Will Buckingham: Polar bears, minor mishaps, and some thoughts on cross-cultural philosophy

Polar bears, minor mishaps, and some thoughts on cross-cultural philosophy

Thursday July 22, 2010

If you want to know how far away Hong Kong is from Beijing, you only have to go to the campus of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and get off the train. There, outside the railway station, is a faux-bronze statue of liberty, a sculpture that brings to mind, of course, not only New York, but also the student protests in Tiananmen Square. For commentary on this, I can do no better than point you to the wonderfully thoughtful analyses by 鬼佬 here and here, (a website that I warm to immediately as it has a quote from Calvino at its head).

I was up at the Chinese University of Hong Kong meeting up with the philosopher Xiaogan Liu, with whom I spent a delightful evening. As well as talking about the novel that I’m here to write, we talked much more broadly about the question of the relationship between Chinese and Western philosophy. Hegel, famously, was puzzled by Confucius, claiming that there was nothing in his writing except rather bland, everyday homilies. And since then, Western philosophers (not all of them – Leibniz, of course, was an enthusiast) have tended to look at Chinese philosophy and, finding little there that they recognise, have tended to think that it can’t be philosophy at all. Certainly, if you pick up an introductory textbook on philosophy, much of the stuff that you will find – the question of the distinction between appearance and reality, the question of God’s existence (why is the philosophy of religion always considered to be the philosophy of God? This always frustrates me), the idea of free will, and so on – does not really loom very large in the traditions of China, although obviously one can find rough equivalents here and there if one is determined. The reason that I find looking into Chinese philosophy so stimulating is that it is a powerful reminder that, even though the Western philosophical tradition pretends to a kind of universality, it is a much more local tradition than we would tend to think. When other people just don’t see the questions that we treat as fundamental as being fundamental (the idea of fundamental questions may be one that is rooted in a particular tradition as well) then we have a choice either to dismiss these folks as simply obtuse, or to question our own sense of what is genuinely fundamental.

So we chatted about these things over dinner and a bottle of wine, and then we went on a quick campus tour, heading up to the pavilion of harmony where heaven and humanity are united (天人合一) – a place with the most spectacular views over Hong Kong. Unexpectedly, there was a polar bear hanging out by the pavilion (see the link here). It was at this point, so spellbound by the view, and perhaps bamboozled by the presence of the polar bear, that I took a step forward onto what I thought was a wet pavement and found myself stepping straight into a shallow pond. All of which felt somehow appropriate to the occasion.

I headed back on the train with wet feet, and spent the rest of the evening drying off and making plans for my last day in Hong Kong and my return to the mainland. I’ve not had a great deal of time to see the city, and the weather has not been particularly good, although the first typhoon of the year has skirted the city way to the West, but it is a place that I like. Today I’m meeting with another scholar to talk about my work, then I’m off to the book festival, all being well. People tell me that Stephen Fry is in town for the festival, although I won’t be catching him as by that time I’ll be heading to Shenzhen and then on to Changsha overnight – this time enjoying the luxury of a hard sleeper. What bliss!