Lin Yutang and his view of recognition

This chapter concerns Lin Yutang's life and works, and his view of recognition. It discusses his challenge to cultural reductionism that leads to the oriental/occidental binary, and his pursuit of a recognition of China as an equal member of the world of republic of letters in the modern world. This chapter demonstrates Lin's insight on the spiritual unity of the modern world, and his argument that the culture of the modern world has a common heritage of human race. This shared heritage of mankind, this chapter concludes, for Lin enables the possibility of unity (and a potential syncretism) of oppositional sides of dichotomies, and this unity is, in essence, the basis of Lin's view of recognition.