Individualism in Chinese Thought

　　Individualism in Chinese Thought

　　in D.J. Munro (ed.), Individualism and Holism: Studies in Confucian and Taoist Values

　　In this paper, Chad Hansen claims that the conceptual structure of Chinese philosophy is less individualistic than that of the West – not to say that there is no individualism in Chinese philosophy. To prove this claim, he sets off from the structure of the Chinese language that has no individuating characteristic. This is also evident in “philosophical Chinese”. According to Hansen, the Chinese language and Chinese philosophy are characterized by a part-whole structure, not by a one-many structure. What counts as a part in part-whole explanations is relative to the context. In such a situation, it is more likely that also Chinese political actors tend to construct holistic, nonindividuating models of society and social process. This is, e.g., to be observed in Confucianism, according to which the state is characterized by hierarchically, functionally defined, and interrelated parts rather than by its members (individuals) and the sum of isolated behavior. This view is more close to early Western philosophy: Plato and classical Western philosophy regarded the universal as knowable, valuable, and real; the individual was unimportant. Individuals were inherently imperfect, limited, and changing, hence less real and knowable than abstract “universals”. The move to individualism in Western Europe took place within the framework of the individual versus universal dichotomy. Also Zhuangzi merely added to the Confucian view that human nature is established by conventional rules of behavior, the awareness that we could be shaped by many different structural systems. For Zhuangzi, desires are socially shaped, not purely natural. Zhuangzi’s view is close to that of the Greek Sophists in that both emphasize conventional skills rather than representational knowledge. Also knowledge is, in the Chinese tradition, essentially skill-knowledge, “knowing (how) to.”