Previously I mentioned that I wanted to write about “why study the West,” and that made me think of the phrase “Western essence, Chinese utility” (西体中用). A quick search online showed that Mr. Li Zehou had already brought it up. He explained “food, clothing, housing, and transportation” as the “essence,” and what he meant by Western essence, Chinese utility was “the ‘Western essence’ of modernization put to use on Chinese soil.”
Some of Mr. Li Zehou’s ideas are excellent, but my line of thought is different from his. Mr. Huang Yinong also seems to have mentioned “Western essence, Chinese utility,” but in a more general way.
What I mean by “Western essence, Chinese utility” is not merely “using the essence of the West in China,” but also a shorthand for “Western learning as essence, Chinese learning as utility.” In the old days, talk of the so-called Chinese essence, Western utility was also aimed at the question of how to understand the scholarly tradition; the original formulation was “old learning as essence, new learning as utility.” Chinese tradition has a scholarly lineage of the Four Books and Five Classics, the classics, histories, philosophers, and collected works; the West, by contrast, has traditions of science, philosophy, political science, engineering, and so on. While learning Western scholarship, should we preserve the Chinese scholarly tradition from being cut off? If we preserve the Chinese scholarly tradition, then what is the relationship between that tradition and Western scholarship? Should both be taught and studied side by side, in parallel, creating something like a split personality in the seeker after learning? Or should they coexist in some complementary way? — These are the questions that the proposition “Chinese essence, Western utility” attempts to answer. In other words, Chinese and Western learning are both studied, but with a distinction between primary and secondary, internal and external. The meaning of Chinese essence, Western utility is that Chinese learning remains the主体, the trunk, while Western learning supplements it so as to enhance practical and technical strength.
As a result, the ideal of “Chinese essence, Western utility” failed, because modern Chinese people do not need to deliberate at all about how to strike a balance between the Chinese learning tradition and the Western learning tradition; rather, the Chinese learning tradition was cut off altogether. “Chinese learning” was swept into the dust heap. The status of Chinese classical scholarship now is not essentially different from academic fields such as the study of ancient Egypt, ancient Rome, German philosophy, or English literature, and has become merely one “academic field.” It has become, like high-energy physics and organic chemistry and the like, one of the specialized subjects under the modern educational system, rather than an independent scholarly tradition. In this educational system inherited from the West, the status of Chinese learning is optional; aside from barely leaving behind some residual threads under the name of “Chinese language” in primary education, it has little bearing on the larger picture.
That is to say, “Western learning as essence” has already become an established fact; to revive the old learning and restore it to a position of primacy is truly as hard as ascending to heaven.
But when I bring up “Western essence, Chinese utility,” it is not merely out of some helpless sense that “the great river flows eastward and never returns,” as though, since Chinese learning as essence is impossible, we might as well squeeze it into the side branches of “utility” in some makeshift way. It is not only that. Even if Chinese learning as essence were still possible—for instance, in the circumstances of the late Qing—I would still advocate “Western essence, Chinese utility.”
First, I believe that the Western scholarly tradition is as great as the Chinese scholarly tradition, and in some respects, such as the spirit of freedom, the idea of democracy, the ardor for knowledge, and so on, it is indeed somewhat superior to the Chinese tradition.
Furthermore, I believe that what is most worth learning from is precisely the core, backbone portion of the Western scholarly tradition, rather than its level of tools and implements, its “hardened ships and powerful cannon.”
Historically, the ironware and horsemanship of nomadic tribes and similar “military technologies” were often more advanced than those of agrarian civilizations. The Mongols once conquered the whole Central Plain with their irresistible “iron-hard horses and weapons.” But China has never, simply because we were overwhelmingly defeated, completely negated our own traditional culture and introduced the scholarly tradition of nomadic culture to replace it. As for why modern China lost confidence in traditional culture, the reason is by no means just the West’s “hardened ships and powerful cannon.” In fact, Chinese traditional culture, having grown increasingly closed since the Tang and Song dynasties, lacked exchange and revitalization, and had already declined to some extent in itself. Faced with Western intrusion, we were unable not only to resist it militarily, but also to hold the cultural line.
When we are overwhelmed militarily, we can “adopt the attire of the Hu and practice mounted archery,” we can “learn the superior techniques of the barbarians in order to control the barbarians.” But if we are also overwhelmed culturally, then it is not enough merely to learn some techniques.
Thus, we must learn the main body of Western culture, and we must learn the theoretical system of Western science. There is nothing shameful about this kind of learning either. For example, even in the Tang dynasty’s heyday, it would proactively journey to the Western Heaven to “seek the scriptures”; and the scriptures brought back were not technical knowledge, but a most fundamental, integrated theoretical system. If the people of the Tang took Indian scholarship and made it their own, if Western Europeans took Greek scholarship and made it their own, then if modern Chinese people can also take Western scholarship and make it their own, that is by no means anything embarrassing. And in the process of transplantation, scholarship will burst forth with unprecedented vitality. History has proved that every transplantation of a scholarly tradition is very likely to stimulate a golden age in new soil. The brilliant civilization of the modern West can also be said to be the result of “Greek essence, European utility.”
But the crux lies precisely in this “taking it and making it one’s own”; the original meaning of “utility” is a container (a bucket). After drawing in the flowing waters of another scholarly lineage, the key is whether one can actually hold them. If one has no bucket of one’s own, then the stream of Western learning really does become a flood that sweeps everything away. Such an act of diversion is merely a process of simple cultural expansion; it can hardly be called cultural transplantation.
So what is this bucket that is used to hold the essence? Is it still “utility” in the sense of practical utility? Yes. But practical utility does not refer to the mechanical techniques of building ships and casting cannons; rather, it is the level Aristotle called “practical knowledge.” I once mentioned the modern absence of the entire dimension of practical knowledge in a rather important essay. That is to say, modern science becoming a flood that levels everything is not just a problem faced by the Chinese; it is the same in the West, where their container also can no longer hold it.
“Practical knowledge” lies between “theoretical knowledge” and “productive knowledge”: pursuing the principle of nature and the way of all things at the theoretical level is theoretical knowledge; producing fine ships and sharp cannons at the level of artifacts is productive knowledge. Practical knowledge, however, aims at wisely selecting the appropriate means. This level is neither the intuition of theoretical knowledge nor the construction of productive knowledge, but rather points toward “acting as.”
The representative of practical knowledge is ethics (of course, not ethics in the modern utilitarian sense), and it is also closely related to politics and education. This is precisely the aspect most emphasized by the Chinese scholarly tradition—benevolence, righteousness, ritual, wisdom, and the doctrine of the mean all concern this “practical knowledge.” The modern Western “Greek essence, European utility” was likewise precisely the transplantation of the Greek scholarly system into a Christian ethical and political environment, thereby opening their golden age. When we now say “Western essence, Chinese utility,” what we are hoping for is exactly to transplant the ontology of Western scholarship into the Chinese tradition of ritual and music, ethics and propriety.
To achieve the ideal of Western essence, Chinese utility, we must summon back this dimension of “practical knowledge.” In terms of Chinese tradition, that is the dimension of “ritual and music.” We might as well re-interpret a phrase usually taken as a representative claim of technological neutralism: “Technology has no good or evil; the key depends on how people use it.” The key lies in what this “use” is. Technological neutralists often go on to say that technology can be used for good purposes, or for bad purposes. But what I want to say is that “use” is precisely not this dimension; rather, it means that technology can be used well, or abused. We need to distinguish between “using well” and “using it for good ends”; “using well” unfolds a unique non-objectifying space, and the knowledge of “use” is not knowledge about objects.
For example, knives and forks can be used to eat, and they can also be used to hurt people—that is the line of thought of technological neutralism. But what I want to emphasize even more is that when using knives and forks to eat, there is a proper, ritual way of using them, and there is a clumsy, vulgar way of using them—that is the real question of “use.” Using tableware in a vulgar manner may, in terms of achieving the goal of eating, be more efficient, yet it is still abuse. In a traditional ritual-and-music society, every object has its proper way of being used; neither excessive nor insufficient, one must use it just right. That is the learning of “use.”
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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