The Ivory Tower and the Marble Citadel: Essays on Political Philosophy in Our Modern Era of Interacting Cultures

8. The Contemporary Predicament of Political Philosophy East and West: The Epistemological Implications of Culture

Chapter VIII h The Contemporary Predicament of Political Philosophy East and West: The Epistemological Implications of Culture 1. Introduction: Defining Political Philosophy and Criteria for Evaluating Political Philosophies East and West As illustrated by the publications of Leo Strauss and his school, the idea of “political philosophy” in modern times has usually been applied to many famous, mostly Western writings ranging from those of Thucydides (c. 460–c. 400 B.C.) and Plato (427–347 B.C.) to those of John Locke (1632–1704), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712– 1778), John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), and even Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). The similarly broad term “political thought” (zhengzhi si-xiang) has been used in books by Xiao Gong-quan, Tao Xisheng , and others to describe the ideas of a great variety of famous Chinese thinkers ranging from Confucius (551–479 B.C.) and Xun-zi (c. 298–c. 238 B.C.) to Dong Zhong-shu (c. 179–c. 104 B.C.), Liu Zong-yuan (773–819), Wang An-shi (1021–1086), Si-ma Guang (1019–1086), Huang Zong-xi (1609–1695), Kang You-wei (1858–1927), and famous figures emerging out of the May Fourth Movement. Used to categorize such a broad variety of ideas, both “philosophy” and “thought” are only roughly definable, and so is “political,” which is sometimes defined to cover almost any kind of social interaction. Yet some attempt at precision is possible. First, following scholars like S. N. Eisenstadt, I use “political” here to refer essentially to domestic and international governmental activities and their immediate contexts.1 Second, it is clear that, 536 The Ivory Tower and the Marble Citadel unlike political science, political philosophy (or “thought”) is less interested in describing political facts than in defining the normative or ideal form of political activities and in justifying this normative form. Indeed, how to justify it became the central problem of political philosophy. Third, for reasons that can be debated elsewhere, all texts east and west that I have seen try to justify this normative form by appealing to something that is metaphysical in the sense that it cannot be observed as an empirical fact, namely, the human or the cosmic situation as a whole. For instance, Rousseau said: “Man is born free…” This did not just apply to Europeans. Similarly, Mou Zong-san remarked: “… the principles of life explained by Confucius applied not just to the people of Shandong but to all of humanity.”2 Even thinkers today holding that ideas cannot express any universal or objective truth do so by illogically claiming that all ideas are in fact the product of historically local and ephemeral cultural-linguistic conditions or “language games.” To conceptualize this metaphysical object, political philosophers have classically appealed to the authority of a sacred canon, such as the Confucian Classics or the Bible, of natural law, of norms implied by biological facts, of history, of “reason,” and so on. The theoretical systems produced by these efforts, however, were strongly criticized from the standpoint of Humean, skeptical, positivistic trends described below as the Great Modern Western Epistemological Revolution (GMWER). Struggling in the face of this criticism to sustain the scholarly analysis of political norms, thinkers like John Dunn (1940– ) felt constrained to replace the term “political philosophy” with “political theory.” Yet Dunn also attempted to derive political norms from a concept of universal human nature. Michael Polanyi’s (1891–1976) theory of tacit knowing, on which Professor Yu Zhen-hua has shed much light, argues for a revision of the modern “conception of man,” and so this approach too can be seen as an attempt to ground basic norms in an understanding of universal human nature. The concept of culture developed in the course of the GMWER, however, made clear that, whatever might be the traits common to all human beings, they were too general either to account for the many fundamental differences between worldviews or to imply moral 8. Epistemological Implications of Culture 537 guidelines for choosing between many specific normative options, especially political ones. John Rawls (1921–2002) responded to this epistemological quandary very differently. He tried in an eclectic, provocative way to revise Kant’s concept of “reason” so as to infer moralpolitical norms from it. He argued that political norms could be derived from a concept of “reasonableness” as a norm which, although lacking any absolute justification, consisted of a mix of rather widely acceptable ideas putting...