chapter 7 A Note on Logical Connectives in the Huainanzi

Michael Nylan

The Problem: Of Particles and Meaning

Over the course of the last century, scholars of early China have conducted a series of lively debates over whether ‘logic’ existed at all in early China, and, if so, what form logic typically assumed there.1 Agreeing with Roger Ames that “the main problem when reading longer . . . Chinese arguments is that one . . . does not know where an arguments starts and where it ends,”2 I took my first task in reading chapter 7, “ ” 精神, of the Huainanzi to be to figure out the best way to divide the chapter into manageable units that might approximate modern English sections and paragraphs. An inability to parse the text would surely signal an inability to understand the internal logic and rhetorical moves of the text. Particle usage seemed as obvious a place to start as vocabulary when thinking about semantic divisions at the level of sen- tences, paragraphs, and sections, and, as luck would have it, particle usages in this particular chapter proved to be excellent guideposts for the internal organization of the text. A modicum of attention paid to particle usage quickly allowed the chapter to divide itself into seven discrete semantic units, as each section displayed at least one distinctive pattern—and usually more—with respect to particle usage, grammatical patterns, and vocabulary. Even more notably, not only does each section in the “Jing shen” chapter rely upon sepa- rate features to convey its main points, but also the repetition of the distinc- tive features within a section lends an air of logic to the occasionally puzzling rhetorical moves of the “Jing shen” chapter’s argument. Whether that air was created through conscious manipulation or unconscious association, we can- not hope to know at this remove in time, and that means that the intentions

1 Two of the more famous contributions on this issue are Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–1962), The Development of the Logical Method in Ancient China (Shanghai: Oriental Book Company, 1922); and Chad Hansen, Language and Logic in Ancient China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983). I dedicate this essay to Sarah Queen, who has been a particularly fine and patient editor. 2 Roger Ames, The Art of Rulership: A Study of Ancient Chinese Political Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 168.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi ��.��63/9789004265325_009 226 nylan of the “Jing shen” compilers equally elude us. Nonetheless, the traces of early compositional practices to be found in the received text cannot fail to interest us. My goal in this essay is to explore the issue of textual composition in the “Jing shen” at the microlevel to open a discussion about larger questions: How did the Western Han compilers of the Huainanzi chapters construct compel- ling arguments on the basis of earlier traditions, including the and parts of the , apparently.3 And how did people of the time listen to and expect to receive texts (oral or transcribed)? Also can one easily understand the principal subject of the chapter, the therapeutic value of ‘nourishing the [regulating] xin 心,’ by reference to the terms familiar from TCM (the modern version of traditional Chinese medicine), which defines jing 精 or jingshen 精 神 as ‘refined and distilled 氣’? Modern readers are invited to take away five points from this essay, the first deconstructive and the last four constructive. First, the standard translations of some particles that function as logical connectives often do not work well when translating texts from classical Chinese into English. Second, we can learn quite a bit about reading and writing practices in early China if we pay closer attention to the construction of an argument, as well as its exact word- ing and word order. Third, citation practices in the text, including the absence of citation markers such as yue 曰 or yun 云, should interest students of the preprinting era. Fourth, logical connections are often established in early per- formance texts, such as the Huainanzi, through a variety of methods other than logical deduction, for example, the repetition of word clusters, adherence to a common theme, the frequent citation of well-known stories from the past whose import is widely accepted, and the dramatic resort to rhetorical ques- tions. Fifth, much of the difficulty in interpreting the “Jing shen” chapter stems from the general assumption that its text must ‘fit’ cosmological and medical

3 The borrowings are taken principally, apparently, from the “Jiu shou” 九守 chapter of the Wenzi, the Lüshi chunqiu, and seven chapters of the Zhuangzi, as noted in Yang Shuda 楊 樹達, Huainanzi zhengwen 證聞 (Beijing: Zhongguo kexueyuan, 1953), juan 3, pp. 43–50. That the Huainanzi borrows from the Zhuangzi (rather than the reverse) seems clear, as the Huainanzi consistently provides abbreviated versions of the Zhuangzi passages. It is possible, of course, that both the Huainanzi and either the Wenzi or the Zhuangzi borrow from a third early source (no longer extant), but that possibility seems less strong now that we have an excavated text of the Wenzi that dates to the pre-Qin period. For further information, see Paul van Els, “The Wenzi: Creation and Manipulation of a Chinese Philosophical Text” (PhD diss., Leiden University, 2006). The original excavation report is Wenwu 1995.12, 27–40.