Hegel’s China: On God and Beauty

Nicholas Adams, University of Birmingham

Hegel’s descriptions of China are today well-known and well-understood. He never visited China, but

drew his accounts from contemporary works. China, in Hegel’s accounts, is emblematic of a stage of

history, of intellectual development. It evokes an ancient source of political and social order, which

persists into the present, and which stands in sharp relief to the more advanced settlements found

in ancient Greece and ultimately Germany or Europe (the two are almost synonymous for Hegel).We

know quite well what Hegel read, how he drew on it and when he departs from it. The translations

of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History and Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion,

edited by Peter Hodgson and Robert Brown, provide detailed annotations of Hegel’s sources.1

It is important to remember, before opening a discussion, that Hegel did not engage China as a

special topic in its own right. China always appears as a subsidiary concern in a wider investigation. It

is also useful to note that there were, in fact, few scholarly engagements with China at that time.

Hegel is arguably the first major European intellectual figure to offer an account of Chinese

intellectual developments.

Hegel’s engagements with China have been well worked over and it is a relatively easy matter to

evaluate his sources (in relation to the details of his accounts) and to situate his Chinese narrative in

relation to his overall project: there is a big picture in which China plays a minor role.2 I will briefly

sketch the state of play in relation to both, by way of initial orientation. I will then focus on two

related themes in the service of the theme ‘beauty through each other’s eyes’. I propose to show

how Hegel’s account of China is related to two (themselves related) topics: the centrality of God and

the importance of art. To state my thesis in advance: Hegel’s theological commitments (especially to

the doctrine of the Trinity) determine the role that Chinese thought will play; and the centrality of

art in Hegel’s approach to religion means that his failure to consider Chinese art robs him of an

opportunity to engage deeply with a culture by whose history he is obviously fascinated.

One final brief preliminary: Martin Müller noted ten years ago that although Chinese scholarship on

Hegel’s philosophy is substantial, relatively little of it engages with Hegel’s account of China.3 This is

perhaps not surprising, given the unflattering nature of what Hegel says.

Hegel on China

We should begin with some general comments about Hegel’s intellectual project and the place of

China within it. There is some debate, to put it mildly, as to whether Hegel is committed to a

narrative of inevitable chronological progress, from lower to higher forms, or whether he is more of

1 GWF Hegel Lectures on the Philosophy of World History Volume I: Manuscripts of the Introduction and the

Lectures of 1822-3 (ed. tr. Robert F Brown and Peter C Hodgson, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011); GWF Hegel Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion Volume II Determinate Religion (ed. Peter C Hodgson, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Henceforth LPWH and LPR. 2 Martin Müller ‘Chinas Hegel und Hegels China: Untersuchung zu ‘Rezeption’ als Interpretationskonstellation

am Beispiel der chinesischen Beschäftigung mit Hegels China-Sicht’, Jahrbuch für Hegelforschung, Vols 10-11/ 2004-2005 (2006) pp.139-216; Sander Griffioen ‘Hegel on Chinese Religion’ in Bart Labuschagne and Tomo Slootweg Hegel’s Philosophy of the Historical Religions (Brill, 2012), pp.21-30 3 Müller ‘Chinas Hegel’, p.139

an experimental typologist, attempting to classify phenomena into lower and higher forms. The texts

will permit both interpretations. Either way, in Hegel’s account Chinese thought occupies a lower

place. We are interested not so much in whether Hegel is right, and more in what is concerns are

and why he places China in the way that he does.

Prior to Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations of 1756 it was common to begin general

histories with the Israelites and to treat the Old Testament as the founding historical document of

world history (by which was meant European history). By beginning with China in his Essai, Voltaire

undermined a certain kind of religious history but also broadened the scope of the meanings of

‘ancient’ history. Sander Griffioen argues that Hegel is following Voltaire by identifying China as the

birthplace of history.4 Oliver Crawford has persuasively argued, however, that Hegel’s account does

much more than this. Hegel is criticising then-recent narratives by Friedrich Schlegel and GF Creuzer

which linked Christian and Oriental histories, and which placed the German people as their

culmination. Hegel, according to Crawford, weakens the link.5 For both Griffioen and Crawford, ‘with

Hegel the distance to China vastly increases’.6 There are, then, arguably two crucial moves that

Hegel is engaging. The first is to shift the meaning of earliest history from Israel to China; the second

is to weaken the link between China, Israel and Germany, and to produce a new account which

allows for independent developments (especially in China) and a more limited intellectual

inheritance for Europe (and for Germany in particular).

Hegel did not publish any of the following texts in which his remarks on China are to be found. They

were all assembled from notes and published posthumously. We cannot be certain that they are

Hegel’s exact words.

Lectures on the History of Philosophy (pub. 1840).

Hegel’s remarks on China here are brief and, by his own admission, sketchy. He says in half a dozen

pages (no more) that China has a reputation for culture, statecraft, poetry, commerce but that the

more one studies it, the lower one’s opinion becomes. Hegel considers three Chinese topics: the

teaching of Confucius, the Yi-king [I Ching; Yi Jing] and Taoism. He comments rather acidly that

Confucius’ high reputation outside China is due to the lack of translations, because when one reads

the French missionary translations of Confucius’ biography, one discovers ‘a commonplace moral put

in the form of good, sound doctrine, which may be found as well expressed and better, in every

place and amongst every people’ (LHP, 121).7 Hegel mocks the I Ching as ‘entirely mythological,

fabulous and even senseless’ (LHP, 121). He offers an interpretation of the Kua ‘ just to show how

superficial it is’. On Taoism Hegel notes that there are attempts to connect its reflections on unity

and multiplicity with Greek logos or with the Christian Trinity, but he himself seems to doubt it. (It is

not entirely clear what he thinks.) He ends his remarks on Chinese philosophy: ‘But if philosophy has

4 Griffioen ‘Hegel on Chinese Religion’, pp.28-29

5 Oliver Crawford ‘Hegel and the Orient’, https://www.academia.edu/4985405/Hegel_and_the_Orient, last

accessed 23 Sept 2015. 6 Griffioen ‘Hegel on Chinese Religion’, p.30

7 References are to GWF Hegel Lectures on the History of Philosophy I Greek Philosophy to Plato (tr. E S

Haldane, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995, orig. pub. London: K Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1892-96)

got no further than to such expressions [e.g. of nothingness as highest principle] it remains at its first

stage’.8

Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1830-1 lectures first pub. 1837)

These lectures have a more substantial engagement. (I have used the new OUP edition of the 1822-

23 lectures.) By contrast with the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, these lectures begin with an

exposition of Chinese history and texts, without judgements (positive or negative). This is then

followed by more evaluative material. He makes the general claim that China developed from

within, that is, largely independently of interactions with other nations, ‘untouched by history’.

(LPWH, 212, 214). (It is not clear on what basis he makes this claim.) His critical judgements follow

after his sketch of the main historical events, beginning in a section which the English editors have

titled ‘Characteristics of the Chinese State’.

Hegel makes the following claims. (1) The Chinese state is patriarchal (p.224); (2) the emperor has

absolute power (p.226); (3) the emperor rules through mandarins (p.227); (4) anyone can become a

mandarin on merit (p.229); (6) ‘*The ideal rulers are portrayed as+ moral, plastic shapes that are all

of a piece like the artworks of the ancients, in the way that we represent to ourselves the ideals of

the ancients; they are figures who express in their every feature a unity or harmony of character,

dignity, circumspection, and beauty’ (p.231); (7) in fact the state stands or falls depending on the

character of the emperor.

Hegel’s critical comments primarily concern questions of law, morality, freedom and their

interrelations. For Hegel, generally speaking, the legal and moral spheres are (and should be

considered) related but independent. Legality is primarily an external sphere of ‘legal right’ which is

or can be enforced ‘externally’. Morality and the ethical sphere (despite their distinctness from each

other for Hegel) are primarily matters of individual freedom. Morality informs law, of course, but the

right expressed in law is independent of any particular person’s free volition; morality simply is a

matter of such free volition. Moral behaviour, if externally compelled, is not truly moral. However, in

the Chinese state ‘what is ethical is made to be the law’ (p.233). Hegel is interested in the way in

which inward self-determination, or sentiment, is commanded by law. By way of example, Hegel

points to the enforcement of customs, so that what should be expressions of inner disposition are in

fact no more than effects of external (sometimes violent) coercion. The moral sphere is coterminous

with strict legality. ‘A government of the kind that issues such legislation takes the place of my own

inner being, and by doing so the principle of subjective freedom is annulled or goes

unacknowledged’ (p.234).

Freedom is paramount in Hegel’s account and, in this case, it is individual freedom that is at stake

and under threat in imperial China. Freedom for Hegel is connected to respect: to respect me is to

recognise my free action, my existence that I have decided for myself. This ‘is not respected among

the Chinese, since there I am subject to moral governance; for that reason there is no room for

respect in this case, nor for what this inner freedom produces’ (pp.234-5). Because my action is not

free, I cannot be respected. Especially grievous, in Hegel’s view, are practices of punishment which

8 The English translation is a bit garbled by typographical errors – I have corrected them without comment.

Unlike the other lecture series, they are available in an inexpensive out-of-copyright translation from 1892. It may be that it is not economically viable to publish an up to date critical edition with notes.

are collective and familial. Any crime is punished by sanctions upon the entire family, including the

confiscation of family property which in effect renders the entire family slaves. Corporal punishment

is also problematic, because it is so severe: this ‘outer’ (purely physical) act is intended to, and does,

discipline the ‘inner’ agency of the one punished.

Ethical customs are a matter of highly regulated ceremony in such a way that there is no meaningful

gradation between more or less significant acts. Everything is vital, without distinction. This means

that responses to perceived injuries are likewise total, and not subject to gradations of seriousness.

An injured party responds to any injury without restraint, and intends to bring about the utter ruin

of the perpetrator and his family.

With regard to the sciences in China, Hegel is sceptical of the great reputation and high regard in

which he takes them often to be held. He condemns it as the accumulation of data whose purpose is

the benefit of the state. Hegel contrasts this with the interest of authentic science which is done for

its own sake, and which stimulates thinking and not simply the amassing of information.

Perhaps the most surprising judgements concern the Chinese language, which Hegel did not speak

and could not read. He draws a strong contrast in written media between a language like German,

where letters stand for sounds, and hieroglyphic systems like Chinese, where signs are

representations. (Hegel says in passing that spoken Chinese is defective because a single word can

have as he puts it twenty-five wholly different meanings depending on intonation. He does not

explain why this is a defect.) The written language obstructs scientific learning, he supposes, because

there are so many signs to learn. Unlike German, where there are a few letters, quickly mastered

and then available for use, Chinese requires up to 90,000 he says. The implication, not spelled out by

Hegel, is that one’s energy is expended on learning the signs rather than on the things to be

expressed by them. Hegel then goes on to catalogue the inferiority of Chinese science.

Hegel has a short section on Chinese art, which is a topic to which we will ourselves turn in due

course. Hegel has a dozen or so lines – no more. They are as follows:

In the field of fine arts the consequence of all this is that ideal art cannot flourish among the

Chinese. The ideal seeks to be conceived from the inward, free spirit, not prosaically but in

such a way that it directly dispenses with something bodily. The Chinese are, to be sure, skilled

in the mechanical arts, but they lack the creative power of spirit, the free inwardness. They

have no lack of productivity. They have beautiful landscape painting and portraits, but they

never attain the brilliance that is produced in ours by means of shadows and light. They are

very precise in sketching, for instance, the scales of carp. Their floral painting is well-executed

in this respect. In all these ways they are extremely precise, but the ideal is extremely alien to

them. Only in horticulture do they excel. Their gardens are quite beautiful, not rigid and

formal. (p.243)

Finally, Hegel considers Chinese religion. There is more here, and this is not surprising, as he was also

composing and delivering his LPR in the same years as the LPWH. Hegel acknowledges at the outset

of this discussion that knowledge of Chinese religion has come through Christian missionaries, and

he appears to doubt the reliability of available accounts. The main point is that, as Hegel

understands it, religious life is more of the same: patriarchal and dominated by the state (p.244).

The highest being is Thien [Tian] or heaven, and it is conceived in a wholly abstract way: without

representation and without connection to nature or spirit. Tian is over and against human agency:

prayers are offered to an alien entity. The nearest analogy Hegel can find is to his interpretation of

Jehovah in the Old Testament: a figure who is benevolent in the face of virtue and who punishes

vice. Consonant with the previous discussion about the emperor’s absolute power is the fact that

only the emperor presents offerings, offers prayers, or carries out other acts of worship. The wider

community is present (these events are public spectacles), but only the emperor acts. Hegel notes

very briefly in passing that Jews and Christians are free to worship in China so long as they offer no

challenge to state power. Hegel has some obscure remarks about particular universal and the one

(or absolute) universal. I take these to amount to the claim that in Chinese state religion, Tian is part

of the cosmos rather than standing in absolute relation to it (as its creator, for example). Hegel notes

that there are ancestors (about which he says almost nothing), spirits (about which he says little)

and Shen (about which he says a little more). There is in Hegel’s account some overlap between the

categories ‘spirit’ and ‘Shen’.

Finally, Hegel offers some brief remarks on Lao-Tse [Lao-tzu, Laozi] and the associated sect. Hegel

notes that spiritual masters can become Shen, and he interprets this as a rudimentary form of what

will become more developed in Christianity, namely the ascent of the human to the divine. He also

notes that in ‘the religion of Fo’, the goal is renunciation in order to immerse oneself in utter

emptiness.

Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion

Hegel delivered this series of lectures four times: 1821, 1824, 1827, and (in part) 1831, the year of

his death. China does not make an appearance in the first series, and it appears that he began

reading seriously in this area around this time.

In 1824 Hegel produced an account that presumably is more or less contemporary with the LPWH

just discussed, and it is more or less the same length as the discussion of Chinese religion in that

other lecture series. Hegel is concerned principally with religion during the Zhou dynasty (1122 BC - )

but his account appears to have been hastily put together. It is largely an account, drawn from a

single Jesuit source, of the measures taken by emperor Wu Wang to establish his new empire. Hegel

focuses on what might be called ‘religious’ aspects (although of course the whole thing can just as

well be described as political, economic, legal and so forth). These include sacrifices, prayers, the

appointing of Shen as administrators (it is ambiguous in Hegel’s account what overlap there is

between human and spirit – meaning dead ancestors - in the case of Shen). After a brief description

of various ceremonies, Hegel draws a single conclusion: ‘Thus in China the emperor’s lordship over

nature is a fully organized monarchy’ (p.303).

In the 1827 series Hegel delivers the fruits of more substantial reading and acknowledges at the

outset (p.548) that there are multiple religious traditions in ancient China: Buddhism, Taoism and

the state religion. His interest remains predominantly the religion of the state which is, he says, a

sphere where the will of one individual is dominant. This individual is the emperor whose rule is

absolute, and who is the only one connected to Tian (heaven). He is the sole bringer of offerings, the

only one who prays to Tian. Hegel draws a contrast with Western tradition where even the ruler is in

some way bound by divine command; in China it is the other way round. Indeed his rule extends to

the souls of the dead. Once again Hegel rehearses the transfer of power to the Zhou dynasty. At the

heart of this is the proclamation by which the emperor makes known, to human and Shen alike, the

decrees of heaven which are simultaneously the decrees of the emperor. Hegel calls the

arrangement of imperial command – of mandarins and of Shen – a form of ‘nature worship’, largely

because the Shen are ‘the Shen of rain, of rivers, and the like’ (p.555). The main thing is the

subordination of everything to the emperor: ‘the emperor alone knows the mandates of heaven, he

alone stands in communication with heaven, and his lordship extends over both the visible and the

invisible’ (p.555). Hegel also rehearses the account of how emperor Wu-Wang excluded

distinguished Taoist generals from a place at court and instead sent them, albeit with honour, to the

mountains to deepen their study of Taoism. Hegel does not speculate as to why they were excluded

in this way, but treats the event as the advent of ‘the next stage of this initial configuration of nature

religion’ (p.557). This is marked by self-consciousness (as opposed to acceptance of imperial

absolute power). It is an ‘orientation to the inner’ and is based ‘solely on abstract thinking’ (pp.557-

8). Hegel is interested in the triadic nature of production in Taoism, and considers the claims (in his

sources) that there might be some connection between Taoist triads and the tetragrammaton in the

Old Testament; he takes no view on this connection but does note that triadic thinking is necessary if

there is to be any meaningful talk of God. He rehearses a familiar claim: that the (here triadic) shape

of thinking (here Taoism) has to be accompanied by a self-conscious awareness that one’s own

subjectivity is productive in this triadic fashion. But here, in Taoism, this does not take place: its

triadic thinking remains purely abstract, over and against the thinking subject. It never becomes self-

conscious. ‘Everything is external *in Chinese religion+, everything that is connected with them is a

power for them, because in their rationality and morality they have no power within themselves

(p.561). This is a familiar claim by now: in Chinese shapes of thinking, Hegel claims, the thinking

subject is confronted by various external forces which fail to be recognised as bound up with internal

subjectivity. Forces are taken always to act from the outside.

Hegel considers Buddhism to be an advance on this remorseless exteriority on the grounds that ‘the

absolute’ takes the form of a singular consciousness (that of Buddha or the Dalai Lama), but his

‘sensible presence’ is negated by the goal of religious practice: the attainment of a state of absolute

negation of all materiality. Hegel explores the possibility that this bears a family resemblance to

certain strands of Christian speech about God as the infinite, including the idea that nothing can be

known about God. Hegel in other places makes it clear that this (especially in post-Kantian forms

that stress the non-knowability of God) is a betrayal of the Western theological tradition; here he

observes without emphasis that it amounts to the idea that God is ‘the nothing’. Throughout his

discussions of the role of Buddha or the Dalai Lama, Hegel stresses that God is central. ‘God is

grasped as nothing’ in these traditions (p.570). This stress enables him to make a further point: that

while there is a temptation to view the idea that God can be identified with Buddha or the Dalai

Lama as ‘defective and absurd’, and to judge it ‘senseless and irrational’, it is also important to

‘recognize the necessity and truth of such religious forms’ (p.570). This recognition takes the form of

an excursus on the relationship between a view of the divine as external to creation, or (with an

explicit nod to Schelling) as ‘the eternal creating of nature’ (p.572). This ‘oriental way of viewing

things’ focuses on the absolute substance over and against the transitory nature of all particular

things. By contrast, the Western viewpoint sees finitude as connected with the infinite, especially

when human consciousness connects infinity with its own subjectivity. This leads to a further

excurses on Jacobi and the Spinozastreit (pp.575ff.) Hegel insists that in true Christian thinking, God

is substance, but also subject, in the idea of ‘absolute spirit’. He then returns to variants of

Buddhism: there is here a failure to think spirit as universal; it can only recognise a particular person

(Buddha or Dalai Lama) as identified with the infinite. This is deficient, for Hegel, because the

religious person is still confronted with an external object (here a particular person) rather than

being led to a higher form of thinking, in which self-consciousness plays a defining role.

Thus, for Hegel, whether it is in Chinese state religion or Buddhism, Chinese religion confronts the

religious subject with an external agency. There is no progress to self-consciousnesss, and certainly

no reconciling of ‘external’ substance with ‘internal’ subject in absolute ‘spirit’. It remains external,

whether in an ‘abstract’ form (Chinese state religion) or a ‘particular’ individual (Buddhism).

Hegel’s Sources

What look like Hegel’s independent judgements are often his report of others’ views, which he is

himself not in a position to evaluate or challenge: he has no independent experience or study

beyond the sources on which he draws. The primary (Chinese) textual sources to which he refers are

the I Ching, Shu-jing, and the biography of Confucius. It is remarkable, especially in the LPWH, that

Hegel does not develop an account of Chinese practices from Chinese texts (as he tends to, in the

LPR, for Judaism) but assembles a description from reports of Europeans in China. One might call it

proto-ethnographic, with its descriptions of festivals and participant observation of everyday life.

Hegel’s instinct is, normally, to approach a culture via its artefacts (its philosophy, its art, its legal

system). In the case of China he is forced to look elsewhere, and primarily at foreigners’ reports. We

have already remarked briefly that this is a source of some scepticism for him, especially in the case

of Christians describing Chinese religious practices. But in fact he relies (although not exclusively) on

missionary accounts of nearly every aspect of Chinese culture and history.

Hegel’s secondary sources, on which he relies completely, are well documented. They include the

Mémoires concernant l’Histroire, les Sciences… des Chinois by the missionaries of Peking (pub 1776-

91 and 1814) and Abbé Grossier’s De la Chine, ou Déscription génerale de cet Empire (pub. 1818-20).

It can be seen immediately that this is relatively recent literature. Nearly every claim Hegel makes

draws in some way upon these two principal sources. The newer OUP translations of Hegel’s lectures

painstakingly reconstruct the sources for Hegel’s views, and measure the amplitude of convergence

or divergence from those sources. I propose to consider two themes which do not show up in

Hegel’s sources, namely the Trinity and art in China.

The Trinity

Hegel’s concern with the Trinity is well known among those who study the LPR, but it is worth noting

that it appears in the other lecture series from the 1820s too. It is particularly significant in relation

to Hegel’s handling of Chinese intellectual life. Martin Müller makes the fairly straightforward point

that Hegel’s presentation (not just of China but of most phenomena in his historical and

philosophical discussions) is not encyclopaedic but programmatic: the aim is to locate material in a

narrative of the self-development of spirit.9 He quotes with approval Walter Schulz’ judgement that,

for Hegel, ‘philosophical history is emphatically “history of spirit”’.10 For Müller, following Schulz’

reading of an early passage from the LPWH, Hegel’s discussion of spirit is a discussion of freedom,

especially in relation to external compulsion and inner subjectivity. Müller gives a good account of

9 Müller ‘Chinas Hegel’, p.144.

10 Müller ‘Chinas Hegel’, p.145, quoting Walter Schulz Philosophie in der veränderten Welt (Pfullingen, 1972),

p.496.

the received view of how Hegel fits his account of China into this general picture, summed up as

follows: ‘China is thus significant for Hegel because it displays an early form of freedom in its political

life, that is, in the capriciousness [Willkür+ of the despot (emperor)’.11 Müller goes on to survey three

important interpretations of Hegel’s account of China: by Johannes Witte (in publications in the

1920s), by Karl August Wittfogel (in the 1930s) and by Wolfgang Franke (in the 1970s). He concludes

with a summary of Hegel’s negative judgements on China, together with three observations as to

why there has not been much of a challenge to those judgements. These are (1) that querying

Hegel’s view of China tends to be more implicit than explicit, and is thus not adequately developed

in the relevant literature; (2) Hegel is in general too important for Chinese intellectual life: even a

decisive critique of this one aspect of his thinking will not throw the entire system in question; (3)

The relationship between Marx and Hegel is so close that, even in the face of concrete claims about

China, a critique of Hegel will inevitably touch Marx too, making such a course of action quite

unacceptable to those committed to Marx.12

It is, however, not solely Hegel’s account of freedom that should command our attention. It is

perhaps unsurprising that this should be the focus of Hegel’s more secular-minded interpreters.

Nonetheless, it is striking how central the question of God is for Hegel’s placing of China in his

narrative of spirit. Again, it might not be surprising that this should be the focus of his LPR, a

‘religious’ discussion, and we have seen in outline that this is so. More interesting is the central role

that God – and especially God as Trinity – plays in the LPWH. These are lectures on history, where

religion is not a primary focus. This is not explicit in the section on China in which, as we have seen,

Hegel places morality centre-stage. But it is important to read around this section, and to note what

precedes it. After elaborating his account of freedom and spirit (pp.146ff) Hegel goes on to outline

discuss the organic way in which the life of a people finds expression. This expression reaches its

highest point (‘the most sublime example’, p.151) in the nature of God. Christianity is the ‘only true

religion’ in this respect, by virtue of the doctrine of the Trinity. ‘If the Christian religion lacked the

Trinity, it could be that thought would find more [truth+ in other religions. … *It+ is the element

wherein philosophy finds and recognizes the idea of reason in the Christian religion as well’ (LPWH,

p.151). It is these claims, and this framework, that precede the discussion of China.

Why should this be significant for us? Stated briefly, if it is the Trinitarian character of Christian

theology that marks it out as the most satisfactory expression of spirit (understood as the life of a

people), then it is hardly surprising that Hegel finds Chinese religion to be inadequate in various

significant ways. Hegel’s account of China unfolds against the backdrop of a commitment to the

Trinitarian pattern of Christian rationality. Chinese thought is bound to be deficient in such a

scheme.

But it is also significant for us in a deeper way. Hegel does not survey religious thought, discover

Trinitarian doctrine in the course of this survey, and then judge it to be excellent. This is entirely the

wrong way round. He is himself formed in a tradition of Trinitarian thinking which fundamentally

shapes his outlook, which patterns his own thinking and which structures the criteria by which he

makes his most important judgements. Hegel is part of a tradition which he knows to be Trinitarian:

it informs his most basic categories and the way in which they are arranged. To engage satisfactorily

11

Müller ‘Chinas Hegel’, po.146. 12

Müller ‘Chinas Hegel’, p.159

with Chinese religion would require dealing not only in fundamentally different categories, but in

fundamentally different ways of arranging categories. I have argued this in my Eclipse of Grace, in

which I show – through exegesis of texts – that Hegel has a distinctive way of handling certain pairs

of terms (e.g. subject/object, individual/community, thinking/being).13 Hegel does not merely find

the Trinity lacking in Chinese religion: this would be a banal and self-evident finding. More

significantly, he finds that his Trinitarian pattern of reasoning leads him to identify certain (surely

inevitable) deficiencies in Chinese religion. It is an interesting to wonder what kind of account of

Chinese religion Hegel might have produced if he had suspended his Trinitarian pattern of reasoning.

Finally, it is significant for us because it is not only Chinese religion that Hegel finds deficient. His

Trinitarian reasoning structures his entire political project because of the way he handles the

relation between substance, subject, and their reconciliation in political life. Hegel’s Trinitarian

pattern of reasoning is expressed in his account not primarily of Christian doctrine (in, e.g., the LPR)

but more importantly of freedom and free ethical responsibility (in, e.g., the LPWH). In other words,

the Trinity is not solely a ‘religious’ topic for Hegel. It is even more importantly a political one, and

this leads almost inevitably to the judgements he makes about Chinese political life.

The Absence of Art

As Craig Clunas has indicated, the very notion of ‘Chinese art’ is relatively new.14 For us, and for our

predecessors, ‘art’ in practice often means Western art. One can travel to many ‘art’ galleries and

not see works from China. The very idea of ‘Chinese art’ is not Chinese. It is, Clunas argues, a

European invention created primarily with an implicit or explicit contrast with ‘art’ as such. Clunas

also suggests that Hegel’s notion of art as – in Clunas’ formulation – ‘the soul of a people’ was a

principal factor in producing the later idea of ‘Chinese art’. The idea served to unify the products of

an extensive land mass with diverse peoples across many centuries. But Hegel himself in his

magisterial reflections on art did not consider art in China in much depth. The few remarks that he

makes suggest that he was not familiar with much actual art from China.

I want to consider the ways in which Hegel’s China might change if room is made for its art and its

art theory. There are two pitfalls to avoid here. The first is slipping straight back into a falsely

unifying picture in which there is a homogenous ‘China’ with an ‘art’ that it produces. China has

never been ‘a people’ with ‘a soul’ that art might reveal. It is and has been many peoples, as a visit

to the cultural museum at Minzu University will quickly reveal. The second is having too narrow a

sense of what counts as art. For Hegel, but also for Western thinkers more generally, art is what is

displayed in art galleries. It overwhelmingly means painting and sculpture. In considering the arts in

China one surely has to think more creatively about textiles, printing, calligraphy and of course

ceramics and architecture. It is, as Clunas suggests, useful to ask what it is that has been called art in

China, and to investigate who has called it art and why.

In my own native Britain, the two most deeply embedded cultural engagements with China are

porcelain – often called simply ‘china’ in fact – together (perhaps) with the pagoda in Kew Gardens,

which was completed in 1762 as one of the expressions of the enthusiasm for Chinese art, that is, for

chinoiserie: an enthusiasm for an imaginary China and the art that it was imagined to produce. From

13

Nicholas Adams Eclipse of Grace: Divine and Human Action in Hegel (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). 14

Craig Clunas Art in China (Oxford: OUP, 2009), p.9.

this context it would be strange to consider art in China and not to include ceramics and

architecture, as these have historically been the two most prominent forms of art from China for the

British. Hegel does not consider them, and for reasons of space I must leave them to one side.

How might an interpretation of art in China, done in a way Hegel might do it, change Hegel’s China?

What effects might it have on Hegel’s narrative of Eastern rise and Western setting, Eastern

immediacy and Western reflection?

Let us take one of the most famous of all Chinese paintings ‘Early Spring’ by Guo Xi.

Given Hegel’s aesthetic theory, what might he have to say about it? And would it enhance or

interrupt his Chinese narrative?

It is a portrayal of nature? Is it an ideal Daoist paradise? Is it an allegory of imperial sovereignty and

order? Is it an expression of a cosmology, with a particular focus on spring? Is it the expression of a

love of nature? These are interesting questions but, quite simply, we do not know. This painting

from 1072 CE is enormously famous and familiar, but this is because this type of painting was highly

prized in later centuries. The painting has been handed down, along with certain (later) habits for

viewing and interpreting it. But we do not know what Guo Xi thought he was doing when he painted

it. We can only guess – and there are many possible interpretations.

This is all well and good. What about Hegel? Hegel insists from the Phenomenology onwards that art

is central to understanding a culture, especially its theology. If he had considered a painting such as

this, what conclusions might he have drawn? I suspect Hegel would have found himself perplexed

because of certain themes in Guo Xi’s treatise Lin quan gao zhi (Lofty Ambition in Forests and

Streams). Clunas notes that in this work Guo ‘stresses the free inspiration of the artist as heroic

creator, and newly current ideas [in the 1000s CE+ about the artist’s character as the defining factor

in the making of the great work of art.’15

The qualities that Guo privileges in painting do not accord well with the claims Hegel makes about

earlier Chinese intellectual life. It is not the freedom of the emperor that is in the frame, but that of

the free artist; and it is not the will of the emperor externally imposed on the people that is

presupposed, but the character of the one who paints: precisely the kind of ethical concern that

Hegel claims is absent from Chinese political life. Hegel’s account focuses on an earlier period, well

over a thousand years before Guo. But it is also an account that attributes to Chinese life a lack of

real development. This painting, and the treatise that accompanies it, interrupt such an account,

even on Hegel’s own terms.

This kind of consideration – the topic of freedom – shows up in Chinese painting rather early on.

However, it becomes even more pronounced when one broadens one’s sense of what ‘art’ might

encompass to include calligraphy. Clunas again is an invaluable guide in drawing attention to the

ways in which the tradition of Chinese reflection on calligraphy describes the work of figures like

Wang Zizhi (303-61) or Huaisu (active 730-80). Calligraphy came to be prized precisely as the

expression – in brush-strokes – of the writer’s character. To appreciate calligraphy is to appreciate

the expression of moral character (rather as a certain kind of British history finds the military

leadership of a Nelson or a Wellington or a Churchill to be the manifestation of certain virtues). Had

Hegel considered calligraphy, or more precisely certain later theories about calligraphy, during the

Southern Song (1127-1279) for example, he would have found it difficult to focus exclusively on the

emperor’s subjectivity.16 Hegel’s sharp opposition between imperial agency and everyday passivity

would be difficult to sustain in the face of a serious engagement with calligraphy. It would certainly

be challenged by the strong contrast between ‘professional’ and ‘scholarly’ forms of artistic practice

(that is, the contrast between free production for its own sake expressing the scholar’s will and

commissioned production done at the behest of a client, and for money, by the professional). This

contrast presupposes a sophisticated and nuanced notion of various kinds of freedom, a notion

which is not only expressed in painting and calligraphy, but self-consciously reflected in treatises on

artistic practices. In Hegel’s terms, it is a profoundly ‘inner’ as much as ‘outer’ matter. (The contrast

between scholar and professional is hard to maintain, and may not reflect the self-consciousness of

earlier calligraphers and artists; but the point is the existence of self-conscious Chinese theory – in

any period – which accompanies the transmission of calligraphic artefacts.)

Hegel’s failure to engage Chinese art can hardly be attributed to European ignorance in the period in

which he wrote. Chinese products were in great demand in the eighteenth century and there was a

lively trade in ceramics well before Hegel’s time. China was a major exporter of ‘art’, broadly

conceived, and it is not unreasonable to wonder why Hegel reflects so little on its products, given

the importance that he generally attributes to art. It is possible that Berlin in the 1820s was

peculiarly untouched by Chinese cultural transmission, and that he would have approached the

subject quite differently had he delivered his lectures in Amsterdam or London, which had more

extensive Chinese connections.

15

Clunas Art in China, p.55 16

Clunas Art in China, pp.144 ff.

Conclusion

We might usefully ask whether Hegel’s view of China would have been substantially changed had he

engaged with art in China (especially painting and calligraphy). I think there is good reason to think

that it would have been changed in certain respects, but not in others.

Hegel’s account of freedom would certainly have been challenged had he engaged Chinese art and

theory. Hegel would have to have conceded that there was a well-developed, and highly ‘self-

conscious’ (in his sense) tradition of reflection on freedom. His account of imperial Willkür would

have had to be supplemented by an account of artistic (especially ‘scholarly’) freedom. An

engagement with ‘beauty through another’s eyes’ would have required a revision of his emphatic

opposition between emperor and subject.

But it is striking how Hegel’s thesis about the individuality of freedom would be largely upheld,

despite this shift. An engagement with painting and calligraphy in China would reinforce his thesis

that, in China, it is the freedom of the individual that is expressed, and not a freedom expressed in a

people. The lack of a communal freedom would be in some ways even more emphatic.

More deeply, however, a consideration of art could not displace what one might call Hegel’s

structural trinitarianism. Hegel might have been encouraged to modify (and perhaps even abandon)

his claims about the ‘early’ or ‘undeveloped’ nature of Chinese subjectivity. He would arguably have

to date Chinese subjectivity rather later, or at least bring it closer to (his account of) Greece because

of the way in which freedom is internalised in the ‘character’ of the calligrapher. There is of course a

great deal more to be said about this, especially in relation to Chinese theory, some of which is quite

explicit about such matters. Hegel’s claim that Chinese freedom is always experienced as an external

demand by the emperor is probably impossible to sustain in the face of an engagement with art in

China. The account of the relation of law and ethics would also experience severe stress if

juxtaposed with Chinese theories of calligraphy, and especially the later scholar/professional

dichotomy. At the same time, however, Hegel’s critique of then-contemporary attempts to connect

China to Europe, with their attempts to cast Germany as the authentic inheritor of China’s wisdom

would not be challenged by an engagement with art.17 It would become apparent that Chinese

aesthetics (and the theology that accompanies it) are somewhat alien to European traditions.

In sum, two of Hegel’s most striking judgements about China would be revised, on Hegel’s own

terms, by an engagement with painting and calligraphy. First, freedom would be a possession of ‘the

few’ rather than merely the (imperial) one. Second, freedom would be a matter of significant ‘inner’

reflection and not merely an ‘outer’ imposition from above. But even a deep knowledge of painting

and calligraphy (and the Chinese theory that followed them) would not be sufficient to displace

Hegel’s emphatic trinitarianism. Indeed, so fundamental is Hegel’s structural trinitarianism, it is hard

to imagine would could displace it.

17

See Crawford ‘Hegel and the Orient’.