The Analects of Aristotle (Part I)

Introduction

History, we now realise, did not end in 1989 when capitalist free market liberal democracy declared a premature global victory and many equiperated a falling wall in Berlin to a rioting square in Beijing.

Thirty years on, liberal western democracy and China’s communism are mutually arising (Xiang sheng 相生) on a heating planet, and mankind’s history continues to be what it always has been, not just one thing after another, but a dynamic dance with the cosmos, with more of us alive on the ballroom floor at this second than had ever lived before. In this dance , China’ s choreography with the rest of the world is a defining concern of our times.

Seven of China’s twenty dynasties endured for longer than the entire history of the United States of America. The legitimacy and mandate of America’s Chief Executives comes and goes at the ballot box ,and the Declaration of Independence and Constitution stand as America Inc’s Memorandum and Articles of Association. In China, the Imperial tenure and legitimacy rested upon whether the Emperor remained cloaked with the Mandate of Heaven, in the estimation of an elite of Mandarins who had all passed an examination to measure their civic virtues. The examination and those virtues were calibrated by the Analects of Confucius much in the way that the US Constitution is informed by the Federalist papers.

In Western democracies there is a crisis of legitimacy in our governance. In China, so far, there is not; but the West doesn’t want communism. The West might have learned in recent conflicts that selling democracy at gunpoint works even worse than selling opium that way, but perhaps you worry that China has not yet learned the same? If so, I am here to tell you to relax.

In these three short pieces I make the following broad propositions;-

First, that modern science has progressively proven the underlying premise of the ancient (and predominantly Eastern) wisdom, that humanity and our environment are fundamentally and systemically interdependent.

Secondly, that the principles on which liberal theories of rights and responsibilities rest automatically predicate that proof of these interdependencies should move the boundaries between individual and communal rights in the direction of favouring the latter.

Thirdly, that a holistic worldview shared in some measure by both Aristotelian as well as Confucian and Taoist thought (respectively muted by the Scientific Revolution in the West, and the Cultural Revolution in China) is reviving, and contains within it a sound basis for a ‘one planet two systems’ symbiotic collaboration under the Rule of Law.

From Cosmopsychism to Divine Clockmaker, and back again.

There are still tiny, scattered and shrinking groups of hunter gatherers today whose stories have always told them that they are relatives of all other life on the planet. They are blissfully unaware of Western thought’s long and painful journey to prove them right, alongside the Old Man, Lao Tzu’s axiom that long journeys always return, as the horse galloping away from the rising sun will end by galloping towards it at sunset.

I recently learned that our common forebear’s new name is (if, you can “Adam and Eve” it[1]) Luca - the Last Universal Common Ancestor. Nobody has yet definitively identified her/him/it/gender pronoun of your choice. What we do think we know ,however, is that all plants and algae derive from a common Eukaryotic cell that resulted from a (possibly one -off) endosymbiosis between two precursor Prokaryotic cellular structures, when one cellular structure insinuated itself into another. That produced what may be termed a combogenesis[2] in which evolution took a great leap forward to permit the emergence of more complex life forms.

The main proponent of this theory of endosymbiosis was the biologist Lynn Margulis who helped James Lovelock to adjust his Gaia Hypothesis to recover from a devastating attack by Richard Dawkins[3]and reframe it as Gaia 2.0 or Gaia Theory, which is now fairly mainstream in Earth Science. This posits that “the planet is a self-regulating system made up from the totality of its organisms, the surface rocks , the ocean and the atmosphere, tightly coupled as an evolving system”. The more controversial claim is the teleological one that “The theory sees this system as having a goal – the regulation of surface conditions so as always to be as favourable for contemporary life as possible.”[4].

The West’s return to this organic, symbiotic and holistic worldview was arrived at via a reductionist mechanistic and linear one. The journey started with Pre-Socratic Milesian ‘hylozoists’ ,who conceived matter as being alive, via Aristotle to Galileo, Descartes and Newton (the king of the mechanics) and back through Darwin’s Evolution, Einstein’s Relativity and Bors’ and Heisenberg’s Quantum Mechanics, to the latest developments ranging across the whole spectrum of the sciences from particle physics and cosmology to genetics and neuroscience.

The ‘new’ way of thinking is now being expressed in terms of an interdisciplinary Systems Science in which “ We have discovered that the material world, ultimately is a network of inseparable patterns of relationships; that the planet as a whole is a living, self-regulating system. The view of the body as a machine and of the mind as a separate entity is being replaced by one that sees not only the brain, but also the immune system, the bodily tissues and even each cell as a living, cognitive system.”[5].

We shall see that this way of thinking is in fact certainly not new in either Eastern or Western thought but took a pause to make way for the scientific revolution in the West. As the biologist Ludvig von Bertalanffy noted in his 1972 paper “The History and Status of General Systems Theory”[6], “One formulation of [the] cosmic order was the Aristotelian world view with its holistic and teleological notions. Aristotle’s statement, ‘The whole is more than the sum of its parts,’ is a definition of the basic problem which is still valid. Aristotelian teleology was eliminated in the development of Western Science, but the problems contained in it, such as the order and goal-directedness of living systems, were negated and bypassed rather than solved. “

This elimination happened because Thomas Aquinas saw to it in the 13th century that Aristotelian teleology was hijacked by the Church and folded into Christian theology and ethics. Science had to confine itself to what is material and measurable and stay away from life’s quality and purpose as a subject for the pulpit and not the laboratory, so as to avoid Galileo’s problem of proving heretical truths. 

Against this background, Newton’s remarkable achievement was to develop “…a comprehensive mathematical formulation of the mechanistic view of nature and thus accomplish a grand synthesis of the work of Copernicus and Kepler, Bacon, Galileo and Descartes. Newtonian physics…provided a consistent mathematical theory of the world that remained the solid foundation of scientific thought well into the 20th Century.’.

The pathway for a return from this mechanistic worldview to a hylozoistic science as expressed by the Gaia Theory was laid by Einstein at a cosmic level and by particle physicists at a microcosmic level. Once we get our heads around energy equaling matter at the speed of light squared with spacetime being curved as a gravitational field ,and then fill it all up with a fizzing confection of what may be particles or waves depending on who is looking and how, Newton’s mechanical, chronological world of linear cause and effect cedes ground to a characteristically Eastern way of looking at things, to which we shall now turn. 

Tao and Zen in the Here and Now

Fritjof Capra in his Tao of Physics, originally published in 1975 comprehensively charted the similarities between ancient Eastern wisdom and modern science noting “The most important characteristic of the Eastern world – one could almost say the essence of it – is the awareness of the unity and mutual interrelation of all things and events, the experience of all phenomena in the world as manifestations of a basic oneness. All things are seen as interdependent and inseparable parts of this cosmic whole; as different manifestations of the same ultimate reality.”[7].

In the broad sweep of history, the story of Eastern thought starts with Hinduism in India from which Buddhism emerged and found its way to China as Mahayana Buddhism. This rubbed up against Taoism to emerge as Chen Buddhism and arrive in Japan as Zen.

CG Jung in ‘Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle[8]” emphasized the distinction between West and East by contrasting that ‘the causality principle asserts that the connection between cause and effect is a necessary one’ Whereas,’ The synchronicity principle asserts that the terms of a meaningful coincidence are connected by simultaneity and meaning.” In Western thought ‘Causality occupies the paramount position…but it acquired its importance…thanks to the levelling influence of the statistical method on the one hand and the unparalleled success of natural sciences on the other.” In search of anything approaching the central ideas of synchronistic polarity and dynamism in Eastern thought , Jung observed that ‘we have to go back to Heraclitus if we want to find something similar in our own civilization’. 

Heraclitus stood for the proposition that change and a state of flux is central to the Universe and the only thing that is permanent in it. This emphasis on the dynamic aspect of all phenomena and the ceaseless transformation of all things and relations in turn underlies the ancient Chinese book of wisdom the  I Ching or Book of Changes[9] which ‘… has inspired the leading minds of China throughout the ages, amongst them Lao Tzu who drew some of his profoundest aphorisms from this source. Confucius studied it intensively and most of the commentaries on the text … go back to his school.”[10].

Accounts differ as to whether Confucius ( 551-479 BCE) and the old man Lao Tzu were in fact contemporaries, but what is clear is that it is Taoism’s more mystical and metaphysical focus that is mainly relevant to the first of our three propositions, that modern science has proven ancient wisdom. It is the political ethics of Confucian thought which will re-emerge in our second and third themes as to the recalibration of liberal rights theories and consequences for the World Order.

But first, what are the essential ingredients of Taoist and Confucian thought ? How did they get suppressed in China? And how are they re-emerging? 

The Ineffable Tao

The essence of the Tao (much like Zen, orgasms and acid trips) is that it can be attained better than explained. Chinese is written in pictures, and the word Fa 法 which stands for the universal way in Taoism and Buddhism consists of the symbols for water and going, well captured by the title of Alan Watts’ Tao - The Watercourse Way, and Bruce Lee’s echo of Lao Tzu’s injunction to be like water.

 Taoism as ‘the way’ looks to the achievement of harmony with nature[11] through ‘Wu Wei’ 无为  -‘The Tao does nothing and yet nothing is left undone”– not so much inaction as masterful inactivity, going with the flow and in martial arts terms defeating your opponent with their own momentum. This is in turn reflected in Te which may be seen as going along with a unity of eye and heart/mind, described by Watts as ‘power exercised without the use of force and without undue interference with the order of surrounding circumstances.’

Central to Taoism are Ying 阴 and Yang 阳, arising mutually. ‘At the very roots of Chinese thinking and feeling there lies the principle of polarity, which is not to be confused with the ideas of opposition or conflict. In the metaphors of other cultures, light is at war with darkness, life with death, good with evil, and the positive with the negative, and thus an idealism to cultivate the former and be rid of the latter flourishes throughout much of the world. To the traditional Chinese way of thinking, this is as incomprehensible as an electric current without both positive and negative poles, for polarity is the principle that + and -, north and south, are different aspects of one and the same system, and that the disappearance of either one of them would be the disappearance of the system.’.

“‘To be’ and ‘not to be’ arise mutually

Difficult and easy are mutually realized;

Long and short are mutually contrasted;

High and low are mutually posited;…

Before and after are in mutual sequence” [Tao Te Ching 104c]

A final feature of Taoism is a conception of the ground of being as an active void in the way that science now sees space as the essential container of matter and being and is dimly cognizant of some anteriority to ‘Big Bang’, even if time as ‘Chronos’ emerged from that singularity.

The Tao Te Ching observes

“There was something vague before heaven and earth arose. How calm! How void! It stands alone, unchanging; it acts everywhere, untiring. It may be considered the mother of everything under the heaven. I do not know its name but call it by the word Tao.”(25)

 And elsewhere says this.

“We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel; 

But it is in the space where there is nothing that the utility of the wheel depends.

We turn clay to make a vessel;

But it is on the space where there is nothing that the utility of the vessel depends.

We pierce doors and windows to make a house;

And it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the utility of the house depends.

Therefore, just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognize the utility of what is not” [104 d].

Sowing Confucian

Confucius’ influence on Chinese thought is comparable to Aristotle’s on Western, and across the span of Chinese history ,up to the present, his teachings have been variously ,co-opted, resisted, suppressed and reinterpreted to serve shifting political ambitions, and make Confucianism something of a Rorschach inkblot to be interpreted at will to suit different interests..

Its core tenets have been likened to a tripod ‘You could say of the three legs of the tripod, one is filial devotion, or filial piety. A second is humaneness. A third is ritual or ritual consciousness.”[12].

Against an ancient background conception in China of tian (Heaven), or di (Supreme Lord) as an ultimate benevolent force and source of legitimacy, which rewarded virtuosity and punished evil, Confucius and his disciples set out to build a comprehensive set of norms for social conduct. The point of departure for this was a characteristically Yin and Yang formulation of the ‘Golden Rule’ in both passive and active form ‘ He …suggested two precepts for social conduct: a negative one that a person should not impose on others what he did not wish to happen to himself, and a positive one that a person who wished to establish himself and reach his goal should help others to establish them and reach their goals[13].’.

In the Analects the rules for social conduct are grouped under four headings as moral principles (de) , the rites (li) , government decrees (zheng) and penal laws (xing). In the Confucian hierarchy of norms, the exemplary cultivation and ritual practice of civic virtues (li) by the governing elite was of a higher order than obedience to the mere regulations and laws (fa) needed to keep the general populace in order. 

The official civil service exams were incepted in the Tang dynasty (618 -906) and endured in one guise or another for over a thousand years to include a test of Confucian classics. The high regard for rites and ethics and low regard for the law was reflected in the high status accorded the governing elite as compared to the petty clerks (doa-bi-li 刀笔吏) and litigation tricksters (song-gun 讼 棍) of my profession. This way of seeing lawyers and the law, as against how “the Party” and its denizens are seen, has cast a long shadow in China up to the present time.

Whilst the Chinese Communist party in its rediscovery of Confucian values may be said to have a vested interest in stressing the aspects of conformity and ‘filial’ devotion, our focus here is on the Confucian conception of civic virtues , taken in the round, and their parallels to a Neo- Aristotelian conception of rights theories, distributive justice and rules for a fair society (to which we shall come in Part III).

These virtues have been categorized by a modern Confucian scholar[14], in three groups (the first two being private virtues, and the third public) as follows:-

1)     Benevolence (ren ai), moral principle (daoyi 道义), honesty (cheng shi 诚实), trustworthiness, (shou xin 守信) filialness (xiao shun 孝顺), harmoniousness (he mu 和睦).

2)     Self-improvement (zi qiang 自强), industriousness (qin fen 勤奋), courage (yong gan 勇敢), uprightness (zheng zhi 正直), fidelity (Zhong shi 忠实), sense of shame (lian chi 廉耻).

3)     Patriotism (ai guo 爱国), law-abidance (shou fa 守法) orientation towards collective interest (li qun 利群), etiquette (zun li 遵礼), engagement in public affairs (feng gong 奉公), devotion to one’s profession (jing ye 敬业).

As an aspirational set of core values worthwhile to recapture and replace the materialism and GDP obsession that has taken hold of both China and the West in the last thirty years, most if not all of these values seem hard to quarrel with[15], but let’s first see how they were lost.

The Cultural Revolution and Markets as God

For anybody in search of a relatable distillation of China’s remarkable journey under Communist rule, the autobiographical essays in  China in Ten Words by Yu Hua, written with a fiction writer’s eye for detail and talent for narrative, conveys, as one reviewer puts it, more understanding of China than a thousand Op-Eds.

The Cultural Revolution beginning in 1966 succeeded the convulsions of the Great Leap Forward of 1958-61 with its calamitous elimination and replacement of peasant enterprise by collectivism and famine (more than eight million starved in Sichuan Province alone).

Yu Hua juxtaposes his childhood in the Cultural Revolution to the economic miracle of the last thirty years saying ‘…I sense that Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Deng’s open-door reforms have given China’s grassroots two huge opportunities: the first to press for a redistribution of political power and the second to press for a redistribution of economic power.”.

The revolutionary vandalism unleashed in 1966 inverted hierarchies and made every effort to wipe clean China’s cultural hard drive, eliminating virtually any reading materials other than the writings of Chairman Mao and his only other favoured author Lu Xun. The Taoist and Confucian legacy was driven deep underground and lost to the generation whose formative years were in this era, which lasted to 1976. Deng Xiaoping’s economic revolution, which followed made no attempt to rebuild the traditional belief systems that Mao had succeeded in dismantling.

There are striking parallels between the effects that unbridled materialistic pursuits ,uninformed by any strong ethical content in the ambient culture, seem to have had on society in both China and America.

In China, “ The pursuit of prosperity had relieved the deprivation of China’s past, but it had failed to define the ultimate purpose of the nation and the individual. Chinese citizens often described a sensation that, in sprinting ahead, they had bounded past whatever barriers once held back the forces of corruption and moral disregard. There was a hole in Chinese life that people named the jingshen kongxu – ‘the spiritual void’ – and something was going to fill it.[16]”.

With respect to America, Harvard Professor of Politics, Michael Sandel explains[17] “Part of what prompted me to write Democracy’s Discontent (1996) was a sense that American public discourse was becoming increasingly empty and technocratic, unable to address large moral questions. The attempt to detach politics from moral argument coincided with a growing dominance of markets in social and civic life, leaving citizens feeling disempowered and dislocated. I worried not only about the hollowness of public discourse, but also about what might fill the moral vacuum. I feared that absent a morally more robust discourse, American politics would fall victim, to those who would ‘shore up our borders, harden the distinction between insiders and outsiders and promise a politics to ‘take back our culture and take back our country’, to ‘restore our sovereignty’ with a vengeance (Sandel 1996,350). Two decades later, that fear has come true. America and the world is now concerned with the moral and political consequences.”.

And so, it seems that the ‘gap in the markets’ which unbridled materialism in the last thirty years has exposed in both America and China (each against a background of sharply rising inequality) has been a moral vacuum. What will ultimately fill the moral market in that gap?

 In China, a repackaged rediscovery of traditional values, which highlight filial piety and obedience as well as patriotism, has been embraced by the Party and projected internationally via Confucius Institutes, as part of the antidote.

Whose Morals to Meet a Market in the Gap?

In a country where GDP is at the top of the tree, but per capita income is still amongst the lowest globally , rediscovery of traditional values is not going to be a panacea. ‘ China is today a land of huge disparities. It is like walking down a street where on this side there are gaudy pleasure palaces and, on that side, desolate ruins, or like sitting in a strange theatre where a comedy is being performed on one side of the stage and a tragedy on the other.”[18]. The Chinese Government knows that it is in a race to keep living standards rising across the board and have fair distributive justice if it wants to maintain its legitimacy.

Embracing a new relationship with the Rule of Law domestically (in which the East may learn from the West) is another tool in the kit to modify the ‘ Be you never so high, the Party is above you” dispensation, which is the modern continuation ,by other means, of millennia of imperialism. Keeping China’s export markets open will be a second tool, where the reassertion of a rules based international order is also key.

 In America and Europe, the vacuum is being filled, for the time being, by identity politics, polarization and rising distrust in our politicians and institutions. The challenge is to reclaim legitimacy and civic engagement[19] and, I shall suggest, to recapture and reframe our own traditional Enlightenment values ,which underpin the liberal democratic worldview, recalibrating them in ways that recognize that modern scientific knowledge calls for ecological ethics where the boundary at which one individual’s freedom impacts upon another’s has been shifted.

This recalibration of rights and responsibilities, I shall address in Part II. In Part III we shall come to how to police these rights and responsibilities globally in a ‘one planet, two systems’ symbiosis.

Tim Taylor QC

13th January 2020

[1] For readers unfamiliar with Cockney Rhyming Slang ,‘Adam and Eve’ = ‘believe’.

[2] A label borrowed from Tyler Volk From Quarks to Culture

[3] The Extended Phenotype (1982)

[4] James Lovelock The Vanishing Face of Gaia (2009) p 255

[5] Capra and Luisi ‘The Systems View of Life’ xi

[6] http://perflensburg.se/Bertalanffy.pdf

[7] Tao of Physics 35th Anniversary Edition p130

[8] Reproduced in JJ Clarke’s CG Jung on the East p71, from Collected Works volume 8

[9] Dating from anywhere from 3000 to 1200 BCE

[10] Tao of Physics p110

[11] Tzu-jan meaning spontaneous, that which is so of itself.

[12] Three Confucian Values Robert Oxnan , President Emeritus, Asia Society

[13] Chang Wejen Classical Chinese Jurisprudence and the Development of the Chinese Legal System in Tsinghua China Law Review Vol 2 207

[14] Chen Lai Sandel’s Democracy’s Discontent from a Confucian Perspective in Encountering China: Michael Sandel and Chinese Philosophy p 90

[15] By way of comparison, Founding Father Benjamin Franklin identified thirteen virtues: 1. Temperance 2 Silence 3 Order 4 Resolution 5 Frugality 6 Industry 7 Sincerity 8 Justice 9 Moderation 10 Cleanliness 11 Tranquillity 12 Chastity 13 Humility. These make him sound a lot duller than he was, but he probably had not lost the English talent for hypocrisy, or perhaps – more appealingly- what Alan Watts calls “the irreducible element of rascality’.

[16] Evan Osnos (former New Yorker Beijing Bureau Chief 2008 -2013) ‘China’s Encounter with Michael Sandel’ in Encountering China op cit vii

[17] Ibid at 262

[18] Yu Hua Op Cit 158

[19] The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds currently has more members than all three of the main British political parties combined, according to Lord Sumption in his recent Reith Lectures. I speculate that membership of the Mormon Church is probably greater than all four of them put together and am uncertain as to which is most concerning.