The Need of Humanized Thinking
Lin Yutang
THINKING is an art, and not a science. One of the greatest contrasts between Chinese and Western scholarship is the fact that in the West there is so much specialized knowledge, and so little humanized knowledge, while in China there is so much more concern with the problems of living, while there are no specialized sciences. We see an invasion of scientific thinking into the proper realm of humanized knowledge in the West, characterized by high specialization and its profuse use of scientific or semi-scientific terminology. I am speaking of "scientific" thinking in its everyday sense, and not of true scientific thinking, which cannot be divorced from common sense. on the one hand, and imagination on the other. In its everyday sense, this " scientific" thinking is strictly logical, objective, highly specialized and "atomic" in its method and vision. The contrast in the two types of scholarship, Oriental and Occidental, ultimately goes back to the opposition between logic and common sense.Logic, deprived of common sense, becomes inhuman, and common sense, deprived of logic,is incapable of penetrating into nature's mysteries.
What does one find as he goes through the field of Chinese literature and philosophy? One finds there are no sciences, no extreme theories, no dogmas, and really no great divergent schools of philosophy. Common sense and the reasonable spirit have crushed out all theories and all dogmas. Like the poet Po Chiiyi, the Chinese scholar "utilized Confucianism to order his conduct, utilized Buddhism to cleanse his mind, and then utilized history, paintings, mountains, rivers, 'wine, music and song to soothe his spirit.' He lived in the world and yet was out of it.
China, therefore, becomes a land where no one is trying very hard to think and everyone is trying very hard to live. It becomes a land where philosophy itself is a pretty simple and common sense affair that can be as conveniently put in two lines of verse as in a heavy volume. It becomes a land where there is no system of philosophy, broadly speaking, no logic, no metaphysics, no academic jargon; where there is much less academic dogmatism, less intellectual or practical fanaticism, and fewer abstract terms and long words. No sort of mechanistic rationalism is ever possible and there is a strong hatred of the idea of logical necessity. It becomes also a land where there are no lawyers in business life, as there are no logicians in philosophy. In place of well thought out systems of philosophy, they have only an intimate feeling of life, and instead of a Kant or a Hegel, they have only essayists, epigram writers and propounders of Buddhist conundrums and Taoist parables.
The literature of China as a whole presents us with a desert of short poems and short essays, seemingly interminable for one who does not appreciate them, and yet as full of variety and inexhaustible beauty as a wild landscape itself. We have only essayists and letter-writers who try to put their feeling of life in a short note or an essay of three or five hundred words, usually much shorter than the school composition of an American schoolboy. In these casual writings, letters, diaries, literary notes and regular essays, one finds here a brief comment on the vicissitudes of fortune, there a record of some woman who committed suicide in a neighboring village, or of an enjoyable spring party, or a feast in snow, or boating on a moonlight night, or an evening spent in a temple with a thunderstorm raging outside, generally including the remarks made during the conversation that made the occasion memorable. We find a host of essayists who are at the same time poets, and poets who are at the same time essayists, writing never more than five or seven hundred words, in which a whole philosophy of life is really expressed by a single line. We find writers of parables and epigrams and family letters who make no attempt to coordinate their thoughts into a rigid system. This has prevented the rise of schools and systems. The intellect is always held in abeyance by the spirit of reasonableness, and still more by the writer's artistic sensibility. Actually the intellect is distrusted.
It is hardly necessary to point out that the logical faculty is a very powerful weapon of the human mind, making the conquests of science possible. I am also aware that human progress in the West is still essentially controlled by common sense and by the critical spirit, which is greater than the logical spirit and which I think represents the highest form of thinking in the West. It is unnecessary for me to admit that there is a very much better developed critical spirit in the West than in China. In pointing out the weaknesses of logical thinking, I am only referring to a particular deficiency in Western thought, and sometimes in Western politics also, e.g., the Macht-politik of the Germans and the Japanese. Logic has its charm also, and I regard the development of the detective story as a most interesting product of the logical mind, a form of literature which failed entirely to develop in China. But sheer preoccupation with logical thinking has also its drawbacks.
The outstanding characteristic of Western scholarship is its specialization, and cutting up of knowledge into different departments. The over-development of logical thinking and specialization, with its technical phraseology, has brought about the curious fact of modern civilization, that philosophy has been so far relegated to the background, far behind politics and economics, that the average man can pass it by without a twinge of conscience. The feeling of the average man even of the educated person, is that philosophy is a "subject" which he can best afford to go without. This is certainly a strange anomaly of modern culture, for philosophy, which should lie closest to men's bosom and business, has become most remote from life. It was not so in the classical civilization of the Greeks and Romans, and it was not so in China, where the study of the wisdom of life formed the scholars' chief occupation.
Either the modern man is not interested in the problems of living, which are the proper subject of philosophy, or we have gone a long way from the original conception of philosophy. The scope of our knowledge has been so widened, and we have so many departments of knowledge zealously guarded over by their respective specialists, that philosophy, instead of being the first of man's studies, has left for it only the field no one is willing to specialize in. Typical of the state of modern education is the announcement of an American university that "the Department of Psychology has kindly thrown open the doors of Psychology 4 to the students of Economics 3. The professor of Economics 3 therefore commits the care of his students to the professor of Psychology 4 with his love and blessings, while as an exchange of courtesy, he allows the students of Psychology 4 to tread in the sacred precincts of Economics 3 with a gesture of friendly hospitality.
Meanwhile, Philosophy, the King of Knowledge, is like the Chinese Emperor in the times of the Warring Kingdoms, who instead of drawing tribute from the vassal states, found his authority and domain daily diminishing, and retained the allegiance of only a small population of very fine and loyal, but poorly fed subjects.
For we have now come to a stage of human culture in which we have compartments of knowledge but not knowledge itself; specialization, but no integration; specialists but no philosophers of human wisdom. This over-specialization of knowledge is not very different from the over-specialization in a Chinese Imperial kitchen. Once during the collapse of a dynasty, a rich Chinese official was able to secure as his cook a maid who had escaped from the palace kitchen. Proud of her, he issued invitations for his friends to come and taste a dinner prepared by one he thought an Imperial cook. As the day was approaching, he asked the maid to prepare a royal dinner. The maid replied that she couldn't prepare a dinner. "What did you do, then?" asked the official. "Oh, I helped make the patties for the dinner, " she replied.
"Well, then, go ahead and make some nice patties for my guests. " To his consternation the maid announced: "Oh, no, I can't make patties. I specialized in chopping up the onions for the stuffing of the patties of the Imperial dinner. "
Some such condition obtains today in the field of human knowledge and academic scholarship. We have a biologist who knows a bit of life and human nature; a psychiatrist who knows another bit of it; a geologist who knows mankind's early history; an anthropologist who knows the mind of the savage man; an historian who, if he happens to be a genial mind, can teach us something of human wisdom and human folly as reflected in mankind's past history; a psychologist who often can help us to understand our behavior, but who as often as not tells us a piece of academic imbecility, such as that Lewis Car-roll was a sadist," or emerges from his laboratory experiments on chickens and announces that the effect of a loud noise on chickens is that it makes their hearts jump. Some educational psychologists always seem to me stupefying when they are wrong, and still more stupefying when they are right. But along with the process of specialization, there has not been the urgently needed process of integration, the effort to integrate all these aspects of knowledge and make them serve the supreme end, which is the wisdom of life. Perhaps we are ready for some integration of knowledge today, as is evidenced by the Institute of Human Relations at Yale University and in the addresses at the Harvard Tercentenary. Unless, however, the Western scientists proceed about this task by a simpler and less logical way of thinking, that integration cannot be achieved. Human wisdom cannot be merely the adding up of specialized knowledge or obtained by a study of statistical averages; it can be achieved only by insight, by the general prevalance of more common sense, more wit and more plain, but subtle, intuition.
There is clearly a distinction between logical thinking and reasonable thinking, which may be also expressed as the difference between academic thinking and poetic thinking. Of academic thinking we have a great deal, but of poetic thinking we find very little evidence in the modern world. Aristotle and Plato are strikingly modern, and that is so, perhaps not because the Greeks resembled the moderns, but because they were strictly the ancestors of modern thought. In spite of his humanistic point of view and his Doctrine of the Golden Mean,
Aristotle was strictly the grandfather of the modern textbook writers, being the first man to cut up knowledge into separate compartments from physics and botany to ethics and politics. As was quite inevitable, he was the first man also to start the impertinent a-cademic jargon incomprehensible to the common man, which is being outdone by the American sociologists and psychologists of today. And while Plato had real human insight, yet in a sense he was responsible for the worship of ideas and abstractions as such among the Neo- Pla-tonists, a tradition which, instead of being tempered with more insight, is so familiar among us today in writers who talk about ideas and ideologies as if they had an independent existence. Only modern psychology in very recent days is depriving us of the watertight compartments of "reason", "will" and "emotion" and helping to kill the " soul " which was such a real entity with the medieval theologians. . . .
It seems that a regenerated form of thinking, a more poetic thinking, which can see life steadily and see it whole, is eminently desirable. As the late James Harvey Robinson warns us: "Some careful observers express the quite honest conviction that unless thought be raised to a far higher plane than hitherto, some great set-back to civilization is inevitable." Professor Robinson wisely pointed out that,
"Conscientiousness and Insight seem suspicious of one another, and yet they might be friends. " Modern economists and psychologists seem to me to have an overdose of conscientiousness and not enough of insight. This is a point which perhaps cannot be overemphasized, the danger of applying logic to human affairs. But the force and prestige of scientific thinking have been so great in the modern age, that in spite of all warnings, this species of academic thinking constantly encroaches upon the realm of philosophy, with the jejune belief that the human mind can be studied like a sewerage system and the waves of human thought measured like the waves of radio. The consequences are mildly disturbing in our everyday thinking, but disastrous in practical politics.
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