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Old notes on an influential interpretation of Chinese culture

Reading Amaury de Riencourt’s The Soul of China: An Interpretation of Chinese History

(1965). It’s a flawed book, and not what would be considered politically correct now, but it’s
stimulating and suggestive.
He attributes immense social and psychological importance to the Chinese language,
which has essentially “no grammar [?], no alphabet, no spelling, no inflections, no declensions,
no conjugations nor tenses, [and in which] every word might be a noun, a verb or an adjective…
The Chinese remained staunch rationalists but lacked the feeling for logical sequence in any line
of reasoning which is so familiar to Western thinking.” The language’s ideographic structure has
stayed basically the same for thousands of years, “and its immensely conservative influence can
never be overestimated. Languages and dialects could change, social conditions could undergo
revolutions—but as long as the ideograms remained intact, the Chinese mind revolved within the
confines of a rigid mold.”
Chronological conception of time, deep feeling for historical sequence, burying the dead
rather than burning them as in India—duration, not obliteration—ancestor worship as a way to
remember the past and be remembered oneself, human-centered outlook rather than nature-
centered as with Indians (who disregarded history, were interested in metaphysical questions)—
Confucius was like Socrates, rejecting metaphysical speculations and focusing on virtue, society,
etc.—but originally, as with the Greeks and all cultures, metaphysical questions were paramount
(see the I-Ching): Yang vs. Yin throughout the universe, Heaven Yang and Earth Yin, everything
founded on this dualism or on a unity of the dualism. Historiography became a substitute for true
religion: mythical past figures were models for living an ethical life. “The true goal of the higher
type of Chinese man was not self-realization through mystical introspection, as in India, but the
securing of an honored place in the harmonious procession of historical personages. Spiritual
realization came from ‘duration,’ triumphing over the corrupting process of time rather than
escaping into eternity.” Clearly China had more dynamic social relations than India, frozen in the
caste system and thus sublimating its spiritual yearnings into timeless states like nirvana. But in
China, philosophy of history more than religion. Time is masculine (creative, active, spiritual),
space feminine (receptive, passive, earthy).
Heaven and Earth are complementary halves, duplicates mirrored in each other. “Man is
surrounded by incorporeal spirits and forces, and a complicated system of regulations is
necessary to obtain satisfactory relations with these mysterious forces: rituals have to be
performed…” Consistent with this interaction of Heaven and Earth is the fact that “The Book of
Changes claimed that every occurrence in the tangible and visible world was only a symbol, an
image of an abstract idea located in the invisible world. Every event that took place on Earth was
a symbolic duplication of a thought originating in the spiritual world beyond man’s sense
perception, in Heaven…” Plato. Medieval Christianity, with its attempt to symbolize heaven in
the structure of cathedrals and so on, to make social institutions a symbol of the divine order.
The difference (or one of them) is that Christians strongly devalued the worldly, unlike the
Chinese, who thought earth complemented heaven. In all these cases, though, an intuition of
transcendence. An escape from the world into something beyond. But not yet complete
transcendence, complete devaluation of the earthly. (That’s what Weber would say, anyway.
He’d be right insofar as earthly life was still interpreted as having meaning in some way or other.
–What is “meaning”? Being part of something greater than yourself. Making an impact on
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something greater than yourself. Being recognized and valued by something that transcends
you.)
This semi-Platonic metaphysics, upheld by Confucius, “implied also a rejection of
causality in the Western sense of the word. Instead of cause and effect, the Chinese chose to
study the coincidental relations between phenomena. Instead of the logical chain of mechanical
causation, we have association between the apparently most incongruous elements; this
association is based on their synchronization. In this type of ‘associative thinking,’ concepts are
not logically deduced from one another but are placed side by side in a pattern and are
organically related to one another. Already strongly pragmatic, the Chinese assumed that
synchronism, implying parallelism rather than causal succession, must be meaningful: the
objective phenomenon is somehow related to the subjective state of the observer at the time, and
the whole of it is a symbolic reflection of an idea produced in Heaven… This peculiarly Chinese
world-picture is essentially based on magic (which constrains the higher powers) rather than
religion (which conciliates). Chinese rituals are based on…sympathetic magic, the fundamental
mimetic principle that ‘like attracts like.’ …The universe is an aggregate of organic entities
precisely fitted into one another, a spontaneous and harmonious super-organism in which laws,
causes and supreme deities are unnecessary…[but] a refined form of magic is imperative because
man has to be in control of his earthly habitat.” Therefore: direct yourself to the rhythm of
nature, the Tao; anything done outside this rhythm is Li, “tension or reason.” “The greatest
psychological characteristic of the Chinese is their close relationship with the earth and the
molding of their energy on the normal pattern of nature.” “History is an eternal recurrence, not a
continuous development of life toward higher forms of life and expression. It has no depth but is
projected on a flat, two-dimensional screen, as is [the Chinese] perspective-less painting.”
The scholars. Successors to the priests, after religion was changed into ancestor worship
long before Confucius. Their task was to memorize the ideograms etc. and preserve the
traditional culture and moral code.
Confucianism: Heaven and Earth must submit to the Tao, which is the source of morality
and the right way of government. The emperor, the Son of Heaven, has only to set a good
example and the social order will fall into place. (A kind of mimetic magic.) “The family is the
indestructible cell of society, to the interests of which the individual must sacrifice himself in all
circumstances.” The state is a political extension of the family. Just as the son can disobey a bad
order from his father, the subject can disobey his emperor if the latter transgresses the moral law.
Confucius taught that music is “the most powerful agent working for social and political
harmony… ‘When one has mastered music completely and regulated his heart and mind
accordingly, the natural, correct, gentle and sincere heart is easily developed and joy attends its
development.’” And “‘The best way to improve manners and customs is to pay attention to the
composition of the music played in the country.’” In other words, music has a utilitarian
function. “The essence of Chinese music, like all Asiatic music, is the absence of harmony and
the complete predominance of melody… It is essentially Tao-like, well-balanced, joyful and
contented, neither longing for spiritual understanding as with Hindu music nor yearning for the
three-dimensional infinite as with Western man.”
“Under Confucianist influence, artistic creation became bound to social ethics.” It
became utilitarian, and might have become quite mediocre were it not for the influences of
Taoism and Buddhism.
China produced hundreds of historians. India produced none until Islamic times.
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Confucianism was born in the north, where barbarians threatened the social order and
scholars were concerned with maintaining social stability. Taoism was born farther south amidst
the beauties of nature, away from a threatened social order. Lao Tzu was like a Chinese
Rousseau, revolted at the artificiality of civilization, in love with nature, emotion, intuition, the
individual, solitude, “non-assertion,” “non-activity.” He rejected history, like the Indians. The
Tao, for him, has nothing to do with “morality,” which is only a man-made set of rules; it is
immanent in all things and can be approached only through mystical introspection. Taoism is
pure individualism. (Ironically it gave rise to the Legalists, who were ruthless and fanatical and
“left the individual alone and helpless, the perfect tool in the hands of the dictatorship called
forth by the Legalists.” The author compares this Taoist legacy to the relationship between
Rousseau and Robespierre.) Confucius and Lao Tzu represent opposing sides of the Chinese
character.
Taoism had vast influence on art and poetry. It called forth the mystical, timeless side of
the Chinese. The painter losing himself in an aesthetic continuum without beginning or end,
submerging his ego in the timeless essence of the universe, painting nature “from the inside,”
unlike the Western artist. A substitute for religion. The Chinese artist is a pantheist, or rather an
immanentist, not a transcendentalist like Western man. (The Chinese artist’s love of the line
comes from calligraphy.) Poetry and painting were impressionistic.
Cultural insights can be gleaned from the traditional Chinese inability to paint human
figures. Good at nature, bad at humans: less individualistic than the West, less scientific, less
fascinated with psychology, less human-glorifying than the post-Renaissance West.
Chinese architecture inspired by calligraphy. Curved lines. Rhythmic architecture, not
dynamic and full of tension like in the West. No will to dominate nature or aspire to heaven (as
in Gothic architecture); contentment with the earth, serenity.
The art of gardening. Harmony between the spirit of the soil and the spirit of the human.
French gardening, on the other hand, is resolutely geometrical, anti-natural, dominating, three-
dimensional. The gardens at Versailles.
After Confucius and Lao Tzu, during the age of the “Hundred Schools” of philosophy
(the Hellenistic age or thereabouts), there was great cultural ferment on the basis of economic
and social changes. Mo Ti was a philosopher along the lines of Bentham: a crude utilitarianism
was his creed. Everything was evaluated in terms of its economic usefulness. Music and art he
regarded as wasteful, economically unproductive; material prosperity was what mattered.
“Mencius extracted from Confucius the useful and the practical.” For instance, the people
should select the ruler, and they could remove him if he was unsatisfactory. They had a “sacred
right of rebellion.” The good ruler would give up warfare and concentrate on abolishing poverty,
regulating economic processes, instituting compulsory education. Other philosophers argued,
against Mencius, that man was fundamentally bad. And so on and so forth.
An era somewhat comparable to early modern Europe. “Nation-states”—not really,
though—emerging on the ruins of feudalism, a proliferation of wars, the rise of urban middle
classes, “democratization” of social and political structures, social rebellions in some states. Hsü
Hsing, a “barbarian” of the south, “advocated a thorough social revolution and the dictatorship of
the working man.” Legalism arose, advocating a strong centralized state under a dictator in
which capital would be nationalized and trade monopolized by the state, and concentration of
wealth would be forbidden. “Family solidarity, ancestor worship and every form of social
tradition dear to Confucius had to be smashed [according to Han Fei-tzu, the main theoretician]
to leave the individual ‘common man’ face to face with a mammoth state, alone and powerless.”
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The rulers are wicked, he said, morality is nonsense, the people are not intrinsically good;
effective laws are necessary, laws that recognize no social distinctions: “‘whoever violates the
interdicts of the state…should be guilty of death and should not be pardoned.’” Social equality in
a “democratic” age was to be purchased with the loss of freedom. Ch’in, the strongest state in
‘China’ (Chin-a), adopted this idea of an all-embracing legal system and eventually imposed it
on all the states when it absorbed them in 221 B.C.
The age of the Warring States. Two hundred years long. Hellenistic era. It’s all strikingly
modern, the improved technology, the massive brutality, the conscription, the total war. Ch’in
won, uniting all of China (in 221) for the first time under a single ruler. That legacy would last
until 1911. Legalism died out after the death of the first emperor, and the Han dynasty was
established within a few years. Confucianism was revived soon after, becoming, eventually,
virtually the state religion.
Great contempt for economic pursuits all through Chinese history (except during the
Warring States era). The merchant was the lowest of the low. True in Japan too. The profit
motive was considered despicable.
The conservatism of traditional China resulted partly from the examination system that
all scholars had to go through after the land was united under the Han. Many years spent
mastering classical texts, memorizing poetry, steeping themselves in Confucianist orthodoxy and
classical culture until it was reflexive for them, the very core of their being. And these scholars
(mandarins) were, of course, the elite, more respected than anyone in the land. Everyone wanted
to be them. Unfortunately, whatever creativity and originality they had was destroyed after all
their years of study. Every generation studied the same texts, was subject to the same despotic
brainwashing. This helped make the social order as unchangeable as it was. (There is truth in that
much-maligned term “Oriental despotism,” and Hegel’s description of China wasn’t wholly
incorrect. Nor was Marx’s, or Wittfogel’s.)
The cultural ideal, to repeat, was the man who fit into the norm of the Tao, who was
cultured but not exceptionally endowed, who epitomized the “golden mean,” so to speak. The
mandarin system could perhaps be called, in Weberian terms, the routinization of the original
creative, charismatic ideas from Confucius and earlier figures. It was one of the most successful
(that is, stultifying) routinizations in history.
Something that recurs throughout history, according to the author: “the inherent,
fundamental socialism of the Chinese.” Lack of true individualism, predominance of family and
clannish collectivism, and the latter’s transfer to the state once “Caesarism” came about.
Compromise between family and state collectivism. Several great socialistic experiments, for
example when one Han emperor established state ownership of all natural resources in order,
apparently, to protect the lower classes against the greed of the wealthy. Prices were controlled,
transportation projects were directed by the state, etc. A hundred years later, land reform: huge
private estates were turned over to the state and given away to landless peasants. “State-owned
communal farms were created; this in fact reduced the farmer to the status of a state slave and
pleased no one.” Banks were nationalized, wine, salt, copper and so on became state monopolies,
etc. But, as always, it ended badly, in corruption and inefficiency, even rebellions. Happened
once again a thousand years later (a very ambitious attempt that time). Then under the Ming.
And finally under Mao—which, not surprisingly, failed as miserably as all the others had. “Of all
civilizations, only the Peruvian Incas displayed greater instincts for socialism and schematic
uniformity.”
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Chinese distaste for abstraction(s), for logic and reason, arising largely from their
language. Intuition. Philosophies not theoretical postulates but ways of transforming the inner
self for social and moral harmony. Essential Chinese pragmatism. “Recipes for action,” concrete;
distrustful of scientific, abstract theorizing. Synthesis, not analysis.
Man and nature form one single society, not two separate worlds.
Yin and Yang are not opposed but complementary. Cooperative. No real dualisms in
Chinese culture. No opposition between matter and spirit, since everything is interrelated. Matter
is a symbolic reflection of spirit.
Another feature of traditional Chinese culture: “the complete indifference to the idea of
quantity and the disregard for quantitative measurement.” Numbers are emblems, used to classify
and qualify times and spaces according to hierarchies. Labels for the ordering of things. A
cyclical, not a linear, view of numbers. 1 is not the beginning of a series but the center of the
mathematical world, the most highly rated number. A higher number like 300 is essentially
peripheral, subordinate to the simple numerical emblems. Similarly there is never a succession of
phenomena in nature but a mere alteration of complementary aspects. Not succession, not cause
and effect, but interdependence. No direction in time or space. Cycles, not linear development.
Natural phenomena are not determined events but symbols, signals from heaven pointing out
related phenomena, portents of things to come.
In observations of concrete things an extremely analytical mentality and a great
empiricism, which made possible their discovery of gunpowder, printing, etc.
“A fantastic web of rites and obligations imprisoning the individual from cradle to grave
and fettering his mind.” The twin arts of rites and music symbolizing the interplay of,
respectively, dissociation and union, two fundamental principles. Rites emphasize distinctions
between people, music emphasizes their harmonic association. “‘Music expresses the harmony
of heaven and earth, ritual the hierarchic order in heaven and earth.’” “The Chinese etiquette
was, in a sense, a definite religion in which God, Satan, the human soul, sin, hell and paradise
were purely and simply ignored, a creed based on a complex set of magical relationships.” All
these “disciplines and obediences,” all this self-control, this ability to integrate every aspect of
human life, resulted in “a lack of individual personality and originality, a devotion to the
concrete and singular welded to a repulsion for the abstract and general, a utilitarianism and
thirst for sheer efficiency… The greatest weakness was the lack of religious feeling for the
transcendental.” He thinks this was one of the reasons that Western science never developed in
China.
Their conception of law was different from the West’s (except with Legalism). Not
something to be enforced rigidly and mechanically, not concerned with abstract justice. Tradition
and custom more than law.
Mahayana Buddhism came after the collapse of the Han dynasty (220 A.D.), when
barbarians were invading. Societal upheavals, confusion, temporary eclipse of Confucianism,
etc. Mahayana Buddhism was optimistic, a religion of salvation, “espousing the fundamental
optimism and earthiness of the Chinese but adding an indispensable strain of mysticism and
religiosity to soothe them in their great times of trouble.” It completed Taoism, so to speak, by
adding a profound metaphysical doctrine. Art and literature fell under its spell, as did millions of
impoverished farmers ruined by wars, and especially women. Consoling message of
reincarnation and karma which promised rewards and punishments after death. “Oppressors and
exploiters would pay for their sins under the iron rule of karma, and the lower classes saw a ray
of hope” in this religion that had shed the exhausted, pessimistic, agnostic character of original
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Buddhism. “Gautama’s doctrine was the Indian counterpart of classical Stoicism, centered
around man’s suffering, aiming at putting an end to that suffering through voluntary annihilation
in a voidlike Nirvana: he taught that there was no Brahman, no Atman, no Godhead, and made
no room in his doctrine for love, pity or mercy. [That’s debatable. It sounds more like
Hinayanism than Gautama’s original teachings.] The transformation of his philosophy into the
Mahayana’s Greater Vehicle was so complete that it amounted to the creation of a new religion,
emotional and positive, endowed with a deep metaphysical doctrine…” The human desire for
transcendence in times of suffering. Christianity, Mahayanism. But the otherworldly aspects of
Buddhism ultimately didn’t take root in China. Sages came to seek “the positive Tao of nature
rather than the annihilation of an Indian Nirvana. The fat, hilarious Buddhas of China had little in
common with their ascetic counterparts in India. And in the moving poetry of Li Po and Tu Fu
we find more cosmic wonder in the Taoistic strain than Buddhist melancholy at the impermanent
illusion of this earth which the Chinese could never bring themselves to share.”
Neo-Confucianist revival under the T’ang, the dynasty that “guided China through the
most brilliant and refined age any civilization had ever known.” Massive cultural flowering,
economic prosperity and the use of printing. But from now on there was no more real originality
in culture. Only appropriations of the past, syntheses. There would be more barbarian invasions
(Mongols and so on), but China always eventually returned to the old order, absorbing the
invaders into their traditional culture—unlike Rome, for instance. “The Chinese owe this
amazing vitality and power of absorption to the family system… The extreme stability of the
family, its complete, unquestioned devotion and obedience to the chief of clan, its yerning to
procreate in abundance because of the increased power and prosperity reflecting on the family,
the immortality conferred on departed parents and ancestors because of the pious homage still
paid to their memory—all this seduced the barbarians…” And don’t forget the sheer numbers of
the Chinese, numbers overwhelming those of the invaders. “And so, Chinese history proceeded
in a rhythmic, cyclic fashion, with the seemingly unending recurrence of barbarian invasions,
their absorption by the Chinese and the consequent injection of new cultural energy, then a few
hundred years of prosperity until the gradual weakening and decay of the whole upper stratum of
society called forth a new wave of northern barbarians…”
The perennial overpopulation intensified another Chinese trait: an exquisite, refined
politeness that wasn’t just a matter of form but was actually part of the essence of their being.
Consideration for other people. Without this, living in such overcrowded conditions would have
been unbearable.
The parallels between early Chinese Communism and the Legalism of the Ch’in are
astounding. “History has come full circle.” The ideologies themselves are different in many
ways, but the historical processes that led to the institutionalization of these ideologies have a lot
in common. The goals of the Ch’in and Maoist governments, too—the collectivistic,
bureaucratic, (quasi-)totalitarian goals, the desired refashioning of human nature—these goals
are like shadows of one another. So are the political policies. Think of the great burning of
traditional books that the Ch’in emperor organized, the attempt to wipe out the past, as compared
with the Communist burning of millions of unacceptable books and its own attempt to rewrite
history. That’s one example out of a hundred.
It’s striking that only the modern West, out of all the cultures in history, developed three-
dimensional painting and ‘three-dimensional’ music. “Rationalized” art. All previous music was,
in a way, “flat and depthless”; the West injected a unique dynamism and individuality into its art.
(Foreshadowings in antiquity, in the Hellenistic era. Some of the sculptures and, perhaps,
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architecture?) Perspective. The only art with perspective! In what way does a culture that knows
nothing of perspectival painting see the world? Your internalized web of norms influences not
only your behavior but how you absorb and interpret experience, how you see and hear things.
(“The creation of the senses is a historical process.” The young Marx.) A culture’s art is a
projection of how it assimilates the world. A projection of its norms of sensation, its historically
molded senses. Try to place yourself intuitively in the position of someone who views traditional
Chinese painting as normal and beautiful—the position, that is, of a person from that culture.
Someone who feels at home when looking at such two-dimensional art with such oddly
unrealistic human figures, art that is, for him, a fully comprehensible expression of his own
(culture’s) spirit. Or imagine what it must be like to delight in those flat, gold, almost
monochromatic medieval European paintings of Jesus. How does, or did, such a person
experience the world? How did his normatively structured modes of sensation, and thus of
thinking and acting, differ from yours?