After Confucius After Confucius Studies in Early Chinese Philosophy Paul R. Goldin University of Hawai`i Press Honolulu © 2005 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer i ca Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Goldin, Paul Rakita. After Confucius : studies in early Chinese philosophy / Paul R. Goldin. p. cm. Includes bibliographic references and index ISBN 0-8248-2842-9 (alk. paper) 1. Philosophy, Chinese—To 221 b.c. 2. Philosophy, Chinese—221 b.c.–900 a.d. I. Title: Studiese in early Chinese philosophy. II. Title. B126.G65 2005 181'.11-dc22 2004017241 University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid- free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. 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Mattos (1939±2002) in memoriam Z«BUÊ (æ{ Év\è !(eºl Àj ãÝ ÄÃ¦ê ¨ò[ÃÈ #ý0Ì åÓ­UÁ YÄw ô»ÆA) °b G C9 Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Toward a Thick Description of Chinese Philosophy 1 1. The Reception of the Odes in the Warring States Era 19 2. Xunzi in the Light of the Guodian Manuscripts 36 3. Han Fei's Doctrine of Self-Interest 58 4. Li Si, Chancellor of the Universe 66 5. Rhetoric and Machination in Stratagems ofthe Warring States 76 6. Insidious Syncretism in the Political Philosophy of Huainanzi 90 7. BanZhaoinHerTimeandinOurs 112 8. Those Who Don't Know Speak: Translations of Laozi by PeopleWhoDoNotKnowChinese 119 Appendix: References to the Odes in Pre-Imperial Texts, Arranged by Mao Number 135 Notes 153 Bibliography 215 Index 261 vii Acknowledgments The debts that I have accumulated in the course of writing this book are numerous, but I owe the most to my parents and to my wife, Edilma. Lit- tle Andrew Samuel arrived in time to observe and applaud some of the ®nal revisions while perched on the author's knee. The title is intended to recall Before Confucius, by Edward L. Shaugh- nessy, who ®rst encouraged me to take excavated manuscripts seriously. I hopeinthiswaytoconveytohimhowmuchofaneffectthatconversa- tion has had on my work. My arguments have been sharpened and re®ned by discussions with the following colleagues: William H. Baxter, Wolfgang Behr, E. Bruce Brooks, Alvin P. Cohen, Chen Ning, Constance A. Cook, Scott Cook, Mark Csikszentmihalyi, Donald Harper, Kenneth W. Holloway, Martin Kern, Terry F. Kleeman, Paul W. Kroll, Joachim Kurtz, Whalen Lai, Victor H. Mair, John S. Major, Michael Puett, Sarah A. Queen, Moss Roberts, David Schaberg, Nathan Sivin, Xing Wen, Xu Shaohua, and Robin D. S. Yates. Special thanks are due Bryan W. Van Norden, who read the entire manuscript, offering many helpful comments, and also suggested the title of chapter 8. I am grateful to Eric Henry for sharing his unpublished index of Shi references in the Zuozhuan and to Command Sergeant Major Eugene B. Patton III, Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center and Presidio of Monterey, for information about language instruction at that famous school. Many thanks, ®nally, to Patricia Crosby and the staff at the University of Hawai`i Press for continuing to accommodate the peculiar demands of an academic author. This book is dedicated to the memory of Gilbert L. Mattos, who knew ix x Acknowledgments more about Chinese writing than anyone I have ever met. We became research collaborators within a week of our ®rst meeting and friends not a day later. The ®nal portion of this manuscript was composed with the bene®t of his nonpareil libraryÐthe greatest gift that one scholar can receive from another. Most of the chapters in this book were presented as conference papers or public lectures. I would like to thank the audiences at each of these events for helpful questions and criticism. Some of the chapters were originally published elsewhere in preliminary versions: ``Toward a Thick Description of Chinese Philosophy'': contains material from research notes published in Journal ofthe American Oriental Society 120.1 (2000): 77±81, and 122.1 (2002): 83±85. ``Xunzi in the Light of the Guodian Manuscripts'': Early China 25 (2000): 113±146. ``Han Fei's Doctrine of Self-Interest'': Asian Philosophy 11.3 (2001): 151±159. ``Li Si, Chancellor of the Universe'': The Human Tradition in Premodern China, ed. Kenneth J. Hammond (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 2002), 15±25. ``Rhetoric and Machination in Stratagems ofthe Warring States '': Sino- Platonic Papers 41 (1993): 1±27(with the title ``Miching Mallecho: The Zhanguo ce and Classical Rhetoric''). ``Insidious Syncretism in the Political Philosophy of Huainanzi'': Asian Philosophy 9.3 (1999): 165±191. ``Those Who Don't Know Speak'': Asian Philosophy 12.3 (2002): 183± 195. Introduction Toward a Thick Description of Chinese Philosophy InhisCritique of Stammler, Max Weber (1864±1920) presented the follow- ing scenario: Let us suppose that two men who otherwise engage in no ``social relation''Ð for example, two uncivilized men of different races, or a European who encounters a native in darkest AfricaÐmeet and ``exchange'' two objects. We are inclined to think that a mere description of what can be observed during this exchangeÐmuscular movements and, if some words were ``spoken,'' the sounds which, so to say, constitute the ``matter'' or ``material'' of the behaviorÐwould in no sense comprehend the ``essence'' of what happens. This is quite correct. The ``essence'' of what happens is constituted by the ``meaning'' which the two parties ascribe to their observable behavior, a ``meaning'' which ``regulates'' the course of their future conduct. Without this ``meaning,'' we are inclined to say, an ``exchange'' is neither empirically possible nor conceptually imaginable.1 Weber's dated vocabulary (we no longer need to speak of ``races'' and of ``darkest Africa'') should not prevent us from recognizing the im- portance of his argument to both history and anthropology. A witnessÐ that is to say, an anthropologist or historianÐwho wishes to describe an ``exchange'' cannot be satis®ed with relating the observable phenomena of the event, for this would be to ignore the underlying logic that Weber calls the ```essence' of what happens.'' From the point of the view of the agents themselves, the signi®cance of the exchange lies not in their ``mus- cular movements'' but in the ``meaning'' that they attribute to the ex- change and that, for the exchange to be completed, they must expect 1 2 After Confucius theircolleaguestoshare.Inshort,theonusistoexplainnotthemere ``muscular movements'' but the ``essence.'' This methodology is often called Weber's Verstehen thesis. Verstehen in this sense is comparable to what Gilbert Ryle dubbed ``thick description'': Two boys fairly swiftly contract the eyelids of their right eyes. In the ®rst boy this is only an involuntary twitch; but the other is winking conspiratorially to an accomplice. At the lowest or the thinnest level of description the two contractions of the eyelids may be exactly alike. From a cinematograph-®lm of the two faces there might be no telling which contraction, if either, was a wink, or which, if either, was a mere twitch. Yet there remains an immense but unphotographable difference between a twitch and a wink. For to wink is to try to signal to someone in particular, without the cognisance of others, a de®nite message according to an already understood code.2 A twitch is not a wink, but the only way for an outsider to come to un- derstand the difference between the two is to investigate the ``understood code'' that informs conspiratorial winking. It is not surprising that anthro- pologists have seized upon the concept of thick description for their own discipline. And the paradigm is equally useful in the study of cultural his- tory, for the position of an ethnologist observing natives engaged in ``ex- change'' is analogous to that of a historian trying to make sense of the scattered evidence found in historical sources. No less than in cultural an- thropology, thick description in the domain of cultural history entails ``sorting out the structures of signi®cation . and determining their social ground and import.''3 In this book I present piecemeal attempts at the thick description of classical Chinese philosophy. This approachisonlyindirectlyconcerned with such considerations as the viability of Chinese philosophy today and its similarity or dissimilarity to Western philosophy, which animate most discussions of the subject within the framework of academic philosophy. The question of whether Chinese philosophy quali®es as genuine philos- ophy, seriously addressed by several scholars,4 dependsentirelyonthe scope of one's de®nitions. If philosophy is made out to be an entity inse- verable from the post-Platonic world,5 then classical Chinese philosophy is not and never can be ``philosophy.'' But it certainly was something, and thick description is the best preliminary method to determine how Chinese thinkers conceived of theirownenterprise.Thisbookisnot Introduction 3 about whether Chinese philosophy is philosophy but about how Chinese philosophy is Chinese.