“As the Chinese think” (Publication, 1922.01)
Year
1922.01
Text
Dewey, John. As the Chinese think. In : Asia ; vol. 22, Jan. (1921). In : Dewey, John. The middle works. Vol. 13 : 1921-1922. Ed. by Jo Ann Boydston. (Carbondale, Ill. : Southern Illinois University Press, 1976-1983). (DewJ43)
Type
Publication
Contributors (1)
Dewey, John
(Burlington 1859-1952 New York, N.Y.) : Philosoph, Pädagoge, Psychologe
Subjects
History : China
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Periods : China : Republic (1912-1949)
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Philosophy : China : General
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Philosophy : United States of America
Chronology Entries (1)
| # | Year | Text | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1921.01 |
Dewey, John. As the Chinese think [ID D28499]. There is an oft-quoted saying of Chesterton's that a man’s philosophy is the most important thing about him. He illustrates the point by saying that it is more important for a landlady to know the philosophy of life of a would-be lodger than to know his financial status. The latter may decide his ability to pay, but the former decides his willingness to make false or true representations and to carry out his agreements. The late Mr. Morgan aroused much interest when he said at Washington that he attached more importance in banking to the character of the applicants for credit than to the material securities they proffered. The remarks of Chesterton and Morgan testify to the practical importance of what in war-time we learned to call the imponderables— grit, stamina, loyalty, faith—in comparison with things so tangible that they can be counted and measured. What is true, in this regard, of individuals is true of peoples. The spirit that countries bring to the negotiations going on in Washington, the spirit in which they will proceed to execute the decisions of the Conference, is more important than the letter of the decisions. Those who are cynical about the Conference are so because they do not believe in the underlying good faith of the governments concerned. They assume that negotiations are simply a hypocritical cover for a series of dickerings and maneuvers for special advantage, and that professions of regard for peace, justice and humanity are merely part of the traditional paraphernalia of a secret jockeying to get the better of some one else. They distrust, in short, the underlying philosophy of existing governments. If we go deeper, we realize that many sources of discord and friction have their root in the fact that different peoples have different philosophies ingrained in their habits. They cannot understand one another and they misunderstand one another. It is fashionable today to assume that the causes of all difficulties between nations are economic. It is useful to fix attention upon these economic causes and to see what can be done in the way of adjustment. But the friction generated by economic competition and conflict would not break out into the flames of war if atmospheric conditions were not favorable. The atmosphere that makes international troubles inflammable is the product of deep-seated misunderstandings that have their origin in different philosophies of life. If we are to take steps to dampen the atmosphere, to charge it with elements that will fire-proof international relations, we must begin with an attempt at an honest understanding of one another's philosophy of life. The difficulty is greatest between oriental and occidental peoples. There are great differences in the mental dispositions of European and American peoples; the philosophies of life of even the English and the Americans are much more unlike than they are usually assumed to be. But all such differences pale into insignificance as compared with the differences between the civilizations of the West and of Asia—between the philosophies to which these civilizations have given birth. It is proportionately hard to secure mutual understanding and respect and proportionately easy on both sides to create suspicion and fear, which slide over into hatred when the time is ripe. The common belief at the present time that the Pacific is to be the scene of the next great world catastrophe, the fatalistic belief that conflict between the white and the yellow race is predestined, are really expressions of a sense of a deep, underlying cleft that makes mutual understanding impossible. But instead of trying to lessen the cleft by effort to understand each other, we talk about an irrepressible conflict of forces beyond human control, or else about the competition for control of the natural resources of China and the tropics. I would not minimize the danger in this competition, but it is ridiculous to suppose that it is so great as to make the Pacific the scene of an inevitable war. If we succeed in really understanding each other, some way of cooperation for common ends can be found. If we neglect the part played by fundamental misunderstandings in developing an atmosphere of combustion, any devices that are hit upon for lessening economic friction are likely to turn out so superficial that sooner or later they will break down. One reason why misunderstanding is so dangerous is that peoples like persons tend to judge one another on the basis of their own habits of thought and feeling. Mr. Wells recently pointed out a specific instance. He said that the Japanese, because of their docility and obedience, tend to overestimate the power of the British government to regulate the sentiments and acts of the English people, while the English, because of contrary habits, tend to exaggerate the control that Japanese popular sentiment has upon the ruling class in Japan. The practical application he made bears upon the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. The Japanese tend to overlook the fact that the Alliance might break down under strain because of pressure of popular sentiment, which would make the government unable to carry it into effect in case of Japanese trouble with the United States. The English, on the other hand, overlook the danger of the Alliance, because they imagine that in a crisis the Japanese governing class would be amenable to an alert and intelligent public opinion. It would be easy to fill pages with instances of just such misunderstandings due to imputing to another people the motives and aims that we should have if we performed the act that the other people has performed. Japanese diplomacy, for example, is centralized, almost dictated, from Tokyo. Ours is comparatively loose. If, accordingly, an American consul in the Orient does an act—if only making a speech—more or less on his own, it is natural for Japanese to assume that he is deliberately acting upon orders from Washington in pursuance of some national policy. Americans, on the other hand, are likely to overlook the compactness and continuity of Japanese diplomacy. Or, when they become aware of some objectionable result of diplomacy, they regard it as a sudden and treacherous coup instead of the culmination of a series of steps, which from the Japanese point of view have been already accepted and sanctioned, if only tacitly. Then the Japanese are perplexed in their turn. Such incidents and others that might be mentioned seem trivial, taken one by one. But the total effect is by no means a trivial detail. The net result is mutual distrust, suspicion, dread. Episodes of this kind illustrate the importance of a better understanding by each nation of the psychology of other nations. The physical means of intercourse between nations by means of trade, mails and cables have got far ahead of the agencies of psychological and moral intercourse. After thousands of years of isolation, the East and the West have been thrown into intimate political and commercial contact. During the period of separation each side of the globe has developed its own peculiar ways of thinking and feeling. It is no wonder that under such circumstances the contact of East and West is so largely materialistic, economic. It is an accident, a by-product of the invention of steam and electric machinery, and, like any accident, it may turn out a catastrophe. There are many questions of a directly practical nature that cannot be understood or properly handled unless the larger background be taken into account. Why are the Chinese so unperturbed by circumstances that appear to a foreigner to menace their country with national extinction? How can they remain so calm when their country is divided within and threatened from without? Is their attitude one of callous indifference, of stupid ignorance? Or is it a sign of faith in deep-seated realities that western peoples neglect in their hurry to get results? So far as diplomatic negotiations, including those of the Washington Conference, are concerned, does the Chinese policy of watchful waiting—with more waiting than watchfulness from a western point of view—imply indifference to their fate or weakness that makes them unable to cope with it? Or is it evidence that they are banking upon the operation of slow-moving forces that in the end will bring things their way? Surely the right answer to such questions is at least of equal importance with the particular decisions of the Conference. In the long run it is more important; for it will control the way in which the decisions work out. Again there is the question of China's long and obstinate resistance to modem methods of industry, to machinery, railways and large scale production and her disinclination to open up her country except because of pressure from a foreign power. This refusal, taken in connection with the desire of foreign nationals to utilize the natural resources of China and to find markets among her teeming millions, is the source of many of China's most acute difficulties. A natural question arises: Why hasn't China taken the lead in developing her own resources? Why hasn't she gone ahead much as the United States did, borrowing foreign capital, but keeping political and, in the main, economic control in her own hands? Is her course stupid inertia, a dull, obstinate clinging to the old just because it is old? Or does it show something more profound, a wise, even if largely unconscious, aversion to admitting forces that are hostile to the whole spirit of her civilization? The right answer to these questions makes a great difference in the treatment of many concrete practical problems. If the course of China is blind and inert, there is much to be said for a combination of nations, a kind of economic-political consortium, which will force modern industrialism upon China, overcoming her obstinacy for her own good, not allowing sentimental considerations to stand too much in the way. But if there is something deeply worth while in Chinese culture, and if industrialism as it exists in the western world is a menace to what is deepest and best in Chinese culture, then the practical answer is quite different. Perhaps there will come a time when historians will say that the course of China gave evidence of a profound instinct. Perhaps they will say it was better for the world and for China that she resisted the introduction of western, machine-made industrialism until the world and she herself were able to control its workings. If so, the entanglements and perplexities into which China has temporarily got will not be too great a price to pay for the result finally attained. Only those who are completely satisfied with the workings of the present capitalistic system can dogmatically deny this possibility. It is much easier to raise these questions than to answer them. But a knowledge of Chinese civilization and of the philosophy of life expressed in it at least makes the questions more real and more pertinent. Two great philosophies of life are intimately connected with the Chinese attitude toward political and social issues—those of Laotze and Confucius. Perhaps a third should be added—that of Buddha. But the latter was not indigenous, and the first two were. Though no one can deny the immense stimulus to Chinese art and thought that came with the introduction of Buddhism from India, yet in the end its influence seems to have een transformed by Taoism and Confucianism. The teaching of Laotze did not become classic and official in the way in which that of the Confucian school did. Yet one obtains a strong impression that fundamentally its influence upon the people is greater than that of Confucianism, since it colored the way in which Confucianism was received. This is no place for a technical exposition of the teaching of Laotze, the Old Master. Nor is it important for our purpose. The important thing is the doctrine of the superiority of nature to man, and the conclusion drawn, namely, the doctrine of non-doing. For active doing and striving are likely to be only an interference with nature. The idea of non-doing can hardly be stated and explained; it can only be felt. It is something more than mere inactivity; it is a kind of rule of moral doing, a doctrine of active patience, endurance, persistence while nature has time to do her work. Conquering by yielding is its motto. The workings of nature will in time bring to naught the artificial fussings and fumings of man. Give enough rope to the haughty and ambitious, and in the end they will surely be hung in the artificial entanglements they have themselves evolved. There is nothing exclusively Chinese in this point of view. But no other people has become so saturated with its consequences. It is at the root of their laissez-faire, contented, tolerant, pacific, humorous and good-humored attitude toward life. It is also at the root of their fatalism. The teachings of Laotze have been influential because they expressed something congenial to Chinese temperament and habits of life. China is agrarian, agricultural; everybody knows that fact. But while we know it, we forget how long and how stable is their agriculture. The title of a book by an American agriculturist, Farmers of Forty Centuries, is infinitely significant when we reflect upon it. Other peoples have been farmers. But by their methods they have exhausted the soil and gone down, or they have turned to other occupations, which have supplanted farming in importance. But the Chinese have gone on tilling, tilling, tilling, even, as in north China, against great odds; and their soil is still productive, as productive, probably, as ever it was. This is an unparalleled human achievement. It helps explain the conservatism of the Chinese, their laissez-faire reverence for nature and their contempt for hurried and artificial devices of man’s contriving. Their minds are as steeped in contact with natural processes as their bodies are apt for agricultural work. They are conservative because for thousands of years they have been conserving the resources of nature, nursing, preserving, patiently, obstinately. While western peoples have attacked, exploited and in the end wasted the soil, they have conserved it. The results are engraved upon both Chinese and western psychologies. The Chinese have learned to wait for the fruition of slow natural processes. They cannot be hustled because in their mode of life nature cannot be hustled. Why be in a hurry when hurry only means vexation for yourself and either accomplishes nothing in nature or else interferes with its processes and so hinders the natural harvest? It is not meant that there is nothing but good in this attitude. Virtues and defects, excellencies and weaknesses go together. Western fatalism takes the form of believing that, since what is going to happen will happen, we might in the meantime as well » go our own way. It is like the fatalism of soldiers in the trenches. Oriental fatalism is directed upon the present rather than upon the future. Why do anything, why try, why put forth energy to change conditions? Non-doing runs easily into passive submission, conservation into stubborn attachment to habitudes so fixed as to be 'natural', into dread and dislike of change. But it is meant that the Chinese philosophy of life embodies a profoundly valuable contribution to human culture and one of which a hurried, impatient, over-busied and anxious West is infinitely in need. It is also meant—and this will appear to be the more 'practical' point—that this philosophy of life is so ingrained in the Chinese people that we cannot understand their way of dealing with political and social problems unless we take it into account. And if we do not understand it, we shall not be able to deal with them, in either politics or business, intelligently and successfully. To attain success, to achieve anything worth while in our relations with the Chinese we have to adopt enough of their own point of view to recognize the importance of time. We must give them time and then more time; we must take time ourselves while we give them time. The teachings of Laotze spring from the depths of Chinese life and in turn they have influenced that life. Much of the actual effect, as it comes home to the individual farmer, has no connection with the general theory. As a philosophy in the abstract, the farmer would not recognize or understand it. It is associated for him with a mass of superstitions and geomantic practices. Yet even the superstitions are bound up with a general attitude toward nature. The most widely influential custom is that called Feng-shui, literally translated, 'wind-water'. The belief in Feng-shui is a belief in certain mystical influences connected with the land. Upon the propitious working of these forces depends the prosperity of the dead, the ancestral spirits, and of the living family. These forces are easily disturbed and their equilibrium and benign operation interfered with. This belief was an earlier obstacle to the introduction of railways and it is still a mighty obstacle in the way of opening new mines, and, in general, of introducing new industrial forces. It is easy to dismiss the whole belief as a gross superstition, which is degrading intellectually as well as inimical to progress. But it is also easy to rationalize the doctrine. Then one would see in it a belief that the land and its energies belong to the whole succession of human beings, past generations and future. The present generation is a trustee of the family and race, of ancestry and posterity. The exploitation of the land must therefore be regulated in the interest of the whole succession. This rationalization is as extreme in one direction as the view that the Chinese system of geomancy is a degrading superstition is in the other. But the doctrine of Feng-shui is at least a remarkable exhibition of piety toward nature and it has been a power for conservation as well as for conservatism. The general point of view of Confucianism is the opposite of that of Taoism. It magnifies the importance of art, of culture, of humanity, of learning and moral effort. Naturally, therefore, this doctrine influenced the scholars and upper classes much as Taoism spread among the people. Yet in many respects the actual effect of Confucianism has been like that of Taoism. In inculcating reverence for the classic literature of the past as the well- spring of wisdom, it supplied intellectual reasons for conservatism. In exalting moral and intellectual, as superior to physical, power, it taught patient disregard for display of military and political force, which is sure, in the end, to be brought to naught by reason. It created that extraordinary reverence for the teacher, that conviction of his abiding influence upon the life as well as the learning of pupils, which is so remarkable a trait of Chinese life, and which helps to explain the tendency of the Chinese to rely upon pacific reason rather than upon brawling force for settlement of troubles. Is there any other people that has persistently believed that the influence of the teacher is in the end the most powerful of all social forces? What other nations are there whose heroes are moral teachers rather than revealers of supernatural affairs, priests, generals, statesmen? Though Confucianism has had its especial career among the upper and official classes, yet its net effect has merged with the influence of Laotze to create a definite contempt for politics and an aversion to government as the West understands the term. To the Taoist, government is unnatural, an interference by men with the orderly operations of nature. The emperors, even the alien Tartars and Manchus, had to bow to this conviction. They got around the people by adopting their belief, by giving the emperor a mystic significance. He was the agent of the people in reverencing Heaven. The emperor did not govern. He ruled by not governing, by not interfering with the real government, the customs of the people, which were so immemorial and so interwoven in agriculture with the operations of nature that they themselves were like the workings of nature. Tribute paid him was not so much political taxation as an expression of loyalty to the natural and moral forces that he embodied. If nature failed to function, if famines and floods recurred, if his demands became extortionate and his officers ceased to be fathers and mothers of the people, these were signs that he no longer represented Heaven. Then the people became, pending the restoration of righteous and benevolent order, the representatives of Heaven. According to Mencius (who emphasized this more democratic side of Confucianism) the people under such circumstances had not only the right but the duty of deposing the ruling house. In putting down, largely in western terms, these suggestions about the philosophy of the Chinese, one is painfully conscious of their inadequacy. But even so, they show why the Chinese maintain such confidence in the outcome of events, in spite of so much that is discouraging. China has survived many such periods. But after a while the civil power, that is, the moral and intellectual, has reasserted itself, and the stable industry of the people has again become dominant. Even now, in spite of conditions that would throw any western state into chaos, there is steady progress among the people. In her external relations, China undoubtedly faces a new situation. It is not safe to argue that, because she has always conquered her conquerors before, she is certain to do so this time. Her conquerors before were her inferiors in everything but military power and skill. Now she deals with peoples who are her superiors in natural science and in its applications to industry and commerce. Conquest of China by economic penetration that will reduce her population to a proletariat working for foreign capitalists backed by superior military resources, is a very different thing from direct military subjugation. Yet the reasons for China's historic confidence are still not wholly shaken. It is a common saying that China manages her international relations on the basis of an old maxim about playing the barbarians off against one another. This fact sometimes inspires a frantic appeal for all foreign nations to get together and impose their unified will upon China. Propagandists for a foreign nation often bid Americans beware of expressions of Chinese regard for the United States. They say these are only another instance of a policy based on the old maxim; and that, if it succeeds, China with a bland smile will retire again into herself and forget her affection for the United States. This argument, taken at its worst, suggests the difficulty in the way of forming a stable combination among the Powers on the basis of material interests. It indicates that the only lasting union of Powers with respect to China must be formed upon a moral basis. A cut-throat union against China will in time bring about a cut-throat policy of the nations in the union toward one another. If the policy is tried, and, as a result of struggle among the nations, China regains her own, she will be entitled to smile at one more proof of the superiority of moral to material forces. Finally, an understanding of the Chinese philosophy of life is not only essential to an intelligent treatment of Chinese problems, but it is of immense value to other nations. Not China alone but the world is in transition and liquidation. Psychologists talk about 'projection'. Persons who are irritated in themselves are always irritated about others. The principle applies in social psychology. Nations are now 'projecting' their own troubles and uncertainty upon China. The result may easily be rash and inconsiderate action. An adoption of Chinese calm and patience, a willingness to take only the steps, like disarmament and abolition of special privileges, which are immediately necessary, and to wait till time has adjusted the present troubled condition, would have a wonderfully healing effect. For it is not true that Chinese difficulties have suddenly become a menace to the world's peace and prosperity. It is only true that western nations are in danger of condensing their own troubles and unloading them upon China. The philosophy of the East was never more needed by the West than in the present crisis. |
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Cited by (1)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2012 | Ethik-Zentrum Universität Zürich | Organisation / EZ |
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