Early in its evolution, humanity came to be astonished by an unprecedented mental faculty. The dead appeared in dreams, and people received mysterious revelations. How to deal with mental phenomena, experienced for the first time by any living thing on earth, became a problem. How should mental phenomena be regarded? How should the relationship between the two be seen: mind and body, spirit and flesh, the mental and the physical? It is in their theories of human nature that the civilizations of East and West part at the source. The East interprets the two as the harmony of mind and body (心身); the West interprets them as the struggle of spirit and flesh (靈肉). Here begin the answers of East and West to the question of who we are.
The West, treating mind and instinct as separate beings and concentrating on the mind, calls the mind by several different names: soul, spirit, reason. Soul was much used in antiquity and is tied to religion; the soul is held to live on after death and be with God. Spirit was used mainly in the theocentrism (神本主義) of the Middle Ages. Reason was used mainly in the rationalism of the modern West; it is sometimes limited to the part of the mind that thinks logically, one part of the larger mind. Such a separation is foreign to the East. Taking little interest in revealed religion and metaphysics, the East has no need of these distinctions. The East, whose theory of human nature rests on the complementarity of mind and body, speaks of mind-and-body (心身), which embraces them all. In this book, which analyzes the civilizations of East and West, soul, spirit and reason are treated as the same, because they all come from the neocortex. Going inside the neocortex to analyze soul, spirit and reason is not the purpose of this book.
The geopolitical conditions of the West demanded far more effort for self-preservation than those of the East. It came to worship the mind and to unite around it. Western civilization distinguishes the mind from instinct and treats the mind as a special being. Looking at Western civilization, we see that at first it expressed the existence of the mind as the pine cone and the eye of the soul, and worshipped it. These foundations began to be laid in Greco-Roman civilization. Then, as the worship of the mind joined with religion, the West passed through the dark period of the Middle Ages, with theocentrism at the center of its civilization.165 In the modern era the worship of the mind developed, in rationalism, into a philosophical system centered on reason. In the end the worship of the mind became the core of the philosophical system of Western civilization for thousands of years.
In a civilization that worships the mind, conflict arises between instinct and mind, and human beings cannot keep their wholeness and become alienated. And to overcome this alienation, or to prove the supernatural character of the mind, they have no choice but to create a supernatural being and identify the mind with it. They create a God who resembles human beings, yet is supernatural. Once God has been made, the effort to explain mental phenomena can simply be handed over to God, the transcendent one. As Fromm said, “theology ends in mysticism,” and as Feuerbach too pointed out, “to man, God is his very mind and soul.”166 As the mind joins with God, the body is treated as matter, and the division between spirit and flesh becomes clear. As nature is regarded as matter, the opposing division between humanity and nature (dichotomy) arises, together with the opposing division between God and nature.
When the supernatural mind is treated rationally, from the philosophical side, it becomes the origin of metaphysics. One falls into the labyrinth of having to explain rationally mental phenomena that are essentially irrational, and this endless, unknowable pursuit must in the end be abandoned halfway, which shows itself in the birth of a monster: a “rational God.” Human beings take the place of God. That is the road from the mind of Parmenides to the Absolute Spirit of Hegel. This situation shows us the course by which, in Western civilization after the Renaissance, religion arrives at metaphysics. One comes to agree with Schopenhauer, who called religion “the metaphysics of the masses.” Metaphysics is, so to speak, the religion of philosophers.167 The mind that religion stands for proceeds in the West into modern rationalism, and then into the age of ideology of the twentieth century.168
Here lies the confusion of twentieth-century Western philosophy. On the ground where medieval theology and modern metaphysics have fallen, only science remains. The West must build anew a philosophical foundation for science to rely on. We cannot stake humanity’s future on the science the West has developed, or on AI, the descendant of the Industrial Revolution. To develop a sound philosophical system, the West must take a new approach to human nature.
The East grasps mental phenomena as one faculty human beings possess, regards them as natural, and sees them as part of natural phenomena. The ideas of the unity of mind and body and the theory of li and qi rest on this. There is no tendency to tie them to religion or metaphysics relying on a separate mind. The East concentrates on sound ethics, politics and political economy. In Eastern civilization the mind is in harmony with instinct, and plays the role of connecting humanity and nature. In the East, the philosophy of the Dao connects humanity and nature, and Confucianism connects human beings with one another. Through these connections human beings keep their wholeness (integrity) without division. As Goethe put it, “It is the whole man who knows nature, and the man who lives is the whole man.”169 In Eastern civilization it becomes possible to pursue a whole human nature through a natural theory of human nature. This thought forms the foundation of Eastern civilization. The Western theory of human nature pursues a covenant between God and man, or a social contract among human beings grounded in human nature; laws and institutions become important. The Eastern theory of human nature concentrates on cultivating human character through each person’s effort, within the bounds of the human nature one is born with. This Eastern theory of human nature leads to the development of ethics and political economy.