Guanxi Master

Postmodern Politics: A Logical Use of the West’s Illogical Argument

This is the first of a two-part series exploring the Chinese use of Western philosophy as a basis for negotiation with the outside world. The first article details how Chinese utilize postmodernism to undermine the West’s position. The second part discusses practical applications for negotiation.

In a recent China Daily article, Chung-Yue Chang provides a classic example of the typical Chinese philosophic arguments used against the West. Ironically, it is the West’s own postmodern deconstructive philosophy, so aggressively pursued by its academics, that is effectively used here to establish the superiority of the Chinese system.

Chang accuses the West of close-mindedness, claiming that in contrast, China has accepted its own traditions along with Western traditions with a generous tolerance. But his prose speaks more broadly, I think, of China’s aloof arrogance in its refusal to learn directly from a culture which it in turn castigates as being inflexible.

Further, the author shows a taste for the faddish neologisms spawned by Western postmodernists who revel in changing a word’s traditional meaning into its opposite. One of these is the title of his article, “Absurd Transcendental Pretence,” which Chang takes from American philosopher and skeptic Robert C. Solomon. Followers of Foucault, Habermas and Marx have often cited Solomon’s The Bully Culture: Enlightenment, Transcendentalism, and the Transcendental Pretence, 1750-1850, as a critique of Western philosophical “imperialism.” Chang uses transcendental to mean an overly rational, rigid, and categorical knowledge. Transcendentalism as traditionally promoted by Western philosophers from Kant to Emerson and through its flowering in Romantic thought, has always meant a rejection of an overly rational, rigid, and categorical knowledge.

I believe this kind of confusion is the starting place for the West’s current understanding of the East, which is equally false: a wonderland of irrational transcendentalism. I’ll call this phenomenon “the New Exoticism”, in homage to our “unique” postmodern impulse.

Here are a few highlights from Chang’s article, in lock-step with the New Exoticism that has been aggressively propagated in Western academia for the last three decades:

While first claiming that China has embraced the best of the East and the West, he then contradicts himself by saying that the two have fundamentally, “different logical schemes” and “modes of thinking”: the West’s view of categorical knowledge is “static,” while the East’s is “dynamic.” He tells us that the philosophy of the ever changing fields of the Yin and the Yang is “very much in practice” within the modern Chinese frame of reference. If indeed they have embraced much of the Western “static” view of the world, however, how is this compatible within the “dynamic” universe of the Yin/Yang duality? How can the “dynamic” universe of the Yin/Yang include the “static” universe implied by the philosophy of the West? Obviously, he believes that the “dynamic” view is better than the West’s, and must exclude its “static” influence. This is something China has been doing consistently for decades. Yet he feels impelled to make the argument that modern Chinese thought is all-inclusive, embracing all philosophies, no matter how contradictory.

How does one even begin to point out the fallacy of this argument? A critical response to such a polemic against Western philosophy would be less than useless, because contradiction is the modus operandi of his philosophy. He is therefore never wrong. It is impossible to criticize someone who believes that within a closed yet somehow infinite universe, the finite could coexist with it. Ironically, as Carl Rapp, expressed it:

What Chang is truly advocating is a political transcendentalism, used specifically to discredit the “static” western traditional philosophies. As Carl Rapp pointed out in his book Fleeing the Universal:

Early on in the Western history of thought, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle founded their philosophies in direct opposition to the postmodern sophistry of their age. Aristotle, much touted by postmodern pragmatists today, was especially blunt in his treatment of this philosophy in his Metaphysics. He was adamant about the finiteness of existence and the cosmos for reasons vital to human well-being:

Really, Chang is not to be blamed for his logical use of western illogical philosophy so in vogue today. In its supposedly fundamental assertion of being an iconoclast of any power structure, postmodern philosophy’s logical end is a narrow argument whose reasonable conclusion becomes whatever you want it to be.

To read more on the practical implications of this philosophy of negotiation, read part 2: Playing the Game – Understanding How It’s Done