Confucianism and the Three Timeless Truths Part I

From The Philosopher, Volume CX No. 2 Autumn 2022

 

A Ming period scroll depicting Confucius handing over an infant Gautama Buddha to an elderly Laozi

Confucianism and the Three Timeless Truths

A Study of the Chinese Concept of Order 

By Abhilash Nath and Abhilash Babu

PART ONE

---

It is increasingly clear that, since the 1980s at least, China has been searching for a new sense of its own identity rooted in a long-lost past. The resurgence of Confucian values has been part of an effort to find the essence of the ‘present’ in the spirit of the ‘past’. As a result, the present is defined by a complex relationship of historical and natural forces – and is an exclusively ‘Chinese experience’. For the current disposition of power in China, this confers legitimacy. It announces a recognition of China’s unique history and cultural values. 

It is a sign of the newly gained significance – a sign of pride for the Chinese, announcing that: ‘We’ have finally arrived on the world stage. It is for this reason that an understanding of Chinese history is crucial to understanding the nation’s behaviour.

By contrast, the modern Western concept of time or the Judaeo–Christian concept of time has its roots in Israel, with a rich prophetic tradition. In Western thought, the whole of history is structured around a centre, a temporal midpoint, the historicity of the life of Christ. In the Western concept of time, the recurring present is always unique and unrepeatable. Because of this, it has an open future before it. In this concept of time, the composition of every single fleeting present is determined by the actions of individuals. From a Western perspective, time is linear, real and irreversible. It is the medium of real change. Time is nevertheless structured; the days of an individual are organised and scheduled according to a firm sense of customs, habits, and duties. Consequently, from the Western standpoint, diplomatic dialogues between countries are largely transactional.

Within China, the authorities often use history to determine China’s external behaviour, such as determining its territorial claims. Traditions even shape Chinese security strategies. For instance, the Go game, or Chinese chess, informs the Chinese attitude toward international politics. The Go game has more than 2500 years of history. Unlike modern chess, the pieces are undifferentiated, simple counters divided into two colours; hence, the game excludes notions of dethroning a King. Instead, the game is won through a steady expansion of space on the chessboard.

In an effort to explain the nature of war, in a book entitled Nomadology, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his co-writer, a psychoanalyst named Félix Guattari, compare the board games of chess and Go. The chess pieces are coded, which means they are marked and identified and can only take internalised, logical moves. They are like citizens produced by modern power. On the other hand, the Go pieces are anonymous pellets. They always form extrinsic relations. Often act in constellations, like a pack of wild wolves hunting together; their movements are essentially intuitive and designed to gain an advantage over the immediate strategic situation. Deleuze and Guattari write:

“Let us take Chess and Go from the standpoint of the game pieces, the relations between the pieces and the space involved. Chess is a game of State, or of the court: the emperor of China played it. Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive. They have qualities; a knight remains a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop. Each is like a subject of the statement endowed with a relative power, and these relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation, that is, the chess player or the game’s form of interiority. Go pieces, in contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function. ‘It’ makes a move. ‘It’ could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant. Go pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic properties, only situational ones. Thus, the relations are very different in the two cases.”

A similar strategic difference distinguishes Chinese from Western geopolitics. Unlike the Western strategy for Iraq during the Gulf Wars, and many previous conflicts, which focussed on replacing the leadership, the Chinese geopolitical strategies are not intended to overthrow the ruling power and replace it with a preferred Chinese model. Instead, the Chinese geopolitical plans are concerned with cultural and economic influence.

The Confucian worldview, in many ways, stands squarely against the ethos of the US-led post-Second World War liberal order. At a time when the advent of the internet, communication technologies, the development of the surveillance state and the centralisation of power have weakened liberal notions of liberty, equality and individual freedom, the Confucian vision of order demands particular attention because of its orientation towards collective interests – privileging the clan over the individual.

Confucian ideology has become a source of soft power to project China as a responsible power on the world stage. China’s evolving global role has demanded a confident self-image from a systematic understanding of its history. This strategy became inevitable as countries around China’s periphery began to perceive its sudden rise as a threat. The conservative cadence of Confucian teachings has further supplemented the interests of the communist party in domestic politics. In a heavily interconnected order, when ideology (along with demography and technology) plays a crucial role in shaping the world, the Chinese party-state, through consistent state funding, has elevated Confucianism as an official state ideology.

Part of this is that the Chinese government has spent significant money in the past years to sponsor “Confucius Institutes” worldwide, including in India, where we are based. Along the lines of Germany’s ‘Goethe Institutes’ and France’s ‘Alliance Française,’ the Confucius Institutes are educational centres for studying the Chinese language and culture. Their establishment is part of a “soft diplomacy” intended to improve China’s image on the world stage.

Confucianism emphasises harmonious development through communication between the self and the community. It stresses harmony between the human species and nature and mutuality between humanity and heaven. Its focus on the community over the individual marks it from the liberal tradition, built around human dignity, freedom, liberty, the rule of law, equality before the law, and multilateral institutions. This is why we stress the relativistic worldview of Confucianism.

The term ‘worldview’, derived from the German weltanschauung, was first used in this way by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, one of the central Enlightenment thinkers, in The Critique of Judgment. According to him, since the human mind is structured similarly in each individual, the ‘worldview’ is schematically organised. Kant considered it to be independent of experience, operating at a transcendental level, as a synthetic-a priori, as a condition of possibility of knowledge in general. Fellow German philosopher and cultural critic Nietzsche shifted the focus from the accuracy and universality of the Kantian conception of worldview to study its function in life: according to him, a worldview is a finite set of beliefs. Later, Marxist thinkers like György Lukács, have in turn ‘worldview’ as a phenomenon mediating the facts of the society and the production of knowledge and, therefore, an historical and sociological category. The worldview is at once the condition of possibility of cultural receptivity and all forms of creative expression.

In this essay, ‘worldview’ is used to denote the historically formed and conceptually unstructured totality of assumptions, beliefs, values, emotions, feelings, and ethics, or gestalt patterns, which is the condition of possibility of an individual or a society. A worldview, modulated by the historical and material conditions of a society, orients the manner in which an individual relates to the social and physical environments; it is the symbolic framework in which one defines one’s sense of selfhood. Worldview may either be consciously articulated or unconsciously expressed; it may even be created out of false notions. What matters instead is their function in facilitating the well-being of those who behold them. Worldviews vary depending on living and working conditions; there is, therefore, always more than one worldview – for instance, there is the elite worldview, the worldview associated with popular culture and subculture, and so on. It follows, therefore, there are as many worldviews as there are individuals alive. However, when considering the historical development of the Chinese civilisation, it is still possible to identify certain shared features, concepts and categories of understanding, such as time, temporality, history, and life.

And so, in the following sections, we will look more closely at the so-called ‘three timeless truths’ of Confucianism – its concept of time, its relativistic worldview, and the stress on the clan over the individual.

Abstraction and philosophical orientation are necessary to understand these aspects of the Chinese worldview systematically; otherwise, most of the ideas and themes that we go on to discuss here are everyday beliefs, ideas and expressions of ordinary Chinese people. The historical approach is used to systematise otherwise distant ideas and concepts. Our approach is intended to open a large canvas within which diverse ideas, beliefs, expressions and ways of life can surface and form dynamic relationships.

Perhaps the key characteristic of the Chinese worldview is the notion of Intrinsic Order. This Chinese preoccupation with ‘order’ is longstanding. The oldest of its classics, the Book of Changes, initially a divination manual in the Western Zhou period (1000–750 BC), maintained that those who know the natural unity of heaven, earth, and humanity would have the foundation to bring order to all under the heaven. During the Sung Dynasty (960–1279), the Changes was one of the key texts for the imperial civil service examinations. The book was also used as a guide for men to overcome narrow self-interest in creating an integrated human society dedicated to the benefit of all. When the Sung dynasty reunified China in the 960s, a unified, well-organised, and centralised civil bureaucracy replaced the rule of local strongmen.

Being a closed system, consisting of sixty-four hexagrams and sixty four associated Chinese texts, the Changes is considered as an expression of coherence, not just as a book but as “change;” the book reproduced in specific ways the coherence of heaven and earth. The Changes, in a way, outlines the metaphysical concerns of Chinese civilisation. It developed the concept of change as a vital force that links the supernatural (Heaven), nature (earth), and the realm of man. In such a system of dynamic interconnections, the vitality associated with the metaphysical concept of heaven or the supernatural introduces spontaneity and dynamism.

The concept of ‘change’ became the primary ‘ontological category’ very early on. As China authors like Kidder Smith Jr. and Peter Bol suggest, it developed as part of “a holistic view of reality as a system of complex and dynamically interacting processes, a continuously changing universe”. The Changes belong to this very tradition. It advances insight into the nature, meaning, and significance of ‘change’ and the underlying common features of the experience and knowledge of ‘change’ in their entirety, both human life and the universe. In its attempt to understand the concept, the ancient text conceives the differentiation of the metaphysical (Heaven), the physical (Earth), and the social (the Realm of Man) as immanent, meaning intrinsic to the undifferentiated (the constantly changing) element of time itself, called the Ch’i. This classical view of ‘intrinsic order’ shaped the progress in Chinese metaphysics, politics, literature, and painting from their inception, and it is still a living aspect of the Chinese worldview today. In this conception of change, the order is not imposed from the outside.

Instead, according to the Changes, the universe is an expression of a divine, cosmic dance of two opposing yet complementary forces – yin and yang. The book thus comprises three main principles: Bian Yi, Jian Yi, and Bu Yi. The first, Bian Yi, signifies everything in the world – inorganic matter, organic matter, human beings, human thoughts, and the universe – is a process of constant change. Though it is the case, the principle of Jian Yi indicates that “change” only occurs according to some underlying principles. Hence the Changes, as a book dedicated to understanding change, does not approve of complete chaos and decay; all changes, whether natural or artificial, are always rhythmic and, therefore, productive. So, this ancient theory of evolution looks for patterns within processes that can be realised with necessary wisdom. The third principle, Bu Yi, indicates that everything is ‘change’, but still, the origin of everything is eternal.

However, the Changes does not offer a permanent solution to man’s existential crisis. Since it attempts to find the inherent principles of “change” in general, it is said, the  contains within itself the shared patterns of human life and the universe. Chinese antiquity frequently draws parallels between the moral qualities of one’s behaviour and cosmic processes. In this context, the Changes was considered a guide for human life. It was used to govern the likely consequences of an action by probing into its moral qualities. Once, it enabled men to observe their nature and the nature of attitudes and interests associated with an act. Thus, the Changes was consulted to resolve matters of great personal and political importance.

Ten Wings, a collection of commentaries on the Changes traditionally ascribed to Confucius, deviated from the 7th and 6th-century BCE standards of interpretation. The Changes is here approached as a coherent whole, as a system of heaven and earth. Rather than a tool to know the future, it is used for structuring thoughts about the ‘present’. However, in Chinese rituals, the “present” is not unique and unrepeatable, a mere pulsation in a temporal sequence or a distinctly audible beat in a rhythm. It is always already connected to the “past” in unconscious ways. This why, the Christian existentialist philosopher, Paul Tillich, says in his book, The Protestant Era:

“As far as history is dealt with, the past is glorified. The ancient emperors and the classical writers are the patterns for all the future in politics and culture. The ancestors determine life more than those who are living. The past is predominant over the future. The present is a consequence of the past, but not at all an anticipation of the future. In Chinese literature, there are fine records of the past but no expectations of the future.”

A second key to understanding Confucianism is the importance for the Chinese of History and Time. The establishment of the imperial institutions during the two centuries before the Common Era and the consolidation of Confucianism, with deep commitments to social and political history, as the official doctrine of the imperial bureaucracy, cultivated a rich culture of writing historical and personal documents. The French sinologist, Marcel Granet, states that the Chinese possessed an advanced historical sense among ancient civilisations. As a meticulously detailed record of the past, of people, societies, and the lives of kings and saints (and the virtues they embodied), history, in Chinese tradition, became an exclusive tool to appropriate the values of the past through learning. In ancient China, particularly with the ascendence of the Confucians, history began to teach what is properly Chinese.

Joseph Needham, the British biochemist, historian of science and sinologist known for his scientific research and writing on the history of Chinese science and technology, wrote in an essay called ‘Time and History in China and the West’, that “The great historical tradition of China envisaged love (jen) and righteousness (i) incarnated in human history, and it sought to preserve the records of their manifestation in human affairs.” Even rulers were expected to master the complex patterns of events and motives, both human and natural, to coordinate effectively with the continuously changing times’ complexities. David Pankenier, Professor of Chinese at Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, quotes Jia Yi, a philosopher from the early 2nd century BCE thus:

“A popular maxim has it: ‘prior events, not forgotten, teach about events to come’. For this reason, in ordering the state, the accomplished ruler observes the events of antiquity, tests them against the present, matches them with human affairs, examines into the principles of flourishing and decline, and looks for what is appropriate according to expediency and tendencies. In this way, discarding and adopting measures have their proper sequence, adapting and transforming their due seasons. Thus, his reign is untroubled and enduring, and his altars to the soil and grain are safeguarded.”

Jia Yi’s words further reflect Chinese civilisation’s spiritual basis, a preoccupation with ethics, an exclusive feature of Confucianism. However, this preoccupation with ethics is primarily rooted in a uniquely Chinese idea of history that matured over several patterns of historical development, organised mainly around deep reverence for ancestors and a quest to learn from their values. Thus, history became a rich source of self-transformation. This intense preoccupation with history to primarily transform lives and societies has attuned the ancient Chinese mind to temporal series more than most contemporaries.

In contrast, for the ancient Hindus, the apparent self and the phenomenal world are outcomes of ignorance one should always strive to overcome. The purpose of life, for them, is to attain an acute sense and expression of oneness. Consequently, liberation is not linked to the phenomenal world but is overcoming it and realising the divine unity within all things. What the ancient Indians sought was the eternal within the temporal, the poetic within the real. Therefore, to overcome the duality of the phenomenal world, it is requisite that one lives absolutely in the present. In this way, the ancient Indians had a poetic relationship with the past.

In the Analects (IX.17), the great Master contrasted the passing river with the flow of time. We are told that “Standing by the river, Confucius declaimed, “How it flows on like this, never ceasing day and night”. According to Needham, the long Chinese tradition of historiography has offered a unique experience of time, a sense of the linear progression of time in which the ‘past’ always repeats itself in the fleeting ‘present’ instants. For this reason, the passing ‘present’ is a gift of the ‘past’. 

For the ancient Chinese, the practical concerns with the immediate demands of life forced them to reject both the metaphysical speculations of the Hindus and the occident’s logical explorations, a point made by the American sinologist and historian, Derk Bodde,

The third central concept is that of Metaphysical Unity. In classical Chinese, the ‘relative’ and the ‘absolute’ appear in a continuum – in the undifferentiated element of time, the ch’i. The principle of immanence – first appeared in the Book of Changes – connects the material (the objective) and the spiritual (the subjective) dimensions of life itself.

The principle of immanence is ancient. It is there in the principle of Bu from the Book of Changes and in the Taoist concept of the way or the Dao. The principle of Bu is timeless within time. Ch’i, the vital energy, is the undifferentiated substance of time. The Dao or the Way is the totality of time to be identified and participated in. It is pure immanence. It always manifests itself in the form of two all-inclusive principles: yin, the principle of quiescence and yang, the principle of activity.

Nevertheless, the yin–yang dualism is based not upon mutual opposition or antagonism but on an underlying harmony. The combinations of these principles create five elements, and their various combinations form all things in the universe, including heaven. The Dao expresses the essence of the universe and every person. It is, according to the Slovenian sinologist Jana Rošker, at once, the ultimate cosmic principle and “the tiniest atom of being which, through their infinite combinations, continuously generate all the infinitely variegated worlds of existence”. It is the vital, abstract driving force of the universe and the concrete, individual ‘way’ of each human being. As a metaphysical concept, the concept of Dao is eternal. It is at once the eternal law of all motions and itself beyond motion, and for that reason, it is beyond history itself.

The supernatural, natural, and social are united in an immanent continuum. Hence, Taoism and Confucianism wanted solutions for related problems. If Taoists posed for themselves how men can adjust themselves to the outer universe, then Confucianism set itself to answer how to get alone equably with one’s fellow men. Since moral order is already embedded in the universal order, following Dao, or learning the way, is an expression of a virtuous life. And one learns the way by integrating the values of the ancient sages.

The principle of immanence in Chinese thought signals something beyond cyclicality and reoccurring patterns. Time is not created; it is an organic unity that spontaneously self-generates itself. Unlike the Judaeo–Christian concept of time and temporality, the classical Chinese do not, in fact, stress irreversibility. In the writings of Chang Tsai, a philosopher and politician who lived from 1020 to 1077, the undifferentiated substance of time, the ch’i, the true source of all beings, is suffused even in the “great void.” The ch’i’s infinite presence connects everything into an all-encompassing continuum, modulating and unfolding everything together in a dynamic process. Since there is no conception of a beginning or end, time in classical Chinese is an open system. Against the linear (the Judaeo–Christian view) and circular (the Hellenic–Hindu view) movements of the time, in the Chinese view, time is dynamic and impulsively self-generating. For that reason, the Chinese worldview is neither truly linear nor cyclic. It is transformational, involving endless combinations and permutations with a web-like structure connecting the past and the future to the present.

The Chinese worldview expresses unity as a shared pattern in the order of nature and morality – there are natural parallels between patterns of nature and human values. For classical Chinese, the similarities do not come from a syllogism involving premises and conclusions; instead, they are developed around a system of analogies and recognition of structural patterns and modes of informal thought. For this reason, the classical Chinese did not follow the Aristotelian laws of identity and non-contradiction, which would have led to the dichotomies of Western logic. The dual oppositions in the Chinese tradition, such as action and reaction, fire and water, darkness and light, or feminine and masculine principles, are viewed as mutually defining and interdependent, guided by the underlying principle of complementarity or correlativity. The Chinese understand dualities as relational and complimentary; their conception of dualities did not sprout from a subject-object structure. In such a conception of duality, all things, including mind and body or soul and body, are mere expressions of the same material that the Chinese calls: Ch’i, the vital energy. It is Ch’i that provides the connection between nature and the world.


END OF PART ONE 

In part two of this exploration of Confucianism and the Chinese Concept of Order, we will shift the focus away from philosophical ideas towards more sociological ones concerning society and social structures.


About the authors

Abhilash Nath completed a PhD in philosophy at the JNU, New Delhi, and is at present teaching at the School of Gandhian Thought and Development Studies, Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala. His area of interest includes Indian Philosophy, Chinese Philosophy, and Continental Philosophy, particularly the metaphysics of the nature of time and causation. His current research interest is, if things go well, to undertake a systematic study on the materialistic understanding of time.

Abhilash Babu has completed his PhD from The Centre for Studies in Science Policy, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He has more than 12 years of teaching and research experience and presently teaches at the School of Social Sciences, Mahatma Gandhi University Kerala. His areas of interest include Water Governance, Decentralisation, Risk communication and Political Ecology. Currently, he is working on the political ecology of floods in Kerala.

Address for correspondence

Dr Abhilash G Nath,
Assistant Professor,
School of Gandhian Thought and Development Studies,
Mahatma Gandhi University,
Kottayam 686560

Dr Abhilash Babu
Associate Professor & Director
School of Social Sciences,
Mahatma Gandhi University,
Kottayam  686560

Notes on Sources and Suggestions for Further Reading 

The authors would like to acknowledge the assistance of the following texts in preparing this article, which following the longstanding conventions of The Philosopher, does not include direct sourcing of references and quotations. 

Baynes, C. F. (1967), The I Ching or Book of Changes, Princeton: Princeton University Press 

Bodde, Derk (Dec. 1942) “Dominant Ideas in the Formation of Chinese Culture” Journal of American Oriental Society Vol. 62, No. 4  
Bol, Peter K. (2008), Neo-Confucianism in History, Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center 
Chan, Wing-Tsit (1969), A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press  
Cheng, Chung-Ying (1974), “Greek and Chinese Views on Time and the Timeless,” Philosophy East and West, Vol. 24, No. 2 
Confucius (2014), The Analects, New York: Penguin Classic 
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari (2010), Félix Nomadology: The War Machine, Seattle, WA: Wormwood Distribution 
Feger, Hans (2019), “Universalism vs “All Under Heaven” (Tianxia / 天下) – Kant in China,” Yearbook for Eastern and Western Philosophy, 4 
Hassard, John (1990), The Sociology of Time, New York: Palgrave Macmillan  
Hillier, Jean and Cao, Kong (2013) “Deleuzian Dragons: Thinking Chinese Strategic Spatial Planning with Gilles Deleuze,” Deleuze Studies, Vol. 7, No. 3.  
Lau, D. C, trans., (1979), The Analects: Sayings of Confucius, London: Penguin Books 
Nath, Abhilash G (2018), “The Delirium of Appearance,” Indian Journal of Politics and International Relations, Vol. 11 No. 1 & 2  
Needham, Joseph (1977), “Time and History in China and the West,” Leonardo, Pergamon Press, Vol. 10 
Nordan, Bryan W. Van (1992) “Mencius and Xunzi: Two Views of Human Agency,” International Philosophical Quarterly 32 (2):161-184.  
Pankenier, David W (2004), “Temporality and the Fabric of Space-Time in Early Chinese Thought,” in Ralph M. Rosen (ed.) Time and Temporality in the Ancient World, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology  
Rošker, Jana S. (2012), Traditional Chinese Philosophy and the Paradigm of Structure, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing  
Smith, Kidder, Bol, Peter K., Adler, Joseph A., and Wyatt, Don J. (1990), Sung Dynasty Uses of the I Ching, New Jersey: Princeton University Press  
Tillich, Paul (1957), The Protestant Era, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press  
Tongqi, Lin, Rosemont Jr, Henry and Ames, Roger (1995), “Chinese Philosophy: A Philosophical Essay on the “State-of-the-Art,” The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 54, No. 3 
Wang, Ban (2017), Chinese Visions of World Order: Tianxia, Culture, and World Politics, Durham: Duke University Press  

Confucianism and the Three Timeless Truths Part II

From The Philosopher, Volume CX No. 2 Autumn 2022

 

A Ming period scroll depicting Confucius handing over an infant Gautama Buddha to an elderly Laozi

Confucianism and the Three Timeless Truths

A Study of the Chinese Concept of Order 

By Abhilash Nath and Abhilash Babu

PART TWO

---

In medieval England, particularly in rural areas, punctuality was almost unknown. Timekeeping such as there had to be done using sundials! The idea of a linear progression of time, that is, minutes into hours, hours into days, days into weeks, weeks into months, and months into years, according to a calendar, was not formal yet. The rhythm of the years was built mainly around a sense of twelve months and four seasons organised around practical knowledge and some formal church calendars and rituals. Hence “the perception of past and future would be blurred. History would be almost unknown, especially further back in time.” And the imagination of the future was determined by a fixed form of the past, materialised in language, customs and traditions. For peasants, the daily rounds were task-oriented and, to this extent, flexible.  

Nevertheless, a rigorous regime of timekeeping was followed in many churches, monasteries and towns. With industrialisation, timekeeping became a necessity. Activities such as organising work, collecting rent, and so on., induced a new sense of time in the populace, particularly in the urban population. Eventually, money would become the defining interest of the time. And managing time would then become one of the preoccupations of money. Here, time, an outcome of a material process, starts to reflect upon its material value, transforming time itself to become a value – money.  

Medieval Europe, from the end of the 17th century, witnessed a reorganisation of power, an outcome of what Foucault would call an épistémè rupture; this would transform power from a means of collecting resources for the sovereign through appropriation and taxation to a means of taking from the subjects their time and labour in the interest of production. The temporal organisation of modern bureaucracy is also an outcome of the Judaeo – Christian concept of time. Modern organisations that are consistent, systematic and rational in the sense of the word employed by Max Weber are always oriented temporally towards the future. They estimate the time required to finish current projects, anticipate timetables for future projects and work according to fixed schedules. The rigidity of the modern bureaucracy is a consequence of this orientation towards the future.  

Time is also at the heart of the Confucianist principle of structure, or li. However, the ancient Chinese were not, in fact, interested in our passive reflection of time but in how time is created as a phenomenon. Their interest extended from the metaphysical understanding of its origins to how time grows out of communal life as a category of understanding created through shared customs and rituals, values, worldviews and the temporal organisation of social and private life. This is true after the revival of Confucian philosophy and political culture associated with neo-Confucianism, which began in the middle of the 9th century and reached its peak in the 11th century in the Northern Song Dynasty. Following neo-Confucianism insight, time grows from within itself by differentiating the undifferentiated element, chi.  

A lecturer to the emperor on Confucian classics, and cofounder, with his brother Cheng Hao, of the neo-Confucian school of principle (li), which dominated Chinese thought for many centuries, Cheng Yi (1033–1107) expressed these dynamic patterns in time as the principle of structure, or li, describing them as “the pattern which runs through all things and joins man to the universe”, to defend the goodness of human nature. Cheng explained Heaven and Earth as aspects of li, restating the problem of human nature in terms of the reoccurring patterns that connect everything under heaven. These patterns become real sensations and expressions in people, who are, by nature, good because they are connected to, and follow these patterns in time.  

In such a worldview, modes of perception, interpretation and recognition of reality arise within endlessly unfolding dynamic patterns. Objects do not appear in isolation but rather, interactions develop significance. Thus, dynamic patterns lead to the concept of a universe behaving like an organism, with the parts reflecting the structure of the whole. Other neo-Confucianists of the 11th century, like Chu Hsi, even took principles as logically and ontologically prior to the primordial energy or ch’i that creates the universe (though they are inseparable). As the Slovenian sinologist, Jana S. Rošker, puts it in Traditional Chinese Philosophy and the Paradigm of Structure:  

“Structure is essential, and its influence appears in the principles of everything that exists in nature. Natural events are not the result of some divine will or higher power but the spontaneous manifestations of the “adjustment” of all that exist to the fundamental constitution of the natural or heavenly structure.” 

As an elaborate pattern or structure, li may hierarchically organise itself alone, a series of relationships between one entity and several others, or unfold in a network of horizontal connections between sets of diverse entities. For Wing-tsit Chan, the Chinese scholar and professor best known for his studies of Chinese philosophy and his translations of Chinese philosophical texts, li, described as ritual, natural law, or the feeling of respect and reverence, exists in the middle of ch’i. In its broader sense, li, as the principle of contact and the sense of what is proper, is none other than ch’i in its constant movement. 

So, the ancient Chinese had faith in ordered change. However, the order was not imposed from without but was intrinsic to change—included in the concept of ch’i. This prioritisation of “change” over solidity, firmness and stability shows that the Chinese never sought permanence. Instead, their metaphysical assumptions emphasise and value the liveliness, flexibility, and nimbleness of modern adventure sports like big wave surfing or air gliding while dealing with the demands of the world. Recent Chinese advances in the realms of economy, finance, science, and technology draw on such metaphysical insights.  

Prominent writers of the Sung period argued that the re-establishment of an integrated human order, the one that had once prevailed in antiquity, was the real task of the new intelligence. Ou-yang Hsiu, an advocate of reform of the bureaucratic system during 1043-1044, for instance, argued:  

“In antiquity, ‘ritual’ was made into the single basis for all aspects of life. The ritual forms of daily life were also the forms through which the affairs of government were conducted and a moral socio-political order maintained. Social life and work were defined by ritual, and ethics were inculcated through the forms of life and work.” 

This relativistic worldview transformed society from above and unified the values and customs below. The reforms of the Sung bureaucracy, an outcome of its economic and political success, introduced the examination system, an effective mechanism for drawing local elites to the state. The new examination system gained credibility as it was based on merit and presented a vision of learning. The elite class was expected to be skilful in composing poetry according to exacting formal criteria and writing prose essays. The consolidation of such a cultural order also promoted a new vision of ethics, in which one would no longer be judged by blood but by virtue.

Confucianism is a political philosophy: its metaphysical assumptions point towards practical reforms. Morality is embedded in the order of the universe so that a good government would promote social harmony and general well-being. Yet, for Confucius, some things are outcomes of what he calls “destiny.” He defined destiny as if it had a heavenly design beyond human understanding. Thus, the human condition is a product of a play of unconscious and conscious forces. These metaphysical assumptions would set Confucianism as a force seeking reforms rather than radical change. As a political ideology, it reinforces a hierarchical order.  

Along with ‘culture’, the concept of ‘self’ has played a key role in shaping the philosophical debates in modern China. Various attempts have been made either to liberate the “self” or to propose its absorption into a collective consciousness; comparative studies have been undertaken to differentiate the ‘moral’ and ‘aesthetic’ self, seen as a choice between the ideas of Confucius and Zhang. But the newfound fervour for the idea of ‘self’ itself is primarily a response to China’s encounter with Western culture, philosophy, literature, and social sciences. 

The concept of ‘self’ attains significance in classical Chinese as part of the problem of self-transformation, while the central preoccupation of Chinese civilisation is ethics. Hence the Confucian school is not an exception. In the Chinese tradition, the question of “what is man?” is not linked to any mystic revelations. Instead, it is explained from a humanist standpoint.  

In the Confucian tradition, man is essentially man-in-society – a social animal. We are already in relations, so we exist in a network of duties and obligations. Goodness is in this world and of this world. Studying the lives of emperors like Yao and Shun, the Duke of Chou, and the past sages is enough to know what goodness is. 

Confucius hardly ever addressed human nature directly. In The Analects, a businessman and philosopher, Zigong said: “One can get to learn about the Master’s accomplishments in literature and the cultural tradition but not his views on human nature and the way of Heaven.” The Analects mention the only time Confucius spoke about human nature: The Master said, “People are similar by nature; they become distinct through practice”. Some would see this statement as a forerunner to Mencius’s much-pronounced posture that “human nature is good.”  

Confucius is also of the position that the environment determines nature. Our actions, feedback, and revisions determine who we are. Likewise, he often denied that he possessed a rare stock of knowledge. And would not even admit that any such abilities are innate. Instead, he would regard anything exceptional in him as the product of his love for ‘learning’, that is to say, self-improvement. Indeed, Confucius saw himself as a transmitter of ancient wisdom, not a genuine creator. 

However, his followers never felt the need to restrain themselves from directly addressing human nature. The leading one was Mencius (372–289 BC), who pursued ‘the continuation of the moral order, the preservation of the classics, the vitality of the tradition of sages, the well-established rituals and good common sense of the people, the respect for teachers, and the stability of the political order. Mencius wanted to direct the attention towards the internal resources for spiritual growth. We have enough internal resources to become a sage, a buddha, or a good person. But it demands ceaseless effort and self-cultivation.  

For Mencius, human nature is essentially good. His position is settled around a deeper insight: human beings are intrinsically evaluative animals – that is, “we are not just creatures who desire food and sex. We desire to feel worth, to be esteemed, to lead lives with moral values”. Mencius considered this a significant part of human nature and maintained that we must attend, through steady concentration, to what we desire to do. We must nurture moral values. Great people would follow this aspect of human nature, our desire for acceptance and respect, and transform themselves, sprouting a moral heart through work. Mencius insisted on self-transformation through hard work.  

The third of the three great classical Confucians, after Confucius and Mencius, is Xunzi, active in the third century BCE. For much of imperial Chinese history, however, he was a bête noire – a Confucian who had been led astray after rejecting key elements of Mencius’s philosophy. Only in the last few decades has Xunzi been gradually rehabilitated. 

Xunzi offers a different picture of human nature in which self-cultivation begins when one self-consciously overrides one’s desires. That is, one must not do what one desires to do but rather what one approves of doing. For Xunzi, all desires are thoughts out of control. If put in Freudian language, they result from a mistaken super-ego. For that reason, individuals are supposed to overcome their ego and wholly identify with the persona, the culturally given identity, or the mask. It enables individuals to connect with themselves and channel their energies to connect with others.  

In this way of understanding, human nature is such that we are, by birth, oriented towards making a profit. We are born evil. If men were allowed to follow their desires and indulge in their emotions, they would violate all forms and rules of society. A rigorous hierarchical order in Xunzi callously separates emotions from conscious activities. For Xunzi, each of us must be initiated by the instructions of a teacher and guided by ritual principles to become good.  

Ancient sages create rituals. However, the sages did not possess rituals by birth. They are really not different from any ordinary men. Instead, rituals are a product of their conscious activities. Since rituals are not part of human nature, even those revered sages had to transform their nature into conscious activities. The creation of rituals demands the cultivation of reflective observation and listening. The sages produced ritual principles and set forth laws and regulations by gathering their thoughts and ideas together and experimenting with various conscious activities. In Xunzi: Basic Writings, we read: 

“A potter may mould clay and produce an earthen pot, but surely moulding pots out of clay is not a part of the potter’s human nature. A carpenter may carve wood and produce a utensil, but surely carving utensils out of wood is not a part of the carpenter’s human nature. The sage stands in the same relation to ritual principles as the potter to the things he moulds and produces.” 

Neither Mencius nor Xunzi denies the human capacity for self-transformation. However, Mencius suggests that the environment determines moral cultivation:  

“In good years, the young men are mostly lazy, while in bad years, they are mostly violent. Heaven has not sent down men whose endowment differs so greatly. The difference is due to what ensnares their hearts.”  

A dialogue between Mencius and a contemporary named, Gaozi offers further insight. Gaozi argues that human nature is morally neutral and that it is the influence of the environment that finally determines whether someone’s nature is good or bad. 

For this reason, Confucian scholars universally agreed upon the role of ‘ritual’ in cultivating the self. Every human act is perceived as a repetition of a time-honoured ritual. There is, therefore, a proper way of doing everything. And the essence of every act and human growth, in general, is realised in the proper conduct of ritual. Thus, one realises the meaning and purpose of life through participation in a social process organised around ritualised relationships.  

Confucian ethics grows out of a series of constitutive concentric circles: self, family, community, society, nation, world, and cosmos. It replaces the calm and dispassionate adventure of reason in Western modernity with “compassion” and “shared concern.” In such a worldview, the whole is always larger than the totality of its parts; collective interest always outshines self-interest. Nevertheless, the question of right and wrong is addressed by choosing those in our circle, considering those closer to us, not in space but along other axes. For this reason, Confucian morality is precisely the opposite of what Plato suggested in Euthyphro. The system demands an atonement of self-interest to fit into the collective articulation of interest as a community. Order is built out of a sense of duty and responsibility. And the system functions around values like empathy and compassion, where the individual earns rights as reverence. 

Ever since the nineteenth-century French sociologist, Marcel Mauss, redefined the scope of anthropology, many thinkers have often insisted that the self, or the sense of ‘I’, is a post-Cartesian, Western cultural construct. Modern conceptions of ‘the person’ and ‘identity’, juxtaposed against the perceived world, are seen as being shaped, in numerous unconscious ways, by the tenacious rationality of this imposing signifier – ‘the self’. Making ‘self’ into a noun, preceded by a definite or an indefinite article, speaking of ‘the’ self or ‘a’ self has become a sign of the modern sense of agency. By contrast, Confucian teaching undermines the significance of such agency and instead focuses on the connections, interconnections, networks, patterns, and relationships that create a society. 

Since Confucius, it has been accepted by Confucian scholars that men and women require initiation: learning, reflecting, and realising. The initiation removes ego from them, and through learning the Chinese classics and history, they embody the traits of the ideal King, teacher, father, mother, brother, friend and so on. Hence, to embody the traits of an ideal ruler, one is expected to study Chinese history and the classics. The superior man is made, not born. However, learning is not exactly a one-way process, a mere appropriation of past values. Rather, it is determined by the specific historical conditions that shaped the present.  

Confucianism unifies life around rituals that are flexible, dynamic procedures. Proper rituals are relationship-oriented and situation-dependent expressions of care, kindness, compassion, appreciation, and social harmony. The neo-Confucianists resolved the problem of human nature by elevating li – ritual – as the dynamic pattern that connects heaven and earth to the realm of humanity. Rituals are concrete means for an ultimate end: emancipation through communal participation.  

In such a system, the problem of the immortality of a person is addressed in two ways. The Taoist teachings guide us to identify with the source of creativity, the essence of change. We attain a form of immortality by attuning ourselves to the vitality and rhythm of nature. The Confucian way of achieving immortality, however, is through communal participation.  

The Confucian gentleman is a well-balanced character who follows reciprocity as a working principle. This principle introduces checks and balances in daily contacts – that “what you do not want done to yourself, should not be done to others.” The principle assumes that everyone has a similar propensity. And therefore, an honourable person can use them to gauge other people’s likes and dislikes. They can use li or ritual as a regulative principle to govern their behaviour towards others. Thus, the Confucian form of government replaced the old system of ‘nobility of blood‘ with ‘nobility of virtue’.  

The Confucian social order revolves around five cardinal bonds in particular. The relations between: 

1. The ruler and ruled,  
2. The father and son,  
3. The husband and wife,  
4. The elder and younger brothers,  
5. And between friends.  

The individual is always conceived in relationships. Relationships endlessly transform him from within, and he reflectively knows his position in society through his social relationships. The ruler derives power and authority from the mandate of heaven; the magnificence and righteousness of this power attract and secure the people’s loyalty, and the ritualised contacts affirm the relative positions of actors. Nevertheless, power is hierarchically organised in all these relationships that constitute an order. At the level of each of these bonds, one of the actors is superior to the other. In addition, besides the five hierarchically indexed bonds mentioned, the Confucian order maintains a marked distinction between a scholar and a layman. To a large extent, the Confucian political order depended on an educated aristocracy. These relationships are organised around a sense of duties and not rights. 

Likewise, the persona, or a social mask, is heavily clothed in cultural values, rites, and rituals, often resulting from folk ideas. It is the product of a compromise between the individual and society at the expense of inner vitality. If the spiritual order (Taoism) rests on nurturing proper attention to the id, the moral order (Confucianism) relies on cultivating the super-ego. In his book investigating the origins of society and religion, called The Future of an Illusion, Freud demonstrated the importance of the super-ego in sustaining civilisations. According to him, cultivating the super-ego in individuals, which is the ethical component of our personality that provides the moral standards by which the ego operates, would reduce the need for repressive forces of the state.  

Similarly, rituals and rites in Confucianism prescribe to the general public what is moral. The rituals and rites enable them to conform to the demands of society, thereby reducing the need for repressive state power. The choice left for most rural, uneducated people of imperial China was to fully identify with their social role, whether to be a righteous husband or a kind brother. For most, life was a pure event with little choice. Confucian universalism presupposes a moral and quasi-religious design secured in a unitary, all-encompassing order. Consequently, moral doctrine and learning merge with political order. Its traditional purpose was to integrate different ethnic groups and populations using shared culture and rituals.  

In Confucianism, duties bind everyone. The recognition of duties and responsibilities indeed runs the entire system. The system requires the harmonious functioning of the five cardinal bonds. The ruler, father, wife, son, brothers, and friends are bound to do their duties according to their relative positions within the system.  

A Japanese folktale, “The Dream of Akinosuke,” offers insight into the Confucian view of order. Initially from Japan’s Edo period (1603 – 1867), shaped by imported Confucian values, it tells of Miyata Akinosuke, a gōshi, a freeholder farmer who dreams a dream under an old cedar tree in his garden while drinking wine with few of his friends. The folktale uses metaphors to remind us of the Confucian views of an ordered society – the ant colony, butterfly and the old cedar tree. Consider the metaphor of the ant colony. Human society is similar in being hierarchically structured with prearranged roles and codes of contact for each member.  

The ant colony metaphor serves to guide us to find our place in the larger order of things. At the same time, it uses the metaphor of the butterfly to remind us to take things lightly in our lives. The butterfly reminds us of the values of change, without which we cannot dance. While the image of a man resting in the shade of an old cedar tree with roots deep in the soil is life nourished by a civilisation with roots deep in the past, the wisdom of the metaphors of ant colony and butterfly is intended to settle all resentment and cultivate a sense of selfhood and subjectivity that would enable one to grow with the society.  

Under Mao, the Chinese Communist Party, during the early stages of its fight against Western Imperialism and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government, utilised these available cultural capitals to attract the masses to their fold and empower them to feel the spirit of the communist dream. The Chinese cultural identities had effectively carried revolutionary ideas, generating new imaginations for the impending success. The American scholar of Chinese politics and history at Harvard University, Elizabeth Perry, for instance, has traced the culture of the Chinese revolution back to the days of the Chinese communist party’s campaigns at the Anyuan coal mine, Jiangxi province where the party learned its formative lessons. The methods and appeals used in Anyuan were later deployed nationwide to convert cultural capital into valuable revolutionary currency.  

At Anyuan, to forge new revolutionary inroads, Mao and his fellow ‘red literati’, people like Li Lisan, effectively used the pedagogical authority long associated with the Confucian elite of imperial China. In its early stage, the party effectively deployed the parallel pull of wen (literary attainment) and wu (martial prowess) to target sections of the Chinese public. Gatherings and parades were accompanied by traditional lion dance and martial art displays. Today, the communist party under Xi Jinping is trying to revive this revolutionary tradition of blending values.  

Public opinion in contemporary China is created through diverse institutions such as the party-state, mass media, internet, communication, surveillance technologies and AI, architecture, academia, cultural institutions, market and the capital. These are dynamic institutions with diverse experiences, commercial interests, loyalties, experts and skills, commentators, whistleblowers and critiques. And always, in this network of institutions and relationships, the Chinese Communist party is omnipresent. The Australian journalist and author Richard Mcgregor writes: “Throughout the system, the Party has positioned itself like a political panopticon, allowing it to keep an eye on any state or non-state agency while shielding itself from view at the same time”. These institutions, with specific logic and practices, function together as an organic unity, producing accepted patterns under the watchful eye of the CCP. Understanding their functioning is crucial in understanding the debate in China today over: “What does it mean to be Chinese?”  

Today, the Chinese media comprises many things, including emoticons, museum displays, traditional magazine displays, newspapers and journals, and television programmes of many different genres. China has the most significant internet users and is the world’s largest e-commerce market, with nearly a billion users. With over 1.3 billion smartphones, China bests every other country. More than 60% of those use smartphones to watch TV online. This vast market suggests that the Chinese should be at the forefront in areas, like cyber enterprises and Artificial Intelligence. Owing to government support, the Chinese have also developed significantly large tech-enterprise while innovating and offering services both in the domestic and global markets. Millions of Chinese people debate, complain and gossip on social media. This platform, therefore, gains considerable attention from authorities, who regularly listen carefully and adapt their policies accordingly. This bottom-up flow of ideas and values happens within a long tradition of whistleblowers. 

In a lecture titled ‘Seeing China Through Its Media’, Hugo De Burgh, the Director of the China Media Centre at the University of Westminster in London, has identified several interesting phenomena on social and screen media. Firstly, of how the Covid-19 pandemic produced a vast number of programmes in Chinese screen media. The celebrations of solidarity and community in the face of terrible threats were often the message presented in all these programmes. An official documentary of CCTV, ‘Fighting Covid-19’, showed the heroic and self-sacrificing work of every arm of the public service. The party-state’s claimed success in containing the disease reinvigorated the debate on the efficiency of the Chinese system. These debates, both on social and screen media, frequently turn into comparative claims citing constant criticisms of the Chinese system in Western media. Thus, the early success in containing Covid-19 evoked a new round of debate on one of the age-old concerns of the Chinese mind – “our system.”  

Such broad social themes frequently recur in reality shows and screen dramas. Notwithstanding the rise in the divorce rate, marriage and family are still taken seriously in Chinese society. The screen dramas often portray the family as the Chinese economic renaissance made flesh. Under harsh economic conditions, the family demands on each other increase, yet the bonds remain intact. In the popular TV series called National Treasure, nine national museums present three treasures each over ten episodes. Finally, nine winners are selected from twenty-seven treasures by public vote. The programme became a huge success, with 800 million requests on public television and video portal sites and over 1.7 billion online comments. The nine museums registered a 50% increase in visitors. What does this suggest? Perhaps that being Chinese today means pride in national culture, an aspiration to be educated and the consciousness of belonging to an influential country.  

In conclusion…

The ascendence of China onto the world stage has set Confucianism squarely against the liberal ideologies of the West. While liberalism stands for the autonomy of the individual and considers rational agents as an end and not a means, Confucianism considers the clan as the basic unit of society. And so, as a political philosophy, Confucianism emphasises responsibility. It deploys a top-down political strategy for development, whereas liberal economics orients itself towards a bottom-up approach. Likewise, liberalism follows a linear view of time, whereas the classical Chinese view of time is complex, even web-like and transformative. 

According to Confucianism, the present is always intricately connected to the past. Hence people are encouraged to learn from Chinese classical literature, history and the unique Chinese experience. However, Western liberalism opposes modernity with tradition, meaning that the liberal ethos is primarily oriented towards the future. In his essay, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim, Immanuel Kant even argued that history, seen as the dialectical unfolding of human reason, is inevitable. The reason is that human beings cannot harness the full potential of reason in but a single generation.

END OF PART TWO 

About the authors

Abhilash Nath completed a PhD in philosophy at the JNU, New Delhi, and is at present teaching at the School of Gandhian Thought and Development Studies, Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala. His area of interest includes Indian Philosophy, Chinese Philosophy, and Continental Philosophy, particularly the metaphysics of the nature of time and causation. His current research interest is, if things go well, to undertake a systematic study on the materialistic understanding of time.

Abhilash Babu has completed his PhD from The Centre for Studies in Science Policy, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He has more than 12 years of teaching and research experience and presently teaches at the School of Social Sciences, Mahatma Gandhi University Kerala. His areas of interest include Water Governance, Decentralisation, Risk communication and Political Ecology. Currently, he is working on the political ecology of floods in Kerala.

Address for correspondence

Dr Abhilash G Nath,
Assistant Professor,
School of Gandhian Thought and Development Studies,
Mahatma Gandhi University,
Kottayam 686560

Dr Abhilash Babu
Associate Professor & Director
School of Social Sciences,
Mahatma Gandhi University,
Kottayam  686560

Notes on Sources and Suggestions for Further Reading 

The authors would like to acknowledge the assistance of the following texts in preparing this article, which following the longstanding conventions of The Philosopher, does not include direct sourcing of references and quotations. 

Baynes, C. F. (1967), The I Ching or Book of Changes, Princeton: Princeton University Press 

Bodde, Derk (Dec. 1942) “Dominant Ideas in the Formation of Chinese Culture” Journal of American Oriental Society Vol. 62, No. 4  
Bol, Peter K. (2008), Neo-Confucianism in History, Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center 
Chan, Wing-Tsit (1969), A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press  
Cheng, Chung-Ying (1974), “Greek and Chinese Views on Time and the Timeless,” Philosophy East and West, Vol. 24, No. 2 
Confucius (2014), The Analects, New York: Penguin Classic 
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari (2010), Félix Nomadology: The War Machine, Seattle, WA: Wormwood Distribution 
Feger, Hans (2019), “Universalism vs “All Under Heaven” (Tianxia / 天下) – Kant in China,” Yearbook for Eastern and Western Philosophy, 4 
Hassard, John (1990), The Sociology of Time, New York: Palgrave Macmillan  
Hillier, Jean and Cao, Kong (2013) “Deleuzian Dragons: Thinking Chinese Strategic Spatial Planning with Gilles Deleuze,” Deleuze Studies, Vol. 7, No. 3.  
Lau, D. C, trans., (1979), The Analects: Sayings of Confucius, London: Penguin Books 
Nath, Abhilash G (2018), “The Delirium of Appearance,” Indian Journal of Politics and International Relations, Vol. 11 No. 1 & 2  
Needham, Joseph (1977), “Time and History in China and the West,” Leonardo, Pergamon Press, Vol. 10 
Nordan, Bryan W. Van (1992) “Mencius and Xunzi: Two Views of Human Agency,” International Philosophical Quarterly 32 (2):161-184.  
Pankenier, David W (2004), “Temporality and the Fabric of Space-Time in Early Chinese Thought,” in Ralph M. Rosen (ed.) Time and Temporality in the Ancient World, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology  
Rošker, Jana S. (2012), Traditional Chinese Philosophy and the Paradigm of Structure, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing  
Smith, Kidder, Bol, Peter K., Adler, Joseph A., and Wyatt, Don J. (1990), Sung Dynasty Uses of the I Ching, New Jersey: Princeton University Press  
Tillich, Paul (1957), The Protestant Era, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press  
Tongqi, Lin, Rosemont Jr, Henry and Ames, Roger (1995), “Chinese Philosophy: A Philosophical Essay on the “State-of-the-Art,” The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 54, No. 3 
Wang, Ban (2017), Chinese Visions of World Order: Tianxia, Culture, and World Politics, Durham: Duke University Press  

Review: Expressly Human (June 2022)

 From The Philosopher June 2022 CX No. 1 Spring 2022

Charlie Chaplin, being taught sign language by Granville Redmond, who was deaf from birth. 

Expressly Human? Theorising emotional expressions as the key to communication

Consider the ‘Silent Movie Problem’: a world in which everything seems the same, yet people interact without language. In fact, in silent movies, invariably a little bit of speech does take place, maybe in the form of decorative speech bubbles presented as still images but the point is that an awful lot of human activity seems to be possible to represent without anyone needing to speak.

And the problem is not just theoretical. A hundred thousand years ago, it is assumed that there were humans, indeed some kind of human societies, yet apparently no one used words because, well, language had not been invented yet. So how would society function without language is a great question – and not just for philosophers.

Paradoxically, it seems that being silent is part of human nature, yet now human beings - even young children, actually, particularly young children! - talk incessantly. But maybe the notion of being silent is a bit misleading. In their book, Mark Changizi  and Tim Barber point out that there are all sorts of ways to communicate apart from a formal language: hey, have you talked to a dog recently? Animals communicate how they are feeling - angry, hungry, afraid. The argument here is that there is evidence that communication via emotional expressions goes back hundreds of millions of years - maybe even to some invertebrates.

The idea is that emotional expressions are the starting point for communication “nature’s first language”. Mark Changizi  and Tim Barber offer hopefully that this insight is a kind of Rosetta Stone that enables us to decode human behaviour. 

The core of their argument is that: 

• the content of such communication and negotiation is basically emotional;

        •  emotional expressions are a kind of negotiation,  a haggle babble;

• communication used to be effected through acts and gestures;

• acts and gestures have now been transferred to words. 

However, for spoken language, communication rarely never comes just as words, but is always also packaged with intonation, prosody, and not to mention facial expressions, gestures and so on. Which points towards another objection, though, that Mark and Tim’s approach assumes a precision to both the words and the underlying emotions that is not there. After all, aren’t semiotic codes arbitrary? In parts of the Pacific, the signal for ‘Yes’ is a raising of the eyebrows, while in Turkey it definitely means ‘No’. In Iran, Greece, Russia, Sardinia, and parts of West Africa the thumbs up sign, that sends so positive a message in other lands, is a very rude gesture…

Mark Changizi is a cognitive scientist, while Tim Barber is a mathematician with a long interest in “diagnosing the algorithms that underlie the uniquely human capacity for abstract reasoning”.  (Henceforth, per the style of the book, I’ll just call them Mark and Tim.) Anyway, their starting point is that humans are locked in competition for resources. The problem with such competition is, that in the absence of words, “jaw-jaw” as Churchill once put it, there will be war. 

Language allows for negotiation. Negotiators may seek what is in some sense the fair outcome, the right outcome, but if there is a difference of opinion on that, then the shadow of force is there. But “how do we negotiate a compromise without language”, the authors ask, with the rather awkward example chosen, throughout the book, the division of a zucchini bread. Mark and Tim’s theory is that emotional expressions fill this gap.

For example, negotiations involve an element of barter, of poker even  - your offer needs to be matched by some movement from the other party. Pride corresponds to feeling confident, and humility to the opposite. (Hmmm… that’s now what Jesus said.)

And when in a negotiation, the more someone pushes against something you believe in, the stronger your resistance comes to the pushing. This is where  the compromise zone emerges, whereas, in a fight, the more aggressive actor may destroy resistance, in negotiations “there is a specific compromise that’s the fair one given the two parties’ beliefs”. Now they add an interesting twist to the argument, saying that any route to a fair compromise needs to allow the parties to correct the other’s claims. Rather than each party expressing only their own confidence level, each party must also indicate their opinion about the other’s confidence level. “Each party ends up having to say two things, not just one.” In this way:

“Once corrections are allowed, it becomes a back-and-forth, where the parties take turns. It becomes a conversation. A discussion.“

Another intriguing idea, here, is that when one side of a negotiation suggests reasons why the other person is wrong… they actually enlarge the space for agreement. On the other hand, as the authors also remark, “Cooperation, sharing, and working together account for the lion’s share of our interactions, and these elements are not aggressive”, with the result that we actually spend a lot of time in life behaving like the Disney chipmunks and insisting politely “No, you go first!”

Throughout the text, numerous mathematically inspired figures are offered to illustrate “the internal emotions for defense” imagined in the zucchini bread dispute. But I’m not sure the graphics clarify the issue. Not the ‘shield facing toward Tim for defense and away from Tim’ (with Mark placed physically nearer to Tim), nor even the ‘Great Tree of Expressions’, with “space for eighty-one emotional expressions within it”. As to this last, Mark and Tim offer hopefully that the cartoon faces “tap into some perceptual kernel of truth, which is why they at least somewhat convey an emotional expression approximating the depicted meaning.

Part of the problem surely lies in attempting to illustrate a concept that is not in itself clear. What’s the theory behind these icons? The idea is that, by using simple icons with things like ‘V eyebrows’ for confident (proud) and ‘upside down V eyebrows’ for not-so-confident (humble), and the same for the other three dimensions (i.e., for ‘your-confidence’, and also for the horizontal and vertical axes of ‘acknowledgment space’),  a simple facial expression icon can be offered for each of the 81 face-combinations in the full four dimensional space. Yes, it does get complicated.

At one point, Mark and Tim explain that one of the most commonly used spaces for visualising emotions is James Russell’s “circumplex structure”. However, they don’t explain that the term, which seems to be, broadly, that ‘a circumplex’ is a pictorial represention of a concept with some aspect of circularity, although they note that “Russell believed that emotions were built out of a combination of two dimensions: pleasure-displeasure (valence) and activation-deactivation (arousal)”. 

Fortunately (for me anyway) the mathematical divisions and distinctions occasionally give way to a more fluid narrative style. The authors explain that their theory “is actually not very complicated”.  Instead, “the beauty of it is that its rich tapestry of emotional expressions come from the barest minimum of ingredients: a pinch of belief (certainties), a teaspoon of correcting each other (responses), confirmation receipts to taste (acknowledgments), and a loaf of precious zucchini bread (the resource being negotiated).”

And they insist that the key elements of negotiation are already known to us all intuitively. One complicating factor though, they suggest, is dishonesty, and the problem of how social creatures deal with it. “The solution, or partial solution, as we will see, is one of the most exciting and deep things about emotional expressions. It fundamentally alters how we think about our daily expressive selves.” The solution to dishonesty is to introduce the notion of ‘social capital’.

“Social capital (or reputation) is the energy of the social world.”

Mark and Tim say that social capital performs a role analogous to springs in conventional mechanics. Or to be more precise, social capital acts just like an energy term. And it’s the human will that acts like a spring in the ‘boingy’ sense.

“We’ve been playing the Poker Game of Life for millions of years! We have the expressions, the bets, the springy machinery. All of it. Emotional expressions have bets hidden inside them. In a sense, you already know this because you totally appreciate that you can get humiliated, and more so the more you trash-talk during a disagreement. Each of those “trash-talks”—a variety of emotionally expressing yourself—amounts to a bet of social capital. The zingier the trash-talk (including the use of curse words!), the bigger the bet. And if your opponent is the one who got humiliated, you know in your bones that you just got “awarded” social capital. You can almost feel yourself raking all the reputation chips over to your corner of the table.” 

But back to the ‘Silent Movie Problem’ - of how to have social life without language. As they end their discussion, the authors assert that this problem is illusory: not least because: “Whether visual, auditory, or whatever, emotional expressions are constantly reverberating between social animals.” The important thing to bear in mind is that:

“When we say someone is smart—and especially in normal, everyday conversation—we often mean they are witty, funny, sharp, clever, entertaining, political, cagey, crafty, shrewd, sly, wary, wily, devious, sneaky, circumspect, cunning, tricky, biting, stinging, confident, popular, or a blast. These “smart”-associated terms have social implications . . . about how smartly we control and conduct ourselves among all the complex cooperative and competitive interactions with family, friends, enemies, and strangers. Our everyday use of “intelligent” usually concerns social intelligence.”

And that’s why, today, Mark and Tim think, social media has this great need to track reputations. In the final chapter, the authors broaden the debate and I think here the book makes a particularly useful contribution. But this one is not in the area of the philosophy of language but rather in the area of the philosophy of science, picking up points raised by Thomas Kuhn fifty years ago about how knowledge is really constructed in the sciences.  

“You might think that science is about hypotheses and predictions and experiments and controls and analyses and statistics and confidence, but the real “genius” that makes science work is that it’s a decentralized network of scientists. Over time, some scientists rise in reputation by virtue of being able to show true and interesting things. They accordingly get more influence; others are more likely to listen to their claims. And some scientists lower in reputation, either by saying boring things or by repeatedly making claims that are false or incoherent.”

The result is that:

“At the end of the day, scientists don’t believe other scientists’ claims because they carefully slogged through all the data and did all the analyses. There are too many papers and too little time. We simply believe what they say, in some part because of some reputation they have garnered.“

And so, what started out as a theory of “emotional expressions” becomes, at the close, part of a wider debate about the social construction of scientific knowledge.  

Reviewed by Martin Cohen

---

Expressly Human 

By Mark Changizi and Tim Barber 

BenBella Books 2022

ISBN 9781637740484