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Reflections on Lao Sze-Kwang 13

In formulating his own philosophy of culture, Lao wants to retain autonomy
and cultural integrity on the one hand, and allow for the growth available to us
through our organically related social and cultural realities on the other. For Lao,
the first “aspect” (面相)—and his deliberate appeal to inclusive “aspectual” rather
than exclusive analytic language is significant—has intuition or self or cultural
consciousness as its root, and out of this comes the externalization of the structures
that shape the spirit of culture and gives rise to the cultural life itself. And the
second aspect takes the mutually influencing social and cultural realities as its
root, and out of this comes the internalization of the structures that shape our
world of experience and our cultural consciousness. Together these two aspects
provide us with what he calls the necessary elements for a “panoramic picture of
culture” (文化全景), where neither aspect can take the place of the other.
Lao calls his own philosophy of culture a “double-structured theory”
(双重结构观), and in formulating his theory about these two structures, insists
that while each has its own proper function, it also has its functional limits.
Importantly, we might say that Lao would regard the Hegelian teleologically-
driven dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, and the Parsonian individ-
ualistic and realist model of internalization as each having its own functional
limitations. Far from “combining” Hegel and Parsons, Lao rather replaces them
with an aspectual, correlative, and holistic model that we might capture in the
“forming and functioning” (体用) language of an always emergent, hybridic
cultural order, a familiar cosmological vocabulary appealed to ubiquitously in
explaining the evolution of Chinese culture broadly. 1
David Hall and I in our own reflections on how to think about the relations
among distinctive cultures—perhaps the most important question that Lao pon-
ders for himself—were also adverse to overly determinate teleological models. And
we ourselves arrived at a position on “the value of vagueness” that I think in many
ways but in a different language, resonates with Lao’s “intra-cultural” conclu-
sions. We formulated our argument in Anticipating China in the following terms:

Our claim is that there is no plausible argument distinguishing, in any final sense, cultures
and their languages. The conclusion we draw from this is that there is only one language (at
most) and one culture (at most), and that many of the paradoxes involved in interpreting
across cultural boundaries are dissolved when one recognizes there is but a single field of
significance that serves as a background from which individual languages and cultures are
foregrounded (Hall & Ames, 1995, p. 166).

1 Lau Kwok-ying summarizes the sequencing of Lao’s internalization and externalization dy-
namic in some detail with the process of transitioning from belief to thought being the internal
dimension and from custom to institutionalization being the external dimension. See (Lao, 2003,
pp. 3–4, ft. 1).