New Wine in Old Bottles?——Revisiting the Problem of Continuity and Discontinuity between Modern Chinese Intellectual History and the Confucian Tradition

墨子刻(Thomas A.Metzger)

I.The nature of Chinese modernity is a problem entailing the controversy about whether all modernizing nations are culturally and institutionally converging or are still diverging. Convergence implies discontinuity with premodern cultures, while divergence implies continuity with them.

II.Since at least 1992, Chinese scholars have widely acceptedzhuan-xingshi-dai(an era of change from one type of society and culture to another type) as an accurate way to describe the current era in Chinese history. This term, however, logically implies that the discontinuities in China will be“more important”than the continuities. Yet whether or not they will be more important is still open to empirical investigation and to argument about what is“important”in the cultural-institutional structure of a society.

III.Zhuan-xingalso logically implies other questions open to debate:

1.Does history,normallyform systemically unified and logically coherent societal structures and then evolve from one structure to the next, or does it also normally take the form of a less systemic, eclectic mix of thoughts and behaviors? (To what extent does intellectual history take the form of systemically unified trends?)

2.If history normally forms logically coherent societal structures, does it also include“global tides of events”(shi-jie-dechao-liu) irresistibly replacing an old societal structure with a new one, or is historical causation more complex and less deterministic, as the Max Weber’s sociological tradition holds?

3.If there are such“tides,”then history itself implies a normative program answering the question“Where should China go?”(Zhong-guoxianghechuqu?) If, however, thee are no such“tides,”what is the epistemological basis for answering this question?

IV.By complicating the question of historical causation, Weberian sociology also complicates the question of what is the“most important”aspect of society.

1.One can say Weberian sociology describes a“society”by distinguishing not only between episodes, personalities, and patterns but also between nine patterns each of which can be described morphologically and quantitatively: 1.geography; 2.biological aspects of the population; 3.popular culture (i.e.paideia); 4.spatial distribution of population; 5.economy (technology, occupational structure, organization, patterns of production, distribution, and consumption); 6.stratification; 7.“thought”(si-xiang), i.e. propagated views of the more educated strata; 8.political life; 9.intersocietal relations.

2.For almost every one of the nine patterns above there is a famous scholar claiming it is the causally decisive pattern in the development of societies. For instance, G. William Skinner has emphasized pattern #4 (spatial organization); Karl A. Wittfogel has emphasized pattern #8 (political life); pattern #9 (intersocietal relations) has been crucial for scholars studying how non-Western societies have developed in the last two centuries under the influence of the West; pattern #5 is widely regarded as causally decisive not only by Marxists but also by many non-Marxist social scientists like the major American sociologist Alex Inkeles. Pattern #3 (popular culture) has been much emphasized in research on Chinese modernization. Strikingly enough, however, a broad variety of Chinese and Western historians agree that in the case of China’s societal development in the twentieth century, a or the major causal role was played by pattern #7,“thought.”

3.They also agree that as“thought”(si-xiang) changed in China beginning in the late nineteenth century, a major discontinuity occurred with the rise of a new vision of modernizing progress, according to which Chinese can progress by struggling dynamically to modernize, that is, to realize prosperity, national power, a society free of the ills of egoism (da-tong), and unsurpassed international prestige by both adopting modern science and technology and fully realizing the dignity, freedom, creativity, equality, and legal rights of all individuals, along with democracy.

V.Controversy about the extent of the continuity between this vision of modernizing progress and the Confucian tradition:

1.The May Fourth Movement and Weberian modernization theory have long agreed that this vision of modernizing progress is essentially discontinuous with the Confucian tradition and arose as a rational, nationalistic response to objective realities and self-evidently valid Western ideas, especially those making up modern science and technology.

2.Since the 1970s, many arguments have emphasized the importance of continuities:

a)Lü Shi-qiang: Liang Qi-chao etc. had deep Confucian beliefs;

b)Wang Er-min and Liu Gui-sheng: Chinese origins, from 1860s on, of the idea of a cosmically-based“vast change in the world”:bian-ju,yun-hui,ying-shi-zhi-bian,Gong-yangzhuan, optimism;

c)Confucian values were used to form image of Western values:tuo-gugai-zhi,XixueyuanchuZhong-guo, Xu Fu-guan’s vision of democracy, which about coincided with Yin Hai-guang’s;

d)Later research;

e)If the modernization movement in China arose mainly out of a rational, nationalistic response to the realities and ideas introduced by the West (Benjamin I. Schwartz), why did this movement develop in a dynamic, utopian way so different from the ways in which other non-Western societies reacted to essentially the same realities and ideas (Rhoads Murphey)?

f)Chinese adopting Western values were not just passive, credulous students of Western thought. Since at least Liang Qi-chao, Chinese intellectuals have seen themselves as judges and critics of Western thought, using their own criteria to select some Western ideas and reject others (qu-she). For instance, with few if any exceptions, they rejected the GMWER (bu-ke-zhi-lun), Burkean conservatism, and (at least until recently) the outlook most central to the West’sjing-shenchuan-tong(cultural-spiritual tradition), namely, Christianity. One has to consider the relation between the Confucian tradition and the criteria Chinese used in evaluating Western ideas. Zheng Jia-dong on Mu Zong-san’s evaluation of Kant’s ideas. Even more basically, one can ask why in China fundamentalism and total rejection of foreign values was restricted to scholars like Wo-ren and did not become a mainstream, as it did in the Muslim world. Was there any relation between the Confucian tradition and the radical cultural self-criticism that quickly became central to the modern Chinese intellectual mainstream?

3.Even if the continuities were important, the importance of the discontinuities also is a major question, the answer to which can be deepened when the continuities are carefully considered. In his 1999 book, Gao Rui-quan offered a new argument about the importance of the discontinuities: they amounted to the formation of a new“tradition”.

VI.Philosophical and methodological arguments affecting the analysis of continuity and discontinuity in the history of thought.

1.Normative or factual continuity and discontinuity?

2.The“linguistic turn”:“thought”is“linguistic practice,”or, at the very least, the verbal form of thought is extremely important and is the aspect of thought most susceptible to empirical description avoiding prejudgment and personal bias.

3.Words versus the meanings of words: the importance of context.

4.“Doctrine”(xue-shuo) versus“train of thought”(si-lu) versus“discourse”(hua-yu).

5.Discourse: shared premises, shared agenda, and idiosyncratic, controversial arguments.

6.Discourses as“free-floating symbolic resources”(S.N. Eisenstadt). Shared premises and idiosyncratic arguments are inseparable; idiosyncratic arguments can partly or wholly reject shared premises; but often premises are widely and persistently shared by texts otherwise disagreeing with each other.

7.To find premises: etic disaggregation and etic recombination of the connotations of a word, as illustrated by Huang Ke-wu’s analysis of the meaning of“freedom”for Yan Fu.

8.Why are culturally inherited premises important? The GMWER; the shift from rationalism to historicism, and then to neo-Hegelianism (Charles Taylor); the resulting shift from“reason”to tension between ROST (local, ephemeral historical-cultural-linguistic rules of successful thinking) and CR (critical reflexivity oriented to universal truth and objective reality); the distinction between“observation sentences”and the interpretation of theLebenswelt.

9.ROST about what? Goals, means to reach them, other aspects of the given world, and the nature of knowledge.

10.The distinction between epistemological optimism and epistemological pessimism is a neo-Hegelian one, not a rationalistic one.

11.“Morally critical consciousness”(pi-panyi-shi): how choose between ROST (qu-she) if“reason”is unavailable? The philosophical issues. How tenable is GMWER?

VII.The discourse #1 thesis: four tradition-rooted premises common to all the leading modern Chinese intellectual trends (Chinese Marxism, Chinese liberalism, modern Confucian humanism, and Sunism), namely epistemological optimism, the utopian goal of a world free of the ills of egoism, belief in a cosmic-historical force supporting the efforts of the moral hero, and belief in an antimony in the given nature of human beings.

VIII.Premise #1: epistemological optimism.

1.Continuing rationalism, if not rationalistic metaphysics, as faith in the objective, universally identical meaning of“reason”and“morality.”Rejection of the GMWER idea that reasoning varies to a large extent depending on ROST.

2.Supplementing deduction and induction, e.g. with“dialectical reasoning”or a major emphasis on“on the basis of many data and considerations, summing up the nature of a massive, monolithic whole”(zong-jie-chu-lai-de), instead of being cautious in going beyond“observation sentences.”Frombian-jutoshi-jie-dechao-liu,tong-yi-deshi-jieli-shijin-cheng, andjiushi-jie-deshi-ming-gan. From“backwardness”to“transcending the West”: turning the perception of historical facts into a“springboard”(tiao-yue-shi-detan-xing-ban) for hopeful action in the future.

3.Epistemological optimism and the Neo-Confucian“sense of predicament.”The latter was an aspect of premise #4 below, i.e. the combination of the optimistic idea that the human mind has the ability to“know the True Way”(zhi-dao) with the pessimistic idea that it is currently subject to radical moral and intellectual weakness preventing successful exercise of this ability. Confucian epistemological optimism refers to how this pessimistic sense of intellectual and moral weakness remained tied to the optimistic idea above, instead of turning into the GMWER’s pessimistic critique of the scope of knowledge. Human nature in the present time and place versus human nature throughout history. Chinese moral and epistemological pessimism applies to the former, Western, to the latter. Is the moral-intellectual quality of peoplehereandnowbasically different from what it was or will be?

4.Confucian epistemological optimism distinguished from“dogmatism”(du-duan-lun) and authoritarianism. From the neo-Hegelian standpoint, no intellectual tradition can avoid all dogmatism. The question is the extent to which ROST encourage doubt and free disputation.

IX.Premise #2: the goal of a humanity without the ills of egoism.

1.Da-tong, etc. Ada-gongwu-siworld withoutli-jizhu-yi,ji-de-li-yi-zhe,bo-xue,ge-he,fen-yun, etc. Utilitarianism asjiyulierliren.

2.Was“equality”the main point of emphasis in the modern Chinese vision ofda-tong? The centrality of the egoism problem is clear from a comparison of the whole spectrum of modern Chinese political philosophy with that of Western liberalism. Making use of Ferdinand Toennies’ distinction, we can say the former put primacy on the goal ofGemeinschaft(she-qushe-hui), the latter, on that ofGesellschaft(jie-sheshe-huiorge-renshe-hui).

a)Gesellschaftis based on epistemological pessimism, moral pessimism, and ontological individualism, or even the idea of ego as ontologically superior to the individual as alter, as indicated by Jin Yue-lin’s point that the GMWER is based onwei-zhufang-shi, i.e. any ontological proposition about anything except the individual as ego (zhu-ti) is open to doubt.Gemeinschaftis based on epistemological optimism, including belief in the knowability of objective norms, on moral optimism, and on the ontological equality of the individual, the group, and indeed all things (as Wang Yang-ming said,daojishi,shijidao, and Professor Gao speaks of “a this-worldly sense of what ultimately matters”[ru-shizhong-jiguan-huai]).

b)InGesellschaft, the combination of epistemological pessimism, moral pessimism, and the ontological superiority of the individual as ego puts primacy on the horizontal interactions of free, equal, and egoistic individuals in the intellectual, economic, and political marketplaces, not on the vertical flow of authority exercised by an elite afflicted by egoism and unable to grasp norms based on knowledge; harmony ultimately depends on an“invisible hand.”InGemeinschaft, the combination of epistemological optimism, moral optimism, and the ontological equality of individual and group interests puts primacy on the vertical authority exercised by a morally and intellectually enlightened vanguard (xian-zhixian-jue)transcending egoism and thus able to act as“the conscience of society”(she-hui-deliang-xin), resolving the conflicts between egoistic individuals in the three marketplaces. In other words, as Yan Fu indicated,Gemeinschafttakes theschoolled by enlightened teachers as the paradigm of the free society,Gesellschaftuses themarketplaceas such a paradigm.

c)While Hume said“ought”cannot be inferred from“is,”this contrast betweenGemeinschaftandGesellschaftindicates that the morally legitimate balance between horizontal and vertical organization is logically implied by epistemological beliefs.

d)The modernda-tongideal refers to theGemeinschaftparadigm. Modern Chinese intellectuals and Western liberals equally use worlds like“the dignity of the individual,”“the liberation of the individual,”“equality,”“democracy,”“law,”and“human rights”and believe these words have the same meaning east and west, but the meanings of these in aGemeinschaftcontext differ from their meanings in aGesellschaftcontext. (Hence the clash between discourses #1 and #2.)

e)Emphasizing how deeply and widely Chinese during the first half of the twentieth century came to believe in the goal of realizing“the Great Oneness,”Professor Gao ascribes this trend to various problems that arose in the twentieth century and caused people to“pursue a new social ideal.”To be sure, this being a time of national crisis,“value disorientation,”and increasing disillusionment with Western civilization, it was natural for people to turn to radicalness and hope to build a society free of the inequalities afflicting the West. It was no accident, however, that the“new social ideal”they came to believe in was that of theGemeinschaftso strongly idealized by the Confucian tradition. The paradigm they so fervently believed in was not a new idea discontinuous with their traditional heritage.

3.Professor Gao rightly says that the modern Chineseda-tongconcept was inseparable from the“idea of progress,”but I disagree with his emphasis on the discontinuity between this modern Chinese idea of progress and the Confucian tradition.

a)Distinguishing between continuity with premodern Chinese behavior and with mainstream Confucian ideas.

b)Confucian roots of the modern Chinese emphasis on material prosperity, on utilitarianism, and on ideas like freedom, equality, democracy.

c)Did the Confucian tradition include any idea of progress as future, creative, continuous improvements realizing a morally and materially ideal world basically different from the current world of selfishness and material suffering? The“theory of the dynastic cycle”(xun-huan-lun) versus the Gong-yang vision and Zhang Zai’s vision of a“perfect peace”(tai-ping) lasting for“ten thousand generations.”Thefu-guproblem: given that all norms refer to future actions, what is more important, believing that the morally perfect segment of history is in the past rather than in the future, or believing that history includes a morally deficient present? Intensifying the moral imperative by not only believing that complete implementation is completely practicable and that it has in fact been accomplished (the negation of utopianism), but also believing that purely spiritual implementation is insufficient, that there also must be full material implementation in“this world”(ru-shi-dezhong-jiguan-huai). Scholars emphasizing the Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist aspects of the modern Chinese quest for“meaning”have neglected this uniquely materialistic aspect of Confucian spirituality. The problem ofsu-ming-lun(fatalism): thetian-mingandqi-bingissue. Zhu Xi’s condemnation of fatalism and his emphasis onming-zhi-zheng(one’s true fate). The problem of a clear contrast between ideal and reality (you-daoandwu-dao), of“axial”civilizations, and of Weberian“tension”between ideal and reality. The manifestation of Weber’s“tension”in bureaucratic behavior during the Qing dynasty and in the many institutional transformations during the last millennia. The limited value of macroscopic, theoretical comparisons claiming that the tension between ideal and reality was“less”in premodern China than in the premodern West (whether it was less or more is a question different from whether it was the source of modern Chinese dynamism and whether less is better or worse than more).

X.Premise #3: a cosmic-historical force supporting the efforts of the moral hero.

1.In Confucian as well as modern Chinese thought, history was a struggle between moral efforts in the present and bad tendencies opposed to these efforts (see XI below). These efforts, however, were conceived of as inseparable from a cosmic-historical force supporting them; from the goal of a world without the ills of egoism, making these efforts meaningful; and from epistemological optimism, according to which the objective nature of this struggle was fully knowable. Thus, contrary to Schwartz, in conceptualizing the relation between their future efforts and a cosmic-historical evolution in accord with these efforts, modern Chinese intellectuals did not just borrow ideas from European thought. Indeed, the emerging idea that Chinese would have to“save the world,”not just“save China”(in Sun Yat-sen’s terms,jiuZhong-guo,jiushi-jie) was contrary to all European ideas on the subject.

2.In conceptualizing this supporting cosmic-historical force, Chinese reacted to the realities and ideas introduced by the West by redescribing this force and the nature of the heroic efforts needed to supplement it. They put into the background the Neo-Confucian idea of“Heaven”(tian) as a cosmic force the omnipotent and totally benign“outer”expression of which would be caused by the“inner,”spiritual efforts of the sage, as Zhu Xi explicitly said. Instead, talking of“history,”“society,”and“culture,”they habitually referred to an“outer,”“global tide of events”(shi-jie-dechao-liu) ensuring the success of“outer”activities carried out by properly oriented citizens, whether“movements”(yun-dong), a revolution, governmental policies, education, or some combination of these. Hence that redefinition of the moral hero first noted by Chang Hao in his 1971 book and richly documented by Gu Hong-liang in his 2005 book: having been a sage, he or she became a regular citizen.

XI.Premise #4: an antimony (er-lübei-fan) in the given nature of human beings.

1.Both Neo-Confucianism and modern Chinese thought conceptualized the needed linkage between human efforts and the supporting cosmic-historical force as currently unrealized and impeded by“inner”and“outer”tendencies preventing this linkage. Such was the“predicament”I have tried to describe. In the Neo-Confucian case, this predicament centered on the difficulty of“linking together”(guan-tong) the“human mind”(ren-xin), the ultimate“principles”of the cosmos (li), and“material things and happenings”(wu). In the modern context, these difficulies centered on figuring out how outer material process and the intentions of the moral hero formed a seamless continuum. Mao’s materialism and Tang Jun-yi’s idealism both were attempts to figure out how to form this seamless continuum. Conceptualizing it was necessary to achieve the seamless oneness of aGemeinschaftfree of “painful fissures disrupting human harmony”(ge-he,lie-hen).

2.The ultimate source of these tendencies currently blocking realization of the idealGemeinschaftwas to some extent cosmic, but most importantly it was the antimony or contradiction in the given nature of human beings. On the one hand, human beings were completely capable of creating a world free of the ills of egoism, whether by achieving sagehood or creating a“new culture,”a“new China,”an“ideal China,”a“new people,”or a“new kind of human being”(xin-ren) (Wang Fan-sen) without these ills. On the other hand, human beings at home and abroad repeatedly fell into egotism and intellectual confusion, whether inflicting imperialism on China or misbehaving in the domestic arena.

3.Until the 1970s, neither Western or Chinese students of Chinese thought were interested in describing this antimony central to Chinese thought because they studied Chinese thought mostly in a normative or philosophical way, as illustrated by the New Confucians’ interest in showing that the Confucian understanding of “experience”was more accurate than Kant’s, or by Wm. Theodore de Bary’s interest in revealing the“individualistic”and“liberal”aspects of the Confucian tradition.

4.The Weberian“tension”discussed above, I think, would not have been possible without this perception of an antimony at the center of human nature. Because of this antimony, Confucians felt morally compelled to pursue their utopian goal; perceived themselves as perpetually failing to reach it; and were perpetually unable to stop trying to reach it. The cultural pervasiveness of this tension can be seen in the Confucian division of history into an era when the human ability to create an ideal world was successfully exercised and an era when it was not. This tension is comparable to the one Weber saw as the cause for the capitalistic restructuring of European society from the sixteenth century on. I see the Chinese version of it as the main cause for China’s distinctively dynamic and utopian response to the realities and ideas injected into the Chinese scene by the West in the late nineteenth century. With this tension, Chinese interpreted these realities and ideas by turning history into a springboard (tiao-yue-shi-detan-xing-ban) from which they could leap out of an era of moral failure into one of moral success and so could re-enter the center of the global community, thus becoming able to“save the world”(jiushi-jie).

XII.The importance of the four tradition-rooted premises.

1.Historical importance. Needed to grasp intellectual change in China during the last two centuries, i.e. the mix of continuities and discontinuities; but not all modern Chinese thought shared all four premises.

2.Needed to develop the typology of societies by going beyond schemes like modern-premodern-postmodern or democratic versus dictatorial, and by looking further into the divergence problem in modernization theory. I believe the evidence is strong that Chinese modernity will diverge from Western liberal modernity in leaning toward aGemeinschaftmodel strongly rejected in the West.

3.Needed to alleviate international tensions by replacing mutual denunciations with an increase in mutual understanding: this is not a fight between freedom and oppression but one between profoundly different conceptions of freedom.

4.Needed to develop political philosophy. If political philosophers aim to improve the public discussion of political life, how can they improve it without first describing it, and how can they describe it without describing culturally-inherited premises basic to it? Moreover, instead of simply assuming that Western liberalism is the world’s leading political philosophy, Chinese and Western philosophers can debate the pros and cons of the current Western liberal paradigm (that primacy of horizontal interactions logically required by the mix of epistemological pessimism, moral pessimism, and the ontological primacy of the individual as ego) and the current Chinese mainstream paradigm (that primacy of vertical interactions logically required by the mix of epistemological optimism, moral optimism, and the ontological equality of the individual, the group, and all other things and happenings). Using Tang Jun-yi’s categorization of the topics of philosophy, one can reopen the question of the relation between ontological-epistemological knowledge and moral-political norms.

XIII.Problems in Modern Scholarship East and West Impeding the Uncovering and Description of Culturally Inherited Premises

1.Continuing reluctance to accept Weber’s advice maximally to separate description from evaluation. For instance, one can recognize as a fact that a) values inherited from the Confucian tradition persisted in the twentieth century and helped Chinese modernize and also believe b) that these Confucian values impede optimal modernization. But scholars recognizing a) sometimes fear that emphasizing a) will weaken their argument against the New Confucian insistence that optimal modernization depends on full acceptance of the core Confucian values.

2.The“axial”ethos of the“ivory tower.”This concerns the relation between the“ivory tower”and the marble citadel (xiang-ya-taandda-li-shi-decheng-bao). According to the ethos created by what Karl Jaspers and S. N. Eisenstadt call the rise of“axial”civilizations, the ivory tower arose east and west as“intellectuals”took on the moral mission to alleviate humankind’s misery by denouncing the failure of“the marble citadel”(i.e. the ruler, the political center) to act in accord with high moral ideals. Such was what Xu Fu-guan called the ivory tower’syou-huanyi-shi(sense of concern about the disasters in the world), their“spirit of protest”(kang-yijing-shen). Such is the historical source of the modern Chinese belief that intellectuals can and must serve as“the conscience of society”(she-hui-deliang-xin), along with Xu Fu-guan’s demand that they never praise the marble citadel, only criticize it. In modern times, however, it has become clear that the beliefs formed by the ivory tower also can contribute to the world’s disasters: disasters can be caused by the influence of culturally-inherited premises; these can be discovered and criticized only in the ivory tower; and the ivory tower has usually failed to uncover them. It probably wants to avoid uncovering them by limiting criticism of itself. It is quite willing to criticize specific doctrines produced by the ivory tower, such as materialism or idealism, but it is not willing to allow criticism undermining its deepest belief, namely, that the main source of the world’s troubles is the marble citadel, not the ivory tower. If the ivory tower looked deeply into culturally inherited premises, it might find itself as guilty as the marble citadel of causing the world’s great disasters and might thus undermine its traditional sense of identity and moral superiority. Yet it may be necessary to redefine the ethos of the intellectual if the world is moving, as Mu Zong-san said, from an era of“subordination”(li-shu) to one of“coordination”(dui-lie).

3.The task of uncovering culturally inherited premises cannot seem worthwhile unless one agrees with the GMWER’s criticism of rationalism, accepts neo-Hegelianism, and also accepts the methodological points above about how to describe discourses. But the GMWER is the usual mix of insights and misunderstanding.

XIV.Bibliographical note. The documentation and the arguments pertaining to these four premises are various and entail a disagreement with Professor Chang Hao. To begin with,EscapefromPredicament(N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1977) emphasized premise #2 along with its corollary of“linkage,”the distinctive, prevalent Chinese goal, shared by Neo-Confucianism with major modern trends like Maoism, of not only conceptualizing the seamless oneness of self, group, and cosmos but also realizing this oneness by turning concrete, contemporary historical reality into an aspect of it.

This book also emphasized premise #4, the Neo-Confucian concept of the self as caught in a“predicament”due to the tension or antinomy between its“transnatural”power to realize“linkage”and its persistent tendency toward intellectual confusion and the moral weakness of egoism (e.g. ibid., pp. 119, 121, 123, 134, 158).

Premise #3 was described most clearly in my“Selfhood and Authority in Neo-Confucian Political Culture,”in Arthur Kleinman and Tsung-yi Lin, eds.,NormalandAbnormalBehaviorinChineseCulture(Dordrecht, Boston, London: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1981), pp. 7-27, which analyzed“nine assumptions defining the interaction between moral hero and cosmic-historical process [that] have been common to so much thought not only in premodern times but also after thought became ‘secularized’ in China. Secularization meant that the traditional, organismic and religious view of ‘Man’ as directly oriented to the universals of ‘Heaven and Earth’ was replaced by the modern vocabulary of ‘history’, ‘society’, and ‘culture’, which all evolved in ‘stages’”(ibid., p. 16).

An earlier version of this analysis is in my“T’ang Chün-i and the Conditions of Transformative Thinking in Contemporary China,”which was presented as a paper at Columbia University in 1977, undoubtedly shared with Professor Chang, and published inTheAmericanAsianReview3:1 (spring 1985), pp. 1-47. This version emphasized that the modern rise of a“secular vocabulary”(ibid,. p. 31) had not interrupted the continuities between Tang’s “transformative”modern Chinese thought and Neo-Confucianism with regard to“linkage”and the concept of the“moral hero”(ibid., pp. 21-22, 37-38, 43); that in Tang’s transformative thought, the“cosmos”included not only“the mind of Heaven”(tian-xin) as its ultimate principle but also a“cosmic-historical process”in the form of a“morally transformative force”filled with“power”and creating a global“tide of events”(chao-liu) (ibid., pp. 23, 30, 43); and that what Tang“shared with....other transformative thinkers”such as Mao was“the perception of the gap between the intentions of the moral hero and the transformative tendency in history, and the idea that closing this gap at least partly depended on figuring out how outer material processes and the feelings of the moral hero formed a single continuum”(ibid., pp. 28, 23). This viewpoint was also expressed in my“Author’s Reply,”part of a review symposium onEscapefromPredicamentinTheJournalofAsianStudies39:2 (February 1980), pp. 237-290. See ibid., pp. 286-287. (Hereafter“review symposium.”)

As for premise #1, I first focused on it in“Some Ancient Roots of Modern Chinese Thought: This-worldliness, Epistemological Optimism, Doctrinality, and the Emergence of Reflexivity in the Eastern Chou,”inEarlyChina, vols. 11-12 (1985-1987), pp. 61-117, a text based on a paper I presented in 1985 at a conference on reflexivity organized by S.N. Eisenstadt. Arousing considerable skepticism, including that of Professors Eisenstadt and Benjamin I. Schwartz, it documented the idea of a contrast between the epistemological optimism of the Chinese intellectual mainstream, modern and premodern, and the epistemological pessimism basic to the modern liberal West. In myACloudAcrossthePacific:EssaysontheClashbetweenChineseandWesternPoliticalTheoriesToday(Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2005), I further documented the themes above by describing China’s modern“discourse #1”as based on the four Chinese tradition-rooted premises above and contrasting it with the modern liberal West’s“discourse #2,”which emerged out of the Great Modern Western Epistemological Revolution (GMWER) going back to the seventeenth century.

This book used a neo-Hegelian concept of“discourse”emphasizing how all human thought, or at least all public moral-political discussion, is made up of a) local, ephemeral historical-cultural-linguistic“rules of successful thinking”(ROST) or premises virtually indisputable in the eyes of the we-group using them; and b) a critical reflexivity oriented to universal truth and objective reality (CR). Thus a discourse combines shared premises blurred in together with idiosyncratic, controversial arguments, not simply as some shared“value system”the content of which can be briefly summed up as a list of fixed beliefs. Values are living thoughts inherently forming out of controversy, not only shared beliefs. Professor Stephen C. Angle calls this approach a“monolithic”one to distinguish it from his, which tends to avoid the problem of shared premises, but I would argue that the empirically most accurate way to understand what historical actors believed is to try to catch this intersection of shared premises with idiosyncratic trains of thought. Moreover, Angle seems to be wrong in holding that my“monolithic approach”“makes it relatively difficult to talk about, or even to recognize, differences among thinkers who participate in a single discourse.”Such differences are at the very center ofACloudAcrossthePacific. SeeChinaReviewInternational14:1 (spring 2007), pp. 28-29.

Today, this concept of discourse has been little applied, whether by philosophers, historians, or social scientists. A good deal of scholarship, however, has come to emphasize factual continuities between the Confucian tradition and not only aspects of contemporary Chinese life often regarded as impeding modernization, such as authoritarianism and particularism, but also aspects integral to the leading Chinese efforts to modernize. The latter include not only traditional aspects of the popular culture, like the emphasis on family solidarity, frugality, and education, but also premises (ROST) used by Chinese to conceptualize modern life; seeACloudAcrossthePacific, pp. 154-157, and my“Continuities and Discontinuities between Modern and Premodern China: Some Neglected Methodological and Substantive Issues,”in Paul A. Cohen, Merle Goldman, eds.,IdeasAcrossCultures:EssaysonChineseThoughtinHonorofBenjaminI.Schwartz(Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1990), p. 283.

Great light on these intellectual continuities has been shed by the publications of Max Ko-wu Huang, such as his“Hu Shi yu He-xu-li (Hu Shi and Huxley),”inJin-dai-shiyan-jiu-suoji-kan, vol. 60 (June 2008), pp. 43-83; his books on Yan Fu and Liang Qi-chao; his“Cong zhui-qiu zheng-dao dao ren-tong guo-zu: Qing-mo Zhong-guo gong-si guan-nian-de chong-zheng (From Seeking the True Way to Identifying with the Nation: Reformulating the Distinction between Public and Private in China during Late Qing Times),”in Huang Ko-wu, Chang Che-chia, eds.,Gongyusi:Jin-daiZhong-guoge-tiyuzheng-ti-zhichong-jian(Public and Private: The Reconstruction of the Self and the Whole in Modern China; Taipei: Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 2000), pp. 59-112, reprinted in Xu Ji-lin, ed.,Gong-gong-xingyugong-min-guan(The Concepts of the Public and of Citizenship: Shanghai: Jiang-su ren-min chu-ban-she, 2006), pp. 40-79; and his“Qing-mo Min-chu-de min-zhu si-xiang: yi-yi yu yuan-yuan (The Concept of Democracy in China during late Qing and Early Republican Years: Its Meaning and Origins),”in Zhong-yang yan-jiu-yuan, Jin-dai-shi yan-jiu-suo, ed.,Zhong-guoxian-dai-hualun-wen-ji(Symposium on Modernization in China, 1860-1949; Nangang: Zhong-yang yan-jiu-yuan, Jin-dai-shi yan-jiu-suo, 1991), pp. 363-398.

Wang Er-min, Wang Fan-sen, and Liu Gui-sheng have brilliantly contributed to the understanding of these continuities, and agreement with the above thesis of the four premises is evident in the writings of Professor Chang Hao. His own publications do not discuss premise #1 (epistemological optimism), but in the letter quoted on the book jacket ofACloudAcrossthePacific, Chang referred to my“trailblazing discovery of a crucial aspect of modern Chinese thought, what [Metzger] calls epistemological optimism,”and in his letter recommending publication of this book, he did not question its emphasis on the traditional roots of epistemological optimism. Chang also does not directly focus on premise #2 (an ideal world free of the ills of egoism), but no China scholar known to me disputes the modern prevalence and traditional roots of this ideal (although Professor Gao Ruiquan perhaps sees it as an“old bottle filled with new wine”).

Chang’s acceptance of premise #4 is apparent from Wang Fan-sen’s description as an original view of Chang’s the proposition that“Confucian thought”created“ a myth about Man, ”“ ‘a consciousness of human polarization (ren-jiyi-shi)’....whereby on the one hand there is extreme dissatisfaction with one’s current situation, on the other, the belief that the true condition of ‘Man’ is not just what we can presently think up, what we are accustomed to—that is only the beginning level of human life. The truly good human condition is open without limits [to new possibilities], one can never know what its ultimate limits are.”For Wang, this idea he ascribed to Chang—a Confucian“ ‘consciousness of human polarization’ ”—helps explain why Chinese intellectuals in the 1920s combined their extreme dissatisfaction with China’s current condition with a belief that“socialism”was the key to realizing a perfect society. That is, this“polarization”was a or the major source for the outlook of modern Chinese believers in socialism, who“viewed the society they lived in with extreme contempt, as a dirty state of degeneration, while celebrating the future in extreme terms, a ‘golden age’ created by human beings.”See Wang Fan-sen et al.,Zhong-guojin-daisi-xiang-shi-dezhuan-xingshi-dai:ChangHaoyuan-shiqi-zhizhu-shoulun-wen-ji(Modern Chinese Intellectual History—an Era of Change from One Type to Another Type of Thought and Society: Essays in Honor of Academician Chang’s Seventieth Birthday; Taipei: Lian-jing chu-ban shi-ye gu-fen you-xian gong-si, 2007), p. 197 (below referred to as“Wang Fan-sen”).

As for premise #3 (the moral hero’s dependence on a supporting cosmic-historical process), Chang in 2004 stated:“the intellectuals of [modern China’s] age of change from one type to another type of thinking and society (zhuan-xingshi-dai) used the idea of history’s irresistible tide (li-shichao-liu) to replace [the Confucian idea] of Heaven’s will, simultaneously retaining the traditional concept of the mind...”Chang also in effect synthesized premises #3 and #4 when he summed up the shared outlook of the modern Chinese intellectual mainstream asyi-shiben-wei-deli-shifa-zhan-lun(a theory viewing historical development as a function of consciousness) (Chang thus mistakenly suggested that all combinations of these two premises took the form of voluntarism, ignored premises #1 and #2, and presented a kind of overview formula that is neither justified as a balanced empirical description nor presented s a recommended philosophical perspective.) I here quote from Max K.W. Huang’s article in Wang Fan-sen, p. 372; Huang quotes from Chang Hao,Shi-dai-detan-suo(Investigations into the Issues of Our Era; Taipei: Academia Sinica, 2004), p. 60.

In thus essentially if not completely agreeing with my conceptualizations of premises #3 and #4 some twenty-five years previously, Chang reversed his earlier refutations of these conceptualizations. These refutations are in his contribution to the 1980 JAS“review symposium”onEscapefromPredicament. In this latter article of his, he refuted the premise #4 idea that Neo-Confucianism pictured the mind of the self as caught up in a tension or“antinomy”between belief in its boundless, transnatural power and awareness of its powerful tendency toward misunderstanding and moral weakness. He said that this emphasis of mine on“tension,”which indeed ran counter to all previous discussions of Neo-Confucianism, especially those of the New Confucians, actually dealt with a distinction in Neo-Confucianism between the“sense of infinitude”and the“sense of finitude, an awareness of the limitations and evils inherent in finite human beings.”He then argued that“Metzger’s conception of a sense of predicament highlights the sense of finitude and the concomitant antinomy, exposing a dimension of the Neo-Confucian view of the self which was never fully explored before,”but that I had overemphasized the sense of finitude, since it“remained primarily in the background of the Neo-Confucian worldview while the sense of infinitude stood out in the foreground”(review symposium, p. 264). Thus, in his eyes in 1980, the neo-Confucian concept of the self lacked any“sense of predicament,”“antinomy,”or“consciousness of human polarization.”

In this same 1980 review symposium, Chang also refuted premise #3, which also ran counter to all previous scholarly discussion. Citing an unpublished version of my 1981“Selfhood and Authority in Neo-Confucian Political Culture,”he perspicaciously quoted from it to sum up my thesis:“ In this new secularized context, however, Chinese found it easy to regard history as a vehicle of attributes previously projected unto [my text said ‘onto’] ‘Heaven and earth.’ ”Chang’s objection:“...formal similarities must be distinguished from substantive continuities....Neo-Confucianism and Maoism both link the individual as moral hero to the cosmic-historical process. But they define the moral hero and the cosmic-historical process differently, and consequently offer different interpretations of the relationship between the two. In his highly suggestive discussion of continuities in this context, Metzger sometimes mixes up the two levels and sees formal similarities between Neo-Confucianism and Maoism as substantive continuities”(review symposium, p. 271).

By at least 2004, therefore, Chang came to agree essentially or wholly with earlier views of mine which he had described in 1980 as suggestive but mistaken. In presenting these new views of his, however, he omitted any mention of the fact that they essentially if not wholly coincided with these earlier views of mine, not to mention saying that he had come to believe that these earlier views of mine were basically correct, and that, in 1980, it was he, not I, who had been mistaken.

His position in 2008, when I for the first time encountered his 2004 text and raised this question with him, was that he indeed had failed in 1980 properly to assess my views and had later come to accept them. Moreover, he acknowledged in general terms that my writings and numberless discussions with him over the years had greatly influenced his work, noting that he had made this general point in the“Acknowledgements”section of hisChineseIntellectualsinCrisis(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. x. He did not, however, agree that he had transferred any specific ideas from my publications into his. He firmly stated that when he came to reverse his judgment about premises #3 and #4, he did not do so by concluding that ideas of mine he had previously viewed as wrong were really not wrong. Instead, he said, he had independently developed similar if not identical ideas. Therefore, he held, he acted appropriately when he presented these new ideas of his as his own without any mention that they coincided with those which I had earlier developed, and which he had originally refuted. It was enough, he said, that he acknowledged my influence on his work in general terms.

As he put it in an undated letter I received around May 1, 2008,“It is true that I didn’t do justice to the insightfulness of your idea of escape from predicament which we debated in JAS in the late 1970s. The reason as I now look back at this episode is that at the time I didn’t penetrate beyond your heavy language to see the larger point you were making. Some years later I finally came around to a notion of the complexity and internal tension in the Chinese tradition by way of Eric Voegelin, [thexin-ru’s] [Chang here used Chinese logographs for ‘New Confucians’]...concept of transcendence inward and the history of religion approach. This finally allowed me to see the insightfulness and power of your notion of ‘escape from predicament.’ ”

With regard to premise #3 (the modern replacement of the Neo-Confucian“Heaven”with the idea of“history”to articulate the moral hero’s dependence on a supporting cosmic-historical force), Chang in a letter to me of May 23, 2008 said:“Regarding the idea that history played a function to self in modern thought similar to that played by [tian] or [tian-ming] [the letter here used Chinese logographs for ‘Heaven’ and ‘Heaven’s Mandate’]...in relation to self in traditional thought, my memory told me I didn’t get it from your article cited in your letter, simply because I didn’t read your article.”

When I wrote him pointing out that he had cited an unpublished version of this very article of mine in his contribution to the 1980 JAS review symposium and there had precisely described and refuted my thesis in this article (review symposium, p. 271), Chang replied in a letter of June 12, 2008:“Regarding my idea of modern Chinese intellectuals’ combination of Confucian [ren-benyi-shi] [Chang here used Chinese logographs I translate as ‘a consciousness putting primacy on the nature of human existence’]...and moral activism with teleological history reminiscent of the Confucian idea of [self/Heaven] [Chang here used the logographs for ‘my mind/Heaven’], I stand by what I said before. The main reason is that this idea grows organically out of my previous writings which I asked you to review before making accusations.”He then referred to hisChineseIntellectualsinCrisis, which was published in 1987, some seven years after he read my“Selfhood and Authority in Neo-Confucian Culture,”encountered and quoted my statement in it that Chinese in modern times“ ‘found it easy to regard history as a vehicle of attributes previously projected onto“Heaven and Earth”’ ”(“Selfhood and Authority,”p. 16, review symposium, p. 271), viewed this idea as“highly suggestive,”and then rejected it as confusing“formal similarities”with“substantive continuities”(ibid.).

His point apparently was that after he encountered and refuted this idea of mine in 1980, it dropped out of his mind while he worked on the manuscript he published in 1987 and arrived at the same idea. His letter of June 12, 2008 continued: trying in the 1980s“to explain how [Kang You-wei] was able to combine the Confucian idea of moral vanguard and the concomitant moral-political activism with his developmental and utopian view of history,”he independently arrived at the insight that, for Kang, history played essentially the same role“heaven”played for Neo-Confucians. He then was able, again independently, to see how this concept of Kang’s became incorporated into the outlook of China’s intellectual mainstream as a whole in the twentieth century.

Apparently, Chang also believed he had independently arrived at a new insight when he used“a consciousness of human polarization”to describe the Neo-Confucian concept of the self, where I had spoken inEscapefromPredicamentof a tension or“antinomy”(as he put it in 1980) between“a transnatural ability to tap the beneficent, transcendent cosmic force impinging on the naturally given mind and organically shaping the world outside”and“a massive tendency toward moral failure based on inescapable cosmic conditions which [Neo-Confucians] could all too easily sense in their own individual minds”(Escape, pp. 123, 158).

It is of course not uncommon for students of history independently to reach the same conclusion. It is, however, at the very least rare for an exceptionally intelligent and erudite scholar to encounter a thesis proposed by an old, close friend who admittedly has much influenced him; to regard this thesis as“highly suggestive”; to take the pains to refute it; to lose all memory of it while independently arriving at a thesis coinciding with it; and then to present this thesis as his own original insight to a Chinese audience uninformed about or uninterested in the earlier secondary literature.

My view is that Professor Chang undoubtedly was persuaded by his own work on Kang’s ideas that they entailed the above equation of history with Heaven as a force supporting the moral hero. I do not, however, believe that my earlier recognition of this equation had disappeared from his mind as he came to think of this equation, which I had systematically analyzed in the lead article of a prominent essay collection. Nor do I believe that when he devised the term“a consciousness of human polarization,”his own consciousness was empty of any memory of that“antinomy”which I had at great length analyzed as central to the Neo-Confucian concept of the self, an analysis he had so carefully refuted in 1980. Moreover, to whatever extent Chang’s conclusions regarding premises #3 and #4 were reached independently, it was incumbent on him as a scrupulous scholar respecting the work of colleagues to make clear in his published texts the extent to which these conclusions of his coincided with and indeed confirmed the conclusions reached earlier by another student of the subject, not to mention acknowledging such earlier conclusions when he originally had objected to them.