Shuchen Xiang - A Philosophical Defense of Culture

A Philosophical Defense of Culture

SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture

Roger T. Ames, editor

A Philosophical Defense of Culture

Perspectives from Confucianism and Cassirer

SHUCHEN XIANG

Cover image of Ernst Cassirer from Wikimedia Commons.

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

2021 State University of New York

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Xiang, Shuchen, author.

Title: A philosophical defense of culture : perspectives from Confucianism and Cassirer / Shuchen Xiang.

Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2021] | Series: SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: ISBN 9781438483191 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438483214 (ebook)

Further information is available at the Library of Congress.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Dedicated to my mother

Contents

Acknowledgments

This project has been long in gestation; I first conceived the project around 201213. The various people, to whom I am indebted draws a map of the journey I have made for its materialization. From my time at Pennsylvania State University, I would like to thank my mentor Erica Fox Brindley for having always encouraged my intellectual independence. I am also grateful to Courtney Rong Fu for her great kindness to me then. From Princeton, I would like to thank Jessica Xiaomin Zu, for many things. From my time at the University of Hawaii, I would like to thank Professor Chung-ying Cheng for introducing me to the Yijing. I am furthermore extremely grateful to Professor Cheng for having provided me with the many opportunities to present and develop my work. I am grateful for having received guidance from Professor David McCraw, whose infectious enthusiasm for the classics has inspired a whole generation of scholars educated at Hawaii; I feel privileged to count myself among them. Finally, I am very lucky to have received the kind attention of Professor Roger Ames during his last year there and his support throughout the gestation of this project. From the APA Eastern Division 2016, I would like to thank Professors Huaiyu Wang and Aaron Creller for their helpful comments on my work. From Aarhus University, I would like to thank Professor Guido Kreis for his personal guidance on this project; his help has been invaluable to me. I have gained enormously from his own work on Cassirer. I would like to thank Professor Michael Forster, from the University of Bonn, for providing me with the much needed platforms for developing my work. From the University of York, I would like to thank professors Peter Lamarque and Catherine Wilson for their kind attention to me during the earlier phases of this project. From Nanyang Technological University, I would like to thank Lili Zhang for the conversations that helped refine my ideas, and for me. Any mistakes are of course my own.

From SUNY Press, I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers whose feedback helped me to gain some much needed perspective on the project and helped give it its final finish. I would also like to thank Mr. James Peltz for all his help in the submission process and in preparing the manuscript. I would also like to thank the copyeditor Gordon Marce for his grammatical expertise and the detailed attention he paid to my manuscript. Parts of the introduction have been previously published in Orientalism and Enlightenment Positivism: A Critique of Anglophone Sinology, Comparative Literature, and Philosophy, Pluralist 13, no. 2. Parts of chapter 2 have been previously published in Freedom and Culture: The Cassirerian and Confucian Account of Symbolic Formation, Idealistic Studies 47, no. 3, as well as The Symbolic Construction of Reality: The Xici and Ernst Cassirers Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Journal of Chinese Humanities 4, no. 2. Parts of chapter 6 have been previously published in Organic Harmony and Ernst Cassirers Pluralism, Idealistic Studies 49, no. 3. I thank all these journals for permission to reuse these articles.

Finally, my thanks to Jacob Bender for having made so much possible, for making it all so much easier, and everything that much more enjoyable; and to my mother, who gave me everything. In some ways she is the inspiration for this project, for she embodies the living tradition that I find so much beauty in.

Abbreviations

I have abbreviated the major works of Cassirers that I have most copiously used, so that it is easier for the reader to see where I am citing from. These are listed below, along with the date that links each to the main reference list. I have used the author-date system for Cassirers other works.

Introduction

Wen () is a term whose sophistication and significance for the Chinese tradition parallels that of Dao () and Qi (). It is a term that designates everything from natural patterns to the individual units that make up Chinese writing, to literature, to human culture itself. I argue that wen became such an important term to Chinese civilization because embedded in the term is the Chinese philosophy of culture and humanism. As Wing-tsit Chan writes, If one word could characterize the entire history of Chinese philosophy, that word would be humanismnot the humanism that denies or slights a Supreme Power, but one that professes the unity of man and Heaven. In this sense, humanism has dominated Chinese thought from the dawn of its history (Chan 1963, 3). It is because of a profound and dominant humanism in the Chinese tradition that the term