,
many more.
What I sketched above about gongfu is an example of how engag-
ing Chinese resources philosophically can legitimize both Chinese
and Western philosophies. By this short sentence, I try to encompass
three points: The first point is about the particular gongfu example—it
illustrates that when those philosophers swept traditional Chinese
thoughts out into the realm of religious studies or area studies, they
blocked their access toward the vision of “practical holism,” as Hubert
598 PEIMIN NI

Dreyfus calls it.24 They eclipsed the practical dimension of human life
and the need for self-transformation, about which Chinese philosophy
happens to contain particularly rich and insightful resources.
The second point is a more general one—the example shows that
comparative philosophy is cross-cultural fertilization, which can effec-
tively revitalize both sides. For the sake of getting new energy and
resource, Western philosophy should first recognize its own locality in
order to reach its universality. It should shake off its colonialist atti-
tude, stop thinking that broadening its own scope to enclose Chinese
philosophy is adopting a homeless child or granting someone asylum.
A more realistic and constructive attitude is to conceive it as an
opportunity for a good marriage—not forced by any political or mate-
rial power, but a union of two free individuals for the benefit of both.
What is most important is not who gets to use which “family name”
but what will be most conducive for a productive interaction and for
producing “children” of true “love of wisdom.”
The third point is about the word legitimize. I deliberatively choose
the verb form here, indicating that it is better for us to conceive
legitimacy as created rather than discovered. It is unfruitful to discuss
the issue with the essentialist approach, trying to answer whether the
corps of Chinese classics is philosophy or not. It is more fruitful to
think that it is up to us philosophers to bring vitality, and hence
legitimacy, to philosophy today, Western or Chinese. In the practice of
reading Chinese thoughts philosophically and engaging it in dialogue
with Western philosophy, we are creating (or re-creating) Chinese
philosophy and revitalizing Western philosophy.
This view entails that philosophy would be better served when we
take it as an evolving concept for human search for wisdom. This view
may entail a danger, as Carine Defoort points out, of stretching the
concept of “philosophy” so broad that it “encompasses almost every-
thing,” which would of course make it “mean almost nothing.”25 But I
don’t think we are anywhere near this danger yet. In the current
situation, our major concern is the opposite—the overly conservative
self-enclosure in Western philosophy that could suffocate the very
legitimacy of philosophy that we try to protect.

GRAND VALLEY STATE UNIVERSITY

Allendale, Michigan

Endnotes

Acknowledgment of Rights and Credentials: This article is a reincarnation of a paper

originally presented at the International Conference on the Development of Chinese
Philosophy in Recent 30 Years, Wuhan University, June 24–27, 2010, and The 4th World
 THE CHANGING STATUS OF CHINESE PHILOSOPHY 599

Forum on China Studies, Shanghai, November 6–8, 2010, which was later published in
Chinese, under the title Cong Hefaxing Dao Lifazhe—Dangdai Zhongguo Zhexue Diwei
zhi Zhuanbian 從合法性到立法者—當代中國哲學地位之轉變 (From ‘Legitimacy’ to
‘Legislation’—An Assessment of the Changing Status of Chinese Philosophy)” in Rujia
Wenhua Yanjiu 《儒家文化研究》(Confucian Culture Study) vol. 5, ed. by the Philosophy
Department, Wuhan University, Beijing: Sanlian Press, 2012, 243–272. The current version
is substantially rewritten specially for the 40th anniversary issue of JCP. I am indebted to
the Editor-in-Chief, Chung-ying Cheng, and an anonymous reviewer of this paper for their
helpful comments and suggestions.
1. Although the official beginning of the discussion is marked by Jin Yuelin’s 金岳霖
(1895–1984) distinction between “a history of philosophy in China” and “a history of
Chinese philosophy” in his report on Feng Youlan’s (Fung Yu-lan) work on the
history of Chinese philosophy published in 1930s (see the appendix of his A History
of Chinese Philosophy, Vol. II, trans. Derk Bodde [Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1952–1953], the effort of trying to gain “legitimacy” for Chinese philosophy
began much earlier, at least since 1919. See Carine Defoort, “Is There Such a Thing as
Chinese Philosophy? Arguments of an Implicit Debate” (Philosophy East & West 51,
no. 3 [2001]: 393–413) for a lucid summary of the history and analysis of the major
positions related to this question.
2. The first person who used what is now the standard Chinese term for philosophy,
zhexue 哲学 (the learning to become wise), was a Japanese scholar named Nishi
Amane (1829–1887) in his Hyakuichi Shimron 「百一新論」 (Chin.: Baiyi Xinlun
《百一新論》) (1874).
3. Leiter Reports, http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2006/12/the_situation_f.html
4. Newsletter on Asian and Asian-American Philosophers and Philosophy, APA News-
letter 8, no. 1 (Fall 2008): 7.
5. In saying this, I do not mean that there is nothing in the Chinese tradition that truly
resemble mainstream Western philosophy (including the pure interest in pursuing
theoretical knowledge), nor do I mean that these elements have no value. What I
mean is that the recognition of these should not block our vision about what is more
distinctively Chinese, which is not only valuable because of its Chinese-ness, but more
importantly because it can contribute to the advancement of world philosophy.
6. Chung-ying Cheng, New Dimensions of Confucian and Neo-Confucian Philosophy
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 5.
7. See Ames and Rosemont’s introduction to their translation of the Analects, in Roger
T. Ames and Henry Rosemont, Jr., The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Trans-
lation (New York: Ballantine Books, 1998), 30–35; Joel Kupperman, Learning from
Asian Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 12–13; Donald Munro,
The Concept of Man in Early China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969), ix;
and Chad Hanson, A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1992), 33–52. Many others have stressed the point in one way or another. It has
led to a discussion of the legitimacy of treating Chinese philosophy, Confucianism
included, as an object of intellectual inquiry. See Kwong-loi Shun, Mencius and Early
Chinese Thought (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 5–9, for a summary of
the main concerns and arguments.
8. Li Zehou, Shiyong Lixing yu Yuegan Wenhua 《實用理性與樂感文化》 (Practical
Reason and Aesthetical Culture) (Beijing: Sanlian Shudian, 2004), 353.
9. Ge Zhaoguang, “Weishenme Shi Sixiangshi—‘Zhongguo Zhexue’ Wenti Zaisi
為什麽是思想史——‘中國哲學’問題再思” (Why It Is History of Thought—Further
Reflections on the Question about “Chinese Philosophy”), Jianghan Luntan
《江漢論壇》 (Jianghan Forum) 7 (2003): 24.
10. For example, the first English version of the Analects has the title The Morals of
Confucius, A Chinese Philosopher. It was converted by a British named Randal Taylor
from the Latin version of Confucius, Sinarum Philosophus (Confucius, Philosopher of
the Chinese), originally translated by Belgian Jesuit missionary to China, Phillippe
Couplet (1623–1693) and a group of Jesuits and the French version of La Morale de
Confuciu, Philosophe de la Chine (1688) by Pierre Savouret.
600 PEIMIN NI

11. Confucian China and Its Modern Fate (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1968), x.
12. See Chapter 1 of François Jullien’s Le Détour et l’Accès. Stratégies du Sens en Chine,
en Grèce (Paris: Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 1995) for an insightful analysis of
Arthur Smith’s book.
13. Bertrand Russell, The Problem of China (New York: Century, 1922), 8.
14. Martin Jacques: When China Rules the World, The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the
End of the Western World (New York: Allen Lane, 2009).
15. Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy, eds., After Philosophy, End
or Transformation? (Boston: MIT Press, 1987).
16. Ibid., 3–5.
17. Ibid., 2–3.
18. http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/04/05/stanley
19. Ibid.
20. Hu Shi, Gudai Zhongguo Luoji Fangfa zhi Jinhua 《古代中国逻辑方法之进化》 (The
Development of the Logical Method in Ancient China) (Shanghai: Shangwu
Yinshuguan, 1922), 7–9.
21. Ge Zhaoguang, “Weishenme Shi Sixiangshi—‘Zhongguo Zhexue’ Wenti Zaisi,” 25.
22. Richard Bernstein, “Metaphysics, Critique, Utopia,” The Review of Metaphysics 42,
no. 2 (1988): 259.
23. David Hall and Roger Ames, Thinking through Confucius (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1987), 38, 39.
24. Hubert Dreyfus, “Holism and Hermeneutics,” The Review of Metaphysics 34, no. 1
(1980): 3–23.
25. Defoort, “Is There Such a Thing as Chinese Philosophy?” 406.