China is for the stranger first and foremost culture. I too remember my arrival in the airport when the two sleepless eyes of mine stepped out of the airplane and saw the picturesque characters on the walls for the first time. So alien to our letters. They somehow were culture. In an instant however the same eyes relocated to the Latin letters, and I felt more safe. Their familiarity guided me through the arrival formalities and then toward the baggage carousel where I picked the piece belonging to me up. Outside the exit sign came an enormous taxi area, “when will it ever be my turn?,” but surprisingly I queued for just a few minutes until it was just that. The driving to the hotel began.

The yellow soil seemed otherworldly compared to the Danish green, and about to crack under the blistering sun, even the window itself. On top of it was the occasional silo dotted whilst smoke continued to rise from the greyest of factories. In the vicinity of them a single mountain range followed the sky like the curved line in a classical Chinese painting. Crossing it all was a lone bird. This view left me speechless, it really did. There was an air of illusion about its utility and beauty. Suddenly a strange building appeared that could be no more than twenty years old, and which resembled a palace from perhaps back home with its mighty columns and church dome pressed down on top of it.

The past this concrete building belongs to is… 

Sometime later the car drove in between faceless high-rises. Mirrors lacking their essential function. To my best ability I stretched my neck further and further, looking up as far as possible. “People up there earn a lot of money,” the driver said. Yet as the car approached the city centre, they became taller and taller; even stronger. Those merely ten years of age already looked cheap, the newest on the other hand expressed great wealth and refused to stand back for the American ones. That was the point. “I got it, that’s where the strange building from before belongs.”

We stopped under them, and nothing passed by anymore. Without knowing why my eyes fixated on all the cars. “The traffic jam, wow, it’s endless despite the four lanes on each side!” But when I looked into the neighbouring car, only passengers staring downward appeared. At last the driver turned left onto a smaller road with two lanes on each side flanked by plane trees with white pants. There a small temple poked its head out in front of a couple of shabby concrete blocks. Then he stopped at the pavement, and I paid him. Said goodbye. There I stood for a moment, in China.

Some distinct breeze carried the smell of soft cement across the road. “Let’s go, I too have to cross it.” When the feet started following the smell’s direction, a Mercedes from nowhere almost drove into me despite not being its right of way. But on the other side, and a little taken aback, again those strange characters now above a shop’s hanging laundry drew attention to themselves. They must have been so different and Chinese forever I felt, also felt something settle within me. Some elderly ladies mumbled, just mumbled. Behind them the light-grey heaven, its texture simmering like water.

That is how one sees it, at least I do when recalling as well as reimagining it years later: only the characters. In our lives few moments of truth are bestowed upon us where we assume something to be important, not because we are unfamiliar with it but simply because it is. Human beings mainly see what is of other to them. A central reason for the relevance of which, and perhaps also for why I wrote this essay, is that the route of my former travel is transforming my seeing even today.

My younger self was formed by new things from a continent in the opposite direction, further to the west than where I come from. First to create the way of matters. This New World and its products made me and everyone else I have known tick, — as always, in persuading many things are taught. But there are things of importance before modernity, and they do not fail of their promise. We shall return to the present soon enough. What was a civilisation, and why is its culture demanded of a healthy, human society? shall be the questions leading us off.

I

The Chinese call civilisation wenming. But the word’s first part can also mean culture, wenhua, writing and script, wenzi, and even literature, wenxue; just to name a few. All these meanings are underscored early in Chinese thought: “Looking ahead, it grants models to coming generations; / Looking back, it contemplates images in the ancients.” In these brief verses alluding to the Analects, the poet Lu Ji (AD 261–303) tells us that wen is the means by which civilisation is held together, bestowing it with content and wisdom, and at the same time indicates it is intrinsically connected to morality as such. Contrary to the volatile nature of speech, always changing in meaning and dying out, the written word has a durability that unites the generations with each other in moral terms. 

Europeans speak Latin in their attempt to capture what a civilisation is. They say civis or civitas. Specifically the citizen who is connected to a city, and they think on Athens and Rome, the latter even becoming a great empire, as well as on the way in which these two cities symbolise their origin. Afterwards the attention turns to Florence, Vienna, Paris, and London in step with its development, its movement toward the north. When articulating the word for culture, Latin is once again spoken in that they say cultura whereby an allusion to agriculture, agri-cultura, is made. Culture is linked to concrete farm work, indeed the sowing and harvesting, life’s daily sustainment. To cultivation. With Cicero, through the Greeks, the word becomes cultura animi: culture of mind, or spirit. Now there is a clear analogue between the cultivation of the mind and the plant.

Nuances are of course latent in both assumptions and should be emphasised now. Literary culture has been prevalent in China and city culture in Europe, and yet both of them have existed alongside each other. Nonetheless, they denote something true about what China and Europe were why both have preserved their characteristic part to this day, for the language is alive in China and the cities stand in Europe. So where you to ask a Chinese, he or she will say, “I’m a member of Chinese civilisation,” and sure enough he has read some of Du Fu’s finest poetry in high school, and if you ask a Western European he or she will answer, “I’m a member of European civilisation,” and, also true, he has visited the eternal city.

Though just a slight scratch on the surface reveals how weak the connection of both is. Unlike today, the poetry and the cities once contained real depth. Could it be because that despite the two civilisations’ ability to preserve their characteristic part, they have lost the other, and that has weakened them? After all, In China the cities are destroyed, and in Western Europe the languages unknown. Indeed nearly every other part.

II

Culture is necessarily more than a part. Things are parts, and only when they move through a whole they are somehow brought to life. Similar to how words and bricks are in need of a whole so as to become themselves as either language or building. Thereby enabled to sustain themselves. Herein lies the root course of an experience made by most of us, namely many can be substituted, a lot cannot, and if this ceased to be the case it would be like the person who watches an urban district in Europe as the architects’ work, and not as beauty.

Any sample of things have a long way to go because their final purpose in a way is somewhere else. And first the whole itself must undergo a precondition of expressions shaped by a combination human beings and nature, which summons it to constitute that which the same things cannot do without, and yet in order to achieve this, things too are required. There is a dialectical dynamism inherent in the process. Furthermore, this process requires at least two other and often overlooked aspects before it can become the embeddedment of wholeness, which we rightly call culture.

One of them is contained in the Danish word egenværdi, best translated literally as own-value. That is, value having no reason nor law outside itself and therefore intrinsic in nature: its very own as to what matters; always without a why just as life is. By implication of which it also demonstrates that life, as own-value par excellence, is fundamentally inexplicable due to the fact no single human being ever created it, least of all consciously. We just live. Meister Eckhart only brought the deep insight up in me.

If a community is open to this own-value through its many a manifestation, a space opens up for life simply to be, showing human beings the importance of wonder, and that is the second aspect. Having done that, each and every thing now has an air of inexplicability about it. The meaning of words can no longer be fully understood as Laozi reminded us, neither can the beauty of the temple as Homer showed us. For the insight into the fact no one really knows who created them originates in another insight, the one mentioned above, namely no one knows who created life, — and it stands at the centre of the community. And some of the path has been laid on which this community can move toward becoming a culture through language and city, history and family, and spirituality and art.

By now a return to cultura ought to be done. This time paying closer attention to the semantics of the word itself. Within its meaning of cultivation there is an additional hint of whereof culture comes. When the gardener prepares the soil for his tree he is meticulous, however having planted it he leaves it to itself. Were he to constantly intervene in the tree’s growth by pruning it all the time soon he would work against what he wishes the tree to do and in the end destroy it. Only when the tree has grown up some branches are cut off here and there, maybe a bit more, but the trunk itself he never touches. 

The reason for this being that to growth inheres the independent development of nature. No matter the object being a tree or a garden of our making, freedom is indispensable. The gardener merely clears the way for a process out of self-initiation retaining time as its sine qua non. In other, more poetic words, it is a process beyond the confines of will whose own-value weave a dense but feather-light brocade of repeated patterns and colours, shapes and textures, varying and growing through time to create a sophisticated way of place. Infinitely more than a surrounding subject to our human interventions; rather our very origin as far beyond our human capabilities as possible.

An wise man once explained proper living in time in the following way, “Of all men only those who find time for philosophy are at leisure, only they are truly alive; for it is not only their own lifetime they guard well; they add every age to their own; all the years that have passed before them they requisition for their store.” When reading Seneca’s words today we see that wisdom is far from individual, clearcut, and only present. Each one of us shall retrieve it in a unifying experience of time, which is to say, experience its growth by trusting that the people within it bring us further at the same time they brings us back. Living as free disappears without a sense of community in time.

So, fully immersed the voice of a person amalgamates singularity with sounds and patterns of ever growing stories that last, beginning a building-process which prepares him for a presence in the world of others like a child listening to a fairy tale. As such conditions of living appear wherein persons can unfold themselves by being something communalily shared, most in time’s clear demand of past, present and future, and in which the unity of opposites provides an offset against the parts whose full manifestation remains a failure to see the other as a whole. Lesbos, Sappho and her poetry is lovely, they are not lovely.

Perhaps too abstract, I know, but we can picture someone standing by a lake close to home in the midst of a life crisis, feeling the fresh wind against his cheeks until a thought comes to mind: “Right here thousands have stood before me with the same problems … yes, I shouldn’t let them bring me down, they aren’t that difficult in the larger scheme of things. I too believe life is worthwhile.” Or the mother in her son’s room, calming him, “You’re gonna be fine, don’t worry, try to think about how grandpa and daddy also struggled with this exam when they were your age. Look, they did just fine in the end.” If sincere you admit, we all need this. 

III

Genuine and good culture mainly emerges as such, to me at any rate. And whilst this is important, likewise it is to reflect upon where we are about to arrive, for we need to travel a bit further. We are not fully there yet. Until now the connection between own-value and life has been indicated, also how time allows us to be truly alive in a human community amongst the living, the dead and the unborn, and obviously nature is living organically as such. However being alive is something more than living communalily and organically; there is an added sense of potency and meaning to it, without being distinct from the former. An intimate moment needs further elaboration.

A clue of it stems from the fact we never speak of scientific life, whereas we naturally speak of cultural life. For instance, when referring to scientists we would say something like, “the scientist community is thriving in that research department.” Were we on the other hand to refer to artists we would probably say, “the cultural life is thriving in Prague’s parks and cafes.” These common phrases suggest something true about being alive. The distinctive sense of human living derives from its organic tendency toward a wholesomeness of culture that all of us share, past, present and future. Its distinctiveness is not reducible to a condition of the conceptual, and therefore cannot be restricted to a method built on a partial way of seeing the world.

Put differently, culture is rooted in life by implication of which it is also in time; science whether it admits it or not attempts to be above life in the form of the concept and thus attempts to be above time. It seems to me that we naturally intuit this from our own daily lives. No one is willing to die for science, and if he wills it is because he perceives science as his cultural life, but many a man will, indeed has throughout history, for his community’s, his loves’ life, that is to say, his cultural life. Likewise it is telling that in several languages cultural life is written in one word, and in line with the paragraphs above this is correct because in writing cultural-life with a hyphen, the now single word wants to indicate, besides the just mentioned, its fundamental temporality. This is the subtle almost mysterious point.

The main reason of which lies in life’s failure to establish itself through an act of being a property of an organism, but does by being a property of an organism in relationship to its environment in a profound way. So concretely temporal is life that even the tiniest bit of its manifestation is developed in conjunction with a particular environment simultaneously with that which anything of being shares. Hence time cannot be separated from life, which in turn also means it is time. Here we should remember that Kierkegaard once said the hallmark of despair is that eternity is not given the proper place in life. To be human is to live this tension, for contrary to the plant or the ant in the human mind this sense of eternity becomes conscious by way of the spirit’s (Aand, Geist) transformation of time, whereby the person transcends a community of mere species.

Which connects to strong interest of mine when I was a university student: the classical Chinese garden. They can be so humble, so uncontrolling, yes human. Approached from the cultural-life angle that garden is no less than life through which elements of a fundamental kind appear, rather than the sole creation of its designer. Best expressed in the words of the Ming Dynasty’s foremost thinker on gardens, Ji Cheng, “The garden is arranged by the human hand, but should appear as if cultivated by heaven.” Perhaps we can approach this seemingly abstract sentence with an almost radical concreteness. Although somewhat distinct from the original, to anyone who has witnessed classical Chinese gardens in person the following interpretation has a lot in common with its general orientation.

As if cultivated by life reveals a most relevant insight. Through the utterance of his own sentence Ji Cheng was able to hint at how the garden when arranged right can appear as the workings of something inherently natural. This is true, but in addition to that a further supplementary interpretation opens the space for time itself insofar as art springs from the realities of life, which is to say, a life lived therein as supremely my time. From which it takes us beyond anything we could have imagined into being truly alive, where “you feel as though you were transported back to the realm of Emperor Fuxi [the Chinese Adam],” in Ji Cheng’s profound words. In other words, back to the very beginning of our life.

Then a premium is put on time in the sense that it contains within it the very beginning of life. Life unfolds within it, and vice versa. However late we may be in its long, tedious, and invisible growth of humanity’s countless roots, we still come from one singular tree, of life. But, and importantly, the seeing of which requires culture cultivated by that same lived time. With the presence of time can the gates of heaven be opened once and for all.

And although the result of which sadly no longer is present in China (I could be wrong, but I have looked for two years), I did see it this year during my two months in Kyoto where my two eyes discovered the remote Shoden-ji Temple. One of the few remaining temples in the ancient capital to be overrun by tourists. What sets this otherwise unremarkable temple apart from the others is its exquisite borrowed scenery, jiejing. While I gazed onto the temple garden with its carpet of wavy gravel and groupings of azaleas that were trimmed to perfection nothing but expanse meet my eyes. Given the garden’s tiny size to many this will seem counterintuitive, but my two eyes become aware of something else, namely the horizon with its majestic mountain encircled by a horseshoe of trees.

From an intellectual point of view the scene seemed understandable to me, after all I knew about the concept of borrowed scenery from my years of architectural China studies. But after giving time its time, as it were, something new happened to me and therefore took me aback, surprised me. It was akin to some sort of Kierkegaardian Øieblik, that is to say, akin to a moment possessing a vision because in Danish the figurative word for moment consists of gaze (blik) of the eye (øje). In its gripping of me I saw something non-conceptual and yet utterly real, it is true. I became aware of how the borrowed scenery transformed not merely this or that part of the garden, or the overall atmosphere of it, but each and every relation; and there were tens of thousands of them, indeed millions.

Each leaf, each word, each sign was like an eternity. Inside of which a unity spoke that I for some unknown reason really willed despite the fact the situation was intellectually speaking rather obscure. Soon after I became aware of how time itself had become a web of temporal vision living inside them, their timeliness was valuable, that most ephemeral matter of all was of an unquestionable value and authority to me. In other words, it was not just a projection of my own self onto them, instead their time was present until it encircled this self of mine in its entirety as well, and became uniquely “my” time, halting time as a succession of a long series of consecutive nows. No longer just yet another now coming and going.

Quite a few will be familiar with Cicero’s historia magistra vitae, and Kierkegaard said that individual history begins in the moment (Øieblik) in which man experiences himself as foreign because he somehow is surprised by himself, setting the dialectical process in motion that restores the balance later on. By way of unifying these insights I would say the horseshoe of leaves shaping Mount Hieh was more than my individual history’s beginning, nor was it necessarily history as such. It was actually a manifestation in the fullness of time of the Other and its could-be memories, replete with the own-value of life, that gave me an appreciating sense for the humble, and which I saw as bigger, more ancient, timely than the rest.

This moment had a memory, not just a now. Elevated as that it taught supremely, far beyond a result of human arrangements. Its presence cultivated by everlasting time spoke and broke my everyday confidentiality by breaking the Other’s since its otherness had been transfigured. I could accept the other as Other, and be at home in it without a need to control or even understand it. The result of which was that I felt myself as human as seldom before in line with this force from which the past and present and future had gained supreme historicity, beyond controlment. These tenses of time were collected and united in each other, and so was I in my humanity, which I unconditionally accepted in all its freedom giving limitations.

Being alive as human was enough.

Once again I felt able to love, to say yes to others as such.

Nor was any choice available. It syncronised with the leaping beats within my own non-conceptual and ecstatic heart; for in Deus caritas est, one of my best-loved works, Pope Benedict XVI rightly stressed that love is “ecstasy,” by which he meant anything but simple intoxication. Rather he used it as a description of how the human person is dragged out of his enclosed I to an opening onto an eternity inhabited by yeses to others. The I’s true ennoblement to the highest art of all, that to be human. Yes, love is one of the features, perhaps thé feature, we carry over into the other where it takes on a new and deeper value, at the same moment it leaves behind what it initially was, and yet continues it.

Hence suggesting the typical contrast of one and many regarding things is too restricted here, somehow fails to grasp the real point. Both in form and content the Øieblik served a simile of the universe similar to the way different fragrances may characterise a single fire, when incenses are thrown upon it, by tapping into its whole. The flame of love carries on, surely.

It is important to underscore that the mentioning of Christian thinkers also indicate something else about the moment itself. Unlike Heidegger’s Augenblick (the German word for Øieblik; the two words are identical from a semantic point of view) which seems to happen almost out of nowhere, my experience was one of utter concrete rootedness insofar as it was culture that opened my heart to it. My moment had been prepared for me by others, like the plant is prepared by the gardener. Christianity had prepared one half; Basho the other.

Reading his poetry and travel writings before my arrival in Japan was the spiritual gardening that prepared the soil within me so as to allow my spirit to become open to time’s partaking in life’s growth out of self-initiation, in Japan. But today it is clear to me that it was not only his poetry that had done so for it would be impossible to point to one poem and say, “ah, that’s the one which did it”; instead it was his life, poetic life at that. Not as in I could relate to his innermost thoughts and emotions, but his mere having walked here gave me the nourishment to intuit it. As I said, similar to how the gardener had prepared the soil for the tree’s life. The typical noun poetry had been transformed into a verb, to poetize, thereby indicating a certain way to be in the world that was me.

But it also required a space. The little temple collected the wealth of cultivation that has been arduously gathered in a community of life throughout generations and transformed it into what maybe be accurately described as a spacial time. According to its gardeners’ clearing the way for a process out of self-initiation allowing for this space to clear the time, as a series of consecutive nows, for Mount Hiei with a horseshoe of trees. As a result me sitting there on its secluded terrace gazing far away from the otherwise progress-faith dominated Japan made me feel as though truly alive. Transformed from a being an observer into a real participant, sensing an overall beyond not merely of the partiality of things such as bricks, but of thingness as such. Always related to others in past, present and future moments of eternity.

IV

During the European Enlightenment several centuries of development crystallised amongst a certain group of people into a widespread belief the world would get better. Their ideals allowed them to follow the path of a single theme of progress through its many variations down the centuries, against the backdrop of the wider darkness that suppressed it, at least tried, and which now itself could be suppressed once and for all; admittedly some of it was indeed dark, in need of reform. Society from now on ought to have an inherent demand that each phenomena must show itself in order to express its value. If unable, it has none.

One Enlightenment word captures this process perhaps better than anyone else, most certainly better than liberalism and socialism, and that word is fremskridtstro. In English it probably means progress-faith; literally forward-step’s faith. And steps into the future’s brighter atmosphere did commence with great force, walking the world over. Although mainly backwardly as in one step forward, two steps backward, for each one of them was a step on something in order to step it down and thus leave room for light by erasing its shadow, however tiny. In other words, an element of negativity was present from the start in the movement’s very character, and appears to be irreconcilable from a purely contemporary perspective.

If we put the steps aside for a moment and turn to the word faith, I like many others propose it must be done against the backdrop of the increasingly lost Christian faith. The rising progressive one are tightly knit with the former’s decrease, similar to how logos was continued in the Christian age after the Classical one by the Gospel of John — after its removal of the Greco-Roman culture’s wholeness, that is. Therefore in a distinct way. Transcendent Christianity, which properly understood has an element of immanence to it, had as its goal the conforming of life to the logos of God by way of humility, whereas for today’s immanent progress-faith the problem is how to subdue logos to man’s own will.

Man alone is transcendent willing as he is to do things hitherto regarded as out of human reach. The arbiter of transcendence. As such he shall continue relentlessly until he has bettered us in strictly immanent terms, so one linear future is present all the same. Neither less metaphysical, nor less powerful.

The glass wall erected in between this certain group and the darkness was of no obstacle. They could see it all, how the ordinary people were culturally oppressed. Yet despite such intensification of longing for an entirely new human meaning through attempts to fill the void by their own minds, rather than participating in the people’s way of laying hold of the gone by, something remained the same. It always does so. Most intensely expressed by their repeated emphasis on the unfinished work that lies before that very people. Maybe here a clue is to why so few of them showed any sign of being tolerant toward non-Enlightenment ideas. It is as though where their conviction can be measured is afar that which silently hides itself.

These words about Christianity penned to Friedrich der Große by none other than Voltaire makes it abundantly clear: “Your Majesty will do the human race an eternal service by extirpating this infamous superstition, I do not say among the rabble, who are not worthy of being enlightened and who are apt for every yoke; I say among honest people, among men who think, among those who wish to think.” One struggles to find it expressed more directly, bluntly, so how can Evelyn Beatrice Hall a century later sum up Voltaire’s view on freedom of speech as follows: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”?

Answering this is no easy feat, but I suspect the correct answer is related to a world that is still on the tipping point. Hegemony is yet to be established. The Old World still has some strength, which balances this extremism out. Her interpretation fails to acknowledge the resentment that lingers beneath the surface of the Enlightenment, that Christianity restricts Voltaire’s and the group’s enlightenment. For what is revealing about this quote is so not much the quote itself but its history. For at start, I have never heard anyone in Denmark as I grew up, where to quote is fairly popular to this day, expressing the view that the quote behind the quote, as it were, is genuinely intolerant. And in Denmark the balance has long-ago been lost, hence there is nothing left to be done away with.

Ask yourself whether a man with such view would when his men and ideals were in full control, as the case is today, would tolerate the expression of Christian views? We already know the answer, for we see it all around us in every part of Western Europe, and it is a resounding no. In short, Voltaire’s letter leaves little room for believing that when his men at last where in full charge, they should or would show tolerance toward Christians, let alone defending their right to say the Word.

* * *

Still, it remains the case that a given content can only be accepted and held to be true if man is actively involved with it; whatever such a content may be, it must be at one and in unity with the certainty of his own self. Hegel — the one philosopher who was capable of retaining elements of the Old World while being modern — regards this principle as fundamental to and characteristic of the modern age, traces its roots back to Christianity and especially Protestantism, and I agree with him. In a nutshell, there was an alternative; we could have avoided going down this road that the group told us to.

V

The key word in progress-faith is progress, a word that is essentially isolatable since it gains its character by being devoid of own-value and thus wonder. As a matter of fact it is much closer to science and technology than life, and faith. It has a thingly and conceptual character to it: we know what a smartphone is insofar as we recognise its utility and use precisely because it is created by ourselves for our own aims. By the same token we know what immanent progress is. Impossible with life, which neither can be isolated nor fully understood, or God for that matter. And is irreducible to a mere thing we call Chinese or European, to a sort of souvenir that is always only created by man.

But the word progress only gain its proper direction and intensity when it is bound together with faith, and light is helpful here. Succinctly brought to the surface in Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s true though somber comparison between East and West,

Now, I refrain from accepting the Oriental ideal in its entirety. But, “he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow” is it. Securely located at progress-faith’s conceptual core is that of negation of the dimly lit reality prior naturally present in the world. Things must change for the better; always. The conflict is as obvious to me as to Tanizaki, for ultimately a forrest can only be half lit, the rest has to be shadow if light shall posses any chance of becoming natural, real light. Were light to stream through the forrest from both sides by being guided by artificial light it leaves no room for the natural balance in the physis.

Demonstrating why Tanizaki’s choice to pick out the technological lamp is fitting. It captures this intense dialectic between the thingly object as well as the quintessential Christian element of light; whether he knew of this special connection between light and Christianity or not is irrelevant. After all there are countless of other technological things which underpins the age of progress-faith, which he could have chosen. But the technological lamp represents par excellence with concreteness and metaphor the unique mixture of progress and faith, the human controlment of that peculiar will to separate things and split them in to concepts and only then show them for man by forcing his own man-made light upon.

By doing so it loses the ability to show anything but the conceptual: progress. The heart thereby ends up longing for something which never really can satisfy it, for it is faith about something conceptual and partial and hence purely immanent, which deepens the need for rooting out the darkness wherever it may be, and however irrational this may be. True universality, and thus transcendence, appears only with sense of the totality of life, of what is hidden.

In tune with the new age of enlightened progress there also emerged a singular way forward as world civilisation, placing one civilisation’s metaphysics above the others. Those who wanted to compete had to pick up in pace. With awed inspiration Europeans first and then mankind began to believe this new version of Western European metaphysics, and today their American manifestation. Began to believe a single aspect of one metaphysics that first had conquered the other aspects within its own overall metaphysics, and only then went on to conquer other civilisations’ metaphysics, such as tian, dao, qi of China.

Earlier in his essay on aesthetics Tanizaki wonders how different everything would be if the Orient had developed its own science. He rightly asks, “would not the techniques and industries based on them have taken a different form, […] — would they not have suited our national temper better than they do?” Impossible to know for sure, but we do know it is unlikely it would have been progressive. Perhaps the real reason why the Orient never developed it.

The world civilisation of progress-faith as we know it had solidified.

Though for a period of time there was a self-correcting movement within the Europe called die Romantik. The one-sided and immanent conceptualisation of the world as in need of light was insufficient, even a distortion of Christian faith as such. Like Tanizaki they thought darkness has own-value. But progress-faith was, and is, fuelled by technological capitalism’s marching forward, therefore its ideals quickly faced down its only serious challenger and won an easy victory in the end. The set terms was impossible to win on for the Romantics.

Few dare to be in favour of darkness on these terms, even less so to assert its necessity for genuine progress which requires the most multifaceted element of all: love. What contains more light and darkness in one than love? Just think on Anna Karenina or Lin Daiyu. Not to forget that the valuable is unable to always show itself for man because it to a degree insists on refusing to do so, and actually often is valuable exactly for this very reason. A reluctant Romantic himself, Kierkegaard said it perhaps best,

Sadly, today we are aware of not only how well the Romantics arguments have aged but also see with our own eyes their gaining of additional force given the other side of progress-faith’s coin has shown itself to be a kind of utter pessimism about the future, when progressive purity is not achieved ad infinitum. Daily collapsing into a kind of regress-faith seen in the mood surrounding climate-change conditions, and so forth. The plain fanaticism present in Western European universities as well as the instant social death to anyone inside them who challenges the orthodoxy. The hole in the heart is too big, and love unceasingly has dripped out.

VI

When developments come of age by way of hegemony a natural systemisation tend to occur. Just about everything nowadays has been turned into European man’s progressive history, and the will to unite modernity into a moral one is ever present. Inevitable forces of liberation are now everywhere. Yet amongst the heirs of the distinct Enlightenment group, now in positions of influence and power in Western Europe and the United States, there is a conviction that the trends unfolding is merely the meeker part within a larger process of a phenomena described as localization, hybridization, and the like.

Societies function best and in actual terms through the fusion of global structures with local ones in their own unique way. Despite much changes, something local deepens. The resultant developments and projects of this something lead to a new way of life which is always changing, and that is good. Other trends such as alienation stem from other sources. So, Chinese culture is more alive and well than almost ever before, and exercises an enormous influence on us in Western Europe or the United States.

The argument however run into problems straight away, for anyone who actually lives outside Western Europe and the United States will hear cultured locals repeatedly express views of frustration and resentment about how their civilisation has experienced a dramatic loss of culture in tandem with an equally dramatic increase in a certain kind of Westernisation during their own lifetime. Confucians’ deep-seated hostility to socialism with Chinese characteristics, in other words, progress-faith with Chinese characteristics, being a case in point.

But beliefs as these are genuinely held amongst the heirs, and this fact needs careful consideration, and accusations of hypocrisy have no place. These theories are not made up, so to speak, coming as they do from fundamental truth assumptions of how the world works and turns. It is incumbent upon us to reflect on how the opposition of these two opposing viewpoints best can be understood, and this leads us back to where we began. I gave a hit in the first section of this essay, for like all my classmates I too failed to see it despite my eyes that flung wide open when steeping out of that airplane. Even awareness of the tension itself passed by me, and them.

In a similar vein when the liberated Chinese woman on birth control pills enters a McDonald’s and orders a burger in Chinese with spicier sauce than the American equivalent, chatting with her girlfriends about Japan being way too patriarchal, the believers mainly see what is of other to them, least of all the pill. The language and spicier sauce. Clear too is my remembrance of a professor describing the former placement of a McDonald’s on a historic Chinese square as “quite simply too colonialist.” But also how he failed even to notice, let alone criticise, the presence of the countless communist block-buildings also surrounding it, literally built on top of the demolished traditional Chinese houses and temples. He only saw the name Tian’anmen guangchang (Square.)

— As a side note, do bear in mind inside progress-faith exists an undercurrent of a pseudo-opposition from academics to capitalism as a hinderance to progress. In reality capitalism along with the university system are probably its two greatest promoters. And the former follows the latter’s lead.

Of course I am only indulging in idle speculation; of inner thoughts I know nothing. But to me the inability of these Western Europeans to live out their own cultural life has naturally resulted in the loss of the ability to see the other’s lost cultural life, whereby an intense longing for cultural life to at last end the alienation in them is brought about. A longing to stem the bleeding of their own hearts. They want to see that which is of other to them. Though unlike “the last Japanese” Tanizaki they in reality only live with things isolated, concepts. Just like I through a stream of broken dreams did when in my younger years I wanted to settle down permanently in China, but had to come to the bitter conclusion that the living whole once present in Chinese society is gone.

In other words, the existence of such inability is logical for progress-faith comes from a core inside their own tradition. Yet Kierkegaard and Trakl alike, it is true, would have seen the pill for what it is, namely world-en-light-ening Western science and technology; a harbinger of alienation. Besides this there is a further reason for why Western Europeans cannot live concretely where the they are born, and that is the ever closer presence of an empire further to west which nowadays not only control their thoughts, but disorient their very heart’s longings rooted as these now are in a New World. That Monroe Doctrine enforcing empire must now be discussed.

VII

From the beginning of her founding people have been amazed by the United States. She is unique and in some aspects better than the rest. The story of a group of Protestant states that went against the European tide of secularism with initial great success. Baptist at one moment, methodist at the next. Soon thereafter, and it is always soon with her, they began channeling their passionate Christian faith into modernity itself in an even stronger sense than the former.

Perhaps this was inevitable. Those born in protestant Western Europe ought to know by now, the passion for individuality inside this cultural sphere eventually triumph the one for the communal and humble Christ. It remains a better, more apt analogy to liberation of the I. So too for America; they were just a century or two behind. However in a different, purer way. Like a New World apart. No less than the Enlightenment cascading down the cliff, for if the two occur together it does seem: twice the strength. Once again the Declaration of Independence deserves quotation:

Words are penned here of utmost value which never should be outright rejected because the basis of a decent society is partly the emphasis on universal justice. One of the West’s greatest achievements, and the main reason why large swaths of the world’s population want to immigrate into it. Also something very important to me on a more personal level given the amount of racial xenophobia (and of course friendliness) I encountered throughout my almost two and a half years in East Asia, especially in China. It got into my soul how evil utterly particular oriented societies in terms of ethnicity can be. Although even this is bound to break down slowly in their world civilisation present-future, look at Japan.

Nonetheless, these words are also fatally flawed due to their one-sidedness. The condition of which turns them into thé expression of pure theoretical en-light-enment mankind possess. Abstract reason ergo universal mixed with the concept of consent, along with an embedding in negativity toward that which negates them, namely darkness. And in due course they transformed into an objectification of light so strong all is deemed to become visible, or not at all. So strong it is almost like the child who tries to look directly into the sun; after all he wants to be of light. Only to lose his sight.

Important as these points are, the real difference is not so much the words per se, you find similar words elsewhere, the real difference is the incomparable power with regards to moral imagination of the empire behind them and its fundamental fact of being the New World — combined with hard power for the last century. For this reason they develop along particularly extremist lines, colonising anything that to the slightest degree supplements them, never mind contradicts them. In addition to that, ideas as we know continue to grow in strength with time contrary to the body which loses it, and already a decade later in France they were far too strong.

In short, it comes down to that in an age of progress-faith the New is the only real currency; only the future has real substance, which like the other side of the coin: regress-faith collapses into resentment of the past that restricts it. Simply put, alienation is too strong. Move forward the word progress says symbolically in Latin, and in Danish literally. At the heart of progress-faith and so the United States is the will to bring about the definitive break with the pre-modern Old World, and therefore with the Øieblik, being human. Her disembodying movements such as transhumanism and transgenderism put it before our very eyes.

Contrast the Declaration with a quote from Goethe who embodied both himself and the best of the Old World. He lived simultaneously with the French Revolution in his neighbouring country, and said, “There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children, one of these is roots, the other wings.” If I with utmost humility add stars to the mix, then we the Old World’s people could be allowed sufficient room to map onto life’s wholeness past, present and future, — a cultural life was just that, roots, wings and stars never failing of their promise…

VIII

China is a warning for us of how bad things will turn out if Europe continues following its current path. In the East the progress-faith rose in front of Mount Tai, none other than its most sacred mountain. Temples living even in the clouds were unable to rise above this rival faith when it as the newcomer arrived with aims of universal enlightenment. Only to blind the entire civilisation’s culture in reddish light. Under the Great Cultural Revolution the tomb of Kong Fuzi, almost visible from the Jade Emperor Peak, was quite literally dug up in order to first have light thrown into it, then dynamite.

We already know the reasons from back home by now. He was patriarchal and reactionary: his memory had to be destroyed. Culturally was insufficient, rage required physically as well. The rituals it gives voice to were only evil the shouts proclaimed; without ever noticing their own-value, nor holiness. Progress-faith’s latent negativity moved them forward and in the midst of the chaos and violence ancient cities were forced into disrepair with indifference insofar as they incarnated the chains of the feudal consciousness, the Old World, — they did the enlightened told them without any doubt. Concrete blocks pointed to a better future, this time pure goodness was to be achieved and a new liberated man arise. Then capitalism took up the torch after the launch of the economic reforms, leaving glass blocks to behold.

Lu Ji for good reasons was unaware of such blistering light born in Western Europe, continued by the Americans until reaching its zenith under Mao’s (or Robespierre’s?) rule, so far. His insight nonetheless contains something true since the survival of a civilisation is dependent on language. However, with the experiences of the twentieth century in mind we must admit this is far from enough; and I am sure he would have agreed. And in the case of Old World civilisations wherein the tension is stretched to its utmost limit it is particularly evident.

One cannot remove all traditional architecture, philosophy, religion, and folk ways and then solely keep the language. That is doomed to failure. Along with cultural life, morality withers away. Likewise Western Europeans cannot remove all language skills and then speak, think and feel in American English and still be certain that as long as the cities stand their cultural life survives. And with each day passing by the illusion is breaking down ever more.

Most worryingly is the pace with which it is picking up in the latter civilisation. Those who govern it through academia, politics, media, museums, big-business, NGOs, and so forth are making an additional experiment by way of some sort of immanent leap of faith into pure goodness, similar in its extremism to the leap made by the Central Cultural Revolution Group. A leap the former today refrains from, and which needless to say the latter has learned from the Americans: changing the very demographic composition of the population via mass migration with no end in sight; instead of a welcoming but controlled immigration system. Light, whether bluish or reddish in tone, demands it, and that is all there is left.

“All men are created equal so what right do you have to establish a border at all, much less using force in order to prevent your fellow man from crossing it?”

Yet on the other hand Western Europeans are daily encouraged by this same governing group to admire traditional countries such as Japan and South Korea that are described as liberal democracies as well which long ago have. Albeit never when poorer white majority countries in Eastern Europe do, and they already welcome far more immigrants and refugees than them, showing something good and generous about Europe. (Hungary alone, a relatively poor country of just 9,5 million people hosts and helps more refugees than Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China combined; to spell it out in some detail, China the world’s second largest economy, and fastest growing, with a population of 1,4 billion has in ten years taken 526 refugees). Countries that unlike the aforementioned Asian ones underwent actual oppression by foreigners for centuries. Clearly indicating one of the many troubling consequences of the alienation that has taken form, here as a Kulturkampf within the white population.

On the surface Western Europe seems to be in a better place than China. Her civilisational reach spans across the globe, inspiring every country to believe in one distinct part of her metaphysics. But beneath it there is a sadder reality. Nowadays she has been reduced to an empty shell deprived of her own cultural life, be it the Greco-Roman heritage, Christianity, the Renaissance, Romantic poetry, der Wiener Klassik, the German, French and Italian languages, and of course the ordinary folkways. Alas, reduced to this most present word of all: progress-faith. 

Indeed we need a vision of life that befits our dignity and reveals life ever young, kindled in cities and languages living, otherwise China will remain a culture to us. Something both we as well as the Chinese should profoundly lament.