1) When Did Mind and Instinct Arise?
For thousands of years Western civilisation believed in creationism, the belief that God made human beings. In the nineteenth century this creationism was decisively challenged by Darwin’s theory of evolution. Since then, supported by paleontology and geology, evolution has become an undeniable fact in the debate between creationism and evolution. The debate between creationism and evolution as science, not as belief, is over.246 Homo sapiens, the common ancestor of Easterners and Westerners, is thought to have appeared and evolved roughly as follows.
The history of human evolution is so long that it is hard to imagine within our short lives. Strictly speaking, it must be seen as being as old as the 4.5-billion-year history of the earth. Before evolution, human beings can be traced back to stardust: beings made of the elements formed after the Big Bang and matter produced in the evolution of stars. But in terms of evolution since the birth of the earth, the theory of recapitulation interprets the development of the embryo as following the course of human evolution and re-enacting the history of the evolution of life on earth. This theory is now known to be only partly correct, but it deepens our understanding of the process of human evolution.
About five hundred million years ago the earth was in the Age of Fishes. The fins of those fish were made of five bones, and their body fluids kept a salinity similar to seawater. That our hands have five digits and our blood a salinity similar to seawater is an inheritance from our days as fish. Our hands have five digits each, ten in all for both hands. But had the bones of fish fins been six, our hands and feet would each have had six digits, twelve for both hands. Then a duodecimal system might have prevailed instead of today’s decimal one.
The first land animals, descendants of fish, appeared about 350 million years ago. From 200 million to 66 million years ago the dinosaurs reigned as kings of the earth (the Age of Dinosaurs). From these reptiles we inherited, in our brains, legacies such as the R-complex (Reptilian complex), which governs instincts such as breathing, sleep and appetite. But reptiles have no capacity for expressing emotion or desire.
About sixty-six million years ago, after the dinosaurs, the kings of the reptiles who reigned over the earth, suddenly died out and disappeared, the Age of Mammals began. From the early mammals that flourished after the reptiles we inherited the limbic system, which governs emotion and desire. The human limbic system differs hardly at all from that of other mammals. The limbic system is where our desires are governed. It tells us that in instinct and desire, the difference between humans and animals is not great.
The small early mammals, shaped like mice, survived for some hundred million years, chased by carnivorous reptiles, crawling on the forest floor and living on plant seeds and insects. But with the end of the age of reptiles, sudden upheavals of the earth’s crust and great changes of climate brought the small mammals both challenge and the opportunity to evolve. Some of them gave up life on the ground and climbed into the trees to begin an arboreal life, laying the great groundwork for the evolution of monkeys, apes and at last humanity.
The mammals, having created an important occasion for evolution by first climbing into the trees seventy million years ago, met another decisive occasion for evolution twenty million years ago, when the savanna formed. Millions of years ago our distant ancestors must have hesitated at the edge between the open savanna and the forest, facing challenge and opportunity. But just as their forebears had overcome the pressing dangers of life in the trees, they must bravely have taken the first step towards an unprecedented life on the savanna. After countless efforts, endurance and hardship, a primate was at last born that could stand awkwardly on two feet on the savanna. Paleontologists once took it to be Ramapithecus, but in the 1980s reclassified Ramapithecus as Sivapithecus, an ancestor of the orangutan. Today the ancestors who made us stand on two feet and freed our two hands are taken to be Sahelanthropus, Ardipithecus, Australopithecus and others, which appear from about seven million years ago.
With their freed hands our distant ancestors could make rudimentary but supremely important tools and show manual skill (Homo habilis), and came to stand ever more upright (Homo erectus). This evolution is thought to have taken place on the African continent. One to two million years ago Homo erectus was at its height. They began to spread into Asia and Europe across the isthmus linking Africa and Asia. Peking man (600,000 years ago), Java man (600,000 years ago) and Heidelberg man (500,000 years ago) are all Homo erectus.
Homo sapiens is estimated to have appeared between 300,000 and 200,000 years ago, and there is still no settled view on where. The first Eve, ancestor of modern humanity, appeared in eastern Africa. Some hold that they migrated to every part of the earth like their Homo erectus forebears; others that they developed into Homo sapiens over a long time in many places, following evolutionary factors already built into Homo erectus. In any case Homo sapiens ultimately spread across the whole world and replaced Homo erectus. Then, from about 70,000 years ago, Homo sapiens became modern humanity by going through the “cognitive revolution,” a period in which new ways of thinking and cultural evolution unfolded explosively.
So Homo sapiens has lived in this world for hundreds of thousands of years with an enormous brain of around 1.5 litres, the neocortex. The neocortex changed the human brain decisively. Human beings, while having like other animals the R-complex (which governs instinct) and the limbic system (which governs emotion), came at the same time to have the enormous neocortex of the mind (which governs the mind).
In its enormous brain, humanity at last began to “think.” This part of the brain is called the neocortex. Modern humanity came to have the neocortex, the so-called New Brain. Human thought: this is what made humanity a being different from other animals. By contrast, the reptilian brain (R-complex) and the limbic system together are called the Old Brain. The reptilian brain governs the survival “instincts” reptiles have: aggression, the desire to dominate, the defence of territory. The limbic system governs the memory, the autonomic nervous system and the “emotions” mammals have.
The new brain is the human characteristic. But we must not forget that the old brain, which governs instinct and emotion, is a very important part of the human being. Here people can easily make a great error of perception: since only human beings have the new brain, it is easy to think that the civilisation human beings made was made by the new brain. It is a partial and inaccurate judgement. The role of the old brain must never be forgotten. The right judgement is that “the new brain (mind, or reason) together with the old brain (instinct and emotion)” made human history and civilisation.
In this book I shall call the old brain, which governs instinct and emotion, instinct. It is not without problems. But culturally we are used to seeing instinct and emotion together as one, often call it instinct, and are used to distinguishing it from the mind as instinct vs mind.247 In the end, analysing human nature as instinct and mind (or body and mind) seems the best approach. Because mind and reason both come from the new brain, this book uses the two interchangeably.248
Looking back, modern humanity appeared about 70,000 years ago, after the cognitive revolution, and lived by hunting and gathering for nearly sixty thousand years. Around 10,000 BC the agricultural revolution at last took place and humanity began to live in settled communities. With this it at last began to think intensively about the relationship between humanity and nature. Around 3000 BC, as “writing” was created, East and West alike began to set their thoughts in order systematically. Around 1000 BC these thoughts began to come out, not in speech, but in “the systematisation of texts.”
In this period the civilisations of East and West show that they had entered entirely different paths. The greatest sign of their different paths is the difference in their theories of human nature: how they see instinct and mind. Think of the mind as a gift God gave human beings and worship it, and Western civilisation takes shape. See mind and instinct both as natural phenomena and set up a complementary relationship between them, and Eastern civilisation takes shape. That is, in the theory of human nature, in the question of who we are, East and West create different civilisations. The key is how East and West, at the level of their philosophical systems, digested the powers of the mind, the human characteristic.
Instinct, Hundreds of Millions of Years Old, in the Limbic System, and the Mind, Hundreds of Thousands of Years Old, in the Neocortex
In terms of anatomical evolution, human beings are made up of an “instinct” (the old brain) hundreds of millions of years old and a “mind” (the new brain) hundreds of thousands of years old. Unlike other animals, humanity came to think as it gained the mind. Because human beings are the only animals that can think about themselves, they have always thought about themselves, and tried to define what a human being is. In the fourth century BC Plato defined the human being as “a featherless two-legged animal.” Diogenes, who always mocked Plato’s pedantry, put it into action. He plucked all the feathers from a chicken, threw it down where Plato and his disciples were gathered and cried, “Here is what you call a human being!” Plato hurriedly revised his definition: the human being, he said, is “a featherless, two-legged animal with broad, flat nails.”
There was an attempt that went a step further, almost two thousand years after Plato. The French philosopher Descartes (1596–1650) argued that the pineal gland, shaped like a pine cone in the brain, is the very organ that separately holds the soul God gave human beings: “The soul is not seated evenly throughout the whole body, but has its principal seat in the small pineal gland in the middle of the brain, from which it radiates its influence to the other parts of the body.”249 With this Descartes gave anatomical support, and concrete form, to the old idea, popular in ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, that the pineal gland represents the human soul. And by putting forward so-called rationalism, in which the soul or mind or reason represents the human being, he came to be called the father of modern philosophy. Modern medicine, of course, explains that Descartes’s claim that the pineal gland is the mind is not right. The pineal gland is merely an endocrine gland that, among other things, secretes melatonin, which is involved in sleep.
Plato and Descartes arrived at mistaken definitions of the human being and of the structure of the brain, but their attempt to define the human being from its physical structure is worth noting. A right understanding of human nature is absolutely important, and it is astonishing that there have been no attempts to infer human nature from bodily structure. In the West such attempts would have been impossible until the end of the Middle Ages because of religious influence. But even today, when modern medicine has revealed many secrets of the human body, especially the structure and functions of the brain, there are few attempts to find the key to human nature in the structure of the brain. In the West especially there is no movement to correct the mistaken understanding of human nature, focused on “mind,” accumulated over thousands of years, and to reach a right understanding.
Philosophy has staying power only when it is freed from theology and metaphysics and joined with science. Theology and metaphysics find it hard to free themselves from dogma, but science is “self-correcting,” so philosophy can rely on it. What is the mind? What makes human beings different from other animals is the brain. Most of the brain is the new brain, which takes up more than three quarters of the whole. The new brain is where the functions reside that human beings, through thousands of years of cultural history, have tried to explain under many names: soul, spirit, reason, heart. Modern medicine explains them collectively by the more exact expression “the higher functions of the nervous system.”
The mind matters. But the mind, the new brain, can never stand for the human being, because there is the old brain. The old brain is the collective name for the R-complex and the limbic system. We must note that the limbic system, which governs human emotion, has hardly changed since human beings inherited it from mammals. It means that in instinct there is no difference between humans and animals.
The actual size of the limbic system has hardly changed during the evolution of mammals.250
Then one could argue that the mind is all the more important for human beings. If there is no difference from animals in instinct, one could take the view that the mind represents the human being. What special physical structure only human beings have is well known: the use of two hands, that is, having a large brain. But this is not a satisfying answer. We must know what features the human brain has compared with those of other animals, because here lies the only key to unlocking the secret of human nature.
In the end, that the human brain is larger than other animals’ means that the neocortex is larger. Most of the brain, grown to some 1,350 cc on average, is neocortex. We now know exactly what distinguishes human beings from other animals: the neocortex. It is the neocortex that governs the intellectual functions, language, memory, analysis, synthesis, judgement, which modern medicine seeks to explain collectively by the more exact expression “the higher functions of the nervous system.”251 We have come to know at last that, physically and culturally, the human characteristic is nothing other than the neocortex.
But the neocortex can never stand for the human being, because there is the limbic system. I have already said that all other mammals have a limbic system too. In fact medicine has shown that the limbic system governs instincts such as the desire for self-preservation and sexual desire, and emotions such as anger and fear. Among the instincts, appetite, the desire for sleep and the like are governed mainly by the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland rather than the limbic system. The limbic system can be seen as governing the latter member of each pair: of mind and body, spirit and passion, intelligence and will, psychology and physiology, reason and feeling, intellect and instinct, it governs body, passion, physiology, feeling and instinct. If human nature is mind plus body, spirit plus passion, psychology plus physiology, the physical expression of human nature can be concluded to be the neocortex plus the limbic system. To repeat, in terms of anatomical evolution, human beings have an instinct hundreds of millions of years old and a mind hundreds of thousands of years old.
Logically, of course, the physical expression of human nature can only be the whole human body. And in fact the neocortex is connected by nerve cells not only with the limbic system but with the hypothalamus, and the limbic system with the hypothalamus, the pituitary gland and other nervous tissue. But judged by the functions each part of the body governs, there is little difficulty in seeing human nature as the combination of the limbic system and the neocortex. If we take what we call the mind to be the neocortex, and what we call instinct to be the limbic system, we find that we have a firm basis for clarifying the relationship between mind and instinct. This becomes clear when we look at the physical relationship between the neocortex and the limbic system.
Anatomically the neocortex and the limbic system clearly have separate nervous tissue. Then may we regard mind and instinct as separate? The two nervous tissues are separate and easily distinguished, yet there is an inseparable connection of nerve cells between them. This connection is called encephalisation. This phenomenon of connection is a mechanism of decisive importance that can explain scientifically the relationship between mind and instinct.
Encephalisation: The Link Between Mind and Instinct
What, physically, is the relationship between mind and instinct? Anatomically, the relationship between the neocortex and the limbic system is described as follows.
The neocortex sits astride the limbic system like a rider on a horse without reins. In fact there are almost no reins. The frontal lobe of the neocortex is connected by nerve cells to the nearby limbic system, and that is all; there may be some indirect connection with the limbic system by way of the hypothalamus.252
That the frontal lobe of the neocortex is connected to the limbic system is of great significance. These connecting nerve cells are the physical evidence of the important “encephalisation.” And the frontal lobe of the neocortex governs in particular analysis, synthesis and judgement, that is, the role of the mind. The frontal lobe of the neocortex and the limbic system, that is, mind and emotion, mind and instinct, are physically and directly connected.
The result of this connection means that a capacity arose for the new brain to regulate part of instinct and emotion. Like every connection or relationship, encephalisation does not work in one direction only; it can only be a two-way street. Clinical studies have shown that, among human instincts, the one most highly encephalised is the reproductive instinct (生殖本能): in human beings sexual function is extensively encephalised and regulated by social and mental factors.253 This explains why human beings concentrate so much on “love” in songs, novels, films and the like.254
We must not overlook the important fact that the mind being able to regulate part of emotion or instinct means, equally, that emotion and instinct influence the mind. “Encephalisation” is in the end a double-edged sword.
Functionally, the activity of the neocortex modifies emotional behaviour, and the reverse also holds.255
The oppositional dualisms of mind and body, mind and emotion, soul and instinct are mistaken because they ignore this phenomenon of “encephalisation.” Here lies a great reason why, for thousands of years in the West, religion and metaphysics could not coexist with science.
That the neocortex is connected to the limbic system proves that mind and body do not exist separately. Just as the neocortex and the limbic system are two parts of one brain, mind and body cannot but be two sides of one whole.
The dichotomy implied in the expression “mind and body” does not exist in living organisms.256
Spinoza grasped that “mind and body are one and the same thing.”257 This brilliant insight is being proved right by twentieth-century science. Psychiatrists and psychologists have recently said the following about the relationship between mind and body.
Mind and body are inseparable and equal expressions of life itself: only two aspects of one existence of spirit and flesh.258
That “the physiological and psychological aspects are integrated and non-separable,”259 another way of expressing mind and body, shows especially clearly. That body and mind work together inseparably shows well in the case of emotion. When emotion is aroused and one enters a so-called state of excitement, one not only becomes mentally tense; the pulse quickens to increase the supply of oxygen to the muscles, the pupils widen to broaden the field of vision, and the body takes an alert posture to prepare for an emergency.
It is certain that an outburst of rage includes not only physical but mental rage. The term “sham rage” therefore cannot exist.260
Medicine is also proving that “instinctive behaviour” and “learned behaviour” are closely connected, and that distinguishing between them is a mistake.
The evidence accumulated so far shows that it is inaccurate and wrong to regard “instinctive” behaviour as separate from, and wholly unrelated to, “learned” behaviour. The two are intermingled.261
Intellectual ability, too, cannot go beyond the limits of human physiology, desire and emotion. In other words, intellectual ability can only aim at what physiology, desire and emotion aim at: self-preservation and adaptation to the environment. In this sense, as Spinoza pointed out, will and understanding can be seen as the same.
The will and the understanding are one and the same.262
This is the philosophical claim that human action and thought should be understood as one fundamental force. But in what form it heads in that direction, and how it is expressed, it is free. Human beings recognise the range of their fate, and within that range can be as free as they like. That is the whole of the freedom they have. The intellectual ability human beings possess, that is, can only be explained by the contradiction that it has at once limits and possibilities. In Western culture such contradiction has traditionally been thought to go against the laws of nature, and the humanities have grasped contradiction as “struggle.” But as the proofs that light has the two properties of particle and wave, or that parallel lines meet, show, contradiction can instead be accepted as a basic property of nature. In nature, duality must be seen not as an exception but as a universal law. Eastern philosophy, as the thought of yin and yang shows, took for granted that the “harmony” of contradiction is inherent in nature. In yin and yang, the two opposed beings of a duality show a complementary, harmonious character. Mind and instinct, that is, make up the human being while showing their fusion.
2) The Western Division of Mind and Instinct: Descartes’s Dualism vs Spinoza’s Connectionism
A philosophical system that shakes the foundation of Western civilisation, the source of the civilisation of mind worship, can be found in Spinoza, because it concerns the theory of human nature. Spinoza destroys the foundation of Descartes’s metaphysics of mind worship. On the fundamental question of whether mind and instinct are one or two, Descartes took the position that the two are separate and that the mind represents the human being. This is the foundation of Western rationalism.
Spinoza, connecting mind and instinct, takes the position that the two are in the end one. As an extension of this he argued that God and nature are the same.263 Spinoza’s philosophical system, in which the mind disappears with death, shakes to its foundations the mind-centred Western philosophical system that had ruled the West for thousands of years. The Western philosophical system interprets Spinoza’s theory of human nature as monism.264 But looking at Spinoza’s philosophical system, his theory of human nature sees the roles of mind and instinct as fused (syncretic). It is a syncretic theory of human nature very like the Eastern theory of the unity of mind and body. Reinterpreting the role of God, Spinoza acknowledged the existence of God but took the view that God and nature are the same: a connectionism that develops while acknowledging both sides, God and nature, mind and instinct. Spinoza must be seen not as an atheist but as a thinker of the unmanifest. In this book, in interpreting the relationship between instinct and mind, Spinoza is treated not as a monist but as a connectionist, an interpretation different from Western thinkers’ treatment of him as a monist. That Spinoza’s theory of human nature is not monism but connectionism is easy to agree with once one understands the Eastern theory of human nature, the theory of complementarity.
The theory of human nature that sees instinct as a burden and reveres the mind long formed the mainstream of the Western philosophical system. Descartes (1596–1650) argued that the pineal gland in the brain is the very place that holds the mind God gave human beings:
My view is that this gland is the principal seat of the soul, and the place in which all our thoughts are formed…. The pineal gland is in the middle of the place where all the impressions and sensations gathered by the two eyes and the two ears come together… Moreover, the pineal gland is supported and surrounded by the little branches of the carotid arteries that bring the (animal) spirits into the brain.265
And on this ground he opened the age of rationalism, the most powerful tradition of modern Western philosophy. “The human being is a thinking being; therefore it exists”: that was Descartes’s proposition about human nature. The human mind took God’s place and came to lead Western philosophy. The powers of the human mind widened the base of Western civilisation and walked the road of universalisation. Through Kant and Hegel the mind became idealism, and later, uniting with the “science” of social evolutionism, it entered the age of ideology.
But the pineal gland, which Westerners called the physical existence of the mind, belongs not to the new brain but to the old brain: to the part that governs not the mind but instinct and emotion. Looking back, it is a stunning irony that Western civilisation worshipped as the mind a part of the brain that belongs to instinct, spent thousands of years wrapped in metaphysics, and in the end drove on into ideology and strayed from human nature. What does the pineal gland, which Descartes and the other Western rationalists claimed was the real substance of the mind, actually do?
The pineal gland secretes melatonin. In many animals it regulates seasonal reproduction. In human beings melatonin physiologically governs the twenty-four-hour cycle.266 The pineal gland is an organ of which there is only one, in the midline of the body…. It is so named because it is shaped like a pine cone. Because we have only one pineal gland and it sits at the centre of the brain, it was for a time thought to be the seat of the soul.267
Spinoza (1632–1677) held an entirely different view of human nature from Descartes. Spinoza did not agree that human beings act freely from instinct as the mind wishes. Against Descartes’s universalisation of the powers of the mind, Spinoza raised the following objection:
Descartes maintained that the soul or mind is specially united to a particular part of the brain, namely the pineal gland, by the aid of which the mind is enabled to feel all the movements set going in the body and also external objects, and that the mind can simply act freely as it wishes.268
Spinoza’s claim rests on his theory of human nature. Unlike Descartes, Spinoza argued that mind and body are an inseparable “one.” But analysed closely, he argued for the fusion of mind and instinct, a theory of human nature that holds both the attribute of thought and the attribute of extension. He did not voice a view that ignores one side and leans to the other, as Descartes or Marx did.
The mind and the body are one and the same thing, which is conceived now under the attribute of thought, now under the attribute of extension.269
Within the essence of Western civilisation, the universalisation of the mind, Spinoza’s thought, which argued for and proved the connection of instinct and mind, was understood only by a few: Voltaire, Goethe, Lessing and others. It is true that Hegel praised Spinoza in part, but his philosophy, unlike Spinoza’s, which argued for the connection of mind and instinct, strengthened the universalisation of the mind still further.
Hegel called the whole, embracing all its complexity, the Absolute. And this Absolute was spiritual. Spinoza’s idea that it has both the attributes of thought and of extension was rejected.270
At the crossroads of Spinoza and Descartes the West followed Descartes because Western civilisation had already, in essence, chosen the road of the powers of the mind. The Eastern theory of human nature and Spinoza’s rest on a theory of complementarity or connection in which one and one together make one and at the same time two. From the scientific and analytical standpoint of dualism and monism, which the West favours, this can look like a paradox. But we cannot stay in the age of classical physics, content in the absoluteness of Euclidean geometry and the mechanics of Galileo and Newton. Indeed in modern physics light has become something that can be explained only by embracing both the particle theory and the wave theory: light is one thing, explained sometimes as particle and sometimes as wave. Perhaps it is the nature of the natural world that the relationship between mind and instinct, mind and body, is explained not dualistically or monistically but by connection or fusion. The Eastern theory of mind and body, the theory of li and qi, Spinoza, modern physics and the discoveries of modern medicine support this.
The philosophy of Descartes, who led the Western rationalism that opened the road to the universalisation of the mind, was not as scientific as he thought. Modern physics in particular stresses this:
The Cartesian division between I and the world, between observer and observed, cannot hold when dealing with atomic matter. In atomic physics we can never speak about nature without, at the same time, speaking about ourselves.271
Weizsäcker (1912–2007), a student of Heisenberg, built a philosophical system through quantum logic. He sought to offer a fundamental alternative to the system Western civilisation had relied on, and as its beginning he put forward a fusion of mind and body like Spinoza’s.
I would argue that body and soul are not two substances but one. This body and soul is the human being, who knows himself in many different ways.272
This view is supported by twentieth-century science. Psychiatrists and psychologists have recently pointed out the following about the relationship between mind and body.
The dichotomy implied in the expression “mind and body” does not exist in living organisms.273
Modern medicine’s account of the relationship between mind and body is similar. The account of modern medicine supports the theory of li and qi and Spinoza’s expression of mind and body.
Mind and body are inseparable and equal expressions of life itself: only two aspects of one existence of spirit and flesh.274
The question of whether mind and instinct are one or two remains with us. As said before, the Eastern theory of human nature and Spinoza argued for a “theory of complementarity” or “theory of connection.” This differs in essence from the claim of Plato, revealed religion, Descartes and others that soul, spirit or reason is a separate being wholly apart from instinct. At the same time it differs in essence from Marx’s materialist monism, which, between mind and instinct, holds instinct to be the essence of human affairs. Through the complementarity of mind and instinct, the East offers a theory of human nature the West has not encountered: “human character that changes within the human nature one is born with.” The theory of human nature of Eastern civilisation focuses on cultivating human character. This shows a “civilizational difference” from the social contract theory argued for in the Western theory of human nature of good and evil.
From the standpoint of Eastern philosophy, the excessive metaphysical taste of Western philosophy can be simply explained.
For the human being, an evolutionary being made up of the neocortex and the limbic system, there can be no dichotomy of mind and body. To detach the mind alone and study it as an independent substance does not hold. The vast Western metaphysical research that presupposes it therefore loses its concreteness. Theology and metaphysics are unsuited to a humanity that does not accept the supernatural. That Eastern civilisation has no taste for theology or metaphysics is a natural result. For humanity, the function of the mind is to savour the order of the vast and mysterious cosmos that is its mother, the order of nature; it does not exist for dreaming of the supernatural.
The mind is only one aspect of biological function, its psychological aspect. The mind cannot be treated as a separate metaphysical substance existing alongside the body.275
Western philosophy, with metaphysics as its chief weapon, belongs to alienated human beings. The human being is a “mental and physical existence” (psychosomatic existence), a being of li and qi (理氣的). Because of a Western civilisation that has set mind and body against each other for two thousand years, the relationship of mind and body carries for Westerners the meaning of contradiction, conflict and struggle. In theology and metaphysics, since God, the symbol of the mind, decides everything, a theory is possible in which human beings can have no freedom at all. Conversely, as in deism, a theory is possible in which, since God does not intervene in human affairs, the human mind has all freedom and can make decisions. This is the thinking that human beings can understand absolute truth through God, or through the mind; it is possible in Western-style rationalism, but it becomes a castle in the sand built on an enormous distortion of the theory of human nature.
In contrast with a mind-centred theory of human nature, if we argue for the oneness of mind and instinct, we can posit “the regulating role of the mind, the reflector, within instinct, the source of light.” We come to accept that enjoying “the freedom of the mind within the fate called instinct” is the human condition. The sizes of instinct and mind differ from person to person. The mind works freely “only within the bounds of instinct.” This is the core of the Eastern theory of human nature. It offers an answer, different from Western civilisation’s, to the question of what a human being is.
We easily ignore the many basic parts human beings share with other animals, value only the parts in which human beings stand out especially strongly from other animals, and see these as “the human.” Everything we call soul, spirit, reason and heart refers to “the human characteristic,” but it alone cannot be “human nature.” From taking the human characteristic for human nature, there can also arise the view that takes only the “animal” side, body, emotion, passion, desire, as human nature. All of these are attitudes that come from confusing human nature with the human characteristic.
The division of human nature by the dichotomy of mind and body created philosophical systems that put their weight on either the mind or the body. Western metaphysics, revealed religion and rationalism assert the superiority of the “mind” over the body. Conversely, as in Machiavelli, Hobbes or Schopenhauer, it also gave rise to views that put their weight on the “body,” holding that human nature does not differ from the nature of other animals. They argued that human beings, too, are ruled by blind desire and will, and that the mind is only a tool for carrying out desire.
And these views, bringing out only one side of the human whole, body or mind, and backing it with all sorts of plausible theories, made it into dogma, and in forms such as “original sin,” “the divine right of kings,” “absolute knowledge” and “the will to live” have produced human alienation. Meanwhile, as a halfway position that is neither, the utopian idea that human nature is like a blank slate, capable of anything depending on education, swept the Western intellectual world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Adding a little of each and synthesising them, theories like communism also sprang up, founded on the belief that human nature can not only be fully grasped but even corrected.
They absolutised their own claims without the least inkling of the phenomenon of the “unconscious” that Freud revealed, and the decisive role it plays in body and mind, or of the fact that part of the autonomic physiological functions of human beings, such as the regulation of breathing and the pulse, and even part of the inherent instincts such as self-preservation and reproduction, are “encephalised.” Nature, human nature and the unconscious will all remain eternal secrets to human beings. Herein lie the value and the reason for being of art. What human beings can and must do is only to keep inquiring without end, without falling into the traps of absolutisation and dogma. What we can know about the unconscious is no more than this: that, like the heart, it does not stop working as long as a person lives; that it stands not in opposition to consciousness but in a cooperative, complementary relationship with it; and that, strictly, the boundary between the conscious and the unconscious is not clear.276 Human nature expressed in words or writing cannot be expressed completely, and every absolute, categorical statement about human nature can only be an error. Every view in human history that human nature is good or evil expresses only some traits of human nature. That human nature, a product of nature, which lies beyond good and evil, should be evil or good is impossible.
Likewise, materialism and idealism each show only some characteristics; they do not explain the truth. Culture and history, the expressions of human nature, cannot be explained by matter alone or by mind alone.
Human nature may perhaps be explained or grasped logically and analytically, but there is no way to explain whether what is grasped is right or wrong. This is the basic stance of the Lao-Zhuang philosophy of China.277
In defining it, there is one thing we must learn from the past: not to confuse the human characteristic with human nature. That means keeping a whole view without falling, in the Western manner, into oppositional dualism or monism. Mind and instinct are not divided but complement each other and form a harmony.
3) The Eastern Complementarity of Mind and Instinct: Mind and Body (心身) and the Theory of Li and Qi (理氣論)
Answered within the Eastern system, the question of whether the mind is more important than instinct becomes the question of whether heart-mind (心) is more important than body (身). Within the unity of mind and body, an important theory of human nature that makes up Eastern civilisation, it becomes a question that does not arise. Eastern civilisation, which does not treat mind and instinct separately as a dichotomy, formed a system of thought different from the West’s. Eastern civilisation sees the human mind and instinct as joined complementarily: the Eastern complementarity of mind and instinct. The human being was grasped as heart-mind and body (心身), 心 (heart-mind) and 身 (body). And 心 and 身 are not understood as split or in conflict. In the civilisation of the Dao, heart-mind (心) was never replaced, as in the West, by the brain (腦), which represents pure mind alone. So there was no need for theology, the study of a God who gave human beings a mind. Nor did metaphysics develop, the study of a mind separated from the body or from nature. And it avoided, too, the ideology that developed from metaphysics. Instead it concentrated on political ethics and political economy grounded in ethics. The mind does not rule instinct; it is realised through instinct. Instinct plays the role of the source of light, the energy, and the mind the role of the reflector that adapts that energy to life: they complement each other.
If human nature is the base, every philosophy can be seen as its superstructure. So thought or philosophy built on a mistaken understanding of human nature is no more than a castle in the sand. Conversely, thought or philosophy built on a right understanding of human nature survives. The Austrian economist Hayek (1899–1992) criticised communism, saying the cause of its failure was that it rested on a philosophy that goes against human nature. This judgement is not limited to communism. Every philosophy and thought that has failed in human history was built on a philosophy that misjudged human nature.
Western civilisation built its own peculiar philosophical system by arguing for a theory of human nature in which soul, spirit and reason represent the human being. It thought that instinct is something animals have too, that human beings should be ashamed of it and despise it, and that the mind must be placed above it. Eastern civilisation, on the other hand, saw the mind as in a harmonious relationship with instinct and built its system of thought on this theory of human nature. 心 refers to the heart. The West designated the brain (腦) as the seat of the mind. The East knew of the brain (腦); why, then, did it use 心 rather than 腦 as the counterpart of the body? Western specialists in East Asian studies are greatly puzzled by this.
It is hard for Western civilisation to understand why China avoided the word brain (腦) and used 心, which refers to the heart.278
They specialised in East Asian studies, but their standard of judgement has not broken free of the foundation of Western philosophy, the Western division of mind and instinct. It is like the way Western scholars of the East, though they have come to understand the East well, still cannot let go of the question of how, in Eastern civilisation, “people can be good without God.” They analyse Eastern civilisation bound by Western-centred thinking. Western philosophers analysed, within the philosophical system of Western civilisation, that mind and instinct must be either two or one. They keep failing to approach Eastern civilisation through the theory of complementarity, in which mind and instinct are at once one and two.
In 心身, 身 (body) refers to the physical structure of the human being, the muscles of the arm and the like. In the end, in 心身, 心 is a comprehensive expression of the human being, not an expression that stands for the mind. So in the Eastern 心身, 心 expresses the whole human being apart from the body. It is closer not to the mind but to intuition. When a problem is complicated, we say let us follow our intuition, or “follow your heart.” Here the heart as the West speaks of it is the expression closest to the Eastern 心. The heart, or intuition, here means a comprehensive or complementary judgement that takes in the whole human being: it means relying not on the judgement of the mind alone, which is easily shaken, but on the judgement of the whole body, mind and instinct together, which relies on instinct too. In this case the human being keeps his oneness. The relationship between mind and instinct is not a Western-style oppositional split but an Eastern yin-yang oneness.
Western civilisation rests on a theory of human nature that divides instinct and mind into two, opposed and dual: instinct and mind exist apart and separately. Especially from the religious standpoint, since God gave the soul or mind specially to human beings alone, it exists in opposition to instinct. The East argues not for separation but for connection and harmony. From this perspective, the Eastern thought of yin and yang, grounded in complementarity, is not easy to understand in Western philosophy. According to yin and yang, instinct and mind are a concept of one and yet two. The difference between East and West in the relationship between instinct and mind is very important for the theory of human nature. To stress it again, the difference in the theory of human nature plays the key role in setting the foundations of the civilisations of East and West differently. It produces the difference between the Eastern cultivation of human character and the Western construction of the social contract.
The West finds the Eastern yin-yang theory of human nature hard to understand because it is used to a philosophy that divides into two what is one inseparable whole with an organic relationship: the human being. Division and explanation grounded in such a theory of separation inevitably commit the error of explaining the whole human being by bringing out one side only. For, as the encephalisation we saw earlier shows, instinct and mind do not exist separately but are connected.
The Eastern Theory of Li and Qi
The Eastern claim of the oneness of mind and instinct, expressing the human being as heart-mind and body, was maintained even after metaphysical concepts were introduced to the East: the philosophy of the theory of li and qi (理氣論). Just as a metaphysics centred on the mind developed in the West, Eastern philosophy too began to show a metaphysical taste for mind and body: the emergence of the theory of li and qi, to which the thinkers of the Song dynasty turned their attention. Eastern civilisation concentrated on political ethics and political economy and took no interest in theology or metaphysics. But as Buddhism was transmitted to the East, the metaphysical taste of India influenced Eastern civilisation. This is where the theory of li and qi arose. To compare it with the West’s rejection of instinct and its being overwhelmed by the mind, we need to examine the complementarity of instinct and mind contained in the theory of li and qi.
According to the Eastern theory of li and qi, the phenomena of mind found in human beings are indicated by li (理), and the underlying source of energy by qi (氣). Li is indicated by the Four Beginnings (四端), qi by the Seven Feelings (七情). The Four Beginnings are the four beginnings of humaneness, righteousness, propriety and wisdom (仁義禮智); the Seven Feelings are the seven emotions of joy, anger, sorrow, fear, love, hatred and desire (喜怒哀懼愛惡慾). The Four Beginnings are the role of the new brain, the mind; the Seven Feelings the role of the old brain, instinct.279 Just as in the East 心 is not the brain but an expression that explains the human mind and instinct complementarily without dividing them, this complementarity is kept as it is in heart-mind and body too. Through the theory of li and qi, expressions such as the unity of mind and body (心身一體) and body and mind as one (身心一如) appear often in the East.
The relationship between li and qi in the theory of li and qi is not simply oppositional but understood as a connected, mutually complementary structure. Li (理) refers to universal and unchanging principle, moral order and the like; qi (氣) refers to material elements, energy, emotion and instinct. Li and qi are inseparable: they cannot be apart from each other. There can be no qi without li, no li without qi. Li gives direction and order, and qi realises it in reality. The mind leads instinct, that is, and instinct is the force that realises the mind. If li is an ideal principle, qi is the medium that reveals it in concrete life. So human moral action becomes possible when li and qi are in harmony. Li is the ground of moral judgement, and qi includes desire, emotion and physiological impulse. Qi, joined with li, is turned into action. So Neo-Confucianism explains the human being not simply as an instinctive being but as a structure in which the mind attunes instinct to make a moral life possible. The mind shows the way, and instinct is the force that walks it.
That Eastern culture, unlike Western civilisation, grasped body and mind not as a relationship of opposition and struggle but as one of mutual complementarity is a concept inherent in the thought of yin and yang, but it shows still more clearly in the theory of li and qi. Zhu Xi (朱子), founder of the Zhu Xi school who brought the theory of li and qi to completion, and Spinoza express the same philosophy of the relationship between mind and body, though there was no connection whatever between them.
Zhu Xi: Li (理) and qi (氣) must always be seen from both sides: seen joined, and seen apart.280
Spinoza: The mind and the body are one and the same thing, which is conceived now under the attribute of thought, now under the attribute of extension.281
The theory of li and qi is the core of Neo-Confucianism, but there was especially lively debate about it in Korea. Yi Hwang put forward a li-centred theory (主理論), seeing li as fundamental and qi as the manifestation of li. The theory that li issues and qi follows (理發氣隨), in which, when li issues first, qi moves after it, is one side of Yi Hwang’s theory of mutual issuance (互發說): it is the claim that moral principle comes first. Yi I argued for a qi-centred theory (主氣論): li and qi cannot be separated, and actual workings take place as qi issues and li rides on it, which is the theory that qi issues and li rides on it along a single path (氣發理乘一途說). Yi I argued for the oneness of li and qi (理氣一體): li and qi act at the same time and cannot be separated; in practice he valued the workings of qi. Yi Hwang, centred on li, stressed moral principle and focused on controlling qi, instinctive desire. Yi I, holding that li and qi cannot be separated and valuing the practical workings of qi, connected it all the way to social institutions and political reform. Yi Hwang can be seen as “a moral philosopher centred on principle,” and Yi I as “a reforming philosopher centred on reality.”282
Against Yi Yulgok’s position that “in all phenomena qi issues and li rides upon it,” Yi Toegye argued that “the Four Beginnings issue from li, and the Seven Feelings issue from qi.” Yi Yulgok seems to have taken a monist position on li and qi, and Yi Toegye a dualist one.283 Both Yi Yulgok and Yi Toegye can be seen, on the whole, as belonging to the Eastern yin-yang theory of complementarity.
They put forward the same theory of human nature as Zhu Xi or Spinoza. All of them explain exactly, in the relationship of the mind, the expression “instinct is the source of light, the mind the reflector.” Apply the Western opposition of instinct and mind to the theory of li and qi, and an interesting thing happens: Western civilisation would have put forward a theory of human nature in which the Four Beginnings and the Seven Feelings are opposed, the Seven Feelings ignored and the Four Beginnings revered. The source of human action lies in instinct, but the direction in which it appears is decided by the mind. All of them held that the Four Beginnings and the Seven Feelings are equally important in human nature, and determine the human being by complementarity, not by replacement.
4) Does the Mind Move History? Hegel’s Theory of Progress vs Spengler’s Theory of Cycles
The idea that world civilisation advances in a straight line with the mind at its centre forms the mainstream of Western thought. The theory of historical progress reached its definitive form with Hegel (1770–1831). Hegel argued that the human “mind” is bound by necessity to seek freedom, and that the whole of human history rests on the linear pattern of “the progress of freedom.” He put forward a philosophical system in which, in the form of the progress of human history, Western civilisation is the most advanced and will stay ahead in the future.284 In his Lectures on the Philosophy of History (lectures of the 1820s), Hegel saw history as the process by which “the consciousness of freedom” gradually develops, and argued that history progresses in the direction of the human mind gradually realising freedom. Many Western thinkers agreed. They argued that human freedom gradually expands, that this is the core of historical progress, and that a particular people or state can for a time represent the world spirit, fulfilling the mission of its age.
Hegel interpreted history as the process by which the world spirit (Geist, World Spirit) gradually extends its self-knowledge in history. This spirit has the purpose of realising freedom, takes concrete form through states, cultures and religions, and in this historical process individuals or excluded civilisations cannot but be sacrificed: such was the idea he developed. He argued that the world would form one sphere of civilisation centred on the Western spirit. Hegel took the position that in the progressive current of world history the West is at the very front, and that therefore true development for the future can be achieved only by the West. From this position Hegel declared that Eastern civilisation lagged behind in the current of world history, and that the West need pay no more attention to it: the core of so-called Hegelianism. Ranke criticised Hegel’s philosophy of history, but his view of the East was no different. He said that to understand the inner movement of world history one cannot start from “the peoples of eternal standstill.”285 In a lecture given in 1854 to King Maximilian II of Bavaria, he said that England had taken India and opened China to Europe, so that “all these countries are, so to speak, subject to the European spirit,” and that the spirit of the Western Christian world overwhelming every other element of the world in this way was “something entirely without precedent.”286 And he argued that Western colonial policy and world conquest would in the end be the occasion for the whole world to accept Western civilisation.
A philosophy opposed to this also appeared. In his book The Decline of the West (volume 1, 1918; volume 2, 1922), Spengler (1880–1936) argued, against the theory of progress of Hegel and others, for a cyclical theory of civilisation. He judged that Western civilisation, indulging in the age of ideology, was now declining according to the theory of cycles. Spengler was inspired by Goethe’s organic worldview of life and by Nietzsche’s relativist philosophy. He explained that cultural spheres such as China and India each have their own life cycle. Every civilisation has its own fate, and there are no universal laws or absolute truths, he held. It was a claim squarely different from Hegel’s mind-centred theory of progress. He therefore rejected the notion Westerners of the time believed in, that “Western civilisation is the peak of human development,” and argued that the West, like other civilisations, could not but decline.
In his book The Hour of Decision (1933), Spengler rejected Nazi policy and the masses’ blind following of it. In this book he criticised Hitler’s anti-intellectualism, demagogic mass politics and violent nationalism. Spengler saw Nazism as a vulgar mass movement and judged that it would hasten the decline of German culture. He rejected racist antisemitism and explained that the Nazis’ biological racial theory was unscientific. Spengler met Hitler in 1933 and was confirmed in these views, judging that Hitler could not lead a true revival of Germany. He continued his intellectual work in political seclusion and died of a heart attack in Munich in 1936. That Spengler published The Hour of Decision at the very moment Hitler, in 1933–34, went from chancellor to Führer and was about to seize absolute power in Germany shows remarkable historical insight.
Arguing for the cyclical character of history, Spengler held that history goes not through linear progress but, like the life cycle of an organism, through birth, growth, maturity, decline and extinction. In this process, he explained, Western civilisation had now entered a mechanical, matter-centred road of decline. It explains well the process by which the humanism of the Renaissance degenerated into the anthropocentric humanism of ideology. Spengler was attacked by experts who followed Western orthodoxy, but his book appealed to general readers, went through more than thirty printings and left a great influence. From the standpoint of comparing the civilisations of East and West, Spengler’s organic theory of cycles has special relevance. He saw civilisations such as China as independent organisms going through an organic process separate from Western civilisation.
This philosophy, of the cyclical character of history, the decline of Western civilisation, and the different organic constitutions of Eastern and Western civilisation, was a singular claim. It was the opposite of the thinking of most Westerners of the time, who argued for the progress of history and claimed that Western civilisation was the most advanced and would keep progressing. So Spengler’s claims were attacked by Westerners as excessively pessimistic, and this criticism has hardly changed. But we have now reached a point where Western thinkers themselves are explaining the decline of Western civilisation. Recent Western thinkers are listening to the account that Western civilisation will in the end decline because it failed to narrow the gap between rich and poor.
This vindicates Spengler’s observation of the last century that Western civilisation would decline through a mechanical, matter-centred process. Above all, that Spengler, offering an organic theory of cycles, explained that there are differences between the civilisations of East and West is a new perspective Western thinkers had not offered. The growth of the East to rival the West, and its great potential for the future, lead us towards Spengler’s theory of cycles. Between Hegel’s theory of progress and Spengler’s theory of cycles, the time has come to look anew, from a historical perspective, at the theory of cycles. Of particular interest are his accounts of the organic differences between the civilisations of East and West and of the causes of the decline of Western civilisation.
Two global situations show that Spengler’s philosophy has more relevance than Hegel’s. First, according to the theory of historical progress, human history should proceed in the direction of developing along the Western model, but the history of the twentieth century has made it plain that the spread of the Western model to the world is failing. Second, in entering the twenty-first century, the West shows signs of decline and a situation that looks irreversible. Then, in the grand discourse of how history flows, we must examine not Hegel but Spengler’s theory of cycles.
The theory of historical progress argued for by Western thinkers formed the centre of modern Western philosophical thought, coinciding with the period when the West, on the strength of the success of the Industrial Revolution, was conquering the world. But now too many phenomena challenge the account that history keeps progressing and the West leads the way. The First and Second World Wars, which the West extended to the whole globe in the first half of the twentieth century, were not struggles for the progress of history. They were what happened when the rationalism the West put forward, placing the mind first, violated human nature and reached the “insane state” of ideology. The irrationality of Western rationalism continued in the late twentieth century too. One example is the failure of the world economic development strategy. That this should be criticised as a failure of progressivist history is a great irony.
As the Western paradigm ruled the world, the West in the late twentieth century drew up a strategy for world economic development and expected every country in the world to develop economically following the Western model. But it ended in failure. The Western way of asserting the universality of institutions ran up against the limits of its thought. Looking at the whole globe, very few countries have caught up with the West, and most, despite more than half a century of effort, have not succeeded in economic development or democracy.
As we have entered the twenty-first century, we have witnessed the dream that we could lead the world to economic development turn into frustration and defeatism.287
Institutions and models can arise only when a civilisation supports them as their ground; otherwise they fail. Institutions are in the end concepts dependent on culture. That is, economic development cannot be achieved with institutions or models. There are many countries in the world with the form of tribal states. To offer such countries the institutions and models of nation-states and point out that they cannot follow at that level goes beyond the error of the Western idea of progressivist history to a merciless philosophical imposition. Culture decides institutions and models. Culture here is not Hegel’s freedom or some other metaphysical ideal. Culture is closer to a thought that cultivates habits of diligence and effort through the individual’s moral cultivation, and at the same time fosters cohesion through the harmony of the community: a culture that grows political and economic capacity while keeping the autonomy of the individual.
Culture is the mother, and institutions are its children.288
According to the theory of historical progress, human beings must strive together for ideologies such as freedom or equality. It is a fiction. For human beings the instinct of self-preservation comes first. Freedom and equality are noble ideals, to be pursued as far as one can afford. But when self-preservation is threatened, people and nations alike protect themselves rather than these ideals. A strategy not supported by civilisation cannot hold. Culture has staying power only when, above all for self-preservation, it can cultivate political and economic capacity while keeping the autonomy of the individual.
As this outward-directed theory of progress was abandoned, the Western nations themselves soon found themselves in crisis. Ideologies such as liberalism and equality came to be abandoned by the West itself before the instinct of self-preservation. Britain’s Brexit, the policies of Western countries expelling immigrants, America’s MAGA strategy abandoning the idea of equality, the tariff-first policy abandoning the multilateral strategy the West itself put forward: these deny the theory of historical progress. The current of history now is better explained not by the theory of progress but by a cyclical theory of history driven by the instinct of self-protection.
Spengler pointed out that the decline of Western civilisation came because it had made a “Faustian bargain.” According to Western folk legend, the hero Faust makes a dangerous bargain with the devil Mephistopheles. The Faustian bargain means that a human being gives up his identity for money and power. Spengler was greatly influenced by Goethe and Nietzsche, and the Faustian bargain is the leitmotif of Goethe’s play Faust. The Faustian bargain exists inherently in all human affairs.
The Faustian bargain describes the process by which the powerful self-interest inherent in human nature abandons ethics and turns into greed in order to seize money and power. Spengler held that, beyond individual affairs, such a bargain is possible within a nation in the history of civilisation too. Spengler grasped that this process lay latent in, and was manifesting itself in, twentieth-century Western civilisation. He saw the Western Faustian bargain as beginning when Western civilisation chose the powers of the mind. Holding that civilisations too pass through periods of growth and decline and in the end disappear, Spengler explains that Western civilisation, after its prime in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, lost its creativity from the nineteenth century on, showing clear signs of civilizational decline, and entered the stage of fall.289
He grasped precisely the problems of the Western civilisation of his time, headed for ideology, and left much wisdom foreseeing what would come. Above all, breaking away from the Hegelianism that claims that, apart from the West at the forefront of civilisation’s advance, other civilisations have no value, Spengler sharply grasped the differences between the civilisations of East and West as well. The most fundamental difference he saw is that the two civilisations see the relationship between humanity and nature differently. He explains that in Eastern civilisation human beings were seen as part of nature, while in Western civilisation the “mind” that only human beings have grasps nature as matter and seeks to rule it and make it a slave.
The Chinese did not wrest things from “nature”; they drew them out. The Chinese felt the advantage of their way of using nature and made use of it. It differed from the way of throwing everything one has into nature and exploiting it… It differs from the Faustian way, the resolve to take everything from nature by every means since ancient times, to make nature a slave… Western man strives to make the world according to his own will.290
He saw Western civilisation’s effort to rule nature as beginning in the end from reliance on human mental power, the mind. In the age of ideology, he analysed the Western intellectual world of his time, the powers of the mind are maximised, and human beings reach the point of seeking to take the place of God.
Man listens to the march of “nature,” records its signs, and by any means seeks to use the laws of the cosmic pulse for this. Man grows bolder and bolder and seeks to play the part of God.291
Spengler expresses a critical awareness of the Industrial Revolution, which became the scientific source of the belief that human beings can rule nature. What does the invention of the machine mean for humanity’s future? He expressed his awareness of the dangers of the knowledge and science inherent in the Industrial Revolution, of the arrogance of human beings blindly believing in it, and of the dangers that follow.
As horsepower, once reckoned in the simple strength of horses, increases millions and billions of times, the number of people grows and grows on a scale no other culture thought possible. This growth is a product of the “machine.” The power of the machine keeps expanding and multiplies each person’s strength a hundredfold. People come to work for the machine, and human life is measured by it…. For the working of the machine, people are forced to cooperate. The whole of human “culture” moves for it and covers the whole earth.292
In the age of ideology human beings were infatuated with the powers of the mind, and Westerners saw in them not only heroic struggle but humanity’s longing for knowledge and ultimate solutions. Faustian passion is absorbed in the search for an ultimate “knowledge” that can free humanity from every problem. In the West of the nineteenth century this passion covered the world of philosophy. Humanity’s glory soars to the infinite and unknown. He analysed that the Western philosophical world of the time, drunk on courage, beauty, sublimation and longing, completely forgot the human nature bound to the fate called instinct, and headed for the cosmos:
This Faustian passion changed the face of the earth. It was already at work when the steam engine was still in its infancy: the outward- and upward-striving feeling of life expressed in Faust’s monologue worked as the true passion of the Gothic. The drunken soul wants to fly above space and time. An ineffable longing lures man beyond undefinable horizons. Man breaks free of the earth, rises into the infinite, casts off the bonds of the body and circles in the cosmic space among the stars.293
But Faust, in spiritual rapture and an intoxication close to delusion, runs in the end into the arrogance of human beings overconfident in knowledge, and its real consequences. The bloodiest ideological world wars of the twentieth century prove it. Spengler classified post-industrial Western civilisation as a “Faustian civilisation” that dreams of realising ideals. Here he expressed a deep unease and pessimism about a Western civilisation that abandons human nature, plunges into the world of the mind and stakes humanity’s future on the development of knowledge (the machine).
These machines become less and less human, more ascetic, mystical and esoteric. They weave the earth into an infinite web of subtle forces, currents and tensions. Their form becomes ever more immaterial and quieter. The wheels, rollers and levers no longer make a sound. Everything important turns inward… But for that very reason Faustian man becomes the slave of his creation. The number of human beings and the way they live are driven by machines, and set on a road on which they can neither stop nor turn back.294
Spengler saw clearly that in the age of ideology party politics and democracy existed not for human beings but, through the Faustian bargain, were in the end ruled by the rulers’ desire for money and power. Spengler held that parties and democratic principles would remain not for the people but a collectivism for the party rulers, and could not transcend their narrow interests. He argued that a free press is an illusion, since the press too in the end follows the orders of power and money, and that in party politics ideals and altruism are only temporary. Ideals and altruism, he held, are fated in the end to be seized by a political game that comes to assert self-interest:
The dictatorship of the party leaders is supported by the dictatorship of the press. The competitors, through the medium of money, divide their readers, indeed the whole people, into hostile camps, and set about training their minds to this end.295
Spengler’s political pessimism runs deep. For him, truth and fact are in the end divided into the forms of the party’s ideals and the funds the party holds.296 To the aristocrats who rule the party, he argues, the people are merely an object, and the ideals they proclaim merely a means.297
Only experience teaches. Only after the whole process is over does one realise that the rights of the people and the influence the people have are two different things. The greater the power of the parties, the smaller the power of the voters.298
In the early twentieth century Spengler saw democracy disappear in many countries as the press, parties, elections and ideas about human ideals were overwhelmed by various ideologies. But his prophecy shows that it applies not only to the age of ideology in which he lived but to the whole of Western civilisation, for the free-market democracy that won in the twentieth-century age of ideology shows itself in the twenty-first overwhelmed in the end by endless human greed. The deepening gap between rich and poor, together with the rise of global problems such as warming born of ceaseless human greed, prove it. Western civilisation today shows many signs supporting the claim that science (machines) and commerce (money) rule humanity. So Spengler’s “civilizational pessimism” remains valid. Indeed the Faustian civilisation that worships money and power has gone beyond the twentieth-century age of ideology to threaten the free-market economy itself in the twenty-first.
Materialism corrupted religious asceticism. In the same way, as Weber himself predicted, must not the spirit of capitalism end by destroying its parent, the Protestant ethic that gave birth to capitalism?299
The Faustian bargain comes from a human nature that cannot shake off the greed that pursues money and power. This human nature is given to human beings like fate, across both the age of ideology and the age of liberal democracy. In the end humanity, driven by insatiable greed, is in danger of blindly destroying its own civilisation. Spengler depicts this world starkly:
Since the discovery of the steam engine, the whole world economy has been created by a very few superior masters. Without their high-level work, nothing else would ever have been born... Faustian money, money that is not minted, comes to rule... Thinking about money itself creates money. This will be the secret of the world economy to come... Even if all the gold in the world were gathered together, it would not be enough to give meaning and value to the actions of the manual worker. So value loses all use. For when the situation arises in which “the expropriators are expropriated,” all the usefulness contained in creation disappears. If that happens, human society will move within an empty shell without soul or will.300
On progress, a golden rule among the elements that make up Western civilisation, some Western thinkers such as Spengler and Russell voice critical views. Spengler did not agree with the problem of progress disguising it, because the Faustian bargain, “human character in exchange for money and power,” is the essence of Western civilisation. Russell too criticises progress as in the end a political and cultural means that human beings created out of a longing for power:
We in the West make a fetish of “progress,” which is the ethical camouflage of the desire to be the cause of changes. If we are asked, for example, whether machinery has really improved the world, the question strikes us as foolish: it has brought great changes and therefore great “progress.” What we believe to be a love of progress is really, in nine cases out of ten, a love of power, an enjoyment of the feeling that by our fiat we can make things different. For the sake of this pleasure a young American will work so hard that, by the time he has acquired his millions, he has become a victim of dyspepsia, compelled to live on toast and water, and to be a mere spectator of the feasts that he offers to his guests. But he consoles himself with the thought that he can control politics, and provoke or prevent wars as may suit his investments. It is this temperament that makes Western nations “progressive.”301
Through communism and fascism, Western rationalism was corrupted as it went through the process of absolutising the mind. It proceeded to an anthropocentric humanism in which human beings can pursue ultimate truth. Abandoning humanism and in the end clinging to power, in the name of pursuing utopia, becomes the essence of anthropocentric humanism. This is exactly what Orwell exposes in his book Animal Farm. What Hitler’s fascism and the leaders of Soviet communism showed in history depicts the process of pursuing power by abandoning the ethics human beings must keep. In the end the Faustian bargain is “the exchange of humanism for anthropocentric humanism”: a way in which human beings give up their identity and trade it for money and power. Among Eastern thinkers, too, some compare the tendencies of the two civilisations: the humanism of Eastern civilisation keeping its essence, while the rationalism of Western civilisation heads for degeneration into such anthropocentric humanism. Professor Tu Weiming is one of them:
Ironically, a corrupted and unnatural Western rationalism developed far from the organic vision of Confucian humanism…. Armed with instrumental rationality and driven by the Faustian drive to explore, know and conquer nature, the faith of the Enlightenment set off dazzling advances in science and technology and became a means of justifying imperialist domination and colonial exploitation.302
So the Western Enlightenment, seen from Eastern civilisation, can be assessed differently from how Westerners claim. The Enlightenment, with its limitless energy and creative impulse, was a mixed blessing. Despite its positive legacy of freeing the human mind from religious dogmatism, it at the same time played the role, in passing into anthropocentric humanism, of advancing towards ideologies that harm human flourishing. So Westerners now come to feel the need to return from anthropocentric humanism to humanism:
In the light of the ecological crisis and the grave danger of social disintegration, the need to recover the wisdom of the Greeks, self-knowledge, the awe of Judaism and the reverence of Christianity is widely recognised in Western scholarship today.303
Just as Spengler long ago prophesied the decline of the West, today the French scholar of international politics Dominique Moïsi foresees in this way the problems of the future of Western civilisation and the direction it should take:
What we are witnessing can be seen as a return to the past, in which the West returns to its original position in the world: a return to history before the long historical decline of China began in the early nineteenth century. The long period of Western global dominance is ending, and accelerating towards its end, because of its own mistakes and irresponsible actions.304
This process required that, through the union of philosophy and science, Western philosophy advance in the direction of absolutising the mind. Darwinism came to fill in the scientific part. Through Social Darwinism the role of the mind was maximised, and Western philosophy was made to head towards anthropocentric humanism. This explains how the Western philosophical world abandoned humanism and instead proclaimed anthropocentric humanism, driving itself into an extreme situation with nowhere left to go. The German thinker Spengler explained it as the decline of Western civilisation.