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2009 Unique but Inclusive Individuality: A Dialogue with John Dewey and Liang Shuming Toward Educational Reform in China Huajun Zhang
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COLLEGE OF EDUCATION
UNIQUE BUT INCLUSIVE INDIVIDUALITY:
A DIALOGUE WITH JOHN DEWEY AND LIANG SHUMING
TOWARD EDUCATIONAL REFORM IN CHINA
By
HUAJUN ZHANG
A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2009
The members of the Committee approve the Dissertation of Huajun Zhang defended on February 24, 2009.
______Jeffrey Ayala Milligan Professor Directing Dissertation
______Tom Anderson Outside Committee Member
______Peter Easton Committee Member
______Shouping Hu Committee Member
Approved:
Jeffrey Ayala Milligan, Chair, Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies
The Graduate School has verified and approved the above named committee members.
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This dissertation is dedicated to my parents
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ACK OWLEDGEME TS
The Chinese Taoist scholar Lao Zi once said: —The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.“ My completion of this dissertation is nevertheless an important step in this intellectual journey. Behind this step are care, support, encouragement, and love from many people. My gratitude first goes to my advisor Jeffrey Ayala Milligan, who demonstrates to me the fascinating world of thought, who is always willing to listen to my unpolished ideas and is patient but sharp enough to help me clarify my ideas. It is his deep respect for different cultures and different ways of thinking that has encouraged me to write a philosophical treatise in English. I also would like to thank my committee members Tom Anderson, Peter Easton, Shouping Hu and my former committee member King Beach. I thank them for their patience in guiding me through the years of my study and I surely know it has not been an easy task. It is a privilege for me to have had the opportunity to learn from them. I also thank Laura Lang, the director of the Learning Systems Institute. Without her generous support, I may not have had enough courage to be fully engaged in this philosophical study. While knowing the seed of this dissertation was planted in the history of my life, I have to thank many teachers and friends who help me to cultivate the ideas in past years. My undergraduate mentor Chen Xiaolu at Nanjing University gives me a great deal of advice, guidance, and support during the various stages of my study and personal growth. Robert Cowen and Ed Vickers at the University of London, Ruth Hayhoe at the University of Toronto, Patrice Iatarola in our own department, Changyun Kang at the University of British Columbia and Jing Lin at the University of Maryland give me lots of encouragement, good advice and cheer. Their mentorship and friendship deepen my understanding of —teachers.“ Indeed, many friends and colleagues have helped me a lot through this journey, especially, the devoted administrative staff Natasha Blankenship, Becky Culp, Jimmy Pastrano and Mary Peterson. Aihua, Carrie, Cynthia, Haroldo, Jennifer, Jian, Josh, Scott, Shanna, and Youngwoo, among many others in my department provide me with lots of emotional support, intellectual conversation and writing therapy.
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Besides the intellectual nurturing and friendship, the unconditional love I receive from my family is my true motif to strive for being a good person, to seek the meaning of goodness, and to develop my faith in education. My parents never had the chance to have higher education. But their insight, wisdom and patience in life make them my best teachers forever. They teach me, with their daily words and behavior (yan chuan shen jiao), about how to become a good person (zuo ren): the most important lesson to learn. They demonstrate their tireless and humble learning attitude through their own lives, in quite different ways though. This dissertation is dedicated to them as a sign of my gratitude and my apology for leaving home for many years. This work is also fruit of my sister who tried to enlighten my mind at a very early age by providing me with great books and writing me hundreds of letters when she was away from home to pursue her studies. Finally, I would like to thank my husband, who is always there to receive my bad emotions, to comfort me and amuse me. Without him, I would not have thought about staying a whole summer in the beautiful campus of Cornell University and would not have discovered the work of Liang Shuming in the Kroch Asia Library. Indeed, this is a work made by collective efforts. Without all the love and care I have received, this writing project may never have existed but would instead have only roamed in my mind. I claim sole authorship of its weaknesses.
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TABLE OF CO TE TS
Acknowledgment ………..………………………………………………… iv
Abstract …………………………………………………………………… vii
1. Individuality in the Rapidly Changing Chinese Society ………………….. 1
Introduction …………………………………………………………… 1 —I am not here.“ A personal reflection ...... 3 When I meet the world: Social changes in post-Mao China …. 6 Jumping into two boats at the same time: Scores vs. suzhi in Chinese education 14 A new conception of individuality through a philosophical dialogue …… 27
2. Individuality in Comparison: The Past and the West ...... …………… 35
Individuality in Chinese history ………………………………………………… 36 Individuality in liberalism, critical theory and post-structuralism …………… 54
3. Educational Comparison through a Philosophical Dialogue …………… 71
Introduction ………………………………………………………… 71 Philosophical approach to educational inquiry ……………………… 74 Conclusion: Comparative philosophy of education as a possible approach 84
4. A Dialogue with John Dewey and Liang Shuming ………………………….. 90
Introduction ………………………………………………………………. 90 John Dewey: Experience as an agent of self-transformation ……………... 93 Liang Shuming: Inner-self as an agent of self-transformation …………… 108 A social self in Dewey‘s and Liang‘s philosophies ………………………. 121 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………... 130
5. Developing Individuality in Chinese Education: An Aesthetic Approach …... 139
Introduction ………………………………………………………………. 139 A new conception of individuality through inner struggle ……………….. 140 Telling life stories as an aesthetic pedagogy ……………………………… 143 Conclusion: A proposal for aesthetic education in the Chinese context …... 163
Bibliography …………………………………………………………………….. 171
Biographical Sketch ...... … 180
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ABSTRACT
This dissertation is written in the context of the radically changing Chinese society, in which the individual easily gets separated from the meaning of life and follows the dualistic social conventions for success. This problem is consistent with the situation of the present educational practice in schools. Education does not respond students‘ disconnection from the radically changing society and thus cannot provide a meaningful resource for cultivating individuals‘ self-identity. Thus, this dissertation suggests a philosophy of education which highlights the cultivation of students‘ unique but inclusive individuality so that the individual learns how to nurture one‘s own mind in this radically changing context rather than getting lost and feeling empty. This conception of individuality is inspired by the American pragmatist John Dewey and the Chinese Confucian scholar Liang Shuming, a contemporary of Dewey. Though living in different cultural traditions, both of them suggest that we need to cultivate one‘s individuality if we are constructing a democratic and free society. Dewey‘s work criticizes the trend of extreme individualism in the context of American‘s rapid industrialization. Liang‘s work has a different focus because he meets the dilemma of China‘s modernization in which a rupture between the Confucian tradition and the westernization is very serious. Liang‘s concern is still alive in contemporary times because we do not have the strong tradition of individualism; however, we also need to deal with the trend of extreme individualism stimulated by the rapid marketization in the recent three decades. On one hand, we need to learn how to find lively connection with the tradition, thus gaining a resource to cultivate a modern culture; on the other hand, we need to deal with the tension of individualism and communal living. I suggest that these two issues are keys for developing a new conception of individuality in contemporary China. Both Dewey and Liang provide insightful thoughts on the issues. I use a methodology of comparative philosophy of education to discuss my proposal on individuality in education. I am not trying to write Dewey and Liang‘s thought in a —right“ way; neither am I trying to compare Dewey and Liang‘s thought for judgment. It is more about dialogue and communication, to learn from different but related thoughts for solving the problem in the present, in Dewey‘s terms. I am using a pragmatic approach to launch a philosophical discussion. Because my concern is shared
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by Dewey and Liang in their respective projects, this dialogue can be meaningful for my question. After discussing Dewey‘s and Liang‘s thoughts, I propose a new idea of education: to cultivate a unique but inclusive individuality by going through inner struggles and gaining self-enlightenment. This experience of inner struggle is the ground in which to cultivate a true self and the basis for discovering an original and creative mind because the individual needs to face her need from her unique life experience and connect with the changing present. The moment that the individual goes through inner struggle is also the moment that the individual gains a sense of wholeness and thus includes the experiences of others into the self through which she expands the boundary of selfhood and self-transformation happens: the individual transforms the limits of the existent self and opens to new possibilities. It is the meaning of learning which the current Chinese education reform does not emphasize. Finally, the dissertation proposes story-telling as a teaching approach to create new space for students and teachers in school. Story-telling is a method that the individual can interpret life experience in multiple ways to explore different alternatives and possibilities she may have and to find the consistent meaning to connect the past to the present. It is also a method of self-expression when the individual goes through inner struggle and finds connection with the world outside. It is an effort that the individual sees the consistency in life, or finds tradition meaningful in her present experience. In this effort, the individual is developing a mind of her own. Narrative is thus a method worth trying in the current educational practice to formulate a new philosophy of education which emphasizes the development of unique and inclusive individuality as one goal of education.
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CHAPTER I
I DIVIDUALITY I THE RAPIDLY CHA GI G
CHI ESE SOCIETY
It is radical conditions which have changed, and only an equally radical change in education suffices.
---John Dewey, School and Society, 1889
Demand for variety is the manifestation of the fact that being alive we seek to live, until we are cowed by fear or dulled by routine. The need of life itself pushes us out into the unknown. This is the abiding truth of romance.
--- John Dewey, Art as Experience, 1934
I. Introduction Choosing a topic on education and individuality for a dissertation is a decision made after long reflection. By —individuality“ I mean not only the development of the individual‘s personality but also the individual‘s identity in the society. It includes the totality of the individual as a person living in society. However, it is not always easy to transfer the sense of problem into an intellectual inquiry: to connect my own experience with the society I live in to understand who I was, who I am, and who I will be in this changing social medium. This dissertation is an effort to uncover some insight, if not answers, to understand the question which originates from my own experience living in a society that has been so full of change in recent decades. Engaging in dialogue with past and contemporary thinkers, in my view, is a way to draw an intellectual map of my own so that I can discover some sense of direction in my journey of exploration.
1 The problem I identify through my experience and observation of the contemporary Chinese education is that it withdraws rather than provides resources to help students formulate their own self-identity amidst the dualistic social categories presented to individuals by the rapid marketization and radical social changes in various aspects of modern Chinese social life. In this radical social change, people have to face an unpredictable and fluid life, so a sense of self easily gets lost. In this dissertation, I will first describe the recent social change in China and introduced the major educational practice: exam-oriented education and suzhi education, a concept I will explain later. In Chapter II, I will introduce the major schools of thought on individuality in Chinese history: Confucianism, May Fourth liberalism and Maoism, and then I will introduce three major schools of western views: liberalism, critical theory and post-structuralism. This introduction will provide an intellectual background for my interactive dialogue with the American pragmatist John Dewey and Chinese Confucianist Liang Shuming. I believe John Dewey and Liang Shuming offer a promising basis for this dialogue. Deweyan pragmatism represents a version of liberalism that articulates a theory of the individual and society oriented toward social equality in a context of rapid and profound social change. Moreover, the contemporary pragmatist Richard Rorty has made the claim that Dewey waits at the end of the road Foucault is traveling.1 Dewey, therefore, synthesizes elements of the three western traditions examined here. This, I believe, makes his ideas a useful dialogue partner. Liang Shuming, on the other hand, lived through the rapid social change of twentieth-century China and is devoted to transforming Confucianism into a modern philosophy so it can respond to modern problems Chinese society faces. His reflective critique on western theories, including Dewey‘s pragmatism, qualifies him for this dialogue which is based on common concern with the changing situation of the individual in modern society. Liang‘s Confucianism contributes richer meaning to the concept by introducing the idea of an inner self which is crucial to the realization of a
1 Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972 1980. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982.
2 self-transformation in which the individual mind can be cultivated. His emphasis on the aspect of inner self, a tradition of Confucianism, may provide some new insight which Dewey implied but did not explicitly discuss in his philosophy of experience. Now I start this journey with a piece of personal reflection to set up the problem which orients this study. I suggest that story-telling is a method of healing and learning by creatively responding to the unique needs and reflecting the unique experience of the individual so that a unique but inclusive individualityœa concept I will propose in this dissertationœcan be made possible.
II. “I am not here.” A Personal Reflection As persons born under the one-child policy in China after 1980, we are often called the —new generation“ who live in an economic boom, not in the mass political campaigns as our parents‘ and grandparents‘ generations did. We enjoy a much freer and more open life than the older generations. On the other hand, we are also on the front line of this radical change since we are cut off from traditions, whether traditional Confucianism, or radical anti-traditionalism, or mass political campaigns, and we have to learn to live with the change which our elders have no experience with in order to teach us.2 Of course, we can know the past history from the older generations, but the past seems too far away to be relevant to on-going reality. Needless to say, we, more or less, live in the shadow (or light) of tradition through our education at home and school. But the tradition will be meaningless to us if we do not know what and how to learn from the tradition we own. It seems that we have lived in a whirlpool of social change since we were born.3 Of the case of my own schooling experience can show a piece of the educational situation in which we find ourselves. My experience of attending both rural and urban schools, both common and elite schools, helps me to reflect on
2 The end of the Cultural Revolution and the sudden change of the society into the market oriented society started in the later 1970s cut off the experience between two generations. 3 To some extent, many generations of Chinese people in the past hundred years live in the situation of radical change without much experience to connect with the tradition. So this inquiry is not only relevant to the youth but also old adults on how to cope with the changing environment we live in.
3 education in this radically changing society from different perspectives. After finishing my elementary education in a small rural school, I attended a key-point middle school in the city and then a top national university in the capital city of the province.4 It would not be inaccurate to say that I was climbing the ladder of success, according to the location I was in. In the first twelve years of my education, I was told that my goal of study should be entering a prestigious university. It was not any specific person who told me to do this, but it is a social norm I was aware of. As a —good“ student, I knew that I should make this goal to satisfy the expectations of parents, teachers, and myself. At that time, I did not think about other choices, but rather this specific goal was so naturally planted in my mind. It was not until I reached my goal of attending the university that I realized that this goal did not satisfy me at all, even if it did satisfy others. I was not happy and I disliked myself. I was desperately lost in the meaning of life. I experienced a quiet but intense crisis in the first years of my college life. After I reached my goal of succeeding in the exam system, I found that I had not learned how to formulate a new purpose: to imagine an unknown future. I only knew the defined and designed future which I had already reached. Meanwhile, freed from the various exams which were common in high school, I finally had time of my own to think about myself. I asked myself, —Who am I and what life do I want to have?“ I knew that I wanted to be unique. I wanted to see the individuality I had. But these ideas gave me even more trouble: I was not unique at all, but rather what I was doing was just following the trend, the discourse of being successful in the education system. The impulse to be unique distanced me from others so the aggressive virus of success would not infect my already chaotic mind. To seek a vision for my own future, I deliberately marginalized myself from the —mainstream“ discourse of success in a top university: to be a business, political or
4 One character of Chinese society is that the resource is located according to the hierarchical order of the place from villages, to towns, to small cities, to big cities and then to the capital city.
4 intellectual elite. Reflection on my past experience gave me a sense that I did not want to be an elite just because it was a social expectation, an expectation of others. Also, living with two contrasted culturesœrural and urban, mass and eliteœpushed me to refuse to take these dualistic categories for granted. Many times, I lost the sense of living when I could not formulate a way of my own. The only certain thing at that time was that I knew my parents loved me so much that I had to live well. But my living was for them, not for me. I told them my plans which might lead to a successful future, even though I had no interest in realizing them. But I met these goals in spite of my lack of interest in them, just as I had done in my high school exams. Those were achievements with no need of celebration and no need of memory for honor. Those were only dead facts which did not connect with the heart. In this sense, studying abroad was one of these dead projects. At the time, it was a strong trend among ambitious college students to qualify themselves as elites when higher education was quickly popularized in the later 1990s and early 2000s. I followed this trend to make my future plans bright though I did not know what I really wanted to do. From elementary school to college, those efforts were decisions I made without a sense of —I.“ —I am not here,“ I told myself. —I am somewhere unknown.“ In this sense, studying abroad was also a trip to this somewhere unknown, a trip to exile for this mindless self in order to find a self with my own mind, not anybody else‘s, by leaving the center of chaos. It became a trip of discovery instead of escape. After several years living abroad, I echoed with the words of cultural critic Leo Ou-fan Lee: —It is only on this marginal ground that I feel psychologically secure and even culturally privileged. By virtue of my self-chosen marginality I can never fully identify myself with any center…The feeling of self-torment, perhaps representing the negative side of a bicultural marginal person, can be turned into a positive character strength.“5 As an alien in the United States, as it is written on my passport, I can be doubly
5 Leo Ou-fan Lee, —On the Margins of the Chinese Discourse: Some Personal Thoughts on the Cultural Meaning of the Periphery,“ in Tu Wei-ming (ed.) The Living Tree, the Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994, p. 231.
5 marginalized as an outsider to Chinese society and an outsider to American society. However, freed from the discourse of the centers, this position also gives me a privilege, in Lee‘s words, to develop a mind of my own. It is not necessarily unique, but it is an open and authentic one, not bounded to a Chinese or a western model. While experiencing different cultures, it is my responsibility to become an —organic intellectual,“ in Cornel West‘s words.6 To be an organic intellectual, I need to seek my intellectual sources and plant my own thoughts in the ground I travel across. What I need to do is to take the risk of entering into the uncertain world and to reflect on my living experience that happens to me and to the broader social context in which I exist. Through telling my own life stories, I may find the possibility of connecting with a broader and more enriched world and find more available resources from the various traditions we have in our history and in the present. Educating the individual mind, we have to have the courage to face our own stories, to face our own time; then, a true self may be revealed and our hopes for a moral and artistic life may come true in this radically changing society. To be myself, I should not be afraid to become a minority or a —cultural orphan,“ a term I borrow from the story of a Holocaust survivor.7 The call from inside will impel the self to transform the conventions and routines to the development of free individuality which will in turn lead the self to construct a home of one‘s own.
III. When I Meet the World: Social Changes in Post Mao China When reflecting on my own life experience as an outsider, I understand that I am only a drop of water in the sea. But through this drop, we may know some larger facts of the sea. In my story, I can smell the scent of radical social change. Economic development legitimizes and enlarges the social gap but it may also bring some fresh
6 From —Martine Luther King, Jr.: Prophetic Christian as Organic Intellectual,“ in Cornel West, Prophetic Fragments: Illuminations of the Crisis in American Religion and Culture, Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1988. 7 I borrow the name of —cultural orphan“ from a description of Holocaust survivor. (Grace Feuerverger, Multicultural Perspectives in Teacher Development. In Joann Phillion, Ming Fang He, F. Michael Connelly (ed.) arrative & Experience in Multicultural Education. London: SAGE Publications. 2005.)
6 air with which we are not familiar. On one hand, the marketization of China brings freer space for individual development and it satisfies the individual‘s needs through market production and consumption. On the other hand, marketization legitimizes unequal social order and thus dichotomizes social categories into two groupsœ —successful“ or —unsuccessful“œthrough market competition. This dichotomy influences the individual‘s self-identity and the development of individuality. More specifically, my educational experience indicates the hierarchical order of the resource allocation which enforces divided social categories. On the other hand, the newly developed economy and improved living conditions largely release the individual‘s imagination, which used to be bounded by assigned roles within the collective community. Personal crises then arise when we do not know how to deal with the new division and the new freedom. In the following two sections, I will describe the social changes over the past three decades in China from the economic, social and cultural perspectives. Then, I will discuss the education reforms made during this period and how they respond to the social change.
Economic change: from a solo of the state to an ensemble with the market Probably the biggest earthquake after Mao‘s death is not the Tangshan Earthquake in 1976 but the open-and-reform policy started in 1978. Since then, a marketized economy has quickly developed. If there was some socialist ideology in people‘s mind that made them hesitate to jump into the market sea in the 1980s, the new leader Deng Xiaoping‘s slogan, —It does not matter if it is the white cat or black cat, the one that can catch rats is the good cat“ encouraged people‘s enthusiasm for establishing making money as their first priority in the 1990s, and the fever continues to the present. It is also the major effort of the state to transform society from a traditional, rural, agricultural, and semi-closed one to a modern, urbanized, industrialized, and open society. The economic reform first started from rural areas where —the household responsibility system“ (jiating lianchan chengbao zerenzhi) replaced the collective agricultural production of communes in 1978. Families were assigned to some
7 farming land according to the number of persons per family. While the older production system afforded farmers no right to decide what they would farm, under the reforms farmers started enjoying full responsibility for the production of farming land. This policy liberated the rural workforce and quickly increased the agricultural production throughout the whole country. Living conditions were greatly improved in rural areas in the first years of the new policy.8 The urban reform began in 1984. In the early experiment of transition from the planned economy to market economy, most of the state enterprises started to take on more responsibility for their production. Production price was still controlled by the state, but the state enterprise could adjust their production according to the needs of the market. Some small businesses appeared as a supplement of state enterprises. Special Economic Zones were experiment with in some southern areas where foreign capital and private capital were playing an important role. It was a time of icebreaking for the centralized planned economy. Marketization was fully introduced to the whole country after Deng Xiaoping gave his famous southern China tour speech in 1992. It was the year in which the war between the planned and the market economy ended: the market won. With the legitimization of the central government, doing business became the hottest fashion among all social groups. Millions of intellectuals and governmental officials left their insured jobs and joined private or foreign companies or started their own businesses.9 The entrepreneurial spirit soon replaced the nostalgic debate and civil movement for democracy in the 1980s.10 Meanwhile, millions of rural residents moved to cities to
8 Ya Ping Wang, Urban Poverty, Housing and Social Change in China. London: Routledge, 2004, p.1. 9 Jing Lin, Social Transformation and Private Education in China. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1999, p. 19. 10 Some important events in the late 1970s and the 1980s: the national debate on the standard of truth from 1976 to 1978; the democratic wall in Beijing in 1979; the literature movement of finding cultural roots in 1980s; the cultural critique on tradition and the popularity of the TV River Elegy (He Shang), which was considered as the fuse of the Tiananmen event in 1989. An interesting study on social life in 1980s is Luo Xu, Searching for Life’s Meaning: Changes and Tensions in the Worldview of Chinese Youth in the 1980s. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2002.
8 find non-farming jobs and provided a huge pool of cheap labor for national and global mass production. In the countryside, rural industrialization and urbanization quickly changed the landscape of many areas, most prominently the Pearl River delta, the coastal belt of counties in Fujian Province, the lower Yangzi delta focused on Shanghai, and the development corridor in Liaoning Province connecting Shenyang to the port city of Dalian.11 At the beginning of 1993, the number of rural employees was reported to be over 105 million, and the figure implied that employment in rural industry was equal to the number in the state enterprise sector.12 Until the first years of the twenty-first century, private enterprise more or less dominated rural industry, and state ownership, to a large extent, no longer existed.13 Throughout the reform period, China‘s GDP growth maintained at around 10 percent every year. Between 1996 and 2002, China‘s GDP per capita increased by 69 percent from 4,854 yuan to 8,184 yuan. In Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangdong, annual disposable income per person had reached 13,250, 12,464 and 11,137 yuan respectively.14 Also during this period, the economic reform went to —deep water“ in the words of Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, who was in charge of reform then. On one hand the highly increasing production and on the other hand the continued privitatization of state enterprise and the marketization of social welfare provisions put the society in a risky situation. To be more competitive and flexible, state property was quickly transferred to individuals who soon became billionaires. However, millions of state employees had to be laid off from their positions, where they might have worked for decades, and lost all their benefits, including pensions. It has been
11 In Gregory Eliyu Guldin (ed.)‘s book Farewell to Peasant China: Rural Urbanization and Social Change in the Late Twentieth Century, (New York: M.E.Sharpe, 1997) urbanization is defined as a number of micro processes: villages becoming townlike in infrastructure, services, and lifestyle (townization) and towns becoming more citylike in infrastructure, services, and lifestyle (citization), p. 266. 12 John Friedmann. China’s Urban Transition. Minneapolis: Univerity of Minnesota Press, 2005, p. 36. 13 Jie Fan, Thomas Heberer, and Wolfgang Taubmann, Rural China: Economic and Social Change in the Late Twentieth Century. London: M. E. Sharpe, 2006, p. 287. 14 Wang Yaping, 2004, p. 2.
9 estimated that about 30 percent (24 million) of all employees in the state sector were employed in 1997.15 This immediately put millions of families into a financially insecure situation. The most recent years have seen continuous economic development with large-scale urbanization and industrialization. However, in contrast with the hot 1990s trend of establishing enterprises, a new trend in the whole country is now financial investment. With the quickly rising price of daily consumption and the rocketing increases in the price of real estate, people are not only searching for ways to make money, but to make money quickly. Risk-taking becomes the norm. Making money is like gambling to some extent. The saying —Audacious people eat until they are full, but timid people are starving“ is well-received by many people. In this atmosphere, the word —chao“ meaning stir-fry, or speculation, has become one of the most popular words revealing a desire to become rich in a very quick and easy way.16 The government is making a big effort to regulate the process of real estate business and stock prices, though these efforts have little effect.
Social change: from the iron plate to the floating crowd Accompanying economic development is the mobilization of people from the state government to business, from the inner lands to the coastal areas, and especially from farmlands to factories. The privatization of state enterprises has encouraged people to —jump into the market sea“ to find opportunities of making big money rather than hold the poor iron bowl with little chance of faring well. But the grandest mobilization is of the rural people who are released from the farmland and find cheap paid jobs in the city. Because of the urbanization and marketization mentioned above, farmers could not derive as much benefit from farming as they could from working in cities. According to Guthrie, income in urban areas has risen much more rapidly than in rural areas. In rural areas, income has risen from an average household level of 133 yuan in 1978 to 2,366 yuan in 2001; during the same period, the overall average
15 Ibid., p. 4. 16 Lin, 1999, p. 20.
10 income for urban households has risen from 343 to 6,859 yuan.17 Meanwhile, the new economic development requires huge numbers of cheap laborers to contribute to low-skill mass production. Since the early 1980s, over 100 million Chinese farmers have left their lands to work as temporary laborers and traders in the cities.18 In spite of the large scale of this migration, it is still a relatively new phenomenon in China.19 During the Maoist period (1955-1978), Chinese farmers had to stick to the farmland and worked as a member of the commune. With the Household Registration System (hukou), which was introduced in 1955, rural registered populations (nongye renkou) could not receive the social welfare from the state as the urban registered population (chengshi renkou) did. People with rural hukou could not move to the city either to live or work. During the period of the highly centralized planned economy, the prevailing strategy was to develop heavy industry for national prosperity by sacrificing the rural peasants. The economic development in the post-Mao period did not cancel the Household Registration System but migration from rural to urban areas is allowed due to the need for cheap labor in market competition. Meanwhile, the extra labor in rural areas due to the rural production growth by introducing the Household Responsibility System in 1978 provided the cheap labor resource for the urban industries. Scholars in sociology argue that economic growth will lead to an erosion of traditional structures, an increase in geographical mobility, a growing disparity between poor and rich, an increasing conflict for investment and consumption, and a growing ability to organize groups and consequently an increase in the expectations that these groups will have toward government, which cannot be satisfied.20 Though the consequences of this process vary from country to country, largely based on how
17 Doug Guthrie, China and Globalization: the social, economic and political transformation of Chinese society. New York: Routledge, 2006, p. 205. 18 Rachel Murphy, How Migrant Labor is Changing Rural China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 1. 19 It is domestic mobility from rural to urban areas. Officially, these migrants are called —floating population“ who do not have local household registration in their working places. 20 Jie Fan, Thomas Heberer, and Wolfgang Taubmann, 2006, p. 9.
11 the state reacts to these changes, economic growth in China will bring about the loss of the old order and a space to create new values and attitudes. The mobilization of the population has suddenly increased the interaction among different people: the northern and the southern, the inland and the coastal, the rich and the poor, the rural and the urban, the educated and the illiterate, the foreign and the native, and the Han and the non-Han. Because of the open-and-reform policy and its quick marketization economic reform, the society is now full of diversity brought about by large-scale social mobility, but this increased diversity also increases potential tensions and conflict. These tensions and conflicts, however, reach a consensus on the new standards for success: wealth and power. A new hierarchical order has already established itself according to the mapping of economic, social and cultural capitals.
Cultural change: an era for new heroes? It is not my intention to describe all the social changes that have occurred but to illustrate a new cultural storm in people‘s minds: a commercial or materialized culture has come to dominate our lives.21 Leaving the nationalist or communist heroes who sacrificed themselves to history, now people worship new heroes who have money, power and fame. The —successful person“ (chenggong renshi), the rich and powerful persons, are the new heroes. In a survey conducted in Shenzhen and Zhuhai, two heavily marketized cities in the South, 1,780 students were asked about their ideal models. To be a billionaire ranks No. 1, to be boss of a multi-national corporation ranks No. 2, and the third is to be a provincial or municipal leader.22 By officially rejecting the legacy of the Cultural Revolution, which was a radical experiment to create an indigenous mode of development, people now comfortably and enthusiastically embrace capitalism and its attendant values, mainly
21 Related discussion, see Stanley Rosen, —The Victory of Materialism: Aspirations to Join China's Urban Moneyed Classes and the Commercialization of Education.“ The China Journal, No. 51, (Jan. 2004), 27-51. 22 Stanley Rosen, 2004, p. 30.
12 introduced from the West. To be westernized can also be read as an effort toward globalization, a sign of China‘s openness and competence to join the world market, not only in economic terms but in terms of comprehensive national capacity (zonghe guoli). In daily practice, there is little inner conflict anymore over adopting the western way of living and consumption. Individualism, along with marketization, is justified in the daily practice of being modern and civilized citizens. Here, individualism legitimizes the satisfaction of personal needs as the priority and motivation for social action. Experiencing a decline of morality in the whole society, people criticize the society in general as selfish (zisi). Meanwhile, everybody needs to be cautious and ready to fight to protect their own interests because the intensive market competition requires and encourages the individual to satisfy the needs of the self and thus can easily lead the individual to be indifferent to the needs of others. It seems that people have never been as clear about what they want as they are within this market mechanism. To reach the goal of what they want, they can be whoever the goal needs them to be. In Liu Xin‘s ethnographic research on contemporary Chinese urban life, he calls it as —the otherness of self.“ Liu observes that the moral landscape has deeply changed in Chinese society. A deep assumption of the common belief is that moral decisions depends on the economic situation and that what a person is can be entirely determined by the material condition of life.23 Liu further argues that in spite of the sharp and increasing gap between the rich and the poor, the urban and the rural, the elite and the mass, the backward and the civilized, the traditional and the modern, there is very little difference among different social groups‘ visions of the future.24 With these sharply defined either-or dualisms in mind, individuals easily change themselves into someone different without much difficulty, in order to meet the expectation of
23 Xin Liu, The Otherness of Self: A genealogy of the self in contemporary China. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2002, p. 14. 24 Liu, 2002, p. 70.
13 —success.“ This change is usually from the —undesirable“ categories of poor, rural/backward or mass to the —desirable“ categories of rich, urban/modern, or elite. It is not my intention to reject the value of market here. Instead, as I implied in my personal experience and the social change in contemporary Chinese society, market reform improves people‘s quality of life and provides freer space and more choices for people to lead their own lives. The market itself does not necessarily bring exclusiveness and extreme individualism and thus the loss of self-identity. However, if the whole society is marketized, this marketized society will transform the value of market into every aspect of social life. Thus it shrinks rather than enlarges the space for individual development into different directions. What I criticize is this marketization of all aspects of social life. The problem for current educational practice is that education does not provide intellectual resources to help the young generation cultivate vision beyond those dualistic categories; rather, it enforces these categories. There is no crucial resource in education for students to learn in order to create a new space of their own, to imagine an unknown future in the dominant materialized culture of success in contemporary society.
IV. Jumping into Two Boats at the Same Time: Scores vs. Suzhi in Education There have been two major changes in education in the post-Mao period. One is the restoration of college entrance examinations. An exam-oriented education system was restored after its termination in the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Again, students need to take exams to enter into the higher levels of school. The curriculum and pedagogy are tailored to the needs of the exams so students can move forward in the education system. Another big change in education policy is called suzhi education, which is education to promote the comprehensive ability of individual students. It is a response to the limitation of the exam-oriented education system which is highly criticized by educators and the public for its inability to provide qualified personnel for market competition. However, it is still a question whether this suzhi reform works or not within the tradition of exam-oriented education system.
14 Does it free the student‘s mind or doubly restrict it? Is it possible to be both good in scores and in suzhi without any internal conflict?
Educational reform after Mao: restoration of examination The university entrance examination was restored in 1977. It was a victory for the political powers who favored a meritocratic approach inside the Communist Party after the death of Mao in 1976. The restoration of the university entrance examination also started a new education system which directly influenced elementary and secondary education. Examinations are keys to educational attainment in the hierarchy of the school system. Good scores in the examination are the most crucial factor in admission to the upper levels of education and better schools (better university, better job, and better social status). Therefore, the examination system is an engine of the post-Mao education system. The university entrance examination, because of its dominant role in university admission, becomes the lighthouse of the whole education system. In the post-Mao school, the major subjects for examination generally are Chinese, Mathematics, English, Sciences (physics, chemistry, and biology), and Social Studies (politics, history, and geography). Mathematics and Languages (mainly Chinese and English) take the dominant part in the university entrance examination. With the aim of —serving the modern socialist construction“ œ the official statement of the Sixteenth Communist Party Conference in 2003 œ the examination system authorizes knowledge which favors science and western languages (English) in the education system.25 As in the ancient examination system, the university entrance examination is open to all people who meet the basic academic requirements. However, the selective function of the examination closes the alternative opportunities for students and teachers, who directly engage in the examination-oriented education system to explore other types of knowledge which are not legitimized by the examination
25 Xinhua News: www.xinhuanet.com. Retrieved on February 16, 2008.
15 system. This orientation of the university entrance examination influences the curriculum and educational pedagogy of the primary schools, secondary education and vocational education as well. In Bernstein‘s educational knowledge system, formal educational knowledge can be realized through three message systems: curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation.26 The uniqueness of Chinese education is that the evaluation system (examination) dominates and directs the other two systems. Here, I will examine how the university entrance examination influences the lower levels of education, especially secondary education and vocational education. Economic benefit, cultural honor, and upward social mobility are considered to be the major benefits of obtaining higher education. In the hierarchy of the higher education system, prestigious universities are on the top of all higher education institutions. Technology and natural sciences are preferred to the humanities and social sciences. These trends influence the lower levels of education. The key schools at the secondary level are considered to be the major sites for preparing students for key universities or access to prospective majors, such as computer science, engineering or finance. After the nine-year compulsory education (six years of primary education and three years of junior high education), there is an option of either going to high school for college preparation or going to vocational schools for receiving skills training. However, the fact within the examination system is that this option is not a choice but a systemic selection by the examination which separates students into different tracks: students with higher scores to the track of college preparation and students with lower scores to vocational schools. In high school, students with lower scores would largely study humanities or social sciences, and students with higher scores would study the natural sciences or engineering as preparation for the university entrance examination. What subject a student will be taught is generally decided by what needs to be tested for further education.
26 Bernstein, Basil, On the Classification and Framing of Educational Knowledge. In Michael Young, ed. Knowledge and Control: new directions for the sociology of education. London: Collier-MacMillan Publishers, 1971.
16 In the reforms since the 1980s, though there have been some adjustments made to the university admissions policy in different years, although the university entrance examination always plays a dominant role in admission. Some other factors have received minor consideration. For example, some situations, such as academic Olympic competition awards, athletic championship, etc. can add extra points to examination scores and increase the possibility of admission to better universities according to the nationwide score scale. Though this exam-oriented system aims to provide equal opportunity for everybody to realize social mobility through education, one significant consequence of the restoration of the exam-oriented system is the increasing inequality of education quality between rural and urban areas. A large number of high schools at village level were closed due to their poor quality under the new academic criteria. High schools were concentrated in big towns where the resources could be focused for students who mostly had potential to attend colleges. On the other hand, rural primary and middle schools were established in various forms: some got public funds from the village administration and some got private funds from parents. Because of the financial decentralization policy and the compulsory education law in the mid-1980s, the demand for primary and middle schools was increasing. Facing the situation of high schools being concentrated in big towns and cities, villages own most of the primary schoolsœboth public and privateœwith poor facilities and a lack of teachers.27 This reform established a dual-track school system with key point schools (usually in cities and big towns) on one hand and ordinary schools for mass education on the other hand. This dual-track school system was enforced by concentrating educational resources in key point schools in cities. While the key point schools are open to everyone by competitive examination, the lack of educational resources at the village level doubtlessly decreases the chances of rural children to enter key point schools and then realize upward social mobility.
27 Lin, 1999.
17 In this exam-oriented education system, students internalize the importance of the exams, so it is natural for students to see exams as the sole personal goal to achieve at school. The rewards - going to better schools, getting better jobs and higher social status - enforce this goal for students who agree to stay in the track of the education system without exploring their unique interests or developing their natural curiosity. Instead of being a cultivating process for diverse individual development, education becomes a tool employed to meet a utilitarian need. Moreover, the curriculum and teaching methods are identical with exams, which formulate standard questions and standard answers. In this way, education molds identical ways of thinking. In other words, it encourages all students and teachers to think in the standard way designed by exams. Creative thinking is not only discouraged but almost not allowed in this exam-oriented education. In key point schools, this restriction may be looser than in ordinary schools, which have more pressure on test-taking due to their much poorer facilities and student exam records. It is a common assumption that succeeding in exams is the bottom line for any further achievement in education. If you cannot excel in the exam, you cannot go to college. In this context, creativity has little importance. Creative thinking becomes a privilege only for some students who have high academic performance. This exam-oriented education also enforces an exclusive approach for survival in society. The highly competitive character of the exam encourages students to compete with each other in the same track to reach the same goal. To succeed in the exam, you have to be better than others. The standard of being —better“ is the test score. There is nothing wrong with competition which can inspire the best potential of individual ability. The problem is that this competition justifies a morality of being the winner while others are losers. It enforces the dualistic categorization of individuals, similar to what the marketized social categories do. It is not my intention here to argue that the exam has no educational function, but rather to argue that it can be a barrier for individual development if we do not use it appropriately. I agree that the exam is an important tool for evaluation and can better improve the quality of education. My point is that the exam will lose its
18 educational function if standardized exams continue to dominate the whole education system. The meaning and purpose of education are explained in the orientation to exams, not in the orientation of the individual‘s unique need for development. Noticing the incompetence of many good test-takers in the job market as China continues its market reform and seeks improvement of its competence in global competition, the government started a new education reform in the late 1990s called suzhi education reform.
Suzhi education reform: The education of a well-rounded person What is suzhi? The direct translation is —quality.“ Even though this meaning is vague, it indicates the refusal of valuing the person solely on the basis of scores but rather favors valuing the person through different aspects of strength. Kipnis claims that it is difficult to translate suzhi into English as —quality.“ In English, one may refer to one‘s moral qualities with the term —character,“ mental qualities with the term —intelligence,“ and physical qualities with the term —strength.“ There is no term like suzhi which can refer to all these meanings at once.28 This word became a popular slogan in the 1980s when the one-child policy became effective in the whole country. There is an assumption behind this slogan that the backwardness of the nation is because of the low suzhi of the people, an old connection people were familiar with.29 Another assumption is that the low suzhi of the people is because of the large population. So to increase the quality of the people, we have to reduce the quantity of the population. This logic is largely accepted by the people, especially the urban people, who consider themselves to be the agents of
28 Andrew Kipnis, —Neoliberalism reified: suzhi discourse and tropes of neoliberalism in the People‘s Republic of China.“ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute ( .S.), 13, 2007, pp. 383-400. 29 This causal relationship between suzhi of the people and the development of the nation can track back to the early twentieth century when the May Fourth intellectuals made efforts to transform the individuals to strengthen the country. I will discuss this point in details in Chapter II.
19 modern transformation as well as people with better suzhi than rural people.30 The Suzhi campaign is not only a state discourse, as many argue, or a strategy to blame the victims, who have —low suzhi.“ In national development, it is believed that the individual must also require it of herself.31 Because of its vague but comprehensive meaning, it is easy to connect suzhi with traditional values in Confucianism as well as Marxism so it is well accepted by almost all people in the contemporary society.32 In the contemporary context of marketized society, it indicates an attitude of self-cultivation in order to achieve desirable and laudable qualities that make one reach economic and social success. Under this background, suzhi education reform started in 1999, launched by the Ministry of Education. It used this already well-accepted word suzhi to campaign for reform. It was designed to bring wide-scale change to China‘s education system: pedagogy, curricula, assessment, and teacher preparation. The motivation behind this reform is a strong opinion among educators, administrators as well as parents that the traditional exam-oriented education could not make the young generations competitive enough in society, domestically as well as internationally. There is a strong belief that we have to educate a well-rounded person: not only a person good at making high scores in exams, but a person who will be successful in this globalized, marketized and technology-dominated society. Suzhi, explained as an entrepreneurial creativity and strong social, psychological, and intellectual skills, is closely connected to the quickly emerging marketized social values that have emerged in the recent social changes. Suzhi is thus favored by the state and welcomed by parents who have high hopes for their —only child.“ An essay written by an educational expert in China can well illustrate this
30 Vanessa L. Fong, —Morality, Cosmopolitanism, or Academic Attainment? Discourse on ”Quality‘ and Urban Chinese-Only-Children‘s Claims to Ideal Personhood.“ City & Society, Vol. 19, No. 1, 2007, 86-113. 31 For example, Rachel Murphy, —Turning peasants into modern Chinese citizens: ”population quality‘ discourse, demographic transition and primary education.“ The China Quarterly, vol. 177, March 2004, 1-20; 32 Andrew Kipnis, 2007.
20 fever of suzhi and how it roots being successful in people‘s minds as a life goal for the individual: The new market economy places new demands on the quality of the personnel (rencai) of the future. The center of the market economy is competition. In order to prepare our youth for this, we have to get them used to the character of the new environment. First, survival of the fittest is the principle of nature in biology, the animal world, and in the changes in human society. Therefore, we have to inculcate in our young people, starting from a young age, the mentality of competition, mastering how to exist in the midst of competition, be good at developing amidst competition. Second, we have to raise their ability to generate new ideas. The central point of the new information age is constant change and newness. If creativity is internalized in one‘s psychology and in actions, it can produce new ways of thinking, new ideas, and new behaviors. In the market economy, those who can grasp the ability to be creative, who understand new technology, who can see new products œ those are the ones who can succeed.33 This is an extremely popular view of the competitive vision of quality as an ideal goal for personal and collective attainment. Here, the principle of Social Darwinism is accepted and taken for granted by most people.34 This theory easily justifies individual achievement through the sacrifice of others‘ interests. The character of exclusiveness of this mentality is totally ignored in this individual-oriented suzhi discourse. Ironically, this individualist discourse does not provide more space for the individual to explore the diversity of individuality but rather it well serves the state‘s intention of governmentality in reaching its collective
33 Terry Woronov, Transforming the Future: “Quality” Children for the Chinese ation. PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2002, p. 33. 34 Social Darwinism is an important resource for the intellectuals in the early twentieth century to help them promote the view on individual development and national strengthening. Thus, it is a familiar concept for Chinese people since the effort for enlightenment by the May Fourth intellectuals.
21 goal for national development because the state needs personnel who are competitive in the global market.35 The comprehensive but contradictory characteristics of suzhi can also be seen from its complementarities to exam-oriented education. At first sight, they seem against each other because the exam-oriented education emphasizes the single mode of thinking and problem-solving, so it is hostile to the creativity which is advocated in suzhi education, at least at the theoretical level. On the other hand, however, good performance in exams is considered as a crucial part of high suzhi. It is argued that high scores indicate the high intellectual quality of students as well as good study habits, good study skills, and self-discipline. It is in this contradictory as well as compromised sense that I use the term —jumping into two boats at the same time“ to describe the condition of education in the present time. In this suzhi education reform, suzhi education and exam-oriented education are paralleled with each other. It is an ironical phenomenon that even though they are contradictory at the theoretical level, they are compatible at the practical level in the Chinese education system. The difference between exam-oriented education and suzhi education is that the latter designs to add new components tailored to the needs of the changed society. The reformed structure consists of new components such as social skills, musical or artistic practice, problem-solving entrepreneurial creativity and in general, the use of more comprehensive and updated knowledge rather than referring only to the subject knowledge contained in textbooks. What is absent in both reforms is a concern about exploring every student‘s diverse interests and curiosity through the educational experience. We can say that it is progress that the dominant role of the exam has been broken in suzhi education reform. However, rural students and students in economically backward areas may be doubly marginalized in this new educational structure. As I mentioned in my discussion of the exam-oriented education system, due to the geographic inequality, rural students are in a disadvantaged situation
35 Terry Woronov, 2002.
22 because of their lack of qualified teachers, facilities and learning opportunities compared to those of urban students. With the new standards established through suzhi education reform to evaluate students‘ comprehensive ability, these disadvantaged students find that it is even more difficult for them to catch up. On one hand, rural people are —naturally“ considered to have low suzhi compared to urban people when suzhi discourse is related to modernization. It justifies the second-class citizenship of rural citizens when they are considered to be less modernized, less civilized, and less educated than urban peopleœa logic developed in the process of modernization and accepted by both rural and urban people. Also, they are considered to lack the cosmopolitan views that their urban counterparts have.36 In the principle of Social Darwinism, they are persons who do not fit well into the global market competition. On the other hand, rural parents usually could not afford for their children to participate in extra-curricular activities as urban children often do, a crucial part in suzhi education. Usually, parents are required to make an expensive investment if the children need to learn to play a musical instrument, draw, or pursue other —high“ taste interests, which are the important indicators for an ideal person with high suzhi. From the discussion above, it is not difficult to recognize that suzhi is a new ideology to govern the individual and a technology of self-government, in Foucault‘s words.37 People accept the idea of suzhi and internalize it into their daily practice, but they do not question who set the standard of high or low suzhi. Some argue that it is the strategy of the state to govern the individual. This may be partly right. Meanwhile, it is also viewed as a practice of self-government, not only according to the discourse
36 Cohen, Myron L., —Cultural and Political Inventions in Modern China: the case of the Chinese ”peasant‘“ (China in Transformation), Daedalus, Spring 1993 vol. 122, no. 2, 151(20); Kipnis, Andrew, —The Disturbing Educational Discipline of ”peasants‘“, The China Journal, no. 46, (Jul. 2001), 1-24; Murphy, Rachel, —Turning peasants into modern Chinese citizens: ”population quality‘ discourse, demographic transition and primary education.“ The China Quarterly, vol. 177, March 2004, 1-20. 37 Michel Foucault, —Subject and Power,“ Critical Inquiry, Vol. 8, No. 4, (Summer, 1982), 777-795. I will discuss about the concept of individuality in Foucault‘s post-modernism philosophy in the second chapter.
23 of the state but also according to the social demand for competition. The market, along with the state, becomes the dominant power in the individual‘s mind. It is in this sense that Foucault used the word —subjectivizing“ to describe the situation of the individual when the self surrenders to the external power which may be internalized in the individual‘s mind.38 There is a crucial difference between a self-conducted process of being transformed and a self-transformation process. The latter is absent in current educational practice, both in exam-oriented education and suzhi education.
Where am I? Problems of the contemporary education reforms In the current practice of the parallel structure of suzhi education and exam-oriented education, the market value of competition and Social Darwinist principles prevent individuals from developing knowledge and their own sense of individuality which can be different from the defined standard of success. In both reforms, the question of where the unique —I“ is located has not been explored in students‘ pursuit of education to become an ideal person with high suzhi. This lack of —I“ is rooted in the radical social change that happened in the past decades as I described earlier. In this context of radical change, it is easy for the individual to get lost when the connection with tradition is not carefully and creatively explored through individual development. As indicated in my personal story, as well as in the description of the social change, we just know some facts of tradition but it is difficult to find useful connections between the present and the past to help solve the current emerging problems in the process of individual development when the crisis of individual identity evolves. It is in this context that I describe the social change as radical when the connection with the past is lost. I am not arguing that tradition has already completely disappeared in daily life. It may be embedded in people‘s minds and act in some unrecognized way. My point is that tradition is not taken as a useful resource to enlighten current experience. Borrowing John Dewey‘s words which he delivered to a Chinese audience during his visit to China from 1919 to 1921, the
38 Michel Foucault, 1982.
24 disconnection between tradition and the present stops transmitting the best of our traditional heritage to the present ongoing environment.39 The disconnection with the past, thus, could not provide an orientation for the individual to develop a continuous personality and locate the self in the current change. In the current educational practice, there is little effort to connect tradition with the present situation as an important learning resource for individual development in the reality of radical social change brought on by market-related economic and social reforms. This social change can be an opportunity to bring innovation to educational practice and develop a rich and diverse sense of individuality for young generations. But the ignorance of a creative transformation of tradition may wither the opportunity for individual development. The current education reform enforces the exclusiveness of market competition rather than exploring the connection between social change and tradition. It thus fails to provide freer space for individual development which market reform may bring about. On the other hand, the exclusive competition of marketization in various aspects of social life proliferates new social values in the cultural vacuum created when tradition is disconnected from the present. The marketized social reforms also legitimize unequal resource allocation in the name of efficiency. A new logic of equity is nurtured in this social context: everyone is equal in terms of capital. With this new logic, people are categorized into different groups, either successful or unsuccessful, as defined by market competition. When this way of thinking is enforced in various social reforms, including education reform, the individual is lost in social categorization, and exists only in these dualistic categories. Education reform directs students to follow a defined social route for success and thus encourages students to identify themselves with this sole approach to self-realization. However, another consequence of social change resulting from the market reform is that it shows the fluidity and diversity of life, which is not a familiar concept to people who are used to living the routine and immobile way of life in Mao‘s time,
39 John Dewey, Lectures in China, 1919 1920, translated from Chinese and edited by Robert W. Clopton and Tsuin-chen Ou. Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1973.
25 which will be described in Chapter II. Also, as described in my discussion of social change, the looseness of the house registration system and the need for economic development provide the opportunity for people to leave the assigned spots and move to different places. To some extent, my moving from the village to the city, to the capital and then abroad is a journey of leaving the familiar hometown for unknown places. The huge number of migrants also predicts a completely new image of life which can potentially provide different meanings for life and for the future, though the potential diversity may be molded into sameness through the powerful social force of marketization. Thus, a tension arises between the fact of an un-predictable and thus —freer“ life and the consequence of the unequal and divided social categories that market reform brings. This social tension becomes intense in the individual‘s life, which may bring a personal crisis of self-identity in the changing society. It is a battle between the individual‘s will and the social force: Can I listen to the beat of my heart or do I just need to follow the social track? When this tension arises, the response of education reform has not been to explore the possibilities but to muffle the question. The reform takes education as the most efficient means of socialization and makes the first part of the question null, thus seeming to solve the crisis. It uses the discourse of suzhi to advocate a reform for the education of —individuals with mind.“40 But this —mind“ has already been defined by the dominant marketization value within the recent social change and thus has only one face of success. To improve the suzhi of the individual is to promote the quality of the mind to better fit in the favored categories. When we seek a goal of our own, the goal has already been defined, confirmed; celebrated by the leading persons. In this situation, we think that we are doing something to satisfy our own interests, for our own sake. We want to be successful people. We are who we are because of this being and because of becoming successful. It seems that we are in the midst of a very self-centered era in Chinese history.
40 John Dewey, ature and Experience. In John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925 1953. Volume 1: 1925. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.
26 However, we do not see other possibilities in being one‘s own self, a self which can be different from the pre-defined model. What I would like to argue here is that education should help us to explore our uncertain potentialities, not simply teach us the socially authorized route of becoming successful. In this sense, the problem of current education reform is that it provides little space for individuals to explore the sense of self, the —individual mind“ in Dewey‘s words, in the midst of this radical social change which disconnects the past and enforces unequal social categories.41 Therefore, the question to improve education is really a question of how schools might conserve and transmit tradition in a creative way so that students can connect their life with past experience. I argue that this connection is crucial to formulate a continuously enriched personality that is not bound by the dualistic social categories present in the context of radical social change. Here, tradition does not simply mean the past experience we have, but rather it refers to the potential connection œ a continuous interaction, in Dewey‘s words œ the individual may obtain with the past; the past experience has the potential to release new meanings in the present situation. I will define this in more detail in Chapter III.
V. A ew Conception of Individuality through a Philosophical Dialogue A new conception of individuality: unique but inclusive The meaning of self I propose here is different from the self which is pre-defined by social expectations. Instead, it evolves by fully engaging in the present social life. Because of its uncertainty and its openness to any possibility, it is unique. But this uniqueness is not always guaranteed. We have to be willing to battle with the comfortable conventions we encounter and make a difficult choice: follow the convention or choose a way of your own. On the other hand, being open to any possibility does not mean to do whatever —I“ wants. —To be self“ is an effort to
41 In John Dewey, Later Works: 1925 1953, Vol. 1, 1925, Dewey differs —individual minds“ from —individuals with minds“. The latter does not need be different minds, It is —in itself a system of belief, recognitions, and ignorance, of acceptances and rejections, of expectancies and appraisals of meanings which have been instituted under the influence of custom and tradition,“ p. 170.
27 connect inner feeling with convention: to face the challenge of the convention, to respond to its limitation, and to be responsible to the consequence of choosing. It is not necessary to rebel against the convention, but we should not easily surrender inner feeling to convention. I argue that current education practice separates the inner feeling of the self from convention, thus the —I“ is absent. —To be self“ is to create the —I“ and connect the —I“ with convention. To do whatever I want is not —to be self“ but another form of surrendering the —I“ to desire, which is a product of following the convention without reflection. In Robert Young‘s words, this —I“ is —the location of a struggle for authenticity and unity.“42 This idea is what I would like to explore through dialogue between American pragmatist John Dewey and Chinese Confucianist Liang Shuming. This —inner feeling“ is not intuition, or anything mystical. This is the concept I will discuss in the following chapters dealing with John Dewey and Liang Shuming‘s philosophies. In Dewey‘s view, inner feeling does not originate from nowhere but rather comes from our daily experience when we interact with the world. In Liang‘s view, it is the product of zijue, a word difficult to translate into English but which can be understood as a kind of ethical intelligence, or self-enlightenment, an idea different from the May Fourth intellectuals‘ conception of enlightenment, which I will discuss in Chapter II. Both of these philosophers were involved in China‘s modernization, particularly its modern education. Though the time of their writing and the present time are dramatically different, we may find that the present problem is heavily embedded in the past. A clear continuity can be seen from the description of individuality in different historical periods, which I will explain in the second chapter. Thus, a dialogue with contemporary Chinese and western philosophies may find ideas that are highly relevant in current experience. For example, the dialogue between Confucianism and pragmatism which has emerged in recent years provides resources to find a creative way of learning to be self in the contemporary Chinese context. It is
42 Robert Young, —Comparative Methodology and Postmodern Relativism“, in International Review of Education, 1997, Vol. 43, No. 5/6, pp. 497-505, p. 499.
28 the time to connect western and Eastern wisdom to cultivate an aesthetic sense of self. Education may be a bridge between the two.
John Dewey‘s Relevance to Chinese Education The value of Dewey‘s philosophy on democratic society had already been recognized by the forerunners of China‘s modernization. Deweyan pragmatism was intensively studied during the May Fourth Movement (1915-1921). Dewey himself visited China in 1919, several days before the May Fourth event, and stayed in China for more than two years. During the time, he delivered thousands of lectures to Chinese audiences around the country. In his lectures on education, Dewey formulated three questions to establish a philosophy of education for social change. First, how can we provide for the majority of people to have access to education? That is, how can we popularize education, and make it universal? Second, how can we bring about a balance between literary education and education for ordinary human activities? Third, how can we make school truly conservative œ that is, on the one hand, enable it to conserve and transmit the best of our traditional cultural heritage, and on the other, to cultivate personalities which can successfully cope with their environment?43 After almost nine decades, the first question has almost been resolved in Chinese education, at least from a quantitative perspective. Suzhi education reform is a sort of effort to respond to the second question. However, we have not faced the third question Dewey addressed ninety years ago to the Chinese audience: How do we connect with our past experience to solve contemporary problems while cultivating personalities which will not get lost in the radical social change? In his lectures, Dewey claimed that the ultimate end of education is volunteering for communal life, to construct a democratic society. He held a strong belief that individual intelligence can only be developed through living together, and that the Scientific method is the medium to develop individual intelligence in social
43 John Dewey, 1973, p. 190.
29 life. Though Dewey‘s lectures received huge audiences during the May Fourth Era, the fever soon faded away when the liberal intellectuals retreated from the center of political reform and communism gained favor among radical intellectuals as a weapon of liberation. After the communist party gained political power in 1949, Dewey was harshly criticized. But this did not mean that he would exit the stage of modern Chinese history. As I suggested in my discussion of the problem of current education reform in the context of rapid social change, Dewey‘s questions are still not only valid but also urgent if we are to deal with the current problem of education. However, it is not until almost five decades after Dewey‘s visit to China that his value to Chinese society has started to regain academic attention in the comparison of his philosophy with the indigenous Chinese philosophies, especially Confucianism.44
Dewey‘s encounter with Confucianism As early as 1941, Alfred North Whitehead claimed that —… if you want to understand Confucius, read John Dewey. If you want to understand John Dewey, read Confucius.“45 Many scholars have argued that Confucianism and Deweyan pragmatism share significant commonalities.46 The connection between Deweyan pragmatism and Confucianism is re-discovered in their potential value to contribute to
44 For example, the Chinese scholar Gu Hongliang published a book on Deweyan pragmatism The Misunderstanding of Pragmatism: The Influence of Dewey to China’s Modern Philosophy. (Shiyong Zhuyi de Wudu: Duwei Zhexue dui Zhongguo Xiandai Zhexue de Yingxiang), Shanghai: East China Normal University Press, 2000. 45 Fucien Price, ed., Dialogues of Alfred orth Whitehead (New York: The New American Library, 1956), p 145. Quote from Joseph S. Wu, —Philosophy and Revolution: Confucianism and Pragmatism.“ Philosophy East and West, Vol. 23, No. 3, (July, 1973), 323-332. 46 Joseph S. Wu, —Philosophy and Revolution: Confucianism and Pragmatism,“ Philosophy East and West, Vol. 23, No. 3, (Jul. 1973), 323-332; Robert C. Neville, —Wang Yang-ming and John Dewey on the Ontological Question,“ Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 12 (1985), 283-295; Joseph Grange, —The Disappearance of the Public Good: Confucius, Dewey, Rorty“, Philosophy East and West, Vol. 46, No. 3, (Jul., 1996), 351-366; David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames, The Democracy of the Dead: Dewey, Confucianism, and the Hope for Democracy in China. Chicago: Open Court, 1999; Joseph Grange, John Dewey, Confucius, and Global Philosophy, Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2004; Tan, Sar-hoo, Confucian Democracy: A Deweyan Reconstruction. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003; Joseph Grange, John Dewey, Confucius, and Global Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York, 2004); Richard Shusterman, —Pragmatism and East-Asian Thought.“ Metaphilosophy. Vol. 35, No. 1/2, (Jan., 2004), pp. 13-43.
30 a global democratic community.47 For Dewey, the question is how to construct a democratic community in which everybody can fully develop his unique potential mind. For Confucianism, the general question is how to realize —the Way“ (Dao) or virtue (Ren or De). Both of the philosophies come to a consensus: that realizing a social self which unifies the unique individual and the diverse society is a key to their respective projects. The Confucian concept of self and Dewey‘s concept of self reach a consensus on its uniqueness as well as its embodiment in social relations. It is always a valid question to ask whether Confucianism can bring a unique approach of democracy for China‘s contemporary modernization. A consensus of the arguments among English-speaking academics is that it is useful to check the resource both from pragmatism and Confucianism so that mutual learning can be achieved in their dialogues. As early as 1920, Remer remarked: —Dewey cannot apply his own philosophy to Chinese life. It will require someone as close to Chinese thought as he is close to American thought to do this.“48 We may need a Chinese to join this dialogue and contribute to the ongoing project of China‘s modernization: the development of the individual as an essential part of this project. Fortunately, in China, an indigenous philosopher, Liang Shuming, also explored this issue. He himself was influenced by pragmatism, but found harmony in his complex thoughts through Confucianism. Can he be the person who can contribute to this dialogue?
Liang‘s Encounter with Dewey Liang Shuming (1893-1988) was a self-educated Chinese scholar who established his reputation as a modern Confucianist with his first book, Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies (1921) written in the midst of China‘s struggles and the social challenges of modernization. Liang came of age intellectually
47 David Hall and Roger Ames, 1999; Tan, Sar-hoo, 2003. 48 C. F. Remer, —John Dewey in China“, Millard’s Review 13 (3 July, 1920), p. 267. Quote from Ching-Sze Wang, John Dewey in China: to teach and to learn. PhD dissertation. Bloomington: Indiana University, 2004.
31 in this turbulent period in Chinese history in which the nation seemed to be caught in a no-man‘s-land between a dying socio-political tradition and a future yet to be born. He himself experienced the personal crisis in his early years; he could not find a worldview to console his chaotic mind. Because of his father‘s disappointment in Chinese classics, he was enlightened by western thoughts in his early years but converted to Indian Buddhism in his late teens. Still confused by the world he lived in, he almost committed suicide before finding Confucianism in his early twenties. This crisis of continuity at both the existential and cultural levels–essentially an inability to frame coherent purposes from past and present experience–focused Liang‘s philosophical reflection on the search for the individual and social resources necessary to survive the experience. That inquiry, motivated by Liang‘s early experience of rapid and profound social change, led him to a revision of Confucianism subtly colored by his encounter with Deweyan pragmatism that enabled him, in his own estimation, to weather the subsequent crises of the Japanese invasion, the Chinese civil war, the Cultural Revolution and the rapid economic development of the post-Mao period, without relapsing into the existential crisis of continuity that had accompanied his earlier experience of the broader crisis of continuity in post-Qing China. In a review article on Dewey‘s philosophy of education, Liang once wrote: —I am with Dewey to fight against the trend of anti-humanity in contemporary western philosophy. However, Dewey could not fight alone; he needs help from the East.“49 His intensive thoughts on Chinese modernization, especially the development of individuality as a key to China‘s democracy, are important resources for this ongoing dialogue. Moreover, his ideas are relevant to this inquiry into the problem of constructing individual identity in a rapidly changing environment. Liang concurs with the social character of the self in Deweyan pragmatism as well as Confucianism. However, what is unique in Liang‘s thoughts is the emphasis
49 Liang Shuming, —The Fundamental Thoughts of John Dewey‘s Philosophy of Education,“ in The Complete Collection of Liang Shuming‘s Work(Liang Shuming Quanji), Vol. VII, (Jinan: Shangdong People Press, 1990), 688. This is my translation from Liang‘s Chinese work.
32 on the reflection of the inner self along with the interaction between the self and the organic environment. In the same review article on Dewey‘s philosophy of education, Liang said, —His [Dewey‘s] philosophy talks about change. He understands that life is about change. […] This is the same as Confucianism. He understands what life is. However, he only understands the changing side of life. He does not see the unchanging part of life. […] His idea is close to Confucianism but misses an important element of it.“50 What does Liang mean by the —unchanging side of life?“ Does he imply some essentialist point by saying that there is an essential human nature which cannot be changed and should serve as the foundation of human behavior in society? By claiming the similarity between Confucianism and pragmatism, Liang has already divided himself from the essentialists‘ view. Instead, he uses the concept of self-enlightenment to emphasize the importance of inner self as an essential part in the interaction between the individual and society. This inner self transforms the quality of the individual in the context of engagement with society. Even though this inner self gains social character in the process, it never completely disappears; it would be inhuman for the social self to replace this inner self. Without the tension between the inner self and the social self, self-enlightenment is not possible and critical consciousness cannot develop. Giving up the inner self will easily lead to the otherness of self.
Summary In this chapter, I begin an inquiry into individual identity in social change by reflecting on my own personal experience; this reflection then leads into a brief review of social change in the past three decades in China. The market reform brings change in various aspects of social life but also categorizes people into different groups according to the marketized value. Unfortunately, current education reform provides little resource to deconstruct this categorization but rather enforces the
50 Liang Shuming, 1990.
33 dualistic social categories in a systematic way. It educates students in an identical way to provide personnel for market competition but individual identity is lost in this education experience. After identifying this problem, I ask how schools can connect tradition with the present social change so students can construct their individual identity without getting lost in the crowd in the context of radical social change. In the following chapter, I will review the concept of individuality in Chinese history and western social theories. The exploration of a modern ideal of individuality in the last century reveals the absence of the concept of an inner self in the various projects of enlightenment and in the communist campaign in China. On the other hand, the western theories of individuality are also trapped in the relationship between the individual and the society. I will not review the complete western history of philosophy on individuality, but will take three examples from liberalism, critical theory and post-structuralism respectively and discuss the ideas of Rousseau, Paulo Freire and Michel Foucault. I will argue that these ideas are inadequate to respond to the current challenge; I will then turn to an analysis of Dewey and Liang‘s philosophies in the chapters that follow.
34 CHAPTER II
I DIVIDUALITY I COMPARISO :
THE PAST A D THE WEST
No one behind, no one ahead. The path the ancients cleared has closed. And the other path, everyone‘s path, Easy and wide, goes nowhere. I am alone and find my way. --- Dharmakirti51
In the first chapter, a question arises from reflection on personal experience as well as the description of social change over the last three decades of Chinese society: How can schools conserve and transmit tradition so that students can formulate self-identity which will not get lost in the context of radical social change? I argue that the lack of a sense of self, —the individual mind,“ brings personal crises in a radically changing social environment. A new concept of individuality is thus needed for education reform in the contemporary context of marketized society in China. Before starting the proposed comparative philosophical analysis of John Dewey and Liang Shuming, which I will launch later in this dissertation, it is necessary to examine prominent alternative conceptions of individuality in both Chinese and western traditions. This review is not to exclude these schools of thought from the dialogue. Instead, they provide important intellectual and historical context for the dialogue since both Dewey and Liang are directly or indirectly influenced by these ideas. As the Confucian scholar Tu Wei-ming stated, —…far from being bound to the past as a fixed entity, to have a historical consciousness is to develop the power of creativity not in isolation but in a dialogue with those great historical personalities by
51 Quote from Octavio Paz, A Tale of Two Gardens: Poems from India, 1952 1995. New York: Directions, 1997.
35 whom one‘s own work is meaningfully judged and properly appreciated.“52 Here, the historical consciousness not only includes the understanding of Chinese ideas of individuality in the past but also means a comparative perspective on influential western conceptions, especially when the modernization of Chinese society is highly related to the West in the past century and continues its intertwining relationship with the West in the present. In the first part of this chapter, therefore, I will review the concept of individuality in Confucianism, the May Fourth radical liberalism and Maoism in China, three of the most influential philosophical perspectives in twentieth century Chinese history. In the second part, I will discuss the western conceptions of individuality from liberalism, critical theory and post-structuralism, three influential philosophical perspectives in twentieth century Euro-American social and political theory.
I. Individuality in Chinese History Confucianism dominated Chinese mainstream culture for almost two thousand years. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Confucianism as a tradition was seriously challenged by western ideas of science and democracy. The May Fourth intellectuals tried to introduce western ideas on individuality to the Chinese people. They believed that educating new citizens was the key to saving the country from domestic chaos and foreign intruders.53 But they failed in this project of national salvation. The Chinese communist Party finally defeated the foreign invaders and won the hearts of the Chinese people by creating the anti-imperialist nationalism of the 1930s and 1940s.54 Mao Zedong, a charismatic leader of the Party, tried to overthrow
52 Tu Wei-ming, —”Inner experience‘: The basis of creativity in Neo-Confucian thinking.“ In Christian F. Murck (ed.), Artists and Traditions: Uses of the past in Chinese culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976. 53 A representative of these efforts is Liang Qichao‘s On A Young China (Shao Nian Zhong Guo Shuo). 54 Edward Friedman, —A Failed Chinese Modernity,“ Daedalus, Spring 1993, 122, 2, 1-17. Some other authors have stated the similar view on Communists‘ victory in China. The following paragraphs on individuality in Mao‘s time will briefly touch this issue.
36 all the traditions Chinese society had, including Confucianism, May Fourth liberalism and radical Maoism through various revolutions and movements from 1952 to 1976. The Cultural Revolution was the peak of these deconstructions. For individuals in that society, a collective identity with the Party was the only way to survive. Soon after the Cultural Revolution, however, collectivism was quickly replaced by the market-oriented social life. In the following part of this chapter, I will offer a more detailed analysis of conceptions of individuality in the different historical periods stated above. This historical narrative may lay a foundation for understanding the problems of individual identity we are facing in the current context.
Individuality in Confucianism A common view on Confucianism is its role-playing, ritual performance and hierarchical social order which are all socially defined. In The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism, Max Weber claimed that —ultimately it (Confucianism) represented just a tremendous code of political maxims and rules of social propriety for cultured men of the world.“55 This statement may underestimate the role of Confucianism in the daily life of common people, not only in that of cultured men. Actually, these codes and rules define an individual as a person in society. If she is deprived of these social functions, the individual becomes an unknown or even meaningless entity.56 In his classic work From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society, the contemporary sociologist Fei Xiaotong further explains this idea that the Chinese are socially defined individuals with the self at the center of this circle. He uses the metaphor of throwing a stone in the lake so that a wave expands from the center. The individual stands at the center of the circles produced by her social
55 Weber, Max, The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism. Translated by Hans H. Gerth. New York: MacMillan, 1951, p. 152. 56 Robert E. Hegel, —An Exploration of the Chinese Literary Self.“ In Robert E. Hegel and Richard C. Hessney, eds., Expressions of Self in Chinese Literature, New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
37 networks and influence. These circles are interrelated with other circles when the person interacts with different people in different times and places.57 This self-social relationship can have different influences on society depending on how this idea of self is understood. In common practice the self is understood as a closed, self-centered entity without a broad social vision. This closed sense of self, derived from orthodox Confucianism‘s emphasis on order and role playing, produces selfish persons without consciousness of public participation and construction. Embedded in the individual self without a broader vision to transform this small self, people are followers of the given tradition, the established ritual, and the social order. A good example is the civil service examination in ancient China. Though the original intention of this examination system was to select qualified persons for public administration, the later development of this examination, especially in the Ming (1368œ1644) and Qing (1636œ1912) Dynasties, transformed the exam into a sole ladder for the individual‘s upward social mobility. The Qing writer Wu Jingzi (1701œ1754) vividly described this phenomenon in his famous novel An Unofficial Biography of Confucian Scholars (Rulin Waishi), in which he satirized the narrow mind of the students and scholars who studied Confucianism as the divine dogma for exams. Unfortunately, this phenomenon is still familiar in today‘s education system as discussed in the first chapter‘s discussion on exam-oriented education. The Song Dynasty (960œ1279) Neo-Confucian master Zhu Xi (1130œ1200) criticized this phenomenon of taking the exam as the end of learning. Within this system, he argued, the individual cannot find any meaning beyond the exam. —In today‘s world,“ he said, —what fathers encourage in their sons, what older brothers exhort in their younger brothers, what teachers impart to their students, and what students all study for is nothing more than to prepare for the civil service
57 Fei, Xiaotong, From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society. A translation of Fei Xiaotong‘s Xiangtu Zhongguo, with an introduction and epilogue by Gary G. Hamilton and Wang Zheng. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992, p. 62.
38 examinations.“58 Facing this exam-oriented learning, he proposed an idea of —learning for the sake of the self.“ Here, the self means —being true to oneself, rectifying the mind and making the will sincere,“ not ending in self-love but taking self-cultivation as the starting point for reaching out to others. This is different from the conception of the self (ji, 己) in Zhu Xi‘s other statement, —subdue oneself and return to decorum“ (keji fuli, 克己复礼), where —oneself“ means the negative sense of self, as in —selfishness,“ or the closed self which cannot overcome the limits of the individual in order to include others in the personal vision. Thus, the self in this latter statement needs to be subdued through self-cultivation. Zhu Xi‘s proposal to subdue this selfish self is to return to decorum. He believed that, in de Bary‘s words, —as a member of society the person must subordinate his selfish desires to the good of the community, or public good. His true personhood is thus achieved by disciplining his desires so that they serve rather than conflict with the public good.“59 Decorum, or ritual, is the tool to discipline the desires and transform the selfish self to an open and larger self which can break down barriers between the self and others.60 Compared to Zhu Xi‘s critique, the Ming Confucian master Wang Yangming‘s (1472œ1528) critique of conventional Confucian thoughts is more radical. Yangming‘s most famous claim is that everyone can be a sage. He saw it an inner decision of the individual, not an imposition or appointment from the outside. Of course, he does not mean that we can be a sage simply by thinking about it. Rather, it means that to be a Confucian is not to submit oneself to a set of established social norms but to experience the inner self in the network of human-relatedness in daily life. This inner self is not something already there, but it is a process of struggling to be a sage no matter how desperate the external situation may be. Also, this inner self
58 Wm. Thodore de Bary, The Liberal Tradition in China, Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1983, p. 22. 59 de Bary, The Liberal Tradition in China, p. 23. 60 About Zhu Xi‘s —Ge Wu Zhi Zhi“, see Yu-sheng Lin‘s article Radical Iconoclasm in the May Fourth Period and the Future of Chinese Liberalism in Benjamin I. Schwartz, ed. Reflections on the May Fourth Movement: A Symposium. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972, p. 32.
39 is the source of energy and strength to cope with any difficulties the individual may face.61 Here, Yangming deconstructed the image of the sage as an external model, but the sage, in his view, represents a metaphor or an ideal. The individual decides to perfect the self when he or she lives in the social interaction. Becoming a sage indeed means making an effort for self-realization by overcoming the barriers between the external and internal aspects of the individual‘s life. Here, Yangming deconstructs the legitimacy of established social norms, including the civil service examination as the standard or goal of the individual. Though both Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming agreed on the importance of the true self which breaks the line between the ego and the world outside, they had different approaches to realizing this true self. Zhu Xi was optimistic about the possibility of enlarging and realizing the self through ritual and decorum, which was the formal expression of social communication. Wang Yangming focused more on the experience of the inner self. He warned that decorum might be easily taken as an established norm and thus suffocates the call from the true self. Yangming was committed to freeing the individual from within through the efforts of the individual in transforming the ego to a larger and more open self through the interactions of daily experience, not just the well-established routines of ritual and decorum. Wang Yangming‘s view does not to deny existing social reality. Rather, in Tu Wei-ming‘s incisive recapitulation, it is a view which recognizes that man is both a given structure and an indeterminate process. He says, —To say that I am a given structure is not to deny the freedom of choice, for I alone can make the inner decision to become what I ought to be. And such a decision necessarily transforms the restrictive ties of my given structure into a set of instruments for self-realization.“62 The construction of
61 In Tu Wei-ming‘s book eo Confucian Thought in Action: Wang Yang ming’s Youth (1472 1509). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976, the author described the biography of Wang Yangming on how he reached this view of sage and established his own thoughts on Confucianism which is different from Zhu Xi‘s Gewu Zhizhi 格物致知 . 62 Tu, Weiming, —Subjectivity and Ontological Reality: An Interpretation of Wang Yang-ming‘s Mode of Thinking,“ Philosophy East and West, Vol. 23, No. 1/2, (Jan.-Apr., 1973), 187-205, p. 190.
40 the inner self provides the strength to face any barriers and difficulties which we will encounter on the way. This inner self is the strength of mind that Confucius calls Ren (仁) in Analects of Confucius. The direct translation of this word is —benevolence,“ —goodness,“ —humanity,“ or —mercifulness.“ It indicates the moral orientation of Confucianism. Surprisingly, in Ames and Rosemont‘s translation of The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation, they translate Ren as —authoritative person,“ a concept which is quite different from the direct English translation.63 According to the translators, Ren is not a fixed character of an individual. It denotes the qualitative transformation of a particular person. It is a process of disclosure and resisting fixed definition and replication.64 To be Ren (or become human) is by no means a —given.“ Instead, the person must participate in society where they live to —author“ the culture by cultivating their own personality. There is indeed no external authority, but the individual needs to learn the custom and culture and reauthorize them for the self. By doing so, one becomes the true author of one‘s own life story. Thus, Ren is a process of becoming an authority for one‘s own community. The authoritative person is then a model that everyone in the community recognizes. She inspires, without coercion or persuasion, other people in the community to construct their own personhood. Tu Wei-ming also claims that Confucian followers rejected the idea of imitating any Confucian masters, including Confucius, but absorbed resources from Confucianism to construct their own personal projects.65 Though it offers a powerful deconstruction of the existing social structure, as well as a call to construct a view of the self which crosses the boundary of the private and the public, this view did not dominate Chinese society in the Ming and Qing Dynasties. Confucianism was considered to be the symbol of the conservative ideas
63 Roger T. Ames and Henry Rosemont, Jr., The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation. New York: Ballantine Books, 1998. 64 Roger Ames, —Confucianism and Deweyan Pragmatism: A Dialogue“, Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 30: 3/4 (September/December 2003): 403-417. The emphasis is original by Ames. 65 Tu Wei-ming, —Self-Cultivation in Chinese Philosophy,“ in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 8, 613-26. London: Routledge, 1998.
41 which made the country backward and weak. The doctrines of Confucianism were severely attacked in the process of modernization started in the late nineteenth century.
Individuality in the May Fourth Movement (1915-1922) A new concept of individuality was introduced by westernized intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth century during the May Fourth Movement. I distinguish the May Fourth Movement from the May Fourth Incident, which happened on May 4th, 1919. By saying the May Fourth Movement, I am referring to the period from 1915 to 1922 during which radical liberals dominated the intellectual discourse in China and their influence extended to other social reforms.66 This time period is important to the discussion of the idea of individuality in Chinese history because some major values regarding the individual and society were dramatically changed during this period. Numerous studies of the May Fourth Movement have already confirmed that it brought social, political, cultural and ideological transformation to Chinese society by rejecting traditional Chinese values, mainly conventional Confucianism.67 Maurice Meisner called this period the first cultural revolution, explicitly comparing it the Cultural Revolution almost fifty years later (1966-1976).68 During this period, the family system was the main target of criticism. Chen Duxiu, one of the leading intellectuals in the movement, the founder of the ew Youth magazine, and later one of the founders of the Communist Party, argued that the family-based value system was the key to China‘s backwardness. By comparing
66 Zhou Cezong had a detailed description on setting this time period as the —May Fourth Period“ in his book The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960, pp. 5-6. 67 Benjamin I. Schwartz, ed. Reflections on the May Fourth Movement: A Symposium. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972; Lin, Yu-sheng, ed. May Fourth: Plural Reflection (Wu Si: Duoyuan de Fansi). Hong Kong: Sanlian Bookstore Co., 1989; Zhou Cezong, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China; Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese enlightenment: intellectuals and the legacy of the May Fourth movement of 1919, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. 68 Maurice Meisner, —Cultural Iconoclasm, Nationalism, and Internationalism in the May Fourth Movement.“ In Benjamin I. Schwartz, ed. Reflections on the May Fourth Movement: A Symposium. 1972.
42 eastern and western philosophies, he argued that western ethics, moral principles, or political theories were all based on the rights and welfare of the individual. Therefore, he criticized China‘s family-based value system because it buried the interests, dignity, free will and independent thoughts of the individual.69 He further argued that conventional Confucianism was the origin of all these old values and thus should be abandoned. This view was supported by other liberal intellectuals in this period, such as Hu Shi and Lu Xun. Henrik Ibsen‘s (1828œ1906) play A Doll’s House (1879) was highly praised by these intellectuals for encouraging the individuals breaking the bondage of family. Liberalism started to emerge among Chinese intellectuals. The rights and welfare of the individual were hotly debated.70 A call for new men, more specifically new Chinese, became the loudest voice in journals and public speeches. The leaders saw young men as the bearers of a new culture and the builders of a new society.71 We can see this trend from the names of journals like ew Youth, or a famous essay by one of the leading May Fourth intellectuals, Liang Qichao: —On the Young Chinese.“72 The May Fourth intellectuals wholly rejected tradition and proposed building a new and liberal culture to save the individual from the corrupted social norms embedded in Confucianism. They assumed that this was the premise for a strong and wealthy nation which could develop democracy and science, the two factors they identified as the keys to western advancement. The contemporary scholar Lin Yu-sheng describes it as an attitude of totalistic anti-traditionalism and iconoclasm. Though these May Fourth intellectuals made a huge contribution to the awakening of individualism, especially among youth motivated to liberate themselves from old norms and to participate in social change, many studies suggest that Chinese
69 Zhou Cezong, 1960, p. 295. 70 For example, the liberal trend in China during that period is discussed in Lin, Yu-sheng‘s book The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Antitraditionalism in the May Fourth Era. Madison : University of Wisconsin Press, 1979; Min-chih Chou‘s book Hu Shih and Intellectual Choice in modern China, (Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 1984.), he discussed Hu Shih‘s life as a liberal and the dilemma he had. 71 Maurice Meisner, 1972, p. 15. This tendency continues in Mao‘s time and the young people called —Red Guard“ were the main force in the Cultural Revolution. 72 The Chinese is —Shaonian Zhongguo Shuo.“
43 individualism exhibited crucial differences from western individualism. A key character of Chinese individualism which was introduced by the May Fourth intellectuals was individualism for the sake of the newly emerged nation-state.73 In the crisis of the nation, the efforts of the May Fourth intellectuals to attack traditional culture and embrace western thought, including individualism, were legitimized for the sake of a strong and modern nation state. In Lin‘s words, the fact of individualism in China during the May Fourth Movement was that —the essential core of western liberalism œ the sense of the autonomy and independence of man derived from a conception of the intrinsic worth of the individual person who must be treated as an end in a political community œ became distorted in the process of transmission.“74 In May Fourth discourse, the individual gained value when she contributed to the modernization of the nation. The individual had to locate the self in this track of modernization in order to understand and cultivate the new individuality. In Zhou Cezong‘s analysis, China‘s rejection of western liberalism was also due to China‘s reality in that period. He argues that the demand for the economic and political independence of the state was more urgent than the demand for individual development in the agenda of the intellectuals. Hence, nationalism and later socialism were more attractive for them than liberalism.75 In Lin‘s view, the concern with the individual from the May Fourth intellectuals actually stemmed from their radical anti-traditionalism as well as their rejection of traditional collectivism. Western liberalism was only a tool for the May Fourth intellectuals to support and justify their iconoclastic movement as an instrument for the national survival.76 No matter the reasons for the May Fourth intellectuals‘ anti-traditionalism and their contradictory stance on individuality, many studies agree that the May Fourth movement had a
73 Lin, Yu-sheng, 1972. 74 Lin, Yu-sheng, 1972, p. 24. 75 Zhou Cezong, 1960. 76 Lin, Yu-sheng, 1972, pp. 24-25.
44 profound influence on Chinese society.77 Perhaps the most significant influence this movement had may have been the ideological transformation of society. In Lin‘s work, he used Edward Shils‘s definition of ideology: It has a systematic view on various events, and it has one identical value which can explain all the other values.78 It is a closed system excluding all disagreements. On one hand, it refuses to receive new ideas; on the other hand, it demands that its followers absolutely obey its principles as the standard of morality.79 To use the Czech writer and political activist Vaclav Havel‘s (1936œ) formulation, ideology is —something ”supra-personal‘ and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves.“80 In Lin‘s analysis, the ideology of the May Fourth Movement was totalistic and monistic in its cultural-intellectual approach to solving all the problems of the society. Further, this monistic cultural-intellectual approach was extremely hostile to traditional culture, especially Confucianism. This ideological transformation changed the landscape of intellectual tradition in Chinese society. The contemporary Confucian Tu Wei-ming has even claimed that the Chinese intellectual community has lost its tradition of Confucianism.81 In another lecture, he argued that, after the May Fourth Movement, the later generations of Chinese intellectuals had already taken western values as universal values but
77 For example, in Vera Schwarcz‘s (1986) study on May Fourth, she argued that May Fourth was the enlightenment movement in Chinese history. 78 The emphasis is not original and made by the author. This sentence is translated from Chinese. 79 Lin, Yu-sheng, 1989, p 30. According to the conversation with a person who witnessed and participated in the 1989 Tiananmen Event, democracy became an ideology to initiate the mass movement. Under this ideology, the individuals had to participate and follow the movement to avoid being an outsider. 80 Leo Ou-fan Lee, —On the Margins of the Chinese Discourse: Some Personal Thoughts on the Cultural Meaning of the Periphery.“ In Tu Wei-ming (ed.) The Living Tree: The Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994, p. 237. 81 Symposium of —The Contemporary Significance of Confucianism: Implications for Harmonious Society, Sustainable Development, and World Peace“, January 25, 2008 at Confucius Institute at University of Maryland. The lecture delivered by Tu Wei-ming is —New Confucianism Re-examined.“
45 considered Confucian values as only a local value embedded in the given tradition.82 This ideological transformation was especially obvious among young people who were eager to learn new knowledge from the West. The authority of the tradition was seriously shattered through effective education reform and the powerful words of the May Fourth intellectuals delivered through new magazines and public speeches.83 The rich meaning of Ren and the idea of self in Confucianism were ignored and gradually lost their legitimacy in people‘s minds. The anti-traditionalist perspective of the May Fourth radicals also implied a main limitation of this movement: its internal contradiction of attacking and deconstructing one value to liberate the individual mind while establishing a new dominant value which bonded the individual mind. In other words, it failed to construct new space to cultivate an indigenous conception of the —individual mind.“ By claiming to free the individual‘s mind from the bondage of tradition, it actually established a new collective ideology for the sake of the nation. What the May Fourth radicals tried to create was —individuals with mind,“ the mind of anti-traditionalism as the sole route for China‘s modernization. This failure also indicates the internal dilemma of the May Fourth project. As a project of enlightenment, as some scholars argue, it did not solve the question of who enlightens whom.84 In the Movement, it was obvious that the intellectual leaders were the teachers of enlightenment, and the people of the nation should be enlightened so a new nation could be created. However, the transformation from one ideology to a new one decided the failure of this enlightenment project, for when the individual is not encouraged to think for her own sake, how can she be enlightened? As both Schwartz and Lin argued, without the emphasis on the intrinsic value of the
82 Symposium of —The Contemporary Significance of Confucianism: Implications for Harmonious Society, Sustainable Development, and World Peace“, January 24, 2008 at Library of Congress. The lecture delivered by Tu Wei-ming is —Toward a Dialogical Civilization: The Confucian Analects as an Exemplification“. 83 The study on China‘s modern education reform, see Sally Borthwick, Education and Social Change in China: the Beginnings of the Modern Era. Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, 1983. 84 One example to take the May Fourth Movement as an enlightenment project is Schwartz, 1986.
46 individual, individualism can only be a tool for particular ends, like nationalism in the May Fourth Movement.85 Because it did not touch the hearts of the common people, the May Fourth Movement did not transform the minds of the people but only imposed some new ideas onto people‘s minds.86 Without an independent and autonomous mind, individual development has no foundation. As Lu Xun described the character Ah Q in his famous story A Biography of Ah Q (1921), this poor peasant did not have any personal identity. He did not even have his own name, just a symbol of Q. He lost his skills and personal dignity in his village at the beginning of the twentieth century when old value did not work any more but new value had not existed yet. Without self-awareness to reflect the change, Ah Q turned out to be a fool in the familiar village in which he lived. He tried to follow all the changes happening outside of him, but he simply did not know how. The new-fashioned culture movement did not teach him how to live better, but just made him more like an old-fashioned fool. He was finally killed by the government because of his robbery, which he thought was a heroic and revolutionary action against the old order. In the May Fourth Movement, the transformation of the minds of the mass of illiterate and poor peasants was ignored. Mao Zedong, then a young person who was heavily influenced by the radical May Fourth intellectuals, picked up this question left by the May Fourth intellectuals. He initiated a peasant revolution by creatively applying another element of western thought: Marxism.
Individuality in Maoist China (1949-1976) It was a tremendous transformation of the society when the communist party won the civil war (1945-1949) and established a new People‘s Republic of China in 1949. There are many reasons for the communist party‘s victory, but one of them is that it was the communists, not nationalists (the Nationalist Party) or radical liberals, nor the conservative, that captured the hearts of the people at that time by helping the people
85 Benjamine Schwartz, 1964; Lin, Yu-sheng, 1972. 86 There are some other reasons for the failure of May Fourth enlightenment in history, such as the turning to conservative, deliberate avoiding political participation, and the ignorance of the economic problems. Zhou, 1960, p 368.
47 to —stand up“ to foreign exploiters, domestic traitors, and imperialism in any form.87 In a biography of Mao Zedong, it is said that Mao released the revolutionary energies of the peasants who were acting on their own will from the depth of their oppression.88 A strong need to live outside of oppression and poverty called for the patriotism of the people. Sacrificing the individual‘s needs to save the country was taken as a necessary step for individual survival. Country first, then the needs of the individual can be guaranteed. This heroic thought dominated the minds of the revolutionaries who converted to communism in the 1920s and 1930s.89 The romantic heroism of the early communists in China was later internalized as a unique character of social life in the communist society.90 The educational experience in Mao‘s time thus transformed the individual‘s mind by sacrificing personal needs. The goal was to establish a socialist state and ultimately a communist utopia through a collective way of living. Soon after the new communist state was established, a Maoist bureaucratic system included all people in this machine by placing the people into two types of organizations.91 One was called the Household Registration system (hukou). Everybody was given a class label according to the head of the household. Usually, there were two kinds of labeling: a rural registered resident or an urban registered resident. The rural registered population (nongye renkou) did not receive the same welfare benefit from the state as the urban registered population (chengshi renkou) did. During the period of the highly centralized planned economy in Mao‘s time, this was seen as a strategy to develop heavy industry for national prosperity. The rural and urban societies were
87 Edward Friedman, 1993. 88 Maurice Meisner, Mao Zedong: A Political and Intellectual Portrait. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007, p. 48. 89 Hung-Yok Ip, —Politics and Individuality in Communist Revolutionary Culture.“ Modern China, Vol. 23, No. 1. (Jan., 1997), 33-68. 90 The related research is such as Mary Sheridan, —The Emulation of Heroes,“ The China Quarterly, No. 33. (Jan. - Mar., 1968), pp. 47-72; T. A. Hsia, —Heroes and Hero-Worship in Chinese Communist Fiction,“ The China Quarterly, No. 13. (Jan. - Mar., 1963), 113-138. 91 Martin Whyte explained the Maoist bureaucracy in his article: Whyte, Martin K. —Bureaucracy and Modernization in China: The Maoist Critique“, American Sociological Review, vol. 38, no. 2 (April 1973), 149-163.
48 systematically divided in the name of state interest.92 The other type of organization was called unit (danwei) in the city and commune (gongshe) in the countryside. In the centrally planned system, the work unit or commune provided for the welfare of the individual but also controlled the private life of every person.93 Personal relationships were changed in this highly organized way of living together. —Comrade“ was the name people used to greet each other in these organizations. The intimacy between friends was replaced by public interaction between comrades. But this public interaction was bounded by the Party organizations, such as the Community Party or the Communist Youth League. In Vogel‘s words, in this comrade relationship, private ethics did not supplement the public ethic to support the commitment of the individual to his friends.94 By passively associating with the Party organizations, the individuals in the group had little intimate or spiritual relationship.95 Whether in the name of comradeship or in communes or work units, a collective identity was enforced on everybody so that the individual not only belonged to but also was bounded to his or her organization and to the Party ultimately. In Lee Ou-fan‘s description, individuals had no heart left in the various political campaigns in which they were ordered to —surrender their hearts“ to Chairman Mao and the Party. In saying this, he means that individuals, especially the intellectuals in traditional
92 Donald J. Munro, —The Concept of ”Interest‘ in Chinese Thought,“ Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 41, No. 2. (Apr. - Jun., 1980), pp. 179-197. The cultural division of urban and rural can be originated to the May Fourth new culture movement in which the rural society was marginalized for its backwardness in modernization. Maoist approach to modernization tried to minimize the difference between the city and the countryside. In various movements he initiated, he called —learning from farmers“ and marginalized the group of intellectuals. In other words, he tried to minimize the city/country division by enlarge the class division. 93 Andrew G. Walder, Communist eo Traditionalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) discussed how the Chinese people respond to danwei system. Also, see Thomas B. Gold, —After Comradeship: Personal Relations in China since the Cultural Revolution.“ The China Quarterly, No. 104. (Dec., 1985), 657-675, p. 664; 94 Ezra F. Vogel, —From Friendship to Comradeship: The Change in Personal Relations in Communist China.“ The China Quarterly, No. 21. (Jan. - Mar., 1965), pp. 46-60. p 59. 95 Lucian W. Pye, —The State and the Individual: An Overview Interpretation.“ The China Quarterly, No. 127, Special Issue: The Individual and State in China. (Sep., 1991), 443-466, p. 449-450.
49 sense, had almost no inner resources to fortify their sense of self and to justify their individual existence.96 In this supposedly equalizing comrade relationship, a new hierarchy was established according to the criteria of good citizens. In the law, the individual must be loyal to the Communist Party, be loyal to the state, and be loyal to the people. In other words, good citizens must be collectivists, selfless, and devoted to the revolution and the Party. In schools, a good student was called —three good student“ (sanhao xuesheng) or —five good youth“ (wuhao qingnian). She was supposed to be obedient to the Party, diligent in work, able to overcome difficulties, good in protecting public property and maintaining the unity of the Youth League members. —Five good workers“ (wuhao gongren) were supposed to be good at political thinking, fulfillment of tasks, observing discipline, regular (political) study, and unity and mutual aid.97 Good citizens with these criteria would be assigned to more important positions in the organization (work unit or commune) and thus be closer to the Party. Heroes and models were created so that regular persons could follow their behaviors. All these heroes and models were described as selfless persons who devoted all their life to the Party and the state. In the propaganda stories, they all had the passion to sacrifice their own interests to meet the interests of the Party, state and the people. Lei Feng, a common soldier in the Army, was a hero like this.98 He was a well-known figure in the nation for a long time. His stories of loving the Party, loving the state, loving the people, and loving Mao were written in textbooks and learned by pupils for generations, even many years after the end of Mao‘s time. By encouraging learning from the examples of heroes who possessed similar characters as selfless comrades and followers of all ideological lines, the Party tried to produce the well-molded good citizen so that a new socialist state could be realized. The political leaders held the assumption that a failure of the socialist state would be
96 Leo Ou-fan Lee, —On the Margins of the Chinese Discourse: Some Personal Thoughts on the Cultural Meaning of the Periphery.“ In Tu Wei-ming (ed.), 1994, p. 233. 97 Theodore Hsi-en Chen, —The New Socialist Man.“ Comparative Education Review, Vol. 13, No. 1. (Feb., 1969), 88-95, p. 89. 98 Donald J. Munro, 1980, p. 190-191.
50 caused by unqualified citizens. Therefore, a highly uniform curriculum and pedagogy were necessary to deliver to all students. In this way the highly valued examples of national heroes and models could be followed by all citizens. On one hand, tailored characters such as —three good student“ or —five good youth“ as the common standard to evaluate all students were deliberately designed to educate new citizens; on the other hand, competitions among citizens to be the best exemplars of the models were encouraged through Party organizations such as schools, communes, and work units. The Great Leap Forward campaign is an example of this mixture of development strategy. —More, faster, better“ was the exhortation of Mao in this campaign. Also, it became a common practice of the pupils or comrades to compete for recognition by the Party. It was the Party‘s assumption that through these competitive campaigns, individuals‘ minds would be transformed to the socialist ideal as quickly as possible. In Sheridan‘s description, the Cultural Revolution may be the most extensive effort in history to transform a nation by changing the character of its people.99 This contradiction between the equalization of comradeship and the competition to be elites among comrades also indicates the conflict between the Maoist and Soviet approach to developing the modernized socialist state. As Meisner described Mao‘s thoughts in his biography, Mao relied on the force of the mass, especially peasants, to win the country, and he also insisted on relying on peasants, not intellectuals or technological elites, to administer the state. This ideal severely conflicted with the Soviet Model, which China adopted in the early years of the new socialist state until the early 1960s. The Cultural Revolution can be explained as an extreme attempt made by Mao to shake off the influence of the Soviet model and find an indigenous approach for China‘s communist reconstruction. This approach did bring some progressive development in rural areas during the Cultural Revolution and earlier in Mao‘s time.100 As Meisner argued, though Mao‘s mass approach brought victory to the communist Party and enabled rapid socioeconomic development of the
99 Mary Sheridan, 1968, p. 47. 100 Han, D. The Unknown Cultural Revolution, educational reforms and their impact on China’s rural development. London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2000.
51 society in the earlier period of the new state, Mao‘s later utopian leap and revolutionary changes made to the communist society would lead to his failure. Standing above all institutions, he finally became a tyrant as well as a utopian prophet.101 His ideal of converting the mind of the nation into selfless collectivism by subduing the individual‘s needs to the needs of the Party and utopian communist ideals failed at the end of the Cultural Revolution when he died in 1976. Soon after Mao‘s death, however, an economic revolution initiated by his successor Deng Xiaoping changed the social as well as private life of the Chinese people when market was introduced into this well-planned society. People‘s attention was soon riveted by a central questionœhow to make moneyœa question which was impossible to think about in Mao‘s time. Overnight, a strong passion of self-interest was released like a flood. This transformation was legitimized by the political leaders who explained a new version of Marxism: economic development was the foundation of all social transformations.
Summary From this discussion, we can see that all three of these influential conceptions of individuality in Chinese history assume that individuality can be cultivated through education. The major difference between Confucianism and the latter May Fourth and communist concepts is that Confucianism, at least the classic Confucianism, suggested the significance of cultivating the inner self: the change of the individual mind starts from inside; it is not enforced from the outside. However, this idea in Confucianism was not popularized or practiced in society. Instead, Confucianism was generally considered to be some mixture of dogmas and a resource of authority to mold individuals‘ minds and behavior in the period of China‘s early modernization. The modern reformers, including the May Fourth intellectuals and Maoist revolutionaries, viewed Confucianism as a sort of virus which corrupted people‘s minds so the country was backward and weak. In the face of national crisis and
101 Meisner, 2007, p. 197.
52 international isolation, they took a utilitarian perspective on education: transforming people‘s minds from the old way of thinking to modern thinking. For the May Fourth intellectuals, this modern thinking was western science and democracy. For Mao, it was a utopian communism. But both ignored the conception of the intrinsic worth of the individual person, so both of their efforts fell into ideological indoctrination. In Dewey‘s words, they tried to cultivate people‘s minds, but they defined what a qualified mind was in a uniform and closed way. The May Fourth Movement did not achieve its goal of enlightenment. Its attitude of totalistic anti-traditionalism broke the connection with the past and thus lost the potential benefit it might have drawn from that past. The attempt at ideological transformation made by the May Fourth Movement was thus like a futile effort to transplant a tree moved from somewhere else into a new environment. Mao‘s effort to establish a communist state went even further in its break with the past, even though some may argue that Mao did inherit totalistic anti-traditionalism from the May Fourth Movement. If the individual were awakened to some extent in the May Fourth Movement, the individual disappeared in the Maoist collective way of living. The individual had to identify with the organization as a comrade. Individuals became the crowd of people who loyally served the communist state. The three decades of market reform after Mao raise the question of individuality again when the individual is released from her subordination to the communes or units. History has already confirmed that modernization without taking into account the intrinsic value of the individual person cannot educate someone to become an autonomous individual who can fully participate in modern life in any social conditions. It seems that it is the time to reconsider the value of Confucianism and reconnect with our past. The major question of reconsidering Confucianism in the contemporary time is how Confucianism responds to the challenges of modernization, such as mass production, high technology, bureaucratic organization, and weapons of mass destruction, etc., which all challenge the traditional relationship between the individual and society. If we just introduce Confucianism in the current context without finding some connection alive in the present, it is like transplanting a tree
53 from somewhere in the past into an alien environment; the China of today is not the China of the past. In order to explore the relevance of Confucianist tradition to a Chinese present profoundly shaped by its encounter with western political and economic thought, we must enter into a dialogue between Confucianism and western conceptions of the individual.
II. Conceptions of Individuality in Liberalism, Critical Theory and Post structuralism Introduction China‘s modern history over the past hundred years is history intertwined with that of the West, especially in terms of the motif of modernization employed in order to gain economic, technological and cultural power. There has also been a struggle between modernization and maintaining a Chinese identity. The failure of liberalism and Marxism in China in the twentieth century tells us that there is no pre-made theory which can directly apply to Chinese soil. We need to understand others in order to find a way of our own. In the following section of this chapter, therefore, I try to examine the concepts of individuality and the relationship between the individual and society, both of which have been influential in western social and political thought. I cannot hope to exhaust all modern western views on individuality. Rather, I choose three influential schools of thought: liberalism, critical theory and post-structuralism. In particular, I will examine them through specific figures: Rousseau‘s ideas in liberalism, Paulo Freire‘s ideas in critical theory and Michel Foucault‘s ideas in post-structuralism. I choose them not because they summarize the entire range of each school of thought but because they are illustrative of conceptions of individuality and the individual‘s relationship to society that, I will argue, are relevant but insufficient in a contemporary Chinese context. There are several reasons that I choose these three schools of thought and particularly these three authors. First, liberalism, critical theory and post-structuralism are related theories which discuss the condition of men in particular social conditions
54 in different time periods of western society. They have different, even contradictory, views on individuality and the relationship between the individual and society. These views themselves reflect the dilemma of western development in modernity: how to deal with the relationship between the individual and society to gain social progress without losing efficiency, justice and freedom. This question is also a question we cannot avoid in China‘s modernization. Therefore, exploring these views may be helpful to us as we think about the problem we face in this project: discovering what relationship the individual may have with Chinese society in radically changing social conditions. Second, discussing these ideas will lay a historical and intellectual foundation for a dialogue between Dewey and Liang in subsequent chapters. To some extent, Dewey and Liang‘s philosophies are influenced by these ideas, directly or indirectly. This review of key western perspectives is not to legitimize the discussion of Dewey and Liang. It is not to say that these three western schools of thought are not qualified for further exploration as responses to our problem. Instead, it is to say they may not be best for discussing the particular question I ask in this dissertation due to their particular limitations I will discuss below. However, the value in discussing them before going on to a dialogue with Dewey and Liang is that they provide a historical and intellectual background for the dialogue: no discussion is isolated, but rather every discussion grows from some traditions. For Dewey, liberalism is an important, maybe the most important, tradition for his thought. He specifically discussed liberalism in two of his later books: Liberalism and Social Action and Individualism Old and ew.102 Critical theory, which is developed from Neo-Marxism, is a response to radical liberalism and the problems of capitalist development. Dewey made the same effort but in a different direction. It is helpful to understand some different approaches to the same problem. Post-structuralism also shares origins with Marxism and structuralism but moves beyond the Marxist perspective and challenges the defined social structure, especially
102 John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action, New York: G. P. Putman, 1935; John Dewey: Individualism Old and ew, New York: Minton, Balch & Company, 1930.
55 the limited vision of class dichotomies in Marxism. It tries to suggest a concept of individuality in a post-modern society that denies the possibility of an autonomous individual but also rejects the possibility of a social identity which is created in critical theory. Dewey works on the same project of proposing a new concept of individuality which can avoid the extremes of liberalism or Marxism but takes a more constructive perspective than post-structuralism. For Liang Shuming, the influence of western theories is clear in his struggle to figure out a Chinese way of development in modernity. All his life, he tried to explore a philosophical perspective that would solve the problems with which he was concerned. When the western tide of thought struck the Chinese mind, he painfully lived through it and developed a perspective of his own from connecting his traditions of Confucianism and Buddhism to the situation he faced. To some extent, both Dewey and Liang lived through these western thoughts in different ways and developed their own ideas from these old but still living traditions. Based on these considerations, I choose to explore the work of Rousseau, Freire and Foucault. Rousseau is the author who connects his social and political thoughts with education, as Dewey does. His book Emile fully expresses his ideal on individuality and how to cultivate this ideal through education. Freire‘s pedagogy of the oppressed is an important contribution in critical theory. His original ideas are from his life experience in Brazil and the later expansion of his ideas to western societies indicates a reaction to the liberal tradition in contemporary western society. This cross-boundary traveling of ideas, especially from the —third world“ to advanced industrial societies reveals a possibility of mutual learning and the importance of dialogue between different traditions. Foucault‘s conception of power as a fluid force deconstructing and reconstructing the existing social structure is helpful in understanding the situation of China, which shows a post-modern landscape where the pace of social change is much faster than the change of individuals‘ identities. It seems that we need a strong intellectual tool to deconstruct what we believe in order to catch up with the change. But if change itself is a power, can we still move beyond
56 the power relation and construct a sense of self? In the rest of this chapter, I will discuss the ideas of these three thinkers.
The Autonomous Individual: Rousseau In Emile and Rousseau‘s other books, especially On the Social Contract, his concept of individuality is clear, as is the ideal relationship between the individual and society. The model of Emile‘s education is designed to achieve his ideal of individuality. In this section on Rousseau‘s liberal approach, I will first briefly discuss Emile‘s education and then Rousseau‘s concepts of the individual in society. His view on the relationship between the individual and society is also clearly addressed in the book On the Social Contract. First of all, Rousseau starts his book on education with the name of the boy he will educate: Emile. It is clear that this book talks about an individual person; the ideal is to be an individual, before all else. How to be an individual being within the modern society is the most urgent and essential question Rousseau asks and tries to answer. He starts with an analysis of the nature of childhood. What is childhood? It is not only the miniature of adulthood but also an important and unique phase which plays a crucial function in the development of the individual and the citizen. This was a revolutionary idea in his time. In Rousseau‘s view, the individual should be isolated from society and learn from nature in the period of childhood. Once the child learns all that can he learn from nature, then the child is ready to learn from things which are man-made, such as crafts, and later, from other people. Rousseau has a clear sense of the stages in human development. Four books in Emile represent the stages of Emile‘s development. Book I is about the nature of infancy from birth to age 2, the time for physical care and training. Book II is about childhood from age 2 to 12. In this period Emile learns through the education of the senses in nature. Book III covers the age of reason from age 12 to 15, when Emile learns how to think and judge from his own sense of logic. He learns language, history, science, and geography from his own activities based on his own nature. Book IV is about the age of passion, from age 15 to 20, when Emile learns to reflect
57 on his own passions. It is not until this period that Emile is ready to enter into society and directly learn from man. Rousseau suggests that learning from society must wait in order that the self might be preserved. It requires that we learn about individual identity, which starts from self-love, the passion innate in men. This need man acquires from nature first helps him to preserve himself in nature and then through a craft. It is through this self-love preserved through a trade of craft that Emile is first introduced to society. Because everyone shares self-love, the child can feel his pains and sufferings which will lead him to feel others‘ suffering by imagination. The process of development from childhood to adulthood, for Rousseau, is an internal movement in man from an animal-like existence to a complete state of self-awareness.103 Man is naturally good. His goodness is essential and internal. The phases of development through education release this potential good that man has within his nature. An important assumption in Rousseau‘s view of individuality is that he considers this natural good in human nature fixed and ready-made; what we need to do is to release it and protect it from the corruption of the man-made culture. That is the reason that Emile needs to be separated from human society in his childhood so that he can have an uninterrupted environment to develop his own senses from his nature of goodness. Society, in Rousseau‘s view, is corrupted and full of evils. It is anti-nature and thus a threat to the autonomy of the individual. As a liberal thinker, Rousseau celebrates the autonomous and independent individual as the highest form of freedom. He claims, —My mind needs to go forward in its own time. It cannot submit itself to anyone else‘s; for I know my experience did not apply to others.“104 In Book IV of Emile, the boy learns to interact with society through his recognition that others share interests similar to his. Rousseau celebrates the ideal of an autonomous individual self which is the full release of the intrinsic good in nature. To reach this ideal, the individual needs to be strong enough to resist a
103 Aryeh Botwinick, Postmodernism and Democratic Theory. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. 104 Huck Gutman, —Rousseau’s Confessions: A Technology of the Self.“ In Technologies of the self: a seminar with Michel Foucault. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton, eds. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1988, p. 100.
58 corrupting social order which is against the development of an independent self. The essential responsibility of the individual, for Rousseau, is self-preservation, which is part of human nature. It is the basic motivation for the individual‘s living in the society, and thus the rationale for the social contract. Rousseau fully understood that man had to live in society even though this society might be hostile to human nature. Still, he believed that it was possible to build an ideal society that preserves the freedom of the individual. He invented an ideal called the —social contract.“ It is a social agreement between individuals who are originally free and remain as free agents, autonomous individuals who can feel and reason in their own way. Even though Rousseau is pessimistic about any social institutions by claiming that —everywhere he [man] is in chains“ in the first sentence of the book On the Social Contract, he still believes that in principle, all these chains can be transformed into —legitimate“ institutions if we, as free men, agree on the social contract.105 To preserve the happiness we have from the uncorrupted nature, Rousseau argues that we all need to agree on —principles of political right.“ The principles should be based on the reasons naturally free individuals behave as they do. —Political right“ is the standard of obligation or duty which makes it reasonable to obey one another without ruining the autonomy of individual persons.106 Rousseau said, —Since each one gives his entire self, the condition is equal for everyone, and since the condition is equal for everyone, no one has an interest in making it burdensome for the others.“107 In this social contract, Rousseau introduces an important concept, the —general will.“ General will is the power of individuals in common. It is not contradictory to the individual‘s self-interest. It is the common part of self-interest people share; the individual can preserve his own interest without destroying the general will as long as
105 Roger D. Masters, —Introduction.“ In Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract. Edited by Roger D. Masters, translated by Judith R. Masters. New York: St. Martin‘s Press. 1978. 106 In —What is Enlightenment?“ Kant also expressed the similar view. 107 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract. 1978, p. 53.
59 everybody agrees on it. General will directs the emergence of a public person, who is formed by the union of all others‘ common interests. Rousseau calls it the Republic or the body politic. Community, thus, is not just an associated collection of human beings, but an —assembly“ which is formulated by general will that everybody shares in the community. Leaders and members of the community have to agree with this general will of the public person; if they do not, then community works against individual freedom. The function of the community does not consider the private interests of any one member but only public and common interests. Rousseau‘s strict distinction between private and public interest decides his preference for a small community, with the family as the ideal, as he indicates in the last Book of Emile.108 Rousseau‘s contribution is that he saves a visible individual being from the overwhelming collective identities men are subject to either in religion, in civilization, or within an authoritative regime. With other thinkers in the Enlightenment, he celebrates the autonomy of the individual man. Meanwhile, he refuses to take individuality as a product of universal rationality. Reasoning is part of individuality but not the whole. The —I“ first starts from senses and feeling in nature. Pure reasoning can lead individuality to the trap of social convention because logic itself is part of this already-man-made civilization. Therefore, it is dangerous if we learn truth (including the truth of self) only through logical reasoning. However, the limitation of Rousseau‘s view of individuality is that when he tries to liberate man from the constraints of authority and convention, he separates man from society in order to create a unique and independent individual being. He is doubtlessly a critical thinker who refuses any ready-made dogma. But his assumption on a fixed human nature is contradictory to his rejection of any ready-made things. His pursuit of a unique and autonomous individual breaks the —natural“ connection between individual and society; therefore, this proposal is an unnatural man-made invention since man is, in fact, always in social relationships.
108 Roger D. Masters, 1978. Rousseau, Emile, or Treaties on Education, New York: D. Appleton, 1907.
60 Furthermore, it is difficult to distinguish public interest from private interest in real politics. Often, the name of the public is abused either to serve the private interest or to serve an interest which may not be a —general will“ with which all individuals agree. In the experience of the May Fourth Movement in China, the radical liberals, in the name of the good of all people, attacked tradition and thus cut the connection of the individual with his past. The failure of the May Fourth enlightenment indicates that this approach is problematic, that the cultivation of an —autonomous“ individual without connection to tradition is impossible. Rousseau‘s conception of the individual is guided by natural self-interest, which is the basis of his entering into society on a contractual basis. While this might be useful to question the collective identity, it is problematic in reality. We are always in social relationships from the time that we are born. In Rousseau‘s treatise, it is not clear that how we can be human without being involved in social relations. The book Emile is mostly taken as a thought experiment. It is also not clear that, in Rousseau‘s blueprint, whether self-interest leads to rationality or to selfish individualism. His idea of —social contract“ is based on the assumption of —general will,“ which cannot be clearly distinguished from private interest in real society. Particularly, separating private interest from public interest is extremely difficult in rapidly changing society like contemporary China. The emphasis on self-interest in Rousseau‘s liberalism may lead to the exclusiveness of the individual in society so that solidarity of society with liberal individuals cannot be possible. The situation of China in the present situation is that the individual‘s excluded self-interest is generally justified when the society is marketized at large. This legitimate exclusiveness enforces the dualistic categories of people and thus shrinks the space for individuals‘ free exploration of their own self-identity. An unequal and divided social order thus dominates the society and individuals‘ ways of thinking.
The Collective Individual and Class Consciousness in Paulo Freire Critical theory shares roots with Marxism and develops as a branch of Neo-Marxism in the twentieth century. It agrees with Karl Marx that —...one must
61 become conscious of how an ideology reflects and distorts ... reality ... and what factors ... influence and sustain the false consciousness which it represents - especially reified powers of domination.“109 Paulo Freire‘s Pedagogy of the Oppressed is concerned with this idea. He advocates the critical consciousness of the oppressed in order to resist the ideology the oppressors enforce on the minds of the oppressed. To be liberated from the situation of oppression, the oppressed people need to recognize their situation and then transform it. Freire‘s original concern is the social condition of the Central American peasants and workers. But his works are influential in North America as well. Many contemporary American scholars such as Henry A. Giroux, bell hooks, and Donaldo Macedo are influenced by Freire‘s work. Critical theory has living roots in contemporary society as a powerful perspective from which to criticize the hegemony of contemporary capitalism: political, economical and cultural neo-liberalism. In Giroux‘s explanation, neo-liberalism uses the dominant institutions to frame a limited range of identities, ideologies and subject positions in the name of free markets and small governments.110 It enforces the hegemony of the capitalistic social structure which is based on exploitation and unjust/unequal social redistribution. Therefore, it legitimizes the economic, political, social and cultural divisions between different groups according to their social status based on the resources they get from this system. It then inevitably marginalizes some groups when the dominant groups become —elites“ and the determinant power for social production and redistribution, including cultural production and consumption. In these social conditions, the perspective of critical theory can be an important tool for marginalized groups to work for social justice and equal treatment in social participation through critical awareness of their marginalized and unjust situation. At this point, Freire‘s pedagogy of the oppressed is significant to many social intellectuals for a truly democratic society. It is an important correction to the extreme
109 Dan MacIssac, —The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas,“ 1996, retrieved from http://physicsed.buffolostate.edu/danowner/habcritthy.html on May 4th, 2008. 110 Henry A. Giroux, Against the Terror of eoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2008.
62 trend of neo-liberalism which legitimizes market competition motivated by self-interest. By criticizing the insufficiency of liberalism for social justice when liberalism emphasizes self-interest, critical theory points out the potential power of marginalized social groups. It thus shifts concern from the individual interest to group welfare. In Freire‘s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, even though Freire stresses the pedagogy of the oppressed, the necessity of the individual to control her own world is de-emphasized. This is a critical concern raised in critical theory. The relationship between the individual and society shifts to the relationship between contrasted groups. Freire did not intend to categorize the people and thus de-emphasize the individual, but the category of the oppressed and the oppressor give an impression that it is not clear in Freire‘s proposal how the interest of the individual differs from the interests of the group. In Freire‘s pedagogy of the oppressed, it seems that the interest of the individual as a member of the oppressed group is consistent with the interest of the group. Therefore, the self-transformation of the individual as the oppressed is the pre-requisite condition to transforming the condition of the oppressed group. Then, a social transformation on a broader scale can be made possible through radical transformation of the mind of the oppressor when their social position is challenged by the revolution of the oppressed, when their collective identity as the oppressed has in turn been understood and acted upon. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the portrait of the oppressor in Freire‘s words is that they —oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power.“ As persons who consider having as being, the oppressors cannot realize that their having is a privilege which dehumanizes others and themselves. He further argues that the oppressors, as the possessing class, suffocate in their own possessions so that they no long are but merely have.111 He claims that only the power which springs from the weakness of the oppressed can be sufficiently strong to free both.112
111 Ana Maria Araujo Freire and Donaldo Macedo (eds.) The Paulo Freire Reader. New York: Continuum, 2000, p. 58. 112 Freire and Macedo, 2000, p. 46.
63 In Freire‘s proposal, transforming the mind of the oppressed is the first step for social transformation. To reach self-transformation, a critical self-consciousness of their situation as the oppressed is necessary. Freire proposed the idea to reach critical consciousness through praxis: reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it.113 In praxis, the first step is to recognize the self as oppressed and commit one to its transformation from the state of oppression to the state of a complete human being. At the second stage, Freire proposes that after the reality of oppression has been transformed, this pedagogy ceases to belong to the oppressed and becomes the pedagogy of all people in the process of permanent liberation.114 Though Freire‘s pedagogy is a powerful critical tool in deconstructing the unequal social structure and empowering the marginalized groups, his proposal is limited in its emphasis on the categories of the oppressed and the oppressor and thus may lead to ignorance of individual differences of members in both groups. Taking the group category as the only unit of analysis, it is easy to have a new hegemony or dominant discourse by categorizing individuals, who carry very rich sensibilities and concerns, into the homogeneous group of either the oppressed or the oppressor. Though Freire‘s critical theory corrects Rousseau‘s excessive individualism in his recognition that individuals are always part of social groups and must recognize themselves as such, his critical theory in Pedagogy of the Oppressed tends to de-emphasize the agency of the individual. China‘s recent experience in Mao‘s time with Marxist thought highlights the dangers in this ignorance of the individual. In his categories of the oppressed and the oppressor, Freire addresses a critical point which is also highlighted in the problem of contemporary Chinese education. That is, when individuals live in the dualistic and hierarchical categories, the ones who are included in a lower category very easily mold their worldview in the framework of the higher category. In Freire‘s description, before critical education enlightens the oppressed, the ideal of the oppressed is to live as the oppressor. Living with limited vision and no choice, the oppressed take the prescription from the
113 Freire and Macedo, 2000, p. 52. 114 Freire and Macedo, 2000, p. 54.
64 oppressor and transform their minds in conformity to the oppressor. This echoes the problem identified in this project where market value shapes the individual‘s mind and conforms to what market favors. However, Freire‘s restriction of his vision to social groups and his de-emphasizing of the individual‘s diverse needs, at least in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, may not directly provide a useful framework to address the crisis of individual identity in the contemporary Chinese situation.
The Fragmented Individual: Post-structuralism and Identity in Michel Foucault As a contemporary counterpart of critical theory, post-structuralism also shares origins with Marxism but responds to the social conditions which critical theory also faces in a different way. Post-structuralism is a reaction and critique of structuralism in the second half of the twentieth century. Just as with Marxism, post-structuralism focuses on the critique of social structure and social power. Unlike Marxism, however, post-structuralism moves beyond the view of class-analysis, recognizing that power is more complex and operates at various levels of social structure and knowledge. Power is not just located in classes, as Marxism suggests, or contrasted social categories as Freire suggests. In Foucault‘s view, the dominant social power works on the basis of other already existing power networks, such as family, kinship, knowledge, and so forth. Therefore, Foucault pays more of his attention to this micro-power, while capillaries of power function at the local level of daily life.115 Foucault was a critic of Marxism. He rejected the idea of a universally legitimate conception of knowledge and reason, a fundamental critique of and reaction to the Enlightenment project. He said, —Enlightenment, as we see, must not be conceived simply as a general process affecting all humanity; it must not be conceived only as an obligation prescribed to individuals.“116 Based on his observation of the characteristics of modernity, —the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent“ in Baudelaire‘s words, Foucault believes that an autonomous and
115 Madan Sarup, An Introduction guide to Post structuralism and Postmodernism. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1989. 116 Michel Foucault, —What is Enlightenment?“ In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984, p. 37.
65 independent self as Rousseau seeks is not possible in modern society because our being is bonded in the present as a part of history. Instead, we have to live within the fluid and fragmented power relations. Therefore, the self is also fluid and fragmented. In the reality of modern society, individuals or arrangement of social institutions are intertwined in micro-power relationships. Power has us before we have it. The individual thus is an artifact of power. Foucault rejects the essence of self which is an important concept in the Enlightenment movement. He argues that the concept of the autonomous self implies that there is an unchanged inner nature or hidden self that has been —concealed, or imprisoned“ by social institutions, as Rousseau suggests. However, when we examine the ontology of self in a historical perspective, what Foucault called —genealogy,“ we can see that there is no essence of self but rather that the self is always in a process of —becoming.“117 That is shaped by power beyond the individual control. Foucault suggests that whether we are the dominant or the dominated, the subject is historically and socially made in the fluid power relationship.118 Foucault examines hidden force behind the domination of class, race, culture, etc., which he identifies as a form of power relationship which categorizes the individual, creates his individuality, attaches him to his own identity, and imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him. This power is the power of knowledgeœpower/knowledgeœwhich is made in history and made in the ongoing social interaction. In this power/knowledge relationship, Foucault argues, the individual is constituted as a subject: a subject who is controlled and dependent upon this power/knowledge that defines knowledge of the self.119 In Foucault‘s view, there is no guarantee of a continuity of individuality. The individual lives in the fragmented and fluid power relations. Thus, it seems that Foucault is pessimistic about the potential of individuals as agents of social
117 Tina (A.C.) Besley & Michael Peters, Subjectivity & Truth: Foucault, Education and the Culture of Self. New York: Peter Lang, 2007, p. 23. 118 Michel Foucault, —About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth.“ Political Theory, Vol. 21, No. 2 (May, 1993), 198-227, p, 222. 119 Michel Foucault, 1982, p.781.
66 transformation, an assumption taken for granted by both Rousseau and Freire. Society, in Foucault‘s view, is a product of power from complex levels of social arrangement as well as individuals‘ daily practice. He claims that —it is true that we have to give up hope of ever acceding to a point of view that could give us access to any complete and definitive knowledge of what may constitute our historical limits. And from this point of view the theoretical and practical experience that we have of our limits and of the possibility of moving beyond them is always limited and determined; thus we are always in the position of beginning again.“120 Foucault‘s conception of the individual is as a byproduct, an accident of the operation of power/knowledge in the social system. The individual is something like an address, a location where power/knowledge defines momentary differences of race, class, gender, social status and other unnamed differences of interest. Individuality is thus fragmented and constantly fluid, to a large extent outside the individual‘s control. Thus, Foucault‘s individual seems to lack agency, the ability to make rational choices and thus control his destiny, an ability central to Rousseau‘s autonomous individual as well as Freire‘s collective individual. Foucault‘s contribution, however, is the insight it offers to question the given mind of the individual. In this project of genealogy, Foucault does not point out the direction of progress. But this progress is local and micro at the level of the individual. An individual is fragmented and thus only a byproduct of power. Post-structuralism is often described as celebrating the death of the subject. Thus, one common critique of post-structuralism is the nothingness and emptiness of the subject it suggests. This diagnosis may lead postmodernism into nihilism and isolation, hopeless for human solidarity. Foucault‘s rejection of the possibility of continuity of individual experience and the possibility of the individual as an agent of change provides little of use to a solution for the problem I have identified in contemporary China. It is helpful in understanding the situation of discontinuity in contemporary Chinese experience, but what we need is an insight to bridge the gap between the past and the present,
120 Foucault, 1984, p. 47.
67 reconnect the broken relations in society, and reconstruct the fragmented individual so that the imagination of the individual can be released to create a space for self-identity in the various restraints of existing power relations. Though post-structuralism is a very useful perspective that sheds light on the present ongoing change, its lack of faith in the individual as the agent of change may exaggerate the moral vacuum that the discontinuity of radical social change brings: if the individual is not the bearer and agent of the change, who or what will take the responsibility for change?
Summary These three schools of thought all have some insight which can be helpful to our reflection on the problem addressed in this dissertation. Rousseau criticizes the reliance on convention to create the self. Freire, on the other hand, highlights the necessity of social solidarity to achieve an identity not defined in the mind of the oppressor. Foucault‘s perspective reminds us of the difficulties of achieving individual agency while trapped in the external and internalized network of power relations. However, their views all have some limitations if applied to the context of contemporary Chinese society. In Rousseau‘s proposal, he excludes the social others in the development of the individual by assuming the wholeness of the self as an innate and fixed product of nature. In Freire‘s pedagogy, he subsumes the individual in the category of class. His vision of the individual cannot overcome the boundaries which social categorization may create. In this divided social category, the individual‘s diverse interests are sacrificed to reach the goal of liberating the group. In Foucault‘s genealogy of power, he subordinates the possibility of making a whole self and thus cannot provide a social vision to reconstruct a unique but social self after the deconstruction of the existing power relations. Though all these schools of thought may not be appropriate to solve the problem here, their views shed light on the problem and imply the necessity of exploring other alternatives. I suggest that Dewey‘s philosophy of experience faces the same problems these intellectuals identified, but also proposes a new idea of individuality which constructs
68 a social self who can connect and include others while not giving up the possibility to cultivate an individual identity. Dewey argues that constructing a new individuality consonant with the objective condition we live in is a key to realize cultural transformation so that the individual will not be lost in social change.121 This point saves the individual from disconnection from society as indicated in Rousseau, or submission to the group as in Freire‘s theory, or in agentless power relations as in Foucault‘s. This point is significant for the question I identified at the beginning of this project: how to overcome the dualistic social categories and create an identity of the self in the radically changing Chinese society. In this chapter, I have reviewed the concept of individuality in three different historical periods in China, discussing this concept in the traditions of Confucianism, the May Fourth Movement and Maoist Marxism. The failure of the idea of the individual as a whole agent in society creates an urgent need to develop a new concept of individuality suitable to the contemporary Chinese context. Since the path of Chinese modernization is closely intertwined with western modernization, the second part of this chapter then reviewed three influential western views on individuality: liberalism, critical theory, and post-structuralism. These perspectives were born from specific historical periods in the West, but are still alive in contemporary western society. But limitations of their conception of individuality have been made clear: they either create new exclusion or division in the relationship between the individual and society or they leave the individual alone in the fragmented power relations of the social reality. They cannot provide a constructive perspective to solve the problem I identify in this dissertation: how to develop a continuous personality in a discontinuous social reality brought on by radical social change. The review of these perspectives on individuality in Chinese and western intellectual traditions suggests that neither tradition offers a ready-made framework for addressing the problem of individual identity and agency in the context of rapidly
121 John Dewey, 1930.
69 changing Chinese society. It does not, however, undermine my suggestion that a possible solution might be found in a dialogue between Chinese and western traditions. Before engaging this dialogue, I will discuss, in the next chapter, the method to be employed: comparative philosophy of education. Then, in Chapter Four, I will launch a dialogue between the American pragmatist John Dewey and the Chinese Confucianist Liang Shuming. I use —dialogue“ as a metaphor to analyze these two philosophers‘ ideas in view of the question I ask in this dissertation. I will interpret their ideas to respond to the question and thus bring their thought into the present situation. This dialogue will help in discussing the problem of a lack of intellectual resources for the development of a conception of individual identity suitable to a context of radical social change in contemporary Chinese education, which provides some intellectual insight into the possibility of reconnecting the present with the past and thus meeting the existential challenge of a rapidly changing social environment.
70 CHAPTER III
EDUCATIO AL COMPARISO THROUGH A
PHILOSOPHICAL DIALOGUE O I DIVIDUALITY
It is difficult to explain the greatness of the ocean and sky to a frog if it always lives at the bottom of a well. It is difficult to explain the beauty of snow and ice to an insect if it only lives during the summer.
--- Zhuang Zi122
We sought ourselves and found the others.
--- Octavio Paz
I. Introduction In Chapter I, I identified a problem in contemporary Chinese education and traced its roots throughout the history of China‘s modernization. In today‘s rapidly changing social environment, market values dominate society and separate people into two dualistic categories: failed or successful, poor or rich, elite or mass, etc. The education system does not provide sufficient intellectual resources to help the individual create space between the two extremes and formulate an identity of her own so that she can have some alternative choices instead of following the dualistic norm. Even though today the individual is largely freed from the totalitarian collectivism of dogmatic Confucianism or Maoism, we still do not learn how to have a mind of our own. Living in the situation of mindlessness or purposelessness, as defined by Dewey, the individual formulates her identity largely under the force of the
122 From Zhuang Zi: Autumn Water. It is a fable told in the Chinese ancient Taoist Zhuang Zhi‘s book. This quote is paraphrased from Ulrich Libbrecht, Within the Four Seas…: Introduction to Comparative Philosophy. Paris: Peeters, 2007, p. 71.
71 society. Living for the self becomes a selfish pursuit when the defined goal to be successful is exclusive and has to sacrifice the benefit of others and marginalize others. Going back to Chinese history to examine the relationship between the individual and society, we can see that the contemporary self-centered individualism is another form of collectivism. That is, the uniqueness of individuality is suffocated by social consensus, either voluntarily or through forced means. In contemporary Chinese society, this social consensus is largely an exclusive and self-centered goal to be successful in marketized social competition. I will not discuss the moral implication of market competition here,123 but I would like to explore the freedom which the individual can obtain in this competitive and exclusive space: the freedom to create a unique but inclusive self which can expand the boundary between —I“ and others, which include people and environment. If the failure to formulate an identity of one‘s own is a social problem, the question should be how we respond to this problem in the system of education. Does the current education system provide resources for our students to respond to this problem in a creative and constructive way? In other words, how can education formulate this inclusive individuality which can connect tradition with radical social change so the individual will not get lost? In chapter two, I first reviewed the concept of individuality in three different historical periods in China: Confucianism, May Fourth radicalism and Maoism. I argued that their failure in those particular periods urged a need to look for a new conception of individuality for the contemporary context. Then, in the second part of the chapter, I reviewed three modern western social theories for their conceptions of individuality: liberalism, critical theory and post-structuralism. Their limitations on the relationship between the individual and society, I argued, indicated the insufficiency of simply borrowing these ideas and applying them to the Chinese context. The constructive meaning of this review is that it provides a necessary
123 There is lots of literature on the moral advantage of free market: Adam Smith‘s work as a classic one and the literature of neo-liberalism as a contemporary example.
72 historical and intellectual background for understanding Dewey‘s philosophy, and Liang‘s to some extent, because both philosophers live through these important schools of thought and respond to them directly or indirectly. The review links my exploration of Dewey and Liang‘s philosophies from which I find more sense for my own inquiry: Is it possible to cultivate a continuous sense of self in the context of China‘s radical social change? While Foucault‘s post-structuralism is critical to liberal individualism as well critical theory, he did not provide a constructive perspective for an alternative approach to the relationship of the individual and society. What I am trying to do in this project is to show that it is possible to sustain a continuous sense of self. This is not because I am simply optimistic that there is an existent continuous self there; by exploring Dewey and Liang‘s philosophies, I try to propose a conception of self which is not pre-existing nor taken for granted, but rather to be sought through inner struggle, or through feeling despair in life: I must do things I have to do, or I cannot live at all. It is this despair that makes the self consistent by seeking the way of living. I will explain this conception in a more detailed way in the following chapters. Meanwhile, those ideas from Chinese history and from the West are not irrelevant or meaningless to our inquiry. Instead, they are part of our tradition and potential resources, which we can connect in various ways. There is no designed route to connect theses resources; rather, it depends on the individual person‘s particular experience and living context. Everyone might have her own way to connect with those intellectual traditions. If we fail to foresee connections with these perspectives, we have only dead cultures or —corrupted civilization,“ in Rousseau‘s words. This project, therefore, aims to launch a philosophical dialogue with the American pragmatist John Dewey and the Chinese Confucianist Liang Shuming to provide insight into the question I raised in Chapter I. This will be the route I take to find a connection between and with these philosophical traditions and thus bring them into the context we live in today. Indeed, it is a tri-logue between the researcher and these two philosophers on how to cope with the changing environment in order to develop a unique but inclusive individuality.
73 In this chapter, I will explain why dialogue as a method of comparative and philosophical analysis is necessary in this project and how it can work to respond to the question this dissertation addresses. In detail, I will discuss the meaning of philosophical analysis, not as an alternative method different from empirical studies but as an inclusive method in which empirical studies may constitute an important step. Also, borrowing Dewey‘s method of intelligence, comparative analysis is inevitable in this philosophical inquiry because communication is a crucial element to solve the problem. Therefore, this approach of comparative philosophical analysis is different from the foundational epistemology which is based on the universal Truth in comparison. It is in this sense that the dialogue between different ideas is necessary and can be insightful to solve problems in different contexts. What I am not doing is treating Dewey‘s and Liang‘s philosophies as an authoritative knowledge, or the truth to solve the problem. I am not trying to portray them in a —correct“ way which may fall into the track of foundational epistemology. Neither do I try to criticize Dewey‘s or Liang‘s thought to legitimize my idea. What I am doing is to use Dewey‘s and Liang‘s thought as —provocative“ resource to reflect the problem I identified at the beginning of this project. It is an approach without an assumption of foundational epistemology. Also, it is not a pure philosophical discussion but inviting empirical experience at various stages of inquiry. Before I go to detail of engaging a dialogue with Dewey and Liang, I will first introduce the conception of a philosophical approach to educational inquiry in this project.
II. A Philosophical Approach to Educational Inquiry Philosophical vs. Empirical It is not my intention to set up a dualism between a philosophical approach and an empirical approach to educational inquiries. Rather, I try to explain my philosophical analysis without excluding its empirical ramifications. Along with Dewey, I suggest that a philosophical inquiry in education should always connect with the sensibility of individuals in concrete situations. In Dewey‘s words, —it (philosophical attitude) tries to place an act in its context œ which constitutes its
74 significance.“124 Dewey further claims, —Every new idea, every conception of things differing from that authorized by current belief, must have its origin in an individual.“125 This dissertation starts with a vignette of my educational experience, including what Dewey called a —felt difficulty.“126 It then examines the broader social change within this experience that connects to various personal experiences of different individuals who travel different routes of growth. For all Chinese, however, radical social change also highlights a common problem we are all facing: the lack of intellectual resources to formulate an identity in a radically changing social context when we are disconnected from tradition and live in a context of market competition. When the individual is just a small or big accessory of social mechanisms, there is little space to discuss moral construction for a democratic society: it is difficult to know who we are and who we will become as unique individuals. There is no morality if there is no space for individual development. It is a very concrete problem we are facing when we examine the ongoing social life. For Dewey, philosophical inquiry is thinking itself. As he explicitly discussed in Democracy and Education, it begins with a —felt difficulty“ when the individual interacts with the external environment, including other people.127 Felt difficulty comes from the genuine situation of experience in which the individual is interested for his own sake. Dewey argues that only in this situation can the individual continuously develop this feeling to a clearly felt problem. It is not a process that automatically happens, but rather it requires courage and rigorous thinking to figure out. When the problem is clear, we need to reflect on possible resolution by examining what has been done and what new things we can do to solve this problem. We cannot fulfill this step only by pure thinking; we need to involve empirical experimentation by collecting information and observation. Then, we can figure out something to be tried. In Dewey‘s words, this thing is a suggested solution which the
124 John Dewey, Democracy and Education, New York: The Free Press, 1916/1944, p. 326. 125 John Dewey, 1944, p. 296. 126 John Dewey, 1944, p. 328. 127 Ibid.
75 individual —shall be responsible for developing in an orderly way.“128 To some extent, we need to foresee the consequence of the experiment and direct it into a better situation. There is no manual to which we need to strictly adhere. Instead, we can begin at any stage of the process. Always, however, we need to have this genuine sense of the problem the individual is experiencing. Therefore, for Dewey, philosophical inquiry and empirical inquiry are simply two phases in the process of thinking through the problems of lived experience. This method of thinking indicates a philosophical attitude in a general sense that we can never take any problem as isolated or ready-made. Also, we are not looking for something like a record of accomplished fact; instead, we are trying something possible in the new situation. It is always in the context of ongoing experience that the individual needs to take the responsibility to order it or transform it in some way so a temporary harmony can be reached. Dewey said, —Finality does not mean, however, that experience is ended and exhausted, but means the disposition to penetrate to deeper levels of meaning œ to go below the surface and find out the connections of any event or object.“129 In this dissertation, I use a framework of Deweyan pragmatism as a way of thinking to examine different conceptions of individuality discussed in Chapter II. In particular, in the next chapter, I will further elaborate on Dewey‘s ideas of individuality in a context of contemporary Chinese society. In Dewey‘s method of thinking, his conception of individuality is just one view to be tried because the problem is different in the different contexts in which it occurs. On the other hand, it is a dialogue with Liang‘s Confucianism that can produce some new ideas which may be useful for resolving the problem I identified in this project. Indeed, the method of thinking that Dewey proposed is not a fixed manual to solve any problems. It is, rather, an open system of mind which does not solely rely on any fixed and already-made principles, but tries any possible alternatives to solve both emerging and ongoing problems.
128 John Dewey, 1944, p. 163. 129 John Dewey, 1944, p. 326.
76 A dialogue with Dewey and Liang, when all the traditions we discussed in Chapter II become connected and involved in this dialogue, can be one of the alternatives to be tried. If we take Dewey‘s or Liang‘s ideas as possible suggestions which may be helpful to the current problem rather than something ready-made or even authoritative, a dialogue can be productive to this project. In this process of dialogue, we will continually visit the ongoing situation and reflect on it. In this sense, there is no dichotomy between philosophical inquiry or empirical inquiry in this project.
Foundational vs. non-foundational epistemology Deweyan pragmatism shapes the philosophical method I employ here. It differs from traditional philosophy which was often concerned with final Truth and a universally applicable knowledge abstracted from reason alone. This Enlightenment project, originating in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe, changed the landscape of assumptions about how we come to know what we know. Empirical study in the natural sciences and technology examined concrete situations from a particular theoretical perspective in order to confirm or disconfirm that theoretical perspective and thus come closer to the objective Truth. Truth no longer came from God, but from nature and reason. This foundational epistemology, however, has been seriously attacked and challenged by contemporary theories, such as postmodernism and feminist theory. But it was also challenged by pragmatism, an earlier theory than post-modernism, which asserts that the separation of knowledge and context is not possible given that there is no theory-neutral standpoint from which to conduct empirical inquiry. Rather, knowledge is made within the context of a particular space and time. Truthœwithout the capital —T“œexists only in this context. It might apply to other contexts but its applicability needs to be re-tested in the new situation.130
130 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, New York: Penguin, 1999.
77 This shift from foundational to non-foundational epistemology also took place in the field of comparative philosophy. In its early development, for example, the standard of comparison was universal Truth. So the philosophical perspective which did not conform to this standard needed to learn from the standard and to be transformed through comparison. In the East-West comparison, scholars in the —non-western“ world needed to give up their own traditions and perspectives and re-examined their own societies from the western perspective. They accepted the norms provided by western scholars and tried to show that the achievements in various fields within their cultures paralleled (or not) those in the West.131 There was a privileged —we“ in this knowledge system which judged and evaluated all —other“ societies through comparison.132 It was an attempt at the systematic exclusion of the —other“ in the name of inclusion. In this logic of borrowing ideas through comparison, there is an assumption that knowledge/Truth is something we can get from outside. In the perspective of the borrower, we can join the —we“ by borrowing western knowledge. It is the process of modernization in many —developing“ societies. In the perspective of the lender, —they“ need to become like —us“ if they want to improve their life and develop their society. But no matter how hard they try, they cannot get close to —us“ nor ever become —us.“ There is thus a —we“/ —they“ dichotomy which is created by the logic of Truth. With this foundational epistemology, dialogue is impossible in comparative philosophy because dialogue requires the surrender of any privilege the author takes and opens for new ideas in the process of conversation. It requires the willingness to accept the possibility that what I know may be wrong and what you know may be right or good in particular contexts or on particular issues. To some extent, the project of China‘s modernization in the twentieth century was an experiment in implanting western knowledge on Chinese soil. Especially in the May Fourth Era which was discussed in Chapter II, Chinese tradition was
131 Daya Krishna. —Comparative Philosophy: What It Is and What It Ought to Be.“ In Eliot Deutsch, ed., Culture and Modernity: East West Philosophic Perspectives. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991, p. 72. 132 Daya Krishna, 1991, p. 72.
78 re-evaluated in light of western thought and confined by western conceptions of technology and democracy. The social experiment Mao made in the Cultural Revolution was an effort to break western domination and discover an indigenous way of development. However, Mao‘s vision of isolation and self-segregation decided his failure. Today‘s globalized society does not just demonstrate a new means of mass production on a global scale. It also means that different cultures and social forces compete with each other and thus create conflicts and even disasters. The dominant one voice or one truth cannot solve these problems but only makes the conflict more intense. Post-modern thinkers argue that there is no absolute Truth but only local truths which are invented through power relations, as Foucault suggests. Pragmatism, however, responds to the crisis of Truth differently as post-modernism does. Pragmatic thinkers such as Dewey argue that we cannot just rely on universal Truth to judge and act. We can never take time and space for granted as continuously progressing and universally connected. Instead, truth may be fragmented and context-embedded. Thus, we need to focus on the particular problems we need to solve in particular situations in order to achieve particular goals. The knowledge we have can help us to solve the problem we face now, but it always needs to remain open to change to fit the particular new situation. If we remain focused on fixed knowledge founded on a claim of universal Truth, it may become a barrier rather than a useful resource for the present situation. Truth, for pragmatists, is not universally applicable but has to be always tested in the particular context and is open to change. Dava Krishna‘s words make sense in this view of non-foundational truth: —What we should remember is that the cognitive enterprise is as unending as any other enterprise, and that though the truth claim must inevitably be made, it is equally certain that it shall remain unresolved in time. The future will always be there to show us not only the limitations of our
79 knowledge and the falsity of our claims but also to bring to our notice new horizons, undreamed of before.“133 With this non-foundational perspective on knowledge, we should always keep in mind that knowledge is historically contingent in particular time and space. Thus, there is no universal truth which we can unconditionally apply to all different social contexts. In the case of this dissertation, the concepts of individuality in different historical periods or in different cultural traditions cannot be assumed to directly apply to the present condition we live in. We have to scrutinize them in order to determine their relevance to the situation at hand. If they are found wanting, as I argued in Chapter II, then we need to look for a new concept of individuality without being bound by these old ideas. A non-foundational perspective on knowledge also requires that we have a philosophical framework for a conception of individuality which is beyond the West-East dichotomy because, in an increasingly globalized society, the dichotomy becomes less and less possible. But to understand our present situation, we need to fully understand the past and thus find a way to connect with the past. Since the current context is shaped not only by global influences but by the past of a particular society as well. The present is not isolated from tradition, which is not just dead heritage without any useful resource to provide for the present condition. Meanwhile, we not only need to connect with the past in time but also connect with others in the present. The West, in this case, intertwines with China‘s past as well as her present. Without these connections, both the past and the West are only seen as irrelevant or hostile —others“ rather than influences on our present situation. The East-West dichotomization of cultural understanding is increasingly meaningless because globalization has already broken the economic boundary and filtered into the cultural arena. Globalization is not just the domination of economic power but also deep cultural exchange as well. To understand ourselves, we need to understand others: these past experiences and experiences from elsewhere to connect with us so that the
133 Dava Krishna, 1991, p. 81.
80 dichotomy between —us“ and —others“ can disappear and real communication can be made possible. Therefore, in this globalized society, we need mutual understanding and learning, a form of communication essential, in Dewey‘s view, to democracy and inquiry. To move beyond this dichotomy we need to give up either-or thinking and the idea of universally applicable knowledge, keeping in mind that knowledge is embedded in particular historical and social contexts. Therefore, we need to be open to any possibility and creatively find new solutions without rejecting the traditions we have already owned. Tradition, like knowledge, is not something we naturally own because we are Chinese or American; neither is it something we can get from outside without involving our unique experience. Indeed, we need to make deliberate efforts to find our own traditions and bring them to our present life. In my project, the first connection I find is not from Confucianism or Maoism but from pragmatist Dewey: —The ground of democratic ideas and practices is faith in the potentialities of individuals, faith in the capacity for positive developments if proper conditions are provided. The weakness of the philosophy originally advanced to justify the democratic movement was that it took individuality to be something given ready-made; that is, in abstraction from time, instead of as a power to develop.“134 Here, I share with Dewey the idea that individuality is not something given or ready-made so the individual just carries it and performs it in daily life. Instead, it changes in particular situations, and it can be changed for the better or for the worse. Therefore, if we never give up the faith that we can and we need to transform the self through positive development, then the possibility is always there. It is this possibility that makes all educational efforts necessary and worthwhile. I see a connection between my project and Dewey‘s. It is a hope we share to find other alternative routes of development different from these designed endeavors to the marketized society and
134 John Dewey, —Time and Individuality,“ in John Dewey: Later Works, Vol. 14, 1939-1941, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984, p. 113.
81 education system: Individuality is not ready-made but waits for us to create it in our own life experience. To some extent, Dewey and I ask a similar question. For Dewey, the problem he faced was the extreme dualism between the individual and society: a radical individualism in the rapid pace of industrialization and the great improvement in quality of life that people experienced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in American society. In the field of education, the problem is the dualism between traditional education and progressive education, as he discussed in the first chapter of Experience and Education.135 In this situation, the question he asked was —How shall the young become acquainted with the past in such a way that the acquaintance is a potent agent in appreciation of the living present?“136 The problem I am facing is how to deal with the exclusive individualism motivated by self-interest in market competition in contemporary Chinese society. Therefore, the question I ask is how to connect with tradition and bring it into the present living situation so that we can develop our rich individuality without losing the inclusive sense of self in the exclusive market competition which is motivated by self-interest.. Dewey‘s pragmatism, therefore, requires analysis of the influence of the past tradition on the present. It assumes the range of the past influences on the present daily experience. This view inspires me to realize that Confucianism never disappears in the process of China‘s modernization. It is right there in our life and waits for us to re-discover its meaning in our present situation. However, we cannot only simply read the classic Confucianism text even though reading the original text may help us to better reflect our daily behavior. We need to creatively reflect on its meaning in our ongoing situation so that we can bring it to life. This understanding was confirmed when I encountered the ideas of Liang Shuming, a contemporary Confucianist who never gave up his faith in the value of Confucianism for China‘s modernization. In reading Liang, I find that he also shares Dewey‘s belief in human potential to lead to —positive development,“ though he himself experienced tremendous difficulties and
135 John Dewey, Experience and Education. New York: The MacMillan Company. 136 John Dewey, 1948, p. 11.
82 witnessed the disasters created by various Maoist —revolutions“ in the history of China as efforts to find a unique modernization model. He shares many commonalities with Dewey but has critical difference from Dewey as well. The dialogue between these two philosophers and me, carrying with the intellectual traditions we all live through, is thus an effort of communication between different ideas and minds to explore possibilities of new perceptions appropriate to the present situation. In Dewey‘s method of intelligence, communication is a crucial step to find a method for problem solving.137 It is through communication that we gain hope of connection with others in different times and spaces so that we can expand the boundary of our knowledge and thought, as well as releasing our imagination for creative participation and construction in the present. When I apply Dewey‘s philosophical approach to the problem and context under investigation in this dissertation, I conclude that a comparative philosophical analysis is required because our understanding, if the truth of the present is historically and culturally contingent, is shaped by different traditions and cross-cultural influences. Thus, the relevance of my comparison of Dewey and Liang on their conceptions of individuality is justified through communication with various traditions with which we may connect. Simple comparison is not enough, for when I find a connection between the problem I am concerned with and the perspectives on the individual these thinkers offer, then communication is made possible in order to understand the similarities and differences of these philosophies. With this connection, there is the possibility that we can overcome the boundaries among these different preexisting theories and launch creative dialogues for the present situation. Also, communication is not just for the purpose of sharing commonalities or taste differences, like commercial tourists do to gain exotic life experience, but rather it also serves to cast some light for solving particular problems we are facing. In the following section, I will discuss the approach of comparative philosophy based on this non-foundational epistemology for mutual understanding and learning.
137 John Dewey, 1944.
83
III. Conclusion: Comparative Philosophy of Education as a Possible Approach Comparative Philosophy Comparative philosophy is a cosmopolitan vision of learning intending to overcome the limitations of particular ideas and to expand the boundary of knowing and understanding. In Daya Krishna‘s words, this is the new function of comparison: —Conceptual structures may be seen as tools for the organization of experience and for giving it meaning and significance. Each available conceptual structure thus shows the limitations of others and suggests an alternative possibility unexplored by them. Also, they may be seen as drawing our attention to those facts of our experience which have been neglected in other perspectives and to ways of organizing and patterning experiences that were not seen by them.“138 In this idea of comparison, the comparativist herself is an important element in the comparative project because the comparison itself will enrich the view of the comparativist for her awareness of other alternative possibilities beside her own tradition. By entering to the thoughts of others, the mind is enriched and opened. In —The Contextual Fallacy,“ Ben-Ami Scharfstein writes, —an individual in fact is far denser than the individuality posited by theories of personality. Not only is he incommensurable as a whole, but he cannot be explained as simply the emergent result of a unique configuration of structures identical with those that make up other individuals.“ It is the nature of human beings that we as individuals will never stop growing or creating new possibilities as long as we live. In this sense, the project of comparison will never be complete because we can always enrich ourselves by seeing things from others‘ perspectives.139
138 Daya Krishna, 1991, p 81. 139 Ben-Ami Scharfstein, —The Contextual Fallacy.“ In Gerald James Larson and Eliot Deutsch (eds.) Interpreting Across Boundaries: ew Essays in Comparative Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988, p. 87.
84 On one hand, it is the uniqueness of every individual being and every culture that makes the comparative study meaningful. On the other hand, it is commonalities that human beings share make the comparative study necessary. Because of the commonalities we as human beings all share, we need to learn from each other, and we can learn from each other by connecting with each other. An example of this sameness and interdependence of human beings is the existence of math, physics, music, and the arts, as Ben-Ami Scharfstein argues in his critique on contextization. These subjects are the fruit of common experience that we share and continuously create with cooperation. Comparison, thus, is an attempt to share similar experience based on the uniqueness of individuals. It is an attempt to make connection possible and thus enrich oneself in the process. In the sense of mutual learning and enlightenment, Ben-Ami Scharfstein even claims that any objects of thought can be compared legitimately, if they have led to anything intellectually useful, pleasurable, or enlightening.140
Philosophy as a General Theory of Education To some extent, all comparison is philosophical comparison because it challenges our existing thoughts and ideas and impels us to contrast our previous notions and learn from the opinions of others. If education can be understood as mutual learning, every comparison can be taken as a comparative philosophy of education. As Dewey wrote in Democracy and Education, —any person who is open-minded and sensitive to new perceptions, and who has concentration and responsibility in connecting them has, in so far, a philosophic disposition.“141 Comparison is the connecting of new perceptions in order to discover and solve the problems of the present and thus adjust the personality of the self to the present. In the view of Deweyan pragmatism, the process of comparison is in itself an educative experience. Dewey went on to claim that —if we are willing to conceive education as the process of forming fundamental dispositions, intellectual and emotional, toward
140 Ben-Ami Scharfstein, 1988, p 89. 141 John Dewey, 1944, p 325.
85 nature and fellow men, philosophy may even be defined as the general theory of education.“ He continues, —By the educative arts philosophy may generate methods of utilizing the energies of human beings in accord with serious and thoughtful conceptions of life. Education is the laboratory in which philosophic distinctions become concrete and are tested.“142 Comparison thus becomes an intrinsic character of the philosophy of education. However, Dewey also reminds us that philosophy is not only an intellectual entertainment for philosophers but it is a way of provoking thinking about difficulties and challenges in contemporary social life. Education is the process through which the identified problematic situations are revised and hypotheses are tested in real situations. Education is a deliberate practice conducted by philosophy. In Dewey‘s words, —since education is the process through which the needed transformation may be accomplished and not remain a mere hypothesis as to what is desirable, we reach a justification of the statement that philosophy is the theory of education as a deliberately conducted practice.“143 If philosophy is to deal with problems we encounter in social life, and education is the process of formulating fundamental dispositions, intellectual and emotional, as in Dewey‘s view, the question I am asking in this dissertation is a question of philosophy of education. The question impels usœnot only teachers, parents, or administrators, but also students and any person who feels the problemœto examine this question in a philosophical way; that is, to reflect on our life situation and ponder the different or similar difficulties we have, and suggest methods for dealing with them. A philosophical and comparative discussion based on two different philosophies, which this dissertation tries to accomplish, is one approach, among many, to this question. This comparison will not provide any definite answers to solve the question but a perspective for further dialogues from different perspectives. It is an effort to transmit a helpful resource from the tradition to solve the present problem
142 John Dewey, 1944, p 328-9. 143 John Dewey, 1944, p 332.
86 so that we can formulate our personality in a continuous environment without getting lost and estranged in the radical change.
A philosophical dialogue (tri-logue) on individuality As I have tried to argue in this chapter, comparative philosophy of education is one approach, among many, for solving specific problems in particular historical and cultural contexts. It is a way of communication and mutual learning oriented by problems. In this dissertation, the problem is how to continuously develop a unique but inclusive individuality through education in radically changing social conditions such as those experienced in the quickly marketized Chinese society. It is a philosophical problem if we examine the idea of individuality as a concept which is embedded in different social relations and conditions and is always open to change. If we do not accept individuality as something ready-made from social relations, then it should be something made from the process of education to form intellectual and emotional dispositions, as Dewey suggests. It is a process of formulating inclusive self-identity by seeking connections between the present self and others in the broader social condition we all share, without excluding the traditions we may own or views we may share with others. Communication is an important means for seeking connections between the self and others. In this dissertation, the meaningful connection I find is with the pragmatist John Dewey and Confucianist Liang Shuming. Though embedded in different philosophical traditions, Dewey and Liang both share a concern about individual development in rapidly changing social contexts. For me, a comparative philosophical view can launch dialogues with both philosophers on the question discussed here. Their thoughts on the concept of individuality and the relationship between the individual and society help me to arrive at an alternative conception of individuality relevant to the present social condition. In this inquiry, the question I am asking brings Dewey‘s and Liang‘s ideas to the present situation and opens them to be re-tested in the new condition. This is the meaning of a philosophical dialogue in the name of comparative philosophy which I address here.
87 Here, I use the word —dialogue“ not to indicate a virtual conversation with Dewey and Liang, which is technically impossible. Neither, will I use a conversational format to discuss their idea. Dialogue here is a metaphor to indicate an interactive discussion. First of all, it is my communication with Dewey and Liang. Therefore, I do not intend to analyze every aspect of their philosophy even though it is helpful for understanding the specific ideas with the broader framework. Second, I do not read Dewey and Liang separately. When I read Dewey, I keep Liang‘s thought in my mind. When I read Liang, I keep Dewey‘s words in my mind. It is this interactive reading of Dewey and Liang that makes this tri-logue possible. It is also in this mutually interactive sense that I call it a —dialogue.“ Choosing this way of reading Dewey and Liang is a natural consequence, when I carry the ideas of both when seeking the answer for my question. Also, it helps me to reach a sophisticated understanding of the relevance of their thought to my question. If I read Dewey without Liang‘s ideas in mind, I may ignore Dewey‘s concern on rich and diverse characters of the self and treat Dewey‘s method of intelligence in a quite mechanical way. If I read Liang without carrying Dewey‘s ideas, I may not see the relevance of Confucianism on self-construction for a democratic societyœa key for connecting the Confucian tradition with the modern social construction. In the following chapter, I will invite Dewey and Liang to discuss their ideas on individuality in detail. In summary, the radical change of the social condition produces a discontinuous personality, and thus the individual experiences an identity crisis when the self gets lost in radical change. The problem impels any individual, including myself, to travel beyond the limitations of personal experience and transform felt difficulties into a broader social landscape by seeking connection with various traditions. This process of learning is a way of connecting the self with broader social concerns so the individual self gains interests shared with people in different histories and cultures. It is only when we break any already-made knowledge or perceptions that we can launch dialogue and start communication with other people to find alternative ways to solve the problems we face. We can understand ourselves better when the boundary of
88 self-formulation is expanded and becomes more inclusive. It is in this sense that I use a comparative philosophy to study the development of individuality in this project.
89 CHAPTER IV
A DIALOGUE WITH JOH DEWEY A D LIA G SHUMI G
A noiseless, patient spider, I marked, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated; Marked how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding, It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself; Ever unreeling them--ever tirelessly speeding them. Walt Whitman --- —A Noiseless Patient Spider“
One of the popular senses of philosophy is calm and endurance in the face of difficulty and loss; it is even supposed to be a power to bear pain without complaint. John Dewey, Democracy and Education
I. Introduction In Chapter I, I identified a problem in contemporary Chinese education: it withdraws rather than provides resources to help students formulate their own self-identity amidst the dualistic social categories presented to individuals by the rapid marketization and radical social changes in various aspects of modern Chinese social life. In this radical social change, people have to face an unpredictable and fluid life, so a sense of self easily gets lost. Moreover, when contemporary change loses a living connection with tradition, which has happened in Chinese society in the past century as described in the changing concepts of individuality during China‘s modernization in Chapter II, the past collective experience becomes irrelevant to the current life and thus the individual faces difficulty in gaining her self-orientation, which is embedded in her cultural roots. The discontinuity of personality is thus a problem I have identified in the context of rapid social change. Therefore, the question of improving education in such circumstances is how schools conserve and transmit tradition in an
90 educative way so that students can formulate a personality which connects to tradition but is not bounded by categorized and standardized conventions. The process of identifying this problem is inspired by my reading of the American philosopher John Dewey, especially his insight on the experience of continuity in social change as suggesting the possibility to create a personality of one‘s own without isolating the self in society. On the other hand, my tradition of Confucianism provides a bridge between Dewey‘s ideas and the Chinese problem explored here since both Deweyan pragmatism and Confucianism emphasize the formulation of self-identity in social relations. The dialogue I constructed here with Dewey and Confucianism is conducted through the Chinese Confucianist Liang Shuming, a contemporary of Dewey, who shares the aspect of continuity and social interaction with Dewey but also provides some different perspectives, especially the idea of the inner self. I suggest that this idea is important to help the individual sustain inner strength in dealing with radical discontinuity in the individual‘s experience. In Chapter III, I discussed the methodology of comparative philosophy of education. That is, this method of dialogue explores an interactive way to discuss an issue from different but related perspectives without comparing and competing with each other. Particularly, it explores the possibility of learning from different perspectives and how this dialogue can shed light on the particular problem explored here. In other words, I am not trying to write Dewey or Liang‘s ideas in a —right“ way with some pre-existent standard in mind. Instead, their ideas are —provocative,“ in that they facilitate my own thinking about the problem I identified at the beginning of the project.144 Their vocabularies are useful in analyzing the situation I would like to explore. Through the discussion of the two philosophers, my intention is to seek suitable vocabularies which clearly express my —felt difficulty“ in the context of the problem identified.
144 —Provocation“ is an important conception in Emerson‘s thoughts. For Emerson, life is not only mastery but provocation and stimulation, to sustain some sense of the self owing to the creative human power. See Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.
91 In this chapter, I will not discuss Dewey and Liang‘s philosophies comprehensively. Instead, I will focus on discussing how self-identity is necessary and possible in the context of radical social change in their thoughts. I will discuss their philosophies in three parts by focusing on their particular ideas in each part. Indeed, the discussion will be a three-part dialogue among Dewey, Liang and myself because I need to explain their thoughts and their connections with the particular questions I am concerned with. Also, I need to read Dewey while carrying Liang‘s idea in mind and read Liang while carrying Dewey‘s idea in mind. In this chapter, I will first discuss the conception of self-transformation as the foundation of learning and social change in Dewey‘s idea of —individual mind.“ In other words, I will discuss the necessity and possibility of self-transformation by engaging with Dewey‘s philosophy. Second, I will discuss the limitation of Dewey‘s conception of intelligence, an essential idea in his conception of —individual mind,“ and thus invite Liang to respond to this limitation in Dewey‘s thought. By discussing Liang‘s ideas, I will argue for the importance of inner strength of the individual which stems from an inner struggle of dealing with radical social change and thus reconnecting the broken relationship between the past and the present of the individual‘s life experience. Finally, I will explore the possibility of social transformation by introducing the idea of —social self,“ an idea appearing in both Dewey and Liang‘s philosophies. I argue that developing both the inner self and the social self are essential to formulating a continuous and inclusive but unique individuality as an agent of social transformation so that tradition can be incorporated into the current social environment without alienating the individual; instead, tradition can provide a constructive resource for negotiating radical social change. In other words, to develop a unique but inclusive individuality, the individual is building her inner strength to be true to the call from inside while seeking alternatives to deal with the radical change of the environment. Based on this idea, the conception of individuality in this project is different from egoism as well as altruism in the relationship to society. There is no dividing line between the self and society but the relationship of the individual and society is based on the development of this unique but inclusive self when the self becomes —social
92 self“ or —selfless self,“ borrowing the terms from Dewey and Liang respectively. This will be the concluding point I derive from this exploration of Dewey‘s and Liang‘s thoughts. The —dialogue“ I offer here is, of course, a creative device of my own invention as there is no evidence that Dewey and Liang ever met, nor any evidence that their philosophies influenced one another. However, in constructing such a dialogue I am enacting an approach to philosophy of education anticipated in the discourse of comparative philosophy. It is consistent with Dewey‘s conception of philosophy as reflection on a problem.145 From this interactive and conversational approach, I formulate my argument for this project: to develop a unique but inclusive individuality as self-identity in the radically changing social context. Their contributions to educational ideas are not restricted to these points and may have extended implications which I will discuss in Chapter V.
II. John Dewey: Experience as an Agent of Self Transformation In Chapter I, the problem I described was that the mind of the individual was marked by social forces and thus was formulated into dualistic categories. There is no —I“ in the individual‘s experience to pursue their goals for success. The mind of the individual thus becomes an assembly of social conventions. In the radically changing environment, it is difficult for the individual in contemporary China to learn to formulate his/her own continuous personality without losing the self in the contradictory categories and changing environment. To respond to this problem, I first argue that when we open the self to unknown challenges in the experience of full engagement, we have the potential to formulate an individual mind, a mind of one‘s own rather than a mind imposed from outside. The condition is that the existing self, or the already-made self, is willing to change and to explore its unknown potential. I call this process self-transformation. In Art as Experience, Dewey described —mind“ as something not only intellectually but also
145 John Dewey, Democracy and Education, New York: The Free Press, 1944.
93 emotionally engaged by the individual.146 It is close to the meaning of heart/mind in Confucianism.147 As I mentioned earlier, —an individual mind“ is different from —the mind of the individual“ because the former must be unique but the latter can be an imitation of others. If learning is a process of recognizing who I am and realizing what I want to be, self-transformation should be a foundation of learning. If it is such a foundation, then a richer and more continuous personality is possible within the changing environment. In this section, I will borrow Dewey‘s ideas to explain the conception of self-transformation and use his idea of intelligence to explain it.
Self-transformation Even though Dewey‘s philosophy tried to respond to the radical social change happening in American society, what would Dewey‘s response be if he faced the specific problem we are dealing with in this project? In the situation described in Chapter I, in contemporary Chinese society the self is often made by social forces and put into different categories. Dewey calls this phenomenon an isolation of the individual from his or her experience because this ready-made self surrenders the richness of experience that the individual could have and follows the ready-made routes of others. He proposed that we needed to formulate —an individual mind“ to replace this false conception of individuality. In defining the conception of self-transformation, I mainly borrow two ideas from Dewey: —an individual mind“ originating from existing habits and developed via the intelligent encounter with problems in experience; selfhood is not ready-made but evolving. In Dewey‘s view, an individual mind is interdependent with the environment in which experience happens. How can it happen? —What then is meant by individual mind, by mind as individual? … Conflict of habits releases impulsive activities which in their manifestation
146 John Dewey, Art as Experience, New York: Minton, Balch & Company, 1934, p. 263. 147 Tu Wei-ming ,—'Inner Experience': the Basis of Creativity in Neo-Confucian Thinking,“ in Christian F. Murck, ed., Artists and Traditions: Uses of the Past in Chinese Culture, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976. In this paper, Tu emphasizes that inner experience, mind-heart as one way to express it, is a prerequisite for appropriating the meaning of Confucian teaching and learning.
94 require a modification of habit, of custom and convention.….. for impulse when it asserts itself deliberately against an existing custom is the beginning of individuality in mind. This beginning is developed and consolidated in the observations, judgments, inventions which try to transform the environment so that a variant, deviating impulse may itself in turn become incarnated in objective habit.“148 In this quotation, there are several points Dewey emphasizes in the process of evolving an individual mind. First, an individual mind does not start from nowhere but from the existing habits and customs we live with. Second, the individual has the desire to reconstruct the habits and customs which do not fit in the individual‘s living experience. The desire or impulsion is the mark and possession of an individual and the beginning of developing unique individuality. However, the feeling is not stable, but fluid, if it cannot be developed with the assistance of observation, judgment and invention, which Dewey calls the method of intelligence. Dewey describes impulsion as the beginning of formulating an individual mind which can then be directed to self-transformation. But impulsion should be developed through social dependencies and companionship. In other words, it begins with the inadequacies of habits and customs but gets nutrition from social experience. These impulsions are the original motivation to transfer social powers into personal ability and a way of reconstructing personal growth.149 Impulsion stirs the habitual experiences and the individual starts to feel the inadequacies of habits where problems arise. Through reflection, observation, communication, and social interaction, the individual finds the method to resolve the identified problem. This is the method of intelligence Dewey proposed in his works. Because impulsion is the inchoate possession of an individual mind and impels change, it can go in different directions. Therefore selfhood is not a fixed and ready-made entity but includes a number of inconsistent selves and unharmonized
148 John Dewey, Human ature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology. New York: The Modern Library. 1922/1957, pp 77-78. 149 Dewey, Ibid., p 94.
95 dispositions.150 Dewey claims that it is the nature of experience to foster these inconsistencies in the individual‘s mind. The key point to transform these inconsistent selves into harmonious dispositions is that the individual should never completely rely on the existing self to act, but must open the mind to new contacts and receptions.151 The self never rests on a fixed condition but develops in changing experiences. There is no final end in self-transformation. Dewey suggests that growth of the individual mind means a more complicated mind to that can be used to deal with the broader scope and intricacy of problems the individual meets.152 So the question is how to develop impulsion into a mature intelligence to direct action in reality. Dewey suggests that this transformation is not an easy task because it is easier to surrender impulsion to the sluggishness of convention. Also, it is easier to idealize tradition by emphasizing its ease, comfort and privileges instead of making the tradition more equably balanced with present needs.153 In the case of Chinese education, even though many of us may feel pressure from the market competition, most of us give up the possibility of creating a new approach of participating in society but just follow the trend the society creates. We pay more attention to the ease, comfort and privilege the marketization may bring without recognizing that the exclusiveness of market competition may narrow our choices if we want to lead a life of our own. So what can we do to avoid surrendering to conventions while transferring impulsion into the force of renewal and refreshment? Dewey‘s proposal is that we need to develop the impulsion via intelligence so that we may not fall into the dead end of a pre-made self. Instead, we need to transfer it into a more inclusive and open mind in the changing environment. Intelligence that starts from impulsion to action encounters an impediment. Reflection transforms the impediment into a problem, conceives aims and develops techniques so that the impulsion can convert to a
150 Dewey, Ibid., pp 137-138. 151 Dewey, Ibid., p 138. 152 Dewey, Ibid., p 286. 153 Dewey, Ibid., p 169.
96 harmonious way of living through the changing environment.154 It develops from the conflict of habits and releases impulsion into a conscious search for methods of problem-solving.155 With the development of intelligence, a moral sense of self will also develop so that self-transformation has some inward direction and is not just influenced by random events in daily life. In Dewey‘s philosophy on change, there is no pre-made standard for good or bad. The only standard of morality, not a standard in the conventional meaning with some fixed rules, is that it liberates the power of the individual and engages the self in activities which enlarge the meaning of life. This enriched meaning of life expands the scope of the self so that other people can be included in the individual‘s sense of selfhood. It is only then that self-transformation gains moral meaning and lays a foundation for learning because it will not close the mind of the individual by excluding opportunities for others. Dewey claims, —Intelligence becomes ours in the degree in which we use it and accept responsibility for consequences.“156 In summary, in Dewey‘s philosophy, there is an assumption that life is inevitably changing. It is a basic fact of human nature. Life is changing in the way that the old habits cease to work and new habits evolve to solve the problems which arise in the conflicts between old habits and new social conditions. Morality is a consequence as well as an effort to readjust and redirect the self when inquiries or crises of uncertainty happen in personal as well as social experience. In other words, it is not moral if we refuse to change and close the self from an unknown challenge in the continuously changing social situation. In this continuously changing life discourse, impulsion is the beginning mark of the possession of the self because it comes when the —I“ grows and a unique element of experience arises, which cannot fit in the already-made habits. Even though habits direct the individual‘s action and make selfhood possible, they can be a barrier for
154 Dewey, Ibid., pp 170-171. 155 Dewey, Ibid., p 180. 156 Dewey, Ibid., p 314. The emphasis is not original and added by the author.
97 evolving new elements of the self so they need to be readjusted. With guidance from the heritage of the past experienceœtraditionœand the mature elders who have richer experience to deal with life problems, the individual mind can develop when intelligence evolves in the action of observation, trying, invention, and reflection. However, this intelligence can lead us to a richer individual mind in the changing situation only when it opens to creating a new self by expanding the scope of mind so that the individual can include others as part of the evolving self. Because it is Dewey‘s assumption that we live in an associated life, the individual mind will shrink without an inclusive scope developed in intelligence. In the case of Chinese education, when the individual is educated to climb the ladder of the education system to be a successful person, the individual has to participate in an exclusive competition in which only a small number of students can win but most are marginalized and categorized into some un-favored social position when they enter into society. Formal education does not teach students how to foster an inclusive mind by enriching their individuality through their educational experience. In this sense, intelligence cannot be developed, but still only some skills are practiced. Without an opening process of self-transformation, the goal of educating an individual mind is just a castle in the air. Therefore, in the following section, I will continue my discussion of Dewey to describe in detail how to cultivate an individual mind by arousing students‘ interests, formulating their genuine purposes of learning and finally enabling them to take intelligent action.
Interest and purpose: two keys for self-transformation My primary question in this section is —How can we cultivate interests so we can realize self-transformation?“ However, reading Dewey makes this question problematic because interest is not the means and self-transformation is not the end. In Dewey‘s view, interest is about self-transformation. He said, —the kind of self which results from generous breadth of interest may be said alone to constitute a
98 development and fulfillment of the self.“157 Also, —interest is an identification of a self with some material aspect of the objective world, of the nature that includes man.“158 Therefore, alternatively, I will discuss what interest is and how interest relates to self-transformation in Dewey‘s view. Dewey claimed that interest meant that —self and world are engaged with each other in a developing situation.“159 In this sentence, Dewey corrected two contrasting views on interest. First, interest is not from an isolated mind. It cannot be solely imagined from the inner mind and then arouse the enthusiasm toward the object. On the other hand, it is also not from somewhere in the external world. It cannot be solely encouraged by others or stimulated by rewards from outside. It has to be developed in activities the individual is engaged in. It is not the means but the consequence of the ongoing activity. From what we are doing, we find what individuality we constitute. In this sense, interest is not a matter of having, but a matter of being: it is a sense of self. Because interest is about self-identity in changing situations, it is not something we can get and hold permanently. It is changing while the self is changing in ongoing activities. We can lose interest at any moment if we give up cultivating an evolving self. In other words, we can lose interest in daily life if we give up connecting the sense of self with the ongoing world. Indeed, interest is the engrossment in the activity in which the sense of self is confirmed. Then, the question is what it means that interest is about self-transformation, not just the means to realize the self. Does interest magically open a new world in which we can do whatever we like without worrying about the bonds of social institutions? Of course the answer is no. But this concept of interest, which is different from the view of interest either purely from the inside of the mind or purely from the outside, does bring a new view of self-transformation.
157 John Dewey, Ethics. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1936, p 335. 158 John Dewey, Art as Experience, 1934, p 277. 159 John Dewey, Democracy and Education, 1944, p 126.
99 When interest is about the self not just as a means for the self, it becomes part of the ongoing activity rather than something added from outside. When it is part of the change, it opens to new possibilities in the present situation rather than sticking to already-made interests from the past experience. Its openness to the new situation helps it gain broader perspectives of the ongoing situation and thus recognizes more alternatives to create connections between the past and the ongoing experience. If the interest does not adjust with the changing situation, it will be difficult to find new connections. Without the sense of connection, not to say engagement, the interest will disappear soon. Also, the sense of self will get lost in the changing situation. Only when the self is fully engaged with the present ongoing situation is self-transformation possible when the mind gains rich opportunities to achieve continuous development from the past to the present. Therefore, self-transformation is not only about change, but about a continuous development of individuality which is based on past experience and full engagement with the present situation. On the other hand, opening to new possibilities also means having a willingness to face uncertainties and unexpected challenges all the time. Interest, when it closes the gap between —I“ and the —world,“ brings unique happiness, which only —I“ can feel, but also brings suffering or pains due to uncertainties and challenges. It is this unique happiness and pain that gives significance to the rich meaning of individuality. It constitutes self-identity, which is about who I am and what I want to be in this world. In Dewey‘s words, —it alone justifies struggle in creative activity and gives opportunity for the emergence of the genuinely new.“160 If the individual is always open to the ongoing and changing situation, she needs to respond to her true feeling regarding the new situation. This true feeling is an —impelling desire of his (her) own.“161 The interest arouses from this impelling desire and finds new connections between the already-made self and the new situation. This old self then opens to new transformation when the new connection is found.
160 John Dewey, —Time and Individuality,“ in John Dewey: The Later Works, Vol. 14, edited by Jo Ann Boydston, Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press, 1981-1990, p 101. 161 John Dewey, —Individuality and Experience“, in John Dewey: The Later Works, Vol. 2, p. 57.
100 Traditions, or habits, or principles which are reserved in past experience are not useless. Instead, they are important for realizing a continuous self-transformation in the changing situation. Only when tradition enters into this ongoing activity, not only being part of this ready-made self but also joining the self into the present changing experience, can tradition play an important role to transform the present. If not, tradition is just conventions which block the change and become the conservative force impeding change. In Dewey‘s words, tradition without change will remain as a mere set of mechanical and more or less meaningless rules the individual is obliged to follow. Tradition then will never really enter into and integrate with the individual‘s intrinsic power.162 It is in this sense that a continuous interest does not mean a changing interest without any consistency. Tradition can play an important role in this changing situation. With no tradition entering into the activity, the present will fall into a vacuum and lead to nowhere. Because interest is a sense of connection between the past and the present, it includes tradition in it when it comes into the individual‘s mind. The practice of interest, the interest which opens to change, then turns the finished and fixed past experience into a lively ongoing experience. When tradition enters into the present situation, it surrenders the privilege of an authority or definite guidance and acts as a medium of connection. On the other hand, without taking tradition into consideration, the sense of connection is not possible. When tradition integrates with the present activity as a lively force rather than as a fixed authority, the interest also gains continuity so the sense of self-identity will not get lost in the present change. In summary, interest, in Dewey‘s view, closes the gap between —I“ and the object. In any particular activity, —I“ is in the object and the object includes —I.“ In other words, the object is meaningless if —I“ is not in it or if the individual has no interest in it. Interest then connects —I“ with the object and creates meaning in an object. Through this process of creating meaning, the self is created and transformed.
162 John Dewey, Ibid.
101 When we apply this conception of interest to education, we have to admit that students‘ interests cannot be designed, but rather they evolve from activities students are engaged in. Even though schools can design curriculum and activities for students, the individual has the right to not be interested in them. It is not the absolute fault of the student if he/she fails in showing interest in the designed curriculum. What schools can do is to make the curriculum more flexible and open so that it can receive students‘ different interests. Moreover, it is necessary for the school to create some empty space for students to create their own interests, which may not be reflected in the existing curriculum or school activities. Then, the following question is what the genuine purpose of study means for every different student. In Dewey‘s view, genuine purposes arise from interest. When passion and impulsion become conscious in man, the interest turns to an end-in-view and foresees the consequence of the action from impulsion.163 If interest is a relationship between the past and the present, then purpose is about a relationship between the present and the future, based on the study of the present ongoing condition. However, purpose is not the final end but a terminus, an aim which the individual can foresee the consequence by fully studying the present condition. It is not ready-made but found in the ongoing activities in which inconsistent selves are unified into an inclusive action which is open to new and unexpected possibilities. Dewey said, —The more inclusive the aim in question the broader is the unification which is attained. …The development of inclusive and enduring aims is the necessary condition of the application of reflection in conduct; indeed, they are two names for the same fact.“164 Purposes or aims are formulated when they are unified with the intense need of the self, where interests are embedded. The self, then, is realized when the purpose is practiced in the name of interest. Therefore, interest and purpose unify the self.165 In this section, we know that interests and purposes are evolving from the intense needs of the self. They are unified and expanded in self-transformation. In
163 John Dewey, Experience and Education, New York: Free Press, 1997, p 67. 164 John Dewey, Ethics, in Later Works, Vol. 7, p. 185. 165 John Dewey, A Common Faith, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934/1960, p 22.
102 Dewey‘s words, the individual achieves —growth.“ From this statement, it is easy to have the impression that —growth“ can automatically happen with interests and purposes in mind. But growth does not happen automatically, as Dewey suggests the idea of progress in his conception of time. In the following section, it is necessary to clarify the conception of time in Dewey‘s philosophy and how individuality can be developed in his conception of time.
Time and self-transformation In a short essay called —Time and Individuality“ in Dewey‘s later work, he criticizes the conception of evolution which suggests that progress is inevitable. The common view of —evolution“ considers that progress automatically happens if we follow the fixed law of nature.166 Even though Dewey has a strong faith in progress, he emphasizes that progress only happens if the human being makes sufficient effort. Progress will not automatically happen because we do not have any fixed law or rule to follow. Instead, we live in never-ending changes and we need to face unexpected challenges at every moment. Progress, in Dewey‘s view, means the expansion of scales of human intelligence in dealing with emerging problems. In other words, progress requires broader perspectives on solving problems within an associated way of living. Moreover, progress can only become possible in the time of the present, in the time when the individual is dealing with the problem and engaging in the ongoing activity. Time, in Dewey‘s view, is not something outside of the individual. If time is just something external to the individual‘s mind, it is passed, is passing and will pass no matter what. Physically, we move in the direction of death, without any doubt. We cannot find any meaning in the present except the smell of death. A life attitude of nihilism may prevail in this conception of time. However, it is not the conception of time Dewey suggests. Time, in Dewey‘s view, is about individuality itself. It is an integral element of the individual being. Genuine time, Dewey said, —is all one with
166 John Dewey, —Time and Individuality,“ in Later Works, Vol. 14, p 100.
103 the existence of individuals as individuals, with the creative, with the occurrence of unpredictable novelties.“167 It means, as discussed in the conception of interest, that only in the genuine time of the present can the individual break through mechanical routines and fixed conventions which are the external elements of the self. It is only in genuine time that creative and unpredictable possibilities can come up in ongoing activities. It is in the present of doing that the individual can change the —unchangeable“ rules and conventions which are set up in the fixed sense of time. It is Dewey‘s basic faith in human intelligence to create progress in the changing world. Dewey admits that we need to face difficulties, uncertainties and struggles in this conception of time when we get ready to fight against any fixed and pre-made rules which block our efforts in expanding the scale of human intelligence. Even though the difficulties and struggles are always there, they are not the failure but an expansion of human power when we broaden our perspectives and have a more inclusive view in dealing with the problems in an associated way. What is not fully emphasized in educational studies is that the real barrier for us to take action in the present is from the individual self, because it is the individual‘s decision to depend on external authority and live by routines or to turn difficulties into opportunities for further expansion and enrichment of individuality. In other words, what we need is a faith in the possibility of the individual mind which can develop its potentiality for dealing with the unknown and the uncertain situations to turn them into novelty. This transformation of the mind can lead the individual life into an inclusive existence so that the individual can include others as part of the self.
Summary In summary, where I firmly stand with Dewey is in his belief in constructing the self in a world that is not fixed but comprised of unknown situations, something beyond the designed and planned and thus open to new possibilities. This unknown situation is not mystical but an open-minded attitude and the willingness to take
167 John Dewey, Ibid., p 112.
104 others into one‘s own perspective; it is an attitude of not losing any opportunity to make connection with —alien“ things and people. Thus, self-transformation is to challenge the existent self, open the self to uncertainties and seek alternatives to enrich the existent self. However, Dewey seems to take this connection for granted because he holds the rationale that if we never set up fixed goals into the fixed situations, we can fully engage in society. Then, we will always have possibilities to continue the connection. This is a life attitude which Dewey advocates. Still, Dewey did not address the question of how we can gain this life attitude, specifically, through education. In Dewey‘s own words, how can we know the intense need of the self if the gap between the impulsion from inside and the objective world is too wide to realize the connection, as I discussed in Chapter I? This question is important if we admit that we are always in danger of losing connection with the environment and thus falling into vanity or boredom. In Dewey‘s view, the uniqueness of the self is a natural phenomenon. It will not disappear in the interaction with the society. In contrast, it can develop only in the interaction of associated life with others. But the uniqueness of the self will disappear if the self is not open to new challenges and possibilities in the interaction. If the self stops transforming, it will merge with the conventions or models of others (external authority) and thus lose its uniqueness. What Dewey emphasizes is that self-transformation has to happen in the interaction with the object, with the world. He said, —in this process of intercourse, native capacities, which contain an element of uniqueness, are transformed and become a self. Moreover, through resistance encountered, the nature of the self is discovered. The self is both formed and brought to consciousness through interaction with the environment.“168
Dewey‘s limitation on self-transformation In the discussion above, Dewey teaches us that we need to give up a teleological view on progress. In other words, progress is not inevitable but only
168 John Dewey, Art as Experience, 1934, p 281.
105 happens when the individual is willing to try. Also, he denied that the view of progress has a specific destination. He also teaches us that although it is not easy to make progress, we need to keep faith in trying in unknown situations. In Dewey‘s own words, we need to learn to develop faith in —the possibilities of experience.“169 He emphasizes —the possibilities of experience,“ which he explains as the method of intelligence in many of his books.170 However, what Dewey did not address in detail is how to sustain the connection and then cultivate the whole sense of the self if this connection is broken or, put another way, he seems to lack a sense of tragedy, as some scholars have criticized.171 Here, a —broken relationship“ occurs when a continuous interaction stops between the individual and the environment that the individual is used to being engaged in. In the short essay —I Believe,“ in his later work, Dewey wrote: —I have not changed my faith in experience nor my belief that individuality is its centre and consummation. But there has been a change in emphasis. I should now wish to emphasize more than I formerly did that individuals are the finally decisive factors of the nature and movement of associated life.“172 Here, Dewey has a clear change from his former emphasis on —experience,“ or interactive —relationship“ to the emphasis on the individual person who is in experience or relationships. In my view, this change is very crucial because it indicates Dewey‘s self-awareness of the limitation on the emphasis of experience only, even though this emphasis is very powerful in criticizing the various kinds of dualism, such as the relationship of the individual and society, body and soul, practice and theory, which Dewey spent so much effort to criticize. In most of Dewey‘s work, he suggests that experience or interactive relationship is the agent of self-transformation and social transformation. In this quote
169 John Dewey, —I Believe“, in Later Works, Vol. 14, p. 91. 170 For example, John Dewey, Democracy and Education, 1944; John Dewey, How We Think, in Later Works, Vol. 8. 171 For example, see Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism, Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. 172 John Dewey, —I Believe“ op cit., p. 91.
106 of Dewey‘s late work, he admits that the individual is the main force in any transformation. Too much emphasis on interactive relationship in experience may lead to an agent-less situation, which post-structuralism suggests.173 Dewey‘s difference from post-structuralism is that he proposes that genuine experience, which cultivates individuality, can be the agent of transformation. However, from the statement of —I Believe,“ Dewey realized that without an individual as the agent of transformation, as the decisive factor in experience, it might be difficult to develop genuine voluntary individuality, especially in the situations where some social forces or social arrangements are so powerful that they shape the individual mind and thus a unique and inclusive individuality becomes almost impossible. In today‘s society, totalitarian social forces and social arrangements are still common, in different forms, even in the form of democratic regimes. For example, if the market force dominates the whole of social arrangements, markets can turn out to be totalitarian institutions. If we do not have a genuine sense of self-identity, our individualities can only be shaped by social forces - market being a major one - into uniformity. The self as an agent of transformation, thus, is a critical issue to discuss for a democratic community. Dewey admits in his late works that he did not sufficiently emphasize this point. What Dewey contributed is that his philosophy saves the individual from the separation of society through genuine experience. Based on Dewey‘s ideas, what we need to further ask is where this faith in human intelligence comes from, to give us hope and strength to keep tryingœwith imagination and creativityœto repair the broken relationships we produce in modern society. Facing inevitable uncertainties, how can we develop a continuous sense of purpose and develop an inclusive and rich individuality? Dewey assumes that if we can give up pre-defined and fixed conventions, energies from the individual can be released so the individual can gain hope for re-connection, though struggle and pain come along with the hope. He says,
173 See Michel Foucault, —The Subject and Power,“ Critical Inquiry, Vol. 8, No. 4, (Summer, 1982), 777-795
107 —New struggles and failures are inevitable. The total scene of action remains as before, only for us more complex, and more subtly unstable. But this very situation is a consequence of expansion, not of failure of power, and when grasped and admitted it is a challenge to intelligence. Instruction in what to do next …can be derived only from study of the deficiencies, irregularities and possibilities of the actual situation.“174 However, what Dewey misses is how we, as human beings and agents of transformation, go through these numerous —struggles and failures“ without losing the hope of connection, like the tireless spider in Whitman‘s poem. Dewey did not take progress for granted, but it seems he took this —faith“ for granted without explicitly discussing it. In Munro‘s view, Dewey takes the capacity of the individual to act as a fact. Not until in his late work did he admit that this capacity was an ideal instead of a fact. Munro further claims that an ideal of —man‘s most desirable condition is one in which the formation of his beliefs and the direction of his choice making stems from himself rather than from outside agencies.“175 It is in this sense that I argue that a discussion of —inner self“œ—his beliefs and the direction of his choice making from himself rather than outside agencies“œis necessary and important for self-transformation.176 To further explore this point that Dewey admitted he did not adequately discuss in his philosophy, I will introduce Liang Shuming‘s philosophy to explore the importance of an inner self in building faith in hopes of reconnecting broken relationshipsœinner strengthœand going through struggles to reach genuine experience. By going through the difficulties of inner struggle, an inclusive and unique individuality may be realized.
III. Liang Shuming: Inner Self as an Agent of Self Transformation
174 John Dewey, Human ature and Conduct, pp. 288-289. 175 Donald J. Munro, The Concept of Man in Contemporary China, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1977, p. 5. 176 Ibid.
108 As does Dewey, Liang believes that the nature of human beings (xing，性) is not pre-made and thus can be transformed. Learning is a process of self-transformation and realizing internal freedom. In Liang‘s view, freedom is a situation where the individual connects with the Universe (things and living beings) without any barriers. It is the freedom that the individual feels from the heart. In Liang‘s opinion, what Dewey ignores is this inner aspect of freedom when the individual interacts with the environment. In this section, I will explore Liang‘s conception of —self-enlightenment“ (zijue) as a key to realizing this self-transformation.177 I will also discuss why this conception is important for the problem addressed in this project and how it can work together with Dewey‘s conception of individuality to contribute to the present inquiry. First, however, to understand Liang‘s thought, we need to clarify two conceptions: inner self and self-enlightenment.
Definition of —inner self“ First, Liang‘s idea of —inner self“ is not a form of essentialism. It is not a matter of fact, not something already there. Neither is it any defined goal that we can reach. I translate Liang‘s words of shenxin (深心) into English as —inner self.“ The direct translation, however, would be —deep heart.“ I use the idea of —inner self“ to capture Liang‘s description of the stable element of the self. It is like the deep water at the bottom of the river. In essentialism, the self is pre-made and has a fixed nature. It is independent from the external environment and does not change when the environment changes. In Liang‘s view, the self is always open to change, a view similar with Dewey‘s. The inner self is the true feeling you have in your heart and the authentic thoughts you have in your mind.
177 —Enligtenment“ was translated into qimeng in Chinese when the word was first introduced in China. However, one scholar Deng Xiaomang argued that qimeng does not well reflect the meaning of enlightenment because qimeng in Chinese implies an elitist attitude the intellectuals use to help the ignorant people. (Xu, Sumin, Rename for —Qimeng,“ Dushu, Dec. 2008, p. 78-79). Here, I translated zijue into self-enlightenment is trying to propose a new view of enlightenment which is different from the top-down elitist approach and emphasizes the crucial role of the self.
109 The idea of —inner self“ is from an understanding of the predicament of life everyone may experience, the feeling of silent despair in life. By feeling this despair in life, the need to get out of the despair is aroused. This need is not an external imposition but a true feeling from inside, from the center of the despair. At this moment, the self has no gap between her body and mind. The unification of the body and mind helps the individual to perceive the need from inside. Therefore, there is no doubt that this feeling of despair develops from the experience the individual has in the environment. But from this experience, the individual needs to develop an —inner self“ which hosts a strong will to get through the predicament of life and thus realize freedom from the bond of social conventions and the various difficult conditions we may encounter in life. In Liang‘s view, this inner self develops from an interactive experience with the world, but it is more than that. Because the inner self is developed through the despair the individual encounters in life, it is more stable and hosts powerful energy to deal with the problems from the outside. It is the source to build inner strength.178 For Liang, it is possible that we can cultivate the self, which is from social interaction, but we also need to go beyond the social organism and act with deep motivation from inside, which is less influenced by the changing environment and more influenced by self-reflection on the existence of the individual. This is the reason I translate Liang‘s word into —inner self.“ There is no guarantee that the individual can get an answer in her despair about questions like —Who am I? And who do I want to be? How can I lead a life of my own?“ But it is the individual‘s decision, an exercise of her strong will, to put herself into uncertainty. It is this decision that leads her into the landscape of learning. It is this despair which leads her to seek the answer that leads to the future: when time becomes genuine time in her life experience. She will not be easily distracted by various changes in the environment but sees a consistent theme in her journey. This consistency is not some defined meaning which has already been clear. This
178 Dewey also discussed about the idea of —energy“ in Art as Experience: —every closure is an awakening, and every awakening settles something. This state of affairs defines organization of energy.“ (p. 176) The definition is also applicable to the context in Liang‘s discussion.
110 consistency is about her unique question in her own life that she tries to find an answer to. This despair also connects the individual with others because they may have different questions about their lives but they all share sympathy and respect for life in general if they feel this despair. The inner self is this consistent sense of self-questioning for a unique life which is relatively stable for individual development in the changing social environment. Dewey may not be willing to use the words —inner self“ because the term sounds too much like the view of essentialism which separates the core of the self from the outside world, the dualism Dewey criticizes. To criticize such dualism, Dewey focused his attention on the interaction between the self and the world. As a result, he did not pay as much attention to the construction of a relatively stable and independent sense of the self, as he admits in his late works.179 I use —inner self“ to describe this cultivated deeper and more stable self. It is true that Dewey claims that there is no isolated experience, but it always has connections with other experience. This sense of solidarity is the foundation of a democratic society. However, what Dewey implies in his late works but does not explicitly describe is that the individual is the final factor in deciding what experience the individual will go through, and thus what individuality will be developed, as the quote from the essay —I Believe“ tells. I call this sense of individual as the decisive force an —inner self.“ This conception of —inner self“ is an agent to develop inner strength by struggling to work through uncertainties and repairing broken relationships. Inner self is not something which has already been there but is what we need to develop through experience. It helps to develop the identity of —who I am“ as a process of both questioning and confirming. The process of questioning —who I am“ evolves with struggle, pain and confusion when the individual enters into the world and tries to distinguish the self from the conventions and norms the society imposes on the person. The inquiry of self-identity may arise if the individual decides to figure out a life she wants to lead in society. In the experience of education, this question naturally comes
179 John Dewey, —I Believe,“ in Later Works, p. 91.
111 up if students have free space to think about themselves instead of just thinking through others‘ minds, as the exam-oriented education system encourages them to do. Then, it is a major task of education to deal with students‘ identity formation. Thus, education is not for anybody else, but for the blossoming of the individual‘s life when the mind is clear about —who I am“ and —who I want to be.“ Though it is indeed a never-ending process to cultivate a mind of one‘s own, wisdom comes when the individual mind becomes clearer and more confirmed. Imagination is released to solve the problems and conflicts —I“ meets with in the conventions and expectations of others, including the otherness of self which is a bearer of social conventions and external authorities. Meanwhile, this evolving mind of one‘s own always needs to open to new challenges so it never ends in a fixed condition. It opens to change and it expands the boundary of the vision of —who I am.“ Thus, the inner self is enlarged and connects to others, people and things in the environment the individual lives in. Liang admits that inner self is influenced by social interaction but it is not a natural consequence of the socializing process. Besides the conscious level of self, Liang suggests that our life is dominated by either passive or conscious habits, or the deeper level of self: inner self. Dewey tried to use the method of intelligence to conquer passive habits or routines in life and enable the conscious adaptation to a changing environment. However, inner self is developed from self-reflection on the individual‘s existence in the world. In other words, the individual sees the self not only embedded in the present and concrete situation but also sees the self in those situations that everybody else shares in a broader world. Through the lens of inner self, the individual can overcome the superficial level of life, which is dominated by the goals of solving concrete problems in the process of social interaction. Through self-reflection, the individual sees the discontinuities of various experiences the self goes through and thus makes an effort to use all her energy to figure out her own way to make connections in the discontinuities. If the individual can go deeper than the conscious level of self which Dewey focuses on, the individual gains self-enlightenment and the individual is free from the changing contexts. The meaning
112 of life can be revealed in the individual‘s efforts to respond to the need from the inner self. Indeed, there is no clear line between —inner self“ and —social self.“ The existence of inner self is not a matter of fact but a need evolving from social interaction and reflection. This conception of inner self suggests an idea which can potentially complement Dewey‘s idea of the social self. They are not contradictory to each other. The idea of inner self emphasizes that the individual does not passively react to the environment but can stand above the changing environment and recover the solidarity of the self in all the discontinuities life itself provides. The individual can live a life not just motivated by clear goals to solve concrete problems but also can live a life to explore the depth of all kinds of possibilities life itself provides. The meaning of life is not created from something outside of self but from inside. Here, Liang agrees with Dewey on the conscious level of self but emphasizes the inner self which is deeper and more stable than consciousness and intelligence. Even though both Liang and Dewey agree that the key idea of democratic society is free development of individuality in a fully socialized experience, Liang‘s idea provides richer explanations for the development of individuality because Liang pays more attention to the deeper level of self which may be beyond the communicable experience Dewey emphasizes. Dewey‘s theory of intelligence highlights communicable experience and social interaction for the development of individuality. But as Dewey admitted in his later work, he might have paid more attention to the individual self who has other aspects of life experience which may not be communicable in some contexts. Thus, Liang‘s idea of —inner self“ complements Dewey‘s conception of intelligence. Liang‘s idea of inner self illuminated my reading of Dewey when I felt the insufficiency of Dewey‘s theory on individuality. However, Liang is not clear in his work how the individual can reach self-enlightenment and recover solidarity at a deeper level of the inner self. He only vaguely mentions that inner self is about the true self the individual can identify from the changing environment she is in, and it is distinguished from the self of others. On the other hand, the inner self also sees the
113 connection the individual potentially shares with other people and thus transforms the self by opening the self to others and including others into the self. The meaning of life is not from seeking maximum good for the small self, but it is from the realization of a big self available in the individual‘s life: an inner self the individual has to connect with the separated pieces of the world. Even though Liang is not clear about this idea, his faith in a deeper level of self (inner self) pushes me to seek some further ideas to explain the concept. Before we go further, let‘s review Liang‘s conception of —self-enlightenment,“ a situation where the individual gains connection with the world through struggles and pains, a process of self-cultivation in Confucianist terms.
Liang‘s conception of —self-enlightenment“ Different from Dewey‘s emphasis on interaction between the individual and her environment, Liang‘s philosophy starts from life itself. A basic assumption of his philosophy is that we gain power of our life not from outside of the body but from inside. If we spend our energy to find the meaning of life from outside our life, we will never find it. Instead, we may lose the sense of life itself in society because it may be covered by our habits which may lead us into routine and thus block the change life itself needs. Along with Dewey, Liang agrees that life is changing. There is no unchangeable individuality because we always live in the changing environment and our life itself is changing as well. However, if we only live by habits and conventions, they may prevent change and thus block the development of life. Liang argues that the energy we gain to cope with change is not from outside but from inside of our life, an aspect Dewey did not emphasize much. It is an impelling force stirring the feeling and emotion of the individual to respond. —Self-enlightenment“ (zijue) is the word Liang used to describe this energy, the feeling from heart. In many of his works, Liang explains this conception in different ways. But the essential meaning is to understand the need of life, which is from the individual‘s reflection based on her life experience: insufficiency, suffering, conflict and the uncertainty life itself provides. Liang admits that the individual has to live in society, in social relations. But he emphasizes that if we need to lead our own life, we cannot
114 just live in response to change from outside. Instead, we have to follow the needs of our heart. What does it mean to —follow the needs of our heart?“ Liang described this life attitude in a criticism of the popular attitude advocated by May Fourth liberal intellectuals, such as Hu Shi. In a public address, Liang quoted Hu Shi‘s statement: —My religious principle is: my small self needs to be responsible to the past as well as the future of the everlasting immortal big self. I need to keep thinking how to make full use of my current small self so I will not betray the past and future of the everlasting immortal big self.“180 In this statement by Hu Shi, the —everlasting immortal big self“ means society, a combination of small selves, individuals. This attitude was popular in the May Fourth Era when the youth were called to be educated to save the country from domestic and international crises. Different from the mainstream voice, Liang argued that this life attitude of committing the self to society was misleading for the individual, especially the youth, even though it sounds lofty and meaningful. Liang suggests that this attitude is irrelevant to the solution of real problems which many youth face in life in this radically changing society: vanity, uncertainty of the future, purposelessness, or loss of significance in living. In this situation of rapid social change, the attitude of committing the self to society is irrelevant to the individual‘s real need. It is an artificial goal created from outside rather than a goal evolving from the self, from the impelling need of heart. Different from Hu Shi, Liang claimed: —The meaning and value of life cannot be found. If you find one, it must be a fake one. ”Where is the meaning and value of life‘ is not a valid question because life itself has no meaning or value… A real and whole life does not need meaning or value… Leave behind your attitude of ”looking for.‘ … The so-called responsibility is only to yourself, not to
180 Liang Shuming, The Complete Work of Liang Shuming. Volume 4, p. 762. Translated from Chinese by the author. Shandong: Shangdong People‘s Press, 1991. All quotes in this dissertation from Chinese books are translated by the author.
115 anybody else or to the ”everlasting immortal big self.‘ My responsibility is only to the self, here and now.“181 However, Liang does not advocate attitudes of extreme individualism and nihilism. Instead, he emphasizes exploring the possibility of facing the real need from the heart rather than surrendering the self to any external and artificial goals before the individual has gained a clear sense of self-identity. His words —don‘t look for“ do not mean passively doing nothing and leaving the self to whatever she is. He continues: —Everybody contains some energy from his body. Only when the energy can be released through some activities, his life can be vivid and happy, as well as appropriate. In my opinion, everybody should follow their unique talent and then release the energy inside of his body… In all, find a way to make full use of his energy. This is happiness of life; this is meaning of life. Life, then, can be interesting.“182 In Liang‘s view, only when we release the energy from the body, can we have —self-enlightenment“ to voluntarily do what we need to do, no matter how difficult it is. How, then, can we release the everyone‘s energy to realize —self-enlightenment?“ Liang starts this question with his basic understanding of human beings: We, as humans who are different from animals, can release our energy from the body to develop the mind on one hand and to change society on the other hand.183 Because of this characteristic, it is possible that the individual can lead a free life without being controlled by his environment or passively following pre-existing rules. Liang said: —We renew ourselves when we have some new ideas; we make some progress when we find some new interests. We reach life achievements through these new ideas and new interests.“184 Self-enlightenment (zijue) is embedded in these achievements. It is the foundation of the mind. It is not any mythical element but is made of sincerity (cheng) and solidarity (gang).
181 Liang Shuming, ibid., pp. 763-764. 182 Liang Shuming, ibid., p 766. 183 Liang Shuming, Mind and Life (Renxin yu Rensheng), Shanghai: Shanghai People‘s Press, 2005, p. 9. 184 Liang, ibid., p. 31.
116 Sincerity is your inner decision, an attitude to fully devote yourself to engaging in things or with others. You may have various —disabilities“ or lack of talents or insufficiency to deal with the problems in an efficient way or not participate in high form of art, but if you have this inner decision to be sincere and loyal to what you are doing, you can overcome the already-existing forms of expression and create a form of your own. Thus, you can lead an aesthetic life through your sincere effort to engage. In Confucianism, solidarity (gang) is an important character for self-cultivation. It implies the willingness of suffering difficulties and struggles when you decide to be fully engaged in doing something. Solidarity is the inner strength the individual builds through difficulties and struggles. Like —sincerity,“ it is also an inner decision the individual needs to make as well. It is a decision about not falling into habits or existing conventions, but of focusing on the present and being open to any new possibilities to create a new self and to get out of the bonds set up by the environment. Different from Dewey‘s idea of consciousness, Liang suggests that self-enlightenment cannot only be developed from external interaction and communication but it is more of the fruit of mental reflection on the true need of the self. Even though self-enlightenment and consciousness are difficult to separate from each other and they have to connect to each other all the time, Liang emphasizes that self-enlightenment is more crucial to leading a life. For Liang, consciousness starts from the reaction of the body when the individual faces problems in the interaction with the environment. Consciousness is a very important aspect of human experience. However, relying too much on the habitual routine reaction easily separates the self from others. When the self is mainly developed from reaction to the routine, it is difficult for the individual to move beyond the boundary between the self and others. If we are satisfied with consciousness from the reaction of habitual routines, the energy in our life cannot be fully released, because we ignore the fact that we human beings do not fully rely on the external environment but can reach freedom through inner effort to overcome the boundary of the body and mind and follow the rhythm of heart. This is what Liang called sincerity and solidarity of human mind-heart.
117 Self-enlightenment is the status of this harmony that the individual has with the surroundings when she becomes part of objects and objects become part of her. In other words, self-enlightenment is not necessarily about solving external problems in the external world. It starts from concrete situations but moves beyond for a more stable and deeper mind-heart than consciousness or intelligence in Dewey‘s word. To release this energy and reveal self-enlightenment, Liang suggests that we need to be aware of habits and conventions we live with in daily life. In Liang‘s view, if we only follow our habits, then we are trapped in routine so self-enlightenment cannot be achieved.185 Liang suggests that we do not need to seek the meaning of life, but we do need to struggle to get out of the trap of our routine life and follow the rhythm of the heart. Only when we can release ourselves from routines can we build our inner strength to cope with varied and radically changing environments. Then, life becomes vibrant and meaningful. In his last book, Mind and Life, Liang said, —self-enlightenment is not for coping with external problems. It is only for the inner self. It is very slight and not easy to realize. However, the individual‘s activities and relations are all from here.“186 In other words, self-enlightenment is developed in personal experience through living in society. However, it gains its independence when the individual reaches sincerity and solidarity with the self. It directs the individual to act in the environment, but it does not come from solving external problems. It has only a slight difference from consciousness: consciousness is to cope with the environment, but self-enlightenment is the foundation of consciousness. It is reflection or enlightenment in the present, neither for the past nor for the future. The true self only exists in the present, here and now. When new elements appear, they immediately become the old. Therefore, self-enlightenment requires a never-ending refreshment of the heart. In this continuous renewal, it is possible to realize a universal self in which the individual can connect with the Universe and the individual can move beyond the separateness of the body.
185 Liang, ibid. 186 Liang, ibid., p. 61.
118 There is no contradiction between Dewey and Liang‘s philosophies. The major difference Liang suggests is the conception of —self-enlightenment“ as an important element in heart-mind, while Dewey ends with intelligence. Liang argues that —self-enlightenment“ is crucial for building the inner strength of the individual, especially in a radically changing social environment in which it is difficult for the individual to have a harmonious relationship with the environment. If a constructive relationship is not possible, badness will arise. In Liang‘s view, it is moral to release the energy every individual has from inside her mind, a view very similar as Dewey‘s. If we are trapped in the routine of daily life, we are leading a bad life and become bad persons. Goodness is consciously and unconsciously revealed through responding to the needs of the heart.187 This conscious and unconscious action is self-enlightenment. As discussed above, self-enlightenment is beyond conscious action because consciousness alone cannot close the gap between body and mind/heart. In this view of morality, Liang rejects the disciplines or rules set by society to regulate people‘s behavior to be good citizens. Instead, morality should come from inside of every unique individual being. Passively following the desire of the body or disciplines set up by others or society is contradictory to his conception of good persons. In the practice of education, we cannot just receive education, but we need to experience intrinsic struggle and have a willingness to suffer from the conflict of body and heart, self and others, to find a harmonious unification. Nevertheless, it is a never-ending process. Once you stop making effort, you will find that you are separated by your habits and conventions. It is nature that there is a cleavage between body and mind/heart, and between the self and others. It is also nature that we, as human beings, need to close the gaps and try to reach connection and unification. That is the truth of life Liang finds in his philosophy.
Inner self as the agent of self-transformation
187 Liang, ibid., p. 188.
119 After exploring Liang‘s thought, we can understand that —inner self,“ in Liang‘s conception of —self-enlightenment,“ does not mean an isolated and separated mind/heart that has its independent function in man‘s existence. Instead, it emphasizes the importance of self-reflection, not excluding communication and interaction, to reach the understanding of self and close the gap between body and mind/heart, and the gap between the self and others. For Liang, it is the deeper —inner self“ which leads our life. If we limit the understanding of the self at the level of interaction with others, we cannot reach our true self. —Self-enlightenment“ is to enlighten this inner self and understand its need. Only then can learning be possible and can we realize freedom from the restrictions of society. He once said in an interview in his later life: —An understanding by saying it or thinking about it belongs to consciousness. It is only when your life is changed, when your life has some fundamental change; then you can say you understand it.“188 It is in this deeper —inner self“ that human beings naturally connect with each other. We create principles, rules, aims or means to reach this connection, to solve our own problems and extend the boundaries of our understanding with others in this problem solving. Even though Dewey did not emphasize the conception of —inner self“ in his philosophy but emphasized social interaction and communication as an important aspect for developing intelligence, he and Liang had a very similar destination: Dewey‘s proposal for a democratic community and Liang‘s proposal for an aesthetic associated living. Following this inner self, we can understand Liang‘s view of the selfless self and the associated and aesthetic life he proposes in modern societies. In the following section, I will discuss their contribution to closing the gap between self and others and reaching connection in a fragmented and rapidly changing social environment.
188 Guy S. Alitto, Has Man a Future? An Interview with Liang Shuming in His Late Years. (Zhege Shijie Hui Hao Ma? Liang Shuming Wannian Koushu), Shanghai: Dongfang Press Center, 2006, p. 31.
120 IV. From Self transformation to Social Transformation in Dewey and Liang’s Philosophies Both Dewey and Liang developed their conception of individuality into a broad and enriched self which connected with the living environment in their philosophies. The discussion of their view of a broader self and associated living (democratic community) is not to say that we can just follow their ideas. Rather, their ideas are only possibilities that emerge through their thinking and their life discourse. We may find their ideas inspiring, but we all need to find a way to connectœa potentially whole selfœin this divided society through our own struggle and effort.
Dewey‘s idea of social self: democratic community for an aesthetic way of living In his aesthetic theory, Dewey explored the possibility of realizing a social self without losing the uniqueness of the individual in a democratic society.189 It is when the individual arouses her energy to fully and inclusively engage with the objects she participates in that she undergoes the experience which enriches and expands her life, and gains an aesthetic experience. Dewey agrees that a conflict between the individual and group is natural in society.190 On one hand, the group tries to organize its members into common interests; on the other hand, people in the group try to distinguish themselves from others. It is exactly this tension between the individual and group that makes equilibrium necessary, and Dewey provides a view of the possibility: fully develop the individual‘s potentiality as the foundation of a democratic society, a possibility that the individual can understand the meaning of social life and contribute her energy to society. In the process, the individual can convert the energy from inside into human resources and into social values shared by members of society. For Dewey, this is art. Art, in Dewey‘s view, is the most common and public medium of communication. It has the power to connect gaps which divide different individual beings.191
189 John Dewey, Art as Experience, New York: Minton, Balch & company, 1934. 190 John Dewey, Ethics, p. 69. 191 John Dewey, Art as Experience, New York: Perigee, 1934/2005, p. 254.
121 First, Dewey distinguishes the art product from the work of art. The former is like a painting, music, a statue, or architecture which is in physical existence; the latter includes the former but has a broader meaning. It includes any experience and consequences of experience that arouse energies from the interaction between the individual and her objects and it —develops cumulatively and surely (but not too steadily) toward a fulfilling of impulsion and tension.“192 It is in this sense that Dewey called art an experience. It is art as experience that can break any barrier of human communication and have the power to bring individualized experience into mutual connection through common interests. Most of the time, most of us only have ordinary experience, different from the aesthetic experience Dewey described. We take life for granted and feel that life consists of daily routine. We live in loose ends, and we surrender ourselves to social conventions and external arrangements. We are pushed back and forth by social change. Dewey has a paragraph to describe this —ordinary experience:“ —Ordinary experience is often infected with apathy, lassitude and stereotype. We get neither the impact of quality through sense nor the meaning of things through thought. The ”world‘ is too much with us as burden or distraction. We are not sufficiently alive to feel the tang of sense nor yet to be moved by thought. We are oppressed by our surroundings or are callous to them.“193 In this ordinary experience, no matter who we are and what achievement or social status we have gained, we are miserably trapped in the routine of life. Although we are physically alive, we are aesthetically dead or lethargic. Here, aesthetic experience includes intellectual and emotional as well as psychological characteristics. Different from people in ordinary experience, a wide-awake personœno matter what possession she has or how much intellectual training she gainsœfaces uncertainties regarding the opportunities life provides. The individual is always conscious of alternatives and is concerned with opening the ready-made self to embrace the newly growing self. She
192 John Dewey, ibid., p. 168. 193 John Dewey, Art as Experience, 1935, p. 260.
122 always welcomes the new situation and works on growing, enlarging and liberating the self to meet new demands, and readapts and remakes the self in the process. In this situation, Dewey argues that the individual is conducting an aesthetic as well as a moral life.194 In fact, Dewey claimed that —art is more moral than morality.“195 As human beings, Dewey suggests, we can break through fossilized life routines and find the interest we have in engaging with objects. We all have natural talents to find the interests for which we have intellectual as well as emotional passion. We may have different talents and different ways of engaging with interests, but this difference is where our unique individualities start to blossom. What we need to do is to arouse the energy from inside and direct it outward, to awaken the passion embedded in our mind so we can become conscious of the inclusive and enduring situation we are in when we engage in the objects we are interested in. When we have passion for some object, the object also receives energy from us. Then, it becomes something not just external to our life; it is inside of it. It includes the self in it. Also, the self is expanded when it includes the objects into the self.196 The connection between the self and the object, whether it is a thing or person, is not mechanical but organic and develops in a more sensitive and enriched manner in this interaction. There is an aesthetic experience in this process. However, Dewey is not an idealist who assumes that the aesthetic experience will automatically lead to a moral life if the individual is willing to do so. Though we human beings have the natural ability to be engaged with objects, it is also human nature that we are bounded by various habits, especially the trend to take the easy route and follow convention and escape into a familiar world. We can also easily get lost in chaotic impulses which distract our attention and consume our energy. At this moment, we can find that we are in the situation of battle with these distracted impulses, and we need to convert them from obstacles or neutral conditions into the favoring agencies which direct us to a clear way so we can consciously know how to
194 John Dewey, Ethics, p. 307. 195 John Dewey, Art as Experience, in The Later Works, vol. 10, 350. 196 John Dewey, Ethics, p. 291.
123 use the energy without wasting it in the negative forms of indifference, lethargy, or vanity. In Dewey‘s words, experience is doing and undergoing. By acting to achieve a purpose, we change our surroundings in some way. It is through the interaction between doing and undergoing that we ultimately are able to direct our action and turn those distracted impulses into ordered energy to fulfill purposes. This allows us to convert meaningless action into meaningful agencies to satisfy the needs or solve the problems created in life itself. At the level of action, we are directed by the evolving purposes to engage in objects and turn the external medium into a part of our energy inside. At the level of undergoing, we need to battle with the impulses or obstacles which are hostile to changes; on the other hand, we need to face the uncertainty life itself provides and open ourselves to the unknown conflicts which change brings. In this full engagement of both aspects of doing and undergoing, the individual gradually gains a better understanding of the relationship between the self and the object she is engaged with. This better understanding helps to develop a native sensitivity to the potential connections the self may have with the environment, including the objects the individual is engaged with. In Dewey‘s view, maturity and original mastery can be developed through this wide and enduring contact. Masters do not follow either models or rules but can subdue both to serve the enlargement of personal experience.197 Indeed, originality and creativity are two key elements in aesthetic experience. However, it is still not clear how we try to continue achieving our goals in the conflicts and chaos of this process. In Art as Experience, Dewey discussed the conception of —impersonal emotion“ and the sense of —detachment“ in artistic production or appreciation. In my understanding, it is the sense of wholeness the individual gains when she is fully engaged in the objects. In other words, it is the joy which the enlargement of experience and the increasing interest and emotion bring that helps soothe the pain of struggle. The meaning of suffering is enriched and the
197 Dewey, Art as Experience, 1934, p. 301.
124 individual gains a broader vision in the engagement so a possible connection with others arises. Thus, a more inclusive sense of purposefulness is also evolving. It is the process of creating meaningœcreating the sense of selfœfrom the meaningless or chaotic world. In Dewey‘s explanation of —impersonal emotion,“ he said: —Energies that constitute the objects and events of the world and hence determine our experience are the ”universal.‘ ”Reconciliation‘ is the attaining, in immediate unargumentative form, of periods of harmonious cooperation of man and the world in experiences that are complete. The resultant emotion is —impersonal“ because it is attached not to personal fortune but to the object to the construction of which the self has surrendered itself in devotion.“198 When we devote the self to the things we are engaged in, the individual‘s concern is transformed into concern with these things. We surrender our particular desires to this engaging relationship. Dewey used the word —detachment“ to describe this situation. It does not mean severance of the self from the object or holding it aloof but fullness of participation. Dewey argued that —attachment“ still implied the separateness of the self and the aesthetic object. But —detachment“ happens when participation is so intense and thoroughgoing that the particular desire from the body of the self will disappear and only the work of art exists.199 Then, it is possible to transform the individual from the exclusive and isolated self into the more inclusive self which includes the objects within it. Dewey further explains that this sense of wholeness is the intense aesthetic experience which also reveals the feeling of exquisite intelligibility as well as religious feeling. Through this sense of wholeness, we enter into the deeper reality of a world which is beyond the ordinary experience and through which it is possible that we alter our characters in order to have a more inclusive, flexible, and sensitive way to interact with the environment. Breaking through the curtains of ordinary and burdened experience, we release our energy and
198 Dewey, Art as Experience, 2005, p. 193. 199 John Dewey, Art as Experience, 1934, p. 258.
125 we can be fully alive. In Dewey‘s words, —we are carried beyond ourselves to find ourselves.“200 The self we carry with us is the self which has already been made, and it is the self which needs to be transformed if we are willing to live a full and enriched life. The new self we create by transforming the existing self is the self in the process of enlarging and enriching experience, the self waiting to embrace the whole universe, and the self trying to gain energy and power for connection. This self is more inclusive than the one which exists. It is a social self Dewey proposes as an ideal, a social and inclusive self as the foundation of a democratic community. In Dewey‘s view, community has a richer meaning than physically associated living. It is the communal association by thorough but voluntary communication among members of society. A genuine community requires the members‘ ability to connect with their environment, things and people which are beyond the already-made self. It is Dewey‘s strong belief that a democratic society cannot be guaranteed by the democratic institutions but by the individuals who are democratic in thought and action, who have their liberty to fully participate in communal life and fully develop their potentiality as the final warrant for the existence and endurance of democratic institutions.201 A full development of democratic community is also an aesthetic way of life for the individual person in the community because it is also Dewey‘s belief that art (the esthetic experience as the work of art) is the most universal and freest form of communication. Art gets material from the common qualities of public world and it has the creative power to release imagination and turn the common qualities of the material into an intrinsic quality of individuality. Its unique and intrinsic quality then also has the potentiality of communicating with the public world where it originated. It is through this artistic transformation that the individual gains the possibility of finding the self in shared experience, rather than in isolation. Community, different from institution, is an inner organization with an aesthetic order
200 John Dewey, Art as Experience, 1934/2005, p. 202. 201 John Dewey, —I Believe,“ in Later Works, p 92.
126 realized through experience.202 It is the sense of wholeness (union) in aesthetic experience composing the most crucial element in community.
Liang: a selfless self and ethical/aesthetical way of social living In the discussion above on Liang‘s conceptions of inner self and self-enlightenment, we learned that self-enlightenment is not a mythical or momentary experience. Instead, it is a revelation of heart. The inner self is deeper and more inclusive than the self which is oriented by habits or conventions or calculation of loss and gain. This inner self is always open to change because it is the intrinsic requirement from life itself. The inner self helps us reveal the creative energy of life which we all have. We can see the commonalities we as living beings all share: happiness and sufferings. This understanding moves beyond the individual life and expands to any format of life. When the individual moves beyond this to a unique feeling of one‘s own, she can get out of her personal sufferings and reach freedom as an individual being. Liang called this a —selfless self.“ This —selfless self“ is different from what May Fourth intellectuals advocated as the big self: society. Liang criticized Hu Shi in the address mentioned earlier. Liang considered the big self to be a misleading concept if we want to free the individual from the various bonds and enable the individual to gain happiness through the inevitable sufferings and struggles in life. Liang emphasized that a —selfless self“ is a natural revelation when the individual reaches self-enlightenment. It cannot be told or trained as a social goal because it has to be an inner decision the individual makes to open the heart and respond to the basic needs of her own life in a direct and solid way. If we can keep sincerity and solidarity in our heart, it is possible that we can reach connection with the heart of others and other formats of life. But it is a never-ending process, because habits or conventions will take the place of self-enlightenment if we stop making efforts to struggle with them and let the heart speak. If we keep trying, then we do not need to distinguish means from goals because self-enlightenment will
202 Dewey, Art as Experience, 1934, p. 84.
127 lead us to act with all energyœimpulsion, emotion and intelligenceœwe have. Goodness will find its way in our sincerity and solidarity. So we will have our moral life without even thinking about morality.203 In this —selfless self,“ Liang rejects both the approach of individual-centered individualism and group-centered collectivism to deal with the relationship between the individual and society. Instead, he proposes an approach called —ethically/aesthetically associated living“ (lunli benwei).204 It tries to transform the dualistic trend of individualism and collectivism. In this mode of living, people live independently as well as interdependently. Individuals enrich themselves by cooperation as well as caring about the life of others, a life extended from the inner self. The individual‘s character can be fully developed in this associated living. Liang once said: —Democracy is the enrichment of individuality and the full participation in social life.“205 This definition is very similar with Dewey‘s. The difference is that Dewey emphasizes communication to realize the enrichment of individuality while Liang emphasizes the release of energy (intelligence as well as human feeling) from inside (self-enlightenment), without rejecting Dewey‘s approach. In Liang‘s view, in a democratic society individuals can reach each other by understanding the feelings of others and can connect with different feelings by expanding the boundary of the self. I translated Liang‘s approach of lunxi benwei as —ethically/aesthetically associated living“ because it is Liang‘s belief that ethical and aesthetical ways of living are closely related to each other if we realize self-enlightenment and see connections among many dualistic categories: body and mind, self and others, things and person, poor and rich, margin and center, etc. In detail, if we find connection between ourselves and the selves of others, we will naturally do good things for others by considering the needs of our own. As Liang said earlier, we can lead a moral life without thinking about morality. This inclusive consideration of others as well as the self will help us to be sincere when we communicate with others or with the
203 Liang, Mind and Life, 2005. 204 Liang, ibid., p. 211. 205 Liang Shuming, Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies (Dongxi Wenhua jiqi Zhexue). Beijing: Commercial Press, 2000, p. 49.
128 environment we live in. We act with care for others when we wholeheartedly do it. In Liang‘s view, this is the true meaning of ritual (li), an aesthetic expression of our existence.206 Liang claims that ritual does not only take place in important events, like birth celebrations, wedding celebrations or national celebrations in modern society. An ideal for democratic society is that we can lead an aesthetic life when ritual is not only for important events but for daily life itself. If we can lead our life with sincerity, even very tiny things in daily life can be meaningful and enrich the individual‘s experience. Indeed, ritual is a natural way of expression when we open our heart to others and are fully engaged in the present life we lead. It is aesthetic because it is from the heart of the unique self and thus it is original. Also, it possesses the power of awakening the true feeling of self and others. The aesthetic expression of ritual for daily life is the natural need that comes from the heart to connect with others and even with the Universe. By connecting the divided situationsœthe conflicting needs of body and heart, the conflicting needs of self and others, etc.œthis ethical and aesthetic ritual temporarily solves the problems arising from life and puts the restless mind at peace. However, as I discussed above, it is a never-ending process. If it stops, it will soon fall into the trap of habits and conventions and lose its meaning of enlightenment. But the temporary solution will nevertheless release the energy of the individual little by little and thus the individuality can be enriched little by little.
Summary From the discussion of Dewey‘s social self or Liang‘s selfless self, we can see that there is no clear and divided line between the inner self and social self. Only when the individual tries to seek the answer for her unique question is she willing to open herself, to explore the answer, even though she does not know if she can find the answer. By doing so, she opens herself to uncertainties. When she enters into this uncertainty, she tries to find lively connections around her unique life path. This unfamiliar or strange land of uncertainty is —the other.“ When she enters into this
206 Liang, 2005, p. 208.
129 uncertainty, she is inviting —the other“ into her life and including the other in her life. This process of finding her answer makes her more inclusive by closing the gap between her and the other. In this process, the inner self and social self become a whole one mind of one‘s own. This uncertainty is different from Foucault‘s fluid change of the self. Foucault suggests the self is in a fluid and complex power relationship which is out of the individual‘s control. If there is a self, it is only a by-product of this fluid and of an uncertain power relationship. The uncertainty I address here is different from Foucault‘s. It is also different from the sarcastic term of uncertainty, that we will never know when we die. Rather, it is uncertainty that when the individual decides to look for her intrinsic needs of life: to feel her despair of life and want to get out of it. It is then that the individual enters into the uncertainty of not knowing whether she will find the answer or not. When the individual is willing to take the challenge of this uncertainty, she is challenging the existent self and seeking alternatives to enrich the existent self by including others in the self. Dewey and Liang‘s common understanding of —social self“ distinguishes their ideas from a dualistic view of the individual and society. Their ideas of social self or selfless self is neither to sacrifice the self to society nor to gain maximum benefit for the self from society. Instead, this social self naturally develops from a unique self who answers the call from inside of her heart and strives to open her mind to the unknown others. V. Conclusion As I addressed earlier, the discussion of Dewey and Liang‘s philosophies is not to be used as guides to find our —true self.“ The meaning of their philosophies is not to provide any definite answers. Instead, it is to encourage and inspire every individual person abandoning pre-existing guidelines or principles made by others and jump into the sea of uncertainty to create a path for the self. In this dissertation, Dewey and Liang‘s thoughts are the source of reflection and inspiration for the question I am concerned with: the problem of self-identity in a rapidly changing society which is highly influenced by the marketized social value. Traveling through their ideas toward the question I am asking in this dissertation is a lively connection with the intellectual
130 tradition I have: Deweyan pragmatism and Liang‘s Confucianism. This is the tradition embedded both in China‘s modern history as well as in my personal intellectual exploration. From the discussion above, we can see that there is not much difference between Dewey and Liang, especially in the later works of Dewey, which focused on the aesthetic aspect of experience. It seems that Dewey realizes the limitation of the problem-solving-oriented method of intelligence even though it is still an important part of experience and social life, and tries to embrace a more sophisticated meaning of mind. It is clear in his late work Art as Experience. Reading Liang Shuming‘s thoughts and his ideas on inner self and self-enlightenment provided me a lived-in perspective I can adopt to critically read Dewey in this inquiry of the relationship between the self and society. It is through Liang that I find the relatedness of Dewey in the contemporary context of Chinese society: an aesthetic and moral sense of the self is the foundation to construct unique but inclusive individuality. The method of intelligence and problem-solving are a way to respond to the environment outside. It is this deeper inner self that arouses the passion of the self to seek the need from insideœgoing through inner struggle and realizing self-enlightenment. Constructing this inner self is the process of developing individuality and leading an aesthetic life the individual owns. Both Dewey and Liang agree that this is a moral life without moral standards. Without introducing Liang in this dialogue, it could easily miss Dewey‘s sensibility on different layers of individual experience, an idea Dewey himself strived to develop and about which he received some critique. On the other hand, Dewey‘s emphasis on the social aspect of human experience adds richer meaning to Liang‘s idea of selfless self. Dewey and Liang‘s common understanding of —social self“ distinguishes their ideas from a dualistic view of self and society: either to sacrifice the self to society or gain maximum benefit for the self from society. Instead, a selfless self or a social self naturally comes up from a unique self who answers the call from inside of her heart and strives to open her mind to the unknown others.
131 In this chapter, I suggest that an inner self in Liang‘s thought, or an individual mind of one‘s own in Dewey‘s words, is formulated in the process of social interaction. It is not a pre-made core of self but it is evolving in the engagement with others. Education cannot be realized without the involvement of this evolution of inner self. I call this process of exploration —self-transformation.“ However, a socially made self does not imply that a person should sacrifice the self by completely merging into society. I argue that this inner self is the agent of self-transformation and lifelong learning in a rapidly changing social context. The development of individuality is a process in which this evolving inner self is created and identified. Liang‘s philosophy helps to explain this conception of inner self. It is an inner decision the individual continuously makes to face the challenges from outside. It is the inner struggle the individual experiences between what she needs and the demands from outside. In every concrete situation, the individual needs to think about different alternatives to solve the inner struggle if she wants to figure out what the real need is from the heart. In other words, the individual always faces the question of —who I want to be.“ I argue that only when we know —who we are“ and —who we want to be,“ can we create meaning in our own life and find the strength to conquer the difficulties and conflicts we face in social life. Only then can learning or education impact our life and develop potential strength to lead our own life. Success does not only mean tailoring individuality to the social discourse of —success“ without insight into —who I am.“ Education is not only a tool used to produce the successful person the market or society needs. Education is also a means to build inner strength and hope and thus enrich personality. Moreover, education is an important agency through which we can learn —who we are“ together. It is a cooperative effort to include others into one‘s self. Meanwhile, we do not need to reject the value of markets, but we do need to add other values and coordinate these values with market values through this cooperative project. It starts with some specific problems but needs to cross boundaries and find the solution from different perspectives.
132 In Dewey and Liang‘s philosophies, Dewey emphasizes the power of intelligence to solve the problem which arises from the individual‘s interaction with the environment. In the process of problem-solving, we need to learn how to use our senses, to think and to harmonize our emotion so we can create new methods of action and then expand our capacity, broaden our perspective and sharpen our sensibilities. Individuality, or the individual mind, is developed in this process of interaction and communication. Liang emphasizes the power of human feeling, the ability to face the most urgent need of life. Liang called the realization of this feeling —self-enlightenment.“ Admitting the importance of communication, Liang also emphasizes self-reflection as a way to realize —self-enlightenment.“ In my view, it is the inner struggle the individual has to deal with by herself. This is what Dewey may agree with but did not fully address, even in his sophisticated treatise of emotion and feeling in Art as Experience. Though Dewey and Liang have different foci on their philosophies of life, their —final aim“ is very much the same: to realize the harmonious relationship between the individual and her organic environment in a democratic society in which variously unique individualities are allowed to fully develop so the individuals can have their authentic and strong mind/heart to face the difficulties life itself provides, especially in a radically changing environment. That is also the reason why even though they have different foci in their ideas, both of them reach a view of selfhood which is beyond the solitude of the individual person. Both of them agree that learning requires the individual to transform the already-made self to a more inclusive and broader self through communicating and interacting with the world. In this dissertation, the question I ask is how to create meaning in life through education for the individual in a radically changing society. The discussion of Dewey and Liang helps me explore the argument that the willingness to challenge pre-existing selfhood and open it to a more inclusive transformation is the pre-condition of learning. In Maxine Greene‘s view, she doubts that individuals who
133 are cowed or depressed or afraid can learn.207 We have to be willing to take the risk to challenge the present self and thus be open to change. We have to leave the familiar and granted —home“ and enter into the wilderness to create a new home of our own. To some extent, everybody is born as a —cultural orphan“ and needs to create a home while growing up.208 Here, learning does not just mean transporting knowledge into the mind. If this were so, it would be what Dewey called —the mind of the individual,“ which may be adopted from others‘ minds. But what we need is an —individual mind,“ a mind of one‘s own. Therefore, learning does not only mean knowing something new, but also transforming the new knowledge into being part of the self so that the self is expanded and enriched. On the other hand, self-transformation does not mean random change of the self after which the individual will have many different or even contradictory personalities, nor does it mean that the individual will make random choices based on its different personas in different situations. Instead, self-transformation is to transform the habituated self which is trapped in the social conventions or external rules into a more conscious self which is always critical of the pre-made or fixed rules or habits. Thus, the self can be renewed and better understand the changing needs of the life the individual leads. Thus, the individual can keep a fresh interest in life itself without falling into the daily routine or any mechanical operations, which is so common in modern society. It is Liang‘s conception of —self-enlightenment“ that helps me to reach the point that the inner struggle of the individual is a key to fighting with the daily routine and the external definitions of life‘s meaning. Especially in a radically changing society, the life meaning defined from outside changes rapidly. If the individual follows this socially defined life meaning, it is very possible that the individual may either get lost or passively follow the fragmented change. In either situation, the individual does not lead an enriched life of her own. In Dewey and Liang‘s philosophy, this is
207 Maxine Greene, Landscapes of Learning, New York: Teachers College Press, 1978, p. 49. 208 Grace Feuerverger, —Multicultural Perspectives in Teacher Development,“ in Joann Phillion, Ming Fang He, F. Michael Connelly (ed.) arrative & Experience in Multicultural Education. London: SAGE Publications. 2005.
134 anti-humane; democratic society is impossible if the individual does not know who she really is and what she really wants. Based on my understanding of their philosophies, I argue that the inner struggle helps the individual to create a unique life meaning of one‘s own. It is in this process that genuine creativity and originality arise. This is an aesthetic experience every individual being may have, regardless of whether she has artistic talent/training or not. It is similar to what Dewey describes as —the work of art“ (different from —art as products“) or religious experience (different from religion as an institutional practice).209 It is also similar to rituals in daily life in Confucianism, what Liang called aesthetic living or moral life without moral dogmas.210 The full awareness of this inner struggle is the —wide-awakening“ to life, a favorite word Maxine Greene used in her essays on aesthetic-artistic education.211 The solving of the struggle little by little is a revolution for the individual life. Not only creativity, but also inner strength is developed in this process and thus provides a ground to create a life meaning of one‘s own without falling into the crisis of nothingness when the given meaning fails or suddenly changes. After reading Dewey‘s and Liang‘s works, I develop the idea of —inner struggle“ to explain the gap the individual faces between the two levels of self: the conscious and social self which copes with the changing environment and the inner self which is more stable in the changing context. It is thus an educational question of how to pedagogically develop the inner self and realize self-transformation for a broader social self. In the context of contemporary Chinese society, we need to avoid the trend of exclusive individualism on one hand and the absence of selfhood in collectivism on the other hand. Liang suggested that self-enlightenment and the reaching of inner self required the individual to overcome the barrier between the self and the world and thus see the commonality the self shares with others. Thus, the small self can be transformed into the larger self. But Liang is not clear what the
209 Dewey, Art as Experience, 1934/2005, p. 168. Dewey, A Common Faith, 1960. 210 Liang, Mind and Life, 2005. 211 Maxine Green, Landscapes of Learning, 1978.
135 commonality that the self shares with others is. While Dewey admits that he did not pay much attention to the development of what Liang called —inner self,“ Liang did not tell how to develop inner self in a way that avoids the traps of extreme individualism and extreme collectivism. Their ideas lay a foundation for my argument and also provide space to develop my idea of unique and inclusive individuality through inner struggle. I suggest that a sense of problem I share with Dewey and Liang is the situation of alienation or isolation which everybody may face. This realization of life connects the self with others by the deepest emotion of being existent in the present moment of life that every individual being shares. Therefore, everybody needs to go through —inner struggle“ to reconnect with the world in which she is separated from others. It is this temporary isolation that defines the boundary between self and other. On the other hand, it is an effort for reconnection and solidarity that enriches the self by including others into the self. It is the process in which the individual finds the true self: the conception of individuality this project works on. But many of us may not realize the shared alienation or separation we go through; therefore, we cannot figure out how to develop a unique but inclusive self. Meanwhile, inner struggle does not mean that the individual needs to desperately fight by herself in isolation. It emphasizes the situation the individual needs to face but not necessarily in isolation. Instead, it is an effort to connect the fragmented pieces of individual experience and social changes into wholeness. In other words, it is when you feel the sense of wholeness that inner struggle starts to gain meaning and supports the individual to get through it. As I discussed in Dewey‘s idea of the social self, this sense of wholeness not only means the connection of the present experience with the past but also the connection of the individual experience with a broader social ecology in which human beings share common feelings. This common feeling is different from the universal rationality which the Enlightenment intellectuals suggested, but it is closer to what Richard Rorty proposed as the —feeling of pain,“ which can be felt by all beings in concrete situations.212
212 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
136 In this process of inner struggle, though it always has the risk of failing if the individual gives up the effort to create a unique and inclusive self with a solid and sincere mind, it is possible that the individual can reach beyond the separated or defined self of social categories and reach an enriched life which connects to a broader context. In this sense, the meaning of community life is created and the individual finds a unique way of connecting with the world around her through her particular way of engaging in concrete life situations. In this chapter, the discussion of both philosophers helps me reach this point. In summary, my exploration starts with Dewey‘s conception of experience. His ideas of continuous interaction between the individual and the environment broaden the sense of self and help me to reflect on my personal experience in a radically changing Chinese society which I describe in Chapter I. The social context in which Dewey developed his philosophy was marked by an extreme individualism in a rapidly industrialized society, so he emphasized the importance of communication and expanding the boundary of the self. In a rapidly marketizing society such as China, exclusive individualism is also being quickly popularized. Dewey‘s vision is thus very useful in this context. On the other hand, China lacks a tradition of individualism, so the conception of the individual is always vague and easily merged into social development in the history of China, as discussed in Chapter II. This concern brought me to a re-examination of Confucianism and then directed me to Liang‘s philosophy. Following the Confucian tradition, he emphasized the importance of self-cultivation. In other words, the individual can lead a fully lived life, which can connect to the Universe without relying on any external authorities. The individual is the author of her own life. It is a Chinese conception of individualism we have in our own cultural tradition but is not well demonstrated in the contemporary time. Carrying this authorship for our own lives, we can hope to have an inclusive social life without barriers. By going back and forth between these two different traditions, I reach the point I briefly discussed here on the role of inner struggle for a unique and inclusive self. That is, inner struggle is crucial to responding to the call of the true self. The inner struggle begins at the moment that the individual realizes her unique quality
137 which may be different from what is expected; she has to deal with this difference by herself and in her own way to be faithful to the call/impulsion from inside. However, this temporarily isolated moment needs to end up with a sense of connection to a broader context the individual is engaged with. The individual thus expands the boundary of the self and realizes self-transformation by including a broader —other“ into the self. The moment of inner struggle is then relieved, but new ones will arise. Inner struggle can be an endless process in which the individual longs for a fully awakened life. In the next chapter, I will develop my argument on inner struggle in greater detail and address the question of how to connect this argument with the problem of contemporary education, which was raised in Chapter I. Particularly I will explore the potentiality of narrative as an aesthetic pedagogy in educational practice to support this argument.
138 CHAPTER V
DEVELOPI G I DIVIDUALITY I CHI ESE EDUCATIO :
A AESTHETIC A D ARRATIVE APPROACH
A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of culture. ---Lionel Trilling I. Introduction At the end of the last chapter, I proposed the idea of inner struggle in response to the tension between the individual and society in contemporary China: between an extreme and exclusive individualism on one hand and an anti-individual collectivism on the other hand. In the situation of contemporary Chinese society, the extremity of the conflict is heightened by a rapidly marketized society which encourages an exclusive individualism focused on satisfying the needs of the individual through fierce competition and a marketized mentality. The problem I identified is that the society does not prepare to nurture a form of individualism that promotes the idea of selfhood in a communal life. Dewey and Liang stood in the different philosophical traditions of pragmatism and Confucianism, respectively, and both dealt with the conflict between the individual and society from their own perspectives. Dewey tried to correct an extreme individualism which evolved during the rapid industrialization of American society at the turn of the twentieth century. Liang‘s task was to connect the Confucian tradition with a modernizing society while China was still isolated from and economically lagged behind the western industrialized societies. Dewey argued for the full development of individuality through participation and communication in social life as a crucial element for a democratic society. Liang suggested that the evolvement of inner self or self-enlightenment was a key to getting out of the trap of conventions and routines so the individual can make her own choice. Both of their views offer insights to this effort to figure out possible alternatives relevant to the problems of
139 contemporary Chinese education. At the end of Chapter IV, I argued that we needed to attend to the necessity of inner struggle in order to create meaning for our lives in this rapidly changing social setting. This inner struggle is the ground to create meaning in life and thus develop an inclusive and unique individuality. I call this an aesthetic experience, an idea I borrow from Dewey‘s in Art as Experience.213 In this chapter, I will first describe a new conception of individuality which I argue as an urgent need in contemporary Chinese education: a unique but inclusive individuality. How is it possible to develop a unique individuality while including others into the vision of self? Why is this conception of individuality helpful to solve the problem addressed at the beginning of this project? Finally, the key question I will address here is how we can develop this conception of individuality in the current Chinese social context of educational reform. Because I suggest that this uniqueness and inclusiveness of individuality is an aesthetic practice, I will first explain what the aesthetic approach means in this context and how this approach responds to the current challenges in Chinese social development, particularly in educational reform. I will use story-telling as a pedagogical example of this aesthetic approach in school settings and thus provide some practical suggestions for dealing with the problems identified in Chapter I.
II. A ew Conception of Individuality through Inner Struggle Dewey and Liang‘s philosophies have already suggested that it is possible to develop unique individuality while including others in the vision of the self. Moreover, they both suggest unique individuality needs to be created through the process of inclusion of a broader living context. We need to find the self by recognizing others both from the perspective of the self and from the perspective of others. It is the sense of connection with a broader world that defines the meaning of self. To reach this point, Dewey emphasizes the importance of social community while Liang emphasizes the critical realization of self-enlightenment to enable social
213 John Dewey, Art as Experience, New York: Minton, Balch & Company, 1934.
140 communication. Both of them agree that uniqueness of individuality has to be developed through interaction rather than isolation. This view is somewhat different from that of Neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty, who denied the Enlightenment assumption of a universal epistemology as a foundation for knowledge but also rejected the post-structuralist view of an agent-less self.214 He describes himself as an ironist in his argument that there are no universal conceptions such as —morality“ or —truth,“ but argues that we can create human solidarity, at least initially through recognizing the pains and other feelings we share with others in concrete situations. There is no common language or final vocabulary we can use to find solidarity but we have to work on our own vocabularies as well as recognizing the legitimacy of other different vocabularies. These final vocabularies we use to express our feelings are, in part, private because of the uniqueness of our selves. But public space can be created from the overlapping of these various private final vocabularies.215 In Rorty‘s view, there appears to be a clearly split line between the private and public arenas. Rorty argues that this split is important in order to keep liberal hope in a democratic society: He emphasizes the importance of a private dimension for the individual as a —foundation“ of a democratic community. To some extent, his argument rejects Foucault‘s conception of individuals as products rather than agents of power and thus provides a more promising hope for a broader community which is embedded in the uniqueness of the self. This split of private-public dimensions may be credible for a bourgeoisie liberal community with a strong tradition of individualism, but it can be problematic for a society which has huge economic and political gaps and inequalities. The emphasis on self-construction as a completely private endeavor may leave the social equality behind and then lead to cruelty, which Rorty realized as a common public problem.
214 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 215 Richard Rorty, 1999.
141 Inspired by Dewey and Liang‘s thought, I argue that there is no clear line between private and public, though I agree with Rorty that a private domain is important and crucial for creating self identity as well as a liberal/democratic community. It is not my intention here to get involved in a philosophical debate on private-public dualism and its implication for liberal democracy, even though it is an important issue. What I am concerned with is the development of individuality through education: How is it possible to develop a unique but inclusive individuality in radically changing social settings? I argue that inner struggle as a private effort is necessary, though this isolation has to be temporary. In other words, I partly agree with Rorty but reject his split between the private and the public. The isolated self immediately looks for connection to a broader context which brings otherness into the self and transforms otherness into a part of the self. It is a sense of wholeness that the individual gains when self-transformation is realized. I argue that this temporarily private inner struggle is the ground to make life meaningful and thus develop an inclusive and enriched individuality. This temporary isolation is not a deliberate exclusion of others. An open self is always inviting others and seeking possibilities of connection within a broader context. However, the pursuit of a unique self as an intrinsic need to release the energy of the individual may bring the individual into a wild landscape where connection with others may be temporarily unavailable. In this sense, the temporary isolation is a natural result if the individual is willing to face her authentic need and thus seeks alternatives which may be different from pre-existing conventions. Originality and creativity arise when the individual enters into the wilderness and has to create a road of her own for further traveling. It is this originality and creativity that provides the ground for the individual to create meaning of life in her way. The connection, or the sense of wholeness, is not a consequence of meaning-making. It happens in an on-going process and never stops in a perfect shape. This sense of connection is a feeling the individual shares with a broader context. When the individual becomes an inseparable part of the context, the self feels a sense
142 of wholeness, a sense of —detachment“ in Dewey‘s words.216 In other words, it is only when we are fully engaged in the project of pursuing an individual mind that we have the intrinsic need to open the self to a broader and unfamiliar space. The energy from inside is released to meet the challenge of this unfamiliar space and find the possible connections within it. This connection does not automatically happen and thus cannot be taken for granted. The individual is always at risk of losing connection if she stops seeking. There is no universal definition of the meaning or content of connection, but it happens in concrete situations in which the individual chooses to fully participate. It is self-enlightenment in Liang‘s words and aesthetic experience in Dewey‘s. This conception of individuality which evolves from inner struggle with a larger sense of connection develops from my reading of Dewey and Liang‘s philosophies. In Dewey‘s philosophy, he emphasizes the importance of continuous interaction between the individual and environment. The individual can expand the boundary of the self and thus individuality can be enriched in a more inclusive way. In Liang‘s philosophy, he focuses on reflection of the existing situation and then creatively transforms it through the energy of the individual which can be released to achieve self-enlightenment. Their overlapping concerns for human freedom and social democracy and their different emphases help me to clarify the importance of inner struggle to the development of a unique and inclusive individuality. How can this new conception of individuality solve the problem that there is little space in education and in larger society to create meaning of one‘s own in a society rapidly transforming from a highly collectivistic community into competitively and exclusively marketized one? In the following section I will address this question by proposing an aesthetic pedagogy which may be applicable in the contemporary Chinese school setting.
III. Telling Life Stories as an Aesthetic Pedagogy Life experience: where learning is necessary and teaching is possible
216 See the detailed discussion on —detachment“ in Chapter IV.
143 This whole project is an effort to problematize the status quoœindividuality which is trapped in a sense of isolation and purposelessnessœand eventually to learn how to foster a sense of meaning and hope in individual lives. Hope is not just optimistic. Hope is a life-attitude enabling self-realization and self-transformation. It is the ability to make change in the individual‘s life. It is an effort to create meaning in one‘s own life no matter what societal change confronts the individual. We need to problematize the taken-for-granted situation and begin —wide-awakening,“ in Maxine Greene‘s terms. This can happen only when the individual is willing to face the need from the heart and face the inner struggle life itself provides. Then, learning gains intrinsic meaning for the individual. In other words, it has to be my effort to gain insight by reflecting on my own experience in communication with others. However, the real situation in educational practice is that many students are trapped in the purposelessness of education and just follow the track which the education system has already designed for them. What students —learn“ is knowledge external to their life experience. Maxine Greene‘s description of the problem of American education also can apply to Chinese education: —The dominant watchwords (in education) remain ”effectiveness,‘ ”proficiency,‘ ”efficiency,‘ and an ill-defined, one-dimensional ”excellence.‘ … Whether the students are rich or poor, privileged or deprived, the orientation has been to accommodation, to fitting into existing social and economic structures, to what is given, to what is inescapably there.“217 There is a big difference between what we get and what we learn. Without knowing what we want and without involving the heart, learning is a mechanical exercise. In this project, I try to argue that originality and creativity is not an inborn talent but it is the product of inner struggle the individual is involved with in her life experience. If education cannot deal with this inner struggle that every individual is involved with, we are wasting the potential creativity of students. Therefore, it is a
217 Maxine Greene, The Dialect of Freedom, New York: Teachers College Press, 1988, p. 12.
144 crucial task of education to help students face their inner struggle and get through it to create a life of their own. Life experience is enriched in the process when the individual is open to broader possibilities and learns to create meaning from the fragmented pieces of life experience. Teaching can thus be effective when students feel learning is necessary for enriching their life. In other words, students need to acknowledge feelings from their life experience first, whether it is pain, joy, or embarrassment. Then students can reflect on these feelings and try to figure out the meaning of these feelings in their lives: whether the individual is willing to challenge herself in that particular moment when the individual acknowledges feelings which are distinguished from routine life; whether the individual is willing to question the situation and ponder alternative possibilities; whether the individual is willing to question the existent self and put the self into an uncertain situation. If the individual is willing to do so, she is creating what Maxine Greene called —a landscape of learning.“218 Learning becomes a need to continue her life and uncertainties of learning become virtue that the individual values.219 Teaching is then necessary and crucial to help students in learning. In a rapidly changing society like China, this conception of education can help to relieve the stress students are facing when they find what they get from school is irrelevant to what they experience in a broader society. In educational reform, an important task for educators is to build a connection between students‘ life experience and what they can learn in school settings. Education therefore cannot avoid the task of helping students build inner strength to deal with difficulties in life. A possible approach is to help students develop their interests, purposes, and method of learning through understanding their own life experience and that of others. A full understanding of the self and the development of an enriched individuality through the expansion of one‘s own vision and including the life of others is a critical
218 Maxine Greene, Landscape of Learning, New York: Teachers College Press, 1978. 219 A point that Mary Catherine Bateson brought up in her biographical works, such as Wiling to Learning: Passages of Personal Discovery, Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press, 2004.
145 foundation, a —final guarantee“ in Dewey‘s words, for a democratic society.220 In the context of China‘s rapid marketization in various aspects of social life, this conception of education which focuses on the development of individuality may provide some insight for developing an inclusive and plural culture. The alleviation of hatred or indifference might thus broaden people‘s minds and provide more possibilities for growth and an enriched life for all.
Art as life: an aesthetic approach —Art is not the possession of the few who are recognized writers, painters, musicians; it is the authentic expression of any and all individuality. Those who have the gift of creative expression in unusually large measure disclose the meaning of the individuality of others to those others. In participating in the work of art, they become artists in their activity. They learn to know and honor individuality in whatever form it appears. The fountains of creative activity are discovered and released. The free individuality which is the source of art is also the final source of creative development in time.“221 I consider Dewey‘s definition of —the work of art“ relevant to my use of the word —aesthetic.“ It is —the free individuality“ Dewey mentioned above that is the goal of education and life. Art does not belong to people who have special talents but belongs to people who are sincere in facing the intrinsic need of the individual to express the self. This is to say that if we agree that art is —the authentic expression of any and all individuality,“ then a full engagement with life itself is the work of art. In this paragraph, Dewey suggests that free individuality is the final source of creative activities. Based on Dewey‘s point, I further argue that inner struggle is the fountain and source of free individuality. It is the key to developing individual uniqueness and creatively responding to the tension between the unique individuality and the force of
220 Dewey, —My belief,“ in John Dewey: The Later Works, Vol. 14, edited by Jo Ann Boydston, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981-1990. 221 John Dewey, —Time and Individuality,“ in Later Works, Vol. 14: 1939-1941, p. 114.
146 social communication. It requires the individual to hear the voice from inside and respond to it, to realize the tension and try to gain a sense of wholeness by temporarily harmonizing the tension with the feeling of communion within a broader context. Dewey does not admit the existence of any —private“ space in life experience. We are always engaging with objects or events, even when we are alone.222 What Dewey emphasizes is the natural attachment of the individual with the environment so it is always possible to seek connection with these potential attachments. Here I use the word —private“ to emphasize the meaning of —undergoing.“ Dewey uses the term as something the individual experiences by herself to create a unique self, to have the autonomy and self-responsibility as well as critical thinking to cultivate an individual mind. It is definitely right that we as individual beings are interdependent social beings. But in this intertwined relationship, it is —I“ who defines the relationship and creates meanings from the relationships. —I,“ not anybody else, am the author. This is a responsibility every individual needs to take if she is willing to lead her own life. As Maxine Greene said, —aesthetic experiences, as I have suggested, involve us as existing beings in pursuit of meanings. They involve us as historical beings born into social reality. They must, therefore, be lived within the contexts of our own self-understanding, within the context of what we have constituted as our world.“223 The phrase —art as life“ means that art is not a product made by some craftsmen, such as poets, painters, or musicians. Instead, art is life itself if the individual is willing to lead her own life through various tensions. To continue life and to expand the boundary of life we need to overcome the conflicts and tensions life itself provides. If we keep the most sensitive awareness of these conflicts, and we keep the faith to overcome them, we are willing to endure the pains of these struggles and apply what we have to create something new to respond to this need from life itself. In this sense, we are leading an aesthetic life: we keep the sincerity and solidarity as aesthetic
222 Dewey, Art as Experience, New York: Perigee, 1934/2005, p. 43. 223 Maxine Greene, Landscape of Learning, p. 180.
147 experience, the two qualities Confucianist Liang Shuming found in the tradition of Confucianism.224 How do we know what the need is from life itself rather than what we are told or is externally imposed on us? In Dewey‘s words, how do we know the genuine purposes of our daily activity, including our pursuit of education, to formulate a unique individuality?225 It is from an awareness of what we lack, rather than what we have. To understand the individual as a human being in society we cannot take ourselves as possessors, as Paulo Freire suggests in Pedagogy of the Oppressed.226 It is the awareness of incapability in some particular situation that can provoke the individual to —repair lacks and take action to create themselves.“227 To take an aesthetic approach to life is to arouse the need and necessity to reflect the self, the curiosity about the unknown part of the self and the dissatisfaction with the already-made self. So it does not take individuality as an unchanged or uncontrollable product from society. Rather, the self is always open to new possibilities and to exploring new landscapes, and thus puts the self into an unfamiliar situation and takes it as an opportunity for further development and enrichment. By challenging what the individual has, the individual also puts the self in a periphery situation because she refuses to be privileged, to be placed in the center, or to follow the center-periphery social structure. By doing so, the individual also realizes the power of self-marginalization: she touches the vulnerability all human beings share and thus is willing to take the responsibility of creating alternatives in her life rather than following the defined status quo of possession and belonging. Indeed, it is a poetic but constructive pain the individual takes. In other words, she gains the power to release the energy from inside and shakes off the bond of the current social structure. Then life gains new meanings in the sense of time we discussed in the last
224 Liang Shuming, Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies (Dongxi Wenhua jiqi Zhexue). Beijing: Commercial Press, 2000. 225 John Dewey, Democracy and Education, New York: The Free Press, 1944. 226 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Continuum, 2007. 227 Maxine Greene, The Dialect of Freedom, p. 22.
148 chapter. The individual is not just the passive being entering into the sequence of time. The life we are discussing is not the life that passively passes through the sequence of time, which every individual being takes from birth to death without any exception or uncertainty. The life we are conducting through education, the life which hosts diverse individualities, is not granted by physical birth, nor does it cease with physical death. It exists in the —genuine time“ Dewey addressed earlier in Chapter IV. This life means that you are willing to face the predicaments encountered in life and seek opportunities to change. Through this problem-solving process, it is the individual self who is getting through and opening the self to unpredictable situations. It involves reconstruction of individuality, which may be painful, but which is necessary to figure out the unique but still incomplete self. Putting this idea in an aesthetic context, Dewey wrote: —demand for variety is the manifestation of the fact that being alive we seek to live, until we are cowed by fear or dulled by routine. The need of life itself pushes us out into the unknown. This is the abiding truth of romance.“228 To summarize, one aspect of aesthetic experience is the inner struggle we experience: the feeling of urgent need to respond to the call from inside without compromising with any external imposition. Meanwhile, satisfaction and joy can be achieved once the conflict between the unique need of the individual and the demand from social conventions is temporarily solved. Then a new order or rhythm can be established in the reconstruction of individuality but this new order is open to change in the uncertain future moments. The source of creativity arises when the individual needs to release the energy and satisfy the needs from this inner struggle. Happiness comes when the individual finds a way to apply the external materials and turn them into an expression of her inner struggle by creatively using the materials she can master. It is the time the individual awakens and reorganizes her energy. In this
228 Dewey, Art as Experience, 2005, p. 175.
149 moment, she is conducting an aesthetic life, and the creative activity gains an artistic quality. But how can we get through this inner struggle to enter into this —genuine time,“ create meaning in life, and enrich individuality which is embedded in life itself? As I suggested earlier, an aesthetic experience cannot be completed in inner struggle itself. To reach harmony and order in things, and to reconstruct individuality, we need to get a sense of wholeness to get through struggles. This sense is not a mythical feeling or intuition for achieving immediate enlightenment. Instead, it is a sense of connection with the unknown future, a feeling of willingness in the uncertain situation, and the confirmation of the self when it is still open to be challenged by alternatives. It is the clear awareness of the need of the self while understanding the boundary of the existent self. This sense of wholeness may not definitely be a concrete connection with objects, though it comes into concrete expression afterwards. It is something that supports the individual through the seemingly endless struggles. This sense of wholeness may not come up if the individual is not sincerely facing her own life but is just wandering through time. It arises in the moment when the individual is fully engaged with life and trying to figure out her uniqueness in fragmented pieces of experience she is in. Dewey even used the word —detachment“ to describe this full engagement. Dewey said, —Participation is so thoroughgoing that the work of art is detached or cut off from the kind of specialized desire that operates when we are moved to consume or appropriate a thing physically.“229 This detachment is what Liang addressed as a —selfless self“ when the gap between body and mind, and the gap between —I“ and the object disappears. It is not to give up the self but an effort to reach the potentiality of the self in the unknown situation by full participation and endless effort. Creativity arises when life pushes the individual into the unknown situation in this feeling of —detachment.“ A creative reconstruction of individuality
229 Dewey, Art as Experience, 2005, p. 258. Also, in Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life by J.M.Coetzee, the author makes an interesting distinction as he describes the boy‘s relationship with the farm: —I belong to the farm.“ He did not tell anybody because he feared that people would soon misunderstand it as —The farm belongs to me.“ This sense of belonging is to surrender the ownership of the self but also become fully devoted to the object with which the individual is engaged. (New York: Penguin books, p. 96)
150 also expands the boundary of the self and moves toward an inclusive and enriched self. In all, art as life suggests an approach to education that understands education as growth, as a way of bravely exploring the real interest of the individual self without being cowed by barriers which are hostile to growth. Growth, in Dewey‘s view, is the organization of energy in a creative way to awaken the potential power everyone has. This organization of energy arouses emotion and intelligence to creatively respond to difficulties. If education is to expand the vision of the bounded and already-made self, it will gain inclusive vision to enrich the self in a moral way. Thus, morality is not defined and regulated by society but figured out in the individual‘s engagement in aesthetic experience. Inner struggle is unavoidable as a product of the undergoing of experience. It is where uniqueness, independence and self-responsibility come up. It is from this inner struggle that we create a complete individuality. It is the reason that life is worth exploring in an unknown future. Going back to Dewey‘s quotation at the beginning of this section, it is to —learn and honor individuality in whatever form it appears.“230 If we try to live fully awakened, and we are willing to face the predicaments in life, we are leading an aesthetic life. How can we use this conception of aesthetic experience to cultivate interests, purposes and methods of learning in education? We‘ve already suggested that by identifying the lack and need, interests and purposes naturally come up in the activity of learning. It is part of the process of meaning making when the self is engaged with the uncertain situations in order to figure out the self. Teachers, as emotional and intellectual supporters for students in this process, also need to seek different possibilities to creatively use materials for this support. In the following section, I will use story-telling as a pedagogical example for developing an inclusive and enriched individuality in the school setting.
Learning from life stories: a definition
230 John Dewey, —Time and Individuality,“ In Later Works, vol. 14, p. 114.
151 If we agree with Dewey that life is education and admit that life itself flows in a narrative way, then narrative story-telling can be a natural way of teaching and learning as well.231 By saying —learning from life stories,“ I try to include two aspects: telling life stories and listening for life stories.232 Story-telling is about learning from our experience and others‘ experience to construct a vision of our own. It is not a new method in qualitative research and therapy.233 But its application in education has not been fully explored yet. In this section, I will argue that life stories can play a positive role in helping students, as well as teachers and people participating in learning, to develop the inclusive and enriched individuality which is discussed earlier. It is a method of —listening to and heeding the voices of experience across borders.“234 Unlike the conception deployed by scholars in social sciences, I not only conceive this method as a way of understanding cross-border societies and cultures, but I also argue that the narrative of life stories can cross the borders between different individual beings as well as the borders within the self. Learning from life stories is an effort to describe and respond to the complex desire to reach a better understanding of the self and others. It is a way of exploring the perplexity of personality and clarifying chaotic experience by expressing it in a meaningful and sensitive way so that the uniqueness of individuality will not get lost in the sequence of time. In this way, un-communicable feelings may be revealed through the metaphorical language of story-telling and the individual becomes closer to the authenticity of the self. Story-telling requires the sincerity of the individual to life experience itself, whether it brings pain, joy, or emptiness.
231 D. Jean Clandinin and F. Michael Connelly, Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative Research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2000. 232 The distinction between —listen to story“ and —listen for story“ see Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot and Jessica Hoffmann Davis, The Art and Science of Portraiture, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997. Listening for stories is more engaging and a process of re-creating stories to be part of the stories of one‘s own, p. 12. 233 For example, Janine Roberts, Tales and Transformations: Stories in Families and Family Therapy, New York: Norton, 1994; Jill Freedman and Gene Combs, arrative Therapy: The Social Construction of Preferred Realities, New York: Norton, 1996. 234 Christine Fox, —Stories within stories: dissolving the boundaries in narrative research and analysis,“ in Sheila Trahar (ed.) arrative Research on Learning: comparative and international perspectives. Oxford: Symposium Books, 2006, p. 48.
152 In telling or listening to life stories, we also gain authorship of our experience. If we receive the stories of others in our own experience, the individual re-creates the story when she is the author. In Confucianism, to be a good person (ren，仁) is to gain authorship of the self, as discussed in Chapter II. Learning to be an author means that the person can see rich meanings in her life and have the ability to find the coherent themes the individual wants to explore in her life. Her mind is not in chaos or blind or randomly playing but knows what she wants to mark in her life. She can see herself as the person she is and wants to be, no matter how she is categorized by external conditions. When life experiences are familiar and relevant to the present self, the individual can become the author in her own life. Meanwhile, because the self is not fixed, authority is always open to challenge as well. To be an author in one‘s own life story, one needs to reflect on the meaningful moments. These moments are meaningful because they bring satisfaction after reflection (maybe after going through painful struggle), and thus bring growth. The memories make the self into the enriched individuality which the individual desires. It also helps the individual to understand the self better and thus to confirm the strength/willingness/awareness the individual possesses. To be an author, it is my responsibility to create my life stories: my life is not interpreted or defined by external conditions, though it is influenced by them. —I“ is the narrator and major character in my life stories. Narrative, therefore, is an effort to explore multiple possibilities in life: to deconstruct the defined moments, to refuse the sole explanation of the event in particular moments and thus to be open to alternative possibilities. In Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Richard Rorty used Proust as an example to explain this idea of —authorship.“235 One extreme example may be providing an alternative description of one‘s life through an almost-non-interactive perspective, as in Proust‘s autobiographical novel In Search of Lost Time. On the other hand, this is a powerful example to demonstrate the possible function of narrative; re-interpreting reality with imagination creates new space for alternative
235 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.
153 possibilities by inviting different perspectives. It provides possibilities to challenge the established conventions as well as the defined and already-existent self. To some extent, narrative is a way to encourage imagination and bring different pieces of life experience together. Also, it is to bring the realized and the unrealized self together. The imagined piece is something unrealized or un-recognized but with some potential to be realized in some particular ways. It is an effort to connect the familiar and unfamiliar, the certain and uncertain things together. In Dewey‘s words, —There is always some measure of adventure in the meeting of mind and universe, and this adventure is, in its measure, imagination.“236 This adventure of bringing mind and universe together is a sense of wholeness which we can experience in narrative by telling and listening for stories. Narrative is not only a skill that we can teach and learn in the classroom or other educational settings. Instead, it is a natural way of expression when the individual faces her inner struggle and tries to find a way out. I am not saying that it is the only method of expression, but it is a method of expression which uses the most common symbols of expression and communication, both in oral and written symbols. This expression can be expanded in its expression and become communication. Narrative gains its own life when it is communicated. When narrative is an effort to explore the alternative possibilities of the defined self and reality and to release the potential energy for harmonizing internal tension, it is an aesthetic expression. It does not have to be beautifully expressed in the standards of high literature, but it gains an aesthetic quality if it breaks the unchanged view or feelings and thus brings new perceptions to the narrator as well as the reader. A full engaging effort of narrative will arouse the feeling of the teller and the listener to challenge the old conception of their selves. The individual is renewed and her vision about the self and the world is expanded in the new perceptions the narrative activity brings.
236 John Dewey, Art as Experience, 1934, p. 267.
154 Therefore, an aesthetic narrative is not only for the literate people who have a good education; it belongs to anybody who is willing to face the multiple possibilities and uncertainties and who is willing to create a sense of wholeness as an author of her life in uncertain situations. Narrative is not to tell a good story to impress anyone. In Rorty‘s word, there is no —final vocabulary“ we can take as authority for narrative.237 We may borrow some words from others‘ narrative, but there is no model we can imitate because everybody has a unique life and thus has unique life experience. There is pain and joy in telling life stories: the pain and joy of being true to the self. The pain is that one often has to deal with social conventions which are often hostile to one‘s personal feelings. Social conventions can be incompatible with the unique individuality, which requires breaking the common view and following the uniqueness of one‘s life experience. The joy is from the discovery of the self: the joy that you know who you are and what you want to be. The joy of self-determination helps you build inner strength to deal with the uncertainty life itself provides. You are willing to open yourself to be challenged without worrying about losing the self. Telling or listening to life stories cannot be taken as an isolated tool for developing individualities. It comes from an intrinsic need from which individualities are explored and expanded in the process of narrating. There is a natural and urgent need for story-telling if the individual feels the inner struggle and seeks to embrace the sense of wholeness so that she can temporarily gain equilibrium. The desire for expression indicates active thinking and feeling when the individual is interacting with the routine life. It is a sign of being fully alive, a sign of being wide-awake. The need for narration is the consequence of many different layers of life the individual discovers, and the consequence is that the individual formulates new perceptions in her mind. By going back and forth in life experience, the individual needs to use different perspectives to ponder on the same moment to enrich the meaning of the moment and thus find a coherent clue of the life. The richer the meaning the individual creates, the more possibilities are available to connect with others and
237 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.
155 embrace the sense of wholeness. A more inclusive perspective develops in this process. A connection to the broader context is natural in any situated event if the individual is willing to explore it. We can also consider narrative a way of exploration in life. You will naturally feel the sense of wholeness when you are willing to open yourself to explore new possibilities because your unique experience is often shared by others who share a common sense of humanity with you. The sense of wholeness has to be developed through concrete situations of interaction with others in which the individual‘s feelings evolved. It is not a taken-for-granted universal morality but the connection to the self that is gained through the potential connection with others. It is developed in concrete situations in which the story reveals the meaning of this wholeness by reflecting concrete situations. The concrete situations are fully revealed in narrative. By sustaining the inner struggle, the individual sees more tensions and conflicts as well as more alternatives in a particular moment, which may be taken as defined and unchanged. The feeling of being trapped by the defined situation and the hope to get out of it to realize other possibilities dramatizes the tension and makes reflection on the moment an inevitable action: story-telling. It is a voluntary challenge to the intelligence and emotional ability of the self. Creating narrative should be an inevitable action like this. It is not just an activity to learn vocabularies and plots which are not connected to the inner struggle of life experience. The goal of narrative is to seek self-identity and lead to liberation from conventions or defined rules. It is a way to open the self and achieve the self-transformation of an enriched individuality. It is an —I“ that makes a —we“ possible. Like Susan Sontag argued, we cannot take a —we“ for granted by giving up the opportunity of fully exploring the meaning of —I.“238 Narrative is an effort to explore the meaning of —I“ by understanding the realized and unrealized moments in the individual‘s life experience.
238 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003, p. 7.
156 In an effort of narration, the individual seeks to find a coherent way to describe life experience. In other words, the individual needs to connect the fragmented pieces of a moment in life by identifying some particular perspectives. But the particular perspectives need to be developed through the process of self-exploration rather than through external imposition. By connecting the past with the present, the individual finds richer meaning in life and thus the meaningfulness is a source of the hope to the future. The story has to be a story written by the —author,“ not anybody else, through struggling to find meaning in life which supports the author to be fully alive. As a reader, she also has to go through her own struggle to understand others‘ stories and transform the stories to her own. Therefore, story-telling or listening to stories is an effort to find a coherent theme for growth, to get out/move forward from the chaotic and fragmented moments and connect these moments by creating a coherent meaning. When a new meaning is created, the individual can successfully transform a situation of boredom or tedium into an enriched moment for growth. It is true that we are often trapped in the bored and tedious moment; we are trapped in —habits“ in Liang Shuming‘s words. Liang suggests that —self-enlightenment“ is crucial to self-liberation, to fight the inertia of the body. In David Carr‘s book, he describes life as —a constant effort, even a struggle, to maintain or restore narrative coherence in the face of an ever-threatening, impending chaos at all levels.“239 This constant effort is close to the conception of —inner struggle“ I try to describe here. In this experience of story-telling, there are also some silent moments which are not told or described in words or other forms of symbols. But these moments can be crucial in the individual‘s life. The narrative action demonstrates the told moments which are sharable. But it also brings the untold moments into mind. These moments play an important role in connecting the mind with the universe, in embracing the sense of wholeness. They help the story-teller to make the self aware of the potential possibility to transform these moments into sharable life stories. As Lawrence-Lightfoot said in her description of portraiture, —the more we hear life‘s
239 David Carr, Time, arrative, and History, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986, p. 91.
157 resonances, the more we recognize the silences. The more we reveal the life portraits, the more we appreciate the empty spaces on the canvas.“240 By telling and sharing stories, we recognize these silent moments and transform them into a coherent life with the meaning the individual develops in the process. However, a coherent life story is not given but an effort to be made by the individual as an author. It is an inevitable struggle we need to take. In Carr‘s words, —to experience, to act, to live in the most general sense, is to maintain and if necessary to restore the narrative coherence of time itself, to preserve it against this internal dissolution into its component parts.“241 If we fail to have coherent life stories about ourselves, life itself may cease because there is no meaningful point in it. The purpose of education, in a general sense, is to gain this coherence in life experience for an enriched meaning in life stories.
Learning from life stories: an aesthetic pedagogy Narrative includes telling and listening for stories about someone‘s experience. It is created by sharing experience and enriched in the interactive relations between the teller and the listener. It reflects the life attitude of the narrator as well as of the listener. They both agree to engage in the stories as part of their life: Let stories enter into life and let life enter into stories. The goal is not to learn how to tell a good story but to arouse the feeling and become open to reflection and communication. The point of telling/listening for stories is —engagement.“ It is about the possibility to be fully engaged in what the individual is doing and thus realize a truly sincere self. —I“ is engaged in the stories in which —I“ has various relationships with the self and with others. It is about how —I“ recognizes these mutual relationships and transforms the limitations of the relationship through narrative. When I am writing (telling) the story, I have to say something that I need to share with others. This —others“ is not pre-defined but open to the unknown and the un-defined ones who are expected to be
240 Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, I’ve Known Rivers: Lives of Loss and Liberation, Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Pub., 1994, p. 612. 241 David Carr, Time, arrative, and History, p. 96.
158 —included“ in the stories, who are invited to create the stories, and to re-define and re-create the relationship the author is engaged with. By writing and re-writing one‘s life stories œ here I consider listening to others‘ stories as a way to recreate one‘s own stories œ the individual creates opportunities for alternative interpretation of one‘s experience. Teaching about telling or listening to stories is not to teach about knowledge or skills related to telling stories; rather it is a guided experience of engagement, intended to release the possibilities of full engagement and to let students express their true feelings, their questions about life and their imagination about the unknown life. Indeed, stories are not just things attached to people but the —magic light“ which kindles the darkness of the individual mind. The darkness is the struggle the individual bears in daily life (awareness of vanity, boredom, contradiction, etc.). The moment of sharing stories is the moment that —I“ as an individual mind emerges in the story and others become part of my story. At this moment, writing (narrative) is not a burden but a thing the individual has to do to realize the potential self, the self which has already been felt in inner struggle, but has not been expressed. It is the impulsion for immediate connection to others and to the unrealized self. Meanwhile, the boundary of the self is expanded in this moment. The fact that everyone goes through this inner struggle means that teachers need to encourage students to explore the past and the present as they relate to students‘ life experiences and how their own lives are connected with others‘ in various ways. Teachers should try to encourage students to interpret some particular moments in the students‘ lives in different ways. Story-telling should not involve teachers telling students what is worth writing/telling in their lives. It is not about transferring some pre-existing knowledge or moral standard to students‘ life stories. The intention is to provide a means or a medium for exploration: a way to arouse interest and passion to explore the self and find coherent meaning in life. It should be an action voluntarily taken rather than imposed or demanded from anybody else. If story-telling is not voluntary, the inner struggle will not appear and this exploration will lead nowhere.
159 For teachers, the question is how to teach students using narrative as a powerful tool to release the energy and imagination, and to explore the experiences the child has in different environment. Bad teaching can restrict, not release, students‘ imagination. Whether encouraged or not, students will reflect on their experiences in their own ways. But it is teachers‘ responsibility to help students reflect with more inclusive and broader meanings, to arouse more energy and interest from inside their mind, to see more layers of their life, and more possibilities to question the defined and taken-for-granted things. In this process, the teacher is a role model to encourage students to enter into the wilderness of the landscape which is beyond what the teacher can provide. The role model is not a stereotyped hero that everybody needs to imitate. Rather, as Alice Walker writes, role models are important to artistsœanybodyœincluding teachers, who would like to give up the routine conventions imposed from outside and walk into a wild land to find a place that truly belongs to the self in its struggle to —make their [its] way in the world.“ In this way, the teacher can —enrich and enlarge one‘s view of existence“ and support a —fearlessness of growth, of search, of looking that enlarges the private and public world.“242 Teachers cannot simply and comfortably provide any knowledge they know to students. Instead, they need to be willing to challenge themselves by reflecting on their own life experience, by sharing their own life stories. Their presence to students needs to be able to arouse students‘ curiosity, confusion, questions, and passions about the students‘ own lives and thus make them willing to explore their lives. As Maxine Greene believed, —that the young are most likely to be stirred to learn when they are challenged by teachers who themselves are learning, who are breaking with what they have too easily taken for granted, who are creating their own moral lives.“243 In another book, Greene even claimed that teachers are strangers in the classroom if they refuse to submerge into the system and refuse to be defined by
242 Wendy Kohli, —A Situated Philosopher“, in William F. Pinar (ed.) The Passionate Mind of Maxine Greene: ‘I am … not yet’. East Sussex: Falmer Press, 1998, p 182. 243 Maxine Greene, Landscapes of Learning, p. 51.
160 others‘ views of what they are supposed to be. To be a teacher, an individual first needs to explore the full individuality she has, to develop the freedom —to see, to understand, and to signify,“ and to enter into the wilderness which is new and is forever made new by interpretation and reinterpretation.244 Therefore, instead of providing concrete knowledge, teachers need to learn how to provide —empty space“ for students to explore their own life, to find their own inner struggle and to find their own way to get out of the struggle and reach a temporary harmony, or a sense of wholeness. Indeed, this is not an easy task. It is not sufficient just to let students do whatever they want to do; rather students‘ interest in themselves should be aroused, and this interest should be seriously addressed by creatively responding to their unique questions in life. This empty space is an art piece created by teachers and students, as well as other members in the learning community. In this space, every member of the community can find their own sense of home, even just for a short while. The home is a metaphor rather than an inhabited place. It is a sense that the individual feels certain about the self by transforming the uncertainties into part of the self. Also, this —empty space“ has no defined boundary. It is a shared responsibility of teachers, students and other members of the community to shape the boundary as well as expand the boundary. Telling stories and listening for stories can be a way to create this empty space and expand the undefined boundary of this learning community. Through learning others‘ stories, the individual develops a way of reflecting on the experience of the self by connecting the self with others, by feeling the same feeling, and by having common concerns, which the individual may never share with others or which may never even be clearly recognized by the self. The reflection can be a natural response to the stories of others if the individual is willing to read, to learn something different, and to be curious about other different life experiences. Because story-telling invites interpretation and reinterpretation, it requires readers to play an active role in constructing meanings for themselves. As Dewey stated in Art
244 Maxine Green, Teachers as Strangers: Educational Philosophy for the Modern Age, Belmont, Cal.: Wadsworth Publishing Company, Inc., 1973, p 270.
161 as Experience, reception and judgment are extended steps of art production, an artistic expression.245
Summary This chapter starts with a critique of Richard Rorty‘s conception of private space for the preservation of unique individuality as well as for democratic construction. However, the conception of individuality in this project does not imply a private existence of individual being. Instead, the private being only temporarily exists in the inner struggle the individual needs to go through. Through inner struggle the individual needs to make an immediate connection to a broader context. It is crucial for the individual to create the ground for meaning-making in life experience. Inner struggle is the preparation for meaning-making because it needs to be creatively transformed into a sharable form in order for the individual to get a sense of wholeness. In this process, the already-made self is challenged and expanded and the unique and inclusive individuality can be temporarily reached for further transformation. This argument for inner struggle and the immediate connection to a sense of wholeness is developed from discussion of both Dewey and Liang‘s philosophies in Chapter IV. Specifically, Dewey‘s emphasis on interaction to expand the boundary of the self and Liang‘s emphasis on self-enlightenment help the argument here. A temporary disconnection or detachment cultivates the originality and uniqueness the individual has. Also, the effort to make a broader connection to help the individual get through the struggle expands the boundary of the individual by including others as part of the open self. From this argument, a further idea is proposed regarding story-telling as an aesthetic approach to education to develop a unique and inclusive individuality. In this context, an aesthetic approach is to arouse the need from life itself, to receive the call from inside and then to creatively and persistently respond to it. Story-telling is a
245 John Dewey, Art as Experience, 2005.
162 way to explore the authenticity of self. The recognition of unique individuality and the understanding of the boundaries of individuality provide opportunities for the individual to challenge the already-made self in the concrete situations in life stories. Narrative can be a natural way to express inner struggle. Because narrative is an effort to explore multiple possibilities in life and to release imagination for different alternatives in concrete situations, it is an aesthetic effort to realize the self and expand the boundary of individuality. Using story-telling in educational practice aims to invite students and teachers to engage in learning. Because story-telling is an effort to release imagination to go through the inner struggle and build inner strength, it needs full engagement in learning activities both by teachers and students. In other words, it requires both students and teachers to open the self to unknown challenges and to realize a more inclusive self-transformation. But both teachers and students should be voluntarily involved in learning activities, not by imposition. Particularly, it requires teachers to be fully aware of the task to engage the self into learning and guide students in this manner. In this engaging learning activity, both teachers and students are artists who are willing to challenge the ready-made conventions and creatively respond to the unknown situations. Teachers serve as role models and as the source of inspiration rather than authorities in this process. In this teaching and learning relationship, authorship is built from inside the individual mind rather than outside.
IV. Conclusion: A Proposal for Aesthetic Education in the Chinese Context A basic idea of Dewey‘s is that life is education. Through story-telling/listening, the individual actually enters into the time of her own. This authorial voice reduces the —timeless authority“ and resists a —temptation to be categorical.“246 It is not only a method to construct the —I“ but also a way of reflecting experience the individual has because life itself is unfolded in a narrative way in a particular time and space when
246 Quote of Mary Bateson‘s words in D. Jean Clandinin and F. Michael Connelly, arrative Inquiry:Experience and Story in Qualitative Research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2000, p. 9.
163 we encounter with others and find connection with others and with the past of ourselves. Thus, through story-telling and retelling we create new space and landscapes of learning where the authorial voice of —I“ emerges and becomes clear. Meanwhile, this authorial voice is open to be challenged and communicates to an unknown audience when life stories are released and enter into other time and space: the experience of others. This practice of story-telling and retelling is a process of learning about the self and about others, learning about the complexity of the changing world of which the individual is a unique part. The boundary of the self is expanded when the defined self is challenged in the unknown situations where —others“ are included. It enriches individuality and expresses the uniqueness of individuality. Thus, telling life stories can be a learning experience through which we develop unique but inclusive individualities, leading the aesthetical and social life both Dewey and Liang proposed.
Educational Implications for the Chinese Context In Chapters One and Two, the problem identified was that there is no strong tradition of individualism in Chinese history while the trend toward extreme individualism is re-enforced in a contemporary context in which marketization penetrates into every aspect of social life, including education. The exam-oriented education system promotes a competitive individuality which narrowly defines successful education: narrow opportunities for others through competition on exams that ignore other potentialities in the individual which are not reflected on exams. This exam-oriented education was criticized for its insufficiency in providing qualified personnel for market competition, which requires a more comprehensive ability of the individual beyond that of understanding the knowledge taught in the classroom. Suzhi education reform prevailed in this context during the late 1990s by advocating the importance of art training and social skills in the curriculum. However, because suzhi education is implemented under the umbrella of the exam-oriented education system, there is no significant change in educational practice, but only the addition of some more elements for testing to evaluate student performance. Also, the definition of
164 suzhi education does not overcome the limitation of an exclusive self. Even though a collective identity for a good society is still advocated through education, there is no close link between developing the well-rounded individual under suzhi education and developing a good society. The current education reform rarely responds to the problem we face in a radically transforming market-oriented society. We are not providing sufficient education resources for students to understand themselves in this radically changing society, so that they can know about the self and to know how to connect the self with the past and with the other. By no means are we helping students to develop their unique but inclusive individualities. The current education reform does not respond to the helplessness of students in their loss of purpose and interest in learning but rather promotes the importance of learning in the common curriculum. The current education reform still does not deal much with these more fundamental questions about education. To deal with the problem, what we need is not only a change in the curriculum, but also a critical examination of the philosophy of education underlying it. What is the end of education? Is it to provide the personnel needed by the market society or is it to provide opportunities for all students to explore their unique potential? What is the role of teaching? Is it to transfer knowledge from the teacher to the students or is it to arouse students‘ passion and interests to explore unknown fields in the world so that students can create a route toward their own lifelong learning? What is the goal of evaluation? Is it to exclude students who fail the exam or is it to help students to find their strengths and weaknesses so that they can understand themselves better and receive more appropriate education? These are all common, though fundamental questions in education. But why does the current education reform not reply these questions? In my view, at least one reason is that the concern for developing students‘ unique individualities is not taken into careful consideration. Though this concern is not rare in general intellectual discussion, it has not become an influential theme in the domain of educational practice. It is still a dominant view that education belongs to the state and thus mainly
165 meets the needs of the state.247 However, as the society becomes more open, some new space to develop individuality has been created recently. Also, in philosophical terms, as I discussed in Chapter IV, both Dewey and Liang celebrated intelligence as an important aspect of individuality: to fully develop unique individuality is to take responsibility to expand the boundary of one‘s intelligence into the unknown and to develop potential creativity without being bounded by conventions. The conception of unique but inclusive individuality I propose in this project responds to the problems in the contemporary context of Chinese society: an exclusive approach for individual development without concerning the true feeling of the self and possibilities for self-transformation. This proposal for a new conception of individuality provides a possible alternative to understanding individuality and thus provides a new vision for developing individuality in educational practice. More specifically, the pedagogy of story-telling, or the art of narrative, which is described in this chapter, can provide some insight for developing this form of unique and inclusive individuality. Story-telling is a voluntary effort of the individual to find a coherent meaning in fragmented pieces of life experience: to find the way to lead and have the authorship of the unique life every individual owns. It should be a voluntary choice the individual conducts to face the calling of the uniqueness of the true self, an adventure to seek this true self which is evolving from the unique life experience the individual has. The way of expression is a way to find the connection by feeling the wholeness in a broader context. It is this sense of wholeness that directs the individual to see the coherence of life experience and thus gain strength to deal with unpredictable difficulties. Sharing stories is also a process in which the individual opens the self to an unknown audience and enriches her insight by receiving different views from sharing with others. In the context of Chinese education with the tradition of exam-oriented education and the recent suzhi education reform, the proposal of story-telling is more
247 Huajun Zhang, —State, Society and University: A Historical Review of Chinese Higher Education,“ paper presented to the International Education Conference —States of Mind: Creating & Transcending Borders through Education“ at New York University, March 2 œ 3, 2006.
166 than adding some new elements in the curriculum. Instead, it is a call to reconsider the fundamental idea of education. Particularly, it calls for a transition from the emphasis on academic performance to an emphasis on the development of individuality in which academic performance plays a part. This idea encourages the exploration of the goal and means of learning based on the understanding of the uniqueness of different individual learners. Educators need to create more space in educational practice for every individual learner to define their own meaning through learning. Through this exploration, the individuals can forge their interests and purposes in learning by responding to the impelling needs from inside rather than from external motivation. This perspective is especially relevant in the context of radical social change in which the external motivation of becoming a member of a favored social category can easily mute the call from inside and the individual can easily get lost in the quick change of social categorization. When self-identity is impossible to realize, the individual can only passively follow the trend of social change, which is mostly molded by existing power structures. The pedagogy of story-telling is an aesthetic approach to education, different from the traditional academic approach practiced in the current education system. Though suzhi education reform tries to overcome the limitations of the academic approach which is implemented in the exam-oriented education system, there is no fundamental change in the understanding of the underlying philosophy of education. In other words, suzhi education reform still focuses on the outcome of performance rather than the process to release the unique potential of individuality every student owns. An aesthetic approach to education does not narrowly mean an emphasis on art education. If we educators can understand art as a way of life, as I discussed in this dissertation, the aesthetic approach is a natural way of learning where the individual learns to understand the true calling from inside and be faithful to this calling. In this way, education is a persistent effort to creatively respond to this calling.
Further Studies on Teacher Education and Curriculum
167 In the discussion of the conception of inner struggle and story-telling as a method of learning, telling stories is an approach to encourage the creative and patient response to inner struggle that a wide-awakened person needs to deal with. This dissertation starts with my own story about my educational experience in China and abroad. In a time of fierce competition and need for efficiency in Chinese education, inner struggle is largely ignored by professional healers, teachers and administrators in this case. A reconsideration of the current suzhi education reform may focus on teacher education and curriculum change: to value different meanings of life and success through teachers‘ practice, to provide more space for different options the individual can develop. Story-telling as an approach of aesthetic narrative is one suggestion drawn from this philosophical discussion. Indeed, there is no way to train some particular teachers to teach story-telling. Teaching story-telling is about understanding the meaning of education by all participants in the teaching and learning process. It is about seeking alternative approaches to education which may be different from traditional ways of learning, though it does not mean complete rejection of traditional education, as Dewey criticized in Education and Experience.248 Moreover, it is about respecting the unique potentiality of every different individual and being willing to fully enter into one‘s life by patiently and persistently exploring this uniqueness. Teachers do not play the role of people who transfer knowledge or indoctrinate moral standards but of people who provide empty space to let students release their own imagination, to provide empty canvas to let students draw their own pictures. It does not mean that teachers passively evade this process of learning. Instead, teachers are role models to demonstrate the possibilities and hope for creating a meaningful life of their own, in which students can find strong connections with teachers and others in a caring relationship. It is worthwhile to pay further attention to the practice of story-telling in teacher education, to understand how the life experience of oneself and others can help further learning and positively impact teaching. To understand the diversity of individuality, teachers need to be artists who
248 John Dewey, Education and Experience, New York: The MacMillan Company, 1948.
168 try to creatively express and disclose the meaning of individuality of themselves and others. As Dewey said, good teachers —learn to know and honor individuality in whatever form it appears.“249 A further study of individuality could include both empirical and theoretical studies on how pre-service and in-service teachers learn about perceptions of teaching and learning through self-transformation. This study can extend to undergraduate students who want to explore teaching as a potential career, no matter what majors they are in. Philosophy of education is not only important but also necessary in any teacher training program. However, studying philosophy of education should not be just reading educational classics. Rather, the more important task is to invite students to engage in critical thinking regarding various aspects of human experience and social conditions, to engage in creative construction of the self, knowing the true calling of the self and expanding the boundary of the self. To the end, education is a moral endeavor. But the moral construction is an aesthetic experience, as both Dewey and Liang suggest.250 Teachers or future teachers have to be willing to face their inner struggle and respond to the intrinsic call in a sincere and creative way. In curriculum reform, it is important to connect the subject matter with the lived traditions students and teachers carry. It is not just a matter of adding some subject matters, such as art education or moral education into the existing curriculum structure. The question is whether the teacher has enough space and whether the teacher can create space for students to learn about themselves and find a meaningful connection between the self and the environment around them. For example, can we create some empty space for students to encourage them to release their imagination for a certain period of time in school? From the discussion of Dewey and Liang‘s philosophies, I argue that the individual needs to develop her life path to conduct learning. We cannot follow any designed or pre-existing route but have to explore the path of one‘s own. The idea of empty space in curriculum is consistent with this
249 John Dewey, —Time and Individuality,“ p 114. 250 John Dewey, Art as Experience; Liang Shuming, Mind and Life, (Renxin yu Rensheng), Shanghai: Shanghai People‘s Press, 2005.
169 argument. It suggests that some incommunicable experience is crucial for developing our unique individuality and cannot be taught but rather has to be explored through our own inner struggle so that we can creatively respond to our own life problems we identify from our unique life experience. It is empty space for students to tell and share their own life stories. When this empty space is filled by students‘ unique imagination and creativity, it is an aesthetic space and students are creating an artistic and unique curriculum designed by themselves. It is a topic worthy of exploration and practice in further studies. Also, how can we connect the Confucian tradition with the lives of students who are born in the 21st century? The task for teachers is how to create a living curriculum based on their interaction with students and their understanding of students, who are all unique and different individuals. Confucian tradition is not only in classic texts written in the past two thousand years but it is a lived tradition demonstrated in teachers and students‘ life stories. Through story sharing, we may find new connections between the past and the present and thus our exploration in this contemporary multi-cultural world is organically rooted. This study is a philosophical analysis of contemporary Chinese educational experience through the lens of re-writing Dewey and Liang‘s thought on the relation between individual and society. The next step of this philosophical study can be some case study or ethnographical study on implementing aesthetic education to develop unique and inclusive individuality. The description of the current education reform on suzhi education in this project is a general description. I am aware that lots of creative and fruitful educational experiments are going on in some Chinese schools, especially schools in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, among others. However, because I haven‘t had opportunities to study these schools and this is primarily a philosophical study, their educational experiments on suzhi education and their efforts to develop unique and inclusive individualities for students could not be reflected here. Indeed, this dissertation project is only the start of the journey to release the energy of the individual and cultivate an individual mind of one‘s own.
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179 BIBILIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Huajun Zhang was born in a small but beautiful village near Yangtze River. She spent her childhood in the village which has developed into an industrial district in the past years. She went through a conventional path of education by attending a key secondary school and then Nanjing University, a top national university in China. Her experience of graduate study in the United Kingdom and the United States expands her understanding of different cultures and arouses her interest in diversity and inclusiveness through education.
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