Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues

A Veteran of Chinese Philosophy

When did you first become interested in China, and how did that initial interest turn into a career-long inquiry into Chinese philosophy, history, and culture? 

I did my undergraduate degree at Stanford University, and I was originally a math and, for a while, engineering guy. I was also in the Marine Corps at the time, and the Vietnam War was still going on. 

Stanford has a search engine called Socrates, and when I looked up Vietnam, I got somewhere around 1,300 to 1,400 titles. I went through all of them, and what I found was all but 20 or 30 were about Vietnam's economy, the Indochina War, or the American War, and the 20 or 30 that were about Vietnamese culture were incredibly amateurish publications. 

So I thought, “Gee, I better start learning something about Vietnam,” but they didn’t offer Vietnamese at that time (and still don't), so the closest thing I could do was study Chinese. I began taking classes in between my summers with the Marine Corps, and I had such great Chinese teachers that I became more interested in studying Chinese. I studied with a man in the philosophy department named David Nivison and finished as a philosophy graduate. 

After several years working at the Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences and serving in the U.S. Army, I eventually decided I wanted to go back to graduate school. I got into Stanford and continued my work in China, though I also pursued some study in Korea and Japan. 

To this day, I still think that we need to understand other cultures more deeply than we do today, and that many of our problems arise from our failure to do this. In this regard, I think the Jesuits and Matteo Ricci are still an inspiration for us, and that we’re really not living up to his example.

How has the field of studying Chinese philosophy transformed throughout your career? Are there any new or more recent challenges that scholars are facing in conducting their research?

I’ve held positions at philosophy departments at Stanford and Michigan University and was a visiting distinguished professor at Boston University. I’ve also taught in Hong Kong and Korea for many years. 

When I started out, there was virtually nobody in North America doing this, and it seemed like an insane idea to think you could make a living this way. There were only two people—my own teacher, David Nivison at Stanford, and Donald Monroe at Michigan—who really worked on Chinese philosophy in philosophy departments at what we now call tier one research universities. 

In my lifetime, the situation hasn't really changed that much. There are right now almost no programs where there's anybody in a philosophy program (at a place that trains graduate students) who is trained in Chinese philosophy. I and my fellow student, Kwong-loi Shun, who is now semi-retired at the University of California, Berkeley, have been the only ones in my generation that were at top analytic philosophy departments. 

This is a major problem because the ability to train the next generation in the way they should be trained can't be done without appointments at these kinds of places. If you want to be a serious philosopher of ancient Greece or China today, you have to have exceptional linguistic abilities, you have to know the history and culture of your subject area, and you have to be a really good philosopher. The entry costs are very high, and the lack of appointments focused on studying Chinese philosophy is stunning in a negative way. 

So the question is now whether or not philosophy is really going to open up, as the discipline has not felt a need to represent East Asia in any significant way.

You’ve spent your career studying the history of Chinese thought, with a particular emphasis on the Confucian tradition. The idea of “Confucianism” has been used in various ways as an explanatory framework for understanding Chinese culture and society. Is this a useful framing, or is the idea of Confucianism too much of an essentialized, idealized, and misappropriated concept? 

A theme underlying my work in the field is that we shouldn’t assume a singular notion of Confucianism, but rather think of it as “Confucianisms.” Just look at the first two great Confucians, Mengzi and Xunzi, and how they disagreed over human nature. One says it’s basically good; the other one says it’s bad. This is probably the most important issue, if there’s any one single issue in the Confucian tradition, and responses to this very question have varied tremendously throughout the history of Confucian thought. So what you get are what I would consider differences among “Confucianisms.” 

Now the government of China is claiming a particular version of Confucianism that is a lot about obedience and deference, and while they have ideals like 和谐社会 (building a “harmonious society”) they give a very distorted version of those ideals. In the Confucian tradition, it's not about obedience, but rather individuals finding within themselves ways to live harmoniously with others. 

If you look at something like China’s surveillance system, and I wrote a very short piece about this, the idea of being constantly surveilled all the time runs counter to the Confucian principle of self-cultivation. There’s a very famous line “君子慎其獨,”which is about the need for people to be watchful over themselves when alone. 

But when you’re constantly being surveilled, you're not going to be looking within. You're going to constantly look over your shoulder and figure out ways to game the system. This totally abandons the idea of cultivating yourself or becoming what I would call an ethically responsible individual, which to me is the essence of Confucianism.

Cosmopolitanism

You recently convened the final meeting of the U.S.-China Research Group on Cosmopolitanism. Give us an overview of some of the outcomes and takeaways from the project.

As a philosopher I’ve been interested in the idea of cosmopolitanism for a long time. There was a very famous essay written by Martha Nussbaum, which basically asserts a Kantian deontological view of cosmopolitanism where everyone should become a kind of secular humanist liberal. The whole purpose for the research group was to inquire whether we could assemble a group of scholars who could represent and articulate ideas about different approaches to cosmopolitanism that were inspired by parts of the Chinese Confucian tradition. 

I have a very dear friend, Peng Guoxiang, at Zhejiang University who I’ve worked with for many years and agreed to co-organize the dialogue. We selected people who are not just Chinese, but who’ve had experience working in China, and we also brought in Westerners who work on the Chinese tradition. It was a lot of fun for the people doing it, and we had several great meetings, which yielded some pretty interesting ideas. 

David Wong wrote a wonderful paper, based upon his study of Zhuangzi and certain early Confucians, that said cosmopolitanism has to be more about the plurality of goods that are available out there. JeeLoo Liu wrote on place and how to get people to cultivate a notion of a shared place of belonging. Other people wrote on different psychologies and on the Chinese idea of the grand unity. Owen Flanagan very happily came in at the end and wrote an overview of the project, and they're going to be published in consecutive issues of a journal that I used to edit called the Journal of Confucian Culture and Philosophy, which is published at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul.

The research group had the unique opportunity to convene in-person meetings in both Hong Kong and Washington, DC. Why is it so important to maintain these types of engagements and collaborations between Western and Chinese scholars? 

When I was based in Hong Kong, I founded a research institute there with very generous support from a number of places. One of the things we did was hold events in Hong Kong, where we invited Western people who had philosophical interest in the research we were doing but no expertise or experience in Asia. 

Something that really struck me while we were running this program was that when we would visit a temple or go to some cultural sites, many of the Western visitors would have comments like, “Wow, it’s really developed here.” I had very similar experiences when I moved to Korea and held philosophical meetings with American academics visiting Korea. We would take them around Seoul and visit places like Gyeongbok Palace, and again, they would say things like, “Wow! Look at these big buildings!” They were so stunned see such a modern but different environment. 

Part of me thought, “What did they think happens here?” These are among the most modern, connected cities in the world. These are cultures that have been around for a long time and are highly successful, so you’ve got to prima facie assume they know what they’re doing, even if they don’t do it as we do in the West. 

These experiences help make the case that I’ve made for a long time, which is that there is a great need for us to expand our understanding of the other cultures of the world, for there is much that we can learn from these very sophisticated civilizations. 

I’m not saying we have to strive to become Korean, which is neither possible or in my view desirable, but I think everyone can benefit from greater exposure and deeper understanding. As a matter of fact, academics in the United States, for the most part, are incredibly homogenous and quite provincial in their views, so these kinds of opportunities are great because they provide much more in-depth immersion in the culture that then can be combined with critical analysis.