1.3 Puett丨Max Weber’s “Big Other”: China

Max Weber’s “Big Other”: China

To begin with India, the argument was that in India you have the emergence of what he called “world renouncing religions.” So, religions that were so otherworldly that they resulted in humans trying to flee from this world to attain transcendence from this world and, accordingly, never trying to understand this world, control this world, and manipulate this world for human interests. Science, therefore, would never develop. Capitalism would never develop. And most importantly, for him, of course, modernity would never develop. In China, his argument was, the mistake was, comparatively speaking, on the other side. Chinese religions, according to Weber, were too “this worldly.” They too much assumed a perfectly harmonious cosmos where humans didn't really have to understand the world, they just had to live within it.

And all they really had to do, therefore, was within this world in which they were born to live properly, with guidelines given to them clearly as to what role in life they should play. There was no tension with the world, in other words, and because there was no tension, they never had a drive to try to figure out the world, understand it, and control it. And hence again, no science, no capitalism, no modernity. If India was too other-worldly, if China was too this-worldly, in this sense of assuming a harmonious world, for Weber what was so distinctive and therefore so important was you had, according to Weber, something right in between the two. So, according to Weber, with the emergence of Protestantism, what you get is an incredible tension with the world.

On the one hand, the positing of a transcendent deity so transcendent that it was beyond human reckoning, beyond human kin, beyond our possible ways of understanding. This God was all-powerful and omniscient. Moreover, this God had actually laid out everything. This God had laid out the fortunes that every single human being would have. This God laid out in advance, and certainly therefore knew in advance, being omniscient, who would be saved and who would not be saved, who in this way of thinking would spend eternity after death in heaven or their eternity after death in hell. And by positing this, they created this thing that really went beyond a possible human understanding.

Now so far, this might sound a bit like the other worldly views in India, but then Weber continued. So, for people living within this Protestant cosmology, Weber argued, it meant that they were filled with this incredible anxiety because they knew that even if they worked hard that wouldn't necessarily mean they would attain a position in heaven because God had already determined that eons ago, and there was nothing they could do to change that because God, being omniscient, omnipotent, and beyond human understanding, had already laid everything out.

And Weber's argument was this was so psychologically devastating to humans that it created this psychological anxiety that led humans to constantly work incredibly, incredibly hard because, psychologically, the only way to deal with such an impossible tension was by in practice being so successful, accumulating so much wealth, working so hard, and changing so much of the world around them it would create a psychological belief that they must be one of the saved because otherwise how could they be so successful? In other words, instead of creating a world that would simply reward them for behaving properly, as Weber claimed to be the case in China, the argument was, no, they had this drive out of this impossible tension that they were forced to live within.

The result of this, Weber argued, is they ultimately develop things like science because they desperately need to understand this world that otherwise seems incomprehensible to them. They create capitalism out of this incredible drive to just work constantly and be incredibly successful, hoping that that would show in practice that they must be one of the saved. And, because of all of this, it equally creates a drive toward the modern world because in the modern world, it would be a world where through our hard work we would achieve success. But again, for Weber, not because the world was pre-given, not because the world was harmonious, not because the ancestors would always support us if we acted properly, rather we did this because the world truly made no sense, and therefore we had to dominate it. The argument for Weber is, once this plays out, it even leads to a rejection in practice of the importance of God.

And so slowly you get a secularized version of this in which humans continue to have this anxiety, continue to have this tension with the world, continue to try to understand and dominate the world even though they don't necessarily believe that there's a transcendent deity. And so, it creates what he calls “a disenchanted world” where all there is is endless science, capitalism, and modernity without even necessarily a belief that there is a God up there directing things. For Weber, this is the modern world. This is also a modern world, as you can see by the way he's phrasing it, that doesn't always sound so good. And Weber felt that underlying modernity was this intense anxiety, an anxiety that someone like Hegel would never be pointing to.

But for Weber it was important because, again, going back to China, which was his “big other,” it is clear Weber loved China. Weber loved the idea of living in a world where everything was harmonious, everything was pre-given. He felt China was lesser than the West because, for the same reason, it didn't develop this tension with the world and therefore it didn't develop science and capitalism and modernity, and yet it's very clear when Weber talks about this harmonious world, it's a very romanticized version where Weber kind of would have loved to live in such a world. And he simply felt that, well, sadly we can't. We must live in this anxiety producing modern world.
And this, this view about China as both being limited by its cosmological assumptions and yet somehow as being a great civilization precisely because of these notions of harmony, this view has continued to be completely dominant in the West, very much up to and including the present moment, where to this day, the view is China failed to develop the modern system of the West and yet, up until the 20th century, was this harmonious land where people truly believe they lived in a wonderful world where if they did what they were told, they would succeed. In other words, ultimately limited, and yet with this kind of romanticized view of what the traditional world of China was like. This, I think, explains why these notions of cosmology have played such an important role in Western thinking about China, both in terms of the claimed limitations of cosmology in China as well as the romanticized views of it.

It is also, as we will see, a fundamentally misguided and dangerous way of thinking about Chinese history. It largely developed precisely as a claim about “the other,” as a claim about what didn't happen in China versus the West, and really only makes sense out of 19th and 20th century European views of what they were experiencing and what they were calling “the modern world.” So, our goal in this class will, on the contrary, be to explore these ideas in China. We will see they're quite different from the ways that they were portrayed by figures like Weber and ongoingly been portrayed in the popular press. And yet we will also do so by means of thinking through the larger comparative implications of these ideas.

As we will see, the world is not consisting of universal views of everything. Civilizations, indeed, have very, very different views, but we will also see often they were wrestling with comparable problems, and the ways they try to articulate these tensions and problems are often very comparable. And once we rethink our comparative studies accordingly, I hope we will see both, in a much more powerful way, what was really going on in China, but perhaps also find ways to rethink our misguided understandings of things like how to compare civilizations and, most importantly, how to rethink the claim that something called “modernity” is a unique invention of the West.

Thank you so much, and I very much look forward to the ongoing discussions in the rest of the course.