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10 R. T. Ames

cultural expressions in art, religion, and philosophy as the highest level of the
human cultural experience are superior to all subjectivity and individuality.
Again, in Levi’s words:

Hegel’s view is that philosophic experience is of intrinsic value, not merely because it is in
sharpest contrast to the thinking of the mathematician and natural scientist, but because its
essence is a nisus toward wholeness—because it is a forming and a synthetic activity. Because
philosophy knows that “truth is the whole” (das Wahre ist das Ganze), it attempts, perhaps
fruitlessly, but at least courageously, to know the whole truth about human culture (Lao,
2003, p. 277)

A fundamental and much remarked ambiguity in the methodology of Hegel’sphi-
losophy of culture is his dualistic juxtaposition and appeal to a seemingly static
logically and structurally ordered whole on the one hand, and on the other to the
temporally driven history of human culture in which such forms are manifested in the
lives of conscious individuals. Hegel is certainly systematic, but there seem to be
clearly two competing senses of system: the logical ordered cultural forms and in-
stitutionsavailableforconceptualanalysis,and theexplorationofthehumancultural
experience as an historical phenomenon within a determinate historical tradition.
While keenly aware of this tension in Hegel’s methodology, Levi gives Hegel
his best argument in claiming that perhaps both systems are necessary to do justice
to the complex nature of the human experience itself. As Levi observes:

But opposite as they are in terms of categorial analysis, cultural forms and cultural history are
cognate dimensions of a single comprehensive “experience” of mankind, and they provide
respectively the genetic and the morphological theory of a comprehensive cultural reality
(Lao, 2003, p. 453).

And while Hegel’s eliding of logic and history might be a source of ambiguity for
us, on one interpretation of Hegel at least, his commitment to a strong, objective
principle of teleology as an apriori concept provides the explanatory principle
needed to discipline our empirical investigations and carry us beyond the limits of
our empirical sciences. Hegel’s strong teleology that is decidedly theological in its
cast would bring logic and history together by conceptualizing both nature and
history as having an inherent logical necessity.
The limitations, univocity, and the exclusions that the Hegelian model of
the philosophy of culture brought with it in were not lost on Lao Sze-Kwang. This
kind of teleological necessity, for Lao, contrasts with the special and distinctive
occupation of the “orientative” (引导性哲学) Chinese philosophical tradition that
has a continuing open-ended emphasis upon personal and world transformation.
It was thus that in Lao’s own evolving philosophy of culture at least, Hegel lost his
hold on an honest philosopher who was quite comfortable in changing his mind
and quite capable of deliberately formulating a more capacious theory that would