Coming to Christian Orthodoxy from Confucian Philosophy

The Chinese Character for “Righteousness” or “Mutual Harmony” Shows a Bowing Man (亻) Next to the Number 2 (二), Implying Respect Between Two Men (人)

Dear Friend, 

I read your letter and took several days to think about the implication of your rejection of culture as a vehicle for truth, and your insistence on individual insight and responsibility as the core of one’s moral experience. It is very clear that you see the evolution of human thought as expressed in modern science as superior to my “medieval philosophy of life,” and I grant you the freedom to maintain such, although I cannot bring myself to agree. You seem to be arguing, 1) Life is the ultimate good, therefore religion is not necessary for a moral or happy life, 2) Science has improved the quality of life (where religion did not), and therefore scientific and contemporary life is superior to life under religion. Is this a correct summary? 

My questions: What criterion determines life itself as the highest possible good? How can you make what is essentially good better? Therefore, how does science become an alternative to Christianity through the improvement in quality of that which is already the definition of the highest good? 

"Life as the highest form of good" is a further development of the Aristotelian idea that existence is superior to nonexistence, because only that which exists can know the difference between existence and nonexistence, and that which does not exist cannot know existence. This was further developed into the foundation of Modern Philosophy through the use of the Cartesian formula "Cogito Ergo Sum,” which was used in an attempt at an unassailable Christian apologetic, reasoning that the highest form of existence would be the intial cause and not dependent on other forms, implying that it is like humanity in cogniscience, and also that it would be the highest good. In this, Descartes was able to repair the logical problems of the Anselmian Ontological argument, insisting on the knowability of self-existence from the reasonable use of doubt, but also created another fault-line in Christian apologetics. Proving the existence of "other" was a burden too great for a philosophy built on the existence of thought to bare. This approach requires a priori knowledge to reach a conclusion on the existence of God, but if you use the Cartesian philosophy as it is limited to the human experience (as Spinoza applied and Kant argued), you arrive at the conclusion that the highest form of good is your own existence. This view of personal existence as the highest possible good is at the core of the philosophy of both Empiricism, Modernism, and Postmodernism, stemming from the Scholastic use of arguments of existence, causality, and the definitions of the highest good, limited by the experiential exclusion of special revelation by Empirical Philosophers. Therefore, we can either accept the ideal of the highest good as God by faith, or logically reject it as a unnecessary anthropomorphicization of the universe, using the pure empirical standards of Kant or the philosophical skepticism of Spinoza. Just as the Anselmian argument for the highest "imaginable good,” Cartesian conclusions on the undeniable nature of self-existence do not contribute to an irrefutable "Other,” a counterpart to the experience of existence that lies within our intellectual or existential definition. 

There is, thankfully, an alternative to the self-centered, cold, mechanical philosophy of the West. I have found extreme resonance in the non-Aristotelian, non-Augustinian, non-Scholastic philosophical definition of good from the writings of the Church Fathers, with Buddhist thinkers, East Asian folk traditions and the Confucian literary tradition. The consonnance comes through the idea of "Communion", and transcends all cultures and barriers and defines the process of human culture and epistemology. The Chinese word for righteousness is "仁義", which is literally the "relationship between two men (二人) when one is superior in resources to the other, but the dependent submits to the superior.” “仁,” according to Confucius is the ground of virtue, and it is a hierarchical relationship between two people, a master and a student, a leader and a follower. Our humanity is bound up in the patterns that this creates - Father and Son, Husband and Wife, Emperor and Governor, Older Brother and Younger Brother. These were the relationships that framed reality and society in the East Asian experience. This was the definition of “Communion,” “Friendship,” and “Hierarchy.” The cultural and organizational acquisition of the operational reality through the face to face interaction with other individuals is the main, trusted, and implicitly genuine avenue for the attainment of knowledge. This places very little stock in self-evident existence, but depends on the confirmation of personal existence received from others through social interaction. The knowledge is produced by knowing and being known, not from within the realm of the person's own thoughts, which are believed to be limited by the access to socially defined information. (i.e., poor people are uneducated and isolated because education is a type of social relationship that directly ties to one's status in the group, reflective on the ability of those tied to the student through social or kinship to direct the time and attention of those who are superior to the student favorably. The social dynamic is the source of knowledge, the process for acquiring knowledge, and the vehicle for its transmission into the future). While the West may claim such a method as philosophically untenable and dissatisfactory, the fact is that Ivy League Schools work on this principle, and the truth is that the attitude that controls the positive social exchange is the accepted view in every culture - therefore, the unconscious standard for truth is not dogmatic or semantic, but culturally conditioned social relationships. This is the truth that both Ancient Christianity and Asian culture has to offer us today as a theory of knowledge and a definition of morality and ethics. 

Knowledge does not come "A Priori" but "Ta Gaosuni" (他告诉你 "Others tell me" in Chinese). The modern West often limits knowledge to the logic of the individual existence, based on doubting the ability of groups or contexts to know, while the Chinese culture does not doubt the ability of the group to have accurate experiences on which criterion for knowledge are based, actually preferring the wisdom of the crowd because of it's much greater authority and basis for knowledge. The older the culture is, the less it doubts the importance of culture and the more it doubts the wisdom of the individuality. Such insights are hard won. 

This is especially true in the idea of "meeting Christ face to face,” trying to build a relationship with the person of God in an iconoclastic Christian Protestant tradition, where the way that everyone pictures Christ is from images that extend from beyond the tradition of Protestantism. This is where you come from, and so do I. I understand the devastating power this background has on the imagination. I understand why you cling to the individuality Protestantism gave you, while trying to jettison the toxic brew that attempted to blind your minds eye. This is why Chinese philosophy is so valuable. Sometimes it helps to see things from a radically new perspective! 

In Christ, 

Joseph (Ancient Church of the West)

July 11th, 2012