A Philosophical Defense of Culture

Shuchen Xiang

Description

In A Philosophical Defense of Culture, Shuchen Xiang draws on the Confucian philosophy of "culture" and Ernst Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms to argue for the importance of "culture" as a philosophic paradigm. A defining ideal of Confucian-Chinese civilization, culture (wen) spans everything from natural patterns and the individual units that make up Chinese writing to literature and other refining vocations of the human being. Wen is thus the soul of Confucian-Chinese philosophy. Similarly, as a philosopher who bridged the classical age of German humanism and postwar modernity, Cassirer implored his and future generations to think of humankind in terms of their culture and to think of the human being as a "symbolic animal." The philosophies of culture of these two traditions, very much compatible, are of urgent relevance to our contemporary epoch. Xiang describes the similarity of their projects by way of their conception of the human being, her relationship to nature, the relationship of human culture to nature, the importance of cultural pluralism, and the role of the arts in human life, as well as the metaphysical frameworks that gave rise to such conceptions. Combining textual exegesis in classical Chinese texts and an exposition of Cassirer's most important insights against the backdrop of post-Kantian philosophy, this book is philosophy written in a cosmopolitan mode, arguing for the contemporary philosophical relevance of "culture" by drawing on and bringing together two different but strikingly similar streams in our world tradition.
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Humanism and Language: Cassirer and the Xici (系辞)

2. Li Xiang Yi Jin Yi (立象以尽意): Giving (Symbolic) Form to Phenomena

3. Shi Yan Zhi (诗言志): Giving (Poetic) Form to Qing (情)

4. Wen Yi Zai Dao (文以载道): Giving (Linguistic) Form to Dao

5. Zhi You Wen Ye (质犹文也): Giving (Human) Form to the Self

6. Wu Yi Wu Wen (物一无文): Organic Harmony

Conclusion

Appendix 1: Definitions of Wen

Appendix 2: A Brief History of Wen

Appendix 3: Partial Translation of Song Lian's "The Origins of Wen" (Wenyuan 文原)

Glossary
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Métaphysique
• Metaphysics
• Confucianism

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781438483214
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 6 Mo

Extrait

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
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
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
Abbreviations
Introduction
1 Humanism and Language: Cassirer and the Xici ( 系辞 )
2 Li Xiang Yi Jin Yi ( 立象以尽意 ): Giving (Symbolic) Form to Phenomena
3 Shi Yan Zhi ( 诗言志 ): Giving (Poetic) Form to Qing ( 情 )
4 Wen Yi Zai Dao ( 文以载道 ): Giving (Linguistic) Form to Dao
5 Zhi You Wen Ye ( 质犹文也 ): Giving (Human) Form to the Self
6 Wu Yi Wu Wen ( 物一无文 ): Organic Harmony
Conclusion
Appendix 1 Definitions of Wen
Appendix 2 A Brief History of Wen
Appendix 3 Partial Translation of Song Lian’s “The Origins of Wen ” ( Wenyuan 文原 )
Glossary
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
This project has been long in gestation; I first conceived the project around 2012–13. 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 Hawai‘i, 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 Hawai‘i; 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 Professor Brook Ziporyn for talking me through some ideas while he was a visiting professor there. I would like to thank Professor Karyn Lai for reading the first draft of this project and providing such helpful feedback. Similarly, my thanks to Professor Geir Sigurðsson both for his comments at a conference where I presented an early iteration of this project and for his later comments on the first draft. From the Humboldt University of Berlin, I would like to thank Professor Christian Möckel for helping me find my feet among all the Cassirer literature; my interpretation of Cassirer is also indebted to his own work on Cassirer. I would also like to thank Professor Donald Phillip Verene for reading this manuscript and for his advice. I would also like to thank Professor Xinzhong Yao for supporting this project and giving me valuable feedback on it. I am most grateful, however, to Michael Beaney for having believed in this project from the beginning and for having continuously supported me throughout its gestation. His help came at a crucial moment, and I would have been lost without him. I hope that the final product does not fall too much short of his earliest expectations. From Peking University, I would like to thank Zhang Yan for her calligraphy, which is on the front cover. I would also like to thank Zhang Yixuan and Wang Rouzhu, both of whom looked over appendix 3 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 Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,” Journal of Chinese Humanities 4, no. 2. Parts of chapter 6 have been previously published in “Organic Harmony and Ernst Cassirer’s 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 Cassirer’s 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 Cassirer’s other works. DI Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics: Historical and Systematic Studies of the Problem of Causality (1956) EM An Essay on Man (1944) FF Freiheit und Form (Freedom and Form; 2001a) KEH “The Kantian Element in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Philosophy of Language” (2013c) KLT Kant’s Life and Thought (1981) LCS The Logic of the Cultural Sciences (2000) LM Language and Myth (1946a) MS The Myth of the State (1946b) NHPC “Naturalistic and Humanistic Philosophies of Culture” (1961) PSF 1 Philosophy of Symbolic Forms , vol. 1, Language (1955a) PSF 2 Philosophy of Symbolic Forms , vol. 2, Mythical Thought (1955b) PSF 3 Philosophy of Symbolic Forms , vol. 3, The Phenomenology of Knowledge (1957) PSF 4 Philosophy of Symbolic Forms , vol. 4, The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms (1996) SF Substance and Function, and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (1923) SMC Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer, 1935–1945 (1979) PE The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1951) PK The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History since Hegel (1950)
Introduction
Wen ( 文 ) is a term whose sophistication and significance for the Chinese tradition parallels that of Dao ( 道 ) and Qi ( 气 ). 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. 1 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 humanism—not 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 wen became so ubiquitous. Wen embodied the ideal of Confucianism: attaining humanity through culture while recognizing that we are part of a natural continuum. It embodies the Confucian vision of harmony between humans, human culture, and the natural world. Whereas the philosophy of culture originated in the eighteenth century with thinkers such as Vico, Herder, Voltaire, and Rousseau, Chinese philosophy (notably the Confucian tradition), since the beginning of philosophical speculation, orientated itself around the question of culture. How culture was justified can be seen in a philosophical reconstruction of the etymology of the term wen. Wen is both humanism and the form of humanism—it is the totality of cultural forms through which we achieve our humanity.
There is pressing contemporary need to think about cultu