International Conference---Humanistic International: Humanism, China, Globalism

The July 25, 2000, edition of Investor’s Business Daily carried the headline, “Chinese Communists Discover Hope in Forgotten American Conservative,” over an essay that marveled that contemporary Chinese should be so intrigued by a long dead anti-revolutionary professor from Harvard. The April 21, 2009, edition of China Now carries the news in its “Hot List” of books that are among the ones most widely discussed in China this month is a book by an ancient Harvard Professor of French, Irving Babbitt published by one of the leading trade publishers in China, Sanlian. This hot book is called Humanism Fully Considered (Rewenzhuyi de chuanpan sikao) (Sanlian, 2003). The write-up says, “This is a volume of essays on American scholar Irving Babbitt (1865-1933). A Harvard professor of French literature from 1912 until his death, Babbitt helped initiate New Humanism, a movement inspired by classical traditions and literature. Babbitt was deeply opposed to the more relativistic pragmatism of John Dewey, who was quite influential in China in the 1920s and later. The book’s popularity is part of the curious Babbitt Cult in China.” Sometime we at Harvard even forget that Harvard was an essential way-station of the road that transmitted key ideas of humanism to China and played a key role in keeping them alive.
What is going on? Let’s approach the issue from a different route. Many in recent years have asked us to follow the Silk Road, and many more of us have learned a great deal by retracing that path through museum exhibits in various venues. But what about retracing the Humanism Road? It’s not the Revolutionary Road, but rather the Evolutionary Road, with even some admixture of ideas of Darwin in 19th century Europe and China.
It is a road with many paths contributing to it and leading from it in other directions. But there is no doubt that the road originates in the modern era when some people in Renaissance began to try to revivify ancient Roman and Greek paganism as an agenda for living. From Renaissance Italy, Spain, and Portugal travelers all charged up with what they’d read about pagan Egypt and Greece as well as Rome went out beyond Gibraltar on that watery road that went to Macau, to the palace of the Chinese Emperor, to Japan. When the humanists spread the humanities to Asia, they were spreading particular activities such as the printing press with movable metal type. (The specifics of the transmission of Gutenberg style printing to Asia are the subject of recent work by Oxford historian M. Andoni Ucerler). When the road came alive with travelers again in the twentieth century, self-styled humanists who were Chinese traveled to the US and then back from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where a few of them, like Liang Shiqiu, had studied with Professor Irving Babbitt and returned to participate in the great intellectual ferment that gave rise to the May 4th movement. The first issue of the New Tide monthly, produced by students at Peking University in 1919, declared, “Real learning gives one individuality and independence. The Renaissance and Reformation in the Western world show how scholars there declared their independence of tradition” (Chow Tse-Tsung, The May 4th Movement, p. 60).
The spirit of humanism is not iconoclastic. It does not seek to destroy all traces of travel along the road that has brought present-day travelers to what they believe is a state of enlightenment. Humanism involves recovering tradition, not the trappings of tradition, but its essence as we (whoever “we” are) understand it. This work involves a struggle. As Walter Benjamin says, tradition must constantly be wrested away from a traditionalism that is just about to suffocate it. What he says exactly is “Every age must strive anew to wrest tradition way from a conformism that is working to overpower it” (Selected Writings, vol 4, p. 391). The humanists inspired by Babbitt went back to China and founded journals that sought to re-enliven tradition. Of course, Babbitt’s students fell into serious debates with serious revolutionaries like Lu Xun. Always having an effect on discussions in China — even after Babbitt’s students became less prominent in China after 1949 — was the fact that the word for human, “ren,” was set into play in Chinese culture by Confucius; and its role, though it might change, was a constant. So the question "what is human?" is always at the forefront in China as it has been in the West. In the last fifty years the towering figure Michel Foucault questioned what is human, but especially in his later work with his frequent deployment of the historical scholarship of Pierre Hadot, he seemed to be on the brink of leading a humanism revival.
There was a humanism revival in China beginning in the late 1970s and then becoming a major force in the 1990s thanks to debates and discussions in Shanghai that soon drew the attention of intellectuals in Beijing and other cities. In 1993, several Shanghai-based intellectuals (including Wang Xiaoming and Chen Sihe) began a movement to restore “the humanistic spirit” that led to numerous publications, including a roundtable held in 1994 whose transcript was published in Dushu and became widely read (see Gloria Davies, Worrying about China, p. 87-105). Overseas-based scholars such as Zhao Yiheng, Zhang Longxi, and Xu also published essays in defense of humanism in the influential Hong Kong based journal Twentieth-First Century. It is past time to figure out what it is that people do when they follow the Humanism Road. The question for our gathering should be about the question that takes us to the heart of the humanistic practice: What has been transmitted across space and time? What’s been lost in transmission and translation and what has been gained? We need to begin with the question: What is the significance of that complex word “human” (or “ren”)? Thanks to the struggles of our ancestors we can go further than Foucault and bring humanism out of the closet and declare that the revival is in motion.
http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k67662&pageid=icb.page322353