Tanya asks:

You mentioned that Chinese thought was more centered on the way (a means/a process; to be guided and to guide), rather than to seek truth (an end?).

Did the thinkers consider The Way to be a form of truth in itself too (the “true” conduct or way of life perhaps?), albeit in a different style from that of the Greeks? It seems counterintuitive for me to dichotomize “Truth” and “The Way”.

Good questions.

As I mentioned in the lecture itself, it’s probably not a good idea to see things in terms of a sharp divide between “Ancient Chinese” and “Western” thinkers in general. But nonetheless, it’s a useful way for us to begin to appreciate a pervasive feature of the thinkers we are discussing in the semester. Secondly, the contrast I mentioned is also not meant to suggest that there is some sharp divide between a concern with the way and a concern for truth such that if your game is the first, you can’t also be about the second, and vice versa. That A and B aren’t the same is not to say that X can’t be both A and B. There could even be interesting connections between the two. Do keep these background qualifications in mind.

When we look for a term or category that seems to play a major role in the organization of the Ancient Chinese thinkers’ reflection–in their own words–the textual evidence points us to the term dao. In contrast, even though there are ways to talk about truth or say that such and such claim is true or untrue in Classical Chinese, truth as an explicitly discussed general category does not play that kind of role in the corpus. The material is more naturally understood as presenting debates over what is proper dao.

The above, however, does not imply a further and more radical claim that the Chinese thinkers’ debates are not or cannot also be understood as a debate over truth. Now, by truth, I mean an attribute of a proposition (something that can be expressed in an indicative sentence, e.g., “white horses are horses”) that it accords with reality, with what is the case. “White horses are horses” is true, if and only if white horses –really–are horses. But don’t let the specific example mislead you–it is entirely possible to apply the same definition to action guiding rather than fact stating propositions. So “people should not be sent to jail for crimes they did not commit” is true, if and only if people–really–shouldn’t be sent to jail for crimes they did not commit.

It may turn out that any dao X can also be stated as a proposition (or series of propositions) Y, such that Y is true if and only if X is proper dao. If this is the case, then even if the original debate was carried out as a debate over dao, it can be restated as a debate over truth. But of course, this assumes the first point of this paragraph–that any dao can also be stated as a proposition. This is not entirely obvious. (Think of a commonsense example–the dao of swimming…) And we shall see later in the semester Chinese thinkers who will be explicit in their suspicion of the connection.

There is also another contrast that might be associated with the way vs. truth distinction. On this version of the story, the aim for the former is practical, while for the latter, it is theoretical. Someone who is concerned about dao–the proper way to live and for communities to conduct their affairs is primarily aiming at living and doing well, or getting people to live and do well. Someone who is concerned about truth is, so this version of the contrast goes, aiming to get it right about how goes the world. The former person is after a life well lived, a practical outcome; the latter is after a good theory that accurately reflects the reality of the world, a theoretical (or scientific) achievement.

Now, the distinction is again not to be taken sharply as if the same thinker can’t be interested in both practice and theory, or that if he is pursuing one, it automatically rules out his pursuing the other. It seems plausible that the seeking of truth requires forms of good epistemic practice both for the individual and for the inquiring community. Conversely, it seems plausible that good practice requires the cognizance of truth, e.g., about how the world really works. We might even think (with Socrates, let’s say), that living well requires that we have knowledge–of the truth about virtue, justice, the good, etc. But not all would agree. Some of those who thought otherwise were even among the Ancient Chinese thinkers.

But it is at least logically possible that someone can be concerned about practice or theory to the exclusion of the other, or at the very least, to be concern about one in such a way that his concern about the other is purely subordinate and derivative. Whether the Chinese thinkers (the ones we are going to discuss this semester) people who are concerned about the way rather than truth in this specific sense will be something that we will have to find out as we go along.

To the students of PH2301/GEK2038 Spring 2015:

This blog was started when I last taught PH2301/GEK2038 (Fall 2012, 2.5 years ago) to disseminate additional notes to discussions we had in class, and to answer some of the questions I received from students. Since most of the material is still relevant, I will make it available to you as well. And I will continue to use this platform for the same purposes for our class.

All the best and Enjoy!

William writes:

I would like to add on to the discussion regarding the “Chinese argument”. 
 
Someone mentioned the common legal practice of using legal precedent during the discussion on “Chinese argument”. Presumably he meant to say that since it is okay to use past ruling to bolster your case, then what the Chinese philosophers had been doing should also be considered acceptable.

However, I am wondering if the usage of legal precedent will be more accurately characterized as “argument from analogy” rather than “appeal to authority”? Supposing a legal precedent A is established as being analogous to a case B, this means opponent will need to account for both and B to prove his case. Therefore references to the old Zhou world order can be seen as a device merely to strengthen the argument.

If so,then we should not claim that Chinese philosophy is appealing to authority and thus being fallacious if Chinese philosophers had established that the old Zhou world order is applicable to resolve the chaos then. However, I did not find any textual evidence trying to establish how the old Zhou world order will be applicable but merely assertion of its greatness.

On the point about legal precedence, couldn’t your opponent say that, yes, analogy is involved, but there is more. That is, isn’t the point that by establishing that there is an analogy between the new case and the old, we make a case for extending the judgment that was given for the old case to the new case as well. In other words, the precedent case is meant to be (in some unspecified sense) authoritative. Lawyers in the common law tradition (UK, US) call this the doctrine of stare decisis (Latin; sta-re de-ci-sis).

Now, there is a lot that can be said on behalf of why stare decisis might or might not be a good thing, but it is only of limited help to the “Chinese Argument” case. It is entirely unclear if the right way to understand the “appeal to the ancients” passages in the Chinese text is appealing to precedent. (This is not to say that Chinese statesmen and magistrates don’t appeal to precedent; I’m sure they do, for instance, citing precedence  seems to be part of ritual protocol. But we are talking about Confucius, Mozi, Mencius, etc.) The appeals to the past in the Analects are somewhat more vague, as you have probably discovered. There are more obvious passages in the Mozi though.

As mentioned in our last lecture, one of the seemingly well grounded generalizations about the Chinese philosophers (in the period that we are covering, but in fact, in later times as well) is their tendency to argue by appeal to the past (“antiquity”). But having said that, it bears emphasizing that this generalization covers potentially logically distinct modes in the thinkers’ writings.

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To supplement what I said in lecture regarding the issue (Pinyin, Wade-Giles, and so on): A senior scholar working in Chinese philosophy once told his students (who told me) that there are basically two signs of madness in the field of Early China studies. The first was to come up with yet another romanization method for Chinese. The other was to offer yet another translation of the Daodejing. (The funny thing was that he did eventually put out his own translation of the Daodejing, but that’s another story altogether.) The take home message here is that there are multiple ways to transliterate Chinese characters into Roman letters, which makes for a potentially confusing state of affairs.

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Kenny writes:

I refer to “Chinese Argument (3)”, since Huainanzi was suggesting that people looks askance at the new, why would many disciples motion with their fingers and accept the writings of the new sages (i.e. Confucius or Mozi) ? Shouldn’t them be skeptical of the new doctrine?

Think of it as an exercise in the careful interpretation of a passage. The passage says:

The average modern person holds the ancient in high esteem, but looks askance at the new. Those who work out methods must attribute them to Shennong and Huangdi, and only then will they be admitted into the debate… Today, if the writings of new sages were to be taken and labeled [works of] Confucius or Mozi, then there would certainly be many disciples who would motion with their fingers and accept them.

There are several items that we need to keep straight.

1. The Huainanzi, a text composed in the first Century BC. It was presented to the court of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty in 139 BC.
2. Shennong and Huangdi (ancient sage kings from the legendary past, more ancient than the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties; see slide “Heros of Antiquity”)
3. Confucius (551-489 BC) and Mozi (roughly 480-390 BC).
4. The “new sages” most probably does not refer to Confucius and Mozi (though there is a twist to this), but to hypothetical innovators or “those who work out methods” in the time of the Huainanzi, or “today”.

Note that from the point of view of the “disciples” “today”–i.e., in the time of the Huainanzi in the Han–Confucius and Mozi are already old (3-400 plus years ago). And they were accepted as ‘ancient’ sages in their own right by people in Han times. (To be fair, this is a separate piece of historical information that might not be entirely apparent.) The writer of the passage is saying that, regarding the hypothetical new sages of his own time, if their ideas were attributed to Confucius and Mozi, people today would be willing to accept them. The reason is that people in general are suspicious of the entirely new. If new ideas are to get a hearing at all, innovates had better to propose them in the guise of old ideas attributed to the past sages–in this case, Confucius and Mozi.

The twist is that, without explicitly saying as much, the writer subtly reminds his audience that while Confucius and Mozi are now accepted sages of the past, there was a time when they too, were the “new sages” of their own time attempting to “work out methods”. And so, again, without being explicit about it, the writer makes us wonder if Confucius and Mozi, too, did what the Huainanzi is advising the new sages of its own time to do–present their own innovations as transmissions of their own past.

There is one more bit that might be hinted at by the choice of ancient sages–Huangdi and Shennong. These were not the usual ancient sages cited by Confucius and Mozi, both of whom were more partial to Yao, Shun, Yu, Tang, Wen, Wu, and the Duke of Zhou. In fact, Huangdi and Shennong were the sages cited by thinkers ostensibly in competition with Confucius and Mozi–the so called “Huang-Lao” School for the first, the so called “Primitivist” School for the second (we will be discussing the latter a bit later in the semester). This may suggest another thing that the writer is hinting at but not directly saying–the different “new sages” were really picking and choosing their preferred ancient sages, and this was part of the flag-waving between philosophical debaters more than anything else. (This additional thought could be there but I’m less certain about it–a deeper look at the rest of the Huainanzi will be needed to properly argue for it.)

I hope that is clear enough.

Kenny writes:

I am an engineering student with no background in philosophical studies (I’m keen to learn though!), what kind of questions (i.e. critical thinking) I should ask myself regarding the statements postulated by people? I find myself “handicapped” in studying critically some statements of the Analects or those provided in the lecture slides.

Asking a question like the one above is a very good start! There are two types of issues that will concern us in the class, and both have a critical dimension. Let me explain:

First, we should always be asking ourselves “just what is the text actually saying?” Often times, the answer to that is not entirely obvious. This is the ” interpretative” dimension. Pinning our best interpretation down may require us to connect up different portions of the text, think about how the same motif or term gets used in different contexts, and in some cases, make use of the cultural and historical information available to us, and so on. Think of the lecture we just had on Friday 24 August. Collect together the passages in which Confucius praises antiquity, the ancient Zhou order, some ancient sage kings, etc.–he clearly said that he “preferred antiquity”, and seemed to think the Zhou order represented the peak of civilization. So far so good; but what exactly is the logic of what he is saying. Is he simply equating The Zhou Order (whatever it is) with The Good Social and Political Arrangement? Or is he saying that The Good Social and Political Arrangement–that being X, Y, Z–happens to have been achieved by the Zhou? Or perhaps some other possibility? And we need to be able to *argue* for our preferred interpretation with textual evidence, and so on.

Second, and this will apply to all of the texts, we should always be asking ourselves: Ok, given some answer arrived at in the interpretative part of our reading, do I, should I, would I–as a modern person–endorse the positions taken by the thinkers we are studying about the moral life, the ideal social and political arrangement, human nature, etc.? In some cases, the texts don’t just assume a certain position but offer arguments in support for their positions–how do I evaluate those arguments. Are they sound? Do I agree with their premises or find the logic valid? If I do endorse the conclusions, are there possible objections (some of which are even found in the Chinese texts) that I need to address? How do I translate it to be applied to the modern world? Can it be done? If I don’t agree with the positions taken, why? Do I have a counter argument or argued objection? Is there some modification to the position that, if made, would have both inclined me to endorse the position and yet preserve the spirit of the ancient thinker? Or is it just irredeemably bad, or outdated, or illogical, etc.? This is the “evaluative” dimension.

Now technically, there is a lot in terms of the above two that we can do with each of the texts, much more than can be fruitfully covered in a short class. As far as the course is concerned, the specific issues (both interpretative and evaluative) that you are responsible for (e.g., for the assignments and exams) will be identified as we go along. (One of them has just been introduced in the last lecture–the question of the “Chinese Argument”, both as an interpretative issue for the different texts, but also our evaluative stance towards those passages that seem to make such arguments.) My aim is that, having given a broader overview, we should zoom into a smaller set of specific issues so that we get practice engaging things up close and at some detail. The hope is that through the process, you gain the mental tools to be able to do the same sort of things to other parts of the text and other issues that we don’t explicitly cover to this detail, and beyond that, other intellectual issues in general–and this is  on top of having gained some content knowledge regarding the Classical Chinese thinkers.

I hope that helps.