Gan Yang on Culture and Capitalism

Gan Yang, "Does Culture Still Have the Strength to Contain Capitalism?"[1]
 
Introduction by David Ownby
 
Gan Yang (b. 1952) is without a doubt one of the grand old men of contemporary Chinese intellectual life.  His career began with one of the famous translation series of the 1980s - Culture: China and the World/文化：中国与世界 – which focused on figures like Martin Heidegger who sought to rethink the entirety of the Western philosophical tradition.  Gan’s embrace of Heidegger was part of his rejection of modernity and capitalism, reflecting his hope that the China that emerged from the wreckage of Maoism would help to shape a new global culture. 

This conviction meant that Gan’s thought has developed in seemingly contradictory ways over the succeeding decades of reform and opening.  Some of his writings appear to be “liberal,” while others are more “New Left” and still others more “New Confucian.”  Gan himself rejects all such labels (as well as their political content) and remains stubbornly contrarian and devoted to his love of culture, a posture which has also led him to a deep appreciation of Leo Strauss and of the idea of a liberal arts education.  Gan has in fact devoted years of his life to creating liberal arts faculties in some of China’s best universities, where students are trained to read both the Western and Chinese classics.

In 2024, Gan Yang published The Path Back to Culture, a collection of more than 30 articles written between 1984 and 2019.  The book is divided into three parts: “Cultural China and Rural China,” “The Western Cultural Left and Global Culture,” and “The Path Back to a Civilizational State.”  Matthew Dean and I have decided to work our way through the volume, translating articles from each of the three parts, perhaps working our way toward a book-length English-language translation of Gan’s work, which could be an important contribution to work on contemporary Chinese intellectuals.  Matt, a graduate student in philosophy at Tulane University, kicks off the project with this translation of the 2017 interview which introduces Gan’s book.

In a week or two, I will add a translation of Gan’s lengthy interview with Zha Jianying in her prize-winning book, The 1980s.  The interview is rich in detail on Gan’s personal and intellectual life and makes for lively reading.
 
Translation by Matthew Dean
 
Question: Thirty years have already passed since China’s “culture fever” moment that launched in 1985. In your opinion, how should we look back at that time?

Gan Yang: Thirty years! I have two conflicting emotions. One is: “It’s already been thirty years!” The other is: “It’s only been thirty years?!” It seems both near and distant. You can imagine how much China has changed. I think what our generation has seen in its lifetime is marvelous. There really has been no generation like ours which has experienced so many great global changes. It was dumb luck that we were born in such times. This is not to say that everything we went through was good, but these experiences were good for the development of intellectuals like me.

When the Cultural Revolution ended, Chinese society was still a traditional society. Chinese people’s basic forms of life, their ethics, were totally traditional. But then you had a torrent of events, all of global significance: Reform and Opening, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the spread of global capitalism, and now Brexit and the rise of Trump. When I was young I read Goethe, who said his greatest fortune in life was to witness the whirlwind of global change that occurred in his lifetime, but the changes he witnessed pale in comparison to ours. All these terrifying changes—from agricultural society, socialism, capitalism, global financial capitalism—all them happened in our lifetime. Almost no one in history has the richness of our experiences. Sometimes I truly wonder how the Chinese people made it through, almost as if nothing happened.

Question: When you look back on those changes do  you feel an intellectual shock? Does anything stand out?

Gan Yang: I watched the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc from the United States. I was spending the latter half of 1989 at the University of Chicago focused on precisely this problem. That was a very important period of time for me. You have no idea what it was like when the Soviet Union dissolved. In those first ten years after the dissolution, life expectancy in Russia decreased by ten years. This had never occurred before in human history. It typically takes at least a hundred years to recover from a civilizational collapse. The fall of the Qing dynasty utterly shattered Chinese civilization, and we are still rebuilding Chinese civilization in its wake. I like to say my thinking is rather old-fashioned. Over the past 30 years, most people have settled into one path or another. For me, however, the big question remains:   how to rebuild a shattered Chinese civilization. My frame of reference is still the utter decimation of Chinese civilization in the late 19th century.

In the 1980s’ debate we were consciously continuing the culture debate of the late 19th century, and the post May 4th debate over Chinese and Western civilization. So all along I understood the collapse of the Soviet Union as a civilizational collapse. A civilizational order is something that stretches from the deepest recesses of the human heart to the entire nation and all of its social institutions. It makes people feel safe and secure. After its destruction, the task of reconstituting a civilizational order is an extremely difficult matter.

How were we to rebuild ourselves after the collapse of the dynastic order? What were the fundamental problems before China? We must begin from this question, since only then can we see other questions clearly.

There have been many changes in the last thirty years. When I was in America, I followed the 1994 debates happening in China about the spirit of the humanities, but honestly, China’s humanities education was so weak then. Why did the Chinese intelligentsia make such a poor showing in the face of capitalism? Their reflections pale in comparison to Europe’s. Western versions of anti-capitalism and anti-modernity were very strong cultural forces, as strong as capitalism itself, and they put up guard rails to keep modernity from careening into catastrophe, trying to limit capitalism’s devastation of human nature and its destruction of everything of value. If there is no supreme governing force, no set of unchanging values, capitalism would be humanity’s worst economic system.

What 18th and 19th century Western thinkers feared most has now come to pass. After the Cold War, capitalism exploded across the globe. When we look back now to Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, what’s so frightening is that already in his time, the human spirit was completely ignored. But the plodding beat of the development of capitalism has continued over the succeeding course of Western history. Over that long period, Europe and America developed interior mechanisms to curtail the force of capitalist money worship. When I arrived in the U.S., the people seemed pretty genuine and honest and didn’t worship money. But after the Cold War ended, the expanse of global capitalism just got crazier and crazier. It just wasn’t the same after that. The most insidious effect of global capitalism is that it seems to have utterly obliterated all other values. The whole world became a world of naked greed. An intellectual (文化人) who supports capitalism is a natural paradox. What does an intellectual value most? Is it money? If so, is he still even an intellectual? So, the idea that an intellectual should support capitalism is ridiculous.

Not everyone feels the same about all of these changes. But I have to emphasize this change, because the world we now know really isn’t the same world we thought it would be. The West isn’t as naïve and simple as people imagine it to be. It isn’t just the power of capitalism. It is also a cultural and social force that for a long time has set strict limits on capitalism. Having now experienced globalization, which drove this fundamental change, we must ask whether culture still has the capacity to constrain capitalism. If we raise the question this way, we can then begin to consider many other questions. 

Question: The modernity question was very important for the editorial board of Culture: China and the World in the 1980s.

Gan Yang: In China’s Contemporary Cultural Awareness, I entitled the first compilation “Rebellion” and the second “Wavering.”[2] I think the title “wavering” spoke to my own personal feelings. Deep within the heart of the humanities lies its ambivalence and fear of modernity, since there is just no telling what modern times would bring. What it has brought are things that assault long-held Western values. This was the basic reaction of the cultural realm. At that time the strongest response was 19th century Western romanticism.

Question: Do you think that problem (of modernity) was beyond the purview of most people in the 1980s?

Gan Yang: The 1980s had one peculiarity: everyone thought everyone else was on their side. The conflict at that time was very simple, and was seen as a black and white divisoin between the reform group and the anti-reform group. Everybody was for the reforms. I feel that there was no connection between myself and the reform party, but neither was I anti-reform. This wasn’t what I was worried about. My concern was about culture. When I look back now, I think I almost naively took a conservative stance. Everything I liked went against modernity. But on the other hand, every great thinker in the modern West has been anti-modernity since the 19th century. Of course, I detested vulgar people who were simply opposed to the West in an unsophisticated way. The heart of Western culture is a deeply fierce adherence to and identification with the humanities, which accompanies an utter refusal to accept all-commodifying capitalism.
 
Question: Why was Heidegger so attractive to you all then?

Gan Yang: It is amazing that we grabbed onto Heidegger by instinct in the murky intellectual environment where we found ourselves. Although reading the background literature to Heidegger was really not the same as reading Heidegger himself, at the time we thought it was. Of course, as I said, we had our vanity. Smart people want to read difficult things.  What sort of thing is attractive to them? Very subtle things. For example, when we read Karl Popper, he just seemed very mediocre and had no intellectual attraction for us.  Heidegger was different. He could occupy your whole soul. He was Western civilization’s high point. His reflections serve as an X-ray of 2000 years of Western civilization and the depths into which his investigation penetrated are unimaginable. This was important in our own assault on philosophy. Heidegger subverted everything that all prior scholars of Western philosophy produced in their professional world. Heidegger is simply amazing.  In my honest opinion, to state it more directly, Heidegger’s thought and Western thought are completely different. He is a wholly other West.

Question: Is reading Heidegger now different from reading him back then?

Gan Yang: First, Heidegger has now been demonized. In the past everyone was quite clear about the problem of confusing a person’s political positions with the depth of his philosophic speculation. You can’t use someone’s political positions to erase the intellectual questions they raise, and at the same time we should note that Western academia’s most profound intellectuals are usually reactionaries, like Plato for instance. Without doubt, in more than 2000 years of Western civilization, the depth of Heidegger’s questioning is without precedent or parallel; if we take away everyone else, the only two great thinkers of Western history that remain are Plato and Heidegger.

You cannot use a simple political litmus test to estimate a thinker of Heidegger’s depth. He is thinking about political questions at a supra-political level. The reaction to politics is nothing but a disillusionment with Western modernity. Heidegger all along had hoped to explain the West more deeply, and he created another set of resources and another logic better suited to that end.

Question: What connection does this have with your discussion today at Tsinghua about Jane Austen?

Gan Yang: For the last decade or so the liberal education I have been pushing for in China is precisely a continuation of my efforts thirty years ago. All my efforts have been rooted in a concern for culture. Austen is without doubt an extraordinary English author. She was facing the confrontation of an old England incompatible with a new England. The traditional culture of England represented by the country gentleman and values which are being violently replaced by new, unknown, anonymous values. Austen thinks these new anonymous values are bad. Her thought is reactionary. What her entire oeuvre reflects is the conflict between new and old values in England at the turn of the century. England at that time was undergoing a massive change. Sentimental novelists were allergic to this change. Her work doesn’t deal with all the big political and social questions, but at a very deep level it reveals all the changes and conflicts human beings must suffer.

Heidegger is the same. He sensed the emergence of a new techno-centrist Europe that would eradicate the old Europe and its amazing tradition of humanist values. So, his first question is: “Why?” He wanted to interrogate modernity to search out the origins of these developments within Western heritage. The second question is whether the West has only this one origin, or whether there might be another origin that can foster a better Europe more aligned with his personal wishes. If you kill off his thought solely for political reasons, you lose any access to the deeper spirit of the West.
 
Question: Do you think an intellectual discourse like that of the 1980s still exists today?

Gan Yang: I think strictly speaking there’s no concept of an “intellectual world” in China anymore today. It’s all so siloed into little disciplines, between which no one can successfully communicate, since there is not any communication at the level of thinking. It’s all become too politicized and demonized. There’s no genuine open-minded desire to hear what the other side is saying. This is the most serious problem of our time. Honestly, I don't think China has a philosophical world now, or even an intellectual world. Every “world” must fundamentally include a plurality of voices and intellectual approaches which can communicate, not just demonize the other from a moral perspective.

The 1980s were relatively simple, and everybody had a common enemy back then: the anti-reform party. That is to say that we were all in the same camp and so everybody who disagreed could still more or less communicate with each other. Nobody would assume you were evil. But after the 1990s everybody got on their moral high horses. You only needed to have a different opinion for the moralizers to pounce on you. They no longer wished to hear what you had to say, unless it was to restate their viewpoint. This is the true problem of our time.

Question: Do you think it’s possible to rebuild [the intellectual richness of the 1980s]?

Gan Yang: At present the whole world, including China, has grown polarized, and this polarization’s growing irrationality makes it difficult to communicate. The important question is whether cooler heads can emerge out of this extreme divergence. I think that the universities offer the only possibility for producing rational and moderate discourse. This is the sole reason why I have only been doing liberal education for the last decade or so. Universities simply must be rational and moderate at their core. It is only from within liberal education that a platform for this reasonable and moderate exchange of thought can emerge, because a liberal arts education is fundamentally incapable of being overtaken by a single ideology. A university’s liberal arts program is necessarily pluralist and expansive. The only standard for a liberal arts curriculum is that it be of high academic quality. If the university can make academic quality its only criterion for liberal arts, promoting pluralist, expansive, rational, and moderate educational environment, then it will be possible for our society to gradually head toward greater reasonableness, moderation, pluralism, and expansiveness. If I thought it were impossible, I wouldn’t be doing all these things.

I am a naive optimist. I believe Chinese culture has a destiny. It is, in the end, a question of faith.
 
Notes

[1] “文化是否仍是制约资本主义的力量,“ a 2017 an interview conducted by Sun Ruoxi 孙若茜 for Sanlian Press.  Reprinted in Gan Yang, The Path Back to Culture 甘阳, 文化归途 (四川人民出版社, 2024).

[2] 甘阳1988《中国当 代文化意识》“反叛”and“彷徨”