I enjoyed the previous interview with Bin Song, in which he relayed the story of how he came out of mainland China from a Ruist family to study Chinese Buddhism, Daoism, Ruism, and Western Philosophy and Science in China; moved to France to study Descartes and Modern Philosophy, and later came to the United States of America to engage with Theology and Religious Studies as practiced within U.S. academic institutions. His story expressed his view of the fluidity of identity well. His understanding of Ruist practice as spiritual, ritual, political, and for the common good of humankind struck me, too, especially as I imagined it forming within a young scholar who transcribed classical Chinese pictographs, relating the symbols to practical and political enlightenment.
I wanted to understand how Ruist practice relates to some touchstones of Western enlightenment (lower case “e”). So I looked to points of contact: Bin Song’s views on the Enlightenment (capital “E”) and what he learned from Hellenistic philosophy. Doing this, however, drew me into the colonial history of the Enlightenment, a recurring subject of Sidra’s and my work here with the APA.
What I discovered was surprising, although perhaps it should not have been. As a scholar from a tradition that rejects binary thinking and privileges harmonious relationships kept alive through their dynamic tensions, Bin Song’s views evaded both dismissive and zealous views of the Enlightenment, suggesting as Michael Eze had, that the common good of humankind depends on dialogue.
Ever since learning about how to practice decolonization, especially from Bruce Kafer and Kyle Whyte, I have been mindful of the internal colonialism that Michael Eze discussed when he emphasized the importance of “decolonizing agency.” Bin Song’s manner of being a scholar – the ever moving back and forth his thinking attests to in finding what is harmonious between traditions – gave me a lesson out of school. So, too, did his overall sense of being a scholar. After all, in our precarious and low-quality economy, scholarship is fraught with contradictions, fractured by stratagems of competition, habits of neglect and division, corrosions of self-commodification. Reactive rejections loom large. But …
Bin Song: “Scholarship is the public’s instrument, useful for all manner of things under the heavens.” This is one slogan of traditional Ru scholarship. The ancient school built by Confucius, the first one [autonomous from the state] in ancient Chinese civilization, aimed to produce “士” (shi, the “scholar-official”) who could serve local governments using knowledge and virtues. From the very beginning of the Ru tradition, scholarship was understood not in the Platonic sense of “pursuing knowledge for the sake of knowledge”, but with a pragmatic orientation.
What could this mean? Bin Song explained that there are three general criteria for Ru scholarship, and these ended up organizing the completion of our interview:
- That scholarship should integrate human life
- That scholarship should be sincere (scholars should “bring their full heart” to scholarly life)
- That scholarship should be doable and useful.
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Criterion I. “That it should integrate human life”
– Not to Be Binary with the Enlightenment
(jbk): Can you apply these criteria to how you approach the Enlightenment?
Bin Song: The Eurocentric Enlightenment was the greatest intellectual engine for the modernization of the world, and consequently, the arrival of the era of Western colonization as well. The Ru tradition bore the brunt of Western colonization engineered as such in a variety of East Asian countries starting around the early 19th century. So it is easy for me to explain why I relate to the Enlightenment as a Ru scholar: The Enlightenment caused the greatest turmoil and transformation in the history of Ru tradition. Hence, as a Ru scholar, I have an obligation to thoroughly study and understand it, to incorporate its best, avoid its worst, and to let the Enlightenment become an essential component of Ru spirituality that we can practice today.
It may feel odd to hear that a Ru scholar intends to critically incorporate a Western lineage of thought that greatly undermined the status of Ruism in East Asia. However, this was not the first time that Ruism faced a challenge from seemingly foreign thought. The migration of Buddhism to China in the Medieval Age resulted in the creation of one of the most systematic and mature forms of Ru thought, the learning of Dao (道學), which is called “Neo-Confucianism” in English.
Taking the sustainment of human civilization as a central goal, Ruism does not approve of any binary thinking between the West and the East. Instead, a Ru scholar should try to see the development of human history in each corner of the Earth as intrinsic to the development of her own humanity so as to be able to draw all available resources of world civilization for the ultimate cause of dynamic harmonization. Yes, Enlightenment philosophies are worth blaming for many tendencies. However, as still the most powerful philosophical foundation of modern society, the Enlightenment contains seeds of truth in virtually all areas of human thought that deserve to be carefully studied, nurtured, and perfected.
(jbk): As Bin Song then showed, the learning goes both ways:
Bin Song: An often overlooked historical fact by contemporary scholars is that, due to early Catholic missionaries’ translation and spread of ancient Chinese thought, Ruism was once a great inspiration for Enlightenment philosophers to defy the religious authority of the Catholic church and to devise their own philosophical blueprint for a rational, prosperous, and free, human society. The philosophical world was more interconnected than it is parochially envisioned by many.
For me, there are two obvious benefits from exploring the interconnection. First, the [sweeping dismissals of Ruism by] anti-Ruist intellectuals in early Modern China were unwarranted, since the resources they drew upon to critique Ruism, viz., Western Enlightenment philosophies, were actually inspired by [Ruism]! Second, as a Ru scholar, I can see the excellences and flaws of the Enlightenment as my own excellences and flaws. Why do we need to pit one philosophy against another if they are intertwined with each other both logically and historically?
(jbk): A month prior, Bin Song had made this following remark about his educational path:
Bin Song: When I had intensive religious experiences triggered by transcribing and reading ancient Chinese classics in college, I was faced by two major puzzles:
- What were these experiences all about?
- Why were they so transient?
In other words, I was struggling with articulating their meaning and maintaining them. So, naturally, since Western philosophies are also taught in China, and it was thought that Western philosophy is good at logic, I started to systematically learn Western philosophies out of my own interest.
Chinese translations of most Western philosophers are very hard to read. So I decided to circumvent many of these translations and learn Western languages in order to read Western philosophy directly.
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Criterion II. “That it should be sincere”
– Philosophy as a Way of Life
Bin Song: Since one of the central concerns in my intellectual work is how to revive Ruism in a new and global context, I am an ardent participant of a long-lasting debate in modern Ruist studies about whether Ruism is a philosophy, a religion, or something else. After years of study and practice, I have came to the conclusion that, among all available categories in Western thought, “philosophy as a way of life” as defined by Pierre Hadot’s work on ancient Greek thought is closest to the comprehensive human spirituality of Ruism.
From the perspective of Ruism, the most valuable points of Hadot’s version of philosophy as a way of life include:
- That analytic and critical discourse of human reasoning is a necessary, albeit not the primary, component of philosophy as a way of life.
The primary component is, as Hadot so eloquently argued, personal transformation via the practice of spiritual exercise. However, given the essential importance of human reasoning, the mainstream contemporary pursuit of philosophy as an intellectual endeavor has not been withdrawn from the concept of philosophy as a way of life. It just repositions itself into a secondary but still indispensable role. Getting this point right is crucial for understanding the difference between philosophy and religion, both of which can be respectively understood as ways of life (as I discussed in our interview last month).
- Centering as it does on personal transformation through spiritual exercise, the practice of philosophy as a way of life in ancient Greece is conducive to mystical experience.
Hadot furnishes an excellent analysis of Hellenistic mysticism in the cases of Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism. In both cases, ultimate reality was not conceptualized by philosophers through theism as it would come to be in the medieval Christian world. If investigated from a comparative perspective through a non-Western, non-theistic tradition such as Ruism, a non-theistic conception of ultimate reality is particularly appealing.
(jbk): Why? Bin Song explained that Ruism “engages humans with an aspect of ultimate reality. No human concepts are adequate to it.” I wasn’t sure what this meant. But in face to face discussion over Zoom, Bin Song acknowledged that both Ruism and (at least) neo-Platonism admitted of an aporetic experience of mental harmony emerging in meditation that both exceeds conceptualization and provides the mind with its life. “Ultimate reality” is not a doctrine about things but appears to be a position within consciousness by which we are motivated to articulate and understand things synthetically as a whole, including fact and value. To me, it seems to be the outward side motivating the experience of a complete and existential wonder.
Bin Song: Given these two distinctive traits of Hellenistic philosophy as a way of life, it would be difficult for a scholar versed in Ruism not to find the collegiality here. Ruism is centered upon self-cultivation and personal transformation. The canonical text “ The Great Learning,” normally the first book one should read to understand Ruism, urges the learner to cultivate herself sincerely and diligently in her family, community, and state – eventually to bring harmony to all under the heavens.
There is a rich religious and spiritual dimension of the self-transformative experience which is explored, described and theorized by generations of Ru scholars. Typically, the experience is not conceptualized in theistic terms. Practices such as quiet-sitting meditation, calligraphy, archery and ritual performances are embodied disciplines to elicit and anchor the experience in one’s daily life.
Most importantly, Ru scholars never give up their intellectual efforts to debate how to integrate everything involved in this Ruist lifestyle of daily renewal into a coherent and true system. Because of this, I feel quite confident to call it a “philosophy” whenever I teach or practice Ruism as long as “philosophy” is understood in the analyzed sense of a way of life.
(jbk): Then, almost as soon as Bin Song focused on integration again, he turned and focused on dynamic tensions between the traditions he was explaining:
Bin Song: Nonetheless, Ruism as a way of life is different from the Hellenistic traditions in both its theory and practice. Theoretically, lineages of Ru thought tend to discuss abstract ideas in contexts and processes. The Platonic idea of the “intelligible world” for which humans can entertain an attitude of “pursuing knowledge just for the sake of knowledge” never played a prominent role in the Ru tradition! An ontological commitment to generic traits of cosmic realities exists, but it is intertwined with concretely unfolding realities [in the processes of people’s lives – jbk].
If we consider the establishment of the first non-state school by Confucius as a starting point (which is debatable, since Confucius taught a tradition that was much older!), the Ru tradition has experienced a basically uninterrupted lineage of development using similar languages along the vast Eastern area of the Eurasian continent over many of the most sophisticated civilizations of the world for more than 2500 years. This makes the Ru tradition incredibly rich, inwardly diverse, and also inseparable from the social, political and economic natures of the engaged civilizations. Overall, we don’t see any of the four major Hellenic traditions listed by Hadot as examples of philosophy as a way of life – viz., Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism and Epicureanism – so intertwined with the development of a unique type of civilizations for such a length of time.
The Ru tradition is a philosophy of civilization, and its central concern is how to sustain human civilization on the Earth in order to manifest the continually creative power of the cosmos on Earth in a uniquely human, and humane, way.
(jbk): These seemingly ecstatic flights made me wonder: if we are not to project possibly Romantic sensibilities onto an ancient and living tradition, what could Ru “sincerity” be? Bin Song’s focus on rituals suggested a novel answer.
Bin Song: The Ru tradition has a distinctively philosophical attitude towards rituals. According to Hadot’s studies, not until the end of late antiquity when Neoplatonists were influenced by Christianity did Hellenistic philosophers start to practice “rituals.” More importantly, when Neoplatonists practiced rituals, their understanding of ritual-performance was significantly deviant from the attitude of earlier philosophers towards spiritual exercises such as meditating, dialoguing, and practicing life towards death, etc. For these newly adopted ritual performances, philosophers were tending to abandon their argumentative mindsets and instead emphasized the subservience of human consciousness towards deities in order to receive the effectivity of ritual-elicited spiritual experiences. In this sense, philosophers’ ritual practices were not philosophical any more, and became increasingly religious.
By comparison, the Ru tradition never stops practicing rituals, and the kinds of rituals that are practiced encompass [practices] far beyond what the normal English term “ritual” tends to convey. The rituals within the Ru tradition come up within (but are not limited to):
- Religious and civil ceremonies
- Social etiquette
- Demeanors
- Customs
- Laws
- Political institutions ….
More importantly, Ru never abandons a distinctively philosophical attitude towards rituals. The Ru tradition generally understands ritual performances as forms of self-cultivation, never stops debating the truth value of ritual-elicited spiritual experience, and thus, never lets the subservience towards deities become a dominant attitude.
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Criterion III. “That it should be doable and useful”
– The “No-Distinction”
(jbk): I could feel the “sincerity,” but it was strange and odd to see, a good oddness that decentered my experience. Here, rituals were the practices of sincerity, neither dry husks of once vibrant experiences, nor mindless repetitions in the mechanics of social conformity. They beautified life in their intensity and construction. But was there more to say about living with one’s “full heart” in scholarly life?
Bin Song: The autonomous role of “self” is emphasized by the Ru tradition. After Buddhism migrated to China around the 3rd century C.E., one big debate between Ru and Buddhist scholars was about the “self.” Buddhism argued for “no-self,” while Ru scholars consistently advocated that the purpose of self-cultivation is to re-discover and nurture one’s “genuine self.”
The Ruist ethical conception of the genuine human self is embedded in human relationships. The genuine self is like a competent manager of human relationships. She not only can harmonize human interests without making her own intrinsic self hollow (and thus entirely defined by human relationships), but she also harmonizes varying components of herself such as intelligence, emotions, will and behavior.
The ideal of this continually harmonizing and self-cultivating process is to become an exemplary human (君子) with virtue and knowledge in varying relationships and evolving situations.
There is no sharp distinction between theory and practice in the Ru tradition. For living a peaceful and fulfilled individual life and organizing a harmonious society with the interests of all involved beings concerned, this “no-distinction” has proven to be a great advantage. It urges scholars’ thinking and talking to be always grounded in individual and social realities, so that their scholarly activities can bring real impact to neighborhoods, communities and states.
As I noted earlier, the Chinese character 士 / shi – which refers to all Ru learners from young students in school to the highest governmental officials – is translated as “scholar-official” in English. It implies that scholars are not expected to be merely scholars in the Ru tradition. In other words, scholars need to constantly find venues to “practice” their knowledge so as to make contributions to the Ruist cause of harmonizing societies and sustaining civilizations.
(jbk): In other words, practicing scholarship for a Ruist involves really giving oneself to the common good. What might this suggest for scholars affiliated with the APA?
This is an installment of Into Philosophy.
Jeremy Bendik-Keymer
Professor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A., land of many older nations
