Le Minh Khai's SEAsian History Blog (+ More)

In the summer of 1972, the Philosophy Department at the University of Hawaii at Manoa held a conference on the Chinese Neo-Confucian scholar, Wang Yangming (1472–1529).

This conference was part of a larger “East-West Philosophers” initiative at the University of Hawaii to bring together scholars from Asia and the West to collectively compare and contrast Asian and Western philosophical teachings.

The conference in 1972 was the first time that Wang Yangming was the topic of discussion, and the conference brought together most of the leading Wang Yangming experts in the world at that time, such as Wing-tsit Chan (Chatham College), Du Weiming (UC Berkeley), David Nivison (Stanford), Tang Junyi (Chinese University of Hong Kong), Tomé Fang (National Taiwan University), Okada Takehiko (Seinan Gakuin University), Mou Zongsan (New Asia College, HK), and Cheng Zhongying (University of Hawaii).

Absent from this conference was a great Vietnamese Wang Yangming scholar, Phan Văn Hùm.

Phan Văn Hùm could not attend this conference because he was dead, having been executed by the Việt Minh in 1946.

You can check out his Wikipedia page for the details, but needless to say, Phan Văn Hùm led an eventful life as a journalist and political activist/revolutionary.

He was also a scholar of philosophy, and in 1943, he published a book of some 500 pages entitled Wang Yangming: His Life and Teachings (Vương Dương Minh: thân thế và học thuyết).

Had he lived, in 1972, Phan Văn Hùm would have been 70 years old, and as such, he was of the same generation as several other of the participants at the conference, such as Wing-tsit Chan (71), Tomé Fang (73), Okada Takehiko (64), Mou Zongsan (63), and Tang Junyi (63).

Further, looking at the book that he wrote some 30 years earlier, and taking into account the conditions under which it was written, it is easy to see that Phan Văn Hùm was intellectually in the same league as these later “academic superstars.”

The only scholar that I am aware of who has ever written about Phan Văn Hùm’s book is David Marr in his 1982 Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945 (Shawn McHale mentions the book in his Print and Power, but does not discuss its contents).

Marr’s book is very important and was a major contribution to the understanding of Vietnamese history in the English-speaking world when it was published. Nonetheless, it has certain limitations which are easy to detect in our current digital age now that many of the sources Marr cited are a mere mouse-click away (I previously wrote about that here).

In this book, Marr tried to capture the “Zeitgeist” of Vietnam in the period from 1920 to 1945 by examining a wide range of printed sources. This was a time when there was an explosion of printed materials, so there is much to examine, and Marr covered a lot of ground.

At the same time, it is clear that in the back of Marr’s mind, he was trying to identify ideas that led to revolution in 1945, and as he read through each book or journal article, that objective influenced how he evaluated each piece of writing.

Indeed, if you look at his bibliography, you see that in addition to publication information, Marr adds a sentence or two of his own which summarizes what he sees as the key importance of each item, and those summaries relate to this larger objective.

This, for instance, is what Marr says about Phan Văn Hùm’s book in his bibliography: “Based largely on compendiums published in China in the 1930s. Phan sees Wang’s ‘unity of knowledge and action’ as having major significance for contemporary Vietnam.”

In his book, Marr devotes a couple of paragraphs to discussing Phan Văn Hùm’s book, but he makes the same point there. To Marr, there was not much of interest in Phan Văn Hùm’s book. It appeared to him that Phan Văn Hùm was just repeating some stuff from Chinese books.

The only point of interest that Marr could find was that Phan Văn Hùm has a section where he explains Wang Yangming’s ideas about “unity and action,” a concept relating to moral behavior that some modern Chinese revolutionaries, like Sun Yat-sen, transformed and employed to mobilize people for political purposes.

That said, in a book of some 500 pages, Phan Văn Hùm only devoted a few pages in the middle of the text to that topic, and contrary to what Marr wrote, he never made the argument that this concept was of “major significance for contemporary Vietnam.”

In other words, when we actually look at the book (which we now can because it has been digitized), we can see that Marr used this book to write about an argument that he wanted to make, rather than to seek to fully understand what Phan Văn Hùm was actually writing about.

So, what did Phan Văn Hùm actually write about?

Wang Yangming’s ideas were very influential in Japan during the Meiji period and in China in the early twentieth century. That said, there was no single way in which Wang Yangming was influential.

For instance, his ideas were used by people in Japan who were promoting a new form of ethics, and they were employed for political mobilization by people like Sun Yat-sen.

There were still others who just saw his life as somehow exemplary. Wang Yangming was both a scholar and a government official, and as an official, he suppressed various rebellions of “savage” peoples in the southern parts of the Ming Dynasty empire.

He was a tough dude, and that was attractive and inspirational to many Chinese in the early twentieth century who were trying to find the strength to survive and thrive in a tumultuous age.

Finally, there were still others who were fascinated with Wang Yangming’s philosophy for scholarly reasons, including a group of scholars who discussed some of Wang Yangming’s ideas in relation to those of French philosopher Henri Bergson whose ideas were very influential in early-twentieth-century China.

In other words, there was much more to Wang Yangming’s ideas for people in the twentieth century than finding the key to mobilize people for revolution.

Indeed, following the linguistic transformation in the early twentieth century from using classical Chinese to Mandarin, many writings about Wang Yangming in Chinese at that time were simply “translations” into the modern vernacular of information about him from classical texts and his own writings.

In his book, I see no evidence that Phan Văn Hùm was interested in Wang Yangming’s thought for political reasons.

That said, to really understand this book would take a lot of work, as much of it, like one can find in Chinese writings at that time, consists of translations into the vernacular of Wang Yangming’s writings.

In 1935, Wang Yangming’s collected writings were published in China, and it looks like Phan Văn Hùm obtained a copy of this collection and spent a lot of time reading it and finding information from different documents that illustrated certain ideas in Wang Yangming’s thought.

He then presented those passages to support his explanations of those ideas.

To do this, Phan Văn Hùm had to translate those passages from classical Chinese into vernacular Vietnamese.

As such, to understand what Phan Văn Hùm wanted to say, one would have to spend a lot of time really studying what Wang Yangming was trying to say in the various letters and documents that he wrote.

This task of “vernacularlizing” classical philosophy was not easy, and it is a task that Chinese scholars were engaged in at that time as well.

That said, what immediately jumped out at me when I was looking through this book is that after presenting information about Wang Yangming’s life, Phan Văn Hùm then begins to discuss his philosophy, and he does this in dialogue with Western philosophy.

In the first half of the twentieth century, philosopher Henri Bergson’s concept of “intuition” was extremely influential among Chinese intellectuals, and there were various Chinese scholars, such as Liang Shuming, who saw something similar in one of Wang Yangming’s concepts, “innate knowledge” (liangzhi/lương tri 良知).

So, there were Chinese scholars who had thought comparatively about Wang Yangming. However, Phan Văn Hùm doesn’t seem to have been following those discussions, and instead, appears to have approached this topic on his own, with a knowledge of Western philosophy and French writings on Chinese philosophy.

Unfortunately, Phan Văn Hùm only does this to a limited degree in his book, but from what he wrote, one can gain a sense of the potential that Phan Văn Hùm had as a scholar of philosophy.

This approach to studying Chinese philosophy by examining it in dialogue with Western philosophy is precisely the approach that the Department of Philosophy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa promoted through its East-West Philosophers initiative.

The first East-West Philosophers conference was held in 1939 before Phan Văn Hùm had written his book, and the second was held in 1949 after he had died, while the one on Wang Yangming came much later in 1972.

As such, Phan Văn Hùm never had the chance to participate in any of these conferences. That said, he also wasn’t a full-time scholar like the men who were writing about Chinese philosophy in China during his lifetime, and like the scholars who participated in the East-West Philosophers conferences.

Indeed, in the years from 1939-1942, the years immediately preceding the publication of his book on Wang Yangming, Phan Văn Hùm was in Côn Đảo prison (!!), and I expect that this is where he researched and wrote much of this study.

So, yes, Phan Văn Hùm’s ideas may not have been as developed as Liang Shuming’s, and he was unable to attend the famous Wang Yangming conference in Hawaii in 1972, but. . . there is a lot more in his book of importance than his brief discussion of “unity and action.”

To fully understand this book and its place in the broader world of writings on Wang Yangming at that time will take a lot of work, but it will help reveal the thinking of a fascinating scholar who left this world far too early.