Sino-Western Diptych：Reflections on history, philosophy and art

Since the Industrial Revolution, Europe and its younger extension across the Atlantic, the United States of America, have been ascending and dominating forces. However, the gradual consolidation of the Chinese renaissance radically alters the West’s relative weight in global affairs.

The 21st century is not only multipolar but also multi-conceptual. In a global village where the advancement of transportation and communication has abolished geographic distance, powers continue to interact while the most ancient civilizations have to coexist.

Looking at China’s recent transformation, especially since the launch of the reform and opening-up, the West was expecting a profound Westernization of the Far East’s largest country. It will have to adjust, instead, to a much more complex reality: a Chinese modern China as one of the components of a multi-conceptual world in which modernity is taking different forms.

In this context, the most regrettable characteristics of the political period that the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States has opened, is the notion of an absolute antagonism between the Chinese and Western values. That the Chinese and Western identities would be structurally in opposition constitutes a false and dangerously misleading narrative.

The West and the Far East met in significant intellectual encounters all along the previous century; the interactions between Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and Kuki Shuzo (1888-1941) or Tesuka Tomio (1903-1983); the dialogue between Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) and Daisaku Ikeda (born in 1928); the conversations between Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) or Ezra Pound (1885-1972) with the richness of the Chinese tradition are references for cross-cultural exchanges.

In fact, a renewed serious intercultural dialogue between the West and especially China can reveal that there are only some profound elements of convergence between the two traditions which, contrary to what Samuel Huntington (1927-2008) suggests, are not destined to clash.

Economic and financial cycles, the spectacular stories highlighted by the media, the vicissitudes of business, the endless struggles for power, the enormous resonance of the social media, are parts of a multi-dimensional reality, but any credible consideration on the relations between civilizations implies a reflection upon history, philosophy and art.

The military confrontation in the Pacific between Japan and the US that ended with the use of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki constitutes one of the darkest chapters of the World War II. However, the deeper roots of these insane destruction were 19th-century Western nationalism and the rivalries among the European powers themselves which, after the unification of Germany, led to World War I.

In the aftermath of the two world wars whose main origin was the fight of Europe against itself, and certainly not a clash of civilizations, the Cold War has been also opposing, from a cultural perspective, two pillars of the Western civilization, the US and the USSR since Russia’s identity is inseparable from Christianity and its profound connections with the European history.

Beyond the ubiquitous discourses on Sino-Western strategic rivalries or the theoretical debates on the "Thucydides trap", the real pattern that a long-term view of history shows is a surprising compatibility between the Sinic and the Western civilizations.

It can certainly be said that, for a long period of time, it is the geographic distance which prevented China and the West to directly clash on a massive scale. When European imperialism forced the declining Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) to comply with its rapacious demands, the two sides collided in what were limited conflicts. More importantly, it was not in the difference between cultures but in Western violent expansionism that laid the cause of these confrontations.

Sino-Western compatibility is also explained, to a certain extent, by the fact that both civilizations are, above all, humanism; they have evolved and persisted under different forms, but they both essentially put the dignity of Man at the center of their preoccupations, a dignity nurtured by objective social mechanisms and self-cultivation.

Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) who is interestingly better remembered by China than by Europe, was able to articulate Confucianism and some of the key principles of Christianity by using their connection in relation with the dignity of Man. The principle of accommodation wisely put into practice by the Jesuits would have been less easy to implement in a context of a greater cultural estrangement separating the two traditions.

More generally, those whose choice is to live for a long period of time the cross-cultural experience and not only to speculate on it as an object of academic study, are more able to comprehend the dynamics and implications of accommodation. They experience a difference which is never absolute, they are well aware of the difficulty to translate while, at the same time, they know that translation and mutual understanding are always possible.

Be it in the West, François Jullien for example, or in China, with the important contribution of Gu Zhun (1915-1974), some theorists look at China’s Zhou Dynasty -- especially the Eastern Zhou (770-256BC) -- and at the Greco-Roman Europe, as the sources of an essential divergence between two traditions. Such an approach has to be nuanced.

Obviously, Greek philosophy and the Chinese traditional thinking operate differently. But, there are also some major correspondences between the Greco-Roman intellectual environment and classical China; the meaningful similarities between Confucianism and Stoicism, between the historians Thucydides (460-400BC) and Sima Qian (145-86BC), or between the Cynics and Zhuangzi (369-286BC) have all been studied and commented upon.

The notion of an "Axial Age" would not have been conceptualized by Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) without the commonalities existing between the Zhou dynasty and Greco-Roman Europe.

With the construction of Western modernity, the affinity between China and the West became even more evident. More concerned by the temporal realities than by the supernatural, separating religion from the public affairs, the European Enlightenment brought the West even closer to China.

The French literatus René Etiemble (1909-2002) presented in L’Europe chinoise (1988) the deep impact that the Chinese tradition had upon the French 18th century. There is, indeed, a relative conceptual alignment between the secularism of the Western modernity and the immanence of Confucian ethics.

The rich phenomenon of cross-fertilization can also be interpreted as the mark of a certain closeness between the Sinic and the Western traditions. The echo of the notion of "Silk Road" sounds almost infinite not because it describes material transactions along routes crisscrossing Eurasia, but because it is a powerful metaphor for the cross-fertilization between the West and the East beyond the passage of time.

One the one hand, Leibniz (1646-1716) and Voltaire (1694-1778) have been deeply inspired by the Chinese culture, while on the other hand, in the 20th century, it has been possible by post-imperial China to adopt republicanism and socialism, conceptualized first by Western minds, because there were not in total contradiction with the Chinese culture. For socialism to be Sinicized, it was necessary for Chinese intellectual circles to articulate it first, with some of the organic patterns of the Chinese tradition.

To use Etiemble’s terminology, if one can certainly reflect upon what has been a Chinese Europe -- L’Europe chinoise -- we could also discuss the multiple dimensions of a European China.

The magnum opus of Qian Zhongshu (1910-1998) is built around the notion of Da Tong, the very possibility to "strike connections" between the Chinese and Western traditions. Qian’s Limited Views - Guan Zhui Bian - a rare expression of intelligent erudition, illustrates through literary criticism that despite the differences between the West and China, they remain at a distance which allows mutual elucidation and illumination. Limited Views is, in that sense, one of the most remarkable expressions of the Silk Road effect as a metaphor for cross-fertilization between different intellectual traditions.

Qian Zhongshu’s masterpiece is the demonstration that a pure sameness and an absolute otherness are simply myths. In this perspective in which thoughtful nuances are what matters, China and the West are in a relation reminiscent of the Yin and the Yang; they are two poles simultaneously within and outside each other in a mutually transformative articulation.

The art of Zhao Wuji (1920-2013) is the visualization of this transformative articulation; but it makes also the unique value of Olivier Debré (1920-1999) or Pierre Soulages’ paintings. The aesthetic emotion that can be felt in front of their creations is the most direct intuition of the forms that Sino-Western transformative relations can take.

David Gosset is the founder of the Europe-China Forum (2002). He is the author of Limited Views On The Chinese Renaissance (2018).