Determinism and “Completion of Character” in Lunheng

This is the most strongly worded statement of something like behavioral determinism I’ve found in Lunheng.  Interestingly enough, it comes in a chapter on government (治期 Zhi qi), and I suspect this is the reason the statement is as stark as it is.  Let’s jump right in (my rough translation follows below-I haven’t tackled Zhi qi yet in my Lunheng translation, though it’s next on my list):

Three Kinds of Destiny

I’ll be talking about Wang Chong quite a bit on this blog in the coming months, as I’ve just plunged into a major project on his work, stemming from the past work I’ve done on his philosophical views.  There’s just far too much of philosophical interest in Lunheng to be overlooked.  The plan is to consider Wang’s philosophy in light of both Han debates and in comparison with contemporary western philosophy, to which Wang Chong’s ideas can make a number of contributions.  I’ve also made a new years resolution for 2012 to post here on UPJ more regularly, as the comments I get here are of great help to me in chiseling and polishing this “unpolished” work!

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. 

Does Anyone Create?

I’ve been thinking recently (as always) about Wang Chong and philosophical dispute in the Han dynasty, and my most recent reading of Wang’s 對作 (“Replies on Creation”) essay in the Lunheng coincided nicely with my reading of Jiyuan Yu’s recent post on zuo (creation) and shu (transmission) in the Analects at Warp, Weft, and Way, which suggests that shu is not merely a secondary and descriptive project of recounting earlier teachings, but something akin to philosophia in the Ancient Greek tradition.  Culture and tradition give us zuo, according to Yu’s interpretation, and thinking and reasoning within this tradition using its tools and following its lead, is shu.

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–More on the Uniquely Human

I’ll be mainly back to commenting on passages from the Analects and other texts here for a while on Unpolished Jade (along with book reviews and possibly some other stuff), as I focus on more generally interpretive and comparative posts on Warp, Weft, and Way.  I’ve been thinking about community as person-making and the unique features of the human in the Analects recently (working on a number of papers on these topics), and so I’ve been focused on the Analects passages that have something to say about the uniquely human, especially as it concerns (and it usually does!) some feature of communal concern.

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.

Listening Ridiculously and the Oddity of the Zhuangzi

Check out part two of my two-part post on the strangeness of the Zhuangzi at Warp, Weft, and Way:

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

Zhuangzi and Utter Weirdness

I’ve recently been engaged in a number of projects (some of which I’ll discuss in more detail in future posts here on UPJ), including writing a book on self-cultivation in various Eastern philosophical texts.   I’m currently working on a chapter on the Zhuangzi for this book.  Even at a basic level (this book is aimed mainly at people with little or no philosophical background, such as intro students or the general public), it is not easy to get a grasp on just what the Zhuangzi is trying to say, or whether it even had any overarching theme or goal at all.  I actually will suggest the latter in a post that will appear sometime soon on Warp, Weft, and Way (where currently Dan Robins has a very interesting post on the issue of Cook Ding’s “skill” in Zhuangzi chapter 3).

What’s been on my mind most recently concerning the Zhuangzi is the oddity of the text

Jia Yi, Power, and The Virtue vs. Law Debate in Early Han

Things have been a bit slow here recently, as I’ve been pretty busy.  Now I’ve got a little more time freed up to post some more–so expect a bunch of new book reviews soon and some other random thoughts on early Han ethics and political philosophy–this is what I’ve been most into lately, along with some issues in contemporary ethics (mainly surrounding “relativism”).

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