Lin Yutang

From Philosopedia

Lin Yutang (10 October 1895 - 26 March 1976)

Lin, a Chinese-American, was born in Fujian, a province near Xiamen in southeastern China. His father was a Christian minister. Lin studied at Saint John's University in Shanghai, then worked on a doctoral degree at Harvard. He left, however, completing his requirements for a doctoral degree (in Chinese) at the University of Leipzig. From 1923 to 1926 he taught English literature at the University Leipzig, after which from 1923 to 1926 he taught English literature at Peking University.

He popularized classical Chinese literature and explained what he saw as Chinese thinking about philosophy. His humanistic work, The Importance of Living (1937), included the following:

The pagan lives in this world like an orphan, without the benefit of that consoling feeling that there is always some one in heaven who cares and who will, when that spiritual relationship called prayer is established, attend to his private personal welfare. It is no doubt a less cheery world; but there is the benefit and dignity of being an orphan who by necessity has learned to be independent, to take care of himself, and to be more mature, as all orphans are. It was this feeling rather than any intellectual belief - this feeling of dropping into a world without the love of God - that really scared me until the very last moment of my conversion to paganism. I felt, like many born Christians, that if a personal God did not exist the bottom would be knocked out of this universe. . . .

Finally my salvation came. “Why,” I reasoned with a colleague, “if there were no God, people would not do good and the world would go topsy-turvy.” “Why?” replied my Confucian colleague. “We should lead a decent human life simply because we are decent human beings,” he said. This appeal to the dignity of human life cut off my last tie to Christianity, and from then I was a pagan. . . .

A Chinese writer, Kung Tingan, said: “The Sage himself loved very much to argue! . . . The Sage talks about life, as he is directly aware of it; the Talented Ones talk about the Sage’s words and the stupid ones argue about the words of the Talented Ones.”

But no philosophy of life is complete, Lin noted, and “no conception of man’s spiritual life is adequate, unless we bring ourselves into a satisfactory and harmonious relation with the life of the universe around us. Man is important enough; he is the most important topic of our studies: that is the essence of humanism.”

When older, Lin was less favorable toward his earlier views of humanism. Many then no longer found him to be a naturalistic humanist, but the earlier views which led some to call Lin a “laughing humanist” included the following:

• Religion in our country has so narrowed down to the contemplation of sin that a respectable man does not any longer dare to show his face in the church.

• Man wants to live, but he still must live upon this earth. All questions of living in heaven must be brushed aside. . . . The earth, after all, is real, as the heaven is unreal: how fortunate is man that he is born between the real earth and the unreal heaven!

• I sometimes think what a terrible punishment it would be for a ghost or an angel to have no body, to look at a stream of cool water and have no feet to plunge into it and get a delightful cooling sensation from it, to see a dish of Peking or Long Island duck and have no tongue to taste it, to see crumpets and have no teeth to chew them, to see the beloved faces of our dear ones and have no emotions to feel toward them.

• As for the superfine metaphysician who says that the teeth belong to the devil, and the Neo-Platonists who deny that individual teeth exist, I always get a satirical delight in seeing a philosopher suffering from a tooth-ache and an optimistic poet suffering from dyspepsia.

• So then, instead of holding on to the Biblical view that we are made in the image of God, we come to realize that we are made in the image of the monkey, and that we are as far removed form the perfect God, as, let us say, the ants are removed from ourselves.

• The difference between cannibals and civilized men seems to be that cannibals kill their enemies and eat them, while civilized men kill their foes and bury them, put a cross over their bodies, and offer up prayers for their souls. Thus we add stupidity to conceit and a bad temper.

• The average mind is charming rather than noble. Had the average mind been noble, we should be completely rational beings without sins or weaknesses or misconduct, and what an insipid world that would be! We should be so much less charming as creatures. I am such a Humanist that saints without sins don’t interest me.

• There is still a greater philosophy than this naturalism, namely, the philosophy of Humanism. The highest ideal of Chinese thought is therefore a man who does not have to escape from human society and human life in order to preserve the original, happy nature.

• I should not presume that there must be necessarily a purpose, a meaning of human existence. As Walt Whitman says, “I am sufficient as I am.” It is sufficient that I live - and am probably going to live for another few decades - and that human life exists. Viewed that way, the problem becomes amazingly simple and admits of no two answers. What can be the end of human life except the enjoyment of it.

• [On immortality]: Deprived of immortality, the proposition of living becomes a simple proposition. It is this: that we human beings have a limited span of life to live on this earth, rarely more than seventy years, and that therefore we have to arrange our lives so that we may live as happily as we can under a given set of circumstances.

• [On Adam]: If the writer of the Genesis story had been a Paoyü and knew what he was talking about, he would have written a different story. God took a handful of mud, molded it into human shape and breathed into its nostrils a breath, and there was Adam. But Adam began to crack and fall to pieces, and so He took some water, and with the water He molded the clay, and this water which entered into Adam’s being was called Eve, and only in having Eve in his being was Adam’s life complete. At least that seems to me to be the symbolic significance of marriage. Woman is water and man is clay, and water permeates and molds the clay, and the clay holds the water and gives it substance, in which water moves and lives and has its full being.

• [On food}: Our lives are not in the lap of the gods, but in the lap of our cooks. . . . Eventually we have to come to a conception of health and disease by which . . . men eat in order to prevent disease instead of taking medicine in order to cure it.

• [On writing]: The technique of writing is to literature as dogmas are to the church—the occupation with trivial things by trivial minds.

• [On Man]: So many people presume to know God and what God disapproves that it is impossible to take up this subject without opening oneself to attack as sacrilegious by some and as a prophet by others. We human creatures who individually are less than a billionth part of the earth’s crust, which is less than a billionth part of the great universe, presume to know God! Yet no philosophy of life is complete, no conception of man’s spiritual life is adequate, unless we bring ourselves into a satisfactory and harmonious relation with the life of the universe around us. Man is important enough; he is the most important topic of our studies: that is the essence of humanism!

Lin invented and patented a Chinese typewriter. He also wrote My Country and My People (1935); Between Tears and Laughter (1943); The Importance of Understanding (1960); The Chinese Theory of Art (1967); and two novels, Moment in Peking (193) and The Vermillion Gate (1953).

After 1928, he lived mainly in the United States and was frequently nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

(See entry for Laughing Humanists.)

{CE; Warren Allen Smith, “Two Laughing Humanists: Lin Yutang, Carl Jonas,” Humanist World Digest, August 1955}