穀足食多，禮義之心生；禮豐義重，平安之基立矣。故饑歲之春，不食親戚，穰歲之秋，召及四鄰。不食親戚，惡行 也；召及四鄰，善義也。為善惡之行，不在人質性，在於歲之饑穰
“When there is sufficient grain and abundant food, the heart of ritual and righteousness (liyi) grows.  When ritual flourishes and righteousness is taken seriously, the foundations of peaceful order are established.  Therefore in the spring of a famine year, one does not feed one’s relatives, while in the autumn harvest of an year of abundant yield, one calls together one’s neighbors (to eat).  Not feeding one’s relatives is bad conduct.  Calling together one’s neighbors to eat is good conduct.  Production of good or bad conduct is not a matter of the substance and nature (zhi xing) of persons, rather it is a matter of whether the year is one of famine or abundance.”

Wow.

Lest I get too carried away, though–the context of this quote is important.  Wang is arguing against (as he so often is) the view that virtuous rulership is effective (in some way) in creating virtuous subjects, a revered Confucian position.  Wang argues that this cannot be the case, as there can be virtuous rulers whose states are in disorder and whose subjects are unvirtuous.  He offers a number of historical examples and examples from the classic literature to demonstrate this.  He then turns to an explanation for this disconnect–what accounts for the moral quality of human behavior is the external situation, such as whether or not food is abundant.  Of course, there are difficulties for this view as there are for any behaviorist/situationist view (what explains heroics, altruism in stressful situations, etc.), but what is so startling about this is that Wang says something like this, given his seeming commitment elsewhere to the efficacy of deliberate effort in creating virtuous character.

He talks in the essay 率性 Shuai xing, for example, about the “completion of character” (成為性 cheng wei xing), claiming that this completion happens through either instruction (for those with initially deficient/bad character), or preservation (in the case of those with initially good character (kind of a mix of the Mencian and Xunzian positions it seems).  Interestingly, there are really two senses of xing here–that which one has naturally as a result of being born with it, and that which is “completed”.  The “completed” xing sounds closest to what we generally mean by “character”, and human effort in some sense is necessary for attaining it (whether through education or actively guarding), while the raw xing is independent of human activity and given (spontaneously, of course) by 天tian.

What is interesting here is that it seems like Wang wants to be a determinist/situationist as well as to uphold the efficacy of character.  But how can he do this?  What differences are there between the person of good completed xing and the person of bad completed xing in a situation of famine, for example?  Will it be the case that both of them will fail to feed their relatives?  The above passage from Zhi qi seems to suggest so.  And if this is the case more generally for external situations, how can xing play any role at all in behavior, completed or not?

I haven’t yet found any proposed solution to this in Lunheng, or even an indication that Wang is aware of the problem.  It could be, of course, that he was overstating the case for determinism in order to make a broader point about rulership, and that this statement from the Zhi qi should be thought of as having the invisible preface “generally speaking…”

I’ve come across an interesting issue in Lunheng recently, and an interesting translation difficulty/issue.  Wang Chong distinguished three types of ming 命(destiny) in the essay Ming yi 命義, and there is a difficulty surrounding how this distinction ought to be understood.  The three types Wang mentions are zheng ming (no not that one, rather 正命), sui ming 隋命, and zao ming 遭命.  In some places, Wang seems to define these in terms of the primary cause of the destined outcome in question.  Thus zheng ming is understood as the destiny one has as a result of their xing, or natural characteristics, which have (according to Wang) nothing to do with post-birth environmental/external forces.  Sui ming is destiny one has as a result of effort, whether inadvertent or intentional.  A person who is naturally weak yet works hard to build the body might attain a different ming than they would have if they left things to their natural course, for example.  The final type, zao ming, is destiny one receives incidentally.  One might meet an early death not as the result of a frail nature or weakening oneself through one’s own efforts (say one drinks too much or fails to eat a nutritious diet, etc), but rather because one is in the wrong place at the wrong time, wandering into a battlefield, or getting hit by a runaway chariot in the road.

It is with this third type of ming that the difficulty is generated.  Wang seems to talk about zao ming as if it is only consistent with a negative, even disastrous, destiny.  Zao ming is always a ming connected with early death, bad luck, catastrophe of some type.  This is odd, to say the least.  Wang doesn’t seem to consider the possibility that one could incidentally stumble upon fortune, rather than disaster.  Sure, one could get run over by a car, but couldn’t one just as accidentally find a sack full of money on the side of the road making one rich for the rest of his life, or some other fortunate event?  Isn’t it possible, that is, for zao ming to be positive rather than negative?

Clearly noticing this correspondence between zao ming and catastrophe in Ming yi, Alfred Forke translates it “adverse destiny.”  At the end of Ming yi, however, Wang discusses zao itself (independently of the type of ming associated with zao) as something much more akin to “incident” or “accident”.  It is this sense of zao I think Wang means to call on for his use in connection with ming, even though he seems to think that zao ming is always negative.  Thus, I translate zao ming as “incidental destiny.”  Forke’s translation choice shows us something interesting, however.  I think he was on to something–that is, it does seem like Wang thinks that not only is zao ming incidental, but that it is catastrophic, or “adverse.”  Why would he think this?  Part of it doubtlessly has to do with the nature of the problem he took himself to offer a solution to with his distinction of three types of ming.  The main problem is that we often observe that those who seem to be robust and healthy (and presumably thus have a ming determining long life–Wang does say that we can determine what kind of ming one has through physical signs such as this–frail and sickly people have a ming condemning them to short life, while the healthy and strong have a ming connected to long life) nonetheless die early as the result of some accidental situation–a war, natural disaster, or other accident.  How can we square such early deaths with the coexistence of natural ming determining that they will have long lives?

The distinctions Wang makes between different types of ming is meant to answer this.  One kind of ming can supersede any other, so that zao ming (in the above case wandering into the road where a runaway chariot is bearing down) can trump zheng ming, which would in this case indicate a long life.  However, zheng ming can sometimes also trump zao ming.  For example, we might imagine a person surviving an injury in battle that would kill a less physically robust person.  Because Wang is so focused on these negative examples, in which zao ming undercuts fortune, long life, etc., he neglects possible cases of zao ming leading to positive results.

My suspicion, even though Wang is not clear on this, is that this is due to a peculiar view Wang has concerning qi and its connection to ming.  Wang argues in a number of chapters that the quality of one’s ming is due to the quantity of qi one has received from birth.  The length of one’s life, for example, connected to zheng ming, is determined the amount of qi one has.  A person with abundant qi will have a long life (barring zao, of course), and the less qi a person has, the shorter they will generally live.  No one, Wang seems to hold, has a short life or misfortune based on possession of some property (generally a type of qi), but rather misfortunes of various kinds are based on privation.  This view, perhaps, leads him to see zao ming as undercutting positive properties.  No one could gain additional qi, and this is presumably what it would take to “accidentally” gain fortunate ming.  Thus, we might read Wang (although again he is not explicit about this, and his view has to be reconstructed from a number of positions) as one cannot accidentally be fortunate.  Fortune is always a result of zheng ming (though not necessarily tied to health, talent, etc., as he argues in a number of chapters), which involves possession of positive properties (mainly abundance of qi), and anything that gets in the way of this can only affect zheng ming by undermining it.  Notice that this does not entail that the zheng ming of everyone is the same or completely positive.  It is not that zheng ming of every person commits them to a long life and zao ming might undermine this.  Rather, because people can have different quantities of qi, the zheng ming of some people can condemn them to a short life, as they have relatively little qi.  What cannot happen, however, is that zao ming intervenes and makes this person’s life longer than that specified by their zheng ming.  It can make it shorter, though.  A sickly or dying person can still meet their demise on the battlefield earlier than they would have otherwise, for example.  This, of course, still leaves the question of how sui ming works, as it seems one might make one’s life longer than it would be dependent on their zheng ming alone through effort (nutrition, doctors, etc.)

Thus, while I agree with Forke’s intuition that zao ming is necessarily (relatively) negative, I think we should still translate it as “incidental destiny” rather than “adverse destiny.”

In Wang’s essay on zuo, he’s mainly concerned with defending himself against the (presumed) accusation that he’s engaging in zuo with his writing of the essays of the Lunheng, and thus doing something unacceptable.  Interestingly, Wang’s view in Dui Zuo is similar to Yu’s position in that it takes zuo to be something culturally foundational, but (unlike Yu’s position), Wang argues that no literary work is zuo in the problematic sense, and that every literary work is zuo in a trivial sense.  What Wang attempts to do, in the end, is to shift the focus of the dispute away from the consideration of whether a literary work is or is not zuo to the more important consideration (according to Wang, at least) of whether a literary work contains truths (實 shi) or falsehoods (虛 xu).

The reason Wang’s view on zuo vs. shu (transmission) here interests me is because it puts pressure on the view that common Han dynasty view (and one that spanned most of the history of Chinese thought) that zuo is problematic.  Wang argues that the view that one engages in zuo when composing a new literary work is either trivially true or necessarily false.

Wang’s argument for the latter is basically a version of “there is nothing new under the sun.”  Every literary work relies on the styles, concepts, and views of others in the past and present, and thus no literary work can be completely innovative.  According to Wang, one only engages in zuo if one creates something that did not exist before, as in the case of the first creation of writing or chariots  (造端更為，前始未有，若倉頡作書、奚仲作車是也).  His use of non-literary examples here is meant in part to show that no literary work can meet such a standard.  The invention of writing itself may have been zuo, but nothing written is zuo.

Wang’s argument for the triviality of zuo in a different sense is simple.  If we understand zuo in the above sense, it is clearly impossible for any literary work to be zuo.  But if we think of it in a more conventional sense, in which to engage in creation is simply to produce something new through one’s own efforts, then clearly any literary work is zuo.  Even a commentary on the Analects by a devoted Confucian would be zuo in this sense.

While we might take issue with Wang’s two senses of zuo (that is, it seems Wang’s two senses don’t exhaust all the possibilities of what one might mean by ‘zuo‘), the view is nonetheless interesting because of the pressure it puts on the position that zuo is problematic.  What is it about zuo, we might imagine Wang saying, that is so problematic?  It clearly can’t be the trivial sense of zuo that people object to.  Presumably, what one might find objectionable about attempts to engage in zuo is that they are unnecessary or unwise given that there is already sufficient material available to us (from the sages) in the realm of ethics, politics, or whatever else.  To engage in zuo is to try to “reinvent the wheel.”  What Wang does in Dui Zuo is to (among other things) point out that no one in the history of literature has actually done this or even attempted to do this (even the sages themselves–who related norms they didn’t invent through writing them).

Analects 2.7 gives us a statement of what the Confucians take to be uniquely human features of connection with one’s parents that counts as filial conduct.  This passage contains a number of interesting layers that can help us think about filiality specifically, and human community and virtue more generally.

2.7:  子游問孝。子曰：“今之孝者，是謂能養。至於犬馬，皆能有養；不敬，何以別乎？”

Translation: Ziyou asked about filiality.  The master said, “today people call filiality nourishing [one's parents].  This is to be like the dogs and horses-even they are able to nourish [their parents].  Without reverence (jing), how can you tell the difference?

One reading of this passage is to focus on the internal features of the property of filiality, extending this to the Confucian virtues generally.  Thus, the other virtues, like filiality, rely on one’s attitude and motivations, and the consequences of one’s actions are relatively less important.  Reverence, in the case of filiality, is more important than the actual nourishment of parents, just as concern for others, in the case of ren (humanity) is more important than the success in securing the physical wellbeing of others.  Analects 12.7, in which the trust of the people is deemed more important for governing than sufficient military might or even sufficient food, might be seen as supporting such a reading.

I wonder if 2.7 is a statement of this kind, however.  Is it really claiming that reverence is more important than nourishment when it comes to filiality, or rather that it is equally important?  I think the use of “dogs and horses” here raises an interesting question that brings us right into the Mencius/Xunzi “debate” on human nature.  Confucius points out that even dogs and horses nourish their parents, and presumably they are not the kinds of things that can be filial.  Filiality requires more than this–reverence must also play a role, and this is something that cannot be done by dogs and horses.  This, of course, does not show that the ability to nourish is not part of filiality–we might expect that Confucius would fail to consider filial a man who has reverence for his parents but is underemployed and unable to sufficiently care for them (just as we would expect from Aristotle, situations outside one’s control can sometimes thwart virtue).

In a sense Analects 2.7 is like a Warring States Rorschach test.  Whether we read 2.7 as claiming that only reverence is necessary for filiality or instead as claiming that both reverence and ability to nourish are necessary depends largely on whether we accept a Mencian or Xunzian view of 性 (human nature).  Where Mencius sees human nature as containing only that which is unique to humans, thus ruling out those features we share with dogs and horses, Xunzi’s view (somewhat similar to Gaozi’s view in the Mencius) is that there is a certain amount of overlap between human nature and a dog’s nature.  They will share certain features (like the desire for food and sex) and not others (like advanced social abilities).  It seems to me a Xunzian (like myself) is more likely to read 2.7 as claiming that both reverence and ability to nourish are necessary for reverence, while the Mencian will likely read it as a claim that it is reverence, and not the ability to nourish, that is central to filiality.  It seems we get little help from elsewhere in the Analects to settle this, like so many other issues in this text.

http://warpweftandway.wordpress.com/2011/03/11/listening-ridiculously-and-the-oddity-of-the-zhuangzi/

What’s been on my mind most recently concerning the Zhuangzi is the oddity of the text, and whether this has any significance as far as how we ought to interpret it.  Analytically minded philosophers such as myself tend to neglect stylistic issues (for the most part) in our interpretations (and I think this is why I’ve had such difficulty understanding the Zhuangzi for years), but I’m coming to think that for the Zhuangzi, the style might be a key to understanding the text.

I am also finding myself returning to the “Zhuangzi as skeptic” view I initially held concerning the text but abandoned years ago.  If the Zhuangzi offers us a kind of skeptical message, however, it is very different from that of the Academics or Pyrrhonians.  It doesn’t posit a distinction between appearances and reality at all, and so there is no “suspension of judgment” concerning something underlying ideas.  There is, as far as I can tell, no representationalism in the Zhuangzi.

Rather, the skepticism surrounds the idea that there is a narrowly right way to experience and perceive things–that seeing ourselves as humans rather than as the butterflies we think we are when dreaming is somehow more valuable, or that seeing the world through the preconceived notions of use/uselessness, right/wrong, etc. is the way we ought to see it.  If this is right, then the Zhuangzi is endorsing something like following the appearances, but concerning the value of experiences and how we ought to respond to them, rather than the accuracy of our judgments.  The Zhuangist sage simply acts as a butterfly when he experiences himself as a butterfly, responding to the world in a way a butterfly would, and acts as a human when he experiences himself as a human.  It is important to note here that there is no single standard for action that the Zhuangist sage then uses, he simply responds to situations.  There is no “self” then, insofar as this describes characteristic actions, values, or goals–rather there is openness and response to situations.  This, I think, is linked to the “fasting of the mind” discussed in chapter 4.

The weirdness and seemingly disjointed quality of the text can be instructive here.  Just like the Zhuangist sage will be one who responds to situations and doesn’t attempt to synthesize their experience into that of a coherent “self” with certain motivations, goals, values, etc., the ideal Zhuangist text will be one that is disjointed and impossible to fully synthesize as one coherent text with a central message.  Part of what may be going on here, that is, is that the fragmentary nature of the text may be part of the way the Zhuangzi attempts to move us away from the tendency to synthesize our experience, to see it as relating to a single self that acts and perceives in certain ways and that leads to the devaluation of experience that is seemingly incompatible with this self.  So, for example, we move away from rejecting or devaluing our experiences of being butterflies while dreaming on the basis of their incompatibility with our “real” existence as humans.

So my current view on the Zhuangzi, although it initially sounded defeatist to me when I first entertained it, now seems to me compatible with the style of the text and the possible purpose of this style.  Trying to synthesize and understand the theme or meaning of the Zhuangzi is to engage in the kind of devaluation of disjointed and individual or unrelated experiences that Zhuangzi decries.

Of course, there are problems with this reading as well, which I will try to raise in my WW&W post…

Anyway–I’ve been interested in the debate between Legalists and Confucians on effective government, which maps relatively well onto the debate between modernists and reformists in the Western Han.  There was a very interesting discussion at the APA Pacific in San Francisco last year surrounding Han Feizi’s criticisms of the Confucian conception of government based in virtue and imitation of the sages, and to what extent Han Fei’s criticisms were successful against the Confucian.  I suggested that Wang Chong supplies a partial response to Han Fei’s objections in his essay Fei Han (Against Han Feizi), but the response Wang develops there builds on an assumption drawn from earlier philosophical work, mainly in the Western Han.  I didn’t go into this stuff in my presentation at the APA, but it might be even more interesting and useful than the Wang Chong bit, as it concerns this debate.

Specifically, Jia Yi (201-169 BCE) dealt with this question of the foundation of legitimacy of government, and took a position similar to what we see much later in Wang Chong, against the legalist view–that both law and virtue are necessary to maintain a government.  There have been some recent scholars (just read Charles Sanft’s dissertation which argues along these lines, as does Michael Loewe in his chapter on the Western Han in the first volume of the Cambridge History of China) who argue that Jia Yi should not be considered as having Confucian motives in his focus on the necessity of virtue in the state.  Rather, they maintain, Jia’s primary interest was in power and the ruler’s ability to retain control, and for Jia virtue was considered a means to power, rather than an end in itself, or as a means for some moral end.

I think this misunderstands both Jia Yi and the early Confucians, to claim that Jia’s focus on maintaining the control of the ruler is inconsistent with a moral focus on virtue.  I read Jia’s views as pretty strongly in line with those of the early Confucians.  Jia focuses on the ordering aspect of virtue.  He speaks of the “people as root” (minben 民本), maintaining that it is only with the support of the people that a ruler ultimately finds success and maintains control.  The way Jia discusses this concept of minben is certainly focused on control, but it is important to understand that this does not minimize the moral aspects of the theory.  In order to maintain control, according to Jia, it is not enough to simply give the people what they want–rather, taking the “people as root” goes deeper than this.  The ruler who truly understands that the people are the key to power will develop the concern with the people proper to a good ruler–which is just what the early Confucians hold that the ruler ought to do.  In the case of the Mencius, as we see in the Book I discussions with King Xuan, Mencius explains that through the ruler’s benevolence toward the people, he ensures they are cared for, and this consolidates the ruler’s power.  As Mencius says, how could anyone stop a benevolent king from eventually holding power over all the world?  The idea here is that the motivation of the ruler is relevant–it is not enough to simply provide for one’s people, because if one does this out of non-benevolent motivations, this will certainly be revealed, and the people will understand the ruler does not have their best interests at heart, but only does what he does to maintain power, and will abandon them and take the easier path to power whenever it becomes available.  Such people will not be committed to their ruler.  The level of commitment from the people a ruler can expect (and thus the amount of power over the people a ruler has) will be directly proportionate to the level of commitment a ruler has to the people.

Jia Yi focuses on minben in its aspect of ensuring control, but this, then, is not inconsistent with a moral concern for the people.  Given that Jia Yi was advising the Han emperor Wen, we should expect that his angle would be one of ensuring control.  Indeed, Mencius used this same tactic in his discussions with King Xuan!  In Jia Yi’s essay Guo Qin 過秦 (The Mistakes of Qin), he claims that what the Qin lacked that led to its downfall was humanity (ren) and righteousness (yi).  But we have to remember that having ren is inconsistent with having selfish motivations such as retaining power–a ruler who provided for the people in order to retain power would not be a person with ren!  Even though there are some differences in how the concept is understood in different Confucian thinkers, they are all clear that having or being ren is not merely a matter of behaving in certain ways, but particular motivations are also involved.

More to come on this–I’ll be presenting on similar issues in Jia Yi at the Central APA in March.  So between now and then I’m sure I’ll have lots more to say on this debate–stay tuned!

Smid discusses four particular conceptions of comparative philosophy in this book, those of William Hocking, Filmer Northrop, David Hall and Roger Ames, and Robert Neville.  Each chapter consists of an outline of the comparative method in question, followed by Smid’s appraisal of the method.  Each of the methods he discusses here fall within the pragmatist or process traditions, although it seems to me that pragmatism is much better represented in this selection of comparative thinkers than any other method.

As a historical account of four different comparative methods and how these methods might be used by comparative scholars today, I found this book excellent.  Smid does a commendable job of outlining the main features of each of the comparative methods, and pointing out where they show promise and where they fall short.  One theme running through the book (of course) concerns the difference of Chinese philosophy and Western philosophy–to what extent there is such a difference, and what we can take from this.  Although this subject is dealt with fairly well, I was very disappointed that issues of the commensurability of traditions as discussed by many important comparative philosophers (including David Wong, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Bryan Van Norden, just to name a few) did not come up at any point in the book (although Smid did tackle commensurability as it comes up in the work of Robert Neville).  This issue seems to me central to the comparative project as a whole (even the possibility of comparison relies on it), and requires much more discussion than it was given in Smid’s book.

My main problems with this book are 1) its scope, and 2) its methodology.

First, its scope is limited to mainly pragmatist conceptions of comparative philosophy, and non-pragmatists (like myself) will find this of limited interest.  I think there are far better methodological stances in comparative philosophy than any relying on pragmatism, which I find very problematic in its own right, and thus I find most of the methodology Smid discusses to have deep flaws.  I appreciate that Smid, in his introduction, is forthright about his exclusion of a number of other conceptions of comparative philosophy–he says, on p. 10:

“…the analytic and Continental philosophical traditions both have their own traditions of comparison, as do a number of non-Western traditions; any one of these could have served as the subject matter for this text; they have been excluded simply because they do not conform as quickly to my own background and expertise.”

Although I appreciate this caveat, I still think that the scope of a work on comparative methods should be broader, simply because when it is as narrow as Smid has drawn it, we don’t get a sense of the real options available in comparative methodology, nor can we adequately appraise the pragmatist methodologies Smid discusses in his book.  If there is no alternative to pragmatism considered, how can we assess whether pragmatist comparative methodology really does do the best job of “getting on with” the business of comparison in a responsible way, a goal of the methodology of Hall and Ames that Smid discusses (and appraises) in the third chapter?  Also, I’m not sure I would distinguish the comparative methodologies of established “traditions”, such as the continental and analytic.  Much of the work of philosophers engaged in comparative issues today does not easily fit within a single tradition, and to identify some comparative methods as “analytic”, others as “continental” complicates things in a field in which it is already difficult to parse the differences between comparative methods.

Second–the methodology of the book seems to be itself pragmatist, which comes out most clearly in the final chapter, in which Smid appraises the four methodologies discussed in the book and considers the way forward for comparative philosophy in general.  In this chapter, Smid contrasts comparative philosophy and “professionalized philosophy,” which he defines as philosophical work making relatively narrow contributions in narrowly defined areas and largely building on the work of others rather than presenting one’s own unique position.  On the other hand, he says, “those who engage in comparative philosophy have a much greater propensity to form broad philosophical views that enable their own personalities and social concerns to shine through” (p. 225).  This seems wrong to me, as it takes comparative philosophy as something with pragmatist roots, which would only be true if the four comparative methodologies Smid discusses in his book are exhaustive, within the field.  But of course they are not.  The methodologies he discusses do not even make up a very large part of those used by comparativists.  Arguably, Hall and Ames’ method has had the largest influence, of all four discussed in the book, but even this is nowhere near dominant in the field today.

Also, it strikes me as odd to think that we should want to our unique personalities and social concerns to shine through in our philosophical work.  My own conception of what the comparativist should aim to do, which I don’t think is very controversial within the field, is 1) to remain faithful to each of the traditions compared, saying true things about them and offering interpretations justified by plausible readings of source texts, and 2) to reveal positions that might be mutually illuminating for each tradition.  One’s personality and social concerns need not (and should not, as far as I’m concerned) play any role in the justification of his or her comparative theory (although these will always of course play an explanatory role).  What this basically boils down to is a disagreement with pragmatism.  One of the key features of the Rortian pragmatism that Hall and Ames adopt (according to Smid) is that it eschews the notion of truth as justifying a certain position, instead accepting that a position is justified insofar as it “contributes novel ideas that are edifying to the current cultural milieu.”  One problem with this Rortian view is that it is flatly inconsistent.  There can be no conception of and edification of a certain cultural milieu without truth playing a central role, and thus insofar as this goal can be met, truth as a key normative concept has to be part of the picture.

Taking it as a good thing for one’s personality and social concerns to manifest themselves in one’s comparative work seems to me based on acceptance of something like the pragmatist (and specifically Rortian?) position that Hall and Ames adopt.  If we are after truth primarily, that is, why should personality and one’s social concerns play any role?

In addition, Smid argues that the failure of comparative philosophy to become firmly part of the “mainstream” up until this point is due to the fundamental difference between comparative philosophy and professionalized philosophy mentioned above.  I do not think this is the case.  Many comparative philosophers (including myself) produce work which could be considered well within the tradition of “professionalized philosophy,” and (also including myself) heartily endorse the professionalization of philosophy (as Smid defines it–see above).  One way of understanding my disagreement with Smid here is the following.  He sees comparative philosophy’s failure to break into the mainstream (at least so far) as due to the narrowness and professionalization of academic philosophy, and thus seems to think philosophy should change so as to accomodate comparative philosophy.  I, on the other hand, see comparative philosophy’s failure to break into the mainstream as due to the relative youth of comparative philosophy, as well as the fact that historically there have not been many philosophers in the west engaged in the study of the history of non-western philosophy (a task mainly left to sinologists, indologists, etc.).  Thus, I think that it is comparative philosophy that needs to change (and is changing!) in order to fit within “professionalized” philosophy.  One might dismiss my gripe here as simply the result of my influence by the so called “analytic” tradition (an influence I don’t deny), but I suspect this is a view not limited to analytically minded philosophers.

All this being said, I hope I have not left the impression that I thought Smid’s book was wrongheaded or useless.  I applaud Smid for engaging in this extremely necessary project of thinking about comparative methodologies, which illuminated the methodological positions and presuppositions of some important philosophers, and I hope to see (as well as write) much more work in this area in the future.

First, I should say that this is a collection that has been needed for a long time, and I hope it can help to spur more interest in Han dynasty thought and lead to more publication of critical source translations of Han material, which is sorely lacking.

Readings in Han Chinese Thought is a short collection (around 200 pages) of readings from Han thinkers, from throughout the two halves of the dynasty, but focusing mainly on Western Han material (including the Huainanzi, Jia Yi, Lu Jia, Dong Zhongshu, and Yang Xiong).

Csikszentmihalyi has organized the readings by theme, collecting them under three main headings: “Ethics and Statecraft”, “Knowledge”, and “The Natural World”.  Each section contains subsections which include short passages from one or another Han thinker on the topic in question.  For example, passages from Dong Zhongshu and Jia Yi are contained in a subsection on self-cultivation within the larger section on “Ethics and Statecraft”.  I think this choice of organization was the right one, given the room Csikszentmihalyi had to work with.  It gives us a sense, in a fairly short work, of the main themes Han thinkers were concerned with.  The only concern I have is with a few of the themes Csikzentmihalyi did not touch on–most importantly language and truth.  Of course, this becomes (I think) a bigger issue in the Eastern Han than it was in the Western Han, and given that the focus in this collection on Western Han sources, this is an omission that can be overlooked.

The translations of the material in the collection are excellent–careful and philosophically sensitive.  The only problem I have here is that there is not enough of the material of any given philosopher translated to give the reader a sense of the main contours of his thought.  Generally, each passage within a subsection from a particular work is about 2-5 pages.  Although this gives us a general sense of how Han thinkers approached certain themes, it does not give us a very clear picture of the thought of particular Han thinkers, and might lead readers to confuse the thought of, say, Dong Zhongshu with that of Jia Yi.

This is my main problem with the work.  Although it contains excellent and much needed translations, it does not contain enough of the material.  Although I understand the need to pick and choose what one thinks is most important in such a short work, I would have liked to see the inclusion of some passages from Eastern Han thinkers such as Xun Yue, Xu Gan, and Wang Fu.  I realize that there is a mountain of important work done in the Han dynasty, and that in a short work like the Readings only a tiny amount of it can be covered, but this shows us, I think, the need for more in depth studies and translations of Han thinkers.

Csikszentmihalyi’s book is in all an excellent introduction to basic themes and thinkers in the Han dynasty.  We now need more robust translations of particular thinkers, perhaps broken into Western and Eastern Han collections.  A 200 page work is simply too short to do more than give the briefest of glimpses of the Han, unless one restricts the work to translation of no more than a few thinkers.

2.47: (Barbara Stoler Miller trans.) “Be intent on action, not on the fruits of action; avoid attraction to the fruits and attachment to inaction!”

This strikes me as a Confucian point.  One acts in certain ways (adhering with 禮 li, “ritual”, for the Confucian) out of a desire to see a thriving society, but this desire itself and the resulting actions are not wholly results-based, such that it is only the realization of a thriving society that leads the good Confucian to act.  Rather, it is because it is central to being human to act in the manners prescribed by li, and thus anyone who adheres to li simply for the utilitarian goal of bringing about social harmony is missing something important about li and how we should pursue virtue.  This, I take it, is the point behind Analects 14.38, in which a gatekeeper asks Zilu, on hearing the name of Confucius:

是知其不可而為之者輿？“Is this the one who knows that it can’t be done but still attempts it?”

We can assume that the ‘it’ here is the establishment of the dao, the creation of the thriving society Confucius aims at.  As we see from the quote, however, if we take 14.38 seriously and not simply as a jab at Confucius (and I think we should take it seriously, otherwise why would the compilers of the Analects have included it?), it advocates Confucius’ dogged determination to reestablish the 先王之道 (the way of the sage kings), even while he knows, it suggests, that this is an impossible task.  One interesting thing this does is to suggest an answer to Zhuangzi’s attack on the Confucians.  Zhuangzi (and presumably others like him, such as the proto-Daoists in Analects 18.5-7) chides Confucius for wasting his energy engaging in the fool’s errand of trying to reestablish the way of the sage kings, not realizing that there is no way to bring back what has gone (see Jie Yu’s speech in Analects 18.5, duplicated in the Zhuangzi, for an example).  Confucius’ answer in the Book 18 passages, as I’ve argued elsewhere (see this earlier post for more) suggests that being fully human requires that one make the attempt to bring about a thriving society–that the junzi does not adhere to li simply to bring about such a society, but to fulfill one’s potential as a human being.

This strikes me as very similar to what is advocated in the Gita.  We should, Krishna instructs, avoid attachment to the consequences of our particular actions.  We should not, then, act to bring about the thriving society simply in order to bring about the thriving society, but we should do it because it is our dharma (sacred duty), and performing actions in accord with our dharma (also understood as devotion of one’s actions to Krishna, as the “universal spirit”) perfects us as human beings–a perfection that the Gita understands as total freedom from existential suffering.  Thus, even if we fail to achieve the results of our actions (if Arjuna fails to win the battle and the righteous war of the Pandavas is lost, or Confucius fails to establish the way of the sage kings), we have not failed in our central project–that of self-cultivation.

In the case of the Analects, this process of self-cultivation more explicitly involves the community and the conception of oneself as in some sense constituted by one’s place in the community, while in the Gita one’s social roles (fixed by caste) are not central to one’s identity as a person (or spiritual identity, if you will).  Still, the two texts seem close to each other on the point of the exemplary person’s motivations.