On Flight: Bin Song (part I)

In Neo-Confucianism, there is a slogan: “Read books to develop virtues; develop virtues to nourish your life!” This is exactly why I prefer the Chinese language philosophically. The pictographic and ideographic nature of Chinese characters has a special aesthetic appeal that is more conducive than most Western languages to the organic connection between abstract ideas, aesthetic feelings, and their practical implications in the everyday world.  Reading Neo-Confucian writings is my spiritual exercise, and so far as my reading experience goes, no other language can function similarly in this dimension of my spiritual life.  As one great classical Ru philosopher, Xunzi, said, the best method of learning is to find the right teachers.

So writes Bin Song, who earned two doctorates – one in philosophy and one in religious studies.  But neither of these Western disciplines captures what he is up to. 

I first met Bin Song in June 2019 at University of Notre Dame’s Philosophy as a Way of Life Project where he was a panelist on the relationship between religion and philosophy.  I reached out to him recently when thinking about the next steps in this mini-series on philosophy as a way of life. After all, there is a need for more comparative philosophy in the U.S. academy, including for more Chinese philosophy, and perhaps an interview might play some small part in expanding philosophical culture. There was this, too, that I have been intent in this mini-series not to identify philosophy as a way of life simplistically with the practices of the old Hellenistic schools. Plus, I just like Bin Song: I find him to be earnest and broad-minded.

The discussion that Bin Song and I had was extensive enough that we decided to break it in two. Below, we discuss Bin Song’s origins in China’s complex cultural history, his move to France to study philosophy, and some preliminaries about Ruism (sometimes called “Confucianism”). This story sets up next month’s “Part II.”

When I met Bin Song face to face by video call, there was calligraphy in the background of his study.  One piece was an expressive pictogram for the Chinese word for flying, “飛”. I began the interview by asking him to describe himself – to convey his flight path.

Bin Song: It is hard to tell what one’s self looks like, since identity is a fluid construction. However, I believe one’s devotion to an ideal or a set of ideals of life can define one’s permanent identity to a significant extent as long as the ideals are constantly devoted to. Seen from this perspective, I do have a way to talk of myself in this interview.

At the end of my adolescence, I longed to be an accomplished writer. I was inspired by poets such as Ai Qing (1910-1996) [the father of Ai Weiwei! – jbk], and wanted to pursue the same artistic and creative career as Ai. However, I was recruited as a philosophy major in 1999.

(jbk) Here’s the context. In China, students are allocated to universities and even courses of study. One factor is the student’s performance on national exams. Depending on the examination score, a student may do more or less well in being chosen for a preferred subject. 

Coming from a Ruist family that was steeped in the practice of the humane arts and rituals and being himself a person with much curiosity, Bin Song put Literature high on his list of preferred courses of study.  Low on his list were the typically most-sought-out majors, such as Finance!  But he had done well on his exams. “How odd, right?“

When the allocation board of the admission office for Nankai University saw that a high performing student had chosen an un-sought-after major, they put the student in Philosophy to help the unit meet its quota!  It needed strong majors, and here was a successful, unorthodox person. But what is orthodoxy?

Bin Song: I see myself as a traditional Ru (Confucian) scholar who tries to make the world better through reviving the tradition in a global and contemporary context. This may imply responding to global philosophical discussions using traditional Ru sources or tackling shared problems of local and global human societies drawing upon Ru and global philosophies.

(jbk):  Why “Ruism” and not “Confucianism”?

Bin Song: “Confucianism” is a colonized name of the Ru tradition (儒家), which was invented by Protestant missionaries in 19^th century due to their biased conception about what “religion” is supposed to be in non-Christian countries. According to this conception, “religion” must have a God, a religious leader with absolute authority, an established institution of priesthood, and a canon of scriptures with an elaborated system of non-secular rituals.

Against this standard, whether the ancient Ru tradition in China is a religion remains highly controversial. However, for the sake of comparison, the Protestant missionaries just named the Ru tradition according to its founding figure, Confucius, and, for the sake of conversion, believed seeds of religious truth in the tradition could be ultimately fulfilled by the spread of the message of Jesus Christ.

Because Protestant missionaries comprised the major part of the earliest sinologists in the West, the name “Confucianism” became prevalent in ordinary English ever since. In the Chinese world, the effort to religionize the Ru tradition according to the model of Christanity in the West was once raised by intellectuals such as Kang Youwei in the early 20^th century. But by and large, it is a failed effort, and scholars have never stopped debating on how to conceptualize the religiosity of Ruism.

The reason why “Ruism” is preferred over “Confucianism” is obvious for me: Let’s just call the tradition how the tradition called itself in history. But I am aware of the fact that “Ruism” is not a perfect alternative. “-[I]sm” tends to emphasize theory more than practice, which is not the case in the Ru tradition.

Also, varying East Asian countries (where Ruism was no less prevalent in their cultural history) Romanize the character 儒 in different ways. If a scholar unilaterally declares a “correct” translation without collaborating with their East Asian colleagues in the field, it may make its contemporary Chinese pinyin form “Ru” sound hegemonic, which I do not wish to imply.

However, despite these imperfections, the essentially untranslated “Ru” is still much more preferable than “Confucianism.”

(jbk) What was it like for you being a scholar in China?

Bin Song:  Growing up in China, I found two perplexing things in my life. First, ancient Chinese thought, particularly Ruism, had been constantly critiqued and even denigrated by a significant percentage of modern Chinese intellectuals since the early 20^th century. For them, Ruism was the major culprit to blame for China’s national defeat by the West in the 19^th and 20^th century.  This anti-Ruist view had even become ideological during the time of People’s Republic of China before the 1980s.

Second, despite this very strong anti-traditional intellectual trend, basically all people in the village where my extensive family is rooted (the entire village shares three extensive families with three distinctive surnames and is very populated) are still strongly attached to a long-standing habit of regularly and rigorously performing communal rituals such as ancestor devotion, tomb sweeping, or the funeral and drinking ceremony. The village is about a 90-minute drive from Confucius’s hometown, Qu Fu; so you can readily imagine that all these rituals would be naturally interpreted by my parents and grandparents as Ruist in nature.

However, I have to say, these ritual performances are philosophically quite hollow. The elders in the village did sometimes talk about whether they really believe our ancestors are still alive when they carefully arranged those offerings of paper money and food in front of our ancestors’ tombs.  However, so far as my knowledge goes, not a single person in the area where I grow up can connect these rituals to ancient Ru classics or tell us why (for what ultimate purpose) we need to regularly perform these rituals.

Most importantly, I didn’t feel human relationships in the village became particularly better or somewhat enjoyable because of the ritual performances. Quite often, the rituals became a burden pressured upon people to show to others that they are still “normal.” When conducting one’s real human relationships and dealing with real human issues, money, status, or simply [what we call] reputable “face” (面子) are still the dominant influencers.  

In other words, before the Ru tradition became overtly supported again by the central Chinese government (a quite recent phenomenon), regular Chinese people especially in the vast rural and sub-urban areas were still practicing Ru rituals, yet without any sincere understanding of them. Their morale had not yet been significantly improved because of these practices either.

If we put these perplexities into the same perspective, a natural consequence to an intellectually young mind such as mine would be to ask, What is Ruism after all?  

Therefore, starting from around my freshman year in the college, I became quite dedicated to reading everything that I could find about ancient Chinese thought.

I did this mostly by myself. One major method for me was to read Chinese thought by actually transcribing it! The first classic I transcribed onto my own paper is Laozi’s Dao De Jing. Then, I did so with many Buddhist and Ruist classics. During the process, I had an intensive religious experience when I transcribed Zen Buddhist texts and the Ruist Classic of Change.

(jbk) Bin Song worked long hours in the Nankai University (old) Library.  One day, after transcribing the (Buddhist) Platform Sutra, he took a break and went outside the library for a breath of fresh air.  There, he had an overwhelming emotional experience of wholeness that seemed, as he described it, to be ecstatic.  Afterwards, he wanted to articulate what the experience meant and how to maintain its otherwise transient quality.  This plunged him deeper into philosophy and religion in order to understand what had happened:

Bin Song:  I started to find ways to regularly practice meditation and nurtured my interest in religious studies. Because of this in-depth reading and practice, I came neither to approve of the anti-Ruist intellectual trend in early Modern China, nor to agree with the hollow ritual practices of my extensive family. Instead, I became a firm believer in the value of ancient Chinese thought, particularly of the Ru tradition, and tried to revive it in this increasingly complicated and globalized world.

This is basically how I came to what I am doing now.  After years of studies, one conclusion I’ve reached is that despite being triggered by the Buddhist text, my religious experience was always mediated by human discourses susceptible to critical investigation.  I ended up disagreeing with the central Buddhist teaching of “no-self” and its radical doubt towards human language and adopted a mainly Ruist framework that integrated religious experience with other aspects of life.

Today, I feel content to myself in my lifestyle. As the Ru tradition consistently advocates, before changing the world, you need to change yourself. Without a deep feeling of self-contentedness towards my own quotidian and ordinary moments of daily life, I do not know how to manage a family, a career, or anything beyond my individual life in any substantial way.

(jbk): So there was a powerful experience driving all of this academic work, an experience appearing within the cultural tensions of an upbringing, social history and political state that had formed Bin Song.

How should we approach cultural tension, even conflict, when it defines our lives from our earliest memories of family, our first involvement with the political realities that shape our society, and our sense of what is available to us as a way to grow and become more conscious of what matters?

Seeking to understand his experiences and the cultural bifurcation modern China underwent, Bin Song turned to the tools and traditions of European philosophy. He went to France where he might work on early modern philosophy and, in particular, Descartes, whose Discourse on Method interested him.

To prepare for this flight (and still a young man), Bin Song studied physics and other scientific subjects at Nankai.  He wanted to arrive in Paris with a background in science. He had also been reading Sartre, Nietzsche, and other modern European authors.

Bin Song: I went to France to study Cartesian metaphysics and philosophy of science in the Center of Cartesian Studies at the University of Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV) for one year. This contributed to my first PhD and the publication of my first monograph [Descartes’ Mechanical Philosophy – from the Perspective of Metaphysics and Physics (in Chinese), Beijing: China Social Sciences Press, 2012 – jbk].

One motivation for me to choose Descartes was the famous question asked by the historian of Chinese science and technology, Joseph Needham: Why did ancient China not invent modern science, despite its historically long-standing advantage with technology compared to other parts of the world?

However, my stay in Paris and travel in Europe gave me insights beyond this motivation. It was only after I finished my study in Paris that I decided to choose to be a university scholar for my career! My career was not quite clear before that.

I had gotten a chance to experience how the most rigorous philosophical work gets done consistently at such a historical institution and in such a culturally dense and influential region. Luckily, after I returned to China, I got a position teaching Western philosophies and philosophy of science at Nankai University.  

[But for someone with Bin Song’s experience, philosophy was only partially adequate. – jbk] In 2011, I obtained a fellowship to study at Harvard University as a Harvard-Yenching Visiting Fellow. There, I found that America is a free place to study and practice religion. I decided to give up my tenured job in a major Chinese university, and continued my graduate studies in the U.S. at Boston University, where I earned my second Ph.D. in religious studies.

(jbk): Amazing. Given all that had been circling around inside you since adolescence, how did you come to understand the relationship between philosophy and religion? 

Bin Song: It took me a long time to figure out the exact difference between “philosophy” and “religion” when these terms are used.

Over the summer of 2020, I argued that the establishment of Christianity in medieval Europe is a watershed for the development in question. Before Christianity’s establishment, philosophy and religion aimed at the same thing: a whole-sale personal transformation in relation to ultimate reality, yet with different means.

Philosophy focused upon spiritual exercise aided by critical discourse, while religion focused upon ritual-elicited spiritual experience which subordinates the agential role of human intelligence to a subservient and receptive attitude, viz., piety, towards deities.

However, after its establishment, Christianity as formalized by the orthodox Creeds was treated as the genuine religion in contrast to other non-genuine religions, while philosophy was stripped of its originally rich, spiritual content and instead became employed as a subservient analytic tool to parse out and re-affirm the creedal, orthodox version of Christianity in varying cultural contexts.

This medieval distinction between religion and philosophy still holds a strong influence nowadays, since philosophy is mainly practiced as an intellectual endeavor to prioritize human reasoning, while religion involves a certain kind of subservience towards transcendent reality (normally referring to varying gods and deities in the West) that subordinates human agency.

But Ruism can productively break the boundary of “philosophy” and “religion” due to the fact that Ruism just did everything that these Western concepts assume one cannot do! In the pre-Christian Hellenistic world, philosophers do not perform rituals, while religionists do not argue. But Ruists do both, namely, they perform rituals while simultaneously debating their efficiency and truth, and hence, they also reform rituals.

Today, philosophers typically do not practice their thought in a fully embodied way, while varying religions are supposedly detached from public human life and walled into private institutions under the principle of the separation of church and state. Religions are thought of as being hardwired with a non-rational mentality so that their authorities are not supposed to be directly invoked for public debate on policy issues.

Yet none of these assumptions are applied to the Ru tradition, which always urges scholars to practice what they are thinking and to be dedicated both to spiritual exercise and political engagement.

It is a marvel that Ruism crosses all the boundaries set by those Western categories, isn’t it? I think it is very important for contemporary philosophers and scholars of religion to feel the marvel in order that we can be freed from previous assumptions which may hinder the full flourishing of human life and undermine the continual development of human society.

(jbk): Thus, Bin Song’s “way of life” is neither “philosophy” nor “religion” exactly, as these are conventionally understood in the Anglophone world. Is so much a question of translation?

Bin Song: Whenever I feel somewhat exhausted by life, I turn to reading ancient Neo-Confucian masters’ works written in traditional Chinese, practice meditation in a Ruist style, and write poems in traditional Chinese. I maintain connections with several major Ru scholars around China (and maintained a close relationship for many years with an erudite Buddhist monk because of visiting studies in Taiwan and Hong Kong).

Although I write bilingually, the source of Neo-Confucianism as it is manifested in multiple types of contemporary scholarship is always the most vigorous, alive and rewarding spiritual fountain of my life.

In the subsequent part II of this interview next month, we will discuss colonialism, philosophy as a way of life, religion, and Ruist practice. Please stay tuned.

~

This is an installment of Into Philosophy.