Deng Xiaomang: Lectures on Hegel’s Dialectic

22,783 characters2006.01.24

Deng Xiaomang: Lectures on Hegel’s Dialectics, Peking University Press, October 2005

The immediate consequence of finishing this book is that the image of Mr. Deng Xiaomang in my mind has taken a big hit! Of course, Mr. Deng’s views and arguments are relatively profound, and the rigor and perseverance he showed in translating the Three Critiques have always made me admire him. However, the problem is that this book is a lecture transcript of his course for undergraduates, and I think the simplistic critical style he displays when teaching undergraduates and beginners is irresponsible. In particular, as for his appraisals of Chinese culture, the simplistic denigration he practices is very harmful for undergraduates who know very little about philosophy, and of course this is not a serious attitude toward scholarship. By comparison, Yangzi’s teaching style is much better—while making no attempt to conceal his own standpoint and preferences, he still maintains a certain politeness and respect toward other doctrines (see the notes and reflections below for details); Teacher Zhang Xianlong’s method and attitude of comparing China and the West are even gentler than Mr. Deng Xiaomang’s.

On page 4, my research shows that: For a long time, Chinese people’s study of Hegel’s philosophy, especially of its core and of Hegelian dialectics, has neglected two most basic elements: one is the spirit of Nous, embodied in the ability to understand self-negation; the other is the spirit of Logos, embodied in the method of reflection.

On page 32, philosophy is a systematic point of view. Even the earliest philosophy of ancient Greece, that is, the philosophy concerning the “arche” of the world, was already a system. For the arche, according to Anaximander, is the thing from which “all things begin and to which they return.” Therefore, even if there is only one proposition, such as “the arche of all things is X,” that is already philosophy, already a self-consistent system. ////—My own understanding of “system,” in fact, is very simple: viewpoints are interconnected into a whole and remain internally coherent. Deng Xiaomang means roughly the same thing: having a beginning and an end, and being self-consistent.

On page 36, reading Hegel is different from reading Kant. Kant’s books have very clear logic in every sentence, but the whole is impossible to make sense of; the thread of thought is too many, and to grasp the whole one must have immense patience and perseverance, mathematical carefulness and logical training. By contrast, when reading Hegel one can seem to understand each sentence only vaguely, yet somehow gain an insight into the whole. ////—My own feeling is actually the opposite: I feel that, at the level of the whole, it is easier to sympathize with Kant’s doctrine. I feel that, compared with chewing through sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph, I seem more easily able to grasp what Kant’s entire philosophical system wants to say, and what he cares about. Of course, this is very likely just my temporary illusion, after all I have not put much effort into reading him. But I also suspect that scholars like Deng Xiaomang may likewise have limitations in their understanding of Kant, at least to the extent that they are unable to sympathetically enter into Kant’s concerns, because I believe that anyone who rejects religion—that is, who is unwilling to take religious faith as some kind of inner need of their own—cannot truly throw themselves into Kant’s state of mind. This is only my one-sided conjecture…

On page 38, when Hegel says that the beginning of philosophy is a kind of “resolve,” he is in fact expressing an active thought, namely: if you want to investigate the origin of all things, you must bring into play your subjective agency; you must commit your free will. Only free will is groundless, absolute, and incapable of being demonstrated.

On pages 52–53, the difference between being and nonbeing is established only in reflection; without reflection, it is indeed hard to say what difference there is between the two. But through reflection, in “change” or “becoming,” being and nonbeing are positioned: first there must be being, a resolve, a will to live; then comes disillusionment with life, everything is nothing; but everything being nothing does not mean that you have nothing to do, rather it means that nothing can prevent you from “becoming being,” from “existing in some fashion,” from bringing yourself into form out of nothing. This is the inner meaning of Hegel’s three-stage structure. It does not mean that there is a ready-made being, plus a ready-made nothing, and then a process of change unites them; rather, it means that the same being self-negates into nothing, and then through this nothing reflects back to its own being, borrowing nothingness to let itself freely become being and become in actuality. ////—Very interesting, but I remain unconvinced.

On page 66, if one uses being and nonbeing to correspond to the West’s being and non-being, then one gets it backwards. The West’s being corresponds precisely to China’s nonbeing, emphasizing non-change; the West’s nonbeing corresponds to China’s being, emphasizing change and multiplicity. This is a very great difference in cultural background. But we usually do not pay attention to this point. ////—Somewhat interesting, but I remain unconvinced.

On page 75, Chinese and Western cultures are two extremes, and at each and every link they correspond one by one, forming a reciprocal relation; therefore the comparison between Chinese and Western culture, including the comparison between Chinese and Western philosophy, has the strongest shock value and inspirational force, for both Chinese and Westerners, and expresses two different structures of human nature. ////—Deng Xiaomang’s way of approaching Hegel and other Western philosophies through a comparison of Chinese and Western cultures is very good, but Deng Xiaomang’s “comparative” method and attitude are fundamentally unacceptable! First of all, when he explains Chinese culture and other ideas he thinks have major defects, he invariably does so in a simplistic way. Often, merely in order to highlight some superiority in Western culture, he simply assigns the opposite side to Chinese culture, without considering that Chinese thought also contains rich and varied content. Others can likewise choose the good points in Chinese culture and then pick relative counterparts in Western culture for comparison, and if dialogue proceeds in this way it becomes almost bickering. Second, his attitude toward Chinese culture is unhealthy. In his writings, whenever he does Chinese-Western comparison, it is always China’s errors or imperfections that are used to set off the goodness of Western thought. As a result, Chinese thought sounds as if it has no merits at all; even when it has a few points of brilliance, they are always eclipsed by the West. Yet he also says Chinese and Western cultures are two extremes and stand in reciprocal relation; then it seems that if Western culture is excellent, Chinese culture must be wretched to the extreme… To give listeners such an impression in undergraduate teaching is obviously extremely irresponsible! By comparison, Yang Lihua’s lectures are much more responsible—although his own position is clearly Confucian, when he speaks of Laozi and Zhuangzi, xuanxue, Western philosophy, and so on, he still leaves in some words of appreciation and affirmation, whereas for ideas he thinks are completely worthless or terribly bad, such as Wang Chong, Dong Zhongshu, and Chan Buddhism, he simply does not discuss them. That is a comparatively more responsible, more peaceful, polite, and humble way of teaching.

On page 76, Hawking’s theory of cosmic origins also traces the beginning of the universe to a “singularity,” a point with no mass and no time or space, yet infinite energy. This view is similar to Hegel’s claim: the true substance is subject, and at the beginning it is motion. ////—As for evaluations of Chinese philosophy, although I am dissatisfied with Deng Xiaomang’s simplifications, I do not have the ability to mount many rebuttals. But here, this obvious error I can fully expose! First, a “singularity” of course has mass—if one says the singularity has energy, though energy should not be infinite, since physics rejects the “infinite.” Of course, whether the physical laws describing mass and energy still hold at the “singularity” is another question… Second, Deng Xiaomang’s obvious mistake here is that he has misattributed the cosmological beginning of the “singularity” to Hawking, whereas in fact this was an earlier view already reached within modern Big Bang cosmology. This view perhaps could be attributed to any physicist who advocates a modern Big Bang theory of cosmic origins, but precisely not to Hawking, because Hawking’s own cosmological origin hypothesis was exactly an attempt to use the “imaginary time” model to “eliminate” the “singularity”! The error here is small, but it can still explain a great deal, namely that Mr. Deng Xiaomang, before responsibly figuring out what the doctrines he intends to use are actually about, rushes to employ them to set off the doctrines he wishes to praise. From this, I wonder whether Mr. Deng Xiaomang has truly and responsibly understood the Chinese philosophies he is using?

On page 81, skepticism also touches on dialectics, but its biggest flaw is that it does not subject its own doubt to doubt, so it reaches no result. ////—Skepticism, as in Descartes, does not fail to doubt its own doubting; rather, when doubt reaches that point, it finds that it cannot doubt any further. To say that they did not doubt “I am doubting” is probably not quite right; here Mr. Deng Xiaomang has again made a “simplification.”

On page 84, this is just like the word “contradiction” itself: one spear, one shield, two separate things. In Hegel, what is meant is not the conflict of two things, but the same thing. ////—Earlier Deng Xiaomang was discussing the translation of the term “Aufhebung,” and in passing he also talked about the translation of “contradiction.” He thought that the translated term could not fully convey the original meaning. He points out that “contradiction” is not a conflict between two things, but rather a conflict within the logical structure of a proposition itself. This is correct, and Chinese modern understandings of “contradiction,” including Mao’s “On Contradiction,” often do in fact commit this vulgarizing error. However, the term “contradiction” itself cannot be said to be defective in translation, because in Chinese the word “矛盾” is drawn from an allusion rather than from the meanings of the individual characters. The allusion concerns the very logical structure of the statement “My spear can pierce every shield; my shield can withstand every spear.” The creation of the word “矛盾” fully embodies the charm of Chinese characters: behind Chinese words there are not only simple sounds and concepts, but also “stories.” The word “矛盾” does not refer to a conflict between a spear and a shield as two things; rather, it alludes to the anecdote of “spear and shield,” within which the logical meaning of “contradiction” in the Western sense is fully encompassed. Although the differences between Chinese and Western languages can indeed explain many things, when we ourselves have gotten the concept wrong and the problem lies with us, do not casually drag our language and writing out to be a scapegoat!

On pages 85–86, applying the concept of sublation to historical analysis, Marx once had an argument with Proudhon. … Today, many of us, whether dealing with traditional culture or foreign culture, as long as history is involved, have an unspoken formula: “take the essence and discard the dross.” … To use fixed or generally accepted standards of good and bad to distinguish the affirmative and negative aspects of history is a very naïve view of history; in Marx’s eyes this replaces dialectics and the historical process with moral judgment. ////—Here I see that what Mr. Deng Xiaomang says is very similar to something I wrote during my recent discussions of Marxist philosophy: in the same way, he found Marx’s mocking passage about Proudhon’s dialectics, and in the same way he talked about taking the essence and discarding the dross… This passage is very long, so I won’t quote it all. However, Deng Xiaomang’s argument later on is still quite different from mine; Mr. Deng has a very interesting line of thought.

On pages 90–91, however, from the perspective of the universe on a grand scale, I do not think heat death is the final destination. On the contrary, the significance of entropy increase lies precisely in cultivating human beings who can decrease entropy out of it. And after heat death there will inevitably be another round of Genesis, and perhaps more advanced intelligent beings will develop. As Engels said, no property of matter is ever lost. ////—Here Deng Xiaomang falls into the same problem as Engels in The Dialectics of Nature! I want to ask: on what grounds does he say “I do not think”? What is the basis? Heat death is a prediction of natural science, just as natural science predicts that the sun will perish in five billion years. Then if I say, on the basis of dialectics or whatever, that I “do not think” the sun will perish, does that make the scientific prediction false? —This is the reason many contemporary scientists look down on philosophers: philosophers are always self-righteous, while they themselves cannot make sense of the scientists’ cumbersome calculations and profound theories. If you cannot understand them, then keep quiet, right? No—philosophers also like to use all sorts of “philosophical” theories that many scientists cannot understand or do not have time to understand, and then make all kinds of comments! Of course natural science allows doubt and welcomes doubt, but one must doubt science in a scientific way, not use “just as Engels said” to doubt science! Of course, we can also “think” or “believe” that heat death is not the end of the universe, but if Mr. Deng Xiaomang insists on such a “thinking,” then he must admit that this “thinking” lies outside science and can only be a form of “faith.” If one lacks the ability to present a rebuttal in a natural-scientific way, then only a religious kind of faith preserved in the interstices of science has the right to keep your “thinking” alive.

On page 96, dialectics is neither purely objective law nor purely subjective method, but rather a doctrine of the unity of subject and object, a doctrine of the unity of naturalism and humanism. Therefore, if we first regard nature as a world detached from humans and opposed to humans, and then go on to seek dialectics within it, that is like climbing a tree to catch a fish, or even self-contradiction.

On page 97, top-tier modern natural scientists such as Einstein, Dirac, Heisenberg, and Hawking are already philosophers in their own right, and natural dialectics is very useful to them. If they could understand a bit of real dialectics, rather than dogmatic or superficial dialectics, their explorations or research would become even more targeted and conscious. ////—No need to say much: there are only four words here—“wishful thinking”! In fact, great scientists such as Einstein, Schrödinger, and Bohm were themselves extremely knowledgeable about philosophy. Einstein admired Hume, and Schrödinger studied both ancient Greek philosophy and Indian Vedanta philosophy. Which philosophy is “useful” to them is of course something the scientists themselves get to decide.

On page 102, one basic principle of Hegel is that substance must be understood simultaneously as subject, understood as a kind of activity or action. Hegel’s subject is neither a soul nor a thing-in-itself, but a real activity that appears. So one major difference between him and earlier philosophers is that earlier thinkers all treated negation as an attribute, function, or predicate of self-consciousness, whereas Hegel treats negation as self-consciousness itself; that is, he reverses the predicate and makes it into the subject. What was originally a function of a thing has now become the subject. This is what puts Hegel above other philosophers, above Kant. ////—I remain unconvinced

On page 102, “I” in Hegel’s view is not some thing; in fundamental terms, it is a function of self-negation, first of all the function that distinguishes the self from the object.

On page 105, self-consciousness, to put it bluntly, is consciousness that takes the self as its object, but if you think about it carefully, if I take the self as an object, does that not simultaneously mean that I also take all objects as selves?

On page 105, if I did not have that object, I would not have my consciousness; it is only because there is an object opposed to me that I become conscious of a self. Conversely, without a self, the object would not be my object either, and would not appear before me; it would only be some “thing-in-itself” of unknown kind. ////—The problem is, why is the power of “I” so great that absolutely everything can become the “object” of “I”? Is there anywhere in the universe that “I” can never reach?

On page 132, the highest ideal of ancient Chinese Confucianism and Daoism is the Great Unity world. A so-called Great Unity world is a world without differences, but such a world is in fact not a true human society at all; it is an animal world. Even the animal world still has conflict and contradictions. … ////—Here we see a case study of Mr. Deng Xiaomang’s “simplification” of Chinese philosophy: he actually lumps together all kinds of richly varied ideals of society in ancient Chinese thought and says they are not even as good as an “animal society”! Unbearable! Is the ritual-and-music society ideal of Confucianism a “world without differences”? Quite the opposite. When we want to praise the democratic ideas in Western culture, then the Confucian social order suddenly becomes a rigidly hierarchical society of exploitation, doesn’t it? Anyway, just throw all the bad points to Chinese culture—what an easy way to do Chinese-Western comparison!

Page 196–197
A skeptic doubts everything except his own doubt; that is where his fatal flaw lies. Many people today do not understand this principle—for example, postmodern currents, which hold that everything is worthy of doubt, that everything is unstable, that there is no truth, and so on. But ask just one question: if there is no truth, is that sentence of yours itself true? You are certainly treating the sentence “there is no truth” as truth if you can then teach others that “there is no truth.” Pluralism is the same way: “everything is plural” — then is that sentence of yours plural? Why do you keep repeating this sentence again and again, using it to deal with every objection? Aren’t you proclaiming it as a monistic proposition? Anyone who talks about pluralism is firmly committed to monism; that is, the pluralism I am talking about is itself monistic. In fact, these contradictions are very easy to point out; this is only a simple dialectical thinking technique. Many people today, including both Chinese and Western people, lack this training. Anyone with even a little training in dialectical thinking would not talk like this. ////——Here Mr. Deng Xiaomang once again “simplifies” pluralists and postmodernists across the board, reducing those contemporary Western scholars to people who are not even as good as someone with “even a little training in dialectical thinking.” But Deng Xiaomang’s remarks lack logical thought; if I wanted to be argumentative, I could say that someone with even a little ability in logical analysis would not talk like this. Still, what Deng Xiaomang says does have some basis, and my only dissatisfaction lies in his method of “simplification” and his attitude of “despising” other doctrines. So, as a pluralist, I must offer some rebuttal: first, statements such as “there is no truth” and “everything is plural” absolutize the positions of those doctrines. Many postmodernists often say “there is no truth” only under certain conditions and within certain limits; so, for example, is the truth that “1+1=2” also not true? Is the question “1+1=?” also plural? Obviously, in general it is not. Pluralism is conditional, and even relativists are usually not so absolute. Pluralists are different from relativists, and there are all kinds of different forms of pluralism, but Deng Xiaomang ignores all this and lumps them together by taking the most absolute position among them. Very well, then I’ll use this most absolute form of pluralism to rebut him. Let me temporarily concede that “everything is plural”; then is that sentence itself plural? Of course it is plural too! That is to say, I also acknowledge your anti-pluralist position, and even if you are the most thoroughgoing dogmatist, even if you do not recognize my pluralist stance in the least, as a pluralist I still respect you. I still believe that so long as your theory is internally coherent, then it must have its own reasonableness; your doctrine will not be without merit altogether. — That is my answer from a pluralist stance pushed to the extreme of concession. Even if I concede that the sentence “there is no truth” is not itself truth, and that the sentence “everything is plural” is also plural, I still have no internal contradiction whatsoever!

Page 237
But if you have a sympathetic understanding, then from the very outset you must make some intellectual preparation. Of course, you must first sort out the sentence’s grammatical relations and logical relations, but when you reach a point where you can no longer make sense of it, where you cannot understand it, you should reflect: perhaps your mode of thinking has already reached its limit. You can think about this: Hegel was not a fool, and neither were his followers. The reason he is so baffling is that he is doing it deliberately; he says things this way not to show off, but to stimulate you, to arouse your capacity for experience and your vitality. ////——This attitude toward philosophy is quite good, but we can go even further and generalize it. We can also say, “Confucius, Mencius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Cheng, Zhu, Lu, and Wang were not fools, and neither were their followers…”; “postmodernists and pluralists are not fools…”. Such self-reminders keep us humble, and then, thinking further, we realize that we ourselves are not fools either, that we too possess basic human understanding, and thereby we remain confident as well—reading philosophy with confidence and without losing humility.

January 24, 2006

Latest comments

Wu
2006-01-25 18:02:12
[Reply]
From what you have argued, Mr. Xiaomang does indeed suffer from the problem of “setting himself up as the sole authority.” But with Mr. Xiaomang, we also cannot look at him in a “simplified” way. Mr. Deng adheres to “new critique” and deeply detests “New Confucianism.” I am currently reading his New Critique; some of his statements are indeed overly extreme, but they are also “understandable.”
Now I am beginning to enjoy reading your blog. Compared with your earlier articles, your commentary-style writing is very good; it makes your criticism more targeted and also more convincing.
Me
2006-01-26
11:06:21
[Reply]
Actually, I very much appreciate Mr. Deng Xiaomang’s spirit of new critique. His statements are not only understandable, but also very insightful. However, what I object to is only the fact that these rather extreme remarks are expressed in a course that is open to undergraduates and even perhaps to students across the university who are not philosophy majors; the kind of guidance this creates is harmful. If one holds views that one deeply abhors, then either one should simply ignore them, or if one is to address them, one should first show them at least basic respect (that is, first assume that the other person, like oneself, is not a fool), and then criticize the matter on its merits. Of course, some simplification and absolutization are unavoidable when speaking about these things—Yang Zi could not avoid it either—but one must clearly know, while simplifying, that one is simplifying. For example, Yang Zi would recommend that students go listen to Wang Bo on Zhuangzi, or Zhou Xuenong on the history of Buddhism; he recognizes that understandings arising from other standpoints are also worth listening to. Such recognition of other positions does not in the least prevent him from clearly displaying his own standpoint. Yet I did not sense any such recognition, nor any appropriate, at least ceremonial, praise of other standpoints, in Deng Xiaomang’s lectures.
Circular constant
2007-07-25
11:58:20 Anonymous 222.188.46.12
[Reply]
I have only read fragments of Deng Xiaomang’s Lectures on Hegel’s Dialectics. According to the Chinese view, it is best to keep quiet and not express an opinion, but I still could not resist trying to be expansive in the American manner. First, I think Deng Xiaomang himself is not playing the role of a philosopher in this book; he is merely playing the role of a student. A philosopher’s mission is to develop philosophy, whereas a student’s mission is to inherit philosophy. In this way, the nature of the Lecture Notes is determined by the author’s own nature; or, conversely, the author’s own nature is determined by the nature of the Lecture Notes. And when students learn, they are always subjective and willful; they always understand and transform what they learn according to their own views, rather than developing it according to the object’s own logic. Therefore, the Lecture Notes splendidly accomplished the mission entrusted to it by its master: to explain Hegel’s dialectics rather than develop it. From this point of view, the author of this blog is demanding of the Lecture Notes a standard that the Lecture Notes itself does not need to possess. If one insists on such a standard, then the Lecture Notes would have to be given a different title, namely, Research on Dialectics and on Whether Western Philosophy or Chinese Philosophy Is Superior.
Guwa
2007-07-25
12:35:34 http://epr.ycool.com/
[Reply]
Lectures on Hegel’s Dialectics is a verbatim record of Mr. Deng Xiaomang’s lectures delivered in a Wuhan University classroom. Could it really be said that a philosophy professor standing at the podium is “merely” playing the role of a student? In fact, I rather think that there is not much difference between “playing the philosopher” and “playing the student”; philosophers are all students, and there is not much difference between “explaining” and “developing” either—explaining is also developing. And the “standard” I demand of the Lecture Notes is the standard of a mentor lecturing to undergraduates. Of course, there is no absolute or objective standard for evaluating how a teacher teaches. I am only expressing my personal dissatisfaction.