Study of Cosmic Love
* Book: Tan Sitong. A Study of Cosmic Love (Renxue).
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Description
"Written in 1896, almost immediately after the Sino-Japanese War (1894– 1895), Renxue, or A Study of Cosmic Love, was one of the first works to radically reinterpret classical Chinese texts in the framework of modern Western philosophy and science" [1]
Review
Viren Murthy:
"Tan begins his treatise by describing ren as both ideal and material. Jiang Guanghui suggests that Tan continues a Chinese tradition of thought in which there is no clear division between the mind and body or the material and the psychic.21 In Tan’s text, ren has an ontological significance and is associated with material substances such as ether.
Tan’s vision brings together unique aspects of premodern Chinese and modern Western patterns of thought. To some extent, we can see Tan Sitong developing an idea that Hajime Nakatani considers prevalent dur- ing the post-Han period, namely that moral characteristics are identical to states of qi or bodily characteristics.
For example, in his Treatise on Personalities (Renwuzhi 人物志), Liu Shao (189–244 ad) defined ren in the following manner: “Thus one whose bones are upright but resilient is called broad minded and strong willed. Being broad minded and strong willed is the essence of ren”.
This passage associates ren with a certain physical disposition and behind this physical disposition is a configuration of qi. In Nakatani’s words: “A person as conceived by medieval authors was then but a passing phase in the consecutive stages leading from qi endowment to its physiological, psychological, ethical and communal realizations.
Tan follows this pattern and connects ren to ether, which as Ingo Schafer has pointed out, in Tan’s thinking has much in common with the traditional concept of qi.25 Like earlier Chinese philosophers’ conception of qi, ether is imperceptible and yet penetrates the world.
The phenomenal world, the world of the void, and the world of sentient beings are permeated by something extremely vast and minute, the cohesive, penetrative, and connective power which embraces all things. Its form eludes the eyes; its sound, the ears; its taste, the mouth; and its smell, the nose. For want of a better term, let it be called “ether.”
Even if we limit our gaze to the Chinese context, the above passages of course draws on more than the medieval connection between qi and ren. Tan expands the medical metaphor associating the flow of qi, health, and ren to envelop the whole world. In his exploration of the influence of Song- Ming Confucianism on Tan’s concept of ren as the world, Shimada Kenji draws our attention to the philosophies of Cheng Mingdao (1032–1085) and Wang Yangming (1472–1529). Cheng Mingdao invoked Daoist and Buddhist conceptions of the unity between humans and the cosmos. We see this vision in a number of classical sources. For example, Zhuang Zi wrote, “Heaven and earth were born together with me,” and the Buddhist Zeng Bi wrote “the myriad things and I are one body.”27 However, Cheng fused this concept of the cosmos with the principles of Confucian morality.
Tan developed the Song-Ming Confucian synthesis of Daoism-Buddhism and Confucianism, in which the ontological source takes on the characteristics of Confucian morality, and ren in particular. Human beings realize this ethical perspective when they allow the cosmos to flow without obstruction and identify their own bodies with the cosmos.
Tan invokes the identity between bodily states and ethical stances to explain moral and religious concepts around the world.
When it [ether] reveals itself in application ( yong), Confucius called it “ren,” “the ultimate source,” and “nature”; Mo Zi calls it “love without discrimination”; the Buddha calls it “the ocean of nature” and “compassion”; Jesus calls it “soul,” “you shall love your neighbor as yourself,” and “love your enemies like friends”; and natural scientists call it “centripetal force” and “gravitational force”—all refer to this thing.
Tan describes the physical dimension of the things in terms of modern scientific concepts such as gravity, which acts on all bodies equally. From this perspective, we might say that the duality between the material and Tan’s cosmological source can be compared to Spinoza’s description of God or Substance having the attributes of thought and extension, which are identical to one another. According to Spinoza as well, every idea can also be understood as some type of physicality or extension. In fact, he even claims that the mind is the idea of the body.
However, while Spinoza avoids calling substance ethical, Tan constantly uses metaphors of the all-pervading substance of ether to derive ethical meanings, such as loving one’s neighbor as one’s self and loving one’s enemies like one’s friends. While previous thinkers may have used qi to establish hierarchical relations, all of the above-mentioned concepts express something similar to the standpoint of exchange value, according to which any thing can be compared to any other. From this arises the ability to stand in for the other. While in Tan’s text this exchangeability or equality is attached to a moral maxim, such as “love thy enemy,” at the same time, it represents a physical force such as gravity.
While in the modern worldview a force such as gravity is devoid of moral content, Tan tries to infuse physicality with the feeling of love and morality. However, unlike medieval authors, Tan faces a world in which physicality appears to resist the imposition of moral norms and human feelings. Thus Tan makes the identity of subject and object or mind and original body or ether into a goal for the reflexive subject to pursue. In other words, the identity between mind and body is Tan’s presupposition but not quite a description of the way things are in the temporal world.
In fact, as we shall see, the unity between the physical and the mental is actually a means to overcome time and finitude; realizing this unity then becomes the true precondition for moral action.”
(https://www.academia.edu/5050630/Tan_Sitong_Zhang_Taiyan_and_Imaginations_of_Time)