An Introduction to Chinese Philosophy: From Ancient Philosophy to Chinese Buddhism (review)

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1 An Introduction to Chinese Philosophy: From Ancient Philosophy to Chinese Buddhism (review) Bryan W. Van Norden China Review International, Volume 15, Number 1, 2008, pp (Review) Published by University of Hawai'i Press DOI: For additional information about this article No institutional affiliation (29 Jun :35 GMT)

2 Features 39 JeeLoo Liu. An Introduction to Chinese Philosophy: From Ancient Philosophy to Chinese Buddhism. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, xviii, 434 pp. Hardcover $84.95, ISBN Paperback $34.95, ISBN by University of Hawai i Press No one history of the early Chinese Masters can meet the needs of every audience. Benjamin Schwartz s The World of Thought in Ancient China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985) has special appeal, I think, to scholars working in the broad humanistic traditions of religious studies and intellectual history. In contrast, A. C. Graham s Disputers of the Tao (Chicago: Open Court Press, 1989) is written from a more distinctively philosophical perspective. To give just two more examples, although neither has written a general history of the period, the works of Mark Lewis and Paul Goldin particularly emphasize the interplay between social history, archaeology, and philology. 1 Scholars will sometimes dismiss methodologies other than their own as uninteresting, as projecting concepts onto the text, or as making claims that are improvable. But interesting, like delicious, is a matter of taste; all interpretation is projection to one degree or another; and as if anything nontrivial were provable! So we should not begrudge our colleagues their own methodologies and interests because each is potentially legitimate. Of course, this does not mean that anything goes. Someone can be using a particular methodology well or poorly, expertly or crudely. My own primary approach to Chinese thought is that of analytic philosophy. (Other scholars working in this style include Kwong-loi Shun and David Wong.) 2 Consequently, it was with great pleasure and anticipation that I discovered that JeeLoo Liu s An Introduction to Chinese Philosophy is written from a similar perspective. As she explains, analytic philosophy emphasizes the analysis of concepts, the formulation of arguments, the examination of basic assumptions, and the pursuit of clarity in language (p. ix). Unfortunately, I was disappointed with the author s execution of this methodology. This book covers most of the major figures of pre-qin Chinese thought and then skips over the Han dynasty Confucians and Daoists to discuss the main schools of Chinese Buddhism. Neo-Confucianism is mentioned in passing, but is not a focus of the book. My own knowledge of Buddhism is limited, so my comments on this section of the book will be briefer and more diffident. Although the first half of the book focuses on pre-qin thought, Liu says nothing about Gongsun Longzi, Huizi, or the later Mohists. I think this is an unfortunate and significant lacuna. Linguistic paradoxes are particular favorites of analytic philosophers, so any work using that approach should find rich material in these Chinese sources. Even more important, without the background provided by thinkers like these, one cannot fully understand

3 40 China Review International: Vol. 5, No. 1, 2008 texts like the Daodejing or Zhuangzi. I follow Graham in thinking that the antirationalism of both is motivated to a great extent by the development of linguistic paradoxes by earlier thinkers. How can language and argumentation be reliable guides when one can persuasively argue that a white horse is not a horse? Issues of coverage aside, the first significant error in this book occurs on the third page, where the author writes, The earliest form of divination that we now know of was the method of tortoiseshell reading. To perform this divination, some encrypted words were first written on a tortoise-shell. (These writings were the earliest writing samples found in China, dating back to BCE.) The shell was then put into a fire until it started to crack at various points. The reader of the sign would decipher the code depending on how those words were separated. (p. 3) There are at least four things wrong here. (1) I am not sure what the author means by saying that the words were encrypted. The inscriptions are very hard for us to read today, but that is because the characters and the grammar differ so much from classical Chinese. The expressions were being written in a ritual context, so they presumably used stylized locutions, but this is not encryption either. (2) Some words may have been written on a given shell prior to divination, but this was not a general rule. (If anything was inscribed prior to divination, it was merely the preface, giving the time of divination and name of the diviner. And we have discovered some shells that show no inscriptions at all [p. 3]). We do not have any inscribed oracle bones dating back to 1700 BCE, and we have some that date from after 1100 BCE. (I suspect that the author simply inserted the approximate dates of the Shang dynasty.) (4) The notion that the shells were interpreted according to how the words written on the shell were separated by the cracks is nothing better than tea-house Sinology. We all make mistakes. No one can stay current on every issue that is relevant to one s topic. The problem is that the above is representative of errors that occur in each chapter of the book. I will list a few more examples. The author announces that [b]efore paper was invented in China (in the first century AD), books had to be carved onto bamboo plates, which were then assembled with the aid of ropes (p. 12). But one can easily consult reference works that show photographs of excavated bamboo strips (not plates ) on which text was written in ink (not carved ). Furthermore, writing was also done on silk from a fairly early period. The author declares that, with Mencius, we witness the beginning of philosophical argumentation in Chinese philosophy (p. 84). There is debate over whether Confucius can be described as philosophical. Obviously, this depends on what one means by philosophy. But analytic philosophers are often inclined to deny the designation to Confucius because of the paucity of explicit arguments in the Analects. So it is at least a defensible view that Confucius does not argue philosophically. However, the author s own discussion of the Mohists makes clear that it is erroneous to suggest that philosophical argumentation begins with Mencius.

4 Features 41 The author asserts that even though Mozi s ultimate goal was the overall benefit of the world, he understood that everyone is intrinsically a self-interested creature (p. 114). This interpretation is implausible, and the author cites no textual evidence in support of it. She seems to be implicitly assimilating the Mohists to the Western philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, for whom the source of human conflict is our natural egoism. However, at the opening of Obeying One s Superior, when Mozi describes what Western philosophers would call the state of nature (that is, the human condition prior to government and civilization), he stresses the conflict that will result from humans having different conceptions of yi righteousness not from innate self-interest. The author also claims that even though Mozi s fundamental doctrine is based on a belief in mutual benefits, throughout his entire book there is not a single chapter devoted to the argument for the importance of mutual benefits (p. 127). Actually, Impartial Caring is devoted to this topic. 3 She even quotes from this chapter earlier in her discussion of Mozi. (This is such a striking mistake that I assume the author means something different from what I think she means by the argument for the importance of mutual benefit. But what could she have in mind?) In discussing the Yijing, the author states that the [sixty-four] hexagrams demonstrate [sixty-four] sequences of causal relations. Each of the six lines of the hexagram represents a stage in the causal development; hence, there are minimally 384 possible transitory situations (pp ). This passage distracted me for a long time, as I tried to figure out where she was getting the number 384. I think what she means is that, since each line in a hexagram is a stage in a causal process, we can think of an additional hexagram governing the development of that stage. So each of the sixtyfour hexagrams can itself be associated with any one of a series of six hexagrams. Now, six (the number of lines of a hexagram) multiplied by sixty-four (the number of hexagrams) does give us 384. However, that product is mathematically meaningless in this context. What the author is probably looking for is the number of possible sequences of six hexagrams. That would be sixty-four to the sixth power (not 64 times 6), which would be 1,073,741,824 (not 384). My correction here may seem overly exacting, but the point is that the text presents itself as giving a precise analytic approach, but this is just the kind of mistake that an analytic philosopher would not make. Criticizing the interpretation given by Herbert Fingarette, the author writes that textual evidence shows that Confucius does not interpret li [ritual] to consist merely of formal ceremonies, and he does not think that morality simply lies in observing the rites (p. 59). I am critical of many aspects of Fingarette s interpretation myself, but he specifically denies that rituals are merely formal ceremonies for Confucius. And he would certainly deny that our obligations are exhausted by simply according with the rites externally, regardless of whether we are, for example, sincere. (Fingarette s views are complex. He was influenced deeply by the logical behaviorism of Gilbert Ryle. But people like Ryle do not want to deny that we can and should use the language of beliefs and desires. They just want to analyze these

5 42 China Review International: Vol. 5, No. 1, 2008 as referring to publicly available states. Again, if one is being serious in presenting a genuinely analytic philosophical approach, one would be careful to get this right.) The author frequently takes passages in the original texts and paraphrases them into premise and conclusion form. Those without a background in philosophy may find this jarring, but it is a common technique of analytic philosophers, and it can be very illuminating in principle. For example (to use an example that I borrow from A. C. Graham), Wang Chong writes in his Dao xu: Man is a thing; though honored as king or noble, by nature he is no different from other things. No thing does not die, how can man be immortal? 4 An analytic philosopher s instinct would be to paraphrase this as Premise 1: No (living) thing does not die. Premise 2: Every (living) thing dies. [This follows logically from Premise 1.] Premise 3: Man is a (living) thing. Conclusion: Therefore, man dies. This interpretation of the passage highlights the logical structure of what Wang Chong is asserting. (In doing so, it obscures other aspects of the passage, but any interpretation highlights some things to the detriment of others.) Notice several features of a premise-and-conclusion paraphrase. Some things get left out: not every sentence in the original is either a premise or a conclusion (e.g., though honored as king or noble ). Some things get added: we may need to make explicit assumptions that are left implicit by the original author (e.g., Wang Chong is talking about living things). Finally, it may be more perspicuous for us to present the premises and conclusion in a different order than they occur in the original text. To illustrate Liu s use of this technique, I shall examine how she converts Mencius 6A10 into its logical form. But it will make things clearer if I first explain what I think is going on in the original passage. Compare 6A10 to 2A6. In the latter passage, Mencius says, Suppose someone suddenly saw a child about to fall into a well: anyone in such a situation would have a feeling of alarm and compassion. 5 This reaction, Mencius says, is the sprout of benevolence. Also in 2A6, he refers in passing to the universal human sprout of righteousness, but does not provide an illustration. Then in 6A10 Mencius writes, A basket of food and a bowl of soup if one gets them then one will live; if one doesn t get them then one will die. But if they re given with contempt, then even a homeless person will not accept them. If they re trampled upon, then even a beggar won t take them. It is plausible to read the beggar stories of 6A10 as providing an illustration of the sprout of righteousness mentioned in 2A6. It is a virtue of Liu s account that she sees this (p. 75), but her own logical paraphrase of the passage obscures it. She writes, 1. Everyone desires life and detests death. But if you humiliate someone by giving him food, he would not accept the food even if he needs it for survival. 2. Hence, there is always something that one desires more than life itself, or something that one detests more than death itself.

6 Features If there is something that one would not do to preserve life and to avoid death, then one is not simply a creature for whom self-survival is the only goal (whereas other animals are). 4. Therefore, we all have our own principle on what to do and what not to do, even when it comes to matters of life and death. 5. A righteous person is simply someone who holds on to his own principle in all matters. 6. Therefore, we all have within ourselves what it takes to be a righteous person. (p. 74) The first problem with this paraphrase is that, when the author quotes 6A10, she leaves out the sentences about the beggars that I cited above, so the unwary reader will think the second sentence in her premise 1 is gratuitous. It looks like the author thinks that Mencius has two conclusions here (expressed in lines 4 and 6). Line 4 presumably is supposed to follow from 1, 2, and 3. But it is not clear whether it does, because it is unclear what Liu means by we all have our own principle. Furthermore, what function is premise 3 performing? Although I am not sure what 4 means, on the plausible readings I can think of, premise 3 seems superfluous to the truth of 4. The conclusion in line 6 is presumably supposed to follow from 4 and 5. It is very hard to tell whether it does, though, because of the obscurity in the expressions have our own principle, hold on to his own principle, and what it takes to be something. There is a way of understanding these phrases on which 6 follows from 4 and 5 by definition. But then we do not really need 4 and 5 at all. Here is another way of seeing what is problematic about Liu s paraphrase: Consider just 1, 2, and 6. Does 6 not follow from 1 and 2 alone? What need is there for 3, 4, and 5? If you think 6 does not follow from 1 and 2, fine, but then ask yourself whether 3, 4, and 5 help at all. The first requirement of a premise-and-conclusion paraphrase is that it be clearer than the original. So on that account alone, the above paraphrase fails. Liu s paraphrase also frustrates her own efforts to evaluate the argument. She begins by asserting that [a]s stated, this argument... is not even valid, because from Premise 1 to Premise 2 Mencius is committing a form of hasty generalization. One example, even if it is a well-known real-life example, does not warrant the claim (pp , emphasis in original). Hasty generalization is the fallacy of going from too few particulars or unrepresentative particulars to a generalization. ( Every person I work with lives above the poverty line. Therefore, everyone in the U.S. lives above the poverty line. ) However, as Liu has stated premise 1 and premise 2, they are both universal in form. Premise 1 makes a claim about what any human would do in a given sort of situation (not just what some particular humans have done), and premise 2 makes a general claim about human motivation based on this. So if there is a non sequitur between 1 and 2, it is not hasty generalization. But Liu immediately

7 44 China Review International: Vol. 5, No. 1, 2008 goes on to say, [h]owever, Mencius is not making such a faulty inference here. His point is rather to use it as an illustration of a general human trait, as stated in Premise 2 (p. 75). So, within the space of a few sentences, Liu has flatly told us that Mencius is guilty of an invalid argument, misdiagnosed what the problem is (even according to her own paraphrase), then assured us that his argument is valid. The really regrettable fact is that Liu is very close to making an insightful and important point. Mencius does state the generalization that any human would refuse handouts given with contempt, even if he were on the brink of starvation. As my students have pointed out every time I teach this passage, this does not seem to be a true generalization. In extreme circumstances, many humans will debase themselves in all sorts of ways in order to survive. Those who will not debase themselves to survive we regard as heroic. (So if there is a hasty generalization here, it is within premise 1 itself.) However, Mencius s view suggests something much more plausible. Is it the case that, for any normal human, there are some things that she will not do, even if it would be in her narrow self-interest to do them, simply because she disdains them as unrighteous? If we answer yes to this question, Mencius has all that he needs to establish the existence of a sprout of righteousness. It is important to note that this is not precisely what Mencius himself asserted. However, it allows us to see how Mencius might have had an insight that we can appropriate and appreciate. 6 Again, it may seem that I am being overly demanding of Liu s exegesis. But this illustrates a general problem with her approach. On the one hand, if one really is a serious analytic philosopher, one will find her approach careless. Analytic philosophers are, after all, the ones who stress the formulation of arguments and the pursuit of clarity in language (p. ix). On the other hand, scholars whose methodologies do not emphasize these things will find distorting or irrelevant her emphasis upon argument and analysis. The second half of the book, which discusses Chinese Buddhism, seems stronger to me than the first half. Even here, though, I had concerns. The author contrasts Consciousness-Only Buddhism with Hua-yan by saying that the former is a form of objective idealism, while the latter is a version of subjective idealism (pp ). These terms are drawn from the Western tradition, in which Hegel is the paradigmatic objective idealist and Berkeley is the paradigmatic subjective idealist. Consciousness-Only Buddhism is certainly some kind of idealism, but one has to be very careful in invoking a term that might encourage comparison with Hegel s notion that the real is the rational and the rational is the real. Similarly, Hua-yan Buddhists do say some things that sound like subjective idealism. However, the Hua-yan patriarch Fa-zang s example of the golden lion suggests something quite different from Berkeley s notion that to be is to be perceived. The gold of the statue really is there, independent of any subjective consciousness; it is only our seeing it as a lion that is, in some way, a mental projection. Overall, I thought this book s treatment of Buddhism from an analytic

8 Features 45 philosophical perspective was less clear and incisive than that in, say, Mark Siderits s Buddhism as Philosophy (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2007). Despite its weaknesses, An Introduction to Chinese Philosophy is a book that suggests a great deal of talent. The author nicely lays out the similarities and differences between Xunzi s view and contemporary metaphysical naturalism (p. 87). Her comparison of Mencius and Rousseau is brief but includes a quotation from the latter that is fascinatingly similar to the child-at-the-well example (p. 73). She argues persuasively that Zhuangzi s butterfly dream story is only superficially similar to a Cartesian dream argument (pp ). So what went wrong? On the one hand, authors have to resist the pressure to publish too soon. Good undergraduate lecture notes (especially those written under a heavy teaching load) do not convert easily into a solid textbook. On the other hand, publishers have to do their job. An editor has to find not only responsible referees but also take their reports seriously. If reports call for substantial revisions, the publisher has to make sure they are completed prior to sending a manuscript to press. To state the obvious: philosophizing is hard; philosophizing about texts from another millennium that are written in another language is harder still. So we should approach our task in the spirit of Confucius s disciple Yan Yuan: The more I look up at it, the higher it seems; the more I delve into it, the harder it becomes. Catching a glimpse of it before me, I then find it suddenly at my back. (Analects 9.11) Bryan W. Van Norden Bryan W. Van Norden is a professor in the Department of Chinese and Japanese at Vassar College. He specializes in pre-qin Chinese philosophy and Neo-Confucianism. Notes 1. See, for example, Paul R. Goldin, After Confucius: Studies in Early Chinese Philosophy (Honolulu: University of Hawai i Press, 2005), and Mark Edward Lewis, Writing and Authority in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999). Obviously, this list could go on indefinitely. I do not mean to slight anyone by not mentioning them here (or in my examples of analytic philosophers below). 2. See, for example, Kwong-loi Shun and David B. Wong, eds., Confucian Ethics: A Comparative Study of Self, Autonomy, and Community (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 3. For a philosophical analysis and evaluation of this essay, see Bryan W. Van Norden, A Response to the Mohist Arguments in Impartial Caring, in Kim-chong Chong, Sor-hoon Tan, and C. L. Ten, eds., The Moral Circle and the Self (Chicago: Open Court Press, 2003), pp Cited in Graham, Reflections and Replies, in Henry Rosemont, ed., Chinese Texts and Philosophical Contexts (Chicago: Open Court Press, 1991), p Translations here and below from Philip J. Ivanhoe and Bryan W. Van Norden, eds., Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, 2nd rev. ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2006). 6. For more on this issue, see Bryan W. Van Norden, The Virtue of Righteousness in Mencius, in Shun and Wong, pp , and Van Norden, Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early Chinese Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).