The so-called political reality is the conceptual site that integrates the real order and the actual order in the process of historical interpretation and maintains a distinction. This requires a class of interpreters to fuse the reality they experience into a set of understandings of order through the action of language or symbols. In the ancient Chinese classic texts, the actual order, or "Heavenly Dao", requires a corresponding set of artificial interpretations, in which the interpreter places "people" within the form of order formed by interpretation, thus forming a "humanity" imitating the Heavenly Dao. Therefore, in the ideological world of the ancients, the time of heaven and man actually reflects the relationship between nature, politics and people at a deeper level.
The "Chaos Control" Model and The Uniformization Theory
In History, Landscape, and Fishing Tree, Zhao Tingyang treats the logic of classical Chinese political thought as a model of "chaos control." This model uses the degree of social suffering as a historical assessment criterion, which makes politics directly related to the problem of order in isolation from the demands of values and rights. The logic of "chaos" can become a universally valid method of historical analysis precisely because every political and social state can be judged by the determination of "order" or "disorder".
This way of thinking is actually closely related to the theory of "uniformity" in classical writings. This line of thought can be seen in the primitive Confucians, such as Confucius's emphasis on "not suffering from widowhood but suffering from inequality, and not suffering from poverty but suffering from uneasiness." In Dong Zhongshu, "equalization" established its principles as a political strategy. In the Ming Dynasty, "uniformization" matched the metaphysical principle, and its limits were set to a consistent Taoist system. This makes it possible to assume that both the "chaos control" model and the "equalization" theory together point to some kind of thinking about political reality.
According to Mencius, "The way of Yao Shun, without benevolent government, can not rule the world peacefully." The "Yao Shun Way" described by the ancients is actually an interpretation of political reality, a design of the relationship between "nature-politics-man" on the basis of expressing the insight of the real world. Through a universal image placed in the realm of heaven and earth, the transformation from "Heavenly Way" to "Humanity" is realized. The Zhongyong understands the sincere people who "know the heavens and the earth and cultivate the earth" and "establish the great foundation of the heavens and the earth" as "the great scripture of the world". The meaning is to show that such universal people are not accidental phenomena within history, but human representatives who expound the order of heaven and earth through the field of history. When the philosophers placed such universal images in the realm of heaven and earth, an order of universal humanity was organized in the form of mutual reference between heaven and earth.
"Political reality" is a relationship that is allocated by the interpreter according to the different weight ratios of "natural" and "man-made" for the construction of order, and its value is limited to a function established in the field of "natural-political-human" concepts. Therefore, the main point of the classical "equalization" theory and the "chaos control" model is to devote itself to evaluating whether the current order can be balanced with "political reality".
The conceptual relationship of "nature-politics-man"
In the world of the past, the highest transcendent categories such as "nature" or "heaven" actually meant the overall structure of beings within the realm of reality, which existed only because of its appearance. The reason why such a manifest person does not escape into nothingness is because the framework of the existence of all things points from the very beginning to the pure existence of the plurality of all things, and such pluralism is reflected in the manifestation of many phenomena. Thus, the ancients did not specifically explore the multiple forms at the level of reality, nor did they question the ones who were unified after the phenomena appeared, so they did not replace the real world with the realm of science and religion. The theory of "Taoism" throughout the ages was based on the stability of the inquiry system.
In such a binary interval, there are still many possibilities for interpretation of the real world, and due to the different tendencies of different philosophers, there are often multiple perspectives on the revelation of truth, and such differential interpretations have been passed down through history in the form of scriptural commentaries. Here, the relationship between the Tao and the Sutra depends on the diversity of analogies and interpretations. The Tao points to the structure of truth in the real world; the Sutra is the interpretation of this structure, which is presented through the canonical system, the classical text, and integrates this interpretation into a particular political order.
The plurality of interpretations shows that in the "natural-political-human" relationship, nature and man do not have the same weight as man in shaping the political order. Sometimes, people think that the "Heavenly Dao" has a stronger explanatory power for human society, such as Lao Tzu's philosophy of "human law and earth, earth law and heaven, heaven and earth, heaven and law, and Dao law nature". Xun Zi, on the other hand, advocated a minimal approach to dealing with the influence of the forces of nature on personnel and society, so that "the Tao, the Way of not heaven, the way of non-earth, is why man is the Tao." Thus, in terms of cultural forms alone, it seems that there is no particular model of interpretation that can be used as a strict expression of "the time of heaven and man", but only the multiple structural relations between nature, politics, man and history. Each interpreter describes the events that occur within the political order from a specific historical field, and they do not give the events a conceptual rationality, but use them as materials for the interpretation of political reality.
History serves as the field of interpretation of "political reality"
In history, the conceptual field surrounding political reality has constituted an explanatory cycle between "nature-politics-man". Each interpreter places the understanding of man within his interpretive framework of the way nature works, thus forming the relationship between man and the original natural order, which is the prototype of the so-called political reality.
Confucius once understood the "Tao" as "so that change becomes all things", and also called the interpreter of the "Tao" of all things "the sage", because he can "know the way, adapt to the infinite, and discern the emotional nature of all things". At the same time, Confucius's so-called "Tao" was used to arrange the current order of personnel affairs, and the rule of three generations was the model of the political system he aspired to. Such a cycle of interpretation from the way of nature to the ideal order constitutes the meaning of "political reality". It is neither a natural order interpreted by man nor a political order framed by reality, nor a utopia manifested in the origin or at the end of history, but a historical interpretation that integrates the three in a relevant way.
This means that in the world of the past, only by placing man in the understanding of nature would a set of human orders be formed in concepts. Correspondingly, discussions involving order tend to proceed from nature. "Nature" is at the heart of the order in the form of a divine code, and all things that come from nature are inevitably defined as the only and total scale. From this point of view, the structure of order that human beings experience from the political level is, first of all, a preemptive natural order. Both man's nature and a vision of its order belong to nature itself, which does not change because of human standards of interpretation.
Politics is really the form of life in which man places himself in the structure of reality that he interprets, and its illustrative picture shines like stars throughout the historical field. The interpretation of the structure of reality always takes the empirical form of order, fixing the relationship between man and reality in a symbolic symbol as the material of history. In this sense, Voegelin described political science as "the science of the existence of man in the history of society and of the general principle of order", which in this case means man's "exposition of the truth of the structure of reality". In this way, the political thought of ancient China can be subsumed under this science. Because the so-called "political reality" is a set of conceptual relations between man and nature developed by the ancients in the interpretation of "reality", and it is used to arrange man's position in the original order. In every epoch there is an understanding of the order of reality, and the task of political science is to interpret people, societies, and histories intellectually in each epoch. It is only with the help of concrete symbolic forms within the field of history that the interpretation of the structure of reality can be constructed in a universal sense.
The structure of the real world is established by the common experiences of multiple consciousnesses, and the identifiable traces of the way these experiences are organized are history. History describes the modalities of the real world through symbols, and in this sense, the description of history is knowledge. Man knows the world through the capacity of reason, and from such an epistemological point of view, the language and symbols used by man establish, in particular, the apparent order of the real world, and in the process of cognition establish it as reality itself. Language and symbols, as the materials of history, are combined into the form of historical existence in a series of imitations, intersections, and concatenations, and at this level, the narrative framework of history overlaps with the universal knowledge of the real world.
(Sun Fei Author Affilications: Department of Philosophy, Graduate School of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)
Source: China Social Science Network China Social Science Daily