CHAPTER 4
£Innovation by Opposition:
Ancient China
As we turn from Greece to China, it is tempting to indulge in visual insights
about the “spirit of the place.” Some have found the lucid rationality of the
Greeks a mirror of the pure light and clear skies of the Mediterranean. Chinese
philosophy has seemed filled with a spirit like the crooked shapes of tree
branches looming through the mountain mist in the paintings of Ma Yüan or
Shên Chou. This resonance with the landscape is our self-imposed illusion. The
golden sunlight beat down on the blue Mediterranean in late antiquity as it
did in the classic epoch; only philosophy had moved indoors to temple rooms
filled with the smoke of idols delivering messages from demons and gods. The
change convinced Spengler that the geometric space of the classic Greeks had
given way to a Magian-Gnostic vision of the cosmos trapped inside a cavern.
Yet it was Plotinus at Rome and Proclus at Athens who epitomized this interior
atmosphere, while outdoors they still strolled the marble colonnades. What
had arisen was an inability to see things any longer in the clear sunlight, just
as it was the rise of Buddhist and Taoist movements that shaped the way
Chinese painters came to present their environment.
Ancient China illustrates a principle of worldwide application. Intellectual
creativity is driven by opposition. Philosophical positions develop by taking
one another as foils. The attention space is shaped by arguments, not by
resolutions. It is when the oppositions come to an end, when Chinese philoso-
phy settles into a period of hegemonic consensus, that creativity freezes. This
is not only an application of the formal sociological point that creative leaders
appear simultaneously, dividing the field under the law of small numbers. The
contents of philosophical ideas are also made up by the pattern of oppositions.
The Sequence of Oppositions in Ancient China
Chinese philosophy begins in dispersion and conflict. Confucius and his fol-
lowers sprang up around 500 b.c.e. in conscious opposition to existing politi-
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