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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
From the fraught world of geopolitics to business and the academy, it’s more vital than ever that Westerners and East Asians understand how each other thinks. As Jin Li shows in this groundbreaking work, the differences run deep. Li explores the philosophical origins of the concept of self in both cultures and synthesizes her findings with cutting-edge psychological research to reveal a fundamental contrast.
Westerners tend to think of the self as being, as a stable entity fixed in time and place. East Asians think of the self as relational and embedded in a process of becoming. The differences show in our intellectual traditions, our vocabulary, and our grammar. They are even apparent in our politics: the West is more interested in individual rights and East Asians in collective wellbeing. Deepening global exchanges may lead to some blurring and even integration of these cultural tendencies, but research suggests that the basic self-models, rooted in long-standing philosophies, are likely to endure.
The Self in the West and East Asia is an enriching and enlightening account of a crucial subject at a time when relations between East and West have moved center-stage in international affairs.
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Seitenzahl: 819
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Notes
Abbreviations
1 To Be or Not to Be: That is a Strange Question
Bewilderment of German
Lost in an English fog of to be
The Western world standing on sein and to be
The East Asian world entangled with becoming
A book on self in two disciplines and two sets of cultures
Notes
2 The Western Essential Self and the East Asian Particular Self
The theorized self in the West
The Western essential self
The East Asian particular self
Notes
3 The Western Bounded Self and the East Asian Flexible Self
The Western bounded self
The East Asian flexible self
Notes
4 The Western Fixed Self and the East Asian Malleable Self
The Western fixed self
The East Asian malleable self
Notes
5 The Western Linear Self and the East Asian Interrelational Self
The Western linear self
The East Asian interrelational self
Notes
6 The Western Rights-Bearing Self and the East Asian Role-Embodying Self
The Western rights-bearing self
The East Asian role-embodying self
Notes
7 The Western Impersonalizing Self and the East Asian Personalizing Self
Nature of the previous five-sided Western self
The Western impersonalizing self
The East Asian personalizing self
Notes
8 The Western Promotional Self and the East Asian Effacing Self
The Western promotional self
The Western self in a nutshell
The East Asian effacing self
The East Asian self in a nutshell
Notes
9 Two Selves within Each Culture, Possible Integration, and Challenges
Both selves within each culture
Cost of extremity
Possible integration and potential challenges
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Abbreviations
Begin Reading
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1
French window
Figure 5.2a
Chinese window patterns
Figure 5.2b
Chinese decorative border pattern
Figure 5.2c
Japanese decorative patterns
Figure 5.2d
Korean decorative pattern
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1
Five kinds of mourning attire and nine-level paternal clanship
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1
Neverfull cup
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Dedication
To Howard Gardner, a trailblazing and synthesizing mentor
The Self in the West and East Asia
Being or Becoming
Jin Li
polity
Copyright © Jin Li 2024
The right of Jin Li to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6137-7
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023923068
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Preface
The East Asian self and the Western self in philosophy and psychology – look again? This was the question I muttered to myself when, in 2015, I received the “task” of working on the theme “the authentic self and the relational self.” This topic was one of the initial themes that Nicolas Berggruen established for his new innovative and impactful think-tank – the Berggruen Institute (BI).1 Under the umbrella of the BI, there were two foci, the second of which is the Berggruen Philosophy and Culture Center, from which I received an invitation.
I had serious doubts about whether I could add anything to this subject area. To be sure, the human self is a vast topic, but it has already been addressed by many disciplines, with some, such as psychology, literature, and art, focusing centrally on it. This intense and unabating human self-examination dates back to the dawn of civilization. It is conceivable that every aspect had been studied; perhaps there was no furrow left to plow. I thought I would be a fool to take on this treasure-hunt in such a well-scavenged ocean; it was bound to be fruitless. My immediate reaction was to say no.
Furthermore, there was this lurking feeling that BI had made a mistake in asking me to do this work, for I am not known as a scholar of social psychology,2 a branch of psychology that targets the self as one of its core research topics. However, I was told that, no, they had not made a mistake. Their reason was that I had advanced a theoretical perspective on learning in these two cultures in my 2012 book Cultural Foundations of Learning: East and West. In light of the mounting empirical evidence, I had traced the respective philosophical origins of learning and argued that learning means different things to people across different cultures despite a universal human capacity to learn. Whereas learning in the West is more of a cognitive/intellectual pursuit, in East Asia it is more a process of social and moral self-cultivation. The self in East Asia is unequivocally as central as the self in the West, but it develops and functions differently. Yet, few scholars have looked at the two kinds of self side by side, purposefully linking them to their respective philosophies. BI asked me to try to do this, albeit agreeing that it was a tall order. I could not come up with a reason to refuse.
Subsequently, I was honored to receive a two-year Berggruen Fellowship to embark on this journey. I took the topic, yes, only the topic, to the place I call “scholarly paradise” – the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University. I began focused reading on Western and Chinese philosophy and other related literature, interacting with six other BI Fellows.3 The first year of the Fellowship (2015–16) concluded with a 100-page single-spaced outline of the book. For the second year, I went to Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University, Beijing. There, I engaged with philosophers who study Chinese philosophy in greater depth, while teaching the inaugural class of Schwarzman scholars. To me, these two years resembled the Greek Lyceum (334–86 BCE) and the Chinese Jixia Academy (稷下學宮 ca. 375–225 BCE), where a truly free but intense exploratory spirit roamed.
When I returned to the United States, I wrote only the introductory chapter, but a longer outline. The remaining chapters took much longer simply because philosophy and psychology are large, ever-growing fields. Adding the two sets of cultures further magnified the scope. Frequently, when I encountered an impasse, I needed a pause to forage into more specific philosophical debates and psychological research. This back-and-forth process helped me put previously discrete and newly emerging parts into a whole that I hope makes sense to the reader.
I must say that this book is the most challenging intellectual work I have ever attempted. I learned and gained understanding that I had not previously imagined. I could not have written this book if I hadn’t lucked out with so many great thinkers and mentors. First, I am forever grateful to my doctoral mentors Howard Gardner and the late Kurt Fischer for their lasting and unwavering guidance and confidence in me. Howard offered many pieces of advice on the content of the book and also helped me think about the title and the book’s final publication. Meeting and being invited to the Philosophy and Culture Center by Nicolas Berggruen, BI’s chairman and founder, was a highlight in my life. His intellectual vision and leadership are rare in our time. I have not seen greater excitement and enthusiasm about human ideas that shaped the past, channel the present, and foreshadow the future than what we experienced at BI. Like many others, I am deeply indebted to Nicolas for the opportunity to be part of BI’s inaugural Fellowship Program. BI’s generosity to support my two-year fellowship was essential in launching and completing this book.
Daniel Bell, an esteemed philosopher in Western and Chinese political philosophy, was instrumental in helping to bring my book to fruition. Not only did he play a crucial role in BI’s work, but he also brought together a cadre of scholars to form a Lyceum/Jixia-like study program. Daniel was also a reviewer of my manuscript and offered wise guidance that enhanced the final version. Chenyang Li, also a renowned Confucian philosopher, was so generous in sharing his expertise. My discussion of Confucian harmony in Chapter 5 relies on his treatise of this significant philosophical topic. I further had the good fortune to benefit from David Wong’s very deep analyses of Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist thought to illuminate contemporary issues that challenge us. David also served as a reviewer of my manuscript and provided extremely valuable suggestions that prevented certain misunderstandings and naiveties from lingering in the book. I make a bow to Robin Wang for her immense book Yinyang: The Way of Heaven and Earth in Chinese Thought and Culture. Robin helped me translate the notion of du (度) into the “balancing art.” To Anna Sun, I am indebted for her acumen about Chinese ritual practice at ancestral graves. She traveled with me to my father’s village and observed the ritual sacrifice my kin and I offered to my father’s tomb. Learning from Anna enabled me to delve more deeply into Confucian ritual practice. I thank Stephen Angle for his wonderful book Neo-Confucianism: A Philosophical Introduction (co-authored with Justin Tiwald). Steve enlightened me with extra Neo-Confucian discussions; much of my section on Neo-Confucian philosophy draws on his book. Finally, I benefited greatly from Roger Ames’s writings and personal encouragement. Roger shared with me the Chinese Text Project, a source of Chinese canonical texts with English translations.
I am also grateful to two particular CASBS Fellows. Daniel Rodgers, a distinguished historian from Princeton, shared with me his own writing on how the original solemn expression “all men are created equal” has come to mean what we currently understand. Dan also suggested a number of important books on how the notion of human rights came about. Andrew Chignell, a Kantian philosopher at Princeton, was the one who told me about Charles Taylor’s must-read Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, which became an important source for my own book. Last, but not least, I thank Julian Baggini, philosopher and journalist, who recommended Raymond Martin and John Barresi’s enlightening book The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self: An Intellectual History ofPersonal Identity. This work helped me significantly to synthesize Western philosophy of the self.
My gratitude also extends to Bing Song, BI’s Senior Vice President and Director, Berggruen Institute China Center, for a grant to support the publication of this book. Likewise, I appreciate Brown University’s Faculty Development Fund for my book’s index and website of Chinese texts.
When I was considering publishers for my book, Polity’s commissioning editor Ian Malcolm came highly recommended. I am so glad that I got the recommendation. Ian elicited very informative scholarly reviews of my submitted manuscript, and his professional judgment was behind the eventual title of the book. Ian’s discernment and wit also helped shape the book’s cover design. Polity’s associate editor Ellen MacDonald-Kramer guided me through legal matters, the process of additional funding, and reassurance concerning the quality of all the figures. Sarah Dancy provided thorough copyediting that improved the flow of the text and ensured the accuracy of other technical details. Finally, Maddie Tyler, production editor at Polity, oversaw the remaining steps that resulted in the eventual birth of the book. I realize that writing a draft, although tremendously effortful, is only one part of the process; to turn that draft into a high-quality book requires contributions from many more skilled people. I feel incredibly lucky to have had such a professional team at Polity.
It is my good fortune to have Cong Li, my brother, who is a trained artist. He and his wife Li Dong drew, and gave me permission to use, the complex diagram presented in Chapter 6, “Five Kinds of Mourning Attire and Nine-Level Paternal Clanship.” Their son Kevin Li, currently a college art student in Toronto, offered a few designs for the book’s cover with the images of both Confucius and Socrates against attractive backgrounds. Seeing the rather abstract nature of philosophy and the psychological complexity of this book transformed into visual designs kindled my aspiration for the book’s appeal to a wider audience. I am grateful for their artistic taste. I also thank my brother-in-law Kelin Wang for allowing me to use his exquisite photo of the Neverfull Cup featured in Chapter 8.
Finally, I am thankful to Springer Nature for granting me permission to use the same themes to rewrite the section in Chapter 5, “Elevated interrelational self by ritual propriety,” from my earlier paper: Li, J. “A Life Worth Pursuing: Confucian Ritual Propriety (禮) in Self-cultivation,” in M. A. Peters, T. Besley, and H.-J. Zhang (eds.), Moral Education and the Ethics of Self-Cultivation: Chinese and Western Perspectives, pp. 93–107 (Springer Nature, 2021).
Last and most importantly, my late husband Michael Hench, a dear lifelong friend and companion, was my “in-house” linguistic and literary guide and editor. His humor, songs, and spontaneous recitations of both Western and East Asian literature permeated our dwelling, enabling me to attempt some literary and other art forms in this book. His penchant for literature helped embellish all passages of the book. Whenever I reached an impasse in writing, he never failed, even during his gloomy health challenges, to inspire, delight, and encourage me to persist on the book project. This book owes so much to him.
This book has a separate website for all Chinese references, text, and weblinks: https://sites.brown.edu/self-in-west-east-asia-chinese-references-text/wp-admin/index.php?page=msreader.php.
Notes
1.
https://berggruen.org
: a global network of thinkers navigating change through ideas.
2.
I am a developmental psychologist by training.
3.
I was incredibly lucky to have spent a year with great scholars, BI inaugural Fellows Daniel Bell, Chenyang Li, Anna Sun, David Wong, Rajeev Bhargava, and Yi-Huah Jiang at CASBS; and another year with Roger Ames and Stephen Angle, among others, at the Tsinghua University. We held intellectually stimulating workshops, meetings, and discussions from which I benefited tremendously. The breadth and depth of their thinking continue to inspire me. There were several dozen other CASBS Fellows with whom I regularly interacted. They, too, provided extraordinary intellectual stimulation to help me refine my book project.
Abbreviations
CASBS
Center for the Study in Behavioral Science
CCTV
China Central Television
CHCs
Confucian-heritage cultures
CTM
Chinese traditional medicine
EEG
electroencephalogram
FAE
fundamental attribution error
FP
filial piety
IH
intellectual humility
IQ
intelligence quotient
MPFC
medial prefrontal cortex
PE
preschool education
PRIE
Protection of the Rights and Interests of the Elderly
RBRs
role-based rights
RP
ritual propriety
SDT
self-determination theory
STEM
science, technology, engineering, and math
vMPFC
ventral medial prefrontal cortex
WHCs
Western-heritage cultures
1TO BE OR NOT TO BE: THAT IS A STRANGE QUESTION
China’s Cultural Revolution (1966–76) was, as officially condemned, a self-inflicted political, social, cultural “calamity of 10 years” (十年浩劫), not just to the country but to virtually every individual. Like millions of unlucky young children, the ten years of revolution that I endured were from age ten to age twenty, a period of human development treasured as golden and irreplaceable. But there was light at the end of the tunnel. Although still hopelessly stuck in the countryside to continue our re-education – as dictated by Mao Zedong’s grand design to yank out our bourgeois book knowledge so as to shovel into us “real” knowledge from farming labor1 – the mass of “re-educated youth” was allowed to take the first college entrance examination (known as gaokao since), thanks to China’s new leadership. Like buying a lottery ticket, the odds were unnervingly slim.2 But in the end, I actually passed. Elatedly, I enrolled in college. No doubt, that was what the Chinese would call heavenly luck. Indeed, it felt like being liberated from hell and ascending to heaven.
I was placed to study German.3 I hadn’t the faintest idea of what that language was about. But I knew that it was a Western language of importance, as we were told, because it was Marx’s native tongue, so I’d better learn it well! Feeling extremely blessed, I began learning this European language. It was such an eye-opening and life-altering experience that I have come to call it “my gaze and gate into the West.”
That’s right: in my humble understanding now (but not then), one’s first encounter with a foreign culture is through its language. Then, if one survives that encounter and doesn’t abandon one’s exploration, the initial glance becomes a gaze, and eventually an entrée into that culture. A language embeds and weaves into its cultural fabric not just the obvious tangible things in its milieu, but the intangible, the more fundamental, as the particular construal of their world. Even Nietzsche, the Western philosophical rebel, remarked:
The strange family resemblance of all Indian, Greek, and German philosophizing is explained easily enough. Where there is an affinity of languages, it cannot fail, owing to the common philosophy of grammar – I mean owing to the unconscious domination and guidance by similar grammatical functions – that everything is prepared at the outset for a similar development and sequence of philosophical systems; just as the way seems barred against certain other possibilities of world-interpretation.4
In other words, different human languages reveal different philosophical outlooks of their cultures.
Bewilderment of German
German is a tough language, even for non-Germanic Westerners. I do not know how other European native speakers deal with German, but native English speakers generally find German grammar, particularly the four cases along with their endless conjugational and combinatorial variations, cumbersome if not mentally torturous. For us, it felt like trying to get through a brick wall. Chinese, regardless of dialect, is spared all the linguistic morphology. I remember once saying to myself: “Had I known what Marx’s native tongue entailed, I would have not so heartily embraced it.” However, we had no choice but to forge ahead. Facing this daunting learning task, we, the toughened but lucky Chinese students emerging from the revolutionary crucible, did not back down but buckled down. We managed to absorb all the hard complexities through endless drilling until we could get the forms right.
But then we encountered a stumbling block: the verb sein. This verb is similar to the English infinitive to be. To Western language speakers, this verb is as common as eye-blinking. We learned that one cannot make any sentence in any Western language without inserting a verb, by formal linguistic definition, not communication with loose omissions but buttressed by contextual clues. Even when there is no real need for the verb’s meaning, speakers still must use a verb (as a filler). But Chinese has none of this. For example, in Chinese we say “我很高興” – literally “I very happy” – but in English the correct way to say this is “I am happy” (i.e., by inserting the verb am), or “Ich bin sehr glücklich” in German.
The conjugated forms of sein, ich bin (er ist, sie ist, wir sind …) or I am (he is, she is, we are …) in English are necessary to construct “ich bin sehr glücklich” or “I am very happy.” So sein/be is just simple everyday speaking in the Western world. It is so basic that hardly anyone would think twice about it until we (from a different world) had to learn how to speak it, trying to do surgery to our minds that were accustomed to “I very happy.” To the Chinese mind, all this need for a verb is utterly unnecessary. “Ich sehr glücklich” and “I very happy” would suffice and is economical.
In our struggles to understand sein, we hit a bigger roadblock, and this time it was philosophical. The verb sein is now turned into a noun, so Sein.5 As if this was not enough, every German noun denoting things tangible or intangible has one of the three definite articles, unlike the much simpler the in English: das, der, die denoting neutral, masculine, and feminine, respectively. And these are more or less arbitrarily assigned, thus requiring learning by rote. Any verb turned into a noun automatically gets the neutral article das. So das Sein. Think about it. If our minds could be retrained to use the filler verb sein, what the heck is das Sein?
In hindsight, I must marvel at German ancestors for first coming up with such purely abstract ideas. Even more remarkable is the fact that they succeeded in injecting these ideas into their language and managed to make that a part of everyone’s language instinct.6 I am stunned!
What is das Sein? According to Saussure’s linguistic theory,7 even if a noun does not have a referent (usually a tangible thing, e.g., table), it is still a sign, a “signifier” denoting a concept or an idea, called “the signified.” What does das Sein signify that we ought to be able to sense if not see and imagine? When we first encountered this linguistic transformation, we were baffled. At that time, my peers and I could not understand why the Germans feel a need to use this strange word. The “signified” felt hollow. But why would the Germans do that routinely with their verbs? It seems that the more abstract a given verb is, the more often it is turned into a noun, as if they are in love with playing empty linguistic games!
Lost in an English fog ofto be
As we lost our way in the fog (如墜五裏雲霧), things got worse. Our fellow English peers were stumbling over similar things, although they were perhaps in less agony. One morning, as I was doing my reading-aloud routine,8 I passed by an English student who was reciting aloud the famous Shakespearean line in Hamlet’s soliloquy: “To be or not to be, that is the question.” I paused to try to process what I had just heard. I thought the student was speaking gibberish, because he was reciting this phrase again and again trying to make it sound right. I remember thinking to myself, “What kind a question is that? THE question? How come there is no subject, who is to be or not to be? To be or not to be with whom, where, doing what? How strange to pose this incomplete thought as a question to oneself or anyone else!” Endless questions swarmed through my brain.
I became curious about how this famous Shakespearean phrase/question has been translated into Chinese. I found some twenty translations of Hamlet, with that by Zhilin Bian (卞之琳) regarded as the best. These bilingual literary figures translated the phrase, with a few variations, as: “To exist after death or not to exist”; “To exist or to be destroyed”; and “To continue to live or not to live.”9
I do not need to convince English readers familiar with Shakespeare that none of these translations captures the English phrase made up simply by the verb to be and its negation. These sophisticated and highly esteemed translators were faced with an impossible task: they could not really find the linguistic match of the full meaning of the original terse phrase. There is no choice but to make it much less abstract, or, shall we say, much more ontologically particular. They had to do what good literature rarely does: to concretize, namely, to unpack, the expression for their Chinese readers. At least this would allow them a chance to comprehend some meaning of Hamlet’s utterance. It was necessary to add more Chinese words to the bare English phrase. However, by doing so, the abstract nature of the verb to be is distorted and the exquisite Shakespearean expression vanishes.
The Western world standing onseinandto be
To be sure, the above linguistic differences are routine in translations. After all, translation is notoriously imprecise between any two languages. In fact, there are no matching “signifiers” for the “signified,” that is, the non-object concepts, in any two random languages. Experts in the translation profession discuss various principles and trade-offs that any translator needs to observe to achieve a better equivalence.10 In translation from Western languages to Chinese, there are also some generally agreed-upon standards. One is fidelity.11 However, for literary and other challenging works, fidelity remains an unfulfilled desire rather than a reality. So what’s all the fuss about here?
There is indeed a big fuss here. The particular issue with the verb to be addressed above is not just a matter of routine translation between any two languages, but that between English and Chinese. Actually, translation is not what concerns us here, but rather the idea that the most simple and prevalent English verb to be in that Shakespearean phrase gets nowhere when translated into Chinese. So it is worth asking what the lost English meanings are that cannot be retained in Chinese translation. Or, why it is so hard to keep the translation as bare, abstract, or, shall I say, enigmatically aloof, as the English. Can to be ever be transmogrified in Chinese as it is in English? These questions are easy and fun to ask, but they are also mischievous. Even just hearing these questions in my own head feels like a crack opening up into a vast unknown realm.
This translation problem has been consuming me for several decades, ever since I began learning German. Each time these questions reverberate in my mind, they lure me into probing more deeply and broadly. After much contemplation, I have finally realized that be, saturated as it is in English expressions, is just the same as sein, and being is also, to be turned into a noun just like das Sein. However, these two linguistic forms are not isolated but echoed by all other Western languages, regardless of their regional variations. This is like a Chomskyan universal grammar,12 except this time it is Western languages’ shared love for Sein and being. Westerners have worked together throughout history to produce and refine their languages to favor this kind of transcendental, universally imbuing way of parsing the world. “Hollow” as non-Westerners may find it, it is the way Westerners see the world.
A tongue spoken is a world construed. In all of this, an overarching philosophy has also been established that serves to ensure the perpetuation of the construal. Such a philosophy then becomes the originator, producer, and guardian of the culture’s psychological reality.13 Thus, the Western world is built and stands on Seins and beings without which it would, from my perspective, be difficult to understand that world. Sein/being is so fundamental a building block that I might as well call it the Western cultural DNA. And, like biological DNA, this cultural DNA may hold the key for me to try to fathom their world.
The physical world asSein/being
Two interlocking and mutually enforcing components of reality support this DNA idea: the physical world and humans as Seins/beings. First, the physical world is viewed as consisting of elemental but discrete parts, which are said to be ontological beings. As such, they are material substances (e.g., rocks) that exist, having fixed spatial locations. If material substances/beings move (e.g., stars), then their movements must follow laws in the universe that can be discovered. Early on, Greek philosophers engaged in their initial exploration of this view. They debated about what the physical world consists of and how things behave in it. Their inquiry was framed by the assumption that the world must be made of something or some things. Their questions determined the course of their inquiry. Consequently, they sought to find out about either the one being (something) or multiple beings (some things) that make up the physical universe. Despite differing foci and arguments, noted Greek philosophers paid attention to, contemplated, and advanced their ideas about the elemental and discrete compositional being(s) of the world (e.g., earth, air, water, fire, and their divisible components).
The Western ancient thinking giants, Pythagoras (ca. 570–ca. 490 BCE), Socrates (469–399 BCE), Plato (428–348 BCE), and Aristotle (384–322 BCE) further constructed their theories about the physical world. Pythagoras was fascinated by many visible and invisible things, and his discovery of mathematics rested on his keen observations of objects, their relations, and movements. Socrates pondered over true knowledge as abstract forms (ideas) that only manifest as concrete objects and concepts that humans sense.14 Aristotle also proposed the idea of aether, which he called a “divine substance” that makes up heavenly spheres like stars and planets to add to Empedocles’ other elements (i.e., earth, water, air, and fire). Aristotle argued that humans can get the essence of beings from perceiving particular things. Their differences aside, all of these thinkers still constructed their theories of knowledge (i.e., epistemology) by parsing the physical world as consisting of Seins/beings.
Greek philosophy has enjoyed lasting influence on the Western worldview. The whole of scientific or natural philosophy, the backbone of Western civilization, has been conceptualized on the notion that the physical world is knowable as made of discrete beings. Minuscule particles/beings (e.g., electrons and neutrons) are believed to underlie the ultimate universe. The predominant scientific method remains based on the belief that, by isolating a single variable, a being, from other variables/beings in a system at a time (e.g., a cell), the single being can be understood. Then being by being, the whole system under investigation will ultimately be revealed. Reductionism is the term used to describe the gist of this Western scientific approach. All natural sciences in the West have relied on it to produce scientific knowledge. Without this basic Sein/being view of the world, science in the West would not exist, although current science may modify this view.15
Humans asSeins/beings
Beyond the physical world, humans are also regarded as Seins/beings. To begin with, humans are called human beings. This view began at least with Aristotle, if not earlier. In the Categories, Aristotle defined human beings by posing his primary, ontological question “What is a man?”16 Again, the question that one asks is the starting point of one’s inquiry, and thus the ensuing intellectual focus is shaped and directed by the framing of the question. Aristotle could have asked, for example, “How does a man grow from infancy to adulthood?” “Does an infant grow by him-/herself or does he/she require others’ nurturance?” But Aristotle did not ask such questions that a mother in either ancient or current times would ask. Instead, he asked the what-question about a human, a discrete being/existence. The what-question by logic demands a definition to describe the what. So, Aristotle was “trapped” to this being-way of thinking. Roger Ames states:
[Aristotle] must … give an exhaustive description of the “subject,” with his own concrete example of this subject being “the man in the market-place” … One of the commonsense corollaries to an Aristotelian ontology that gives privilege to an isolated, individual subject is to experience the world as being populated by discrete things or objects … And a second corollary to this substance ontology is the assumed doctrine of external relations: that these various objects, each having its own essential integrity, are first-order as discrete things, and any relations that might conjoin them are second-order contingent relations that they subsequently contract … [Aristotelian substance ontology] buys into the notion of simple location and discrete individuality.17
One might think that this was just the ancient Western way of thinking, the world now viewed interconnected and even flat.18 Current global trends and social media are making the world a small village, rendering very few isolated. However, frequent contact with people does not necessarily mean that the way in which humans are defined and viewed in the West has changed fundamentally. After all, throughout human evolution and since the dawn of civilization, all human children have been nurtured by their social world for survival. Even primates and other animals have sophisticated social interactions and rely on them for survival.19
Despite the universal social nature of human lives, central to my discussion here is how different cultures define and regard humans and related consequences. In the West, the overarching and continuously predominant view is that humans are discrete beings, that is, individuals that are bounded by their skin, separate from other human beings. Each individual has his/her own internal characteristics that are regarded as the quality that distinguishes one individual from another.20 The most important consequence of such a view is that the individual is the basic unit in society that is believed to possess his/her own cognitive capacity, moral power, political rights, social privileges, and responsibilities. These rights, entitlements, and priorities are accorded to the individual as a standalone entity with functioning power in human society.21 And this view is fundamentally no different from that of Aristotle as well as the whole cadre of philosophers in concerted thinking who laid down the foundation of Western civilization and have fostered it throughout history.
Furthermore, the Aristotelian ontology is not only not obsolete, but it has become stronger due to two mutually constitutive Western forces. First, democratization along with the promotion of individual rights is spreading across the globe.22 Second, the mechanistic view of discrete beings in science and technology is penetrating ever more profoundly into human lives,23 although such views have been criticized by Heidegger24 and other postmodernist thinkers. As more and more humans discover their special individuality and seek societies that will enable that individuality to flourish, the world becomes increasingly populated by individuals who think, feel, and behave in ways that live up to that ontology.
The East Asian world entangled with becoming
One of the observations made by socially oriented psychologists and anthropologists is that the way cultural values are transmitted and internalized by people is of no import whatsoever in daily life.25 Counter to popular belief, the power of formal education, ideological inculcation of political movements, or government-controlled messages is not nearly as strong as the day-to-day socialization of children on the ground.26 Research inspired by the Vygotskian sociocultural theory shows that the transmission/socialization power of cultural values lies mostly in the developmental process of childrearing at home. Because this process is quotidian at any given moment, but effective over time, the osmotic nature means that most people embedded in this process, even parents, are unaware of it. As such, people rarely question their way of life.27 This is one reason why cultural members are seen as willing executors of “cultural prescriptions” by Richard Shweder, a leading scholar in cultural psychology.28 This process applies to any culture, West and East Asia included.
Thus, to people of Western heritage (I recognize the diversity of the West), the ontological and discrete being-way is very natural; any other way of seeing the world would seem strange. I alluded earlier to my initial questions about Sein/being as feeling like prying open a vast unknown realm. I felt that way because of exactly the same taken-for-granted way of life I came from. The culture in which I grew up does not share Aristotelian ontology. However, that does not mean that a core belief in Aristotelian ontology is in any way a superior cultural achievement in thinking.29 Years of immersing myself in the West has not shaken off what I came with, although I have gained a greater understanding of that vast, previously unfathomable, world.
East Asian becoming
East Asia began contemplating the world with religious awe toward deities and spirits (polytheism and shamanism), much like many early cultures. Two interacting forces were conceptualized that underlay how the world operated: yin and yang.30 The several millennia before Confucius (551–479 BCE) witnessed a continuation and fruition of the yin-yang thinking. During that time, Chinese civilization moved on with agriculture and accumulation of knowledge and technology. Later, tribal warfare and the formation of dynasties developed sophisticated political systems to ensure order.31 Ideas such as sage rulers with virtues, care ethics (for benevolent governing), rituals, music, and art flourished. The yin-yang philosophy became the overarching cosmology that was integrated with subsequent political, social, agricultural, and many other domains of life. The most important view was that humans were an integral part of nature/heaven, the oneness of the two (天人合一). The cosmos is the inexhaustible source of vitality that nurtures all things in the universe. More importantly was the shared view that that source also includes human moral and virtuous development. Confucians clearly articulated that cosmic vitality is the model for humans to emulate in their moral striving. Rulers should do the same to ensure the rule of virtue. At the same time, Laozi (老子 ca. sixth century BCE), known as the founding Daoist philosopher, expressed nature (self-originating 自然) as the fundamental vitality underlying both the natural and the human world. Later, Zhuangzi (莊子 ca. 369–286 BCE) turned the oneness of nature’s Way (天道) and the human Way (人道) into a major philosophical concept.32 As such, taking the cosmic Way as a model for human lives is to stress that the human world shall observe and follow nature’s Way (rather than cracking its code to master/control it).
To be sure, yin-yang thinking is an abstract principle that East Asians believe applies to all aspects of both the natural and the human world. However, it would be erroneous to equate yin-yang thinking to that of Western logical reasoning that rests on deductive logico-mathematical and reductive thinking. Instead, yin-yang thinking is holistic, seeing the world as interconnected in every way and in flux all the time.33 Even humans who are the observers and theorizers of the world are regarded as an indivisible, but irreducible, part of it. Perhaps due to this cosmological perspective, East Asians took a different path, one that led them to perfect their holistic philosophy rather than charting the Western or some other path. This philosophy is so comprehensive and penetrating that its influence is still deeply palpable everywhere in East Asia today.
However, Chinese philosophy took a decisive turn when Confucius appeared on the horizon in response to the crumbling political, social, and moral order of his time (禮崩樂壞). Instead of staying with the Daoist cosmology about nature and human relation to it, Confucius zeroed in on the human Way that drew inspiration from Daoist cosmology. Unlike the question posed by his contemporary Aristotle, “What is a man?”, Confucius and his followers contemplated a very different question: Is a person at birth a full human? Their response is, unsurprisingly, a resounding “no.” Then, their whole thinking turns to what a full human might be or ought to be and how one can get there. Hence, the fundamental question for Confucians is not about what exists (an ontological starting assumption), or whether the human exists at birth, but, given that an infant is born into a human social world, then what? Their follow-up contemplation is geared toward responses to questions such as these: How does one’s life unfold in the social world? How does one achieve one’s goal?34
Humans are not conceptualized as beings each of whom occupies a fixed location in space, but “becomings” with open-ended fields, as Roger Ames described them. They are journeys, and, in Confucian persuasion, it is worthy of these journeys to move toward “full humaneness.” To address the meaning of “full humaneness,” Confucians determined that no human becoming/journey is ever alone, and every human becoming/journey is fundamentally social.35 A human is a small part situated in a much larger web of social relationships. Without care, tender love (慈爱), and guidance of others in one’s most important relationships (i.e., parents or others), no human can flourish. Therefore, “full humaneness” needs to be anchored in human relationality. To parallel the Western ontological emblem “To be or not to be: that is the question,” the East Asian equivalent might therefore be rephrased as: “To become or not to become a full human: that is the question.”
Confucianism became an established political philosophy during the Han dynasty (206 BCE–22 CE) and throughout Chinese history thereafter, gaining much more power. Furthermore, Neo-Confucian thinking during the Song and Ming dynasties (960–1279 and 1368–1644, respectively) influenced Japan, Korea, and Vietnam profoundly as well.36 Beyond the political influence, the Confucian way of life – namely, moral/social self-cultivation – entered East Asian families, communities, and society at large so comprehensively and deeply that the values remain strong to the present time, as documented in empirical research.37
The person I am
I was deeply imprinted in this Confucian (but also Daoist and somewhat Buddhist) cultural ethos, despite suffering some confusion during my tumultuous childhood. Since foraging briefly in the German world, I have had several decades of much greater bicultural and bilingual acculturation in the US. Undoubtedly, the process afforded me an exploratory and expansive experience. However, this process has also been a personal struggle to confront the two cultures’ differing, and often clashing, philosophies, cultural values, and practices. Undeniably, the person I am today has been shaped by those forces. This bumpy personal development has constantly stimulated me to probe and reflect on the fundamental role played by culture in influencing human development.
A book on self in two disciplines and two sets of cultures
This book is an ambitious, perhaps even a foolish, attempt to integrate both Western and East Asian philosophical insights within psychological research to illuminate human lives in these cultures. However, instead of addressing this goal broadly, I chose to focus on the selves that are deeply influenced by each philosophy. Why self? So far, I have not introduced the notion of self directly. I reserve this section to explain why I aim at analyzing the two kinds of culturally shaped self in light of an interdisciplinary synthesis.
Self as both a human endowed capacity and a sociocultural outcome
Humans are endowed with the basic capacity that enables them to be aware of themselves and to develop self-concepts and many facets of self-understanding. From mirror neurons38 to our general mental power, humans have this self-reflective capacity to a higher degree.39 On biological grounds, human infants, compared to primates, engage much earlier in activities that are precursors to their sense of self. For example, while younger infants do not actually recognize themselves in the mirror, by the age of four months, they display behaviors that lead up to this recognition. Between the age of eighteen months and shortly thereafter, they become fully able to do so. Then, when a red spot is put on their nose, pointed at, and the infant is asked “Who is that?” they will answer “Me.”40 After this, a human sense of self blossoms.
As we develop further, the self becomes the overseer of our lives. The capacity to self-reflect allows us not just to recognize ourselves but also to characterize, imagine, judge, discipline, and improve ourselves. As such, no human life is led instinctively or blindly as dictated by sheer biological forces, but, to a large extent, purposefully by ourselves. We can do much to mold our own lives. This is the quintessential human agency.
Importantly, developmental psychology has well documented that the human self does not develop just by oneself, as the individualistic Sein/being as discussed earlier. Quite the contrary, the self is only possible in the social life in which we are embedded. The social is essential to the self. Further, given that the social is inextricably intertwined with the cultural, the human self is an outcome resulting from the interactive process between our natural endowment and our sociocultural development.41
Self in light of philosophy, culture, and empirical research
Philosophy’s importance is epitomized in the statement of the Los Angeles-based Berggruen Institute: “To understand a people, we need to understand their culture; to understand their culture, we need to understand their philosophy.”42 Philosophy here is not limited to the kind of philosophy that academics study formally, but also includes folk philosophy that every culture has. Philosophy focuses on ideas, their delineations, and theories that are a layer deeper than what psychologists often refer to as “cultural values.” The latter draws on the former to form a cultural value/belief system. For example, in recent psychological research, we encounter the East Asian idea of dialectic thinking.43 Admittedly, this is an important East Asian value that underlies much of what people do in life. Nothing is wrong with this common way of conceptual framing to conduct psychological research on dialectic thinking. However, we might ask why East Asians tend to gravitate toward dialectic thinking rather than the linear thinking that may be more common among Western-heritage people? Empirical research that settles for naming dialectic thinking as a value stops short of answering the why-question.
In the West, since ancient times, the self has been the subject of philosophical contemplation. Since the emergence of modern psychology in the late nineteenth century, the self has become a vast topic of research. However, the study of self is not a domain only of philosophy and psychology, but also of other disciplines. Resultantly, there are many theories and empirical studies elucidating the human self and its many intricacies and dynamics.
Because psychology as a new scholarly discipline was developed in the West, most research has been done with Western-heritage people. Consequently, conclusions drawn and theories built about the self also reflect Western philosophy. Moreover, such theories were once regarded as being universal across cultures. Yet, as these theories and empirical paradigms were taken to test non-Western peoples, this assumed universality did not hold. Over the past few decades, new self-theories reflecting the philosophies of diverse cultures have emerged.
As it turns out, how self is conceptualized and how it functions (e.g., forming purpose, judging, planning, and acting) are far from neutral, but are deeply influenced by the philosophy and associated values of one’s culture. Hazel Markus and Shinobu Kitayama, two leading cultural psychologists, used the terms self-construals or self-ways, to refer to how culturally shaped selves function.44 It is not only that one has a sense of self (surely we all do), but how one defines what one’s self is and how one interprets oneself and acts in relation to the rest of the world. The cultural values undergirding self-construals trace back to the culture’s philosophy. Using the earlier example, that East Asians find greater ease with logical inconsistencies and contradictions reflects the philosophy that produces dialectic thinking. This is only a part of a more comprehensive and complex ancient Chinese yin-yang and subsequent Daoist philosophy.
I focus on the selves of the West and of East Asia for several compelling reasons. First, both sets of cultures have comparably long civilizations but diverging philosophies at the outset. Both have significant historical developments that resulted in rich philosophical thinking and intellectual traditions. Second, such intellectual traditions have profound but different influences on the psychology of their respective people. In turn, people think, feel, and behave differently.
Third, over the past few decades, both comparative philosophy and psychology on Western and on East Asian selves have been considerably advanced. For example, in philosophy, scholars have written about the important contrast between the Western and the East Asian conceptualizations of the human person. In the West, a person is defined primarily as an individual, which is readily articulated by Aristotle’s question “What is a man?” as discussed earlier. Again, the way a question is asked directs the way the answer will be given. A logical answer would begin with something like, “A man is a featherless biped that has a head with two eyes, one nose …,” distinguishing a man from other animals. Then perhaps the answer continues with gender, mental, social, moral, political, economic, and other attributes.
Yet, the East Asian conception is, first, based not on a single person but on persons; hence, it is not anchored on the individual but on the relationality between persons. A resultant question may be: “How does a baby grow from infancy to adulthood under the care of their family?” Responses to such a starting question will differ widely from those that Aristotle’s question elicited. Indeed, decades of cross-cultural research on self have conclusively and compellingly demonstrated very large and consistent differences between two types of self: the autonomous as espoused and promoted in the West, and the relational as prioritized and practiced in East Asia.
Unfortunately, it is often the case that few contemporary philosophers draw on psychological research, and the same applies to psychologists who usually do not attend to philosophical insights. Hence, the two fields have remained largely disconnected. The growing scholarship in both philosophy and psychology signals unabating interest in the two kinds of self, highlighting the need to bring the two disciplines together. Yet, surprisingly, I am unaware of any treatise on this synthesis on the self. I hope that this effort will generate new understanding of the human self, bridge cultures, and perhaps even lead to a genuine integration of human wisdom that could help us achieve better harmony in the world.
The book’s guiding questions and approaches
Synthesizing two large disciplines pertaining to two sets of cultures is no small task. Instead of trying to touch on all aspects of the self exhaustively, I sought to highlight major themes by answering three basic questions: (1) What are the key differences in these two different kinds of self? (2) Why are they so different? (3) How do these two types of self function in life? Despite much philosophical writing and empirical research, in my view, many important aspects of the two types of self have yet to be articulated and understood. This is especially true with the portrayal of the East Asian self. Without better articulation, research findings tend to render a skeletal image of the self, leaving out important details.
It is not my goal to provide a historical account of how each kind of self came about in their long traditions. Rather, I pursue the three questions of what, why, and how to integrate the philosophical, the psychological, and the lived selves in these cultures. However, whenever it is necessary and helpful, I will draw on historical accounts and other relevant sources to provide support for my descriptions and analyses.
To respond to the three questions, I pursue also three related goals. First, I explore Western and East Asian philosophical origins. Regarding the latter, I primarily draw on Chinese philosophy, since the two predominant philosophical traditions, Confucianism and Daoism, both originate from China. Although not native to East Asia but from India, Buddhism influences East Asian cultures deeply; therefore I also discuss this. Second, I synthesize empirical research that evinces the self under each culture’s persistent philosophical influence. Third, I draw on personal examples to illustrate my points, but without claiming that these examples are necessarily representative or shed deep light on cross-cultural differences. The first goal is to address my questions on what and why. The second goal is to respond to the how question. The third goal is to give flesh and bone to the more abstract nature of (1) and (2) to descend to the ground-level, real lives.
The trap of broad terms of the West and East Asia and contrastive analysis
A cautionary note on the usage of the terms Western and East Asian seems called for. It is well known that broad terms such as these may meet objections from researchers and readers who emphasize finer variations in each subculture, and for that matter, each small group within a given subculture.45 To be sure, research on diversity within any large or small culture is important. However, I would argue that there are compelling reasons for the persistent usage of these two terms (and other similar terms). First, as discussed earlier, these two sets of cultures started out with very different philosophical questions and assumptions about the world and human lives. Some would go as far as to argue that the civilization blueprints were laid down in the early development of human history.46 Afterwards, different kinds of civilizations were charted, rather like different rivers, diverse paths down through history, resulting in largely non-overlapping philosophical outlooks for life. These significant differences are also reflected in their respective languages, with which I opened this chapter. Western thinking dates back to Greek antiquity through Christian theology to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, modern science, and Romanticism, all the way to liberal democracy in contemporary times.47 This overarching historical development has influenced the West profoundly. Similarly, East Asian thinking dates back to the same time in China, predominantly with Daoist, Confucian, and, later, Buddhist philosophy, which more recently have also been having a deep influence on East Asia.48
Second, scholars in both sets of cultures across intellectual disciplines have persistently been using the two terms along with each set of culture’s basic and shared concepts and lexica to participate in discourses. Certainly, there is increasing recognition of withinculture differences, particularly among Western societies that host diverse ethnic groups. Still, there is no denying that the mainstream cultures are still that, mainstream, holding and practicing Western values politically, religiously, legally, and institutionally. For example, irrespective of which non-mainstream culture one comes from, one still must live under the same rule of law in the West. Likewise, despite centuries-long learning from the West, Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist values are still strongly upheld and adhered to in East Asian countries, regardless of their political systems.49 Third, the two terms are used prevalently in East Asian scholarship. Fourth, these terms denote significant diverse ideas about the world in which we live. These ideas have real life consequences, as detailed in later chapters. Finally, as Rothbaum and Wang explain, examining cultural-level variations is of importance because this level of analysis is designed to lead to an understanding of a middle ground, instead of a highly abstract or fine-grained level.50
A better set of terms might be Western-heritage cultures (WHCs) and Confucian-heritage cultures (CHCs), as they have been used in scholarship.51 WHCs refer to the mainstream cultures of Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand, but not to ethnic diverse groups within those countries that may not endorse WHCs’ values and way of life. Likewise, CHCs refer to cultures in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, but not to their ethnic diverse groups that may not endorse CHCs’ values or ways of life. However, while CHC is a more familiar term, WHC is less so. For clarity and convenience, I use both the West/Western-heritage and WHC as well as East Asia/East Asian and CHC, depending on the context.
Whenever one engages in comparative analysis, one faces a dilemma between one’s hope to distinguish the two sides being compared and one’s need not to overdraw the distinction. Logically, such an intellectual exercise makes this dilemma unavoidable, no matter how much one tries to qualify the degree of comparison. My chosen four-sided comparison is no exception, and I am fully aware of this trap. Since my focus is on the distinctions rather than the possible overlaps between the two sets of cultures, I am likely to be vulnerable to both commission (over-distinguishing) and omission (neglecting possible similarities and diversity within each set of cultures).
