SOURCE: "Some Uncommon Assumptions," in Thinking Through Confucius, State University of New York Press, 1987, pp. 11-25.

[In the following excerpt, Hall and Ames comment on distinctions between Confucius's original teachings and later interpretations of them.]

In this essay we have been bold enough to challenge both the principal understandings of Confucian thought and the traditional methods of articulating them. It behooves us, therefore, to begin by discussing certain of the fundamental background assumptions which characterize what we consider to be an appropriate interpretive context within which Confucius' thought may be clarified. The primary defect of the majority of Confucius' interpreters—those writing from within the Anglo-European tradition as well as those on the Chinese side who appeal to Western philosophic categories—has been the failure to search out and articulate those distinctive presuppositions which have dominated the Chinese tradition.

The assumptions we shall be considering are precisely those not shared by the mainstream thinkers of our own tradition. It should be of some real assistance to our Anglo-European readers if they have ready to hand some important cultural contrasts as a means of avoiding the unconscious translation of Chinese Confucian notions into an idiom not altogether compatible with them. We should caution, as well, Chinese thinkers trained within the Neo-Confucian tradition to keep in mind that we are here primarily attempting to explicate the thought of Confucius as it appears in the Analects, and not as his Neo-Confucian disciples, however distinguished, have envisioned it.

We must attempt to be as clear as possible at the outset concerning the nature and applicability of these uncommon assumptions. By "assumptions" we mean those usually unannounced premises held by the members of an intellectual culture or tradition that make communication possible by constituting a ground from which philosophie discourse proceeds. By calling attention to contrasting assumptions of classical Chinese and Western cultures, we certainly do not wish to suggest that the conceptual differences we chose to highlight are in any sense absolute or inevitable. The richness and complexity of the Chinese and the Western traditions guarantee that, at some level, the cultural presuppositions dominant in one culture can be found—if only in a greatly attenuated form—in the other milieu as well. Thus, our claims with respect to the assumptions uncommon to Chinese or Anglo-European cultures are to be understood as assertions as to their differential importance within the two cultures.

When we discuss the "uncommon assumptions" in the following pages we shall take the conceptual contrasts from the inventory of Anglo-European philosophy, but the meanings of these contrasts will be shaped in part by the fact that we are employing them to engage Confucius with the Western tradition. This is only to say that we shall often be employing our philosophic vocabulary in a fashion that stretches its traditional connotative bounds.

As we noted in our consideration of the necessary resort to cross-cultural anachronism in the Apologia above, by discussing concepts that Confucius did not explicitly entertain or by representing him as a defender of one of two contrasting assumptions grounded in a distinction he might not explicitly have recognized, we are attempting to provide an assessment of Confucian thought that openly accepts as inevitable that one always begins to think where one is. The naive assumptions that one can find a neutral place from which to compare different cultural sensibilities or that one can easily take an objective interpretive stance within an alternative culture, while comforting to those compulsively attached to the external trappings of objective scholarship, have led to the most facile and distorted accounts of exoteric thinkers.

1 An Immanental Cosmos

Perhaps the most far-reaching of the uncommon assumptions underlying a coherent explication of the thinking of Confucius is that which precludes the existence of any transcendent being or principle. This is the presumption of radical immanence. Our language here is somewhat misleading, since, in the strict sense, the contrast of transcendence and immanence is itself derived from our Anglo-European tradition. At any rate, it will become clear as we discuss Confucius' thinking in subsequent chapters that attempts to articulate his doctrines by recourse to transcendent beings or principles have caused significant interpretive distortions. Employing the contrast between "transcendent" and "immanent" modes of thought will assist us materially in demonstrating the inappropriateness of these sorts of transcendent interpretations.

Given the complexity surrounding the several applications of the term "transcendence" in the development of Western thought, it is essential that we be as precise as possible in what we intend by it. Strict transcendence may be understood as follows: a principle, A, is transcendent with respect to that, B, which it serves as principle if the meaning or import of B cannot be fully analyzed and explained without recourse to A, but the reverse is not true. The dominant meanings of principles in the Anglo-European philosophic tradition require the presumption of transcendence in this strict sense.

The prominence of the language of transcendence in considering the basic principles of Western philosophers tempts Anglo-European interpreters of Confucius' thinking to employ such language in their analyses of the Analects. This has been particularly true to the extent that the major burden of introducing the Chinese classics to the non-Chinese world fell initially to Christian apologists with an inescapable commitment to the notion of transcendence. The necessity to employ transcendent principles is, of course, quite obvious in the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions. In Plato's Timaeus, the ideas or forms are independent of the Cosmos and provide the models in accordance with which the Cosmos is made. Aristotle's Unmoved Mover is the primary substance which, as the eternal, immutable, immaterial source of all other things, is the principle that accounts for all change and motion and grounds our understanding of the natural world. This principle, by its very definition, remains undetermined by the Cosmos or any element in it.

Classical forms of materialism, drawn from the philosophies of Democritus and Lucretius, construe the world in terms of "atoms" as the independent and unchanging units of which everything else is comprised. In the strictest sense the atoms of classical materialism transcend the things of the world which they comprise since they are the determinants of these things while themselves remaining unaffected by that which they determine.

A fourth alternative source of philosophical categories among the traditions of Western philosophy is associated with the dominant forms of the existentialist or volitional perspective. Here principles have their ultimate origin in human agents. "Princes" provide principles; rules come from "rulers." In the most general sense the human world is an array of artificial constructs which places upon each individual the burden of achieving "authenticity" by making this world his own through acts of reconstruction and valuation. Although this characterization of the existentialist perspective may seem to echo the sort of human-centered contextual ethics that we choose to associate with Confucius, these are false resonances to the extent that, in the Anglo-European tradition, existentialists have tended to be less concerned with interdependence than with the independent realization of excellence. According to this view, individuals at the peak of self-actualization become transcendent principles of determination, independent of the world that they create.

The existentialist perspective can be adjusted toward classical Confucianism only to the extent that it recognizes the relativity of the individual with respect to the society that determines, as well as is determined by, him. Furthermore, this interaction with the social context cannot be in the form of a "war of each against all" but must be grounded in deferential relations within interdependent contexts.

In the project of comparative philosophy, we have no choice but to attempt to articulate the other tradition by seeking out categories and language found in our own tradition that, by virtue of some underlying similarity, can be reshaped and extended to accommodate novel ideas. The thought of Confucius can only make sense to the Western reader by appeal to analogous structures within the purview of his own cultural experience that, however inadequate, can provide some basic similarity through which to deal with the differences. Difference cannot be taken on wholesale. What we are at a loss to find in the classical Anglo-European philosophic tradition is any fully developed position within which the principles of order and value are themselves dependent upon and emerge out of the contexts to which they have intrinsic relevance. An appropriate and adequate explication of the meaning of Confucius' thought requires a language of immanence grounded in the supposition that laws, rules, principles, or norms have their source in the human, social contexts which they serve.

If contemporary comparative philosophic activity is any indication, it might be the pragmatic philosophies associated with Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead, and extended toward a process philosophy such as that of A.N. Whitehead, that can serve as the best resource for philosophical concepts and doctrines permitting responsible access to Confucius thought. This presumption, in fact, will be tested in the following chapters. This is hardly a controversial move, of course, since many from both the Chinese and Western contexts have pointed out the similarities between pragmatism and process philosophy, on the one hand, and classical Chinese philosophy, on the other.¹

This immanental language necessary in the explication of Confucius' thought is of peculiar importance in articulating the Confucian concept of the self as an ethical agent. For there is a direct relationship between the Anglo-European language of transcendence and the necessity to construe the world, and a fortiori the social world, in terms of substances. Thus any recourse to transcendent principles inevitably leads to a substance view of the self. If the meaning of an agent or an action is to be discerned by recourse to a transcendent principle, then it is that principle which defines the essential nature of both person and context. Rational principles require rational beings to implement them. Moral principles require moral beings to enact them. Such beings are agents characterized respectively in terms of "rationality" and of "morality." And it is such characterization that renders the agent into a substantial being—that is, a being with an essence, an essential "nature."

Confucian philosophy, on the other hand, entails an ontology of events, not one of substances. Understanding human events does not require recourse to "qualities," "attributes," or "characteristics." Thus in place of a consideration of the essential nature of abstract moral virtues, the Confucian is more concerned with an explication of the activities of specific persons in particular contexts. This does not involve a mere shift of perspective from the agent to his acts, for such would still require the use of the substance language we have deemed inappropriate. Characterizing a person in terms of events precludes the consideration of either agency or act in isolation from the other. The agent is as much a consequence of his act as its cause.

The defense of the substantial self so prominent in the Judaeo-Christian tradition is to be contrasted with articulations of more diffuse senses of "self" in the Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian schools of classical Chinese philosophy. The fact that these two disparate traditions have begun to interact constructively by dint of the recent growth of comparative philosophy raises some extremely interesting questions with regard to the distinctions within the various traditions. Criticisms of the notion of substantial selfhood within Anglo-European philosophy, beginning perhaps with Nietzsche and emerging most distinctively in the twentieth-century process philosophies of James, Bergson, and Whitehead, altered the problematic that had been presumed fundamental to the understanding of persons. The resort to exoteric cultures was therefore almost inevitable, for the theoretical context of Anglo-European thought was not conducive to the optimal expression of the nonsubstantialist insights.

The ontology of events underlying Confucius' thought is a most important implication of the immanental cosmos. Two other implications should be highlighted. These are the altered meanings of "order" and "creativity" in an immanental universe. Two fundamental understandings of order are possible: one requires that order be achieved by application to a given situation of an antecedent pattern of relatedness. This we might call "rational" or "logical" order.² A second meaning of order is fundamentally aesthetic. Aesthetic order is achieved by the creation of novel patterns. Logical order involves the act of closure; aesthetic order is grounded in disclosure. Logical order may be realized by the imposition or instantiation of principles derived from the Mind of God, or the transcendent laws of nature, or the positive laws of a given society, or from a categorical imperative resident in one's conscience. Aesthetic order is a consequence of the contribution to a given context of a particular aspect, element, or event which both determines and is determined by the context. It would be an error to suppose that order in Confucius' thinking meant anything like the rational order that results from the imposition of an antecedently entertained pattern upon events. As strange as this may seem to those still persuaded by the rigid stereotypes foisted on us by our received tradition, for Confucius order is realized, not instantiated.

It is also important that the Confucian sense of "creativity" be noted. In the Western philosophic tradition, informed by the Judaeo-Christian notion of creatio ex nihilo, creativity is often understood as the imitation of a transcendent creative act. In Confucian terms, creative actions exist ab initio within the world of natural events and are to be assessed in terms of their contributions to the order of specific social circumstances. In no sense are creative actions modeled after the meaning-closing actions of an extra-mundane creative event. Creativity in a Confucian world is more closely associated with the creation of meaning than of being.

2 Conceptual Polarity

The ubiquity of the concept of transcendence in the Western tradition has introduced into our conceptual inventory a host of disjunctive concepts—God and the world, being and not being, subject and object, mind and body, reality and appearance, good and evil, knowledge and ignorance, and so forth—which, although wholly inappropriate to the treatment of classical Chinese philosophy, nonetheless have seriously infected the language we have been forced to employ to articulate that philosophy.³ The mutual immanence of the primary elements of the Confucian cosmos—heaven, earth and man—precludes the use of the language of transcendence and therefore renders any sort of dualistic contrast pernicious. The epistemological equivalent of the notion of an immanental cosmos is that of conceptual polarity. Such polarity requires that concepts which are significantly related are in fact symmetrically related, each requiring the other for adequate articulation. This is a truistic assertion about Chinese thinking, of course, and is usually illustrated with regard to the concepts of yin … and yang.… Yin does not transcend yang, nor vice versa. Yin is always "becoming yang" and yang is always "becoming yin," night is always "becoming day" and day is always "becoming night." But having said as much, most commentators on the Chinese tradition simply leave it at that, without spelling out precisely the character of the presupposition that underlies the mutual immanence and symmetrical relatedness of classical Chinese notions.

The presupposition, abstractly stated, is simply this: the Confucian cosmos is a context that both constitutes and is constituted by the elements which comprise it. But an important clarification is necessary. An organism is generally conceived as a whole with parts that functionally interrelate in accordance with some purpose or goal. In the West, Aristotelian naturalism is the most representative example where in an important sense the end or aim that characterizes the highest purpose or purposes transcends the natural world. The Unmoved Mover is an unconditional aim or goal. Where "organism" might be applied to the Confucian cosmos, an important distinction is that there is no element or aspect that in the strictest sense transcends the rest. Every element in the world is relative to every other; all elements are correlative.

If there is a true lack of correlativity even in naturalistic cosmologies such as the Aristotelian, then a fortiori there will be this same lack in philosophic systems influenced by cosmogonies of the creatio ex nihilo variety. Since the convergence of the Hebraic and Hellenic traditions in the West, creatio ex nihilo doctrines have had a profound influence in encouraging the language of transcendence and the dualistic categories which perforce must be employed to instantiate this language.

A dualism exists in philosophic vocabularies influenced by ex nihilo doctrines because in these doctrines a fundamentally indeterminate, unconditioned power is posited as determining the essential meaning and order of the world. This dualism involves a radical separation between the transcendent and nondependent creative source, on the one hand, and the determinate and dependent object of its creation on the other. The creative source does not require reference to its creature for explanation. This dualism, in its various forms, has been a prevailing force in the development of Western-style cosmogonies, and has been a veritable Pandora's box releasing the elaborated pattern of dualisms that have framed Western metaphysical speculations.

Polarity, on the other hand, has been a major principle of explanation in the initial formulation and evolution of classical Chinese metaphysics. By "polarity," we wish to indicate a relationship of two events each of which requires the other as a necessary condition for being what it is. Each existent is "so of itself and does not derive its meaning and order from any transcendent source. The notion of "self" in the locution "so of itself" has a polar relationship with "other." Each particular is a consequence of every other. And there is no contradiction in saying that each particular is both self-determinate and determined by every other particular, since each of the existing particulars is constitutive of every other as well. The principal distinguishing feature of polarity is that each pole can only be explained by reference to the other. "Left" requires "right," "up" requires "down," and "self" requires "other."

Dualistic explanations of relationships encourage an essentialistic interpretation in which the elements of the world are characterized by discreteness and independence. By contrast, a polar explanation of relationships requires a contextualist interpretation of the world in which events are strictly interdependent.

Not only are the dualistic categories mentioned above inappropriate to the orientation of polar metaphysics, they can be a source of distorted understanding. Polarity requires correlative terminologies in order to explain the dynamic cycles and processes of existence: differentiating/condensing, scattering/amalgamating, dispersing/coagulating, waxing/waning, and so forth. Further, since everything that exists falls on a shared continuum on which they differ in degree rather than in kind, the distinctions that obtain among them are only qualitative: clear (ch'ing …)/turbid (cho …); correct (cheng …)/one-side (p'ien …); thick (hou…)/thin (po … ); hard (kang …)/soft (jou …); genial (wen …)/overbearing (pao …).

The polar character of early Chinese thought discouraged the interpretation of creativity in terms of creatio ex nihilo. The historian, Michael Loewe, goes so far as to assert that in the classical Chinese context, "in neither mythology nor philosophy can there be found the idea of creatio ex nihilo."⁴ The Chuang Tzu, as an example of this tradition, explicitly challenges the principle of an absolute beginning:⁵

There is a beginning. There is not yet begun to be a beginning. There is not yet begun to not yet begin to be a beginning. There is being. There is nonbeing. There is not yet begun to be nonbeing. There is not yet begun to not yet begin to be nonbeing. Suddenly there is being and nonbeing. And yet I don't know what follows from there "being" nonbeing. Is it "being" or is it "nonbeing"?

The implications of this dualism/polarity distinction are both many and important in the kinds of philosophical questions that were posed by the Chinese thinkers, and in the responses they provoked. For example, Loewe suggests that in that culture, "no linear concept of time develops from the need to identify a single beginning from which all processes followed."⁶ The process of existence is fundamentally cyclical. There is no final beginning or end in this process; instead, there is cyclical rhythm, order and cadence.⁷

Again, the notion of a purposeful, anthropomorphic creator is certainly found in the classical tradition—the tsao wu che … of the Taoists, for example. However, the polar commitment which does not allow for a final distinction between creator and creature rendered this idea stillborn.⁸

If the Chinese tradition is grounded in conceptual polarities, a reasonable expectation is that this fact would be manifested in the main areas of classical Chinese thought: social and political philosophy. Benjamin Schwartz among others has observed that this is indeed the case. Schwartz identifies several "inseparably complementary" polarities which are grounded in classical Confucianism and which pervade the tradition: personal cultivation (hsiu shen …) and political administration (chih kuo …), inner (nei …) and outer (wai…), and the familiar knowledge (chih …) and action (hsing …).⁹

One of the most significant implications of this dualism/polarity distinction lies in the perceived relationship between mind and body. The dualistic relationship between psyche and soma that has so plagued the Western tradition has given rise to problems of a most troublesome sort. In the polar metaphysics of the classical Chinese tradition, the correlative relationship between the psychical and the somatic militated against the emergence of a mind/body problem. It is not that the Chinese thinkers were able to reconcile this dichotomy; rather, it never emerged as a problem. Because body and mind were not regarded as essentially different kinds of existence, they did not generate different sets of terminologies necessary to describe them. For this reason, the qualitative modifiers that we usually associate with matter do double duty in Chinese, characterizing both the physical and the psychical. Hou … for example, can mean either physically thick or generous, po … can mean either physically thin or frivolous. Roundness (yüan …) and squareness (fang …) can characterize both physical and psychical dispositions. In fact, the consummate person in this tradition is conventionally distinguished by his magnitude: great (ta …), abysmal (yüan …), and so forth. Similar yet perhaps less pervasive metaphors in the Western languages might hark back to a pre-dualistic interpretation of person. At the least, they reflect an interesting inconsistency between theory and metaphor, reason and rhetoric, in our tradition.

3 Tradition as Interpretive Context

The final assumption that gives access to the thinking of Confucius concerns the character of tradition as the interpretive context within which the foregoing presuppositions receive their literary and philosophic expression. As in the case of the two former assumptions, it will be helpful to characterize the Confucian position in terms of a conceptual contrast.¹⁰

History may be understood in distinctively different ways, of course, but there is a rather broad agreement concerning the centrality of the concept of agency. Whether history is construed directly in terms of efficient causal factors of an above all economic or military sort or is interpreted as the history of ideas, the concept of agency is indeed crucial. Ideas have consequences, if not in the same manner then certainly to the same degree as the arrangement of economic variables, for example. Even so, it would appear that neither idealist nor materialist conceptions of history would promote the notion of human agency to the same extent that, for example, volitional or heroic notions would. But there is little doubt that the materialist and idealist understandings are themselves constructions of individuals who lay claim to greatness. If not the historical figures themselves, then historians and philosophers, as authors of texts, become the efficacious agents determining the meaning of events. One has but to recall the manner in which the history of science, grounded in a materialist paradigm for most of its history, is celebrated in terms of the "great" scientists.

The situation is certainly no different with regard to intellectual history. We are still concerned with the import of our historical past construed almost exclusively in terms of the great minds. Ideas have discoverers, inventors, champions, and caretakers. And these individuals have names and careers. Their stories can be told.

All this is truistic and so much a part of our self-understanding as to be wholly taken for granted. Is there, after all, an alternative? The alternative that most readily contrasts with that of the preeminence of history as the defining context of cultural experience is one which finds tradition to be central. The terms "history" and "tradition" certainly have overlapping significances, but it is usually the case that one of these notions is more fundamental to a given social context. History is made by personages or events. Traditions possess a kind of givenness that defies or is at least resistant to the questions of originators and creators. History is rational and rationalizable in the sense that reasons and causes can be demonstrated for any given event or sets of events even though the whole complex of events may seem chaotic and irrational. With tradition just the reverse is true: it may be impossible to defend the rationality of this or that tradition, ritual or custom, but the rationality of the whole complex of traditions can usually be well-defended in terms of, for example, social solidarity and stability.

The different sorts of rationality associated with history and tradition indicate a great deal about the nature of the relationships that are most viable between them. Traditional cultures are ritualistic in the sense that the ritual forms associated with public and private praxis are employed in large measure as ways of maintaining institutional and cultural continuity with a minimum of conscious intervention. Those societies conditioned less by tradition and more by conscious history must resort to positive laws and sanctions to a greater degree.

This obvious and much advertised distinction between historical and traditional cultures is, of course, related to the fact that the former tend to stress morality in the sense of obedience and disobedience to principles and laws while the latter stress the aesthetic character of ritualistic participation. Rules are normative in the sense of external ordering principles with respect to historical cultures, while in traditional cultures rules are constitutive and immanent in the sense that, as ritualistic forms, they constitute the being or agent in the performance of the ritual. Also, given that a necessary and defining condition of ritual action is that it be personalized, there is a closer relationship between rituals and persons than between principles and individuals.

Rituals performed in accordance with tradition are readily contrasted with rules obeyed out of either rational deliberation or prudent self-interest. And the weight of this contrast is to be grasped in terms of the consequences it has for the exteriority of the person with respect to grounding principles characterizing his social matrix. As a constituting activity, ritual action provides form to the person and the means of his or her expression. On the other hand, laws, which transcend the individual, provide guidelines for actions since they serve as guiding norms which measure, and standardize. They are to be obeyed. As such, one may (indeed must) feel "outside" the laws and alienated to however slight a degree by them and from them.

In the West, the strength with which one feels one's individuality is a function of the exteriority of norms. Unless one exists over against and in tension with the norms of society, there can be little in the way of ego-centered existence. The blending with one's ambience associated with aesthetic, ritualized life does little to promote intense forms of individuality. One can easily understand this by recourse to the contrasting senses of individuality in Western and Chinese cultures.

The distinction between Western forms of individualism and the Confucian concept of the person lies in the fact that difference is prized in Western societies as a mark of creativity and originality, while in China the goal of personality development involves the achievement of interdependence through the actualization of integrative emotions held in common among individuals. Such an ethos is based upon a rejection of those idiosyncratic emotions and actions that are not expressible through immanent norms of custom and tradition. The actions of individuals who dare to stand away from and challenge tradition and the visions of the past are interpretable by the Confucian as consequences of self-serving effrontery in the face of the legitimate continuities of a received tradition.

The dominance of tradition as the source of practical and affective norms leads to a restriction of the novel contributions of persons as individuals who would break the continuities of the past and establish new directions in thought or institutional practice. History thrives on the actions of rebels, idiosyncratic creators and innovators. Traditional societies prize continuities as embodiments and elaborations of the thinking and action of the past. The history of theoretical disciplines in China and Europe illustrates this distinction extremely well. In Chinese philosophy, the mark of excellence is found in the manner in which the wisdom of the originating thinkers of the past is appropriated and made relevant by extension to one's own place and time. In the West, the history of philosophy may be read as a series of revolutionary visions forwarded by (to limit ourselves merely to modern times) Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and so forth.

Tradition-oriented societies, like the persons who comprise them, do not tend to initiate dramatic cultural changes. Of course, this is not to deny change. On the contrary, the continued appeal to the authority of Confucius as sage in the Chinese tradition has masked a great deal of novelty. Doctrines significantly at variance with those of Confucius have been credited to him by virtue of the tendency to promote the continuity of traditional values. For example, although Confucius seems repeatedly to eschew the explicit treatment of metaphysical questions in the Analects, the profoundly metaphysical Chung-yung is nonetheless "attributed" to him via his grandson, Tzu-ssu. And Hsün Tzu, consciously flying under the banner of Confucius, does in fact represent a radical paradigmatic shift from his original teachings. Tung Chung-shu, the ranking Confucian scholar of the Western Han, is arguably more representative of Han syncretism than of Confucius or even pre-Ch'in Confucianism. And so on.

This relationship between the original teachings of Confucius and later interpretations can be understood in two ways. Either Confucius, for whatever reason, has been used as a medium to conceal the novel ideas of innumerable creative individuals, or he is in fact a "corporate" person who is continually being seen in a new way by virtue of the participation of later thinkers in the ongoing transmission of cultural values. Thus viewed, "Confucius" is a community, a society, a living tradition.…¹¹

It is interesting in this connection to note the degree to which important historical changes in China have been occasioned by external forces. The so-called "Westernization" of China, particularly in its late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century phases, is a perfect example of such seeming historical passivity. This very historical passivity, however, masks the novelty and discontinuity of Chinese society. When Liang Souming, one of the principal theoreticians of the Chinese May Fourth Movement, spoke of China's "accommodating will" in contrast to the "aggressive will" of the West, he was alluding to this characteristic of many traditional societies. Such accommodation is a process of absorption taking place over a long period of time. It is, likewise, a process of transformation in which what is in its inception a novel element is provided a traditional interpretation.… [One] must avoid the temptation to interpret Confucius' thought from a strictly historical rather than a traditional perspective. To do so would make of him an originator, a "great man," instead of the "transmitter" that he understood himself to be. On the other hand, unless one remains sensitive to the meaning of creativity in Confucianism, the understanding of Confucius as a transmitter of tradition will lead one to mistake him for a mere transmitter, and not the sage that he indeed is.

Notes

1. See, for example, Hall (1), pp. 169-228 for a discussion of some of the relations between classical Chinese thought and Anglo-European process philosophy.
2. The distinction we are insisting upon between "logical" and "aesthetic" order will be discussed in some detail at the beginning of Chapter III, below.
3. Indeed, one may question the appropriateness of dualistic categories in Western thought, as well. See Hall (1), Chapter 3, "What 'God' Hath Wrought," for a consideration of some of the cultural consequences of conceptual dualism.
4. Loewe, p. 63.
5. Chuang Tzu, 5/2/49.
6. Loewe, pp. 63-64.
7. Relative to this observation, it is significant that the notions of "birth" and the process of "growth" (or "life") are not clearly differentiated in Chinese; both are denoted by the character, sheng.… Since reality in the early Chinese tradition is conceived in terms of cyclical process, the absence of cosmogony is compensated for by an elaborate cosmological tradition, to which the Yi-ching and the Taoist, Yin-yang and Wu-hsing (Five Phases) schools bear witness.
8. Loewe, p. 68.
9. Schwartz, pp. 50-62.
10. We should again stress that our employment of contrasting terms such as "transcendence and immanence," "polarity and dualism," and, in this section, "tradition and history" is not to be construed as descriptive of contrasts existing within the Confucian culture itself. On the contrary, these contrasts are couched in terms more congenial to the Anglo-European intellectual tradition and, as such, have the sort of dualistic associations supported by that context. Freed from these dualistic associations, the concepts of immanence, polarity, and tradition as stipulated here, are the most pertinent we have been able to discover in order to illumine the Confucian world view from a comparative perspective. The proof of their value, however, must be realized pragmatically as one attempts to use these uncommon assumptions in order to understand the discussions in the body of this work.
11. See de Bary, (1) vol. II, pp. 188-91. Even the term ju …, typically rendered "Confucian" and taken as the emblem of Confucian thinkers, has the etymological association with ju … (weakness, servility).…

Works Cited

Chang Tzu. Harvard-Yenching Institute Sinological Index Series, Supp. 20. Peking: Harvard-Yenching Institute, 1947.

de Bary, Wm. Theodore. Sources of Chinese Civilization. New York: Columbia University Press, 1960.

Loewe, Michael. Chinese Ideas of Life and Death. London: Allen and Unwin, 1982.

Schwartz, Benjamin I. "Some Polarities in Confucian Thought." In Confucianism in Action, ed. David S. Nivison and Arthur F. Wright. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959.