The motive in researching for a solution to the problem of the repressed form of self within the theoretical context of a contemporary Ru-influenced Chinese relational selfhood started this academic and personally spiritual journey of discovery and liberation. The research question guiding the direction and range of this journey is as follows:
To what extent do Tu Weiming’s and Jürgen Moltmann’s conceptualizations of relational selfhood provide asuitable alternative or modified modern resource for solving the problem of the repressed form of self within the theoretical context of the contemporary Ru-influencedChinese relational selfhood?
At the end of this study, but not the end of this journey, reviewing the whole course of it until now will be significant and valuable.
David L. Hall (1937–2001) (1994:214), as well as other scholars in different fields,1 asserts that a religion or a culture fundamentally shapes its people through the ways that selfhood is formed and morality is cultivated. Besides, studies in psychiatry as well as in the behavioural sciences have found that in dealing with mental disorders one cannot achieve insights without considering two other variables: culture and the concept of self. As these studies show, these three variables are ‘interdependent’ (Marsella 1985).
Without taking this journey of study, I could not have found evidence about how contemporary Ru-influenced Chinese cultural contexts had considerably and deeply shaped the ways I myself think and feel, the patterns of the ways I behave and react, especially interpersonally. I now see how the value system and the worldview that I regularly rely on stem from that cultural orientation; this includes perspectives by which I look at myself and other persons. I have grown up in an environment of Protestant Christianity mixed with the traditional Chinese Three Teachings, especially the small folk Ruist tradition. I became a devoted Christian in my early thirties and later also became a minister. Even though my Christian parents, especially my father, are very Ru-inspired and I was indoctrinated with Ruist teachings in my school education, nevertheless, I have never thought about becoming a follower of Ruism. Still, the Ruist influences on me have been, as I now realize, quite beyond my initial imagination or intuitions, far greater than most Christian influences. This journey has also made me more and more sensitive to such influences on other contemporary Ru-influenced Chinese persons, so that I have collected many stories from other persons echoing my own experience and identifying my research problem in their own lives. To liberate our repressed forms of self by means of overcoming repressive social imposition is undoubtedly our common yearning. To recognize its existence is a way to begin to identify the cause of its formation and can become the departure point towards a path of personal and communal liberation.
Based on scholars’ evidence, studies of the way the repressed form of self appears in contemporary Ru-influenced Chinese cultural contexts are significant because they point to some underlying causes of certain mental disorders and their related personal and social problems (S3.1). As the following chapters will show, to deal with the problem of the repressed form of self requires that we also deal with the religions or cultures that shape the repressed form of self and might become engaged in liberating or transforming it. The varying ways of forming selfhood and pursuing moral cultivation influence the degree to which any repressed form of self might be liberated. Before starting this study, I had no clear picture of the repressed form of self I suffered from, nor had I ever considered that the study of Christian trinitarian doctrine would be able to provide any solution for it.
What I did recognize was that when one’s self is repressed, a disharmony is formed between the self (the person, or the unique self within, or the spiritualself) and its presentation (the personage, or the social self). Through studies of Tournier’s observations and analyses (S1 to S4 in A-E), I came to understand that the problem of repression lies not in the personage itself, or its roles, but within the discord between the personage and the person. Under those discordant situations, people might cripple themselves by trying to live up to an ideal image, or acting out an ideal role, for instance, as a parent, a child, a teacher, or a student (Fiddes 2000:21–2). This is exactly what has been criticized by certain scholars from different academic disciplines: many contemporary Ru-influenced Chinese persons suffer from a repressed form of self that is shaped by and sustained within the structures and institutions associated with contemporary Ru-influenced Chinese cultural settings and their associated understanding of relational selfhood.
To search for solution/solutions to liberating or transforming this repressed form of self in contemporary Ru-influenced Chinese societies, this study of comparative theology first examined Tu’s New Ruist conception of relational selfhood,2 including looking in depth into his two inconsistent attitudes towards scholars’ criticisms, what I have referred to as the responsive Tu and the resistant Tu. Subsequently, Moltmann’s Christian social trinitarian relational selfhood was explored as a potential means for responding to this problem of the repressed form of self. These were done to assess whether any of Tu’s or Moltmann’s conceptions of relational selfhood could become an appropriate alternative solution for the research problem. However, this cross-cultural and interdisciplinary study proved to be a daunting task involving challenges and complicated interpretative difficulties. Here below I will summarize these challenges and difficulties and indicate how they have been overcome.
As Chapter 1 and Section 2.2.7 will explain and it will be mentioned elsewhere regularly in most chapters, most of the primary and secondary sources I investigated are full of problematic expressions and arguments. Scholars make broad claims in these writings without specifying or analysing more precisely their ambiguous, generalized, or even over-generalized, terminology and interpretations. This is especially manifest in the often used and abused monolithic comparative methods in their general cross-cultural (China-West or East-West) and other specific interdisciplinary analyses. In this regard, I am indebted to Lauren Pfister who always questioned and challenged such kinds of presentations appearing in my study, but also encouraged and instructed me how to avoid them as much as possible during this intellectual journey under his supervision.
Many of the efforts at dialogue among different cultures, religions, and disciplines within modern Chinese cultural contexts — especially between different cultural and religious studies, but also between them and the social scientific disciplines (Tu 1967:77–80) — have been filled with interpretive challenges and difficulties. According to the evidence disclosed in the relevant literature, I have identified four main reasons for persistent difficulties leading sometimes to ineffectiveness in those dialogues:
(1) Some of the same or similar terminology is employed to denote ambiguous meanings or different scopes of study as used by different authors in varying contexts. For example, consider the general use of terms such as Confucianism (Ruism) (as mentioned in S1.1.1), individualism (or collectivism) (Hwang, Tsungi 2023), Christianity (Walls 1996:129–57), true self (A-D), Heaven (S4.3.4 & S5.6), transcendence (S4.3.4.2, S5.6, & S8.3.2.3), and [European] individualism and egoism (S5.4.2) or Sino-theology and Chinese theology (Chin 2006:126).
(2) Some different expressions, probably including employing technical terms in non-technical or other disciplinary contexts, are adopted to denote the same or similar thing (Tu 1967:75–6) or two similar things without a clear demarcation. For example, there are different phrases describing the phenomena associated with the problems of repressed form of self (A-E), different phrases denoting the same or similar meaning of true self (A-D), or different Ruist traditions with high overlap of their characteristics (S1.1.3 & S1.1.4).
(3) Some evidence provided by social scientists is ignored or rejected simply due to the excuse of their unrecognized authority or different professional approach to interpreting religions or cultures. For example, this is one of the reasons the resistant Tu argues against the social scientists’ criticisms of contemporary Ru-influenced Chinese relational selfhood (S5.3.1).
(4) Some terms and concepts used in Chinese language contexts are not precisely translated, and so cannot be adequately understood or communicated in English language studies (Tu 1985:7). For example, in considering the differences between zìwǒ
自我 and self (ibid. & A-E), guānxì關係 and relationships (C3F23), lúnlǐ倫理 and ethics (S2.2.4). This is a special challenge for this study, because most of the secondary sources in this study are presented in Chinese language, and the vast majority of the issues involve concepts linked directly to Chinese contexts.
As Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 will disclose, when discussing the issues related to asymmetrically hierarchical social relationships, Tu’s attitudes towards scholars’ criticisms are wavering and even reasoning circularly from time to time, without providing enough rationale to explain their decisive change. Besides, some of his arguments and expressions tend to be either extremely absolute or reductionist, and so easily appear to be over-generalized. The presentation and evaluation of Tu’s overall integrated account in both his English and Chinese works tend to look like I have a critical bias against Tu, especially if readers have no opportunity to review enough of his works in both languages. I have suffered from such a misunderstanding every time I presented this part of my study throughout this journey of discovery even at my pre-viva review. Tu addressed the same questions with different attitudes when he wrote and published in these two languages. This adds both to the interpretive difficulties and to the sense of what some might see negatively as either his inconsistencies or positively as his flexible explanations. It is notable that these variances are more evident in Chinese than in English, especially in those works produced during the 1980s and 1990s.
As Chapter 6 to Chapter 8 will manifest, Moltmann (1926–2024) did not present and argue his vision of social trinitarian relational selfhood directly for liberating the problem of repressed form of self, let alone for interacting with contemporary Ru-influenced Chinese cultural contexts. Although I was attracted to this conception of relational selfhood as soon as I got to know it, there is a significant explanatory challenge to apply it to this research problem within the particular cross-cultural contexts I have considered.
For my personal existential need and the yearnings of all the other suffering contemporary Ru-influenced Chinese persons mentioned above, this study adopts an ‘indirect dialogue’ as the main approach (S2.2.7) to solve the research problem, instead of merely exchanging information about different conceptions of relational selfhood. However, in contemporary Ru-influenced Chinese multifaith and multi-cultural societies within the contemporary world, the paths towards liberating the repressed form of self for varying cultural types of Chinese Christians and non-Christians must be very different. While this is not the place to go into further diversifying contemporary Ru-influenced Chinese person into subgroups, as field research methodology does, it is enough to suggest possible alternative solutions based on the studies of Tu’s and Moltmann’s accounts of relational selfhood for readers, especially for those who are suffering problems related to the repressed form of self.
While a comprehensive examination of all these difficulties in the primary and secondary literature would take us too far away from our declared study project, I believe it is enough to seek to avoid ambiguities caused by them as much as is possible in the discussions and arguments of this book. Without many good academic examples to follow and refer to, I have taken extra efforts in this book to avoid the over-generalizations that are so prevalent in the secondary literature as much as it has been possible for me to do.
For example, Barnlund (1989:32), Markus and Kitayama (1991a; 1991b), Joan G. Miller (1997), Holland (1997), Baumeister (1997:193–5; 1999), Zusho (2008), and O’Neill et al. (2016).
Some academic scholars, such as Neville (1991), include Confucianism as a religion so that the comparative studies between Christianity and Confucianism are categorized into comparative theology.