in Chinese Philosophy

Introduction

Chinese philosophy of all periods looked back to what we can think of as a ‘Classic Period’ between about 500 and 221. At the beginning of this period China was supposedly under the control of the Zhōu dynasty (1045-256) and had been for about 500 years, but the feudal system was breaking down and the country was being divided up amongst small states. China then entered into its ‘Warring States’ period (戰國時代, zhànguó shídài; 476-221) as these states engaged in a vicious struggle for power which finally ended when the whole Chinese world was united under the semi-barbarian Qin dynasty. It was, as you can imagine, a time of great strife, but it was also a time of great cultural productivity. Many of the displaced and dispossessed minor nobility took their education into the disordered world and set up as teachers and public intellectuals; and as a result of their activity this time became known as the time of ‘The Hundred Schools of Thought’ (諸子百家, zhūzǐ bǎijiā).

Only six schools, however, were later supposed to be really significant. Those were

1. Confucianism (儒家, rújiā)

2. Taoism (道家, dàojiā)

3. Mohism (墨家, mòjiā)

4. Legalism (法家, fǎjiā)

5. the School of Names (名家, míngjiā)

6. the Yin-Yang School (陰陽家, yīnyángjiā)

We’ll be looking at all of these in some detail, because at all later times the philosophers working in the native philosophical tradition framed their ideas in terms of their relationship to the teachings of these original schools. They tended to claim that what they were doing was repairing their faults, or extending their applications, or correcting their misinterpretations, or finding the more subtle implications or readings of their original texts, etc. Of course, this doesn’t apply to the philosophies that took their inspiration from the Buddhist teachings.

The Social Order

The point of almost all Chinese philosophising is determining how one ought to behave. The way of acting or of being that each school recommended was called its Tao (道, dào), a term that you will become very familiar with. Of the Six Schools just named, only two failed to make ethical concerns central. The School of Names was a school of logicians that grew out of the later Mohists, but they disappeared early and had little effect. As was explained earlier, logic was never a significant interest of the Chinese. The Yin-Yang School was mostly interested in oracles and divination, and tried to explain the universe in terms of the five elements and the principles of Yin and Yang. At a glance you’d think that Ethics was not involved in this; however, the Yinyang school came to be associated with Confucianism and added some metaphysical depth to its ethical doctrines, so this might not be an exception at all. Confucianism, of course, and Taoism are very significant, but we’ll consider them separately later on. Confucianism appears to be a kind of virtue theory directed at achieving social harmony, and Taoism can be seen – in some of its forms – as a type of ethical individualism that functioned to balance the collectivism of Confucianism. The Mohists and Legalists are two schools which were ultimately unsuccessful, but do have some implicit philosophical interest, and are remembered in Chinese thought – if only as things to avoid. The Mohists, we will see, advocated a fairly crude form of consequentialist doctrine, and the Legalists put their faith in the power of the state to compel ‘good’ behaviour.

Later schools tended to fill out the stories that the original schools told about the world, but they did this in order to tell a more complete story of why we were to behave in certain recommended ways. Fundamentally, however, they all remained similar to each other and the original schools in that they justified their claims in terms of their promoting harmony in society. This obsession with social harmony is usually attributed to the fact that the schools arose in a time of great disorder, and so philosophers would naturally try to understand what had gone wrong and how it could be fixed; but this is a Just So story that doesn’t explain why the Greeks and Indians, whose traditions of philosophy were born in similar conditions, did not have the same obsession.

Nostalgia

Nevertheless, the native schools did arise in a period of collapse, and the thinkers of the time looked back at the previous period as one of order, and took it generally as a model of how a society should be. This was a time, they thought, when all the world was united under a single ruler, everyone knew their place in the social world, and everyone knew just how to behave. This rose-tinted view of the Zhōu world, preserved through all the changes that time wrought on the teachings of those schools, had several consequences for the Chinese world-view.

Unity is the natural state of China

In the first place, it came to be accepted that the natural state of China – and also the only morally defensible condition – was as a single state united under a single authority. Those times when the Chinese people were divided into several different states were seen as aberrations and interludes – no matter how long those periods lasted. The situation has some similarities to the West after the fall of Rome : for a thousand years we looked for and worked for a renewal of the Roman Empire as the proper way to organise Europe , but since that never happened the idea has withered.

The claims of the natural and the moral order were also reflected in the general theory of sovereignty that applied almost throughout Chinese history. The ruler was said to rule in virtue of his possessing the ‘Mandate of Heaven’ (天命, tiānmìng), which was granted to him so long as Heaven approved of his virtue; but he could lose it through tyranny or vicious behaviour, in which case the ‘mandate’ would be removed to a more worthy agent of Heaven. While he possessed the mandate however, the ruler was the ‘Son of Heaven’ (天子 tiānzì) and was entitled to rule ‘all Under Heaven’ (天下, tiān xià). This theory first appeared in justifications by Zhou historians for the replacement of the Shang rule by the Zhou, and was refined and modified through the ages. The idea has obvious similarities to the European theory of the ‘Divine Right of Kings’, but it should be noted that tian, which is here translated as ‘Heaven’, is a less explicitly supernatural concept than that comparison would suggest. It can also mean just the natural world, or the natural order. Like the Romantics in Europe , the Chinese did tend to make a link between the way things were in nature and the way things ought to be. We’ll see more of this when we look at Taoism. 

It will be useful to include here for your continuing reference a basic timeline of the various dynasties. The shaded areas are periods of disunion and the italicised early part is mythical.[1]

Precedent is the best form of validation

A second consequence was that the ways of the old world were taken as the proper model for the ways of the new. The aim of many philosophers was to find a way to return the world to the order of the early ‘golden age’ of the Zhou. It was also characteristic of the philosophers that whenever some idea was proposed, it was justified as being no more than a restatement in new language of principles already known in the past. The best historical precedent that could be hoped for was to find that some idea or custom had been endorsed by one of the Five Sage-Kings. These were types of culture-hero supposed to have ruled in the very earliest times. If you read the primary texts you will often see the names of these five. They were

1. The Yellow Emperor (黃帝, huángdì)

2. Zhuānxū (顓頊)

3. Dì Kù (帝嚳)

4. Yao (堯)

5. Shun (舜)

Shun handed over power to Yu (禹) who then founded the Xia dynasty. His example is also often cited, since he was obviously one of great virtue and had the Mandate of Heaven.

Of course, in order to use the past as a model, it is really necessary (at least formally) to know something about how things were done in the past. There was a great reverence for tradition and especially for the ancient literature that had survived from that time. There are several books or collections of books of this kind, but the most important are the ones known as the Five Classics. Confucians took a knowledge of these to be fundamental for any study of the old ways of life. They were the following:

1. Classic of Changes (易經, Yi Jīng). Originally a guide to using sticks as oracles, it came to be interpreted as a text on metaphysics.

2. Classic of Poetry (詩經, Shī Jīng). A collection of poems and songs of different sorts. Some religious, some folk songs, some hymns, and so on.

3. Classic of History (書經, Shū Jīng). Documents from the Hsia, Shang, and Early Zhōu period.

4. Book of Rites (禮記 Lǐ Jì). A guide to ceremonies, rituals, etiquette, and manners.

5. Spring and Autumn Annals (春秋 Chūn Qiū). A history of the state of Lu from 722 to 479. The historical period gets its name from this book’s title.

And, of course, if one doesn’t have the example one requires in the available traditions then it’s always possible to invent one. This, together with the realisation that if old is good then older is better, led, over time to a gradual extension of historical ‘knowledge’ into the past. Derk Bodde wrote that:

… the historical age of a myth (the period of history to which it purports to belong) usually stands in inverse ratio to its ‘literary age’ (the period when it is first actually recorded in literature.)[1]

The family is the centre of social life

Quite why the Chinese seemed to value the past so much more than others is not really known, but it is usually supposed that it has something to do with the Chinese family system, which has always been remarkably resilient and complex. As we will see, proper family relations play a large role in the Confucian moral system, and this aspect of China ’s most ‘characteristic’ philosophy is clearly an extension of the natural moral life of the people. Moreover, expressions of respect for the ancestors of the family have had a large part to play in the spiritual life of the people. It can’t be a coincidence that the cult of ancestor worship survived longer in China than in other advanced societies.

In any case, this attachment to the past is a continuous thread in Chinese thought, with only two brief exceptions. There are two periods when there has been a concerted effort to reject the past, both of them leading to disaster. The first effort was that made by the first Emperor of Qin, who burned the books and killed the scholars; the second effort began with the modernisers in the XIX^th C and the Cultural Revolution (文革, wéngé) of the late 60s and early 70s is a part of it.

Natural Rhythms

It was mentioned above that the Chinese tended to take Nature as their guide. But the Nature that they looked to had a somewhat different structure from the Nature that we call upon. To begin with, they thought that Nature was constructed of various aspects, qualities, properties (etc.) which came in oppositional pairs – such as dark-light, female-male, wet-dry, low-high, earth-heaven, and so on. These pairs were all themselves aspects or embodiments of a fundamental oppositional pair which they called Yin and Yang. We’re familiar with similar forms of Dualism in the West, but ours tend to have also a moral component, which is not the case here. Both Yin and Yang are essential to the universe and there is no question of there being an ultimate triumph of one over the other.

In the Chinese view, it is the normal way of things that the Yin or Yang of an aspect of Nature will tend to increase in strength up to a certain maximum, and then it will decline to be superseded by its correlated opposite. Nature thus tends to move in cycles, and in it was usually claimed that all change could be explained in terms of such cycles. The Just So story associated with this belief appeals to the fact that the philosophers and scholars were also members of landowning and farming families – if not farmers themselves – and were therefore very aware of the seasonal cycles on which farm life depended.

Be that as it may, it’s also worth noting in this respect that no appeal to a divine actor to make these cycles work was felt to be needed. In so far as there was a divine element to their thought this tended to be assimilated to Nature itself – as we saw when discussing the term ‘Tian’, or ‘Heaven’, earlier. This would certainly be more true of the intellectuals than of the common people, but Chinese intellectual culture in general is remakable for its rejection of superstitious elements and its tendency to fairly strict materialism.

Human Nature

To return to the topic of Nature, the idea of Yin and Yang was also extended to human nature. This became important with the imperial synthesis of the yinyang and Confucian schools in the Han dynasty, when the idea of man as a mkicrocosm of the universe was made an central part of the governing ideology. The question of human nature, however, had been fundamental long before this. There was a long-running dispute about whether the essential nature of Man was good – meaning that he was naturally possessed of the recommended characteristics – or bad – in which case these characteristics would have to be social impositions. The question had obvious significance for the ethical theories. It’s no good recommending a kind of society which doesn’t fit the nature of the people. We’ve seen the sad effects of that experiment too often in the XX^th C.

For those schools that did accept that it was within the power of a man to improve his nature – and the schools that survived all did believe this – the goal for any individual, if he was capable of the appropriate dedication to the task, was the acquisistion of ‘sageliness within and kingliness without’. The Tao of each school would have as its aim the cultivation of the spiritual awareness of the sage (聖, shèng), but this did not entail that the sage would necessaily withdraw from the world: the ‘kingliness’ to which one ought also to aspire referred to the effectiveness of the truly cultured man in society. Since the aim of all philosophy was to form the character of the follower of that Tao, it follows that philosophy was not something that could be done as a purely intellectual exercise: as it is character-forming, it has to be lived. This is an attitude that some in the West have also championed, but since philosophy has become an academic discipline this has been very much a minority point of view. It’s just too hard.