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Asian Philosophy
An International Journal of the Philosophical Traditions of the East
ISSN: 0955-2367 (Print) 1469-2961 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/casp20
The birth of enlightenment secularism from the
spirit of Confucianism
Dawid Rogacz
To cite this article: Dawid Rogacz (2018): The birth of enlightenment secularism from the spirit of
Confucianism, Asian Philosophy, DOI: 10.1080/09552367.2018.1428051
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09552367.2018.1428051
Published online: 18 Jan 2018.
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ARTICLE
The birth of enlightenment secularism from the spirit of
Confucianism
Dawid Rogacz
Department of Philosophy, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland
ABSTRACT
The aim of the essay is to demonstrate that the contact of European
philosophy with Chinese thought in the second half of the 17th and
18th century influenced the rise and development of secularism,
which became a distinctive feature of the Western Enlightenment.
The first part examines how knowing the history of China and
Confucian ethics has questioned biblical chronology and under-
mined faith as a necessary condition of morality. These allegations
were afterwards countered by reinterpreting Confucianism as crypto-
monotheism. I will argue this debate has contributed to the birth of
secular philosophy of history, which put an end to the Enlightenment
Sinophilism. Throughout those changes in the image of China, noth-
ing but an image was discussed: as it would be presented on a basis
of the thought of Wang Fuzhi and other representatives of Chinese
kaozheng考證 movement, the encounter with the contemporaries of
the Westerners would have opened a real dialogue.
KEYWORDS
Enlightenment; secularism;
Confucianism; philosophy of
history; Chinese
historiography
Introduction
The aim of the essay is to demonstrate that the contact of European philosophy with
Chinese thought in the second half of the 17th and 18th century influenced the rise and
development of secularism, which became a distinctive feature of the Western
Enlightenment. The role of internal factors that have led to the rise of the Enlightenment
will be here suspended by virtue of some sort of idealization, in order to give saliency to
external factors, which are quite often omitted. As John Marenbon states, in the field of
intellectual history, the discovery of China in the 17th century was no less important for the
inception of modern Europe than discovery of America in the 16th century (Marenbon,
2015, p. 259). Forgetting about it, ‘we strengthen the illusion that European thought is a
causa sui, growing up of itself, without interaction with the rest of the world. This illusion of
an independent Europe allows for easy distinctions between “us” and “them,”“East” and
“West,” at the same time that it obscures the historicity of those distinctions.’ (Perkins, 2004,
p. x). In the case of such notion as secularism, this illusion is even stronger.
Secularism may be defined as a belief that science cannot be limited by the need to
justify itself in religious terms, it is necessary to recognize the separation of the church
from the state in public life and to act according to moral norms independent from
CONTACT Dawid Rogacz dawid.rogacz@amu.edu.pl Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Social Sciences,
Adam Mickiewicz University, Szamarzewskiego 89C, 60-568 Poznan, Poland
ASIAN PHILOSOPHY, 2018
https://doi.org/10.1080/09552367.2018.1428051
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
religious beliefs. Such secularism is itself a product of secularization, understood as
either factual or necessary historical process. In the second sense it already assumes
some form of philosophy of history and thus could be treated as a result of the
secularization in the first sense, or precisely—as Karl Löwith famously claimed—of a
‘terrestrialization’ of Christian eschatology (Löwith, 1949, p. 5). The main weakness of
Löwith’s approach is nevertheless limitation to internal causes of secularization, which
actually do not explain why some religious ideas have been terrestrialized. For that
purpose, European minds have had to encounter remote and new terra firma.
Secular chronology
Chinese culture has emerged on the horizon of European thought thanks to the Jesuits. As
fate turned out, its reception undermined the Christian image of the world. This occurred
primarily in the field of two spheres of culture: the first was history, the second was ethics.
First and foremost, knowing the Chinese chronology cast doubt on chronology based
on the Bible. In 1659 Jesuit Martino Martini published the History of China to the
beginning of our era. Martini began the chronology of China with the emperor Fu Xi,
i.e. in 2952 BC, presenting the history of seven Chinese emperors who were to rule
before the times widely accepted as a date of the biblical flood, 2349 BC. As if that were
not enough, Martini admitted ‘he takes for granted that Far Asia was inhabited long
before the flood’ (Martini, 1658, p. 21). The initial reaction to the shock caused by
Martini’s work was the rejection of the authenticity of Chinese chronology, yet
Chinese records became quickly considered rather credible, and therefore reinterpreted.
One of the solutions was to reconcile the Chinese chronology with the Bible. This task
was undertaken by Georg Horn in his Noah’s Ark from 1666. He stated that the Chinese
legends about the emperors who dealt with the outflow of rivers describe the flood
during Emperor Yao’s reign, that is between 2355 and 2255 BC. Yao was considered a
designation for Noah, Fu Xi—for Adam (Horn referred to the legend that Fu Xi had no
father or mother), and other emperors for e.g. Cain or Enoch. Existence of the traditions
preceding the Deluvium Horn explained with the fact the inhabitants of the ark laid the
traditions in (van Kley, 1971, pp. 364–365). Both biblical history and Chinese historio-
graphy depicted, albeit in different ways, one and the same past. In 1669, John Webb
defended the hypothesis that mankind was using the Chinese language before the
Deluvium, pointing to its figurative character and the fact that the modern Chinese use
the same characters as the ancient emperors (Webb, 1669). In similar manner other
contemporaneous scholars demonstrated similarities between Chinese and Hebrew
languages, not without manipulating the data (Duyvendak, 1936, pp. 332–340).
Martini’s discovery also caused quite opposite reactions. Chinese chronology reached
out to the so-called Pre-adamism, the movement that asserted the existence of people
before Adam. The creator of its classic form, Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676), in the Prae-
Adamitae from 1655 claimed that God has created men twice: first he created the
pagans, and then created Adam, who gave rise to the Hebrews. His conclusions were
supported by the exegesis of the Bible, but over time it was Chinese chronology that
provided the empirical argument for the Pre-adamits (Poole, 2004, p. 3). A different
viewpoint was considered by Isaac Vossius. In 1659 Isaac Vossius published de vera
aetate mundi, where he stated that the chronology of the Chinese is reliable, and the
2 D. ROGACZ
Chinese literary tradition is the oldest in the world, covering 4,500 years, that is writers
elder than Moses (Vossius, 1659, pp. 44–45). Vossius stated that in comparison with
Chinese records, the dates of the Hebrew Bible are wrong. This led him to the under-
mining of the infallible and inspired nature of the Bible: ‘Does anyone have such deficits
in the judgment to believe that God always stood next to a Jewish writer and controlled
his hand and pen?’ (Vossius, 1659, p. 5). As a result, Vossius recognized the flood as a
local event that happened only to the Jews (Vossius, 1659, pp. 53–54). However, he did
not deny the facticity of the Deluvium or the truth of biblical history as such, but
believed that the Septuagint, according to which the flood occurred around 3000 BC,
presents chronology in line with traditional Chinese historiography, that is authentically.
The step towards discrediting the revelation was nonetheless done: biblical events were
deemed local, secular chronology—the criterion of the truth of the ‘holy’ one, and the
Bible itself—not altogether divinely inspired work of fallible people, at the same level as
Chinese works.
This was accompanied by a specific Sinophilism, monumental expression of which
was Vossius’ Book of various observations from 1685. In the chapter, ‘On the magnitude
of Chinese cities,’ Vossius treated China as an incarnation of the Platonic project of the
republic ruled by philosophers, i.e. the noble literati (the Confucians). He also wrote that
the Chinese lived for thousands of years without any contact with other countries, free
from war and happy until the invasion of the Tatars (Vossius, 1685, pp. 57–58; Weststeijn,
2012, p. 209). In the next chapter, ‘On the arts and sciences of China,’ Vossius called the
Chinese language the oldest and most complete language of humanity, guaranteeing
the continuity of Chinese culture throughout thousands of years (Vossius, 1685,
pp. 69–70). On the following pages he celebrated Chinese accomplishments in the fields
of medicine, botany, pharmacology, architecture, music, painting, sculpture, and Chinese
inventions: compass, print, and dust. Only in the field of mathematics and astronomy the
Christians towered about the Chinese (Vossius, 1685, pp. 70–85). The Christian heritage
was relativized once again.
Secular morality
Just like in the case of the chronology, the first descriptions of the Chinese moral code
came from the Jesuits. There emerged a picture of moral teachings harmonizing family,
social and political life in a rational way, devoid of religious elements. In 1688, in the
work La Morale de Confucius philosophe de La China, its likely author, Jean de Labrune,
stated that:
It might be said that morality of this philosopher is infinitely sublime, yet still simple,
reasonable, and derived from the purest sources of natural reason. Surely, never had a
mind devoid of the light of God’s revelation appear such developed and with such force (…)
which is a very significant advantage [of this philosophy] not only over many pagan writers,
who dealt with similar material, but also over some Christian authors. (Labrune, 1688,p.4)
Confucian morality was for Labrune an ultimate achievement of human reason in the
field of morality, a concrete historical experiment showing how Western morality would
look like if it had not become Christian. It seemed that Chinese morality is practically
equal to Christian, which later posed a question: does Christianity make people better?
ASIAN PHILOSOPHY 3
Recognition of Chinese morality has spread. According to William Temple, the philo-
sophy of Confucius aimed at study and development of natural reasoning to its limits. As
Temple wrote, according to Confucius, the highest happiness of all humanity lies in the
perfection of natural reason (Temple, 1963, pp. 113–114). Nicolas Fréret claimed that
Confucius’ thought was full of clues that would make it possible for all humanity to be
happy, and that Confucian morality should therefore be universally practiced (i.e. uni-
versalized). As Jonathan Israel notices, the philosophy of Confucius was treated as a
model for all mankind mainly because it shaped and preserved Chinese culture in an
unchanged millennium (Israel, 2006, p. 642).
Pierre Bayle made the next step in the interpretation of Chinese morality. While
Labrune and Temple characterized it essentially as local (and Fréret as a universal)
agnostic morality, the deist and defender of atheism Bayle went even further, treating
Confucianism as universal atheistic morality. As he noticed:
But nothing will be more irritating than the question of the atheism of Chinese philoso-
phers. This is not a simple negative atheism, as of the American Indians; it is a positive
atheism, because [created by] philosophers by comparing the whole system based on the
existence of God with the opposite system. (Bayle, 1707, p. 140)
The positivity of Chinese atheism meant both his philosophical character and opposition
to mere ignorance and its moral implications. Bayle proclaimed Chinese atheism is an
Asian Spinozism that recognizes the existence of one substance—nature. He argued that
Spinozists and Chinese literati are aware of the moral principles and the various types of
social goods no less than the most pious Christians (Bayle, 1707, p. 434). He also wrote
that China is a proof that in an atheistic society there may be moral order, and even such
that it is superior to Christian (see Israel, 2006, p. 646). It should be stressed that for the
contemporaries of Bayle, the very expression of ‘atheistic morality’ was contradictio in
terminis.InA Letter concerning toleration from 1689, John Locke condemned the atheists
as unworthy of tolerance because of their immorality. Discussions whether morality
without any (not necessarily strictly religious) belief in God is possible turned out to
be pointless when such morality was not only possible but also factual.
Bayle proved to be the true winner of the debate on Chinese morality, because even
Bayle’s opponents, more or less consciously, accepted his image of ethics and, more broadly,
Confucian philosophy (identified with Chinese in general). Dialogue between a Christian
philosopher and a Chinese philosopher on the existence and nature of God by Nicolas
Malebranche could serve as an example. Malebranche brought the Chinese under materi-
alism, according to which the mind is nothing but an organized subtle form of matter
(Malebranche, 1708, p. 21). Likewise, the principle (li 理) of Chinese metaphysics is insepar-
able from matter (qi 氣), which contradicts in his view the freedom of will. Both mistakes
stem from the misunderstanding of the fact that matter is passive, as Malebranche takes for
granted in his version of the Cartesian dualism (Malebranche, 1708, pp. 3, 13). This argument
was to show that in Chinese thought there is no room for morality, because its condition is
freedom, excluded here by materialistic determinism. As one of the few at this time,
Malebranche also notes that the enlightened views of the elite must be clearly distinguished
from the idolatrous religion of the rest of society (Mungello, 1980,p.560).
Both Bayle and Malebranche regarded the Chinese as atheists, judging it differently.
Malebranche wanted to persuade the Chinese to ‘try’ to understand Christian God under
4 D. ROGACZ