Freedom and Necessity in Chinese Thoughts

It is a momentum of capital importance in determining the character of our view of the world, whether we consider the various orders in human life to have been imposed upon us with necessity, or, on the contrary, to be something which depends upon our free choice ; and in this respect each race is found to have its own particular inclination. The concept of ‘T ien ' in Confusianism, the fundamental ideas of Taoism, the doctrine of predestination found in ‘Shên-Hsien' Theory, etc., all seem at first sight to incline towards accepting these orders as something given by necessity. This, however, does not definitively mean that the human liberty is made little of in the Chinese thoughts. The Chinese are, generally speaking, a people with a strong aspiration towards freedom, and their philosophies accordingly do not fail to display strenuous efforts in constructing such systematic theories as may insure the possibility of freedom ; or we should more rightly say that it was just for this purpose and in the process of these efforts that they first recognized the authority of necessity, rejecting the freedom and personality proper to human beings. And this, as they believed, was exactly the way how to attain to the genuine freedom established on a firmer ground : in other words, obedience to the authority of ‘necessity' does not imply the negation of the subjective spontaneity of human intellect, but rather such was to be, so to say, the logical postulate necessitated for its positive foundation. The first passage of the "Doctrine of the Mean" might be quoted as a fine example of such sources as would suggest this sort of interpretation : “What Heaven has conferred is called the Nature. An accordance with this Nature is called the Path of Duty”. In close relation with this state of affairs in the region of ideas, Chinese people are found, in practice also, to have endeavoured to get to freedom by way of recognizing necessity first of all. It was only because they had provided themselves with cosy corners of personal freedom, that they were not called upon for such a considerable space of time to organize any revolutionary movement against the government of bureaucracy combined with absolutistic powers. Thus the discovery of freedom in the context above stated makes a remarkable factor which constitutes the character of the thoughts as well as of the real society of China. In case the Chinese people had not possessed such mentality from the very beginning, Chinese culture and society must have been quite different from what they actually are