1) Ren (仁) and Love (愛): An Ethics Beyond Every Doctrine
Humanity invented writing around 3000 BC. So-called “history” begins from then. And some two thousand years later, human societies in many places began to bring civilisation into astonishing flower. There was only one such period of civilizational explosion: what Karl Jaspers named “the Axial Age.” Within a mere few hundred years humanity’s great teachers, Confucius, Laozi, Socrates and the Buddha, were born one after another, and later Jesus and Muhammad followed them. They concentrated on the fundamental question of how we should live in human society. To the question “How should we live?”, humanity’s great teachers each offered an answer: Christianity’s love of neighbour, Confucianism’s ren (仁, ren or empathy), Buddhism’s compassion, and Islam’s brotherly love.
Looked at closely, these answers come down to one. What they offered humanity is the same ethics. The ways of expressing it differ, but all mean “love of neighbour.”
Ren (仁) is loving others. (Analects 12, “Yan Yuan”)
You shall love your neighbour as yourself. (Leviticus 19:18, Matthew 22:39)
Why love of neighbour? It has to do with human nature. Every human being without exception is born with “powerful selfishness and weak altruism.” Only when these are brought into harmony can human society be sustained. So powerful selfishness must be embraced by weak altruism. The way to do it is love of neighbour.
Greed for property and desire for honour are the most powerful in human beings, and for their sake people compete to get ahead of others. Some outstanding people understand altruism, apply it to their lives and become leaders (君子). But most human beings (小人) are swept up in selfishness and live their whole lives unable to escape greed. In nature the leader does not differ from the follower (xiaoren, 小人). That is, the most powerful human nature, common to leader and follower alike, is selfishness, that is, greed. This greed is sometimes adjusted and managed by the mind, but in many cases it is further enlarged and made stronger by the mind. In the end the management of greed is the core of ethics.
The management of greed is achieved by the mind. In human nature the role of the mind is decisively important, but limited. The mind cannot enjoy freedom as a source of light. The mind is only a reflector. This is the domain given to the mind in human nature. If the mind tries to leave the field of action inherent in instinct and act as a source of light, it brings human beings fatal danger, because the mind is then used to lend legitimacy to the pursuit of greed and to ignore ethics. Here lies the importance of ethics. What restrains the mind’s straying is ethics.
The difference between East and West in relations between human beings shows clearly when we compare Eastern Confucianism and Western Christianity. The teachings of Confucius and Jesus share a deep likeness: ren (仁), that is, love of neighbour. But despite this same starting point, in the end the West sought to work out human relations through commandments (the rule of law), and the East through ethics. Jesus, like Confucius, taught us humanity’s common ethics, love of neighbour. Ren (仁), which Confucianism set as the highest value among human beings, Confucius declared to be loving people. Jesus, too, left us the parable of the Good Samaritan: love your neighbour regardless of faith or tribe. He left a universal ethics. Eastern civilisation firmly kept its central ideas: the Dao of nature, and the ren (仁) of human society grounded in it. It is a universal ethics that goes beyond every religion, tribe and scientific thought. Western civilisation, by contrast, following religious doctrine, wavered again and again in conflict between deeds (ethics) and faith (religion). Under the influence of Christianity, despite many efforts to harmonise faith and love, religion in reality and in history has valued faith over deeds. The principle of self-preservation was at work.
Western history shows that, inevitably, the important standard for judging a human being has been not whether one does good deeds but whether one is a Christian. Only after the mid-twentieth century has the West reached a situation where it seeks to leave behind Aristotle’s tribe-centred ethics of domination, and the religion-centred ethics of domination, and accept a universal ethics unrelated to tribe or religion. This is fortunate. But the legacy of an ethics of domination practised for so long remains a heavy burden, because it has seeped into every corner of Western philosophy and systems of thought.
Many Western philosophers argued until the early twentieth century that Westerners, being biologically superior to Easterners, came to have a superior civilisation. If so, we need make no further effort to find the cause. We need only accept that Westerners were biologically superior to Easterners, and so Western civilisation became superior to Eastern. But if Easterners and Westerners, as Homo sapiens, share the same genetic traits at their stage of evolution, the matter is different, because the difference between the civilisations of East and West does not come from racial difference. We must accept that the difference comes from the interaction between human beings and their surroundings: that is, from the surroundings, the difference of civilisation.
In Eastern civilisation, since ethics itself, without religion, is the core of civilisation, there is no need to impose an ethics contained in religious doctrine. It takes ethics as political philosophy, dividing people into Daoism’s sage and people and Confucianism’s leader (junzi, 君子) and follower. The sage and the leader are precisely the expression of ethical politics. In Western civilisation the question of ethics is tied to the question of good and evil. Human beings eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil and are driven out of paradise, the Garden of Eden. Before eating it, it is said, human beings lived without working in the paradise of Eden, together with the other animals. But on eating the fruit they are banished from paradise.
Because they have a mind, human beings, unlike other animals, fall into the trap of pursuing their own greed without end. As the religion tells it, once human beings came to have the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, that is, the faculty of mind, they must, unlike other animals, keep working in pursuit of greed. By eating the fruit human beings opened their eyes to the mind, and by having a mind they come to tell good from evil. But if they think and act as though the mind could tell good from evil at will and do as it pleased, in many cases they make decisions that break their promise with God. This is the limit of the mind and the trap hidden in it. The mind can lead the greed latent in instinct towards good, but it can also lead it towards evil. Here lies the warning to human beings bound up with the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. This warning is the necessity of ethics, that is, the reason the Ten Commandments exist.
But history in many cases does not show the teaching carried out as it is in matters of ethics. Depending on circumstances, dogmas form that destroy love of neighbour. But such dogmas are human-made and hold only values limited in time and space. In religion there are dogmas wrapped as faith. Confucianism, too, has dogmas, such as strict methods of ancestor worship. Buddhism has taken in dogmas unrelated to its early teaching, such as hell and paradise. But dogmas cannot cover over love of neighbour. That is why love of neighbour is all the more needed:
We cannot but conclude, therefore, that it is he who persecutes an honest and righteous man merely because his opinions differ, because his creed or doctrine differs, who is the Antichrist.326
The Ten Commandments of Moses were made when the Jews were founding and raising up their nation, that is, when they could assert justice. It was owing to circumstances in which insisting on faith alone could help survival. But in the time Jesus lived, the Jews were in no position to assert justice. The Jewish people had been conquered by Rome. And since Hellenistic thought had spread through the Mediterranean region at the time, Judaism, too, needed to widen its view from the Jewish people to the people of the whole world. This was the cause of the birth of Christianity.
In Jesus’s time Hellenism became the spirit of the age. Hellenism is Greek thought spread through the Mediterranean world. It came about after Alexander the Great’s conquests of Egypt, Persia and India. After Alexander’s death his generals built several kingdoms around the Mediterranean, in Persia, in Egypt and in part of India, and Hellenism was born as Greek civilisation absorbed the civilisations of the conquered lands. Geopolitically Hellenism took on a strongly cosmopolitan character, and it coincided with the time when the manifest that pursues absolute truth, represented by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, was spreading.
Christianity, too, arose at the moment when God had to leave behind the tribal character of Judaism and reach out to the whole world. In such circumstances one could not assert a justice of “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,” as in the law of Moses. Instead a new ethics had to come forth: “love your enemies,” “whoever strikes you on your right cheek, turn to him the other also,” “if anyone would take away your coat, let him have your cloak also.” We can see Jesus as having grasped the relativity of the law and telling people to transcend it. “Jesus was sent not to preserve a nation and lay down its laws, but to teach the one and only universal law.”327 In the Old Testament, by God’s commandment, whoever works on the Sabbath is to be put to death. But Jesus made it clear that the Sabbath exists for the sake of human beings. Jesus’s worth lies in this: amid a current that asserted Jewish justice for the sake of preserving a tribal state, and amid the high noon of Rome, where might passed for right, he alone discovered an ethics that transcends time and space: “love your neighbour as yourself.”
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I?” Was not the answer to this riddle-like question of the Talmud given by Jesus? Confucius, too, offers an answer, expressing the same thought as Jesus: “I cannot live in a flock with birds and beasts. If I am not one who lives among people, what am I?” (Analects 18:6) Confucianism, insisting on three years of mourning after a parent’s death, stirred much controversy. Passages insisting on three years of mourning appear in the Analects too. But Confucius’s ren (仁) is no different from Jesus’s love of neighbour, the love of the Samaritan. Confucius makes it clear that ren is loving people: “A disciple asked about ren. Confucius answered: ren is loving people” (Analects 12:22, “Yan Yuan”). Sima Niu said with a worried look, “Others all have brothers; I alone have none.” Zixia said: “I have heard it said that death and life are a matter of fate, and wealth and rank depend on Heaven. If the leader is careful and makes no slips, and is respectful and courteous in dealing with others, then all within the four seas are his brothers. Why should the leader worry about having no brothers?” (Analects 12:5). Confucius’s deep meaning was never to teach unconditional loyalty and filial piety or rigid relations of father and son, ruler and subject.
What Confucius pictured as the highest ideal society is the Great Unity (大同社會), in which people “do not treat only their own parents as parents, nor only their own children as children.”328 Politics, too, aims at the Great Unity: politics is when the king acts as a king, the minister as a minister, the father as a father and the son as a son.329 In this context Mencius insisted that a king who abandons his people becomes a mere ruffian (殘賊) who has broken rightness and ren, and that such a king must be removed. Mencius may be the first philosopher in East or West to argue for the people’s rights against their ruler. In the West a similar philosophy first appears only with Locke and Rousseau, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Mencius stressed the importance of politics and the responsibility of the ruler: just as there is no difference between killing a man with a club and killing him with a blade, there is no difference between killing him with a blade and killing him with bad government.330 Very few Westerners have understood Confucius’s true meaning. Most know him only as someone who argued for a stuffy ancestor worship.331
Buddhism’s Compassion vs Nirvana
The great migrations of peoples, which brought down the Roman Empire and with it ancient Western civilisation, were not confined to Europe. In China too, in the same period, ‘barbarians’ invaded in great numbers and occupied the whole land, and Buddhism, a foreign culture, flowed in; for some three hundred years between the third and sixth centuries, in the so-called Six Dynasties (六朝) period, China faced the greatest crisis in its history, not only politically but culturally. It was a great crisis comparable to the fall of the Qing and the inflow of Western civilisation that China would face some 1,500 years later.
Had Eastern culture been a culture of the manifest like Western culture, or had Buddhism not been confined to ethics but been a comprehensive culture covering every side of culture, politics, military affairs, economics, as Western or Eastern culture did, the Chinese empire might have perished like the Roman Empire. But China not only revived as a state and founded the Tang dynasty; it “sinicised” Buddhism, took in new energy without losing the essence of Chinese culture, and met a cultural renaissance as well. And so China kept cultural and political superiority over the West for some thousand years.
What effect did Buddhism, which made possible the renaissance of Chinese culture, have on China? And conversely, what effect did Chinese culture have on Buddhism? What does the saying “Buddhism was sinicised more than China was Buddhicised” mean? How can it be explained in light of the separation or harmony of mind and body that we have taken as the standard for telling cultures apart, that is, cultures of the manifest and cultures of the unmanifest? The traditional Indian religion of Brahmanism, like the Judaism of Moses, separates mind and body. Brahma in Indian religion corresponds to the God of revealed religion; both are supernatural. This is well expressed in the Upanishads.
Through ignorance man wraps his true self round, and takes the sheath of matter for himself; by transcending it he becomes one with Brahman, who is pure bliss.332
In India the spirit (Atman), separated from the body, strives to reach Brahman, and in this striving towards an unreachable Brahman the body is an encumbrance. From here arises the habit of mortifying the body. The Buddha shocked and horrified his five companions by refusing to go on with his austerities and asking for the food ordinary people eat. He had realised that whatever truth human beings can reach can be reached by a brain well nourished in a sound body. Such a thought was entirely new and alien in that time and that land.333 What the Buddha, having realised the harmony of mind and body, felt at the same time was, naturally, that you and I cannot be separated and must be in harmony; and this appears as the idea of compassion.
A realistic stance concentrating on this idea of compassion is stressed in the Buddha’s Buddhism. That the Buddha rejected the transcendent stance of traditional Hinduism, its metaphysical taste, and valued the real problems of life, the problems of you and me, shows well in an episode told in the Majjhima Nikāya. To Māluṅkyaputta, who demanded explanations of questions much like Kant’s metaphysical antinomies, whether the world is eternal or not, whether it is infinite or finite, whether soul and body are the same or separate, whether the Perfect One lives on after death or is simply gone, the Buddha answers as follows.
Māluṅkyaputta, the religious life does not depend on the dogma that the world is eternal or not. Whether there is such a dogma or not, there remain birth, old age, death, sorrow, lamentation, misery and despair, the sufferings of this life whose destruction I teach·····.334
Buddhism, unlike Judaism or Brahmanism, does not posit an opposition between mind and matter. The working of the mind is understood as one human function, like the working of any other part of the body. The Buddha does not preach about the atman, the core of Brahmanism. Nor does he explain any permanent, unchanging metaphysical substance. The Buddha, like Confucius, simply regarded himself as a human being. They did not rely on the power of God or of any transcendent being. Buddhism, like Confucianism, only explains how to improve this world and how human beings can live a better life. In this respect Buddhism, like Daoism and Confucianism, becomes not a religion of the manifest but an ethical philosophy grounded in the unmanifest. Making an absolute or transcendent being and identifying oneself with it arises in the end from an egoistic notion of self-preservation, and is the first step on the road to dividing me from you.
In the psychology of every individual there are two roots: the instincts of self-protection and self-preservation. For self-protection human beings came to seek it in God. For self-preservation human beings thought up the atman that lives forever, that is, the immortality of the soul. In ignorance, weakness, fear and desire, human beings believe in these two, take comfort in them and are reassured. This is why human beings cling to these two and show a fanatical passion for them.335
To reject the division of instinct and mind of the Buddha’s day and deny the difference between me and you is a truly revolutionary attitude. The Buddha, like Jesus, seems to have foreseen that his teaching would meet great opposition. The Buddha, who opposed metaphysical thinking, warned against the self-righteous attitude that metaphysical thinking often draws as its conclusion.
It is not right for one who loves truth to conclude self-righteously that this alone is truth and all else is falsehood. A man may have a belief. If he says, ‘This is my belief,’ he is speaking the truth. But he must not go further and take the absolute position that his belief alone is right. No one stands in a position to say that this alone is truth and all else is falsehood.336
By breaking with the custom of austerities and denying the existence of the atman, the Buddha rejected the separation of mind and body. By rejecting Brahmanism, the Buddha rejected the separation of you and me. The Buddha’s teaching rests on a deep philosophy of identifying the other with the self (彼我). He held that relations among human beings must be governed by compassion above all else. In this the Buddha’s idea of compassion shares its essence with Confucius’s ren (仁), Jesus’s love and Muhammad’s brotherhood. As with Jesus and Confucius, the Buddha left no teachings in writing. His teachings were recalled and compiled by Indians over the three to seven centuries after his death.337 So it is very hard to tell true from false between the essence of the Buddha’s teaching and what his disciples handed down.
In this process popular Buddhism came to give great weight to nirvana (nir meaning nothing or emptiness, vā meaning breath, 氣). Nirvana is the state reached when the fire has gone out: afflictions and attachments wholly extinguished. When human beings enter nirvana, it is said, they wholly cut the chain of suffering and rebirth and reach liberation. Many think nirvana is the core of Buddhism. And some believe in Buddhism in order to reach nirvana themselves, thinking the Buddha reached it. But the Buddha said little about nirvana. Beyond defining it as nothingness (無) or emptiness (空), he gave little explanation. Nirvana runs on the same track as the Christian heaven and the happiness of the Greeks. It has its appeal, but in the end it is a metaphysical expression and coordinate.
All of humanity’s great thinkers concluded that the basis of human ethics is “love of neighbour.” The ethics of love of neighbour that the Buddha, Confucius, Jesus and Muhammad left us is a shortening of the words “love your neighbour as you love yourself.” Love of neighbour becomes in the end humanity’s one and only ethics: “The New Testament teaches that all the law comes down to a single law: ‘Love your neighbour.’”338 “Let us repeat to one another day after day: morality is one, and comes from God; dogmas differ, and are made by men.”339 Yet many are still confused about this ethics, explained so clearly so long ago.340
We live still misunderstanding the teachings of Confucius and Jesus. Human beings cannot live alone. Whatever we do, acting for ourselves and acting for others cannot but be mixed together. Ren (仁) means a relational love of neighbour. In the Analects Confucius asks, “One cannot keep company with birds and beasts. If not with my neighbours, with whom shall I be?” And the Talmud asks, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And when I am for myself alone, what am I?” The answer has already been given.
Since the Buddha did not seek individual salvation, nirvana cannot be the essence of his teaching. The Buddha longed for the deliverance and salvation of all beings. If nirvana means ‘individual salvation,’ ‘the cutting off of desire,’ ‘the quenching of thirst,’ ‘release from hatred,’ ‘escape from delusion,’ ‘a state of perfect wisdom,’ ‘rescue’ and the like, it is no different from the state in Brahmanism in which the atman becomes one with Brahma. In that case Buddhism becomes no different from Brahmanism.
Gautama said: It is truly hard to preach to ordinary people. They cling to vulgar superstitions and readily follow whatever their feelings whisper.341
The land of India did not welcome Gautama then. It does not welcome the Buddha now. Brahmanism, after a brief retreat, came back in force (捲土重來) and rooted itself more firmly than ever in the land of India. It is the same with Jesus. Nazareth, his hometown, rejected Jesus (Mark 6:1–6). Judaism reconquered Galilee more firmly than before. It seems prophets are bound to be persecuted in their own country. The apostles of Jesus wrapped his clear teaching, “love your neighbour as yourself,” in all manner of myth and dogma. Gautama’s disciples acted the same way. They made up the myth called nirvana and wrapped the Buddha’s true teaching, compassion, in it.
The Buddha set himself against Brahmanism because the state of nirvana it spoke of, in which atman and Brahma become one (Brahmanic Nirvana), meant a cold, dry individual salvation with no regard at all for others. The Buddha once rebuked the Brahmin priests for not striving to deliver all beings and for having no compassion for others. So nirvana must be thought of in connection with compassion for others. The nirvana the Buddha taught could not be attained alone. It is a nirvana reached through others.
In the daily life of the Indians of his time the Buddha saw dukkha (苦: pain and anguish). And to do away with that suffering he sought to do away with desire. That is why the Buddha preached nirvana as nothingness (無) or emptiness (空). But the human heart cannot stay nothing or empty. The law “Nature abhors a vacuum” applies to the human heart too. When the bad desires that cause hatred, envy, strife and discord are pulled out of the human heart, something else must fill their place. The Buddha held that the place must be filled precisely with compassion.342 When negative desires vanish from the human heart and it is filled with a positive and productive desire, that is, compassion, then human beings come to have the sense of not distinguishing themselves from others.
For the Buddha, nirvana can be reached only through the relationship of self and others, that is, through compassion. Nirvana is inseparable from compassion. Nirvana is compassion made full, and pure compassion is nirvana. The very moment one experiences, under this realisation, the oneness of you and me, and beyond it the oneness of me with nature and the universe, is the moment one experiences nirvana.343 According to Buddhist legend the Buddha experienced this state at thirty-five. And he sought to make it known to all beings.
2) How Can the Worship of God and the Love of Neighbour Avoid Contradicting Each Other?
A simple answer to the question “Why do we live?” can be devotion to progress. Chasing a vision can be the surest way of finding meaning in life. Progress comes to aim at a vision that the mind takes the lead in pursuing. The pursuit of vision is the mark of Western civilisation, from revealed religion to the twentieth-century age of ideology. The problem is that, in light of history, every pursuit of vision fails to reach the goal it first set. At the same time, ethics is lost along the way. The vision offered by revealed religion or by ideology is to spread and follow God’s doctrine or metaphysical truth, and in actively carrying this out it cannot help harming love of neighbour. It brings about the so-called conflict between ethics and vision.
Confucianism and Christianity do not differ in offering one and the same ethics, love of neighbour. But between Confucius and Jesus, the Analects and the Bible show a clear difference. In Confucius’s case the teaching is clear and distinct. Confucius recognised no other value that hinders the establishing of relations among human beings. He holds to a deep humanism in which ren (仁) can only be realised by human effort. That is, he cares, through and through, only for the real world, and rejects any role or existence of the other world, of death or of God. Confucius’s teaching “In ren, one does not yield even to one’s teacher” (Analects 15:35, “Wei Ling Gong”) means this. The meaning of ren is that one must meet a good teacher or good companions and come to understand it together; ren is not achieved by the teaching of scripture, by a teacher’s drilling, or by God’s command or compulsion. The one ethics the East offers human society is well expressed in political ethics too, in the leader’s philosophy of “cooperating without being the same”: “The leader cooperates without being the same. The follower is the same but does not cooperate” (Analects 13:23).
But in Jesus’s case the teaching his disciples left is not as distinct as in Confucius’s. As recorded in the New Testament, it takes a position concerned with this world and the other, with life and death, with human beings and God. Its lessons can be summed up in two: faith and love. Christianity made its stance clear through an explicit law: “The law of God is twofold. The first is to love God, and the second is to love your neighbour as yourself” (Mark 12:30–31; Matthew 22:36–40). At the same time the teaching of love of neighbour, “love your neighbour as yourself,” is clearly conveyed by the apostle James: “faith apart from works is dead… You see then that by works a man is justified, and not only by faith” (James 2). In the end Christianity has two absolute teachings: love of neighbour, and the faith that loves and serves God. It teaches both ethics and faith.
Yet historically “love your neighbour” and “obey your God” have very often collided.
That faith and ethics cannot help betraying each other is a mark of the civilisation of God. If there is one single way for faith (law) and ethics (love) not to contradict each other, it is to believe that “love your neighbour as yourself” is God’s one and only law. In that case ethics and faith become the same thing, and ethics becomes absolute, something never to be put aside in any case. But faith seen from this side is far from the definition of faith Westerners have held, because it is a declaration that ethics comes before faith. In fact even the apostle Paul, who played the key role in spreading Christianity, causes confusion by arguing sometimes for faith and sometimes for love:
Faith: We maintain therefore that a man is justified by faith apart from the works of the law. (Romans 3)
Love: But now faith, hope, and love remain, these three. The greatest of these is love. (1 Corinthians 13)
These doctrines seem to have arisen in the course of spreading Christianity. Many thinkers have written that the law of God recorded in the Old Testament is a law human beings imagined (or believed they had received as revelation from God), wrapped in miracles. In fact there are differences not only between the historical life of Jesus and the life of Jesus in the New Testament recorded by the apostles, but also among the lives of Jesus the apostles themselves drew. Just as Christianity in fact changed again and again through history, worshipping the Virgin Mary, for example, under the influence of the cults of the Egyptian goddess Isis or the Greek goddess Artemis, with no connection to Jesus’s teaching,344 so the Gospels, as Christianity spread to each region of the Mediterranean, seem to have taken in many of the local folk beliefs and myths:
So that the new doctrine would not grate on people’s ears, the apostles adapted it as much as they could to the tastes of the people of their time, and built their doctrine on the foundations most widely known and accepted in that age.345
In fact, despite Jesus’s important role in ethics, Christianity as history shows it swings between two missions: “worshipping Jehovah with all one’s heart and all one’s strength” and “loving one’s neighbour as oneself.” Love of neighbour is humanity’s one and only ethics, but each sect and body showed the pattern of following its own principle of self-preservation rather than love of neighbour. The papal doctrine “Outside the Church there is no salvation” shows the principle of self-preservation taking precedence over love of neighbour. So with each sect within Christianity. Historical Christianity founded sect after sect. Each sect, for its self-preservation, put forward different forms and claimed to be right. Voltaire pointed out:
Every sect, of whatever kind, is the child of error and doubt. Scotists, Thomists, Realists, Nominalists, Papists, Calvinists, Molinists, Jansenists: these are all merely names of war. There are no sects in geometry. No one speaks of a “Euclidean” or an “Archimedean” sect. When the truth is plain, there can be no parties or factions. No one denies that it is light at noon.346
This contradiction between faith and ethics does not arise in the East’s civilisation of the Dao, because there is no place for an absolute being who created nature, and nature itself, as the Dao, becomes the support of the ethics most important to human beings. That is why in the civilisation of the Dao ren (仁), that is, love of neighbour, was accepted as it was, philosophically, as the highest ethics. Broken into its parts, the character 仁 means two people. That is, it recognises no authority or doctrine that may interfere in the relationship between one human being and another. The mark of the East’s civilisation of the Dao lies in denying every entity or value that interferes with the ethics of ren. The Bible has the same philosophy: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” So too with its plain statement of “the love of the Samaritan,” to love all people regardless of tribe.
But in theocentrism the commandment that God’s command must be valued above the ethics of family relations came to lie much deeper than in the East. The importance of the law is stressed again and again in Judaism, and repeated in Christianity. A collision with Christianity’s commandment of love of neighbour, the lesson of the Samaritan, is foreshadowed:
One said to him, “Behold, your mother and your brothers stand outside, seeking to speak to you.” But he answered him who spoke to him, “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?” He stretched out his hand towards his disciples, and said, “Behold, my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father who is in heaven, he is my brother, and sister, and mother.” (Matthew 12)
In the civilisation of God, the law of worshipping God was indispensable for self-preservation, and love of neighbour, humanity’s one ethics, was indispensable too. Yet history shows cases in Western civilisation where these two teachings, religion and ethics, contradict each other. How is contradiction to be avoided? Once absolute truth is expressed, the “infallibility” of the expression must be claimed to protect it from contradiction. This is the ground on which the infallibility of the Bible and of the Church is claimed in Western religion. But by the logic of 道可道非常道, the Dao that can be spoken is not the eternal Dao, absolute truth cannot be expressed. The same philosophy is expressed in Confucianism. The saying “The leader is not a vessel” (Analects 2:12) carries the meaning that ren cannot be expressed as a metaphysical theory. The core is that ren is not formed by imitation alone; one must take it in for oneself. Ren is not knowledge gained by learning from outside, but an ethics that must grow within oneself and is completed through practice.
Mencius explained, “To believe everything in the Book of Documents (書經) is worse than having no Book of Documents at all” (Mencius 7, “Jin Xin, Part Two”). This thought is explained by Confucius as a virtue needed in social life: “The leader is in harmony but not the same (和而不同); the follower is the same but not in harmony (同而不和).” It is the philosophy that leaders can work together without sharing the same thoughts, while followers go along outwardly but do not truly share the same mind. It is a social philosophy opposite to the Western manifest that stresses absoluteness.
Infallibility becomes dogma, and in the end walks the road of being denied in reality. In the manifest, how is the one absolute, vital truth conveyed to human beings? It is conveyed from God through the prophet to human beings, as the prophet connects God and man. In monotheism the law becomes important, and it has as its starting point that human beings obey God absolutely. Here a problem arises in real life. If there were only one such single God in history, representing absolute power and truth, there would be no problem. But two or three thousand years of human history present a different reality.
What happens if there are several single Gods? Judaism, Christianity and Islam appear as a struggle among single Gods. So far no single God has eliminated another. And problems arise within a single God too. When different interpretations arise within one religion, what becomes of the relations among them? Each can only claim its interpretation is absolute. Then a struggle for self-preservation among them is unavoidable. So when various sects arise in a monotheism, the struggle among sects is no less fierce than the struggle with other religions. A desperate struggle for survival arises, like a civil war within one country. The terrible struggle between Protestants and Catholics in the age of the Reformation proves it. Believers honour as a prophet the one who received the revelation, and obey him absolutely, because the prophet’s words become the words of God.
Jesus’s role lies in an ethics that goes beyond the law of Judaism, but historically Christianity has left a record of clinging more to the law. The polytheistic systems of Greece and Rome tolerated the worship of other gods. But after Christianity became the state religion of Rome in the fourth century, the forms and statues of gods other than the Christian God were destroyed by law on a wide scale in the West. Historically Christianity has been the most exclusive and intolerant of the religions on earth.347 And after the Renaissance, Western metaphysicians inherited as it was the intolerant attitude of the medieval Christian theologians. It found its most extreme expression in Marx. He thought persecution of opponents a necessary measure for building the proletarian utopia “proved” by history. As Berlin, quoted in Part 2, Chapter 1, said, he regarded anyone who did not side with him as an enemy, without condition.
As Spinoza declared, all things in the universe, human beings included, exist for self-preservation. Every other account, the Dao and God included, the role of the mind, the role of ethics and law, is all contained in the comprehensive principle of self-preservation. Easterners and Westerners, as the same human beings, Homo sapiens, only exist and act for self-preservation. By that principle of self-preservation, Easterners and Westerners made different civilisations and only strove for self-preservation. Philosophically, the principle of self-preservation embraces both one’s own interest and one’s neighbour’s. Yet we have long been steeped in a principle of self-preservation that looks only to one’s own interest. That principle, which looks only to one’s own interest, often made use of the concept of God in the civilisation of God. And in pursuing this purpose, what it stresses is the role of “the mind.” The civilisation of God often shows this situation. When the role of the mind is stressed, the separation of mind and instinct occurs. Believing in a supernatural God is possible only on the separation of mind and instinct. The separation of mind and instinct is the other face of the separation of human beings and nature, and this necessarily separates you and me.
So “worshipping Jehovah with all one’s heart and all one’s strength” means in the end the separation of believer and non-believer, of you and me. Has not war between those who worship Jehovah with all their heart and strength and those who worship Allah with all their heart and strength in fact gone on from the Middle Ages to this day? “Love your neighbour as yourself,” by contrast, is the demand not to separate you and me. Two thousand years of Christian history, too, show that faith and ethics were not in harmony. In the human being, the mind’s superior position over instinct derives from God. In Christian doctrine the mind holds a special position that human beings alone receive from God. So a philosophy that identifies the existence of God with the existence of the human mind came to pervade the West’s civilisation of God. And this came to have an absolute influence on ethics among human beings. When the capacity of mind is universalised and absolutised, its conclusions easily turn into faith, metaphysical truth or ideology. Then those conclusions become the most important purpose for human beings, and absolute truth. Before that absolute truth, ethics and every other consideration must be sacrificed.
If we accept the precondition of following the freedom of the new brain within fate, the human condition that the old brain represents, and build ethics on that foundation, there is no problem of collision between faith and ethics. In this case humanism holds. Love of neighbour becomes an ethics that cannot be violated. But if fate is not recognised, ethics collapses and humanism degenerates into anthropocentric humanism. What matters here is ethics. The Western blank slate makes it possible to leave ethics behind; the East’s goal is to make people grounded in ethics. Following religion, metaphysics and ideology, people sometimes ignore or leap over humanity’s most important ethics, “love of neighbour.” Jews, Christians and Muslims were not born with their religion; they learned it as it was from their parents. Imperialism, communism and fascism, too, were not inborn but learned from parents and schools. In wars of religion and wars of ideology the ethics of “love of neighbour” is ignored, because all of them insist on putting first a heaven or a utopia they claim stands above love of neighbour. Conflict between the idea of progress and ethics is unavoidable.
The idea of progress arises from absolutising the capacity of the mind. It is the mark of Western civilisation. Western civilisation, instead of seeing the capacity of mind as one of humanity’s biological functions, tends to treat it as a special capacity set apart from all bodily capacities, and so separates mind and instinct. The outward expression of the separation of mind and instinct is the separation of human beings and nature; conversely, the inward expression of the separation of human beings and nature is the separation of mind and instinct. Being the product of a mental culture that separated mind and instinct, it is only natural that it tends to deny instinct, ignore it and treat it as sinful. Catholicism, arguing original sin, denied instinct in favour of the mind, and Protestantism only changed the wording; the division of mind and instinct went on. In relations among human beings, this division, by dividing believers from atheists, bred a tendency to divide you and me. As seen in Calvin and Luther, loving oneself was treated as sinful or forbidden, and in Kant it found philosophical expression: loving oneself was regarded as utterly without worth.348 Jesus’s words “love your neighbour as yourself” were twisted into “love your neighbour and do not love yourself,” or simply “love only your neighbour.”
In the end the collision between the pursuit of vision, faith included, and ethics is unavoidable, because the organisations made by those who insist on the worship of God try to survive by the principle of self-preservation. When love of neighbour and the worship of God come into contradiction, a collision of self-preserving interests arises in the end between humanity’s universal ethics and the priestly class that guards God. For its self-preservation the Church puts forward the doctrine “Outside the Church there is no salvation.” In the age of the West’s conquest of the world, which the West calls the Age of Discovery, the West proclaimed in the Pope’s name a bull (Nicholas V’s Dum Diversas of 1452) granting the power to conquer Saracens and pagans and “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.” For hundreds of years Westerners welcomed that bull. It was far from the ethics of Jesus’s love of neighbour towards the Samaritan. Its aim was rather to establish and extend the power of the Church or the state.349
3) Is Ethics God’s Command, or Nature’s Counsel?
Love of neighbour is one of Christianity’s most important doctrines. What made Westerners love their neighbours is God’s command. It is the ground of Western ethics. Love of neighbour is not for one’s own selfishness. So Westerners see altruism as coming from sacrificing oneself. Western philosophy thinks ethics comes from self-sacrifice. In the Western philosophical system, the grounds for harmonising altruism (love of neighbour) and selfishness in the theory of human nature are weak.
In Western civilisation, because ethics is God’s command, if God does not intervene in human affairs then human beings can be free of the ethics God commanded. If there is no God, there is no need to sacrifice one’s own interest. In other words, the question arises: “If there is no God, why should I love my neighbour?” Then people who have abandoned religion come to question why they should keep ethics.
It is hard to understand how, in places like China, unlike Europe, religious scepticism did not lead to ethical scepticism.350
Even after deism, Western thinkers ran into hard problems concerning faith and ethics. Comte, rejecting theology and metaphysics, cried that “the only absolute is that everything is relative,” showing an attitude essentially the same as Ivan’s words in The Brothers Karamazov, “If there is no God, everything is permitted”; and Nietzsche too declared himself an atheist.
‘God,’ ‘the immortality of the soul,’ ‘redemption,’ ‘the beyond’: these are concepts to which I never paid any attention. I wasted no time on them, not even as a child. Perhaps I was never naive enough to believe them? ··· Atheism is for me not the result of anything, still less an important event in my life. For me it is a matter of course, and instinctive.351
Russell declares, “I am not a Christian,” and Lin Yutang, who introduced one side of Chinese civilisation to the West, also once declared, “I am a pagan” (he returned to Christianity in 1959).352 These attitudes show that they understood neither the essence of Christianity, which Spinoza set out so clearly, nor the essence of the idea of ren (仁) that Confucius took such pains to leave us. Comte, Nietzsche, Russell, Lin Yutang and others, seen from the side of Eastern thought, may be not atheists but thinkers of the unmanifest. The negative Western judgement on atheists is the stance of thinkers who could not conceive the difference between the manifest and the unmanifest; it comes from the stance of analysing world affairs and the history of philosophy only from the Western position of the manifest, and becomes a vast philosophical problem peculiar to the West alone, above all at the level of ethics.
Even a philosopher like Russell seems not to have understood the essential difference between the civilisations of East and West. Without understanding the theory of human nature that came from Eastern natural philosophy, one cannot understand that ethics is an expression of selfishness for one’s own sake. This hard problem comes to be solved by the West’s naturalists. They do not recognise an absolute connection between revealed religion and ethics. They began to understand that ethics is not God’s command but nature’s counsel. Dawkins, too, expresses doubt about the role Western revealed religion claims religion plays in ethics:
People who have religion often doubt how people can be good without religion, and why they should be good.353
Deism presents Westerners with the serious problem of where the source of ethics is to be found. When metaphysics could not revive the Christian God, already struck by medieval theology, and hastened its decisive fall, Westerners began to deny everything absolute. The disappearance of ethics is the task facing most Westerners, who have lived in a civilisation of the manifest. Westerners who went through eighteenth-century deism (理神論), nineteenth-century Darwinian evolution and the tyranny of twentieth-century ideology have lost their way in ethics. Deism, on the proposition that God exists but can be understood not through revelation but through the thought of the mind, and that morality and truth can be discovered through the mind, puts forward Kant’s (1724–1804) categorical imperative as the source of ethics, but it is weak in persuasion, because its metaphysical side, grounded in rationalism, is large.
Rousseau (1712–1778) put forward a human nature different from that of revealed religion. He argued that human beings are born good, but that human civilisation is making good human character bad. So he explained that what matters to human beings is sensibility, the expression of the original human nature. And he put forward the hypothesis that if human beings act according to their sensibility all is well, winning a great positive response across the whole West. Telling people to trust their sensibility becomes the claim that even acting in disregard of ethics is no problem, since it is the action of human beings who are good by origin. In the end he explained that the most important element in a human being is to have “sensibility and a warm heart.”
This situation breathed into Europeans the tendency we call “Romanticism.” Relishing their new freedom, they came to ignore the ethics within civilisation, holding that what makes human beings bad has to do with civilisation. In The Social Contract Rousseau argues, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” So at this point, as Romanticism was argued for, a peculiar kind of person appears in the West: those who actually put Rousseau’s sensibility into practice. Rousseau, Sade (1740–1814), Byron (1788–1824), Shelley (1792–1822) and others are they.
They argued for living a life that simply followed one’s own sensibility, since everything bad was the fault of the civilisation human beings had made. They all took it for granted to borrow money from friends and not pay it back; all had promiscuous love affairs and made a habit of betrayal; acted as their instincts bade them and despised keeping promises, such as fidelity; and rebelled against the sentiment called ethics that society sought to keep. Of mind and passion, Rousseau distanced himself from the mind and stood firmly on the side of passion. And Rousseau valued religion not from the side of the mind but of sensibility, supporting religion through feeling, the heart, awe, mysticism and the like. Rousseau himself left all his children at a foundling home, taking the position that he could live as was comfortable to him, according to his sensibility.
After Rousseau, as the age of the mind entered the Age of Ideology, deism was replaced by ideology. Ethics became ideology’s lackey. Ideology believed that human beings could cooperate to build an ideal world, a utopia, in this world. The idea was to sacrifice ethics “for the time being” to achieve the goal of the utopia soon to come. It becomes a logic that ignores the basic direction of ethics and justifies merciless dictatorship and war. Communism and fascism are the examples. Communism has the dictatorial code of ten commandments that Karl Marx put forward: ten measures of a dictatorial system, modelled on the Ten Commandments of the Bible. The code includes the transfer of all means of production to the state, the confiscation of all the property of emigrants and rebels, the centralisation of all means of transport in the hands of the state, and so on. The Ten Commandments, which became the norm of ethics in the Bible and made Westerners keep ethics thoroughly, were replaced by ten commandments of dictatorship. Hitler, too, acted as he saw fit: the partition of Poland with the Soviet Union, the invasion of Poland that followed, the attack on the Soviet Union. Hitler boasted of these acts as the most effective means of achieving his utopia. He stressed that the extermination of the Jews, too, was a measure necessary to achieve the same utopia. The problem is that because these acts themselves are utterly unethical, they violate “love of neighbour,” which humanity’s prophets offered. And in reality, if utopia is not achieved, “for the time being,” until utopia is achieved, “becomes forever,” and ethically destructive action stands out as ideology’s greatest problem.
Before deism, the most important ethics between human beings was damaged by the collision between the worship of God and ethics; after deism, as the world became one without God, it brought about a situation without ethics. Not only were the Ten Commandments and love of neighbour, which God laid down as law, openly damaged, but the age of ideology made an astounding world in which a new ethics taking their place, the “anti-ethics” for achieving utopia, passed itself off as “ethics.” Dictatorship and ethnic cleansing became their “ethics.” They made a world in which three ideologies, colonialism, communism and fascism, were tangled together in a fight to the death. For this Westerners did not shrink from two world wars in the twentieth century. And after that they drove the world into the Cold War.
Since the rise of deism many Western thinkers have wandered in search of the origin of ethics. Where must ethics come from? As we have analysed, Kant sought to replace ethics with a “transcendental moral deontology” grounded in the mind. Dostoevsky (1821–1881), portraying in The Brothers Karamazov Ivan’s reasoning that “if there is no God, everything is permitted,” strove to bring God back to life. Nietzsche aimed at a moral overman, not a superhero in the sense of human function, but one made by his own inner will, unbound morally by Christian doctrine.
Eastern philosophy, as seen in Daoism and Confucianism, aimed from the start at engagement with reality grounded in ethics. The first condition for setting oneself right is realising the harmony of selfishness and altruism. Without it one cannot govern the family, the country or the world: “Set yourself right, order your family, govern your country, and bring peace to the world” (Great Learning, Chapter 8). In the East this was already completed as a philosophy two thousand years ago. It is basically not altruism but powerful selfishness that breathes original force into human society. But society is sustained only when it reflects the weak altruism in human nature. In the end all our philosophy is connected to the theory of human nature.
If altruism is the bond that makes a healthy society, human society becomes something far removed from nature. But there is one way out of this dilemma. Can what at first sight looks like altruism be “selfish” from the point of view of Darwinism? That is, can an individual’s sacrifice in the end help the continuity of his own genes? The answer to these opposed propositions is Yes.354
Before deism there was no need at all to study human beings. Since human beings were made in the image of God, studying God was studying human beings. The human being was a creature born bearing original sin, living a life of toil in the world, and then facing the Last Judgement. But as they came to believe in deism, in which God does not intervene in human affairs, Westerners for the first time came to think about what the human being is, at the level of natural philosophy.
In the West theists were the overwhelming majority, but lately churchgoing theists have become a minority. That does not mean Westerners have become atheists. Quite a few atheists, though they do not admit it themselves, belong to the unmanifest: people who, like Spinoza, declare themselves in the end theists who believe in God, but are treated as atheists by the Church’s law. David Mills, author of Atheist Universe; Richard Dawkins of The God Delusion; Christopher Hitchens of God Is Not Great: these are atheists in the West, but in the East they may be thinkers of the unmanifest. They believe in absolute truth, but do not believe in a faith revealed through prophets as revealed religion presents it. In the West they are condemned by the believers in the manifest, but in the East they become free thinkers of the unmanifest who believe in absolute truth.
How ethics is to be kept in a world without God remains a task for many in the West. But the answer must be sought not in the manifest that claims absolute truth, but in the unmanifest. Chapter 8 of the Daodejing explains how human beings should live: “In friendship, keep company with the kind. In speech, speak with good faith. In governing, govern rightly. In work, do your best. In moving, choose the right time.” It is the ethics of the Dao that anyone can find in nature, not God’s commandment.
Eastern civilisation relies on a natural philosophy in which, even without the God of revealed religion, the ethics “for one’s own and others’ interest” can arise of itself and be sustained. The source of ethics is “enlightened self-interest,” for others and for oneself. What matters is that the source of ethics is not God’s command, but the principle of self-preservation inherent in the human nature that protects itself.
By human nature, not the mind but instinct should be the source of ethics; yet at the stage of making ethics the mind has an important role. At this stage the mind can come to influence instinct. At the stage where the mind influences instinct, there must be a ground for it in instinct, and this is the altruism that exists within instinct. Looking at human nature, instinct holds, besides powerful selfishness, an altruism that is faint but real. Looked at deeply, this “harmony of powerful selfishness and faint altruism” is what makes human society run dynamically. If human beings were born with a nature of powerful altruism and faint selfishness, human society would be something like heaven, but thoroughly dull, and there would be no reason at all why human beings should live. In the end human society becomes, in matters of ethics, a process of struggle and agreement, carried on at the levels of individual, society and the running of the state: the hard and difficult, but dynamic, effort to strike a balance between altruism and selfishness through the mind. This is how the Confucian leader, or the Spinozan wise man, is made.
Analysing it this way, we reach one conclusion: the most important element in human ethics lies not in “the mind” in the manner of Descartes or Kant, but in “the human nature that embraces instinct and mind together.” We arrive at the philosophy of Spinoza, who argues for a rationalism of instinct and mind together.355 If the source of human action rests not on the mind but on instinct, the mechanism of instinct follows human beings like fate from birth to death. At the same time, since the human mind plays the role of managing instinct, it goes on managing instinct until the moment of death, not as a source of light but as a reflector.
Hold this philosophy, acknowledging human nature as the source of light while the human mind plays its role as reflector, and the direction ethics between human beings should take is set. This is the concept of “freedom (mind) within fate (instinct).” That is, while acknowledging instinct, the nurture of human character decides everything a human being can do after birth. The nurture of human character comes back wholly to the responsibility of the individual. This responsibility lasts until death: the Eastern philosophy “Life has an end, but knowing has none” applies here. Immersion in doctrine, metaphysical discovery or ideology cannot replace the nurture of human character. Hence the importance of “The leader is not a vessel” (君子不器). (Analects 2:12).
Morality (道德, Moralism) Does Not Accord with the Laws of Nature
The philosophy that morality does not accord with the laws of nature offers an important standard in relation to the theory of human nature. Such a philosophy is hard to find in Western civilisation, which the manifest rules, because the manifest holds that human affairs follow the current of good and evil, so that morality is what judges human beings in the manifest. We can find such a philosophy by going back to the Greek era before Socrates. In the Greek thinkers of the unmanifest we can see the possibility of arguing that the theory of human nature has nothing to do with morality. For example Carneades (214–129 BC), one of the Greek thinkers of the unmanifest, opposing ontology and determinism, left the view that we should attend to chance and probability. Saying that morality does not accord with the laws of nature, that is, that there is no natural justice (natural law), he voiced the view that what we call justice cannot be eternal, is irrational, and is asserted only out of the need of a given time. Sent to Rome on an embassy, he gave famous speeches: one day a speech praising justice, the next day a speech criticising it, deeply shocking his listeners. Carneades’s philosophy follows a naturalist theory that would, rather than immerse itself in a rationalism based on the mind, see morality and human nature as they are. He argued that we must doubt the absoluteness of moral concepts such as justice, freedom and human rights, and come to know their relativity through argument.
But the West, following the philosophy of the Greco-Roman era and medieval Christian philosophy, gave morality absoluteness as a command handed down by God. And entering the Enlightenment it went on growing this philosophy of the manifest. Adapting to the situation in which the mind replaced God, Kant’s philosophy, that morality is a “transcendental moral deontology” commanded by the mind, won a great following. Kant’s philosophy runs in the same vein as the view that human nature is good, argued by Rousseau. Early modern Western philosophy was thus enchanted by the view that human nature is good, and by moral idealism.
Against these claims about human nature there appeared empiricist philosophy, which for the first time in the West set out a counter-theory to the rationalists biased towards the mind. Among its representative philosophers is Hume (1711–1776). He set out a naturalist account of human nature, and since it stood squarely against religious human nature he was branded a heretic and faced dangers, including proceedings before the church courts.
Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.356
Thinkers of his day treated Hume as an atheist or a sceptic. Western thinkers still class him as a sceptic. But widen the view, and his thought can be classed not as a negative scepticism but with the Greek Sceptics, or with the thinkers of the unmanifest of the East. In Hume’s day Western philosophy was in the hands of confirmed rationalists such as Descartes and Kant. They thought the mind governed everything. Hume left this current and opened a new horizon. Astonishingly, he stressed the importance not of the mind but of instinct:
Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.357
For its time it was an astonishing theory. Even now it may seem to many a theory that raises doubts. Hume’s ethics is still called “ethical anti-rationalism.” But Hume’s theory has its supporters. Hume’s claim can be found in the Greek era too. As we saw, it resembles the claim of Carneades: morality does not accord with the laws of nature. What we call justice cannot be eternal. Morality is irrational and is asserted only out of the need of the time. For example, slavery was accepted as a rational ethics of human society for thousands of years, up to the eighteenth century. But in the twenty-first century slavery has become the most abhorrent ethics of human society. Ethics in many cases depends on how we see human nature. The relationship of instinct and mind above all matters. As Russell, quoted earlier, put it, instinct makes action and the mind only regulates it.
The assessment of human nature is closely bound up with how the civilisations of East and West assess, philosophically, the proverb “Heaven helps those who help themselves.” As said in a note to Part 1, Chapter 3, in the civilisation of the Dao those who help themselves receive the blessing of the Dao, while in the civilisation of God human beings are held to be able to help themselves only with God’s grace.
Locke’s and Adam Smith’s philosophies of human nature depend heavily on religion. Human effort matters, but the philosophy that in the end one must rely on the power of God is strong. And whatever human beings do, since they are human beings God made, they come to rely on an optimism that everything will turn out well in the end, because in their faith they believe that “God is benevolent.” But the civilisation of the Dao relies on the philosophy of a negative theology: “The Dao is not benevolent.” Then it believes that human affairs are not resolved by the Dao, but must in the end be handled by human beings within the bounds of the Dao. It is not optimism but realism. By Eastern thought, Heaven will not help human beings who do not help themselves. The philosophies of God and of the Dao are fundamentally bound up with the theory of human nature that defines “who we are.”
4) What Is Altruism? The West: The Sacrifice of Self-Interest vs the East: Enlightened Self-Interest
Altruism is essential for keeping social order and for the inner peace of the individual. Confucianism and Christianity both make altruism the core of human affairs. What is altruism? In the analysis of altruism, East and West show a fundamental difference with regard to human nature. In Eastern civilisation altruism is a kind of self-interest: self-interest of an enlightened character, self-interest that serves itself while serving others. Enlightened self-interest, that is, altruism, is inherent in human nature. By the theory of human nature seen in Western civilisation, altruism is not in human nature. Altruism is God’s command. Selfishness is the whole of human nature. Altruism becomes a special ethics that offsets human nature, arising from God’s command or the mind’s command. Is altruism inherent in human nature, or a command of God (or an ethics based on the mind) unrelated to human nature? This is the difference between East and West concerning altruism.
In the West altruism is seen as a state that has abandoned self-interest and replaced it. One can only choose one of the two, self-interest or altruism. In Western civilisation altruism is self-sacrifice. In the relationship between self-interest and altruism, the difference between the philosophies of “complementarity” and “opposition” in East and West shows again. Look up altruism in Western dictionaries or documents, and it is used uniformly in the sense of against one’s own interest, for others only, not for oneself. Altruism carries the implication of “not being for oneself” (selflessness or unselfishness). The Bible too shows the opposition of altruism and self-interest.
Let no one seek his own, but each one his neighbour’s good. (1 Corinthians 10:24)
This philosophy, following the law of revealed religion, was inherited as it was by the rationalism of the Enlightenment, in which the human mind could take God’s place. The Enlightenment philosopher Kant defined “true moral love” as “practice for the sake of others.” He stressed that human beings must be treated “never merely as a means, but always at the same time as an end,” which runs in the same vein. As the starting point of ethics Kant argued for a moral deontology by the categorical imperative, grounded in the mind. He thought human beings are born with the moral law in their minds. Within the Enlightenment’s philosophical system of deism, in which God does not intervene in human affairs, Kant’s philosophy was hailed by Western rationalists as a “Copernican Revolution.” But in the end it is a form in which “the human mind” replaced “the law of God.”
The East analyses altruism as “enlightened self-interest.” Altruism is an element needed to pursue a sustainable, long-term self-interest. The common good (共同善) becomes enlightened self-interest. In Eastern philosophy it is hard to find the Western-style oppositional demand to give up one’s own interest and pursue others’ for the common good. In the East the common good means pursuing one’s own interest and others’ together. It is the difference between the importance of “I” claimed by individualism and the importance of “we” claimed by relationalism. Because Eastern civilisation takes as its core the importance of “we,” grounded in relationalism, a common good that asserts both my interest and others’ is possible. Confucius explains in the Analects the essence of the common good, that is, of enlightened self-interest:
If you would establish your own interest, establish others’ interest with it. If there is something you want, bring about what others want as well. (Analects 6:28)
What matters here is not “sacrificing myself,” but pursuing “others’ interest too, for the sake of my own.” It is a relational philosophy in which considering others’ interest turns out, in the end, to be best for one’s own interest as well. The Western proposition “Let no one seek his own, but each one his neighbour’s good” comes from the West’s oppositional division of self and others. Seen from Eastern civilisation, grounded in complementarity, “one’s own interest and others’ must be pursued together” to be realistic. In Western ethics the oppositional proposition posits a human nature that goes against “the instinct of self-preservation.” The oppositional view that one must abandon oneself to serve others lacks realism. Ethics must in the end be for oneself. Xunzi explains that ethics and law exist for “us.” That is, ethics is an enlightened self-interest needed for self-preservation:
Suppose, for example, we did away with all ethics and law, removed everything the government does, and removed every possibility of punishment, and then saw how human beings behave. The strong would torment and oppress the weak. The many would harm the few and try to wipe them out. Ethics and order would vanish. Society would head down the road to ruin. (Xunzi 23:7)
Ethics in the end belongs to the human nature of self-preservation. In the East ethics is neither a moral command nor self-sacrifice. It is enlightened self-interest belonging to self-preservation. The West now seems to be beginning such philosophical thinking.
The biological reality of self-preservation produces human ethics. Because of the inalienable need to protect ourselves, we must help others to be protected too. If we fail in this we ourselves perish, because we betray and abandon the standard contained in the basic principle of self-preservation.358
Unlike any other animal, human beings are born with greed. What can cure greed is ethics. As we have seen, humanity’s great pioneers all offered love of neighbour as the standard of ethics. In Eastern civilisation ethics is not God’s command; it comes about naturally through one’s own awakening.
The Dao is honoured and virtue (德) prized not because of any command, but naturally, of themselves. (Daodejing, Chapter 51)
In Eastern civilisation ethics comes not from God but from nature. It is the ethics of the Dao, which would see nature as it is and learn from it. The concept of the harmony of self-interest and altruism inherent in Eastern civilisation is a philosophy the West does not have. That is, it follows the Dao that nature offers human beings. The Dao offers the way to harmonise self-interest and altruism.
The core task of the Eastern theory of human nature is how to deal with the powerful selfishness and weak altruism that exist in human nature. Confucianism and Daoism treat altruism as enlightened self-interest for one’s own sake. That is, altruism is not the sacrifice of self-interest but, in the end, part of it. Confucius offers the harmony of self-interest and altruism as an important virtue in nurturing human character. Just as nature preserves biodiversity, human beings keep the balance only by learning, for self-preservation, how to reduce selfishness and apply altruism. The Daodejing too speaks of the order of nature that keeps the balance: “The Dao of Heaven takes from those who have much and helps those who have nothing” (Daodejing 77).
Kin Selection and Reciprocal Altruism
Western scientific philosophers have lately been providing a theory, grounded in naturalism, that supports the “enlightened self-interest” Eastern civilisation argues for. With the discovery Western scholars call “kin selection,” made in the latter half of the twentieth century, enlightened self-interest gains a firm scientific source. Kin selection proves, at the level of human nature, that the source of ethics lies not in the mind but in feeling. In this it contrasts with Kant’s philosophy, fashionable in the West. Kin selection follows David Hume’s philosophical system rather than Kant’s. Hume argues that human ethics is limited by the human nature human beings are born with; Kant, conversely, argues that ethics is the product of a free mind, unlimited by the nature called feeling.
At last the seed of enlightened self-interest is found in the minds of some Western thinkers. Moral judgement does not come from the mind; they came to argue that feeling is its source. The British biologist Hamilton put forward the idea of kin selection in 1964. It came from the discovery that altruism belongs to genetic selection for one’s own sake. With this discovery about human nature, the philosophy that kin selection follows self-interest appears in the West for the first time. Professor Dawkins explains altruism as belonging thoroughly to selfishness.
Though at first sight kin selection seems to come from altruism, at the level of biological genes it is an expression of thoroughgoing selfishness.359
Genetically, human beings have a nature that is highly selfish and shows altruism only as the exception. It is the claim that human nature is born with powerful selfishness and weak altruism.
Genes that succeed genetically act very selfishly. So human beings too act selfishly. But in exceptional cases our selfish aims can be achieved when we show a limited altruism. The words exceptional and limited are what matter. However much we may wish it, we must take it that such things as universal love or general welfare do not exist in the evolution our genes govern.360
Nevertheless, the reason we must grow altruism and consideration as ethics is that the selfishness we are born with is so powerful.
Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.361
Altruism arises in the same way in people and in animals. Kin selection is the logic that by sacrificing oneself to help one’s kin, in the long run, genetically, even if one dies, the genes that make one up multiply. Reciprocal altruism is altruistic behaviour in which individuals who are not kin give and receive help. In the animal world such altruistic behaviour is not praised as ethically good behaviour. Altruism is a kind of self-interest. But reciprocal altruism is praised only in human society. In view of this, the term “reciprocal altruism” appeared in Western civilisation, which had treated altruism only as self-sacrifice, to resolve the matter. Professor Gould explains it as follows:
According to Darwinian evolution, paradoxically, altruism and selfishness can both be selected by evolution. Altruism can create individual benefit, because it sets up relations of mutual obligation with others, or helps kin so that genes for altruism can be copied.362
So in the end reciprocal altruism too belongs to the ultimate purpose of self-preservation. Under this proposition powerful selfishness and weak altruism coexist within human beings, and we live within these properties. Professor Gould sees this coexistence as playing a kind of prisoner’s dilemma game:
In the end, between selfishness and altruism, animals, plants and people are playing the game of the “prisoner’s dilemma.” Its purpose is self-preservation.363
Extend this game to the whole of society, and we can see that civilisations of flourishing societies and of societies that do not flourish exist on earth. Successful societies have civilisations that spread, through learning, the reciprocal altruism that belongs to the genes. Because altruism is very faint compared with powerful selfishness, it works in society in balance with selfishness only when strengthened by learning.
Reciprocal altruism exists in a society that works properly. This logic may belong to the genes, or it may be acquired through learning.364
We have looked at how the civilisations of East and West hold different philosophies of altruism. Confucianism and Daoism make the practice of reciprocal altruism, that is, the nurture of human character, the highest aim of learning. The East assessed altruism as enlightened self-interest and built a civilizational consensus on it. The time when this philosophical system took its place as the core of civilisation was the fifth and fourth centuries BC: the point at which the theory of human nature was established in the East.
The West saw self-interest and altruism as in struggle, and held that altruism could be breathed into human beings only by borrowing the power of religion. As this revealed religion went on developing, through the Enlightenment to deism, Western thinkers have lately left “religious ethics” behind and arrived at the philosophy of a natural “enlightened self-interest,” that is, “reciprocal altruism.” Through this process the Western theory of human nature finds its first meeting point, in natural philosophy, with the Eastern theory of human nature.