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

1. Introduction: Political Rationality and the Uncovering of Culturally Inherited Premises

Chapter I h Introduction: Political Rationality and the Uncovering of Culturally Inherited Premises 1. An Overview of the Book: A Chicken-and-Egg Problem Fate has certainly been kinder to me than I deserve, but like many old persons, I think much about matters I regard as distressing, and it is these dark thoughts that have motivated the preparation of this book. These thoughts center on two parts of the world that have greatly benefited me: the U.S., which blessed me with enormous opportunities after I arrived here in 1941 as a Jewish refugee; and what Tu Wei-ming (b. 1940) calls “cultural China”— especially Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Mainland—a vast, spiritually inspiring, intellectually fascinating realm interaction with which bestowed on my life many of its contours. What distresses me are the reigning political philosophies in the U.S. and cultural China. As I see it, each of these philosophical patterns in its own way undermines domestic political development. Moreover, the divergence between their definitions of political rationality aggravates international tensions. My last book, A Cloud Across the Pacific: Essays on the Clash between Chinese and Western Political Theories Today (2005), tried to explore this problem. This one attempts to clarify questions it left hanging. Addressing these questions, however, how can I provide any answers that, even if not fully based on any objective truth or knowledge, are at least more than rhetoric trying to turn my quite possibly egocentric “dark thoughts” into a political philosophy others should regard as enlightened? How can I avoid the biases of my idiolect enough to define “political rationality” and “political philosophy” in an enlightened way? I try in four ways. 2 The Ivory Tower and the Marble Citadel First, I try to uncover and justify the premises on which my methodology rests. It has been decisively influenced by what can be called the Great Modern Western Epistemological Revolution (GMWER). Inspired by the rise of modern science, going back especially to René Descartes (1596–1650), and essentially rejected by modern Chinese philosophy, the GMWER gradually challenged rationalism and led not only to relativistic historicism but also—with special thanks to Charles Taylor (1931– )—to neoHegelianism .1 By “rationalism” I refer to the idea that “reason” as the ability logically to apprehend objective truths about oneself and the rest of the world exists as an identical mental faculty possessed by all normal human beings irrespective of cultural differences. Similarly describing the objective nature of all human beings irrespective of cultural differences, relativistic historicism illogically asserts that human beings cannot readily form any such ideas clearly corresponding to objective reality, because none of them can be sure that her or his ideas are more than ways of rationalizing egocentric interests as well as beliefs based on ROST (historically local and ephemeral cultural-linguistic rules of successful thinking that seem indisputable to the group using them and erroneous to others). Neo-Hegelianism tries to avoid such illogicality by arguing that ideas about the world are formed by both ROST and CR (a critical, logical reflexivity oriented toward and often apprehending universal truth and objective reality). Thus one can logically hold that one of the objective truths human beings can grasp is that ROST and egoism exist, instead of illogically holding that, because of the known existence of ROST and egoism, humans cannot securely grasp objective truth. This neo-Hegelian position makes sense to me, as I explain in section 6 below. Chapter V supports this neo-Hegelian position by comparing it to two other prominent outlooks which also struggle with the problem of how to prevent the GMWER’s discovery of historicity (ROST) from turning into relativistic historicism: HansGeorg Gadamer’s (1900–2002) hermeneutic philosophy and Liu Xiao-gan’s (b. 1947) critique of the latter. Neo-Hegelianism opens up not only historiographical investigation into how differences between one historically inherited pattern and another lead to clashing conclusions about the true nature of the world but also a new philosophical path: using these clashing conclusions as 1. Political Rationality and the Four Premises 3 the starting point for debate about what exists (ontology), how to know what exists (epistemology), and what to do about what exists (ethics, political philosophy). Neo-Hegelianism, then, arose as the GMWER challenged rationalism’s treatment of these three questions, arguing first that “reason” cannot fully answer them, then that “reason” is really a critical reflexivity blurred in...