Oliver Davies
Professorial Fellow, Interdisciplinary Centre for the study of Philosophy and Cognitive Science, School of Philosophy, Renmin University of China
Emeritus Professor of Christian Doctrine, King’s College London
After many years visiting, often to teach, there is one thing I have never understood about China. Why have they not yet had their own Enlightenment? The question has often been asked: why did China not experience its own Enlightenment several centuries ago, at the point where it could have followed the West, and indeed, when it probably had parity with the West in terms of technological innovation? This has consolidated in Chinese studies as the so called ‘Needham question’. The celebrated Sinologist Joseph Needham pointed to the fact that the learning and writing of Mandarin, a monosyllabic language with enormously ornate and richly complex signs in their thousands, fuses the Chinese people together in exceptional ways. But China has taken great strides since then, not least in science. If Enlightenment occurs where science and culture fuse and combine, then China with its new science should be setting a path for humanity through developing influential scientific and philosophical understandings of human sociality, as a vital value-laden counterbalance to technology in the modern world.
In early November, 2019, the second ‘Jiangnan Context Forum’ took place at Wuxi, a beautiful and ancient town in Jiangsu province of Eastern China. The Yangtse Basin with its water, hills and temperate climate has long been understood to have provided an ideal environment for the birth of Chinese civilisation. Today it continues to be regarded as the ‘home’ of ancient Chinese culture, as well as being the economic powerhouse of ‘new China’. The colloquium asked the question how is it possible for such an integration of the most rapid economic development in combination with exceptionally strong traditional culture, to have occurred? Are there insights here for the rest of China and indeed, for dialogue with other societies? The Forum brought leading Western scholars together with Chinese scholars engaged in what might be one of the largest research programmes into practical or civilizational ethics anywhere in the world. It enjoyed the full support of the Chinese government and was, in every way, a very ‘Chinese occasion’. For us too, it was a very inclusive experience.
But the question arises: a project of this kind has to bring the resources of science and culture together which, in this case, means science and Chinese culture. In recent decades we have seen many significant advances in both social neuroscience and evolutionary biology. So why then has entrepreneurial China with its distinctive ancient history, and concern with finding a central place for itself in a globalizing world, not absorbed the new – generally Western – science in the interests of a Chinese Enlightenment? In fact, this may be becoming one of those pressing global questions, not least since we appear to be living in an increasingly divided world and a social Enlightenment may be exactly what we need to stabilize society.
And, despite the enormity of the proposition, the answers to such a seemingly profound question may in fact be quite unexceptional. In the first place, the Chinese lack of direct experience of the first Enlightenment should not be underestimated. We Westerners generally assume that everyone knows what Enlightenment is, and of course Chinese science and technology are very highly developed. It is easy to forget that China only entered the modern period in around 1910. But there is also a considerable appetite among the Chinese for Western degrees in philosophy and for Western speakers in China, many of whom are philosophers. Surely these two factors are a potent way of introducing Chinese civilisation to contemporary science, with its new emphasis on sociality? In fact, however, this is misleading. In the first place, the classical offerings in leading Western universities will reflect the Western Enlightenment in some detail, and will provide scant accounts of Romantic or Marxist emphases on questions of sociality. The – largely analytical – philosophers who visit China regularly also generally reflect this classical Western and analytical tradition. But what about philosophers such as Albert Newen or Shaun Gallagher, and others from the dynamic ‘enactivist’ school? Surely these are ideal transmitters of the new philosophy? In my experience however these thinkers tend to be seen as being too closely aligned with neuroscience to find their way into the Chinese thought-world. Here traditional Chinese philosophies and high status, Western-orientated analytical philosophers tend to dominate.
In summary then, Chinese scholars of philosophy, who inhabit a culture for which sociality is central, attend the best Western universities where however social philosophies exist only on the margins. The Western philosophical skills that they acquire may not be well suited to give expression to their core experience of strong sociality as Chinese; or indeed to approach understandings of reality from a Chinese cultural perspective. Equally the many Chinese philosophers who do grasp this cultural mismatch may struggle to find the resources to respond. The link between science and, for instance, traditional Chinese social traditions is still underdeveloped.
What is needed therefore is a new approach to these questions of philosophy and science. The historical experience of the Chinese includes deep, long term sociality and the strong social bonding which comes from ritual-like practices such as memorizing thousands of complex characters of an essentially monosyllabic language (thus for Mandarin speakers, meaning has to be constantly renewed at the level of shared and particular context). Through the education system, contemporary Chinese culture is deeply shaped by processes of internalization and repetition of the material sign for which Western parallels will be the great ‘calligraphic’ cultures of Islam, Judaism and medieval Christianity. Here we see that what is religion in the West will be sociality or tradition in the East. But the West too has something to contribute here. After all, we understand what an Enlightenment is: we know its power. This Western memory then becomes a potential resource for global culture. The crucial thing required here is that we in the West should learn to see the early Chinese civilisation of Wuxi, with its ancient beginnings of Chinese script, not just as ‘Chinese’ history but more fundamentally as our human history: the history of us all. Only in this way can we lay the foundations for building a common future together.
