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Reflections on Lao Sze-Kwang 17

idiosyncratic and audacious human genius—Goethe’sFaust, Shelley’sFran-
kenstein, Milton’s Satan, Nietzsche’sUebermensch—is dark, dangerous, and
deliciously depraved—a promethean offense against God’s natural and moral
order. Even in our contemporary times of radical innovations, we do not usually
associate the word “creativity” with the core human occupations of religion,
morality, science, and philosophy that have a strong teleological cast. Instead,
this term “creativity” prompts the more marginal aesthetic interests such as the
creative arts and the writing of “fiction.” Whilewemight be inclined (although
probably at a safe distance) to admire the rakish charms of someone deemed
“morally creative” or be intrigued by the intensity of devotees in the performance
of the colorful rituals of some “new” or exotic religion, we find that in Confucian
role ethics singular value is invested in the moral imagination needed to inspire
real artistry in our moral lives and our human-centered religiousness. Indeed,
in the classical Chinese tradition, the Confucian project as it is defined in the
cosmology of the core canonical texts such as the Book of Changes (《易经》)or
)
Focusing the Familiar (《中庸》 requires of human beings as the heart-and-mind
of the cosmos (天地之心) nothing less than both the imagination and the
refinement to stand together with the heavens and the earth as co-creators of the
cosmos.
Reflecting further on the genealogy of wen, dating back more than a millen-
nium earlier than the passage cited above from the Garden of Stories, and in a sharp
departure from the contemporary use of “culture wars” as a metaphor for cultural
tensions, wen has consistently been contrasted explicitly with the coercive,
destructive, and dehumanizing use of martial force wu (武) as it arises in the
human experience. Wen far from provoking wars, is its antithesis. Wen denotes the
expansively civil and civilizing dimension of the human experience that emerges
when the life of a community is guided by an aesthetically- and critically-enriching
counterpoint between persistent canonical texts and the interlinear commentaries
that are continuously being written on them by each generation as they respond to
the pressing issues of their day.
In sum, the conceptual genealogy of the term wenhua implies that culture
emerges through an intrinsic relationship between “persistence and change”
(变通)—a symbiotic relationship described at great length in the Book of Changes
between a determinate tradition and the ambient forces of transformation. Cultural
conservation and prospective change, far from standing in opposition, are com-
plementary and mutually enhancing.

4 As Psalms 24 insists: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof, it is He that has made us
and not we ourselves.”