by Chul-Ho Youn

I. Introduction

The subject-object structure is basic to the epistemological vision of reality. In modern Western culture the subjective side is determinative with regard to the experience of reality. In the traditional or communal cultures of Asia, which do not establish such clear ego boundaries between subject and object or subject and subject, however, such an egocentric attitude is problematic. Especially in Buddhism, such a lack of firm ego boundaries is precisely the problem that limits our discerning or intuiting our relationship to the universe or to God.

Yet the difficulty in thinking and speaking about God has also been recognized in Western culture. In the Christian church there have been theologies which concluded that it is impossible to speak about God. They contended that our God-relation is ineffable and thus we can express God only via negativa. Even those who affirm the possibility of articulating their relation to God, understand their religious language as symbolic, mythical, metaphorical, or analogical.

The Hebrews in the ancient period forbade the utterance of the divine name and in the suffering time of national exile and oppression they testified, “Verily, thou art a God that hidest thyself” (Isa.45:15). When Augustine in the Western church sought to articulate the Christian Trinitarian view of God, he qualified his articulation with the admission that it is “not because the phrases are adequate - they are only an alternative to silence.”2 Even Thomas Aquinas, who most carefully articulated the analogical nature of our God-language, wrote, “This is what is ultimate in the human knowledge of God: to know that we do not know God.”3 But he used analogical language to affirm the possibility of communicating religious meanings and expressing the meaning of God.

Today the question whether our finite, culturally relative rationalities and languages can hope to express religious experiences in relation to the universe or to God is still open to discussion. Even a rationalistic metaphysician like Whitehead, as he tried to articulate a modem cosmology, felt the limits of our rational capacity: “How shallow, puny, and imperfect are the efforts to sound the depths in the nature of things. In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly.”4 He found the ground of hope not in any metaphysical premise but in the religious faith which forms the motive for the pursuit of all sciences alike, including metaphysics. “Such an intuition marks the point where metaphysics - and indeed every science — gains assurance from religion and passes over into religion)

If we as religious persons acknowledge our limit and yet hope to articulate our religious faith for the whole of our common life-experience, we must be willing to participate in an ongoing dialogical process. This hope is often frustrated by the “idolatry” that a society has for itself with its own culture and religion and the fear and hostility that the society has for another with its strange culture and religion. For example, if the tribal theism of Shinto could justify the aggressive nationalism of Japan, it may be equally true that North American Judeo-Christian civil religion can and has functioned in similar ways.

And it could be also the case that resources for the healing of such tribal and nation idolatries can be found not only in the tradition of Mount Sinai but also in the “compassionate fellow-feeling for all creatures” found in the “superbly aesthetic and communal life of Buddhism and Confucianism.”6 In our contemporary age of the so-called globalization, the sense of the dialectical synthesis which is aimed at the reconciliation of our divided and conflicted world is growing. Religious persons have all overattached themselves to the cultural and religious tradition that has formed and nourished them. Truly, is it possible for us both to stand in and stand out of our formative traditions so as to communicate meaningfully in our cross-cultural and interreligious context? This is the main point which we are about to investigate here.

II. The Hermeneutics of Gadamer

Hans-Georg Gadamer’s reflection about these issues is illuminative for our discussion. According to him it would become vacuous and undialectical if emancipatory’ reflection tried to think the idea of a completed reflection, in which society would lift itself out of the continuing process of emancipation - the process of loosening itself from traditional ties and binding itself to newly constructed validities - so as to achieve an ultimate, free and rational self-possession.7 If, as he said, no completed reflection is possible for our finite, historically conditioned spirits, then we must give ourselves to a dialectical and dialogical process within and beyond our traditions. This requires a creative and critical participation in our own traditions that enables us to give up any attempts at their absoluffzadon: “Tradition is not the vindication of what has come down from the past but the further creation of moral and spiritual life.8 In our cross-cultural global village this further creation should be accomplished through a dialectical process of dialogue among diverse traditions.

It is remarkable that this thought came from one who consistently emphasized the formative power of Western tradition. He stressed that understanding, above all, is participation in an event of tradition.9 Hermeneutics is the “interplay of the movement of tradition and the movement of the interpreter. But the interpreters are already conditioned by the tradition they are interpreting. No one may claim complete self-knowledge as he or she interacts with their formative tradition, for no one is ever a fully self-conscious transcendent ego. “To be historical means that knowledge of oneself can never be complete. All self-knowledge arises from what is historically pre-given. . . because it underlies all subjective intentions and actions, and hence both prescribes and limits every possibility for understanding any tradition.10

Gadamer’s well-known definition of understanding as the “fusion of horizons” came out of the recognition both of the formative powe/ of tradition and the finitely free creativity of the interpreter. “Horizon” characterizes the way in which thought is tied to its finite determinacy, and the way one’s range of vision is gradually expanded. The historical task of hermeneutics is to investigate the past horizon from which any traditional text speaks without denying its claim to be saying something true to a supposedly closed contemporary horizon of complete self-knowledge. We dare not because ultimately we cannot objectify tradition. There can be no Robinson Crusoe-like dream of historical enlightenment within a closed horizon.

The horizon of the past is always in motion and becomes aware of itself in historical consciousness. “Our own past and that other past toward which our historical consciousness is directed help to shape this moving horizon out of which human life always lives and which determines it as heritage and tradition.”11 Our present horizon is continually in process of being formed as we test our “prejudices.” Gadamer finds the Enlightenment’s attitude toward prejudice itself prejudice.12 We simply cannot form our present horizon without the attitudes, values, and commitments, which are the prejudgments we receive in any present from our past. Yet our modem historical consciousness differentiates us from and allows us partially to transcend our past as we test our prejudices. The understanding to which we come in any present. historically effected consciousness may thus be expressed as a “fusion of past and present horizons.”13

Heidegger made contemporary Euro-Americans aware their finitude and historicity and thus recognize the problematic of the turn to the subject by elucidating them the phenomenological relation of being to time. Illumined by Heidegger’s phenomenology, they are no longer able to understand themselves in terms of the Cartesian “cogito” or Kantian “transcendental ego” but in the faticity of dasein (being there, existence). We have the possibility of understanding because there is a “there” (da), which constitutes the distinction between being and beings. According to Gadamer, Heidegger recognized in Husserlian “positivism” of phenomenology “the unresolved problem of metaphysics,” that is, the concept of mind or spirit as conceived by speculative idealism. In grounding the “hermeneutics of faticity” he went beyond both the concept of mind developed by classical idealism and the thematic of transcendental consciousness purified by phenomenological reduction.14

The unresolved problem of metaphysics for religious persons who understand and accept the finitude of their historical conditionedness is how we may understand the metaphysical meaning of our God-relation. Is there a way to understand and communicate the meaning of the universal relationality, of God along with our relative and historical experience? The turn to the subject in the West since 18th century has made the cross-cultural communication of meaning more difficult especially with Asian culture. As mentioned above, Gadamer indicated that no completed reflection is possible for our finite, historically conditioned spirits. If no completed reflection is possible for us as finite subjects, how may we reconceive our subjectivity so as to enter more dialectically and dialogically into the process of clarifying the metaphysical meaning of our universal God-relation? May we conceive God as a Reality that limits and exceeds the omnipotence of our reflection while remaining its rational ground? If we may, we are able to maintain the religious hope that undergirds our rationality. In the cross-cultural vision of reality which envisions universal relationality, particularity of person and culture is to be not only overcome but also included.

III. The Horizon of Asian Religion and Culture: The Experience of the Undifferentiated Aesthetic Continuum

F.S.C. Northrop is a Western scholar who has made an impressive attempt to understand and interpret the transcultural and interreligious characteristics of Asian culture. According to him, in the West verbally designated connotative relations structured by grammatical syntax communicate theoretical meaning with minimal dependence upon immediate experience. In contrast “the genius of the East is that it has discovered a type of knowledge and has concentrated its attention continuously upon a portion of the nature of things which can be known only by being experienced.”15 He notes that the ideographic character of the Chinese and Japanese languages largely denotes what is immediately experienced, and its syntax structures its ideographic symbols in the way they are associated in immediate experience. For this reason, he says, the Oriental is continuously telling that one can never understand what he is saying or writing by merely listening to or studying his spoken statements or published works alone and that one must in addition directly apprehend and experience, and then take time to contemplate, that to which they refer.16 I think Western people may hope to fuse their traditional horizon with the horizon found in the great philosophical and religious classics of Asia to find in their immediate experience what has become primary in ours.

The aesthetic relationality which is personally experienced in Confucianism consists of three virtues of ‘chih’ (knowledge, wisdom), ‘jen’ (compassion, human-heartedness), and “yung’ (courage, fortitude). Jen or compassion is the central virtue prerequisite for all of the others. It is first realized by human beings in the filial relations of their human families, but it more fundamentally denotes a factor in human nature as such.

In Taoism, jen is even conceived universally and ontologically. The reality of relational being expressed as jen is not only found in humanity but is to be found in the universe as a whole, The jen found in human being is also the ‘tao’ (the way). It is an all-embracing mode of being that comprehends both human being and nature.17 But it cannot be epistemologically comprehended by focusing on any determinate sensory experience, as a Western empiricist might. It must be immediately appfehended in a mode Northrop designates as the “undifferentiated aesthetic continuum,” which contrasts with the dominant Westem modes of experience and thought. We must not confuse the immediately apprehended aesthetic continuum with the postulated extemal space of Western science and philosophy. Between the aesthetically given self and the aesthetically given natural object there is oneness or identity, as well as difference. They are not merely different from each other, but also differentiations of the one, all-embracing, immediately apprehended aesthetic continuum.18

For Asian experience, the all-embracing continuum or manifold is as much the content of immediately experienced nature as are the differentiations within it. It is the experience of oneness given in this experience that is the basis or compassion (jen) in all relations, and for human-heartedness in all human relations. It cannot be adequately known in the theoretical constructs of words and language but only through contemplation of its immediacy. The distinction between subject and object thus also cannot be adequately expressed through subject-predicate modes of syntax. It must be experienced within an all-embracing continuity. This is why aesthetic experience is finally the basis for the moral and religious life of Confuciariists and Taoists.

Human beings, however, do not usually experience the aesthetic continuum as undifferentiated; it is usually at least partially differentiated. The differentiations in the form of our experience of persons and natures, however, are always temporal. They are transitory and mortal; only the continuum abides. When one faces the loss of what is aesthetically and emotionally dear in the temporary relation with a beloved person, the cultivation of the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum for its own sake becomes important. Buddhism seeks to grasp this indeterminate immediacy as ‘nirvana’. This is not “nothing” as Westerners understand it, but the most emotionally and aesthetically rich experience one could have, as Buddhists understand it.

It is not that the time experienced in the transience of events and relations that become and perish is nothing, but it is conceived differently than in most Western culture and religion. It is best symbolized as the ripples on an otherwise placid and silent pool. The ripples are not without value as they are experienced in the differentiations of an aesthetically beautiful landscape or a beloved personality, but they are transitory. The tragedy of their transitoriness can be met only as we overcome our possessive desires to grasp and control these inevitably temporary and transient phenomena. Asian sages teach that it is possible to experience this blessing, seeking to reduce or remove the differentiations arising in objective sensory perception. This mode of experience removes or reduces the focus on the centered ego-self in relation with external objects, so that one may experience the immediacy of the unlimited, undifferentiated continuum.

IV. The Fusion of Asian and Western Horizons

We can find a form of Western religious experience which is similar to the Eastern tradition mentioned above in the experience and reflection of Pierre Teilliard de Chardin. He urges that if we look beneath the superficial way that we ordinarily understand ourselves, we will begin to sense an Unknown One -- one hardly emerged from consciousness and only half-awake. Seen beneath ourselves in half-shadow the features of this Unknown One seem to merge into the face of the world. Teilhard is stunned by “the vehemence and possessive force of the contact” between his individual self and the universe: gripped “with religious horror” he realized that “what is emerging in us is the great cosmos.”19

Yet what marks Teilhard’s experience as Western is his emphasis on, and concern for, activity. This is a cosmic sense of reality that actively moves toward expression. It is not quite Northrop’s “undifferentiated aesthetic continuum,” for it apprehends a cosmos that is moving toward differentiation - that is a cosmos that is in process toward ever greater complexity. In the depths of the consciousness that experiences reality in this way, there is the sense that one is participating in a cosmos and a humanity that is emerging. There is a creativity within that takes over and acts through one’s person.

What is evident in Teilhard’s religious experiences are both the traditional Western prejudices of a created order or ordering in the cosmos and the more recent scientific prejudice of an evolutionary process in the universe. Between his sense and experience of cosmos and that of Asian cultures and religions, there are both similarity and difference. TeiThard, like them, knew both the lassitude and exaltation, the agony and the ecstasy of participation in the cosmic universal. But unlike them, he could affirm that the cosmic universal is the more active the more personally vulnerable and fragile he feels. “God is all the more likely to act through us, the more aware we are of our own helplessness . . . Now that the veil of my person is beginning to wear thin (because I feel so vulnerable), I have confidence that God will take over for me somehow.”20

Northrop, however, does not admit any essential difference between East and West in their evaluation of activity. He argues that the “undifferentiated aesthetic continuum,” as Asians experience it, provides a genuine basis for human freedom. In the Oriental thought freedom has its basis in that part of the nature of man and things which is indeterminate and thus a potentiality for a determinateness that is not yet. As the Orient has seen, and as the Westerner, by the failure of his attempts to derive freedom from the behavior of determinate entities, has demonstrated, if all reality is determinate, then no meaning for human freedom can be found. The Oriental asserts that if man gives expression only to the differentiated, specifically sensed, determinate portion of himself and of things, then he is caught in the remorseless wheel of fate. “It is also what he has in mind when he affirms that it is only by recognizing the indeterminate, all-embracing field component of his nature and by giving expression to the creativity which it permits, that man attains freedom, while also gaining equanimity with respect to the coming and going of the transitory, differentiated tortion of the self and all things.”21

The Buddhist or Taoist may not refer to the creative activity of “God” at this point as Tei.hard did, but they both sense that the dynamic of their creative freedom rests on their participation in the indeterminate cosmic universal.

In comparing and contrasting these Western and Eastern modes of experiencing and expressing an immediate participation in the cosmic universal, similarities and differences are disclosed. They are similar in expressing the intuitive immediacy of participation in an all-embracing continuum or universal and the attendant reduction or obliteration of the ego boundaries of the differentiated, experiencing, rational self. The disjunction between the subject and the differentiated object is overcome while subjectivity is not entirely lost but in some ways is vividly enhanced. A oneness is experienced with nature or the cosmos, which some religious Westerners might more characteristically express as an atonement (at-one-ment) with God.

The differences within similarity are equally important. Westerners dislike their inability to describe and theoretically interpret this experience, so that some judge it to be debilitating. The Western tradition enculturates persons to value discursive, systematic articulation of differentiated experience even as they may intuit their participation in the cosmic universal. A more fundamental difference is in the valuation of activity and the Western person’s desire to be active. The Taoist affirmation of wu-wei (actionless activity) is interpreted by Northrop as being grounded in the indeterminate, all-embracing cosmic universal; it is this alone that enables creative, free activity. But he does not note that it is the desire for actualizing a “potentiality for determinateness that is not yet” that is precisely a problem for the consciousness of many Asian.

Teilhard found resolution for the finite limits of his Western desire for activity by intuiting his participation in the activity of the Creator God who is interpreted as creating the emergent determinate order of the spatio-temporal process. Teilhard’s desire to be active co-creator, despite the transience of his finitude, is affirmed within his experience of the cosmic universal: “God is all the more likely to act through us, the more aware we are of our own helplessness.” This vividly contrasts with the Buddhist experience and evaluation of desire.

Northrop’s focus on the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum leads him to minimize the crucial issue of desire and the dialectic of the desire for desirelessness in Asian, especially Buddhist religion. Nirvana is not simply a positive aesthetic experience for Asians but gains much of its meaning because it is the experience that results when desire is eliminated,”22 Buddhism intends to offer salvation to people who had conceived themselves as chained to caste and to a wheel of rebirth. The Buddha’s Eightfold Path and the Four Noble Truths are a means to salvation which may be ecstasy on its positive side, but which is on its negative side, an escape from craving and desiring, the course of suffering. The mysticism of the East is therefore a symptom of a still more profound difference between East and West a difference, namely, between a people who repudiate and a people who accept the claims of desire.23 The Four Nobel Truths express the single proposition that the suffering of life can be ended only by halting the process of desiring that is its cause. Nirvana, the ultimate goal of the Buddhist was originally a Sanskrit term meaning essentially “without desire.” Thus, this negative meaning must be seen as dialectically necessary to its positive aesthetic meaning, and it would seem that the widespread experience of helpless poverty would enhance for those who suffer it this negative dimension of nirvana’s meaning.

A crucial issue of cross-cultural and interreligious dialogue is how to interpret and resolve the conflict of desires and the very meaning of the experience of desire in East and West. Northrop, like many others, examined his Western cultural history to judge where it went wrong and found in Eastern culture a principle of intuiting the undifferentiated substratum of experience that might heal the increasing arbitrariness of his destructive Western desires.24 Northrop and many other Westerners shared the Buddha’s revulsion at the struggle of all against all and commended to the West the Buddha’s answer to our individualistic, possessive desire that we rid ourselves of the sell that needs to be satisfied by the objects of its desires.

Yet the alternative answer is also found in the Abrahamic religions as well. As was seen in the thought of Teilhard, what is crucial in this faith is the alternative understanding of creativity that is grounded in the Western tradition of God as Creator. Peter Munz presents “another alternative” to the cravings and conflicts endemic to recent Western culture. “it is contained in the prophetic faith and in the notion of man as a fellow worker wit God. It says that the world is a very terrible place but we must cooperate with God in order to improve it. . . And the belief in God Creator is the belief that the goodness which made the world has an intrinsic value and that one iota of it will outweigh. . . all evil and all terror.25

Munz expresses the alternative to Asian perspectives that some Christians articulate as the creativity of God. And he properly restates it to the central Christian experience in which our human terror of historical karma manifested in the terror of Jesus’ cross is transformed by the creative love of God. That “perfect love casts out fear,” as I John 4:18 puts it, is very near the center of Christian “aesthetic” experience.

Can the meeting of East and West help? The dialectical answer to this question should be that it may be either or both good and bad. These two traditions need not be adversarily disjoined so that to learn something of the meaning of Christian’s God-relation from the East requires the loss of the meaning discerned in Christian’s relation to the Creator. Rather, the fusion of these horizon may be very good inde~d, even enhancing Christian’s experience and understanding of the meaning of both God’s and humanity’s creativity. Christians need not negate their Judeo-Christian desire to serve or cooperate with God’s creativity, even in some of the secular forms it has taken, but Christians do have to limit its excesses if they are to be reconciled again with nature and be reconciled with a deeply divided humanity, many of whose divisions have resulted from the demonically possessive desires of the West’s political and economic colonialisms.

V. Cross-Cultural Mediating Concepts

A. Whitehead’s Panentheistic Metaphysics - To facilitate the communication of a cross-cultural vision of reality, mediating concepts are needed. For example, at the turn of this century the theory of relativity shifted Western scientific understanding from a world-as-absolute-physical-entity to a world-picture as a structure of sensory experiences. Planck’s quantum physics and Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy brought Western science to recognize an inexpressible substratum of energy events or waves that underlie all of our phenomenological experience. Thus, Western science and philosophy has been brought far closer to Eastern perspectives through its own development than seemed possible from the earlier Western perspective on subject-object relations, even though the primacy it still appears to give to the conceptual over the intuited seems excessive to Asians.

Yet it is Alfred North Whitehead who provides the conceptual mediation needed for the cross-cultural communication of meaning. Whitehead critiqued Western epistemology by showing it to be based on a highly abstract derivative, and limited second-order experience, which he calls “experience in the mode of presentational immediacy.” The more primal mode of experience is a vaguer but more rudimentary preconscious or subconscious feeling (prehension) that the human mind shares with its body and the rest of the sentient world, which Whitehead terms “experience in the mode of causal efficacy.”26 The Cartesian clear and distinct ideas in the mode of presentational immediacy are abstracted from the generic feelings (prehensions) that are the causally efficacious data in the concrescence of a subject. Whitehead’s recovery of the experience of causal efficacy was intended to resolve the Western difficulty of crediting “immediate experience.

All modern (Western) philosophy hinges around the difficulty of describing the world in terms of subject and predicate, substance and quality, particular and universal. The result always does violence to that immediate experience which we express in our actions, our hopes, our sympathies, our purposes, and which we enjoy in spite of our lack of phrases for its verbal analysis. We find ourselves in a buzzing world, amid a democracy of fellow creatures, whereas under some disguise or other, orthodox (Western) philosophy can only introduce us to solitary substances, each enjoying an illusory experience.27

When Whitehead characterizes our basic experience as the prehension of a “buzzing” world, he is expressing the “differentiated” character of experience. We experience the effects of diverse forms of definiteness that myriads of energy event (quanta) have upon the concrescence of the energy event that is our sell in any given moment. But the experience is of a differentiated “continuum” because reality is not solitary substances, whether mental or physical, but an organism where each actual entity is constituted by its synthesis of other actual entities. In contrast with Aristotelian dictum “a substance is not present in a subject,” which underlies the subject-object dualism in much of Western philosophy and science, and Cartesian dualism between the cogito as mental substance and the world as extended substance, Whitehead characterizes his metaphysics as a philosophy of organism. In this organistic vision of reality, a being is present in another entity and “an actual entity is concrete because it is such a particular concrescence of the universe.”28 Thus, the experience of a subject in the primal mode of causal efficacy is always that of a “differentiated universal” as a “particular concrescence of the universe.”

In Whitehead’s panentheistic philosophy, God is the complete, concrete “differentiated universal.” As the chief exemplification of the metaphysical principles that order and interpret our cosmos, God is the only complete concrescence of the whole universe. The finitude of all other actual entities requires abstracting and eliminating (negatively prehending) subjectively centered forms of definiteness from the myriad energies that affect us if they and we are to synthesize a new and limited unity. We as finite subjects therefore objectify by abstracting from the subjective unity of other actual entities. God alone prehends the complete concrescence of all actual entities in God’s “consequent nature.” Thus in God’s physical pole, God alone is the complete, concrete “differentiated universal.”

But what of the Taoist and Buddhist experience of the “undifferentiated universal”? In Whitehead’s terms, this is God’s mental pole, or “primordial nature,” defined as “the unlimited conceptual realization of the absolute wealth of potentiality.” As such, God is “the principle of concretion” as the indeterminate ground and origin of creativity and novelty, which is close to what Northrop thinks of the Eastern perspective as “the indeterminate which is the potentiality for a determinateness that is not yet.”

But there is a fundamental difference, and it is at the point of the validation of desire. Whitehead envisions the subjective form of God’s conceptual feelings as including appetition for the determinate actualization of indeterminate potentiality. Thus God is “the lure for feeling, the eternal urge of desire. His particular relevance to each creative act as it arises from its own conditioned standpoint in the world, constitutes him the initial ‘object of desire’ establishing the initial phase of each subjective aim.”29

Western religious affirmation of desire, however, need not take the form of “the irresistible moral drive.” Whitehead repudiated ‘God in the image of the personification of moral energy” for the sake of affirming God in the image of love. God does not “combat productive force with productive force,” even if it is understood as moral drive, but like a poet of the world, leads it with tender patience by the visibn of truth, beauty, and goodness. This remains far closer to the Tao that “undifferentiated and yet complete, which existed before heaven and earth,” enables “acting without action.”30 That is, one acts on the basis of one’s empathic participation in the whole, which concretely takes the form of sensitive, dialogical, mutual interaction. But this undifferentiated whole must be seen as moving toward differentiation through such activity.

This Whiteheadian concept model of a differentiated, relational, becoming universal may be cognitively useful to mediate the cross-cultural meaning of our God-relation. Whitehead’s panentheistic metaphysics articulates an organic, evolutionary model for understanding the spatio-temporal process in which we creatively participate. There is cosmic unity, but that unity differentiates. The universal is a “relational universal.” Because relational, it cannot be fully known in the completed reflection (Gadamer). It can only be increasingly known in the dialogical process that is passing into and bringing God’s very being into fuller actualization. Our capacity to discern meanings in the sign-events of our commonly experienced cosmos or to communicate meanings in the syntactical relations of our various symbol systems is grounded in our participation in this relational universal, which is both the creative primordial ground and created consequent eschaton of our spatio-temporal process - god as conceived panentheistically in relation to our world.

B. Korean ‘Han’ Thought - The adequate Mediating concept of the cross-cultural relationality of meaning is not only found in the Western process thought, but also in Korean thought. Korean philosophical theologian Sang II Kim analyzes how the many are related to one by comparing Hua-yen Buddhism with Whitehead’s philosophy. He notes that the Korean word ‘han’ is the root for the Korean term for God, ‘Hanenim’ or ‘Hananitn’. This Korean ‘han’ shares the same semiotic and semantic root in Ural-Altaic world, where the same root is pronounced as ‘gan’, ‘kan’, or ‘chan’. And this term ‘han’ can be found in almost all ancient religions in Asia.31 In Summerian ‘an’ or ‘kan’ signifies three meanings: totality or much, field, and production.32 Kim notes that the Korean word ‘han’ comprehends five major meanings: one, many, middle, same, and indeterminacy or about.33

According to him, it was in the Axial age (BC. 2C - SC, Karl Jaspers) that the concepts ‘one’ and ‘many’, along with such concepts as rational thinking, reason, justice, love, emerged onto the human consciousness in their differentiated and contrasted relationality. Since then, the problem of the relation between the one and the many has been the crucial theme both West and East. In Hebraic religion and culture, the monotheistic faith was constructed by those prophets of the Axial period like Jeremiah, Amos, and especially the second Isaiah. Through those prophets the faith in Elohinz (plural form of El) was transformed into that in the monotheistic Yahweh.

In the ancient Western culture of Helienism, it was Plato above all who contrasted the undifferentiated one (idea) with the differentiated many (phenomenal world). The central concern of the West as well as the East, has been how the one (nous) and the many, the universal and the particular, transcendence and immanence, or God and the world are related to each other. In generaL traditional Western religion and philosophy strengthened the polarization between the one and many. For some time the one aspect was dominant and thus the transcendence and distinctiveness of the one was emphasized, and at another time the many aspect dominated, and thus the one was equalized with the sell-transforming universe. As a consequence, the solution set forth in Western thought throughout its history, took the form of “either/or,” or dialectical “both! and,” and in theological terms, transcendental theism or immanent pantheism. The former is represented by Kierkegaard, while the latter is by Hegal. Kim criticizes traditional Western philosophy for failing to adequately synthesize the one and the many.

In the East, the relation between the one and the many is investigated in term of li and shi (Hua-yen Buddhism), or li and gi (Neo-Confucianism). Buddha (BC. 566-486) was enlightened into the Middle Path in which he integrated the one and the many into the same. Nagarjuna developed Buddha thought. He comprehended the one as “the higher truth” and the many as “the worldly truth”, and found “nothingness” in the middle of them, unlike the Theravada Buddhism in which nothingness is understood to be in contrast with being. Kim also criticizes Taoism and Buddhism for integrating the one and the many into the same by making them middle.

According to him, the Buddhist vision of reality went beyond the stage of the Middle Path into the ultimate dimension of “about” or “indeterminacy” after it arrived at Korea in AD. 4-5C.

The thought of Sung Lang (BC SC) of the Kogureu Dynasty has come down through his disciple Ji Jang. He developed “the Theory of Prepositional Synthesis of two Truths”34 According to this theory, in the first proposition the worldly truth and the higher truth are contrasted in such a way that the former is related to “being” and the latter is to “nothingness”.

In the second proposition, these contrasting two truths of the first proposition are synthesized into another worldly truth as ‘being nothingness”, and the higher truth is set up as its negation, i.e., as “not-being not-nothingness”. In the third proposition, those contrasting two truths of the second proposition are again synthesized into still another worldly truth as being-nothingness not-being not-nothingness”, and in turn still another higher truth is established as its negation, i.e., as “not-being-nothingness not-not-being not-not-nothingness”. When “nothingness” corresponds to the “one” and “being” corresponds to the “many,” “not-being not-nothingness” in the second proposition represents the Middle Path.

But Sung Lang breaks through the Middle Path by negating even this, and thus goes on to “being-nothingness not-being not-nothingness” and “not-being-nothingness not-not-being not-not-nothingness”. What comes after negating the Middle Path is the final meaning of ‘han’, i.e., the ‘indeterminacy” or “about.” The Korean philosophy of ‘han’, therefore, sees the one and the many as indeterminate so that they can appear in any form. Kim sees this Korean notion of indeterminacy as similar to Whitehead’s understanding of creativity where the one and the many always concrese in new and creative forms.35

Modern quantum physics or the principle of indeterminacy might be helpful in understanding it. According to these theories, the truth of reality is neither determined by the one nor the many, neither by the object nor by the subject. Rather, it consists in passing through their synthesis (middle) and the destruction of the synthesis and thus finally reaching indeterminacy. The one and the many interpenetrate each other. And the truth manifests itself when this interpenetration is fully realized and in turn destroyed. Using the concepts of Huayen Buddhism, this vision of reality may be properly expressed in terms of the identity of the absolute and the phenomenal or ‘li’ and ‘shi’ and the identity among all factors of existence among all phenomena.36

Probably Sung Lang found the structure of his theory of indeterminacy in the innate ethos of the Kogureu people. That is to say, his theory might reflect the Korean ethos of han, in which one, many, “middle”, and “about” are integrated. The final meaning of han as indeterminacy is succeeded an developed by Won Chuk’s “One Mind Theory”. Wei Sang’s “One Aspect Theory”, and Wonhyo’s “Theory of Harmonization of All Disputes in Ten Chapters

It is a great blessing for Korean Christians to appropriate the inherited concept ‘han’ and thus formulate the term ‘Hanenim’ or ‘Hananim’ in order to name God. With this term, and in the faith in I-Iananint Korean Christians are able to overcome without difficulty the polarity among the undifferentiated one and the differentiated many, transcendental theism (one), immanent pantheism (many) and atheism (middle). The reality envisioned in han thought many be regarded as corresponding to the panentheistic metaphysics of Whitehead, if it is recognized that it does not so much favor the inclination of Whitehead’s philosophy toward the differentiation of the undifferentiated continuum with its desire for activation in radical temporality. Yet no matter how this sort of qualification may be formulated, ‘han’ thought must be a no less superb mediating concept for the Coors-cultural vision of reality in East and West than Whiteheadian metaphysics.

With the help of these mediating concepts, we can hope that the alienation between Western and Eastern modes of experiencing and expressing meaning can be reduced through adequate communication of meaning in the open, yet mutually critical, dialogical process. Without it there shall neither be the cultural reconciliation nor the religious peace that the worship and service of the universally relatibnal God requires.

1. This essay is fundamentally based on a selective summary, with minor editing and alteration, of the article written by Dr. James E. Will, who was my advisory professor in Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary, Chapter 2 “The Cross-Cultural Relationality of meaning” in his The Universal God: Justice, Love, and Peace in the Global Village (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994). I introduce this essay, for I think it an exemplary and desirable attempt for the cross-cultural dialogue between the traditions of East and West. At the last section, 1 also suggest the Korean ‘han’ thought, as is understood by the contemporary Korean philosophical theologian Sang II Kim, as an adequate cross-cultural mediating concept along with Whitehead’s process thought.
2. Augustine. On the Trinity 5.9, quoted in Ramsey, Words about God (London: SCM Press, 1971), p.1.
3. Aquinas Quaestiones Disputatae de Potentia Dei 7, 5, 14, quoted in Ramsey, Words about God, p.1.
4. A.N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, corrected ed. (New York: Free Press, 1978), xiv.
5. Ibid., p.42.
6. F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West (New York: Macmillan Co., 1946), p.421.
7. Hans-Ceorg Gadamer in the “Afterword” of his Truth and Method, 2d rev. ed. (New York: Crossroad, 1989), p.579.
8. Ibid., p.571.
9. lbid., p.290.
10. lbid., p.302.
11. Ibid., p.3O4.
12. The fundamental prejudice of the Enlightenment is the prejudice against prejudice itself which denies tradition its power. Ibid., p.270.
13. Ibid., p.306-307.
14. Ibid., p.258.
15. Northrop, Meeting of East and West, p.315.
16. Ibid., p.320.
17. A good introduction to these concepts may be found in John Clark Archer, revised by Carl E. Purinton, Faiths Men Live By, 2d ed. (New York: Ronald Press, 1958), pp.86-97, 125-29
18. Northrop, Meeting of East and West, p.331
19. Thomas M. King, Teilhard’s Mysticism of Knowing (New York: Seabury Press, 1981), p.92-93.
20. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Letters to Leontine Zanta, tr. Bernard Wall (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), pp.1O4-5.
21. Northrop. Meeting of East and West, p.343-44.
22. Cf. E.A. Burtt’s review, “The Meeting of East and West,” The Philosophical Review 56 (1947): 75.
23. Stuart M. Brown, Jr.. “The Meeting of East and West” Ibid., 81.
24. Cf. J.P. McKinney, “Comment and Discussion: Can East Meet West?” 3-4 (October 1953): 257- 67.
25. Peter Munz, “Basic Intuitions of East and West,” Philosophy East and West (April 1955), p.53.
26. Whitehead, Process and Reality, part II, chap. 8.
27. Ibid., pp.49-50.
28. Ibid., pp.50, 51.
29. Ibid., p.344.
30. These phrases are quoted from chapter 7 of the Tao-Te Ching by Kuang-Sae Lee, “A Critique of the Scope and Method of the Northropian Philosophical Anthropology and the Projection of a Hope for a Meeting of East and West,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 2 (1984): 259.
31. For this, refer to Sang II Kim, Han Thought (Seoul: Wonnuri, 1986), p.218.
32. Ibid., pp.78-79.
33. Ibid., pp.91ff.
34. Ibid., pp.94-95.
35. Sang II Kim. Han and World Philosophy (Seoul: Jeonmang Publishing Co., 1989).
36. cf. Francis H. Cook, Hua-yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra (University Park, Philadelphia: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977), pp.55-72.