Today Professor Dong talked about the relationship between scientific creation and freedom and tradition. Professor Dong believes that “freedom” is the source of creativity, while “tradition” is a necessary condition for creativity.
What is tradition? Why must one respect tradition in order to create anything? Professor Dong did not make this clear, and I would like to say a bit more on this point.
At the outset, Professor Dong defined tradition mainly as “the classics and their interpretations.” Thus, in China, “tradition” means the Four Books and Five Classics, the canonical texts of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism. Defined in this way, it is hard to understand why those texts are a necessary condition for scientific creation.
In fact, the more important meaning of what we call tradition lies in “continuity” itself — not in whatever happens to be what is continued. Professor Dong later mentioned that China is a “rare resource” for the modern world’s creation of new culture, because among the old agrarian cultures, only China has continued to the present day. If one wants to create a new culture through the collision between industrial culture and agrarian culture, one must start from the Chinese tradition. But if “tradition” is understood as “the classics and their interpretations,” then there is no basis for speaking of any “rare resource,” because although the other old agrarian cultures have all been broken off, their texts have still been preserved, and they can still be interpreted, can they not?
China has become the so-called “rare resource precisely because” tradition is not only those classics, but this very continuity itself. When we look at relics and texts from Ancient Egypt, Ancient Babylon, and the like in museums or libraries, we are not dealing with “tradition”; we are merely dealing with the “past,” and with another civilization. Only when something from that “past” continues in ourselves does it become “tradition.”
Tradition, as a past that continues, is a kind of inertia, or rather a kind of “laziness”; it seems to be something that hinders creation, and yet it is also the condition for creation. How should this be understood? It is rather like saying that air is a resistance to flying, but also a condition for flying. Creation is always only creation when it takes place under some kind of constraint. People often understand innovation as a subversion of tradition, but if one is completely cut off from tradition, with no “old” as a framework, how can there be any “new” at all? Creation is not about building one imaginary castle after another in the air; it is always an exploration that takes place after tradition. Creation is not a rupture with tradition, but precisely its continuation. Without continuous renewal, tradition becomes those dead cultural relics.
Professor Dong said that in periods of historical transition, tradition will play a crucial role. Here he is probably referring to some kind of heterogeneous tradition. Western science develops within Western cultural traditions, continuing its own tradition through ongoing creation; this does not require Eastern culture. But if each cultural tradition becomes self-enclosed and develops only within its own pattern, it will inevitably reach a point where its vitality is exhausted. The “major turning points” in the history of human creation often occur only after the collision and fusion of two cultures. Greek civilization was so radiant and magnificent, yet it still had to wait until the cultures of Egypt, Rome, the Hebrews, the Germanic peoples, and so on injected fresh blood into the Greek tradition before it gradually opened up new horizons.
October 22, 2010
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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