Introduction

What we now call Chinese philosophy was not treated as a distinct cultural formation by the Chinese themselves before their encounter with the West in the late XIX^th – early XX^th C. It was then was seen that Westerners distinguished and respected certain genres of literature and ways of life which had analogues in Chinese culture but were not grouped together in the same way. In 1873 the Japanese scholar Nishi Amane (1829–1897) coined the term tetsugaku, meaning ‘the study of wisdom’ to refer specifically to Western philosophy. As zhé xué (哲学 = ‘wisdom’ + ‘learning’) it was then applied to the Chinese case by the Chinese scholar-official Huang Zunxian (1848–1905) and was quickly adopted by Chinese scholars as the proper term for Chinese philosophy.

The general picture of this so-called Chinese philosophy that we have now – and that is presented in these lectures – is largely due to the efforts of modern Chinese scholars who sought to give content to the category named by the new term. The first of these was Hu Shih (胡適, 1891-1962) whose incomplete 1919 work An Outline of Chinese Philosophy (中国哲学大纲, zhōngguó zhéxué dàgāng) laid the groundwork for critical presentation and study of the field. The most important, however, was Feng Youlan (冯友兰, 1895 – 1990,) whose 1934 History of Chinese Philosophy (中国哲学史, zhōngguó zhéxué shǐ) may still be recommended.  Feng’s presentation of his chosen material gave to Chinese philosophy the sort of structure that had long been provided for Western philosophy: a number of distinct movements arising in time, a picture of progress building upon past efforts, the recurrence of certain themes and questions of interest, the establishing of relationships between different schools, the distinguishing of different periods, and so on; all this being achieved with an analytic rigour that was quite alien to the earlier traditional treatments of such material.

Such revisionary efforts have gone some way to overcome the resistance by Western scholars to the claims that there is a Chinese ‘philosophy’ worthy of the name. In the past, in fact, they were very often unwilling to credit the material pressed on them as philosophical with the name of philosophy at all. This wasn’t just a matter of chauvinism: the texts that were identified as ‘philosophical’ in China are very little like the texts that are honoured in Western philosophy. If you look inside the ‘Analects’ of Confucius or the ‘Tao Te Ching’ of Laozi, you will find no arguments to establish a conclusion, no sustained reasoning, and barely any recognisably rational progression of ideas in the topics that are treated. Instead you will find aphorisms and allusions and parables and a skipping from topic to topic that is utterly confusing – and which is not only unconvincing, but not even particularly clear on what it would convince you of. These are extreme cases but the same is largely true of all of the main works.  

If the reason for this was that the Chinese writers were merely recording their (or others’) passing thoughts, then the Western philosophers would be right to be dismissive. Daydreaming, even if expressed elegantly, is not the same as reasoning; and poetry is not the same as philosophy. It turns out, however, that there are ways of reading the Chinese texts that make them much more philosophically respectable.

Two Ways to Read Chinese Philosophy

1.             As Containing Hidden Arguments

In the first place, it is possible that what are recorded are merely the conclusions of arguments the premisses of which have been omitted. Two problems then arise: first, we would wish to find out why the premisses have been omitted; and second, we would like to know whether and how we can reconstruct the arguments in question. In response to the first problem, it could be proposed that it is expected that anyone wishing to know these arguments would have access to a teacher who could supply them. The premisses of the arguments are thus presumed to be part of an oral tradition that it was not considered appropriate to set down permanently. This, of course, also gives us an answer to the second problem: we need to find one of those teachers – or, and this may be more practical, we can search through the letters and records of the time (i.e. outside the official texts) for clues as to the arguments that supported the claims in those texts. Lacking even that support, we may try to reconstruct the arguments by appealing to principles of charitable interpretation – first assuming that there are arguments, and then trying to come up with ones that could plausibly have been made by the people of that time, and are consistent with the other things that they wrote.

2.             As Suggestive Rhetoric

That’s one approach. A second possible reason for Chinese texts being written the way they are is that they are conforming to a particular Chinese style of art. The preference in Chinese art is for suggestion rather than for explicitness. So the writings of the philosophers are intended to put certain ideas into your head merely by suggestive stories, allusions, and parables. There is no question here of there being suppressed arguments to be uncovered; arguments are simply irrelevant to the process. There is some support for this proposal: we have Zhuangzi saying, for example,

The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you’ve gotten the fish you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit; once you've gotten the rabbit you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning; once you have the meaning you can forget the words.[1]

This is a defensible way of putting ideas forward; after all, if all that is desired is that the ideas be understood and accepted, and if that can be done by the kinds of rhetorical methods we’ve mentioned, then that is a good method to use. Unfortunately, it’s not one that Western philosophers will accept, since we have very strong views on the proper ways by which we should fix or modify our beliefs. We do not see arguments as one way amongst many others that a complex idea can be gotten into one’s head. Arguments are the only legitimate way.

Two Possibly Distinctive Characteristics of Chinese Philosophy

1.             Utility is Preferred Above Truth

This points to at least two possible profound differences in the attitude of philosophers here and there. In the first place, Western philosophers, we could say, are principally interested in the truth of the statements they are defending, whereas Chinese philosophers may be principally interested in their utility. We insist that claims need to be supported by arguments because only arguments according to approved standards of rationality give us direct evidence that our claims will be true. Chinese philosophers are not so constrained. They are primarily interested in whether accepting a claim will or will not prove to be useful in achieving certain desirable goals – and we will see below what those goals might be. (It would be nice to think that the two criteria would approve the same claims, and perhaps they do ‘in the limit’, but they are independent criteria and there are plenty of examples of them disagreeing.)

One of the consequences of this attitude on the part of the Chinese thinkers is that logic never became accepted as an essential branch of philosophy in the way it did in the West. In the West, logic began with Aristotle (more or less) and has never ceased to be pursued – even during the Middle Ages when so much else was lost. China ’s logic began about the same time with the later Mohists and the School of Names , but it did not thrive. Even when logic was reintroduced by the Buddhists in the 7^th C. it did not take.[1] The logic studied in China today is entirely the result of the introduction of Western learning in modern times.

In any case, from the Western point of view, if we are to consider the Chinese ‘philosophers’ as having something interesting to say to us, we cannot accept that their arguments are unsupported by any possible arguments, and so we reject the second approach to their writings, and from now on we will assume that something like the first approach is the right one. In what follows we will therefore always assume that there were rational arguments for their points of view and we will try to reconstruct them as best we can.

2.             Core Concepts are Supposed to be Simple Intuitions not Complex Ideas

A second possibility – less popular now than it used to be – appeals to a distinction between two kinds of concepts. Of the first kind are those which are deliberately constructed in terms of some theory – for example, ‘blue’ defined as a certain wavelength of radiation as understood in the EM theory of light. The meaning of a term naming such a concept is completely determined by the meanings of the terms of the relevant theory; and how we come to know whether the term applies in any particular case is by determining whether the constructive terms apply in the right way. This is exactly the sort of thing that argument (in some cases anyway) can be used to establish. Of the second kind are those concepts that are immediately apprehended (sensed, intuited, etc.) – for example, ‘blue’ understood as the sensed quality of a colour. It is clear that the meanings of terms denoting such concepts are just the appropriate apprehensions. To know whether this term applies in some situation it is enough to present that situation to oneself and ask oneself whether the appropriate apprehension occurs. In such cases there can be no question of any argument establishing whether the term applies or not. Consequently, if Chinese philosophers thought that the concepts that they were trying to get across to their public were of that second kind, then it might very well be that they would see no point in including arguments in their presentations.[2] It would not be so odd if they did think this: even in Western philosophy, there is a strong tradition of intuitionism concerning moral concepts.[3]

One of the consequences of this attitude on the part of the Chinese thinkers is that epistemology never became accepted as an essential branch of philosophy in the way it did in the West. When the important concepts of your philosophy are thought to be knowable simply through proper presentation in the same way that colours are known or faces are recognised, then the problem of justifying knowledge becomes much less pressing. Consider that although we – following a longer skeptical tradition – may wonder whether the sky that we see is really blue, or whether there is really a blue pen here for us to be looking at, we do not doubt that there is such a thing as the colour blue, because our experience of it – our apprehension of it – is all the evidence that could reasonably be required. Now, even if we think that the analogy between philosophical concepts and primitive experiences is a faulty one, the fact remains that epistemology in China is associated only with the later, alien Buddhists, and is not very important even there.

Another consequence of this attitude (that the important conceptions are intuitions) is that the language that may be used in presenting those conceptions is quite properly vague and imprecise. Intuitions are not given definitions, and concepts that are not given definitions are (technically) imprecise.

Difficulties in Translation

1.             The Language Itself is an Obstacle

Which brings us to the another of the difficulties that we face in understanding Chinese philosophy, particularly in its ancient forms: the Chinese language itself. Chinese is a language of the Sino-Tibetan family, quite unlike the Indo-European languages (including Greek and Latin, English, French, and German, Sanskrit and Pali) in which all the philosophical writings of Europe and India were done, and it seems to be a particularly difficult language in which to conduct the sorts of philosophical discourses to which we are accustomed in the West. For a start, the grammatical categories of Chinese are much less strictly defined: it is much more common in Chinese than in English for a word to act as a substantive, an adjective, an adverb, or a verb in different contexts. Moreover, classical Chinese seems to lack abstractions, such as a distinct word to mean, say, ‘humaneness’[1], and even lacked any sort of copula, which is a word to play the role of ‘is’ in ‘the horse is white’. All in all, it would seem that classical Chinese was really rather poorly equipped for expressing complex ideas, (so was Greek at first – consider Plato’s Sophist for example – but it had better resources to repair those deficiencies,) and this being the case, it would not be surprising if the Chinese philosophers had difficulty expressing themselves adequately – and it may also have been difficult for them to formulate their ideas properly.

2.             There is a Greater Danger of Committing Oneself to a False Interpretation

Combining those characteristics of the language with a lack of motivation to avoid vagueness, and a disinclination to create texts with obvious contextualising structure, and you can imagine that translations of the old texts (and even the more modern ones) are rather more than usually disputable. But that isn’t the most significant problem in translation. The most significant problem arises from the fact – well known to philosophers – that a translation is always at the same time an interpretation. When we consider how to translate a term or a phrase in Chinese, we apply rules of charity and fidelity and humanity to settle upoon the translation which makes the translated word or phrase come out most sensibly or believably. We consider not only that sentence, but also all the other sentences (in translation) that the subject has sincerely produced. Now, this means that we have to have a working understanding of the other things that the subject has claimed – or, to speak more plainly – a theory that we think that they hold. We determine whether our translations are good by comparing them with the theory that we are attributing to the subject, and we reconstruct the theory by careful consideration of the best translations that we can come up with. But you can see that there is a considerable danger of circularity here, and it is difficult to think of how we might find an independent means of determining whether the interpretation that we are working with is the correct one.

To give you an idea of just how much interpretation goes into these translations, we can have a look at the source text and a sample of translations for the first line of the Daodejing ch. 2.

Characters             天下皆知美之為美斯惡已

Pinyin                     tiān xià jiē zhī měi zhī wéi měi sī è yǐ

Word-for-word     the world - all - know - beauty - nominalizing particle - deeming/acting - beauty - then - ugly - aspect particle

Lau                         The whole world recognises the beautiful as the beautiful, yet this is only the ugly[2]

Sturgeon                All in the world know the beauty of the beautiful, and in doing this they have (the idea of) what ugliness is[3]

Blakney                  Since the world points up beauty as such, there is ugliness too[4]

Red Pine                All the world knows beauty but if that becomes beautiful this becomes ugly[5]

Cleary                     When everyone knows beauty is beauty, this is bad[6]

Every one of these translations says something different (sometimes a lot different); and there are at least 100 more (in English) that you can easily find online.[7]

It’s very easy to imagine that if we once began our translations with an incorrect theory, that that theory might be very difficult to dislodge. Translations would be produced that strove to make sense of the statements being made according to that theory, and that would be done at the expense of an accurate representation of what the writer or speaker actually intended. Eventually, much of what was translated would hardly make sense at all. There are those who believe that this is exactly what has happened. Chad Hansen has proposed that the initial Western translations, importing the concepts and concerns of the Western translators, set us off on the wrong track a hundred or more years ago, and we’ve just gotten further and further away from an accurate understanding of the texts. In response he has come up with a very interesting new interpretation and has been busily reinterpreting Chinese classic philosphy by its lights.[8] For the sake of interest, his translation of the passage above is

Hansen             That the social world knows to deem the beautiful as 'beautiful' simply creates the 'ugly.'[9]

We will assume, however, that the ‘ruling interpretation’ that Hansen criticises is the best interpretation we have, and the philosophical positions that will be described in what follows are those that would be endorsed by that interpretation.