Reflecting on Schelling – Is China "Non-Myth"?

Liu Gang

The absolute principle of prehistoric civilizations – human nature

At the same time as Hegel was concerned with China, there was another philosopher, his name was Schelling.

Schelling's perspective, unlike Hegel's, looks at China from the perspective of mythological philosophy. What did he see? In the article "China - Mythological Philosophy", he found that the Chinese nation is a nation without myths, and in order to emphasize this, he also deliberately added the word "absolute". The article, translated by Bian Zhao, was included in the book "German Thinkers on China" edited by Xia Ruichun.

In the article, Schelling further pointed out that due to the separation from the mythological movement, China did not produce religion, became an atheistic kingdom, and did not establish any religious principles. In response to the consciousness of the Chinese, he made two explanations:

First, Chinese absolute non-mythology in consciousness. From this, he concluded that the phrase "Chinese nation" was incorrect, because China had no myths, and without myths there would be no nation.

He positioned the consciousness of Chinese in prehistory, when myths did not appear, but there were absolute principles that governed prehistoric mankind. Schelling did not say that, in our view, should be the undifferentiated principle of human nature, and if human reason is legislated by nature, then the principle of human nature is the original law concerning human beings.

Since the end of the Neolithic Age, Westerners have used bronze culture to break with the primitive law of human nature, but Chinese have adhered to this principle of human nature with jade culture, when bronze culture has spawned nations and countries from human nature with myths and religions, jade culture has formed cultural China with cultural identity, and maintained the primitive law of mankind with the concept of heaven and earth.

Although Schelling acknowledges that "the laws of the mythological process are in fact only hypothetical in meaning", he points out in particular: "If a genealogical process or a religion of reality is to be produced, the only principle that governs the earliest consciousness must be limited, it must be subordinated to a higher principle, and replaced by this higher principle." That "higher principle" is the mythological principle and the religious principle, from which the nationality arises, and from the religious principle the nationality arises, that is, the nationality and the nationality replace the human nature.

Second, Chinese the complete non-religious nature of consciousness. If there are no nations without myths, then, of course, it can also be said that there can be no state without religion. Therefore, when Xie Lin looks at the "Chinese nation" in this way, he feels that he does not feel like a "nation", and when he looks at "China" in this way, he does not feel like a "country". However, we can say that "China" is the unity of many nationalities and "China" is a unified country, but such a statement is also from the position of the nation and the state of Westerners, and the difference is that the word "unification" is emphasized.

Unification and differentiation are the two roads of civilization and civilization, and eastern and western cultures cannot be circumvented, but their success is still biased and focused, Eastern culture is biased on the road of unification, and Western culture focuses on differentiation.

The East, that is, China, historically, has taken a road of cultural unification, so that the politics of division is unified by culture and developed by unity; the West, mainly Europe, has led to cultural differentiation, not only politics, but even religions that have always pursued unity, have to be divided, divided by monotheism, and progressed by differentiation.

Development and progress, which seem similar, are not. Development, in general, of course, includes progress, but it can also be said to be a pattern of doing big, such as spreading big cakes, layer by layer, such as rows of large circles, a circle around. Progress, on the other hand, manifests itself as a breakthrough point, rising, moving forward, and then, relaying by civilization, transforming to the state, and then rising, moving forward.

In the unified pattern of development, civilization has been consistent, with cultural identity and Renaissance for a long period of time and large-scale homogeneous expansion, slowly precipitated, accumulated, so that it can establish a deep foundation, into a huge scale, in addition to natural disasters and man-made disasters to bring about a cycle of chaos, there is no clash of civilizations and religious wars. These two are precisely the driving forces for the formation of the nation-state by the differentiated civilization, and the two sources of motivation for the progress of Western civilization, so that Western history remains in the Warring States era.

The theme of the Warring States Period, in the West, ancient and modern, was nation and state, while in China, it was barbarians and China. The former manifests itself in the clash of civilizations; the latter, it manifests itself in cultural identity. In the clash of civilizations, what stands out is the concept of the state, while in cultural identity, it is the view of the world that is identified, so how does Schelling see the view of the world?

He said that Chinese did not see their country as a territorial, individual unity, but rather as an all-encompassing unity. Chinese human beings, standing independent of other peoples, above them, although they do not belong to the Chinese, and Chinese believe that there is no need at all, but in concept, they are still placed in the position of subjects, this contradictory attitude seems irrational from the rational point of view, but if Schelling knew that there were two Chinas, in addition to dynastic China, there was also a cultural China, he could understand. The tolerance of cultural China and the arrogance of dynastic China, like the two sides of the world's view of unity, are all expressed, and their contradictions are discovered by Schelling.

The primitive religion of Chinese – heaven

Schelling pointed out that the "original principle" of Chinese is not God, but heaven. Based on this premise, the "primitive religion of Chinese" is not a religion about God, but a religion based on heaven. According to this, it can also be said that the religion of Chinese is an atheistic religion, but when it is said, the question arises again: does atheism still produce religion?

If we believe that China should also have religion, and at the same time firmly believe that God is the foundation of religion, then we may as well turn around and ask again: Maybe the problem lies in God, but is heaven not God? It is true that heaven is a natural form, not the god of creation, but is it not the god of nature that lives endlessly and incarnates all things? The difference between heaven and God may lie in the fact that one is a natural god and the other is a personality god, so there are also different manifestations of its divinity, one is the generator, the other is the creator.

The Supreme God, whether he is the Generator or the Creator, is one God. However, there will be two different styles for the same god, one for the unified style and the other for the only one. The unified monotheistic god, which first appeared in the Liangzhu culture in China, was engraved on the jade as a divine emblem. The oneness of the gods, on the other hand, originated in ancient Egypt.

From the emblem of the Liangzhu culture, what we see is a unified monotheistic god - the style of heaven, which is earlier than the unique sun god Aton in ancient Egypt, composed of four parts: the god face, the human body, the belly of the beast, and the bird's claw, including the god of nature and the god of personality, and the animistic divinity represented by man, bird, and beast is unified under the illumination of the sun, of which the human body and the bird's claw are more obvious, as for the god's face, the phoenix-shaped crown at the top, or the sun belt, or called the bird feather, together, it looks like a " The emperor became a dove", and only the light of the sun had such unity.

The light of the sun represents the heavens, expressing the natural unity of the heavens, and the people of the world, or the Son of Heaven, represent all sentient beings, among which there is the unity of the birds, the phoenix, which flows to and from the heavens and the people, and the unity of the beasts, the dragon, presents the connection between man and the earth, such a schema, which has achieved the Confucian archetype of "consistent three kings" - the people of heaven and earth.

As Schelling put it, this should be the "primitive religion of Chinese." It appeared five thousand years ago, in The Jade Culture of China, and although it was never seen by Schelling, it can be said to have provided an original form for what he called "a pure heavenly religion."

Schelling believes that this primitive religion of heaven is the starting point of Chinese consciousness and the umbilical cord of human consciousness, and unfortunately, when consciousness is born and the umbilical cord should be cut off, Chinese consciousness refuses to separate, but seeks unity and adheres to its first principle, heaven and God, and does not allow higher forces outside the heavens - the only God.

Without dualistic enlightenment, there would be no pursuit of God, which would have led to "China being outside the mythological movement," avoiding the emergence of higher powers and settling the First Principles so that they would not be driven from heaven.

Obviously, this is seen from the perspective of the opposition between man and nature. Opposites lead to the separation of man and nature, making man and nature conflict, and if man wants to conquer nature, he must replace the heavens with the highest god and conquer the heavens, so from the mythological movement of pantheism, the only god appears with the contract spirit and philosophical speculation of the Erxi civilization. God is the supreme legislator and wise man, and all things in the universe are incorporated into God's Book of Genesis, and God not only legislates nature with pure reason, but also rational legislation for man with logic and faith, whereby reason replaces spirituality, philosophy ends mythology, and pantheism is reduced to one God.

Chinese has always been taught that we should constantly rebuild the original innocence cultivated by Heaven, we should respect Heaven, we should never allow any thoughts that violate Providence, and we should obey Heaven's will with peace of mind.

The consciousness of the Persians, although it broke through the limitations of the first principle of the beginning of man and opened a new chapter of mythology, still stayed in the stage of pantheism, and failed to move forward through metaphysics through philosophical speculation.

Such a statement is quite similar to That of Hegel, who affirms China as a "non-historical country" from the perspective of historical philosophy, and Schelling points out that China is a "non-mythical world" from the perspective of mythological philosophy. But they all overlook the point that the intersection of myth and history is exactly a style of Chinese culture. From the perspective of historical philosophy, China does not have a historical appearance, and from the perspective of mythological philosophy, there is no mythological appearance, but they are unified in a higher paradigm, which Tai Shi Gong called "the change of ancient and modern times at the time of heaven and man.".

The prototype of "the time of heaven and man" is in the divine emblem of the Liangzhu jade culture, which expresses the unity of man and all things in heaven and earth, in this unity, whether it is the god in mythology or the person in history, it has the duality of god and man, which can be transformed into each other, not only the mythical space and historical space in space - the time of heaven and man can be transformed, but also the transformation of mythical time and historical time in time - the transformation of ancient and modern changes, and "History of the Five Emperors" is an example of transformation. The key to conversion is restore. Restoration is to return to the origin - heaven, and at the origin, heaven and man are not distinguished. Back to the original point, it is the unity of heaven and man.

In the earliest Chinese hieroglyphs, the heavens were originally people, the horizontal above the heavenly characters represented the head of the person, as soon as the person appeared, he stood upright, with the head of the sky, the feet standing on the ground, the heavens and the earth, the Chinese mythology of Pangu, is such a person who opened the world, and the prototype of Pangu is the figure in the Liangzhu God Emblem.

When dynastic China appeared, the royal power began to divide heaven and man in the way of "Jedi Heavenly Communication", however, from the old foundation of cultural China, it also opened a movement of "unity of heaven and man" that returned to the origin.

Therefore, the mission of the Chinese tradition is not only to politicize culture, continue the hereditary system and hierarchy since the Bronze Age and the institutional arrangement of absolute monarchy, and divide heaven and man, but also to culturalize politics, return to jade culture and restart the historical process of "the unity of heaven and man" in the Renaissance way of "Zushu Yao Shun, Charter Wen wu".

A system of ideas about "heaven"

Reduction, seemingly cyclical, cyclical, can also be a "spiral". Every time it rises, it is not a cloud rising straight up, but a dragon traveling the world and spiraling up, that is to say, it is necessary to first return to the origin of history, draw the force of civilization from the background of cultural China, and start a new Renaissance.

Therefore, China's historical progress cannot be seen from dynastic China, and it is necessary to look at cultural China, to see the progress of Chinese history from the Renaissance movement again and again, and the progress is not manifested in dynastic politics, but in Chinese culture, not only in literature and technology, but also in technology and scholarship.

The most dazzling performance, of course, is literature and art, and literature and art in literature and art are poetry.

Poetry is not only expressed as a literary poetic song, but also as a political poetic country, from the Chinese of "no poetry can be spoken without learning poetry", to the National Policy of the Han People to "rule the world with poetry and books", and then to the National System of the Tang Dynasty Xingkeju to give poetry to scholars. In this world, besides China, what other country can be so beautifully poetic? Some people say that the ancient Greeks once used the "Homeric Epic" as a city-state textbook, but if we want to talk about the long-term movement of poetry and the formation of a poetic world, how can it be more elegant than the Chinese "Book of Poetry"?

There are also technological advances, so obvious that Joseph Needham said in the preface to The Four Seas: A Dialogue between East and West that if the Greeks benefited greatly from Babylon and the ancient Egyptians, then the Europeans also received many scientific inventions and discoveries from Asia, and China was an important source.

He asked: How many people know that the constellation coordinates now commonly used by astronomers around the world are Chinese not created by the Greeks? How many people recognize that the deep well drilling technology that now brings fuel and oil to the world was invented by ancient Chinese engineers, according to reliable data? He criticized the Europeans: he knew that he was proud of the achievements of the great voyages, but he refused to ask, where did the important inventions that made the great voyages come from? He pointed out that the compass and the sternum rudder came from China, the multi-layered mast came from India and Indonesia, and the tail mast spinnaker came from Islamic navigators. He also said that Galileo's mathematical theory of physics would be difficult to conceive of without Indian notation, and that the arsenal where he made his great speech of changing the world could not have been built without mastering the chinese technology of cast iron.

But the Europeans at that time did not know where those technologies came from, and they obtained a lot of Chinese technology from the Arabs through arabic, laying the foundation for the later European Renaissance movement.

Needham looks at modern technology in this way, just as Braudel looks at modern capitalism.

The development of modern science and technology coincided with the rise of capitalism, and they placed them in the perspective of global history, and emphasized the Chinese factor in it, so the modern history of the world is not created by Europeans, and the progress of Europeans also includes Chinese factors, so we look at the progress of Chinese history not only from the perspective of cultural China, but also from the history of the world.

Unfortunately, Neither Hegel nor Schelling saw it this way, so their eyes only stayed on dynastic China, and they could only see the stagnant side of Chinese history, not only seeing China as a "non-historical" country, but also viewing China as a "non-mythical" "tianxia", although in the Chinese Confucian tradition of "self-cultivation, qi family, governance, and peace in the world", "tianxia" is at the highest position in political culture, but in Schelling's view, the view of tianxia is a restoration of the most primitive "heaven".

"Heaven" is the natural nature of human beings, which has not yet been civilized into national and national nature, and has failed to show the corresponding myths and religions, and Schelling obviously has not yet realized that the consciousness of Chinese does not stay in the primitiveness of "heaven", but has developed a highly rational concept of mandate of heaven, heavenly path, and heavenly reason through the "time of heaven and man".

The Mandate of Heaven, which is the command of Heaven, expresses the inevitability of Heaven and carries the meaning of a certain personality of God; the Heavenly Dao, which is the movement of celestial bodies, expresses the regularity of heaven and transforms the laws of nature into humanity; The Heavenly Principle is the subjectivity of the unity of heaven and man that is revealed from the laws of nature, that is, "the universe is my heart, and my heart is the universe."

This speculative development of the conceptual system of "heaven" can be said to be a shortcoming of Schelling's cognition of China, because he put too much emphasis on the "heavenly son", the Chinese emperor. What he saw from the Chinese emperor was that the Chinese state system was based on superstition, transforming the earthly empire into a heavenly kingdom, and treating the earthly emperor as the god of the heavenly kingdom. In this way, it seems to be quite in line with god' separation, and the "kingdom of heaven" he said did not use a religious tone, but contradicted the "non-religious" statement?

The Chinese emperor and the heavens are one, not in the form of a national system, but in an individual way, without the need to bear the flag of heaven and the flag of heaven, without the transformation of the state, as long as they claim to have the Mandate of Heaven and the Way of Heaven, they can unite the heavenly emperor and the same body.

Schelling also mentioned in particular that under the imperial system, Chinese culture suffered all kinds of misfortunes, and he excerpted a passage from a German book, saying: In China, every discipline, any state affair, has a memorized charter, poetry, free invention, all truly beautiful art, if not approved by the superior, it will be eclipsed.

Such a situation, both historically and in reality, is commonplace. But this is only one side, one side of dynastic China, showing the characteristics of kingship; parallel to it, there is another side, that is not in the side of the dynasty, not in the "temple high", but in the opposition, itself in the "far side of the rivers and lakes". These two sides, one side "walking the path of the world" and the other "walking the rivers and lakes", can coexist in the personality of one person and parallel in the national fortunes of a dynasty. Therefore, when we look at a person, we must not only look at the side of his "journey of career", but also look at the other side of his "walking in the rivers and lakes"; in the same way, when we look at a dynasty, we must also look at these two aspects, not only to see the situation of "taking the path of the people" in the DPRK, but also to look at the situation of the opposition of "walking the rivers and lakes", a good era, we must confirm it from both the government and the opposition.

The side that Schelling pointed out, of course, refers to the side of the dynasty, the situation on that side, in the words of Confucius, has also reached the time of "loss of courtesy and seeking the wilderness", although in reality, it is normal, but in theory, it is considered abnormal - disrespect, "courtesy and loss of the wilderness", culture is in the folk, so civil society began to renaissance.

The progress of Chinese history is reflected through civil society through the Renaissance movement after renaissance movement. When the emperor boasted that he would "win the world at once," someone reminded him to "rule the world through poetry and books"; when classical studies were realized by a generation of dynasties into "modern literature and classics", civil society had the rise of "ancient literature and classics" to compete with them; when Confucian classics were politicized as part of imperial studies, civil society would replace them with the Taoist metaphysics of "free thought"; when a generation of literary styles were transformed into institutionalized contemporary texts by the dynasty, civil society restored its free style through the literary retro movement.

The impetus for the Renaissance came both from within Chinese culture and from outside.

In China's history, there are two major foreign cultures that have profoundly influenced and changed China.

One is the Hellenistic Indian Buddhist culture from the Western Regions. Indian Buddhist culture, combined with the Ideas of Han Tang Laozhuang, from Tianshan to Tiantai Mountain, deeply participated in the Chinese Renaissance movement and formed a new Chinese Buddhism

One is the Western Christian culture from scientific missionary. European Christian culture, from Matteo Ricci and Xu Guangqi to Wei Li and Li Shanlan, from the foundation of the "Geometric Primitives" by Lu Wangxinxue to the establishment of democracy and science in the new cultural movement, a more profound Renaissance movement has not yet ended. If it is said that the development of Buddhism from the Han Dynasty to the Tang and Song Dynasties has gone through thousands of years, making China the center of Buddhism in the world, then the Study of the West and the East have gradually been from the late Ming Dynasty to the present for more than four hundred years, whether it is the late Ming Dynasty and the Western union, or the late Qing Dynasty, or the westernization of the Republic of China, we can see the progress of democracy and science in China, and the future can also be expected to be like Buddhism, so that China will become the world's science center after becoming the world's factory, in the near future, it will also become the world's scientific center.

We so expect that, according to tradition, we will put it on the Mandate of Heaven, the Heavenly Dao, and the Heavenly Principle, and confirm its way by "investigating the changes of the ancient and modern at the time of heaven and man"; if we use the current words, then it is inevitable, it conforms to the law of historical development, and it is not only the desire of the people in Chinese, but also the general trend of China's historical development.

Unfortunately, what Schelling saw did not reach this, but his evaluation of Chinese history was very different from That of Hegel, who said: From a purely historical point of view, China seems to be a historical miracle, and among all the countries, China has always maintained its independence in the form of the oldest empire, showing its unshakable national will. After this remark, he should actually add a sentence, that is, China has been living in this world with the old foundation of The old chinese culture of the oldest five thousand years, and has lived out a historical miracle with a retro posture.

(The author is close to "Cultural Rivers and Mountains", volumes 1-7, CITIC Publishing House)