Tam, Ka Pok, Andrew (2020) On the Kierkegaardian philosophy of culture and its implications in the Chinese and Japanese context (post-1842). PhD thesis. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/81400/ Copyright and moral rights for this work are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This work cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Enlighten: Theses https://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] On the Kierkegaardian Philosophy of Culture and Its Implications in the Chinese and Japanese Context (post-1842) Andrew Ka Pok Tam MA Submitted in fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) School of Critical Studies College of Art University of Glasgow December 2019 © Andrew Tam 2019 Abstract This thesis aims to establish a Kierkegaardian philosophy of culture to address the theoretical problems of modern East Asian philosophy of culture, particularly Chinese New Confucianism and the Kyoto School (represented by Mou Zong-San and Watsuji Tetsuro respectively) who try to formulate their cultural subjectivities for the sake of cultural modernisation. Both schools adopt Hegelian philosophy of culture and therefore inherit the problems of Hegelian dialectics which Kierkegaard criticises. While Kierkegaard himself does not develop a philosophy of culture, this thesis argues that his concepts of culture in terms of the manifestations of passions, community and contemporaneity are useful resources for the formulation of East Asian cultural selves. Firstly, in chapter 1, I argue that there are two tasks of modern East Asian philosophers of culture: how to understand a culture (epistemic task) and how to establish a cultural self (ontological task). Secondly, in chapter 2, I argue that there are three theoretical problems in Mou’s and Watsuji’s Hegelian philosophies of culture, namely, the impossibility of change in cultural value, the lack of empirical method and the neglect of openness of interpretation. Thirdly, in chapter 3, I argue that Kierkegaard’s definition of culture in terms of the manifestations of passions explain East Asian cultural development more consistently than Hegelian dialectics. Fourthly, in chapter 4, I establish a Kierkegaardian philosophy of culture and argue that a cultural self is formulated by the concepts of community and contemporaneity where individuals express their passions according to their free wills. Finally, I argue that Kierkegaardian philosophy of culture fulfils both the ontological and epistemic tasks of East Asian philosophers and solves the theoretical problems they encounter when they adopt Hegelian dialectics. 2 Table of Contents ABSTRACT 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS 3 LIST OF TABLES 6 LIST OF FIGURES 7 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 8 AUTHOR’S DECLARATION 9 NOTES ON ROMANISATION 10 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS 11 1. INTRODUCTION: PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE AS A PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEM 12 1.1 What is Philosophy of Culture? 14 1.2 Philosophy of Culture is different from Cultural Theory 25 1.3 The Epistemic and the Ontological Tasks of Modern East Asian Philosophy of Culture 37 1.3.1 East Asia and Han Cultural Zone 38 1.3.2 East Asian Philosophy of Culture as a Response to the Problem of Cultural Modernisation 51 1.3.3 How New Confucianism and the Kyoto School Adopt Hegelian Dialectics 56 1.4 Outline of the Thesis 71 2. CONTEMPORARY DISCUSSION OF THE DEFINITION OF CULTURES 76 2.1. Culture as spirit 78 2.1.1 Etymology 78 2.1.2 From Herder to Hegel: Culture and Bildung 86 2.1.3 Kyoto School Attitudes Towards Hegel 98 3 2.1.4 New Confucian Attitudes Towards Hegel 105 2.2 Modern East Asian Philosophies: Culture as National Spirit or Values 115 2.2.1 Mou Zongsan’s Study of Virtue Completion 115 Manifestation of Mind Nature in Cultural Activities 119 The Task of New Kingliness in Phrase Three of Chinese Confucianism 錯誤! 尚未定義書籤。 2.2.2 Watsuji Tetsuro’s Climate and Culture 133 2.3. Culture as Tradition 155 2.3.1 Three Problems of the Fixed ‘Cultural Values’ 155 2.3.2 Humboldt: Culture as the Cultivation of the Mind Through Language 169 2.3.3. Hermeneutical Issues in Schleiermacher, Dilthey and Gadamer 178 3. CULTURE AS PASSION IN TWO AGES 201 3.1 Kierkegaard’s Concept of Passion as Motivation 202 3.1.1 Aesthetic Passion: Immediate and Unreflected Passion 209 3.1.2 Epistemic or Cognitive Passion: Motivation to Know 215 3.1.3 Ethical or Moral Passion: Self-Positing and the Possibility of Choosing Wrong in the Ethical Choice 217 3.1.4 Religious Passion: Existential Pathos and Dialectical Pathos 231 3.2 Reconstruction of a Kierkegaardian Philosophy of Culture 240 3.2.1 How Culture as Passion Solve Three Problems of ‘Fixed Cultural Values’ 240 3.2.2 Concluding Remarks: Four Orientations of Culture: Aesthetic, Epistemic, Ethical and Religious 248 4. FROM INDIVIDUAL TO COMMUNITY: KIERKEGAARD’S CONCEPT OF COMMUNITY AND GADAMER’S CONCEPT OF TRADITION 250 4.1. The Spatiality of Cultural Self: Community 252 4.1.1 Three Orders of Individual Self 253 4.1.2 The Three Moments of Community 263 4.1.3 The Transcendence of the Individual Self over Relations With Others 269 4.1.4 Kierkegaard’s Emphasis on Individual Subjectivity and his Criticism of the “Public” 274 4.1.5 Kierkegaard’s Dialectics of the Community vs Hegel’s Sittlichkeit 284 4.2. The Temporality of the Cultural Self: Contemporaneity 291 4.2.1 Contemporaneity and Gadamer’s Fusions of Horizons 291 4 4.2.2 Historical and Cultural Development as Coming into Existence 310 4.3 The Problem of and the Solution to the Impossibility of Cultural Distinction 318 4.3.1 Kierkegaard’s Criticism of the Distinction between the Cultured and the Uncultured 319 4.3.2 Exclusive Membership Provided by Tradition 323 5. CONCLUSION: WHAT A KIERKEGAARDIAN PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE CAN CONTRIBUTE TO EAST ASIAN PHILOSOPHIES OF CULTURE 326 5.1 Three Kierkegaardian Criteria of a Philosophy of Culture 326 5.1.1 Individual Subjectivity within a Community 326 5.1.2 Contemporaneity: Acknowledgement of the relation between the Past and the Present 331 5.1.3 Four Passions and Four Selves: Aesthetic, Cognitive, Moral, and Religious 335 5.2 How Kierkegaardian Philosophy of Culture Addresses the Problems of East Asian Philosophy of Culture 340 5.3 How a Kierkegaardian Philosophy of Culture Can Fulfil the Task of East Asian Philosophy of Culture 343 NOTES ON THE APPENDIX 352 APPENDIX I: MAP OF EAST ASIA OR HAN CULTURAL SPHERE 353 APPENDIX II: TABLE OF EAST ASIAN DYNASTIES 354 BIBLIOGRAPHY 356 5 List of Tables Table 1 Three Levels of Individual Self and Community ................................................................................ 266 Table 2 The Public vs the Community ............................................................................................................ 275 6 List of Figures Figure 1 Changes of the Hanzi of tin1 .............................................................................................................. 20 Figure 2 Matteo Ricci’s A Map of the Myriad Countries of the World (坤輿萬國全圖, 1602), which was the first Chinese map indicating China as an ‘Asian’ (亞細亞) country. Source: Kano Collection, Tohoku University Library. ............................................................................................................................................ 41 Figure 3 Complete Terrestrial Map (山海輿地全圖, 1609), Source: the Asian Library, the University of British Columbia. .............................................................................................................................................. 42 Figure 3 Map of Han Cultural Sphere ............................................................................................................ 353 Figure 4 Timeline of East Asian Dynasties 1 .................................................................................................. 354 Figure 5 Timeline of East Asian Dynasties 2 .................................................................................................. 355 7 Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to several people: Prof. George Pattison and Dr. Saeko Yazaki who have been supporting my research and giving me valuable feedbacks on early drafts; Prof. Wang Qinjie, who taught me hermeneutics; Dr. Cheung Ching Yuen, who taught me philosophy of culture and japanese philosophy and inspire my PhD research, even though we follow very different approaches to the question of East Asian cultural subjectivities; Prof Liao Xiaowe, for his comments and encouragement; and my funders, including British Association of japanese Studies, Mosspark Church, and, in particular, Macao Higher Education Bureau, who granted me three years of Macao Postgraduate Scholarship and support my academic research even though my research on cultural subjectivity is a politically sensitive topic at that time. This dissertation was written during the difficult period of Hong Kong, including the 2019 anti-extradition law protest. Facing Chinese Communist socio-political intervention, the preservation of Hong Kong cultural subjectivity becomes my major concern since my undergraduate studies. As we shall see in this dissertation, a community preserving individual