President Ma Ying-jeou made mention of the “Taiwan Spirit” in his inaugural address on May 20.All he did was to group all the core values of the people of Taiwan as the Taiwan Spirit, with which he believes the people would work hard to make Taiwan a better place for them and their children live in.
That in itself isn’t unusual.A new president has to have a slogan to rally public support and Ma, who calls himself a postwar emigrant to Taiwan, had to evoke something typically Taiwanese to emphasize his closer association with the island.A Taiwan University psychology professor, however, read Hegelianism into Ma’s Taiwan Spirit, while another scholar tried his hands on a rebuttal.That is much ado about nothing.
Hegelianism is the objective idealism of German philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel, according to which the rational and the real are equitable so that reason can arrive through dialectics at a comprehension of an absolute idea of which all phenomena are held to be partial representations.His Hegelian triad is the three dialectical stages of thesis, antithesis and synthesis often held to be his characterization of the progress of history.
The psychology professor seems to regard “Taiwan consciousness” stressed by President Chen Shui-bian as a thesis and Ma’s Taiwan Spirit as an antithesis, one stage ahead of the last in the Hegelian triad, which should inevitably lead to the synthesis Ma wants to arrive at, albeit nothing is made clear as to what that synthesis is going to be in the history of Taiwan.The psychologist equates Taiwan consciousness to Hegel’s ego- or self-consciousness and Taiwan Spirit to the group consciousness as mentioned in the German philosopher’s Phenomenology.The rebuttal charged the professor with trying to give a facelift to the mainlander president by applying passé Hegelian terminology, which is difficult for the great masses to understand anyway, in condemning the populist de-Sinicization campaign of the previous regime.
One thing we don’t quite understand is why all these great scholars won’t leave politicians alone.
For one thing, aren’t the core values of the people of Taiwan Ma cited as part and parcel of the Taiwan Spirit the core values of the Chinese people?We can’t find any difference.Moreover, there isn’t much difference between the Taiwan Spirit and – well, let’s say – the Protestant ethics.As a matter of fact, the core values in all world civilizations are similar, if not identical.
Let politicians talk about anything they want.It’s freedom of speech and more often than not, they do not mean what they say.It’s totally and absolutely unnecessary for eggheads to make a fuss about what politicians believe or do not believe.
（本文刊載於97.05.26 China Post第4版，本文代表作者個人意見）
