Page 27 - 2022(1) International Confusion Studies

20 R. T. Ames

Liang Shuming (梁漱溟 1893–1988) is often and quite properly identified as
the first of the New Confucians. In his earliest writings Liang rehearses a kind of
“reverse Hegelian narrative” of the phasal development of philosophy that is then
refined and amplified over his long professional career. That is, the first stage in
philosophy is its Western phase in which the human will is able to satisfy the basic
needs of the human experience by disciplining the environment in which our lives
are lived. The second Chinese phase entails a harmonizing of this human will with
its natural environment, with all of the joyful wisdom and satisfaction that such a
reconciliation brings with it. The third and final phase is Buddhist philosophy that
provides an intuitive negation of the self-other dichotomy, and a true spiritual
realization through a regimen of self-cultivation.
There seems to be a consensus among scholars that the most prominent and
indeed promising lineage among the New Confucians is that of the teacher and
founder of New Confucianism, Xiong Shili (熊十力 1885–1968), and his two
prominent disciples, Mou Zongsan and Tang Junyi. The greatest foreign influence
on the development of Xiong Shili’s own philosophy was the first wave of Western
learning—Buddhist philosophy—with only a passing ripple of the European
canons of philosophy. And probably the source of his own most profound insights
into the nature of the human experience was the Book of Changes (《易经》), the first
among the classics generally considered to be the cosmological ground of both
Confucian and Daoist philosophical sensibilities.
One way of focusing Xiong Shili’s lasting influence on New Confucianism is to
recount briefly his core doctrine of “the inseparability of forming and functioning”
(体用不二) that we have referenced above. His basic point is that “forming” and
“functioning” are an explanatory, nonanalytical vocabulary for describing the
dramatic and ceaseless unfolding of our experience. Given the wholeness of
experience that includes both the human mind and the experience of the world,
Xiong Shili took the Book of Changes natural cosmology to be a model for human
self-cultivation. That is, human creativity and the advancement of cosmic meaning
are inseparable aspects of the same reality.
Xiong Shili’s two most prominent protégées, Mou Zongsan and Tang Junyi
continued this New Confucian lineage by translating, and in fact, transforming the
foreign rivals they admired most into a vocabulary consistent with their own
premises. For Mou Zongsan, Kant is the Western philosopher who began to
understand the real nature of morality. Indeed, Mou Zongsan is so smitten by Kant
that he appeals to his transcendental language to explain what is unique and
distinctive about Chinese philosophy. But Mou Zongsan as a Chinese philosopher
makes it clear that whatever might be construed as “transcendent” in classical
Chinese thought is neither independent of the natural world nor theistic. Far from
appealing to a “two-world” cosmology and grounding the dualism that emerged