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Classical Chinese Thought and the Sense of Transcendence

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Transcendence, Immanence, and Intercultural Philosophy

Abstract

A crucial focal point in debates today on intercultural philosophy is the question of transcendence versus immanence. Particularly with regard to Chinese philosophy, Western scholars have very often stressed the lack of transcendence and the inappropriacy of importing Western metaphysical concepts into this realm of thought. However, the exclusion of transcendence has become problematic, too, in recent research. Itself a typically Western maneuver, such an exclusionary gesture contradicts the holistic thinking characteristic of Chinese classical thought. I employ negative theology as a method of mediating between the two traditions without totalizing either one but rather opening each to the other and to the unlimited possibilities for thinking in between all definable paradigms.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Benjamin I. Schwartz, “The Age of Transcendence,” 3 [40]. See, further, Schwartz’s The World of Thought in Ancient China [42].

  2. 2.

    Karl Jaspers, Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte [22]. For multiple perspectives on the current relevance of this topic, see Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas, eds., The Axial Age and Its Consequences [25].

  3. 3.

    This hidden past is illuminated revealingly from archeological evidence anew by David N. Keightley, These Bones Shall Rise Again: Selected Writings on Early China.

  4. 4.

    Benjamin I. Schwartz, “Transcendence in Ancient China,” 59 [41].

  5. 5.

    See Eric Ziolkowski, “Axial Age Theorizing and the Comparative Study of Religion and Literature” [49].

  6. 6.

    From the beginning of his “Introduction: The Axial Age Beakthroughs—Their Characteristics and Origins,” Shmuel N. Eisenstadt acknowledges Schwartz’s work and focuses on the “strain toward transcendence” through “reflexivity” [13].

  7. 7.

    Heiner Roetz, Die chinesische Ethik der Achsenzeit, 42 [38].

  8. 8.

    Roetz has extended his views with extensive reference to Jullien and his critics more recently in “Die Chinawissenschaften und die chinesischen Dissidenten. Wer betreibt die ‘Komplizenschaft mit der Macht.’”.

  9. 9.

    Roger T. Ames, Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary, 211 [3].

  10. 10.

    In Confucian Role Ethics, Ames emerges as an eloquent advocate in the name of Confucianism of a “human centered religiousness as the highest expression of personal cultivation” (92). On this account, and in defiance of typical prejudices of secular modernity, Ames fervently affirms that “religiosity is not only the root of the flourishing community and the seed from which it grows, but is most importantly its matter and its radiant flower” (92).

  11. 11.

    Steven Burik, The End of Comparative Philosophy and the Task of Comparative Thinking: Heidegger, Derrida, and Daoism, 164 [10].

  12. 12.

    Ames and Hall, Dao-de-Jing: Making this Life Significant, 45–46 [7].

  13. 13.

    Robert W. Smid, Methodologies of Comparative Philosophy: The Pragmatist and Process Traditions, 133 [43].

  14. 14.

    In fairness, it must be noted that some inflammatory language had already been directed against them by Gregor Paul, “Against Wanton Distortion: A Rejoinder to David Hall and Roger Ames by Gregor Paul,” and Michael Martin, “A Rejoinder to Ames and Hall.”

  15. 15.

    Robert W. Smid, Methodologies of Comparative Philosophy, 133. See, further, 128–132 [43].

  16. 16.

    See Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall, Thinking from the Han, 191–192; cf. 230 [6].

  17. 17.

    Insistence on precisely this point is found, for example, in Dale S. Wright, “Rethinking Transcendence: The Role of Language in Zen Experience.”

  18. 18.

    The affinity here with Chinese Daoist thinking is elaborated by Joseph Grange, “An Irish Tao.”

  19. 19.

    See William Franke, On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts, Vols. 1 and 2. [14].

  20. 20.

    One of the most relevant of Neville’s many books is God the Creator: On the Transcendence and Presence of God and On the Scope and Truth of Theology: Theology as Symbolic Engagement. The Comparative Religious Ideas Project (CRIP) produced three volumes (The Human Condition; Ultimate Realities; and Religious Truth) published in 2001 by the State University of New York Press. The same press earlier published Neville’s Axiology of Thinking in three volumes: Reconstruction of Thinking (1981), Recovery of the Measure (1989), and Normative Cultures (1995).

  21. 21.

    Robert C. Neville, Ultimates. Philosophical Theology, Vol. 1 [33].

  22. 22.

    Robert Cummings Neville, Boston Confucianism: Portable Tradition in the Late-Modern World, 47–50, 147–166 [31]. Neville musters other comparatists including Tu Weiming, Wm. Theodore de Bary, and Joseph Grange into his camp as well. See Smid, 120. I would add Eske Møllgaard and Wolfgang Kubin. Neville’s approach is discussed later, toward the end of this section.

  23. 23.

    They, too, are not alone. A similar position is taken notably by A. C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao: Philosophic Argument in Ancient China. In this critique, Ames claims to have as allies the most important and authoritative researchers at work today, including Graham, Nathan Sivin, Chad Hansen, and Norman J. Girardot. However, there is also much equally determined opposition. Robert Wardy, Aristotle in China: Language, Categories and Translation, admires the remarkable achievement of the seventeenth-century Jesuit translations and mounts a massive attack specifically on Graham as mistaken in his fundamental assumptions, notwithstanding the impressive sophistication of his linguistic analyses.

  24. 24.

    Zhang Gang, “Form and Formless: A Discussion with the Authors of Anticipating China,” 585–586 [48].

  25. 25.

    Aquinas, “De Deo Uno,” Summa Theologica, pt. 1, Quaestio 12.

  26. 26.

    This logic of monotheism is elucidated provocatively by Jan Assmann, Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism.

  27. 27.

    Seminal for this outlook is Marcel Gauchet, Le désenchantement du monde: Une histoire politique de la religion.

  28. 28.

    Roger T. Ames, “Paronomasia: A Confucian Way of Making Meaning,” 41 [2].

  29. 29.

    Ingolf Dalferth effectively brings out the fathomless theological subtlety and complexity of “The Idea of Transcendence.”

  30. 30.

    Massimo Leone and Richard J. Parmentier, “Representing Transcendence: The Semiosis of Real Presence,” S5. This introductory piece usefully inventories some of the semiotically innovative means that art and religions across diverse cultures have invented in the self-subverting endeavor to represent transcendence. Significant works from the very rich, cross-cultural bibliography on this topic include Valerio Valeri, Kingship and Sacrifice: Ritual and Society in Ancient Hawaii, trans. Paula Wissing; Neal H. Walls, ed., Cult Image and Divine Representation in the Ancient Near East; Kimberley Christine Patton, Religion of the Gods: Ritual, Paradox, and Reflexivity; Herbert L. Kessler, Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art; and Giselle de Nie, Karl Frederick Morrison, and Marco Mostert, eds., Seeing the Invisible in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages.

  31. 31.

    Matthias Jung, “Embodiment, Transcendence, and Contingency: Anthropological Features of the Axial Age,” in The Axial Age and Its Consequences, 77–101 [25].

  32. 32.

    Cf. Markus Gabriel, Warum es die Welt nicht gibt [16].

  33. 33.

    In the much more extended discussion in Chapter 3 of my forthcoming Apophatic Paths from Europe to China: Regions Without Borders.

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    William Franke

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    William Franke

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Franke, W. (2016). Classical Chinese Thought and the Sense of Transcendence. In: Brown, N., Franke, W. (eds) Transcendence, Immanence, and Intercultural Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43092-8_2

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