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12 R. T. Ames

evolution of human culture: “theseparationofthe oneand many” (一多为二).
Lao on the other hand embraces a model of philosophy of culture that would
resist this strong teleology by insisting upon the inseparability of the one and the
many in the evolution of distinctive yet hybridic traditions. That is, Lao wants
the “intra-” rather than the “inter-cultural” model in which vital cultures and
their philosophies remain distinctive and yet are organically related to and have
influence upon each other as always unique aspects of a complex, continuous,
unbounded organism called philosophy itself.
In formulating his own philosophy of culture, Lao introduces an important
distinction between the actual creation of culture as “initiation” (创生) and cul-
tural borrowings as “imitation” (模仿) that serves him in preserving the cultural
integrity of the Chinese tradition. For Lao, the initiating processes of our cultural
histories are fundamentally creative, and are not a process of reduplication. On
the other hand, if a particular cultural form has already been initiated—the
introduction of a particular institution, for example—it requires borrowing and
imitation from the population of a second culture who want to incorporate this
same form into their cultural ethos. For Lao, the changes that have been occurring
within Chinese culture are a largely matter of such learning and imitation, and do
not constitute the “initiative” process of creating a completely new stable cultural
structure that Hegel’s model would assume. Importantly, while endorsing cultural
borrowing as a resource for enriching our philosophical narratives, an immediate
corollary of Lao’s intra-cultural philosophy is that the integrity guaranteed by the
“initiation” nature of culture precludes the simple interpretation and assessment
of one tradition in terms of another.
As another step in formulating his own theory of culture, Lao appropriates and
adapts Talcott Parsons sociological model of “internalization” (內在化) for his
philosophy of culture as a counterweight to Hegel’s “externalization”—that is,
internalization as the process of one culture learning from and imitating the
contents of a second culture. Parsons argues that the source of social behaviors,
institutional structures, and whole cultures is an external experience in the sense
that it is the product of internalizing what other people or other cultures have
themselves internalized.
In Parsons’ own words, “the function of pattern-maintenance refers to the
imperative of maintaining the stability of the patterns of institutionalized culture
defining the structure of the system.” (Parsons, 1985, p. 159) The internalization of
culture is an important aspect of this function of pattern-maintenance at the level
of the individual or of individual cultures. Parsons notes that “internalization of a
culture pattern is not merely knowing it as an object of the external world; it is
incorporating it into the actual structure of the personality as such.” (Parsons,
1985, p. 141)