Bulletin Number Two 1985
diversified backgrounds could hotly debate with one another and at the same time laugh heartily with one another. As a group we seem to be able to find harmony in strife which far exceeds the wildest of our expectations. An idea was actualized not by prearrangement, but by the cooperation of intellectuals of high calibre from different parts of the world through the exercise of their good will. We had scheduled a round table discussion on Saturday morning for the following purposes: to enable everyone of us to have a further chance to express our opinion, and to voice whatever criticisms we had of the conference. The discussions started on totally uncarved courses and again they proved to be most helpful and fruitful. I think everyone shares Professor Apel's observation that in a conference like this you find so many things novel which are beyond your own field of competence and feel the challenges from a great variety of sources, however, you do not easily give up your own ideal, but rather have to commit yourself to make even greater effort to expand your ideal in such a way that it can meet these challenges in the open field. And the final remarks made in the session by Professor Richard Hocking, an observer in the Conference, are equally memorable. He is Professor Emeritus at Emory University, and the son of the distinguished Harvard idealistic philosopher, William Hocking. He had attended the Fourth East- West Philosophers' Conference held in Honolulu in 1964 , and found that the spirit of that Conference has been revived in this conference and hoped that it will find further expressions in the future. At the closing ceremony, Professor Shu-hsien Liu as the organizer gave a summary statement and paid tribute to all parties and individuals who had helped the idea of the conference materialized. Goethe Institut had shared the operation cost with this University. The Vice-Chancellor had used the D.H. Chen Fund to help us pay for the expenses for a Buddhist scholar from Japan. The American and Australian scholars had to pay their own way to come to Hong Kong. Not only had the Ming Yu Foundation of New Asia College helped to pay for the operation cost, but the College would also bear the exorbitant cost to publish the proceedings in a special issue of New Asia Academic Bulletin, And the contributions of our own colleagues, graduate assistants, secretaries and workers were all duly acknowledged. Dr. Dieter Stollwerck of Goethe Institut expressed complete satisfaction at the achievement of the conference and paid special tribute to Dr. Tu Li, to whom he first mentioned the idea of organizing an international conference of philosophy at CUHK. Dr. Li could not attend the conference because of ill health and all hoped that he will recover soon. Finally, Professor Ambrose King, Head of New Asia College delivered his closing address. He emphatically struck the keynote: harmony in strife, which was demonstrated over and over again during the whole conference, and would surely be remembered by all the participants for a long time to come. As the conference drew to a close, we were sad that we had to part so soon, and happy that we were parting in the spirit of Harmony and were able to leave Strife aside in the background. The scholars will be allowed three months to revise their papers before submission to the conference for consideration for publication. No doubt many insights they learned from the conference will be incorporated in their papers. But strife in views will never come to an end. In spite of the diversity in viewpoints, there does emerge a certain consensus which may be summarized as follows: (1) that the concept of strife is not to be slighted: harmony through conformity without any strife may not be a desirable thing; perhaps the conference has not probed deep enough into the concept of strife which should receive equal attention as the concept of harmony; (2) that harmony is the regulative idea towards which we must strive after, however, criteria for good harmonies must be spelled out so that harmony will not be sought for its own sake and at any costs. Several patterns of thought can be discerned during the conference exchanges: (a) The relativistic approach: there is not much choice between harmony and strife, and we are simply the products of our own time and environment. This is not a very popular position as anyone with any ideas to make changes in things in a voluntary way will be dissatisfied with this viewpoint; (b) The empirical approach: empirical evidences are cited to show that good harmonies are preferable to strifes, but the problem of the gap between Is and Ought remains the major stumbling block to this view; (c) The transcendental approach: harmony is considered to be a regulative idea only, if such is the case, then it remains a profound mystery how such an idea can ever be actualized in the real world! and (d) A transcendental approach combined with a pragmatic approach: a transcendental 4 NEWS
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