To Biyun
§1. Chinese Philosophy in the Western Academy: Between Sinology and Philosophy
Sinological Challenge Concerning Classical Chinese Philosophy
2.1. The Problem of Authorship in Philosophical Interpretations
2.2. A Case Study of Authorship: Contemporary Debate on the Zhuangzi
2.3. Multiple Roles of Authorship
2.4. Sinology and Philosophy on Authorship and Textual
2.5. Two Sets of Scholarly Objects: Sinological versus Philosophical
2.6. Three Roles of Sinology in Chinese Philosophy: Preparer, Challenger, and Jailbreaker
The Politics of Chinese Philosophy in the West: Some Recent
1. Ritual and Ren in Confucius’s World: Humaneness-cum-Justice at the Incipience of Chinese Moral-Political Philosophy
2.1. The Mandate of Heaven and the Justice Turn in Chinese History
2.2. Confucius’s Subversive Claim Concerning the Heavenly Mandate 62
§3. Ritualizing the World 67
3.1. Vicissitudes of Ritual in Early Zhou 67
3.2. Emergence of Ritual as a Distinct Conceptual Category 70
§4. Confucius’s Ethicization of Ritual: Shifting the Ground of Ritual from Heaven to Ren 72
4.1. Ren: A New and Contested Ground of Ritual 74
4.2. Ren as Humaneness: Ideal Person, Family, and Polity 77
4.3. Ren as Justice 83
A. Semantic Argument 84
B. Philosophical Argument: Ren and the Golden Rule in the Analects 89
4.4. Continuum between Humaneness and Justice in Confucius’s Ren 93
§5. After Confucius: Early Confucianism in the Excavated Bamboo-Slip Manuscripts 97
5.1. Scholarly Disputations about the Excavated Texts 98
5.2. Confucian Discourse in the Guodian Manuscripts 101
A. Tian (Heaven), Ming (Mandate or Fate), and Xing (Human Nature) 101
B. Unity of Virtues and the Imperative of Self-Cultivation 105
§6. Conclusion: Humaneness-cum-Justice in Confucius’s MoralPolitical Project 111
PART II. HUMANENESS VERSUS JUSTICE: GRAPPLING WITH THE FAMILIAL- POLITICAL RELATIONSHIP UNDER A NATURALIZING HEAVEN
2. The Great Divergence: Mozi and Mencius on Justice and Humaneness 115
§1. Mozi: The Pioneer of Universal Justice in Chinese History 116
1.1. Mozi and the Mohist Project 116
1.2. Heaven, Ghosts, and Spirits in the Mohist Cosmos: Caring Supernatural Agents on Human Affairs 121
A. The Supernatural: Confucius versus Mozi 122
B. Tensions in the Mohist Supernatural World 125
1.3. The Two Legs of Universal Justice in the Mozi: Impartial Care and Objective Standards 131
A. Impartial Care 132
1) Universal State Consequentialism
2) Golden Rule in the Mozi 135
3) Impartial Care, Filial Piety, and Moral Motivation 136
B. Objective Standards 142
1.4. Concluding Mozi: Justice and Its Challenges 147
§2. Mencius: Humaneness, Impartiality, and the Challenge of Family 149
2.1. From Confucius to Mencius 151
2.2. Humaneness, Impartiality, and the Challenge of Family 155
A. Normative Mencius: The Ren-Based Extensionist 157
1) The Extensionist Interpretation of Mencius 157
2) Two Moral Roots: Buren 不忍, Qin 親, and Their Relationships with Ren 仁 160
B. The Case of Shun 166
C. Radical Mencius: The Yi-Based Sacrificialist 170
1) Conflict among Desirable Goods 170
2) Yi and the Imperative of Sacrifice in Mencius’s Thought 171
D. Mencius: The Extensionist versus the Sacrificialist 175
2.3. The Ambivalence of the Familial in Mencius’s Political Thought 177
A. Dis-analogy between the Familial and the Political 178
B. Tension among Virtues 179
2.4. Concluding Mencius: Humaneness and Its Challenges 181
§3. General Conclusion: The Great Divergence between Justice and Humaneness 182
3. Justice and Humaneness in a Naturalist Cosmos: Laozi’s Dao and the Realignment of Values 184
§1. Contextualizing Laozi and the Daodejing in Light of the Excavated Texts 185
§2. What Is It about? 190
§3. Laozi’s Dao and the Realignment of Values 193
3.1. Heaven, Dao, and the Naturalist Turn in the Laozi 193
A. Displacing Heaven and Decentering Humans: Cosmogony in the Excavated Texts 193
B. The Primacy of Dao and the Naturalist Turn in the Laozi 199
3.2. Traces of Mohist Elements in the Laozi 201
3.3. Justice and Humaneness in Laozi’s Naturalist Cosmos 205
A. Justice as the Way of the Naturalized Heaven 205
B. Laozi’s Critique of the Confucian Universalization of Humaneness 207
C. Laozi’s Separation of the Familial and the Political Norms 209
§4. Laozi’s Metaethical Critique of the Mainstream Moral-Political Project 212
4.1. Wuwei and Youwei 212
4.2. Laozi’s Genealogical Critique of Youwei Values 217
4.3. Wuwei vs. Youwei: Metaethical and Normative 223
4.4. Laozi’s Rejection of Universalist (Youwei) Projects 226
§5. Conclusion: Laozi’s Realignment of Values and Its Consequences 229
4. Modeling the State after Heaven: Impartiality in Early Fajia Political Philosophy 232
§1. Problems with Fajia and Legalism 233
§2. Shen Buhai: A Pioneer of Impartialist Administrative Techniques 238
§3. Shang Yang: An Impartial Institutionalist 243
3.1. Situating Shang Yang 243
3.2. Shang Yang’s Political Project 247
A. The Bureaucratic Turn: Professionalization of the Military and the State 248
B. Shang Yang’s Justification for Political Reform 250
C. Shang Yang’s Political Analysis of Human Nature
D. An Institutional Solution to the Political Crisis: A Fa-Based Bureaucratic System 255
E. Conflict of Interests between the Private and the Public 259
1) Shang Yang’s Diagnosis
2) Shang Yang’s Solution
3) Virtues and the State
§4. Shen Dao: Modeling the State after Heaven
4.1. Heaven: From a Supernatural Agent to a Natural System
4.2. A Political System to Channel Human Dispositions to the Benefit of the State
A. A Political Approach to Human Dispositions
B. Standards and Regularity: Fa 法
C. Authority and Power: Shi 勢
D. Professional Virtues
Specialization
2) Professional Virtues versus Moral Virtues
4.3. Modeling the State after Heaven
§5. Conclusion: The Bureaucratic Turn and the Problem of the State 282
PART III. PERSONAL FREEDOM, HUMANENESS, AND JUSTICE: COMING TO TERMS WITH THE STATE UNDER A NATURALIZED HEAVEN
5. Zhuangzi’s Lone Project of Personal Freedom 287
§1. Contextualizing Zhuang Zhou and the Zhuangzi 288
§2. Zhuangist Metaphysics: Relationality and Transformation 293
§3. Defending the Personal: Yang Zhu and the Integrity of the Personal 298
§4. Zhuangzi’s Redemption of the Heartmind as the Faculty of Personal Freedom 304
4.1. Zhuangzi’s Unease in the Confucianized Lifeworld 304
4.2. The Confucianized Heartmind and the Problem with Knowledge 307
4.3. Fasting the Heartmind and Attuning It to the Dao
§5. Two Spaces of Personal Freedom in the Zhuangzi
5.1. Freedom as Roaming at the Margin of the Lifeworld
5.2. Freedom as Roaming within the Lifeworld
§6. Conclusion: Tension between Personal Freedom and Humaneness/Justice
6. Xunzi’s Synthesis of Humaneness and Justice: Ritual as the Sages’ Partnership with Heaven and Earth
§1. Situating Xunzi and His Project
§2. The Changing Conceptions of Heaven: From the Heaven of Care to the Heaven of Order
§3. The Changing Conception of Ideal Humans: From the Followers of Heaven and Earth (法天地) to Their Partners (參天地)
3.1. Human Nature in Xunzi’s Philosophy
3.2. Artifice/Deliberate Effort
A. Heartmind
B. Differentiation and Integration
C. Renyi as the Human Source for Care and Rightness
3.3. The Cult of the Sage-Kings and the Human Constitution of Cosmic Order
A. Sage-Kings as Partners (san 參) of Heaven and Earth
B. Accumulation in the Achievement of Sagehood and Moral Order 375
§4. Ritual as the Institution of Humane Justice: A Grand Synthesis of the Heavenly and the Humanly
4.1. The Chaos of Desires and the Origin of Ritual
4.2. Ritual and the Emergence of Moral Agency
4.3. Ritual as the Institution of Humane Justice
§5. Conclusion: Xunzi’s Synthesis of Humaneness and Justice
7. Universal Bureaucratic State as the Sole Agent of Justice in Han Feizi’s Thought
§1. Han Feizi: The Thinker and the Text
§2. Contextualizing Han Feizi’s Conception of Political Order
2.1. Laoist Cosmology
2.2. Repudiating the Confucian XQZP Moral-Political Ideal
A. Between the Personal and the Political
B. Between the Familial and the Political 416
C. Han Feizi’s Elevation of the State as the Sole Source and Arbiter of Values
§3. Han Feizi’s Statist Political Order
3.1. Its Characters
A. Standardization
B. Clarity, Transparency, Impartiality, Uniformity, and Reliability
Acknowledgments
This book was initially conceived of as a project on Zhuangzi’s philosophy a decade and a half ago. In the course of doing the research and formulating what I believed to be a cogent and compelling Zhuangist project of personal freedom, I felt it necessary to account for the Confucian and the Mohist ideas critiqued and ridiculed by the Zhuangists as a way to frame the Zhuangist project. However, I quickly realized the inadequacy in my understanding of the Confucian and the Mohist projects, which were the mainstream moral-political projects during the Warring States period. Sure, I was familiar with the basic concepts, the standard narratives and interpretative tropes, and various points of disputation, but I only had a vague sense of the philosophical nature of their projects. More specifically, I did not know what guiding values were motivating those thinkers and why those values were important to them. Therefore, it seemed only natural to expand my study to include all the major thinkers of the classical period, which eventually became this monograph over a decade later.
Therefore, this book was driven by a desire to understand the origins of moralpolitical philosophy in China, especially the nature of major philosophical projects, the intellectual parameters within which they originated and operated, the changing normative boundaries that were, more often than not, crossed and transgressed, as well as the guiding (and evolving) values that motivated early Chinese philosophers to grapple with a radically changing world. It offers a new narrative and interpretative framework about the origins of moral-political philosophy that tracks how the three core values, i.e., humaneness, justice, and personal freedom, were formulated, reformulated, and contested by early Chinese philosophers in their effort to negotiate the relationship among three distinct domains, i.e., the personal, the familial, and the political. Such efforts took place as those thinkers were reimagining a new moral-political order, debating its guiding norms, and exploring possible doctrinal sources within the context of an evolving understanding of Heaven and its relationship with the humans.
Over the years, I have benefited greatly from conversations and discussions on many aspects of the project with friends and colleagues at conferences, workshops, guest lectures, and dinner tables, as well as through private correspondences. I would like to especially acknowledge my indebtedness to Philip J. Ivanhoe, who read an early draft of the manuscript and offered many invaluable comments that were very helpful in improving the book. I also want to thank the following friends and colleagues who helped me at different phases
of the project: On-cho Ng, who invited me to present parts of my project at the Penn State Comparative Literature luncheon and who has continuously encouraged me and expressed confidence in my project over the years; Masayuki Sato 佐藤將之, who shared with me his works on Xunzi; and Zheng Jiewen 郑杰文, who helped me to gain access to his works on Mozi. I am grateful to colleagues at Peking University (Beijing), Fudan University (Shanghai), Jilin University (Changchun), and National Taiwan University (Taipei) for their kind invitations to present materials that have been incorporated into this book.
At Rutgers University I have been very fortunate to have supportive friends and colleagues in the departments of Religion, Philosophy, and Asian Languages and Cultures, as well as at the Center for Chinese Studies. They have provided a collegial environment for my professional life. I want to express my gratitude to James Turner Johnson of the Religion Department for his sagely advice over the years, especially when I first became department chair in 2010. Emma Wasserman and I have been kindred spirits since she came to Rutgers in 2008. I especially enjoyed our many meetups at the Think Coffee in Chelsea, NYC, during our sabbatical several years ago to update each other on the progress of our own projects. My friendship with Wendy Swartz in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures has lasted longer than our respective affiliations with Rutgers. I have learned a great deal from the Chinese Medieval Studies Workshop she has been hosting over the years. Larry Temkin of the Philosophy Department offered detailed comments on an earlier draft of my paper on Zhuangzi and Berlin, which is incorporated into the conclusion of this book. Ruth Chang (now at Oxford) and Dean Zimmerman of the Philosophy Department have been great partners in the effort to bring Chinese philosophy to Rutgers through the Rutgers Workshop on Chinese Philosophy (RWCP) we started together in 2012. Stephen Angle of Wesleyan University has been an indispensable part of the RWCP initiative from the very beginning. Other friends and colleagues at Rutgers, including Edwin Bryant, Jessey Choo, Xian Huang, Tia Kolbaba, Sukhee Lee, Mingwei Liu, Xun Liu, James Masschaele, Jawid Mojaddedi, Nancy Rosario, Susan Rosario, Tanja Sargent, Richard VanNess Simmons, Weijie Song, Louisa Schein, Xiaojue Wang, Joseph Williams, and many others have all made my professional life at Rutgers a deeply fulfilling one.
I want to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their hard work in making this book a better final product. It would be an unforgivable omission if I did not mention the extraordinary vigor and care demonstrated by reviewer #2. The detailed and thorough, chapter-by-chapter, nine-page single-spaced comment on the manuscript goes far beyond what is normally expected for an anonymous review. It is vigorous, critical, and fair—really the best kind of review an author can receive.
A special thanks goes to Lucy Randall, my editor at Oxford University Press, whose empathy, reassurance, and understanding in guiding me through this entire process was simply exemplary. Hannah Doyle at Oxford University Press was also very helpful in shepherding the book through its final stages. I am grateful to Sara Ellenbogen, who proofread an earlier version of the manuscript.
I would like to express my gratitude to the following journals for allowing me to incorporate previously published materials into this book: Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, Journal of Chinese Philosophy, and Journal of Confucian Philosophy and Culture. The author expresses appreciation to the Schoff Fund at the University Seminars at Columbia University for their help in publication. Material in this work was presented to the University Seminar on Comparative Philosophy. I would also like to acknowledge Rutgers University Research Council for its generous support of this book.
Last, but by no means least, I want to thank my family for their support and indulgence all these years. I would like to especially thank my spouse, Biyun Wu, who has accompanied me through much of the long journey in writing this book. Since the very beginning of our courtship in that idyllic summer of 2012, Biyun has brought vitality and joy into my life, lifting my spirit when I needed it, keeping my feet on the ground when my mind stayed in the clouds for too long, and becoming my sounding board for materials that might not be the most exciting thing for everybody. This book is dedicated to Biyun as a token of my love and gratitude.
Introduction
This book is an attempt at a systematic presentation of the intellectual projects at the origins of moral-political philosophy in early China. The foundational period in Chinese philosophy, also known as pre-Qin (xianqin, 先秦), from the time of Confucius (traditionally 551–479 bce) to the establishment of the first unified imperial dynasty of Qin in 221 bce, has always been considered the single most creative and vibrant chapter in Chinese intellectual history. Works attributed to Confucius, Mozi, Mencius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Xunzi, Han Feizi, and many others represent the origins of moral and political thought in China. As testimony to their enduring lure, in recent decades many Chinese intellectuals, and even leading politicians, have turned to those classics, especially Confucian texts, for alternative or complementary sources of moral authority and political legitimacy.1
Since the last decades of the twentieth century, the study of early Chinese texts has undergone major changes. A critical development is the fact that many texts sealed away in tombs from the Warring States and the early Han periods were excavated and have been made available for scholarly investigations. They have provided critical interventions to the study of early China, filling many gaps in our knowledge, unsettling some established scholarly orthodoxies, and provoking more scholarly debates. Furthermore, there has been an explosion of new and sophisticated translations by specialists of early Chinese texts, making them, including many excavated ones, much more accessible to a broader audience. All these efforts have produced a massive amount of new scholarship, vastly enriching as well as complicating our understanding of the early Chinese intellectual landscape. In all these scholarly advances we can start to discern the outline of an emerging new picture with respect to the development of early Chinese philosophy.
1 Yü Dan 于丹 is a famous spokesperson for this popular Confucianism. Her book, Insights into the Analects 论语心得, which is based on her popular lecture on Chinese Central Television broadcast in 2006, sold millions of copies. As a representative of voices that mock and reject the trend to deify Confucius in contemporary China, Li Ling’s 李零 books, A Homeless Dog: My Reading of the Analects 丧家狗：我读论语 and Stripping away His Sageliness to Reveal the Real Confucius: Vertical and Horizontal Readings of the Analects 去圣乃得真孔子：论语纵横读, are worth the read. Interested readers can get the gist of Li’s writings in Contemporary Chinese Thought, vol. 41, no. 2 (Winter 2009–2010), which contains the translation of several key chapters in Li’s two books.
Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China. Tao Jiang, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197603475.003.0001
However, a good deal of Western scholarship on classical Chinese thought still tends to be rather historicist in orientation, with the result that the philosophical significance and the normative entailments of the classical texts remain underexplored, especially when compared with their Western counterparts. There is a structural reason for this: in the contemporary Western discourse on classical Chinese philosophy, there is a schism between the historicist orientation of Sinology and the presentist orientation of mainstream contemporary Western philosophy. Such divergent disciplinary norms have put scholars of Chinese philosophy in a difficult position. On the one hand, they have to defend the philosophical nature, or even the philosophical worthiness, of classical Chinese texts to contemporary Western philosophers who are more interested in the philosophical integrity of ideas than in their historicity. At the same time, scholars of Chinese philosophy, when dealing with Sinologists, need to justify the basic premise of their philosophical approach to the classics due to the historical ambiguity and compositional instability of these early texts.
Therefore, in this Introduction, before sketching out the new narrative about classical Chinese philosophy, I would like to take a closer look at the structural issue facing Chinese (and other non-Western) philosophy in the contemporary Western academy and offer some solutions to such a problem which has threatened the very legitimacy of Chinese philosophy in the academy.
§1. Chinese Philosophy in the Western Academy: Between Sinology and Philosophy
At a workshop on classical Chinese philosophy at Princeton University on February 22, 2014, Mark Csikszentmihalyi recounted a fascinating exchange with Herbert Fingarette when they were on a panel discussing the formation of the Analects at Berkeley in October 2013. Csikszentmihalyi was making the case that the Analects is a multivocal text and that reading it that way provides an interesting perspective on a diverse and dynamic period in the formation of Confucianism. Surprisingly, Fingarette was not at all willing to entertain this approach, claiming that philosophers would not be interested in it. Csikszentmihalyi wanted to find ways to convince scholars like Fingarette that they should be interested in such claims.
This exchange points to a critical issue lurking beneath the contemporary project known as “Chinese philosophy,” namely the disciplinary chasm or mountain between Sinology and philosophy within the Western academy concerning the interpretation of early Chinese texts, especially “philosophical” texts such as Classics (jing 經) like the Book of Rites (Liji 禮記) and the Analects (Lunyu 論語) as well as texts attributed to various Masters (zi 子) like the Mozi (墨子) and the
Laozi (老子). In other words, the study of (pre-modern) Chinese philosophy2 within the contemporary Western academy is straddled between Sinology and philosophy, with the former dominated by historians and the latter remaining almost exclusively Western. As a result, scholars of Chinese philosophy in the West have to engage both Sinologists and philosophers. Conforming to two disciplinary norms is never an easy task, and one of the unfortunate consequences of the contemporary discourse of classical Chinese philosophy in the Western academy is that for the most part it remains a marginalized field in both Sinology and philosophy.
The tension between philosophical and historical inquiries has been a perennial problem. Within the modern academy, the disciplines of philosophy and history are protected by their respective institutional norms and practices, without much need for interaction. However, Chinese philosophy, sandwiched between Sinology and philosophy in the Western academy and lacking institutional support, has encountered extraordinary challenges from both Sinologists (most of whom are historians) and (Western) philosophers. As Holmes Welch observed more than half a century ago when dealing with the dating and the interpretation of the Daodejing,
the book presents two classes of problems under one cover. The first class is philological; the second is philosophical. To solve the first requires a thorough grounding in Chinese studies, which make the most crushing demands on memory and patience. If there is any metier designed to smother the imagination, it is Sinology. Yet imagination above all else is what is required to solve the second class of problems, the philosophical. (Welch 1957, 192)
Welch’s dismissiveness of Sinology as stifling in the interpretation of Chinese classics is reflective of an earlier era when the philosophical approach to the classical texts was more dominant than the Sinological approach. It is fair to say that the fortune between the two approaches has since been reversed. For Welch, the philosophical approach, driven by imagination, provides a better and more attractive alternative than the “dull” Sinological approach. If anything, the struggle identified by Welch might have worsened, likely attributable to the fact that there are now more scholars engaged in the study of Chinese classical texts than ever before, bringing with them deeply entrenched disciplinary norms.
2 I am limiting the scope of classical Chinese philosophy here to the Masters texts (zi 子) and some Classics (jing 經), following Carine Defoort (2006, 627). Some scholars prefer the category of Masters Literature to Chinese philosophy when describing those early texts since the former is an indigenous category in the Chinese tradition which was coined in the Han soon after the period under discussion, whereas the latter appeared under the influence of the Euro-American traditions and practices, e.g., Denecke (2011, 32). While such a practice is perfectly sensible, it is clearly Sinological in nature, different from the philosophical approach adopted in this book.
The availability of newly discovered texts has also added to the fuel, despite the occasional calls for interdisciplinary or post-disciplinary approaches (e.g., Valmisa 2019).
Much of the difficulty facing Chinese philosophy in the Western academy has to do with the fact that Chinese philosophy as an academic discipline is relatively new, as a result of the encounter between the West and China in modern history. In many ways, Chinese philosophy is a modern invention. A recent book, Learning to Emulate the Wise: The Genesis of Chinese Philosophy as an Academic Discipline in Twentieth-Century China, provides a comprehensive look at the origins of the discipline of Chinese philosophy in early twentieth-century China. Chinese intellectuals at the time tried to reconfigure the way Chinese classics were studied in their struggle to counter the overwhelming Western challenge in the intellectual discourse which was part of the overall Western dominance of China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a result of that effort, Chinese intellectuals, often learning from their Japanese counterparts, categorized traditional texts as philosophical or historical in order to align them with established disciplines in the Western intellectual discourse. As John Makeham observes in his introduction to Learning to Emulate the Wise,
it is well known that Chinese intellectuals introduced a new “language” or “grammar”—academic philosophy—into China soon after the turn of the twentieth century, subsequently leading to the institutional incorporation of the discipline “Chinese philosophy” (Zhongguo zhexue 中國哲學) alongside Western philosophy. This was one of many responses to an “epistemological crisis” in which China found itself in the closing decades of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). Western philosophy provided key conceptual paradigms, vocabulary and technical terms, bibliographic categories, and even histories and periodization schemes essential to the demarcation, definition, and narration of the discipline of Chinese philosophy. This was not, however, a simple case of the blanket inscription of Western philosophy upon a Chinese tabula rasa. Nor was the process by which Western models of knowledge categorization were introduced into China a passive one in which the “foreign” was imposed on the “native.” Rather, it was an ongoing process of negotiation and appropriation initiated and conducted by Chinese protagonists, in which traditional categories of Chinese knowledge were “translated” into the new academic category of zhexue. (Makeham 2012, 2–3)
Put briefly, the birth of zhongguo zhexue is the fruit of intense intellectual negotiations between traditional Chinese categories of knowledge and Western philosophy, with the result that Chinese philosophy is, strictly speaking, neither traditional Chinese nor Western, but something new.
However, Learning to Emulate the Wise deals with Chinese philosophy almost exclusively within the Chinese (and some Japanese) context, with its focus on key figures in the “invention” of Chinese philosophy in the China of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It does not tackle the state of affairs of Chinese philosophy within the Western academy, which is vastly different from the Chinese context. Despite the relatively recent birth of Chinese philosophy, it is a firmly established discipline in the Chinese academic world. Almost all Chinese universities that have a philosophy department include Chinese philosophy as one of the subject areas. Except for periodic disputations among Chinese scholars about whether or not China has a philosophical tradition, sometimes as a nativist way to claim uniqueness from the West (e.g., Ouyang 2012), the legitimacy of the discipline of Chinese philosophy is by and large taken for granted and institutionalized in the way philosophy departments are set up in Chinese universities.
By sharp contrast, the status of Chinese philosophy is much more perilous in the Western academy. Its viability is still very much a question mark. Institutionally, there is no disciplinary home for Chinese philosophy. The arguably natural disciplinary home for Chinese philosophy is the philosophy department, but there are few faculty positions on Chinese philosophy in the leading mainstream Anglo-American Ph.D.-granting philosophy departments.3 Some scholars of Chinese philosophy are housed in area studies (East Asian studies or Asian studies) dominated by Sinologists. This means that many scholars of Chinese philosophy need to engage scholars who might have little, if any, interest in philosophical approaches to Chinese intellectual traditions. Furthermore, it also means that many students pursuing their doctorate in Chinese philosophy are trained in non-philosophy programs, depriving them of the opportunity to engage with their natural (or maybe not so natural, after all) disciplinary partner, namely Western philosophy, and making them less desirable for potential hires by philosophy departments. This is clearly a vicious cycle concerning the institutional viability of Chinese philosophy in the Western academy.
Furthermore, the disciplinary and institutional split between religion and philosophy in the modern Western academy adds to the complication in the study of Chinese intellectual traditions: even if we accept philosophy and religion as broadly applicable categories to the Chinese intellectual traditions, a split between the religious and the philosophical did not take place in Chinese
3 The Philosophical Gourmet Report (PGR), which has come to dominate the ranking of philosophy programs in the Anglo-American world, has created powerful incentives for top philosophy departments to compete for prominent philosophers in the ranked areas so as to boost their rankings. Since Chinese philosophy, along with other non-Western philosophical traditions, is not one of the primary ranking categories, there is very little institutional incentive for top philosophy programs to invest in it.
intellectual history the way it did in the West. The categorial ambiguity is institutionally reflected by the fact that many scholars of Chinese philosophy in the Western academy are housed in a religious studies department rather than a philosophy department. When situated within religious studies, the disciplinary acculturation pulls these scholars of Chinese philosophy in the direction of engagement with scholars of other world religions with their own distinct theoretical frameworks and canonical foundations,4 which might be of little direct scholarly interest to either philosophers or Sinologists.
The institutional diffusion (or, rather, homelessness) and vulnerability of Chinese philosophy in the West reflects a skeptical attitude that Sinologists and philosophers harbor toward the very project of Chinese philosophy. For a Sinologist, a work on classical Chinese philosophy tends to be historically inadequate5 in that it does not illuminate the historical complexities of a text or its context; on the other hand, for a (Western) philosopher, a work on Chinese philosophy is likely to be too involved in the intricacies of historical and cultural contexts—not to mention the linguistic complexities with regard to key terms and names—that are hard to keep track of, unless one is already familiar with them. Put differently, if a work is too embedded in the Sinological discourse, it would lose the audience on the philosophy side; if it is too philosophically focused, Sinologists would not be interested in it. If it tries to appeal to both, instead of attracting audience from the two camps, it can easily end up losing readers from both sides, falling through the proverbial interdisciplinary cracks instead of serving as a bridge to bring the two together. The asymmetric power dynamics and divergent disciplinary norms in the Western academy involving Chinese philosophy means that scholars of Chinese philosophy have to be acquainted with both Sinological and Western philosophical discourses, whereas such efforts are, more often than not, unreciprocated from the other directions, some notable exceptions notwithstanding.
So far, the debate about the legitimacy of Chinese philosophy has been mostly addressing challenges from (Western) philosophy, especially the applicability of the category of philosophy to Chinese intellectual traditions.6 Challenges from scholars of (Western) philosophy have been treated extensively in the scholarly discussion and I will not repeat those discussions at length here. Instead, I will briefly examine some of the more recent development on the philosophical
4 For example, works by Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Clifford Geertz, Jonathan Z. Smith, and others are critical to scholars of religious studies, whereas they are of little interest to philosophers, who have their own canons in works by Plato, Aristotle, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and John Rawls, etc.
5 For a recent example, see Nylan 2013.
6 Defoort 2001 and 2006 provide a helpful summary of the debate.
discourse of Chinese philosophy later in this Introduction when we look at the politics of Chinese philosophy in the Western academy.
By contrast, not as much attention has been given to challenges from Sinology.7 I will focus on the Sinological challenge, as it has received less attention in the scholarly discussion, using the lens of authorship to look into a particular aspect of Sinological challenges to the project of Chinese philosophy. I argue that Fingarette’s refusal to engage with the Sinological discourse on the authorship of classical Chinese texts reveals the underappreciated high stake of authorship in the philosophical project. I explore philosophical implications for interpreting texts whose authorship is in doubt and develop an alternative model of authorship and textuality, so that a more robust intellectual space for the discourse on classical Chinese philosophy can be carved out from the dominant Sinological discourse within the Western academy.
My argument is that philosophical and Sinological approaches to Chinese classics have divergent scholarly objectives and follow different disciplinary norms. To clarify such divergence, I propose an interpretative model to distinguish two sets of scholarly objects operative in Sinology and philosophy that are related and at times overlap, but often are irreducibly distinct, i.e., original text versus inherited text, historical author versus textual author, and authorial intent versus textual intent, with the former in the pairs belonging to Sinologists and the latter to philosophers.
§2. Sinological Challenge Concerning Classical Chinese Philosophy
Sinological challenge to Chinese philosophy is particularly salient with preQin classical texts, which happen to be the primary interest of most scholars
7 The Sinological challenge to the project of Chinese philosophy has garnered some scholarly attention in China. For example, Liu Xiaogan 劉笑敢 has tried to grapple with some aspects of this challenge in several of his more recent works (e.g., Liu 2007 and 2008). He uses Zhu Xi’s 朱熹 commentarial method as an example to articulate two orientations in hermeneutical practice: restorative construction (sigou 似構) and creative construction (chuanggou 創構). The former refers to an interpretative effort that attempts to recover the original text and its historical context as much as possible, whereas the latter is a hermeneutical exercise that is more geared toward addressing contemporary concerns of the interpreter. Accordingly, the restorative construction of a text has an “objectivist orientation” that deals with the text in its historical vicissitudes, whereas the creative construction has a more “subjectivist orientation” that pertains more to the interpreter’s appropriation of traditional resources in her deliberations on contemporary issues. The former is a typical Sinological approach and the latter philosophical. Liu makes a persuasive case that these two interpretative orientations need to be evaluated differently as they have different objectives. As the reader will see in the following, our approaches share similar concerns, but I frame the problems differently and proposes different solutions. I would like to thank Yong Huang for directing my attention to Liu’s methodological reflections.
of Chinese philosophy in the West right now. Pre-Qin classical texts are the favorites of Western scholars of Chinese philosophy (including Chinese scholars working in the West), and it is precisely those texts whose textual ambiguities are the greatest given their early dates. Herein lies one of the central problems in the philosophical approach to classical Chinese texts, namely the problem of authorship, crystallized in the exchange between Fingarette and Csikszentmihalyi.
2.1. The Problem of Authorship in Philosophical Interpretations
Most scholars of classical Chinese philosophy, both in China and in the West, acknowledge the Sinological consensus on the multivocal nature of many of these early texts. That is, most, if not all, of the early texts are the results of collective efforts by people across several generations, even though they are usually attributed to a single person as the “author,” whether that person is a historical figure, a fictional character, or some mixture of the two. However, the problem of authorship pertaining to the early texts is even more serious since the very concept of authorship was still at a very early stage during the pre-Qin period. Mark Edward Lewis, in Writing and Authority in Early China, traces the early development of text and authorship, using the Analects as the paradigmatic example. According to Lewis,
the master began to figure as the author of his own text only in the fourth century B.C. In the earliest philosophical writings, he appeared as a figure whose words were addressed to followers or political figures, and recorded by an implied scribe. The texts were produced by those who shared a common master, and reproduced within themselves the factional splits or debates among these followers. As object rather than subject of writing, and as an object offering a ground for disputed narratives, the master acquired distinctive characteristics that had a formative impact on later Chinese writing practices. In order to accommodate the multiple agents speaking through him over the centuries, the master appeared not as a consistent philosophic voice speaking in the form of binding universals, but rather as a set of individual propositions whose underlying principles, or lack thereof, had to be deduced by the reader. (Lewis 1999, 83)
In other words, many of the early texts were the result of group effort (reflecting factional interest and lineage stake), and the master to whom a text was attributed or dedicated was the very product of the text. The emergence of the idea of author as an isolated and individual voice gradually took place when the textual
authority shifted to the “classic” (Lewis 1999, 63). Lewis identifies the breakthrough of authorship in the construction of Qu Yuan (屈原, 340–278 bce) as the author of the lead poem in the Chu Ci 楚辭, “Li Sao” 離騷:
The appearance of the proto-Chu ci under the name of Qu Yuan was a crucial step in the invention of authorship in the late Warring States or early Han. A set of themes and images, probably defined by generic conventions, was redefined as the expression of an individual’s response to his experiences. The mutual echoes and resonances of the poems that appeared when they were read together were explained by reference to a single author, and ultimately each poem was linked to a specific stage in the writer’s life. The author was thus effectively invented out of the anthology, just as Confucius was created within the collected sayings of the Lun yu. However Qu Yuan, the figure of isolation, had no disciples and was thus credited with personally composing the poems. (Lewis 1999, 186)
What is especially compelling here is the fact that the idea of a single author is an interpretative invention, demonstrating its attractiveness and effectiveness in textual exegeses. Lewis calls Qu Yuan “the first author to be identified for an individual, poetic voice, and as such he became the archetype for later Chinese poet” (1999, 186). Once such an identification took place, Qu Yuan became fundamental to the interpretation of “Li Sao”: “The text was bound to the narrative of a presumptive author’s life and understood as a record of his experiences, so no reading of the poem could escape reference to the poet” (Lewis 1999, 186). In contrast to Confucius, the “author” of the Analects, Qu Yuan was not portrayed as addressing his followers in the “Li Sao” and in fact had no known disciples. This means that under such a construction Li Sao represents a singular voice, that of Qu Yuan, who supposedly composed the poem in isolation, instead of a group effort. This is the dominant paradigm of authorship we take for granted today.
Indeed, Sinological scholarship has vastly enriched our understanding of authorship of early Chinese texts, while historicizing it to such an extent that the value of traditional exegetical approach is thrown into question. One of the most significant Sinological conclusions about early Chinese texts is the fact that (almost) all of them were systematically edited in the imperial library during the Western Han period. The most famous editors/redactors were Liu Xiang 劉向 (79–8 bce) and his son Liu Xin 劉歆 (c. 46 BCE–23 CE) who worked as bibliographers in the imperial library.
Because traditional exegeses are largely premised upon an original single author for a text, their value is rather limited in helping us understand the historical specificities of the text they comment on. Given their primary philosophical interest, in order not to get caught in the complex Sinological discourse on
