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Reflections on Lao Sze-Kwang 19

Western philosophy as a resource to philosophize about the Chinese tradition itself
have come to be referenced under the rubric “New Confucianists,” a term coined in
the mid-1980s to describe a philosophical “movement” that began in the early 20th
century and that still continues today. While this continuing New Confucian
movement in Chinese philosophy has some relevance to the global philosophizing
of Lao Sze-Kwang, he is not only not numbered as one among them, but in fact in
many ways, is perhaps best understood as a contrast to them.
For the century and a half that led up to the founding of the People’s Republic
of China in 1949, China had been a hapless victim of Western imperialism. Before
the ideas of first Charles Darwin and then later Karl Marx arrived in China, these
transitional Western thinkers were already spawning revolutionary movements in
Europe that challenged at the most primary level those persistent presuppositions
grounding the full spectrum of disciplines within the European academy itself. In
China, the popularity of evolutionary ethics was driven in important measure by
practical social concerns of which professional academic philosophy was only a
minor part. Reformist thinkers found resonances between such explicitly pro-
gressive foreign movements and philosophical sensibilities within their own
tradition. They turned to Chinese philosophy as a resource in their best efforts to
respond effectively to the unrelenting Western aggression that was perceived as
threatening the integrity if not the very survival of Chinese culture. At the end of
the day, what has allowed contemporary historians of Chinese philosophy to
collect a truly disparate range of Chinese thinkers under the single category of
“New Confucians” is their shared commitment to appropriate and apply their
many divergent interpretations of traditional Chinese philosophy as a tourniquet
to control the hemorrhaging of what was a culture bleeding out as it was assailed
from all sides. What is fundamental to the identity of these New Confucians is their
own self-understanding that they are Chinese philosophers operating within
the intergenerational transmission of the traditional lineage (道统) of Chinese
philosophy itself. Given the porousness and synchronicity that has been the
persistent signature of the Chinese philosophical tradition over the centuries, 20th
century Chinese philosophy with all the hybridity it entails should not be
construed as a disjunction in kind from its earlier narrative. In fact, this aggre-
gating philosophical amalgam can be seen as a continuing fusion of foreign
elements that complement, enrich, and ultimately strengthen its own persisting
philosophical sensibilities. It is for this reason that the term “Confucianism” (儒学)
which can be traced back more than three millennia to an “aestheticizing” social
class in the Shang dynasty history can continue to be invoked as a name for an
ostensibly new and yet still familiar current in the always “changing yet persistent
identity” (变通) of Chinese philosophy.