Generations of Western thinkers perpetuated this view of China as stuck in an earlier stage of evolutionary progress. The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) described the Chinese as rooted in a state of perpetual harmony with nature. He believed that progress was possible only when states had reached the stage he saw Europe at: rational, self-aware, broken free of the natural world, and able to consciously engage in struggle and conflict that would help continue their progress. The sociologist and economist Max Weber (1864–1920), also from Germany, tried to understand why capitalism had never emerged in China the way it had in Europe. He concluded that China’s lacking a set of transcendental principles had limited it. He argued that Confucianism and Protestantism had laid very different philosophical foundations that led China to adapt to the world, while the West sought to transform it.
Yet there was no doubt that much of what Europe inherited—and, by default, our twenty-first-century world, too—has its roots in China. The general concept of meritocratic exams (such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT, the standardized test used for admissions at US colleges) can be traced ultimately to China. Laws that apply to everyone equally originated in China, as did bureaucracies run by an educated elite.
And there is a little caveat to the story of what Europe learned from China. Only one facet of these ideas made it: the ideas of Mozi and his intellectual descendants, the Legalists. The ideas that spread throughout Europe portrayed human beings as rational agents running rational legal systems based upon universal laws. Their exams measured pure ability, not moral goodness or moral training. These Mohist ideas were taken out of the moral framework in which they had been embedded and were seen purely as a vision for how to create a bureaucratic government. Legalism became a key ingredient in the rise of what we think of as the modern, rational state. The ideas that Westerners left behind were those having to do with moral training, goodness, and self-cultivation.
So while forms of statecraft from Asia were imitated, they were employed differently. In China, the goal had been to divorce wealth from political power so that the state could function as a meritocracy run by an educated elite. In the West, though, the strategy was to break down aristocratic societies by trying to connect wealth and political power as much as possible. Social mobility would be established through acquiring wealth—which would then lead to direct access to political power. The driving force behind social mobility in the West would not be education, but wealth. Not the state, but the economy.
This is one way to break down an aristocratic world. But it is not the only way. And by thinking of all of previous human history as “traditional,” we prevent ourselves from seeing other ideas as something from which we could potentially learn.
We can create a new age where all sorts of global ideas come alive again. Given the personal and societal crises we face today, these ideas may be our best chance.
How We Have Viewed Asian Ideas
Some reading this book might feel that Asian ideas have already come alive for the West. Buddhism became enormously popular here several decades ago, bringing with it all sorts of Buddhist-inspired ideas: meditation, mindfulness, retreats. Many of us in the West have long felt an emptiness—a sense that our big ideas have let us down. We have been on a quest for other viable approaches that will help us live more fulfilling lives.
But there are significant problems with how Buddhism has been appropriated to fit directly into a Western mind-set and model. Buddhism appealed initially because it seemed to provide an antidote to our ambition and greed. Buddhism and the East were romanticized as the polar opposites of the harried, avaricious West. But Buddhism has, for the most part, been misread, further entrenching some of the more dangerous aspects of Western notions of the individual self.
Take mindfulness, for example. It is based on the concept of detaching yourself and looking upon the world and each moment nonjudgmentally, so that things no longer bother you. Mindfulness is hyped widely as a popular technique for gaining peace and serenity in our fast-paced lives. Today it is even promoted as a tool for productivity and effectiveness by business schools, corporations, and the military.
But mindfulness was intended to break down the self. Buddhism is the doctrine of no self, and Buddhist practices as a whole are designed to do away with the notion that any sort of individual self exists. Yet many of these aspects of Buddhism have been discarded, and instead, it has often been distorted as a way of looking within and embracing the self. It has become a form of exotic self-help: the doctrine of no self utilized to help people feel better about themselves.
More recently, other Asian ideas have also been reinterpreted as coherent ideologies: Daoism, say, or even Confucianism. They have been stripped of their power and recast as somehow being about learning to accept the world as it is and to accept your place within it.
These idealistic readings are the flip side of the Western view of the East as traditional and backward. In this rendition, Asia represents ancient wisdom about a wiser, more integrated, and ideal way to live. But if feeling better means accepting your true self, harmonizing with the world, and being at peace with that, this is a short step from encouraging people to accept their lot in life and play into a traditional worldview that life is predetermined. We become complacent and detached, surrendering the opportunity for self-cultivation.
We have folded these notions into a worldview in which the West determines the direction of history and provides the lens through which we see everything. This keeps us from seeing them for what they really are and from recognizing their great potential. As our philosophers have shown us, there are many different viable ways to break down a world in which everything is determined by what we’re born with, and move toward one in which humans can flourish.
The opposite of mindlessness and complacency is not mindfulness. It is engagement. The ideas we have traced in this book are immensely pragmatic, rooted in our everyday world and our everyday lives. Each of these texts questioned how best to break from passivity and alter the world in which we live.
The Promise of a Fragmented World
We already know many of the things we have learned about in this book. We already practice aspects of them in our lives. Our Chinese philosophers enable us to name and perceive consciously impulses and behaviors we might otherwise dismiss as irrelevant because they don’t fit into our notions of agency and sincerity. They show us that when we think we’re being active, we’re actually being passive; that when we think we’re being true to ourselves, we’re boxing in ourselves. They teach us to recognize that the world is unpredictable, and that we grow by living “as if,” not by seeking authenticity.
These thinkers all had different views about what makes for a good life. But they are connected by their opposition to the ideas that there is an unchangeable past that binds us, a unified order in the cosmos to which we should adhere, a set of rational laws we should follow, and ethical doctrines handed down that we should heed.
The challenge our philosophers present is this: Think what your life would be like if you assumed none of those things to be true.
Our attempts to build a coherent, stable, noncapricious world have taken many forms. For some, it might be a set of universal ethical rules, similar to that of the Mohists. It might be a Kantian code of rational, moral laws we follow, no matter the circumstances. Or perhaps it is a belief in a unified cosmos with which we seek to harmonize. In our most recent rendition, that greater truth is embodied by the authentic self that we must discover within.
We now know that ideas like these existed in one form or another in early China too. But our philosophers viewed the world very differently. They saw us as living in a fragmented and fractured world where people constantly treat one another in all too human ways. They saw us in endless conflict and imperfect relationships.
Westerners tend to look at the Chinese ancestor-worship ritual and take it to mean that the Chinese were always listening to the de
ad and living in their shadows. Thinkers such as Weber viewed the ritual through the lens of sincerity. His interpretation was that people performing the ritual believed sincerely that the world was as harmonious as the ritual portrayed it to be.
But, in fact, the participants in this ritual knew perfectly well that it didn’t reflect reality. They knew they lived in a fragmented world, but that was exactly why they needed the ritual, to allow them to break with messy real life and to play out imaginative possibilities. The ritual helped people not to follow the past but to create a different future. Through as-if ritual, descendants worked with the ghosts that haunted them and created a new version of the past. This was an ongoing process. Those ancestors were never fully put in their place.
But this is why the ritual was repeated again and again. Slowly, over time, there was a progression. By their actions, the living were saying, “This is how we could live our lives if we viewed the past this way.” And as they reconstructed the past over and over, they really did begin to live differently.
We can learn something from this too. Our attempts at repairing our own fractured world inevitably are insufficient or even fail. Metaphorically speaking, ghosts—or more literally, our pasts—haunt us to varying degrees. But if we live in a broken world haunted by our pasts—our difficult relationships, our work hardships, our losses, our many inevitable missteps—we need to engage in the equivalent of the ancestor ritual. We must cultivate our emotions with other people repeatedly as we work on constructing a better world. When we can accept how limited we are by the past, by the negative forces within us, and by the fragility of human relationships, our own relationships have limitless potential to be refined and transformed. Caring for one another is hard work. It requires endless awareness, adaptation, and responsiveness. But it is one of the most important and rewarding things that we human beings do.
In this fractured and fragmented world, it’s up to us to generate order. We are the ones who construct and give pattern to the world—not by getting rid of the unwieldy human emotions, the messy stuff that is us, but by beginning right there. And we do this through daily self-cultivation: working through our rituals to improve the way we relate to those around us; cultivating energies in our bodies so that we can live with more vitality; training our hearts and minds to work through daily decisions in a powerfully different way; and resisting our tendency to cut ourselves off from experience, so that we become constantly receptive to new things.
The process of building a better world never ends because our attempts to build better relationships are never finished. But as we learn how to better our relationships, we will learn how to alter situations and thereby create infinite numbers of new worlds. We will open ourselves up to the possibilities in these philosophical ideas that point the way to a good life.
If the world is fragmented, then it gives us every opportunity to construct things anew. It begins with the smallest things in our daily lives, from which we change everything. If we begin there, then everything is up to us.
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, we would like to thank the thousands of students that Michael has been privileged to teach over the years. Their intellectual curiosity and passion for ideas have been a constant source of inspiration to him.
We are grateful to our agent, Gillian MacKenzie, for seeing the great potential in a book on Chinese philosophy; publisher Jonathan Karp, for so warmly backing this project; our editor, Priscilla Painton, for keen edits and unflagging enthusiasm; Sophia Jimenez, for ever-reliable support and assistance; Phil Metcalf, for superb copyedits; and the fantastic Simon & Schuster publicity and marketing team: Cary Goldstein, Richard Rohrer, and Dana Trocker. We are ever grateful to the splendid Allison Devereux and Kirsten Wolf for their help. Heartfelt thanks go to Camilla Ferrier, Jessica Woollard, Jemma McDonagh, and Georgina Le Grice at the Marsh Agency, as well as all the editors who are enthusiastically publishing the book abroad.
In addition, we are especially appreciative to Daniel Crewe of Viking UK, who took the time to offer invaluable editorial comments and suggestions. Grateful thanks also go to Samuel Douglas, Jennifer Margulis, and Laura Simeon, who commented so astutely on earlier drafts of this book, as well to Jen Guidera, Roland Lamb, Elizabeth Malkin, Adam Mitchell, Katherine Ozment, and Jeannie Suk for their support.
Deepest thanks go to our families, without whose patience and support this book could not have been written.
Finally, with great gratitude, we thank each other. This was a true collaboration: the discussions of the philosophers were developed in Michael’s class, while Christine added in modern-day examples and wrote about the ideas of these thinkers for a contemporary audience. The result is a book that greatly exceeds what either of us could have done on our own.
To read relevant passages from the original works of Chinese philosophy, see our e-book The Path’s Chinese Philosophers: Selected Passages
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Confucius, Mencius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Xunzi
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Resources and Further Reading
A note: many of the texts discussed in The Path are thought to have been created over lengthy periods of time and compiled in different ways by different editors. However, throughout history, they have been read and discussed as coherent texts representing the ideas of the sole philosopher in question, and for readability’s sake, we continue in that tradition by using the names of the major philosophers; for example, rather than writing “The text of the Mencius argues,” we write “Mencius argues.”
An excellent anthology of most of the philosophers we discussed can be found in Philip J. Ivanhoe and Bryan W. Van Norden, eds., Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005).
For full translations, we suggest:
Burton Watson, trans., The Complete Works of Zhuangzi (Translations from the Asian Classics) (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
D. C. Lau, trans., The Analects (New York: Penguin Books, 1979).
Mencius (New York: Penguin Books, 2005).
Tao Te Ching [by Lao Tzu] (New York: Penguin Books, 1985).
Harold D. Roth, Original Tao: Inward Training (Nei-yeh) and the Foundations of Taoist Mysticism (Translations from the Asian Classics) (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
The Age of Philosophy
For further reading:
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005).
Ian Morris, Why the West Rules—for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).
Confucius
On “as if” from a larger philosophical perspective, see:
Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of ‘As if’: A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind, translated by C. K. Ogden, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935).
Adam B. Seligman, Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett, and Bennett Simon, Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
On history of please and thank you:
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2011).
Laozi
On Lincoln:
Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).
On the presidential salute:
Garry Wills, Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State (New York: Penguin Books, 2010).
Inward Training
On self-divinization:
Michael J. Puett, To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002).
Zhuangzi
On flow:
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1990).
Xunzi
Sherwin B. Nuland, The Doctors’ Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignác Semmelweis (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).
About the Authors
© MARGARET LAMPERT
Michael Puett is the Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. His undergraduate class on Chinese ethical and political philosophy is among the most popular at the university. He is the recipient of a Harvard College Professorship for excellence in undergraduate teaching.
© MARGARET LAMPERT
Christine Gross-Loh is a freelance journalist and author. Her writing has appeared in a number of publications, including the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, and the Huffington Post. She has a PhD in East Asian history from Harvard University.
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