A SHORT HISTORY OF CHINESE PHILOSOPHY

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: I never had any idea of where or how Chinese Philosophy emerged. This books shows a clear line of how historic events effected (sponsored) the various schools of thought and how they threaded and departed over time.

It is written without point of view and the writer writes well and is smart. Needless to say I really like the book

Rating:
Summary: A Good Start
Review: Professor Fung's book has been around for a long, long time, and countless Westerners have gotten their introduction to Chinese philosophy from it.

As such, it has provided a great service to both Westerners and Chinese in helping to have that gap bridged. Having said that, I am not at all sure whether it points the reader in the right direction. For one thing, it concentrates too much on Zhou Dynasty thought. While a concentration in this era is to be expected, just as a similar survey of Western philosophy would concentrate on the Greeks, I feel it was taken too far; there was a great deal more speculation in Chinese thought through the last two thousand years than even Chinese themselves seem to realize.

Another thing is that the book seems to me to pigeonhole Chinese philosophy too much, no doubt in order to make it understandable to Westerners, but after a while it's too much. In short, don't accept this book as the final word on the subject.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: This book is an excellent survey of Chinese philosophy. Extremely thought provoking and informative.

Rating:
Summary: A real eye-opener
Review: This book should put to rest, once and for all, the very idea that Chinese philosophy is a set of disconnected and rather charming aphorisms, primarily concerned with ethical matters and not ontology, and productive of quietism in politics.

In Western bookstores, Asian philosophy in general is filed separately, and often ranged alongside the Tarot, crystals and the New Age.

But as Professor Fung Yu-Lan makes clear, the concerns of Chinese philosopher were with truth.

It is true that there has been a tradition of edification in Chinese philosophy. However, this edification has been consistently treated as the end product of, and motivation for, the philosophical journey, and truth is assumed to be edification's necessary precondition.

Even the most "geometric" of Western philosophers in the modern era such as Spinoza recommended their philosophy for the global improvement and final edification of the mind, and, as Professor Fung Yu-Lan points out, Spinoza's final words in documents such as Of Human Freedom have an exaltation they share with "the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao".

Had Professor Fung's book been written at a somewhat later date, it would also have mentioned the Tractatus of Wittgenstein, whose negative exaltation, in passages such as "Wie auch beim Todt" ("so too at death the world does not alter but comes to an end") have an "Oriental" edification that is based, in the "Oriental" precision and economy of what has gone before.

Post Edward Said, of course, "oriental" requires scare quotes. But a reading of Chinese and Islamic philosophy shows today how "Oriental" with scare quotes makes contemporary "analytic" Western philosophy, insofar as it is anti-edification not in Wittgenstein but in Ayer and in Quine, is the world-philosophical exception...whose deliberate cultivation of ugliness has a political explanation and is linked to the West's rage for an undeserved, and perhaps short-lived, hegemony.

We find in Professor Fung Yu Lan's book and original texts that far from universally recommending quietism and obedience in the political sphere, anti-Hobbes, Mencius felt that the sovereign was bound by the Tao.

Mencius talked back to great kings when they demanded information from which they could profit with in fact an analytic than anticipated Hobbes, and Spinoza, by thousands of years, for he showed the king how "profit" was a zero-sum game that (perhaps especially in agrarian societies, but not exclusively) would set the king against the knights or *shih* and the *shih* against the common people.

Mencius had only the inexhaustible Tao for the king. This had a practical result in that for thousands of years, ordinary slobs in China had on balance a squarer deal than the slaves and serfs of the West.

Indeed we find that Chinese political philosophy emphasized obedience dialectically for the surprising, even shocking, reason that two great dynasties were formed by peasant jacqueries as if Wat Tyler had overthrown Richard Plantagenet and as if, today, the Tyler menage were installed at Buckingham Palace amidst great pomp and state.

As if Spartacus had not in other words been crucified in vain.

Thus obedience becomes an active virtue rather than the nasty secret it is even today in the West, where a surface cultural rebelliousness is in fact used to enforce deep conformity as seen in Foucault.

At the heights, we see from this short book (which unfortunately only whets the appetite for the unabridged history by this scholar, available at Symond's off the Salisbury Road in Hong Kong, but expensive as well as expansive) that Chinese first philosophy existed in the form of what can only be termed, an ontology in order to disambiguate it from either theology or metaphysics.

For at the beginning and unlike Heraclitus, Lao T'se separated li and yi, and "the Tao that can be expressed is not the eternal Tao" is not merely edifying.

Ontologically it is the same sort of analysis of concepts that is much more painfully expressed (thousands of years later) in the Kritik der Reinen Vernunft.

The insight is profound. For if ontology were crude theology or metaphysics and ultimately some shopkeepers inventory of the ultimate furnishings of the world, then those knick-knacks would themselves have a Tao or li, residing in Kantian form, which would not be expressed in the ontological assay, leading to infinite regress.

But as Professor Fung points out, in a way that also anticipates Adorno, this negative result is supreme wisdom. And as he correctly shows (but does not say out of courtesy, leaving the job to an insensitive clod like me), the sour, late-Wittgenstein gesture, of decrying philosophical talk as the buzzing of the fly in the fly-bottle, is also a mistake.

"The Tao that can be expressed is not the eternal Tao" is after all misused by New Age gnomes in corporations to silence dissent, and a populist, survey-course misunderstanding of Kant is that he denied the knowability of "truth": but clearly and as this book declares, "one must speak very much before one is silent".

Nothing further from a Western re-presentation of Oriental philosophy could be imagined, for in the Orientalist mis-re-presentation, the adept is forever the Parzival fool/seeker beaten into silence by the Zen master in a totalitarian caricature.

Western thought is wounded by a series of splits that emerge, perhaps, from Trinitarian doctrines and the fact that Western historical memory includes a time before writing in a way the Chinese does not. The result, for example, is the monstrous, if unremarked, fact that what Western people study in school is forgotten on spring break and seldom applied on the job.

The result is a Romanticism at the end of its tether which normalizes deviance, in which "edification" is a term without content.

Without forgetting its love affair with truth, Chinese philosophy is a healing return to the very idea that after great pain, a feeling for aphorisms comes...a clumsy paraphrase, perhaps, of Lady Dickinson, but, I think, apposite.