connections which we find in the tradition of Chuang Tzu and incipient
Taoism; nor do we find Chinese debates over hedonistic suicide comparable to
those of the Cyrenaic school. By contrast, ethical debates in Greek philosophy
(at least until the time of the religious movements of late antiquity) covered a
narrower territory; from the Cynics and Stoics onwards, the issue was the
purity of the ideal of goodness and how much compromise there should be
with worldly and sensual goods—a spectrum of argument that never greatly
concerned the Chinese.
The underlying condition has to do with the different ways external politi-
cal conditions shaped the starting points for the contents of philosophical
discussion. In Greece the state cults under the leadership of priest-kings were
undercut by the democratic revolutions between 700 and 500 b.c.e. The civic
cults remained, though manned by citizens as part of their political duties, with
little or no influence by a class of professional priests (Burkert, 1985; Bryant,
1996).^6 The volatility of military power among the numerous city-states pre-
vented the dominance of any particular state cult over the others. The inability
of the state to monopolize the focus of religious attention was furthered by the
resulting influence of non-state cults; centers such as Delphi, Olympia, and
elsewhere depended on an “international” market of clients and gave consid-
erable attention to private religious concerns (Fontenrose, 1978). For intellec-
tuals in the city-states, career possibilities depended increasingly on the atten-
tion of public audiences. The space of religious cosmologies became an arena
in which secular intellectuals now competed for attention. G. E. R. Lloyd
(1987: 56–70) points to the uniquely Greek combination of “innovations and
egotism” resulting from this struggle for reputation. The pantheon of nature
gods used as initial cultural capital was transmuted into philosophies of cos-
mological elements.
Lacking city-states and democratic revolutions in China, intellectuals were
oriented toward the support of princely patrons. Drawing at first on traditional
cultural capital, scholars made the initial issue restoration of the old state
religious cult; the alternatives ranged from Mohist anti-ritualistic monotheism,
to withdrawal from the state religion entirely, to infusions of peripheral magical
cults as answers to political legitimacy. Since they were appealing directly to
authoritarian regimes, Chinese intellectuals stressed the traditional legitimacy
of the ancient religious cosmologies, and disguised whatever innovations they
made by reading them into ancient texts, even inventing the texts if necessary.
Hence there are no “Presocratic” nature philosophers in China. Explicit philo-
sophical argument was confined to the realm of the newly forming state and
the relation of the individual to it.
For the Greeks, religious legitimation of the state was never a grand issue
to be pursued by abstract philosophy. Community rituals, although all-perva-
Innovation by Opposition: Ancient China^ •^147