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Reflections on Lao Sze-Kwang 11

serve his own intellectual needs. We might summarize the gist of Lao’sreflections
on his intellectual development that led him away from Hegel as he remembers his
own philosophical growth and transition in his preface to the 1998 s edition of The
Essentials of Chinese Culture: Newly Revised (《中国文化要义新编》).
In his prefatory remarks, Lao certainly appreciates the power of the Hegelian
model to conceptualize and explain the process of a single culture’sevolution.
But he is also worried that when we want to distinguish between a specific
culture’s growth and development and the mutual influence that obtains among
various ostensibly distinctive cultures—how these cultures influence and draw
upon each other—we encounter questions that Hegel’s dialectic cannot answer.
Hegel can perhaps say something about the unique spirit of Chinese culture and
how this culture undergoes a process of “externalization” to assume its objective
institutional forms and achieve its complete cultural life. But how is Hegel going
to explain the evolving way forward for Chinese philosophy and culture? From
Hegel’s holistic and synthetic point of view, cultural differences among either
individuals or groups are in fact only a matter of degree rather than kind. Hence,
in the light of Hegel’s theory, if Chinese culture has modernization as its goal, it
will have to understand its own evolution in terms of growing the fruits of a
modernized Western culture. And, as Lao observes, such an outcome has in fact
been advocated in so many of the competing efforts to modernize China from the
May 4th Movement (1919) down to the present—that is, a commitment to a
thoroughgoing Westernization. Scholars who would resist such wholesale
colonization, emphasizing as they do the intrinsic value of traditional Chinese
philosophy and culture, and who thus want to preserve its distinctive spirit in
undergoing any kind of change, are left behind. For Lao, these two positions—
preserve the distinctive and substantial contributions of Chinese philosophy and
yet at the same time, modernize to become wholly Western—are contradictory
and cannot accommodate each other. And Lao was not ready to embrace the idea
that traditional Chinese values will recede and whither as Chinese culture is
subsumed into the Western canopy. Indeed, Lao rejected fundamentally what
still continues to be the profound asymmetry of our own historical moment in the
accelerating evolution of a changing world cultural order: that is, for the younger
generation of Chinese themselves and their western counterparts who have little
interest in Chinese philosophy and culture, there is an uncritical assumption that
modernization is westernization.
Appealing to the language that Lao’s contemporary, Tang Junyi, has
drawn from Yijing cosmology—“the inseparability of the one and the many”
(一多不分观)—it is clear that Hegel’s philosophy of culture, entailing as it does
clear traces of an old theology, provides us with the “one” Absolute Spirit as it is
synthesized from the “inter-cultural”“many” as the singular ultimate goal of the