Page 16 - 2022(1) International Confusion Studies

Reflections on Lao Sze-Kwang 9

The publication of the Phenomenology in 1807 was, in short, an unprecedented philosophic
event. The work is so rich, and it has had such an ambiguous and controversial destiny
since Hegel’s time that it is easy to forget just where its epoch making character lay, and
this, I think, was not as most believe in its dialectic or its absolute idealism or in its theory of
development as such, but rather in that here for the first time since Aristotle the subject of
philosophizing is taken to be neither a particular science nor an aspect of social living, nor a
segmentofexternalnature,butthe entire range and compass of human culture as a total
and developing entity (Levi, 1984, p. 447).
Lao’s own earliest forays into philosophy of culture are found in his Early
)
Works (《少作集》 and in his original 1965 The Essentials of Chinese Culture
( 《中国文化要义》). Lao was steeped in German idealism and, sharing the same
exuberance as Levi expresses here for Hegel’s genius, in these early works relied
heavily on Hegel. Specifically, and on his own reckoning, Lao was deeply
committed to a Hegelian teleologically-driven “externalization” model of culture
where the higher objective spirit overcomes and “externalizes” the lower subjec-
tive spirit within the dialectical evolution of human culture. In this commitment to
Hegel’s model, Lao saw himself as walking the same road as his contemporary New
Confucian philosophers, Tang Junyi (唐君毅 1909–1978) and Mou Zongsan (牟宗
三 1909–1995) (Lao, 2003, p. 277). But in the fullness of time and with his own
ongoing philosophical reflection, Lao found that Hegel and his teleological dia-
lectic could not answer many of his questions about cultural diversity, and most
importantly, his concerns about the integrity of Chinese culture and its future
directions. At the same time, under the influence of Kant, perhaps, he grew sus-
picious of the metaphysical assumptions of his contemporaries, Tang and Mou,
who in their work were much enamored of German idealism.
What then were Lao’s reservations about Hegel’s philosophy of culture?
Beyond his panegyric on Hegel rehearsed above, Levi goes on to give a summary of
the several dialectical stages in Hegel’s philosophy of culture that will assist us in
understanding Lao’s reluctance to stay with the Hegelian model as Lao’s own
thinking about philosophy of culture continued to develop and mature. Levi
explains the Hegelian cultural dialectic in the following terms:

The new direction taken by Hegel is based upon the central conviction that the human spirit is
the proper subject of philosophy and that the general character of spirit will differentiate itself
in a series of cultural forms or phrases of development culminating in philosophy. Subjective
spirit is the lowest level: it includes sensory knowledge and reasoning, mathematics and the
natural sciences. Objective spirit is the intermediate stage: it includes all that makes for the
institutional life of man including law, ethics, political philosophy and world history. Absolute
spirit is the culminating stage and it includes art, religion, and philosophy (Lao, 2003, p. 277).

What is of greatest moment in Hegel’s philosophy of culture is its assumption that
because truth must be whole, the evolution of human culture is a synthetic
development in search of its culmination as a holistic vision of the human expe-
rience. Said another way, Hegel is convinced that common institutionalized