Thoughts on Chinese Philosophy
from The Importance of Living
by Lin Yu-Tang.

The Chinese philosopher is one who dreams with one eye open, who views life with love and sweet irony, who mixes his cynicism with a kindly tolerance, and who alternately wakes up from life's dream and then nods again, feeling more alive when he is dreaming than when he is awake, thereby investing his waking life with a dream-world quality. He sees with one eye closed and with one eye opened the futility of much that goes on around him and of his own endeavors, but barely retains enough sense of reality to determine to go through with it. He is seldom disillusioned because he has no illusions, and seldom disappointed because he never had extravagant hopes. In this way his spirit is emancipated.

For after surveying the field of Chinese literature and philosophy, I come to the conclusion that the highest ideal of Chinese culture has always been a man with a sense of detachment (ta kuan) toward life based on a sense of wise disenchantment. For from this detachment comes high-mindedness (k'uang huai), a high mindedness which enables one to go through life with tolerant irony and escape the temptations of fame and wealth and achievement, and eventually makes him take what comes. And from this detachment arise also his sense of freedom, his love of vagabondage and his pride and nonchalance. It is only with this sense of freedom and nonchalance that one eventually arrives at the keen and intense joy of living.

For here we come to an entirely new way of looking at life by an entirely different type of mind. It is a truism to say that the culture of any nation is the product of its mind. Consequently, where there is a national mind so racially different and historically isolated from the Western cultural world, we have the right to expect new answers to the problems of life, or what is better, new methods of approach, or, still better, a new posing of the problems themselves. We know some of the virtues and deficiencies of that mind, at least as revealed to us in the historical past. It has a glorious art and a contemptible science, a magnificent common sense and an infantile logic, a fine womanish chatter about life and almost no scholastic philosophy. It is generally known that the Chinese mind is an intensely practical, hard-headed one, and it is also known to some lovers of Chinese art that it is a profoundly sensitive mind; by a still smaller proportion of people, it is accepted as also a profoundly poetic and philosophical mind.

In the West, the insane are so many that they are put in an asylum, in China the insane are so unusual that we worship them.

The Chinese have a light, an almost gay philosophy, and the best proof of their philosophic temper is to be found in this wise and merry philosophy of living.

The Chinese character has a high sensitivity, which guarantees a proper artistic approach to life and answers for the Chinese affirmation that this earthly life is beautiful and the consequent intense love of this life. But it signifies more than that; actually it stands for the artistic approach even to philosophy. It accounts for the fact that the Chinese philosopher's view of life is essentially the poet's view of life, and that in China, philosophy is married to poetry rather than to science as it in the West.

This high sensitivity to the pleasures and pains and flux and change of the colors of life is the very basis that makes a light philosophy possible.

Man's sense of the tragedy of life comes from his sensitive perception of the tragedy of a departing spring, and a delicate tenderness toward life comes from a tenderness toward the withered blossoms that bloomed yesterday. First the sadness and sense of defeat, then the awakening and the laughter of the old rogue-philosopher.

The realism of one awakened is the poet’s realism and not that of the businessman, and the laughter of the old rogue is no longer the laughter of the young go-getter singing his way to success with his head up and his chin out, but that of an old man running his finger through his flowing beard, and speaking in a soothingly low voice.

Such a dreamer loves peace, for no one can fight hard for a dream. He will be more intent to live reasonably and well with his fellow dreamers. Thus is the high tension of life lowered.

The chief function of this sense of realism is the elimination of all non-essentials in the philosophy of life, holding life down by the neck, as it were, for fear that the wings of imagination may carry it away to an imaginary and possibly beautiful, but unreal, world.

The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials, in reducing the problems of philosophy to just a few--the enjoyment of the home (the relationship between man and woman and child), of living, of Nature and of culture--and in showing all the other irrelevant scientific disciplines and futile chases after knowledge to the door. The problems of life for the Chinese philosopher then become amazingly few and simple.

Gifted with this realism, and with a profound distrust of logic and of the intellect itself, philosophy for the Chinese becomes a matter of direct and intimate feeling of life itself, and refuses to be encased in any system. For there is a robust sense of reality, a sheer animal sense, a spirit of reasonableness which crushes reason itself and makes the rise of any hard and fast philosophic system impossible.

The mature Chinese is always a person who refuses to think too hard or to believe in any single idea or faith or school of philosophy whole-heartedly.

The final product of this culture and philosophy is this: in China, as compared with the West, man lives a life closer to nature and closer to childhood, a life in which the instincts and the emotions are given free play and emphasized against the life of the intellect, with the strange combination of devotion to the flesh and arrogance of the spirit, of profound wisdom and foolish gaiety, of high sophistication and childish naiveté.

This philosophy is characterized by: first, a gift for seeing life whole in art; secondly, a conscious return to simplicity in philosophy; and thirdly, an ideal of reasonableness in living. The end product is, strange to say, a worship of the poet, the peasant and the vagabond.

The Scamp as Ideal

Man’s dignity consists in the following facts which distinguish man from animals. First, that he has a playful curiosity and a natural genius for exploring knowledge; second, that he has dreams and a lofty idealism (often vague, or confused, or cocky, it is true, but nevertheless worthwhile); third, and still more important, that he is able to correct his dreams by a sense of humor, and thus restrain his idealism by a more robust and healthy realism; and finally, that he does not react to his surroundings mechanically and uniformly as animals do, but possesses the ability and the freedom to determine his own reactions and to change surroundings at his will.

This last is the same as saying that human personality is the last thing to be reduced to mechanical laws; somehow the human mind is forever elusive, uncatchable and unpredictable, and manages to wriggle out of mechanistic laws or a materialistic dialectic that crazy psychologists and unmarried economists are trying to impose upon him. Man, therefore, is a curious, dreamy, humorous and wayward creature.

In short, my faith in human dignity consists in the belief that man is the greatest scamp on earth. Human dignity must be associated with the idea of a scamp and not with that of an obedient, disciplined and regimented soldier.

In this present age of threats to democracy and individual liberty, probably only the scamp and the spirit of the scamp alone will save us from becoming lost as serially numbered units in the masses of disciplined, obedient, regimented and uniformed coolies. The scamp will be the last and most formidable enemy of dictatorships. He will be the champion of human dignity and individual freedom, and will be the last to be conquered. All modern civilization depends entirely upon him.

Probably the Creator knew well that, when He created man upon this earth, He was producing a scamp, a brilliant scamp, it is true, but a scamp nonetheless. The scamp-like qualities of man are, after all, his most hopeful qualities. This scamp that the Creator has produced is undoubtedly a brilliant chap. He is still a very unruly and awkward adolescent, thinking himself greater and wiser than he really is, still full of mischief and naughtiness and love of a free-for-all. Nevertheless, there is so much good in him that the Creator might still be willing to pin on him his hopes, as a father sometimes pins his hopes on a brilliant but somewhat erratic son of twenty. Would He be willing some day to retire and turn over the management of this universe to this erratic son of His? I wonder......

Speaking as a Chinese, I do not think that any civilization can be called complete until it has progressed from sophistication to unsophistication, and made a conscious return to simplicity of thinking and living, and I call no man wise until he has made the progress from the wisdom of knowledge to the wisdom of foolishness, and become a laughing philosopher, feeling first life’s tragedy and then life’s comedy. For we must weep before we can laugh. Out of sadness comes the awakening, and out of the awakening comes the laughter of the philosopher, with kindliness and tolerance to boot.

The world, I believe, is far too serious, and being far too serious, it has need of a wise and merry philosophy. The philosophy of the Chinese art of living can certainly be called the gay science, if anything can be called by that phrase used by Nietzsche. After all, only a gay philosophy is profound philosophy;

The serious philosophies of the West haven’t even begun to understand what life is. To me personally, the only function of philosophy is to teach us to take life more lightly and gayly than the average business man does, for no business man who does not retire at fifty, if he can, is in my eyes a philosopher.

The world can be made a more peaceful and more reasonable place to live in only when men have imbued themselves in the light gayety of this spirit. The modern man takes life far too seriously, and because he is too serious, the world is full of trouble.

I am perhaps entitled to call this the philosophy of the Chinese people rather than of any one school. It is a philosophy that is greater than Confucius and greater than Laotse, for it transcends these and other ancient philosophers; it draws from these fountain springs of thought and harmonizes them into a whole, and from the abstract outlines of their wisdom, it has created an art of living in the flesh, visible, palpable and understandable by the common man.

Surveying Chinese literature, art and philosophy as a whole, it has become quite clear to me that the philosophy of a wise disenchantment and a hearty enjoyment of life is their common message and teaching--the most constant, most characteristic and most persistent refrain of Chinese thought.

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