Mind and Body in Early China critiques Orientalist accounts of early China as a radical "holistic" other, which saw no qualitative difference between mind and body. Drawing on knowledge and techniques from the sciences and digital humanities, Edward Slingerland demonstrates that seeing a difference between mind and body is a psychological universal, and that human sociality would be fundamentally impossible without it. This book has implications for anyone interested in comparative religion, early China, cultural (...) studies, digital humanities, or science-humanities integration. (shrink)

Western scholarship on early Chinese thought has tended to either dismiss the foundational role of metaphor or to see it as a uniquely Chinese mode of apprehending the world. This article argues that, while human cognition is in fact profoundly dependent on imagistic conceptual structures, such dependence is by no means a unique feature of Chinese thought. The article reviews empirical evidence supporting the claims that human thought is fundamentally imagistic; that sensorimotor schemas are often used to structure our (...) understanding of abstract concepts; that these schemas can be selectively combined to result in novel structures; and that there are inextricable connections between body, emotion, and thought in both everyday and philosophical cognition. It also provides a review of a recent trend where, explicitly or not, scholars from a variety of backgrounds have begun to take metaphor more seriously as a foundational bearer of philosophical meaning in early China. (shrink)

Early Chinese thought enjoys a wide appeal, in the scholarly world as much as elsewhere, as people are keen on learning about the ideas of Confucius, Mencius, and other thinkers whose views have shaped traditional Chinese culture. In the study of early Chinese thought, emphasis has long been on what thinkers said, not on how they proffered their views. Even studies that do consider the how, tend to focus on logic and argumentation, rather than rhetoric. Fortunately, in the (...) past few decades growing attention has been paid to Chinese rhetoric which has led to an impressive number of publications. This work briefly outlines rhetoric in the West and in China. (shrink)

This paper introduces the first English-language book-length study to focus on the rhetorical function of anecdotal narratives across several literary genres of early China. In this volume we seek to clarify the nature and function of early Chinese anecdotes by raising the following questions: What are their characteristic features? What are their generic boundaries, that is to say, how do they relate to other types of narrative? What degree of historical authenticity do they display? How malleable were (...) the stories? What different framing techniques did authors use to fit stock anecdotes into larger narrative contexts? What was the rhetorical power of anecdotes when used in argumentation? How does the early Chinese preference for using anecdotes in argumentation differ from modes of argumentation preferred in other eras and cultures? In addressing these and other questions, this book will advance the idea that anecdotes were an essential rhetorical tool that early Chinese writers used effectively to persuade their audience of one or another point of view. (shrink)

The turn to descriptive studies of ethics is inspired by the sense that our ethical theorizing needs to engage ethnography, history, and literature in order to address the full complexity of ethical life. This article examines four books that describe the cultivation of virtue in diverse cultural contexts, two concerning early China and two concerning Islam in recent years. All four emphasize the significance of embodiment, and they attend to the complex ways in which choice and agency interact (...) with the authority of tradition. In considering these books, this article examines the relations between our academic claims concerning the self and ethics, conceptual or theoretical claims made in the elite writings of traditions, and the lived experiences of the people we study. The conclusion turns to our methodological foundations for studying these topics both comparatively and constructively. (shrink)

Ethics in Early China: An Anthology is a major contribution to the philosophical study of early Chinese ethics and comparative ethics by a collection of some of the most distinguished scholars in these fields. This anthology honors Professor Chad Hansen's many and important contributions to the study of Chinese philosophy, but the work is not a festschrift per se. Instead of discussing the honoree's oeuvre in a collection of essays, these new, innovative, and outstanding writings engage, bear (...) upon, develop, and contend with important themes in Hansen's work, including, for example, Hansen's provocative interpretations of the meanings of dao 道 and de 德 in early Chinese sources, his analysis of the action-guiding .. (shrink)

Introduction: On the Huang-Lao tradition of Daoist thought. Looking at the basic characteristics of Huang-Lao Daoism -- Reviewing past research and looking to the future -- How does the idea of a "Huang-Lao Daoist" school stand up to scrutiny? -- A brief introduction to the contents of this book -- Conclusions -- Huang-Lao Daoism research in light of excavated texts. Introduction -- Two types of theories regarding Dao and governance in the Huangdi Sijing -- Early Huang-Lao thought in bamboo (...) manuscripts from the ancient state of Chu -- Conclusions -- Huang-Lao thought and folk techniques and calculations: using clues from excavated texts. A look back at previous studies -- Techniques and calculations in textual images of the Yellow Emperor -- The relationships between the concepts of "forms and names" and "forms/punishment and virtue/bounty" and techniques and calculations -- Linguistic characteristics of techniques and calculations in Huang-Lao texts -- Conclusion -- The literary structure and characteristics of the thought in the bamboo manuscript known as All Things Flow into Forms (Fanwu Liuxing). Introduction -- The literary structure of the Fanwu Liuxing -- The characteristics of thought in the Fanwu Liuxing -- Some last observations -- From auto-creation to autonomy: an analysis of political philosophy in the Hengxian. Introduction -- Past research -- Self-generation from Pre-Qin, throughout Qin to the Han dynasties -- The parallel between the sections of the Hengxian -- Concluding remarks -- The idea of names or naming as one of the key concepts in the Huangdi Sijing: discussing the relationship between the concepts of the schools of Dao, names and legality. Preface -- The kinds of names seen in the Huangdi Sijing -- Surveying names in the Huangdi Sijing -- The relationship between ruler and names -- The relationship between names and law -- Conclusion. (shrink)

Mind and Body in Early China: Beyond Orientalism and the Myth of Holism. By Edward Slingerland. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv + 385. $35.

The turn to descriptive studies of ethics is inspired by the sense that our ethical theorizing needs to engage ethnography, history, and literature in order to address the full complexity of ethical life. This article examines four books that describe the cultivation of virtue in diverse cultural contexts, two concerning early China and two concerning Islam in recent years. All four emphasize the significance of embodiment, and they attend to the complex ways in which choice and agency interact (...) with the authority of tradition. In considering these books, this article examines the relations between our academic claims concerning the self and ethics, conceptual or theoretical claims made in the elite writings of traditions, and the lived experiences of the people we study. The conclusion turns to our methodological foundations for studying these topics both comparatively and constructively. (shrink)

An innovative work for its time, the text remains a critical tool for mapping women’s social, political, and domestic roles at a formative time in China’s development.

A new translation of Liu Xiang’s 劉向 Lienü zhuan 列女傳 is long overdue.1 And most of the translation by Anne Behnke Kinney, Exemplary Women of Early China: The Lienü Zhuan of Liu Xiang, is very well done indeed. At the same time, Kinney has made a series of odd and clearly intentional choices when translating the classic, choices worth querying. Most importantly, she insists on translating the classic as if it directly addressed its readers, even if this insistence (...) rides roughshod over the language used in the text, and flies in the face of the early evidence about both the composition of the text and the literary outputs of the woman, Ban Zhao 班昭.. (shrink)

This book aims to rectify this imbalance by including essays on Daoism and Confucianism, early Chinese moral psychology including widely neglected views of the Mohists and newly reconstructed accounts of the "embodied virtue" tradition, ...

This essay explores a call for non-action in certain ancient Chinese texts that, contrary to expectation, implicitly upholds definitions of action that are comparable to Western understandings of the term. The call for non-action in ancient Chinese texts differs significantly, however, from what Western theorists usually define as legitimate, agent-led action through its negation of viewing means-end calculations as the basis of action. Closer analysis of such formulations on non-action reveal that that there is room for a broader definition in (...) action theory of what constitutes a coherent, unified, creative agent. (shrink)

An introduction to ancient Chinese ideas on how to live a good life.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Writing and Authority in Early ChinaLothar von FalkenhausenWriting and Authority in Early China. By Mark Edward Lewis. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Pp. vii + 544. Hardcover $92.50. Paper $31.95.Writing and Authority in Early China is a forceful and sparklingly original work in which Mark Edward Lewis explores the role of writing and texts in the transformation of political authority (...) during the Warring States, Qin, and Western Han periods. Following in the footsteps of the author's well-received first book1 and his magisterial contribution to the Cambridge History of Ancient China,2Writing and Authority establishes Lewis as the premier Western historian of the crucial centuries surrounding the unification of China under a centrally administered empire in 221 B.C. The book's complex, comprehensive, and coherent argument is informed by a variety of Western theoretical approaches, but it principally emanates from a close reading of the full record of transmitted texts and recently excavated manuscripts on [End Page 127] bamboo or wooden slips. The inclusion of the latter class of sources, beset with treacherous problems of decipherment, is still unusual in mainstream sinological scholarship and indicates the author's supreme confidence in his philological skills. With a firm hand, undaunted by the multifarious nature of his materials, Lewis guides the reader to some fundamental themes in recent sinology, opening manifold novel perspectives along the way. Even when dealing with well-known texts, he often proposes striking reinterpretations.In his Introduction, Lewis enumerates six main functions of writing in ancient China: enforcing state authority; creating text-based communities and "public spheres"; transcending the confines of space, time, and human mortality; fashioning figures of authority in the past; standardizing specialized technical terminology; and encrypting secret meanings. In Lewis' own words, "the culminating role of writing in the period, and the key to its importance in imperial China, was the creation of parallel realities within texts that claimed to depict the entire world" (p. 4). This ultimately led to the formation of the Confucian canon as a "textual double of the polity" that could survive cataclysmic changes of regimes.In chapter 1, "Writing the State," Lewis points out that before the Warring States period Chinese writing occurred exclusively in religious contexts. After circa 500 B.C., written documents gradually came to be used in the administration of government and trade. Both in their details of formulation and in the implication that anything committed to writing was thereby supernaturally validated, these new types of documents exhibit pervasive continuity with the earlier kinds of texts used in ritual communication with the ancestral spirits. Such continuity is also reflected in the rise of religious beliefs in a netherworld governed by a bureaucratic hierarchy and administrative processes parallel to those of the world of the living. According to Lewis, "the most important modification in the shift to an administrative polity [in the Warring States] was the extension of writing to new elements of the population. The attributes of the Zhou nobility... were transferred to the common people in the administrative documents of the new state. This widening range of inscription into the state order altered the social meaning of being recorded from a sign of power to one of subjection" (p. 13).Warring States rulers were cast in the role not of the authors of texts but of the authority behind them. Administrative and legal texts were concerned, ultimately, with the proper naming of phenomena, a process that had to adapt itself continually to the changes of the times. The authority of rulers came to encompass both human society and the natural world. "Whereas local and central administration were largely created through reworking and rewriting the ritual bases of the old Zhou order by means of a rationalizing cosmology, the re-invention of rulership drew on the contemporary religious realm and what is sometimes described as shamanism to provide images of cosmic power" (p. 42). Lewis illustrates the mechanics for applying these universal principles of rulership by a comprehensive analysis of the Zhou li (or Zhou guan), emphasizing the cosmological arrangement of the ideal government described therein and the dual administrative and religious dimensions of... (shrink)

As part of a trend in modern cognitive science, cognitive linguist, George Lakoff, and philosopher, Mark Johnson claim to provide a biologically-based account of subsymbolic meaningful experiences. They argue that human beings understand objects by extrapolating from their sensory motor activities and primary perceptions. Lakoff and Johnson’s writings have generated a good deal of interest among scholars of Early China because they maintain that “our common embodiment allows for common stable truths.” Although there are many grounds on which (...) Lakoff and Johnson’s theories have been criticized, this essay focuses in particular on problems related to their schema of Self as Container. Lakoff and Johnson contend that there are no pure experiences outside of culture, while nevertheless arguing that the experience of being a closed-off container is “direct.” “The concepts OBJECT, SUBSTANCE and CONTAINER emerge directly,” they write. “We experience ourselves as entities, separate from the rest of the world—as containers with an inside and an outside.” By “emerge directly,” they do not mean emerging free of culture, but rather that some experiences within culture, specifically physical experiences, are more directly given than others. My study explores the pitfalls of presuming the “direct” experience of containment makes good sense of texts from Early China (ca. 500–100 B.C.E). (shrink)

What is unique about China is the agreement on all sides that men are naturally equal. This is the second of our two central themes. ...

In this book, Edward Slingerland criticizes and rejects a pervasive and widely accepted viewpoint in Chinese philosophy: holism. Simply speaking, holism is a non-discrete and non-analytic pattern of thinking that avoids the adoption of mutually exclusive and dualistic concepts such as mind-body, theory-practice, reason-emotion, and macrocosm-microcosm typically found in many Western philosophical theories. In the context of Chinese philosophy, it is understood as an interpretational framework where Chinese philosophy is characterized as a fundamentally and essentially non-dualistic system of thought. According (...) to Slingerland, holism is not simply one of the characteristics of Chinese philosophy but a deeply rooted... (shrink)

Classicists have long been wary of comparisons, partly for ideological reasons related to the incomparability of ‘the Classical’, partly because of the often problematic basis and limited illumination afforded by such efforts as have been made: the -reception of the work of the Cambridge ritualists — such as J.G. Frazer and Jane Harrison — is a case in point in both respects. Interestingly, even the specifically comparative interests of the much more rigorous projects of the Paris School, at the Centre (...) Louis Gernet, have not had much resonance outside France, notwithstanding the enormous influence of their work concerning purely Greek subject matter. In part, perhaps, this was a result of the shift from Vernant's originally Marxist framework, in which societies were comparable in terms of an evolutionary sociological scheme, to a structuralist one, entailing an emphasis on the uniqueness of different cultural traditions. The emphasis on the uniqueness of the Classical world was only reinforced by post-structuralism and post-modernism, which in their strongest forms suggested that cultures, like languages, were fundamentally incommensurable, and thus not accessible to outsider knowledge, let alone comparable. Indeed, so virulent was the post-structuralist virus that disciplines to which we might have expected to be able to turn for guidance, like comparative religion, are only now recovering the courage ‘to compare religious phenomena, theologies or artefacts outside of footnotes or less heavily policed epilogues’. (shrink)

This volume is the result of a three-year collaboration (funded by the American Council of Learned Societies and the British Academy) between scholars of early China and of ancient/Hellenistic Greece to investigate the emergent discourses of emotions in philosophy, medicine, and literature from around the fifth century BCE to the second century CE. It brings together scholars working on the history and philosophy of emotions in the two ancient traditions, and with different areas of expertise, to investigate the (...) emotions and their conceptualization at a crucial period in the cultural and intellectual development of both cultures. The project was motivated by a desire to make an intervention in the existing scholarship on emotions in both fields, which stands to benefit from a greater methodological self-awareness about the category of emotions and the kinds of commitments it entails. The volume aims to explore how the tools of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary investigation might be deployed to advance our understanding of the emotions in the two ancient societies and to use that understanding as a contribution to current research on the emotions more generally. (shrink)

This wide-ranging book reconstructs this debate and places within their contemporary contexts the rival claims concerning the nature of the cosmos and the ...

Review of Individualism in Early China: Human Agency and the Self in Thought and Politics by Erica Fox Brindley.

This book rewrites the story of classical Chinese philosophy, which has always been considered the single most creative and vibrant chapter in the history of Chinese philosophy. Works attributed to Confucius, Mozi, Mencius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Xunzi, Han Feizi and many others represent the very origins of moral and political thinking in China. As testimony to their enduring stature, in recent decades many Chinese intellectuals, and even leading politicians, have turned to those classics, especially Confucian texts, for alternative or complementary (...) sources of moral authority and political legitimacy. Therefore, philosophical inquiries into core normative values embedded in those classical texts are crucial to the ongoing scholarly discussion about China as China turns more culturally inward. It can also contribute to the spirited contemporary debate about the nature of philosophical reasoning, especially in the non-Western traditions. -/- This book offers a new narrative and interpretative framework about the origins of moral-political philosophy that tracks how the three normative values, humaneness, justice, and personal freedom, were formulated, reformulated, and contested by early Chinese philosophers in their effort to negotiate the relationship among three distinct domains, the personal, the familial, and the political. Such efforts took place as those thinkers were reimagining a new moral-political order, debating its guiding norms, and exploring possible sources within the context of an evolving understanding of Heaven and its relationship with the humans. Tao Jiang argues that the competing visions in that debate can be characterized as a contestation between partialist humaneness and impartialist justice as the guiding norm for the newly imagined moral-political order, with the Confucians, the Mohists, the Laoists, and the so-called fajia thinkers being the major participants, constituting the mainstream philosophical project during this period. Thinkers lined up differently along the justice-humaneness spectrum with earlier ones maintaining some continuity between the two normative values (or at least trying to accommodate both to some extent) while later ones leaning more toward their exclusivity in the political/public domain. Zhuangzi and the Zhuangists were the outliers of the mainstream moral-political debate who rejected the very parameter of humaneness versus justice in that discourse. They were a lone voice advocating personal freedom, but the Zhuangist expressions of freedom were self-restricted to the margins of the political world and the interiority of one's heartmind. Such a take can shed new light on how the Zhuangist approach to personal freedom would profoundly impact the development of this idea in pre-modern Chinese political and intellectual history. (shrink)

Named for the famous Chinese minister of state, Guan Zhong, the Guanzi is one of the largest collections of ancient Chinese writings still in existence. With this volume, W. Allyn Rickett completes the first full translation of the Guanzi into English. This represents a truly monumental effort, as the Guanzi is a long and notoriously difficult work. It was compiled in its present form about 26 B.C. by the Han dynasty scholar Liu Xiang and the surviving text consists of some (...) seventy-six anonymous essays dating from the fifth century B.C. to the first century B.C.The forty-two chapters contained in this volume include several which present Daoist theories concerning self-cultivation and the relationship between the body and mind as well as the development of Huang-Lao political and economic thought. The "Dizi zhi" chapter provides one of the oldest discussions of education in China. The "Shui di" chapter refers to the circulation of blood some two thousand years before the discoveries of William Harvey in the West. Other chapters deal with various aspects of statecraft, Yin-Yang and Five Phases thought, folk beliefs, seasonal calendars, and farming. Perhaps the best-known chapters are those that deal with various methods of controlling and stimulating the economy. They constitute one of the world's earliest presentations of a quantity theory of money. Throughout the text, Rickett provides extensive notes. He also supplies an introduction to the volume and a comprehensive index. (shrink)

This essay depicts the emergence of the notion of predetermined fate in early China by focusing on the changing meaning of the word ming 命. Many scholars have long interpreted the term ming in the Lunyu 論語 as a kind of inevitable fate, but I show that it is still subject to change depending on the will of an anthropomorphic Heaven. In the Warring States period, however, Heaven became increasingly conceived as following fixed patterns in its behavior, and (...) the growing belief in the validity of these patterns lead to the idea that the course of the future is more or less fixed and predictable. I argue that the idea of predetermined and predictable ming was a result of these changed conceptions of Heaven and the future. (shrink)

Through close readings of excavated texts from Guōdiàn, this book provides a comprehensive analysis of the way in which meaning is produced in early Chinese philosophical texts. It is the first book on early China to cast light on the relationship between material conditions and ideas and shows how, in an evolving manuscript culture, texts were used by different social groups.

_Ideology of Power and Power of Ideology in Early China_ explores Chinese political thought during the centuries surrounding the formation of the empire in 221 BCE, examining devices of legitimation, views of rulers and ministers, economic thought, and administrative practices.

The articles in this volume present an important selection of Jao Tsung-i's research in the field of the early Chinese intellectual tradition, especially as concerns the question of the conditio humana. Whether his focus is on myth, religion, philosophy or morals, Jao constantly aims at describing the Chinese version of a series of developments that are broadly associated with the Axial Age in the study of the ancient world in general. He is particularly interested in showing how early (...) China had developed its own notion of transcendence as well as a system of prediction and morals that allowed man to act on his own account, without having to rely on divine providence. (shrink)

Challenges the idea held by many prominent twentieth-century Sinologists that early China experienced a “language crisis.” Jane Geaney argues that early Chinese conceptions of speech and naming cannot be properly understood if viewed through the dominant Western philosophical tradition in which language is framed through dualisms that are based on hierarchies of speech and writing, such as reality/appearance and one/many. Instead, early Chinese texts repeatedly create pairings of sounds and various visible things. This aural/visual polarity suggests (...) that texts from early China treat speech as a bodily practice that is not detachable from its use in everyday experience. Firmly grounded in ideas about bodies from the early texts themselves, Geaney’s interpretation offers new insights into three key themes in these texts: the notion of speakers’ intentions (yi), the physical process of emulating exemplary people, and Confucius’s proposal to rectify names (zhengming). Jane Geaney is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Richmond and the author of On the Epistemology of the Senses in Early Chinese Thought. (shrink)

Exemplary Women of Early China: The “Lienü zhuan” of Liu Xiang. Translated and edited by Anne Behnke Kinney. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Pp. lvi + 323. $105 ; $35.

Early Chinese texts make us witnesses to debates about the power, or lack thereof, that humans had over the course of events, the outcomes of their actions, and their own lives. In the midst of these discourses on the limits of the efficacy of human agency, the notion of ming 命 took a central position. In this article, I present a common pattern of thinking about the relationship between the person and the world in early China. I (...) call it the reifying pattern because it consisted in thinking about ming as a hypostasized entity with object-like features. Although external and independent, ming was not endowed with human qualities such as the capacities for empathy, responsivity, and intersubjectivity. The reification of fate implied an understanding of ming as an external, amoral, and determining force that limited humans without accepting intercommunication with them, thereby causing feelings of alienation, powerlessness, and existential incompetence. I first show that the different meanings of ming hold a sense of prevailing external reality, and hence can be connected to the overarching meaning of fate. Then, I offer an account of the process of reification of fate in early China and its consequences, theoretical and practical, through cases study of received (Mengzi 孟子) and found (Tang Yu zhi dao 唐虞之道) texts. I end with some reflections on the implications of ming as a nonpersonal and nonsubjective type of actor for both early Chinese and twenty-first-century accounts of agency. (shrink)

Literary Forms of Argument in Early China examines the functions of rhetorical markers and devices as well as the patterns and larger modes structuring various styles of early Chinese argumentation. The nine contributors to the volume each present tight analyses of specific compositional or literary aspects of persuasion, hoping to demonstrate how an unabashed focus on the formal elements of philosophical writing might come to the aid of, or even more drastically alter and transform, philosophical interpretation. The (...) volume includes essays by the following nine scholars, who are at once a mixture of philologists, textual and literary specialists, and intellectual historians: Rudolph Wagner, Andrew Plaks, David... (shrink)

We present the first large-scale, quantitative examination of mind and body concepts in a set of historical sources by measuring the predictions of folk mind–body dualism against the surviving textual corpus of pre-Qin (pre-221 BCE) China. Our textual analysis found clear patterns in the historically evolving reference of the word xin (heart/heart–mind): It alone of the organs was regularly contrasted with the physical body, and during the Warring States period it became less associated with emotions and increasingly portrayed as (...) the unique locus of “higher” cognitive abilities. We interpret this as a semantic shift toward a shared cognitive bias in response to a vast and rapid expansion of literacy. Our study helps test the proposed universality of folk dualism, adds a new quantitative approach to the methods used in the humanities, and opens up a new and valuable data source for cognitive scientists: the record of dead minds. (shrink)

Between History and Philosophy is the first book-length study in English to focus on the rhetorical functions and forms of anecdotal narratives in early China. Edited by Paul van Els and Sarah A. Queen, this volume advances the thesis that anecdotes—brief, freestanding accounts of single events involving historical figures, and occasionally also unnamed persons, animals, objects, or abstractions—served as an essential tool of persuasion and meaning-making within larger texts. Contributors to the volume analyze the use of anecdotes from (...) the Warring States Period to the Han Dynasty, including their relations to other types of narrative, their circulation and reception, and their central position as a mode of argumentation in a variety of historical and philosophical literary genres. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Humaneness and Justice in the Analects:On Tao Jiang's Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early ChinaHagop Sarkissian (bio)IntroductionOne of the central themes of Tao Jiang's Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China is the contestation of the values of partialist humaneness and impartialist justice across diverse thinkers and texts throughout the classical period. His departure point is the Analects, which displays a keen awareness of the difficulties (...) in balancing these opposing values. Jiang's analysis of this dynamic is skillful, filled with Sinological detail and philosophical analysis.Here, I hope to add to Jiang's discussion, focusing on two broad points. First, I suggest two different interpretations of Jiang's analysis of ren 仁 as preference for kin in the Analects, and argue that one of these interpretations is more successful than the other. Second, I argue that aligning humaneness with partiality on the one hand, and justice with impartiality on the other, may obscure some of the Analect's views on these topics, even while illuminating others. In particular, I try to argue that justice cannot be understood as consisting of impartiality alone.Humaneness and JusticeJiang provides "thin or baseline definitions" of the key values of humaneness and justice so as to "schematize … competing normative values operative in the moral-political project during the classical period while … leaving room for variations on these broad underlying values among different inherited texts and the thinkers they are attributed to" (p. 35). They are as follows:[H]umaneness is understood in this book as the … natural inclination to be partial toward those who are close to us, especially our family/kin members; justice is defined here as … our exercise of impartial judgment on the merits of persons and states of affairs, especially in lieu of articulated and publicized standards and codes, irrespective of their relations to us. In other words, humaneness is partialist in nature, whereas justice is impartialist. Humaneness is understood in relational terms, whereas justice is non-relational by contrast. More importantly, precisely because of the relational nature of humaneness, [End Page 429] agent and recipient cannot be switched or substituted, whereas in justice agent and recipient are switchable and substitutable.This framework is fruitful, allowing Jiang to draw connections across texts and thinkers, highlighting aspects of the debates that too often remain hidden from view. His detailed analyses of concepts such as xiao (filial piety), jianai (impartial care), fa (objective standards), tian (Heaven), and shu (conscientious perspective taking) show how they relate to these overarching values. The schematization works, and the book repays careful reading.There are also points, however, where the alignment of humaneness with partiality on the one hand, and justice with impartiality on the other, can lead those familiar with these texts to wonder whether the presentation has, as a result, oversimplified some complex issues. I discuss two of these in what follows.Ren and PartialityJiang claims that the concept of ren in the Analects has two components or elements to it. As he puts it,[T]he way ren is articulated by Confucius, it contains both a partialist element favoring one's family and an impartialist element when dealing with others. … To put it in terms of the central terminologies employed in this book, ren in the Analects is a comprehensive category that contains the elements of both humaneness and justice.Jiang 2021, p. 53)Jiang's analysis of ren in terms of impartiality is compelling, so I will focus on the other half of the analysis—specifically, the claim that the concept of ren itself is partialistic (or, more accurately, has a notable partialist element). This claim may surprise some readers. For example, ren has often been contrasted with the partialistic xiao (filial piety) as the more impartial, public-facing virtue in Confucianism. Indeed, this contrast has been the focus of a strenuous and strident debate in Confucian ethics in modern times (see, e.g., Guo 2007; Guo 2004; Liu 2003), and has a pedigree going at least as far back as the Hou Hanshu (Chan 2004). However, such debates span multiple texts and thinkers in the Confucian tradition. We can still ask the more pointed... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Writing and Authority in Early ChinaLothar von FalkenhausenWriting and Authority in Early China. By Mark Edward Lewis. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Pp. vii + 544. Hardcover $92.50. Paper $31.95.Writing and Authority in Early China is a forceful and sparklingly original work in which Mark Edward Lewis explores the role of writing and texts in the transformation of political authority (...) during the Warring States, Qin, and Western Han periods. Following in the footsteps of the author's well-received first book1 and his magisterial contribution to the Cambridge History of Ancient China,2Writing and Authority establishes Lewis as the premier Western historian of the crucial centuries surrounding the unification of China under a centrally administered empire in 221 B.C. The book's complex, comprehensive, and coherent argument is informed by a variety of Western theoretical approaches, but it principally emanates from a close reading of the full record of transmitted texts and recently excavated manuscripts on [End Page 127] bamboo or wooden slips. The inclusion of the latter class of sources, beset with treacherous problems of decipherment, is still unusual in mainstream sinological scholarship and indicates the author's supreme confidence in his philological skills. With a firm hand, undaunted by the multifarious nature of his materials, Lewis guides the reader to some fundamental themes in recent sinology, opening manifold novel perspectives along the way. Even when dealing with well-known texts, he often proposes striking reinterpretations.In his Introduction, Lewis enumerates six main functions of writing in ancient China: enforcing state authority; creating text-based communities and "public spheres"; transcending the confines of space, time, and human mortality; fashioning figures of authority in the past; standardizing specialized technical terminology; and encrypting secret meanings. In Lewis' own words, "the culminating role of writing in the period, and the key to its importance in imperial China, was the creation of parallel realities within texts that claimed to depict the entire world" (p. 4). This ultimately led to the formation of the Confucian canon as a "textual double of the polity" that could survive cataclysmic changes of regimes.In chapter 1, "Writing the State," Lewis points out that before the Warring States period Chinese writing occurred exclusively in religious contexts. After circa 500 B.C., written documents gradually came to be used in the administration of government and trade. Both in their details of formulation and in the implication that anything committed to writing was thereby supernaturally validated, these new types of documents exhibit pervasive continuity with the earlier kinds of texts used in ritual communication with the ancestral spirits. Such continuity is also reflected in the rise of religious beliefs in a netherworld governed by a bureaucratic hierarchy and administrative processes parallel to those of the world of the living. According to Lewis, "the most important modification in the shift to an administrative polity [in the Warring States] was the extension of writing to new elements of the population. The attributes of the Zhou nobility... were transferred to the common people in the administrative documents of the new state. This widening range of inscription into the state order altered the social meaning of being recorded from a sign of power to one of subjection" (p. 13).Warring States rulers were cast in the role not of the authors of texts but of the authority behind them. Administrative and legal texts were concerned, ultimately, with the proper naming of phenomena, a process that had to adapt itself continually to the changes of the times. The authority of rulers came to encompass both human society and the natural world. "Whereas local and central administration were largely created through reworking and rewriting the ritual bases of the old Zhou order by means of a rationalizing cosmology, the re-invention of rulership drew on the contemporary religious realm and what is sometimes described as shamanism to provide images of cosmic power" (p. 42). Lewis illustrates the mechanics for applying these universal principles of rulership by a comprehensive analysis of the Zhou li (or Zhou guan), emphasizing the cosmological arrangement of the ideal government described therein and the dual administrative and religious dimensions of... (shrink)

Ideology of Power and Power of Ideology in Early China. Edited by Yuri Pines, Paul R. Goldin, and Martin Kern. Sinica Leidensia, vol. 124. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Pp. viii + 348. €120, $152.