The Sociology of Philosophies

(Wang) #1

the upper limit of the law of small numbers was being severely strained by
around 300 b.c.e. In both cases we see a period of confident fractionalizers,
pouring into a newly opened space for abstract considerations, taking up
extreme positions and disdaining compromise with rivals. This is noticeable
among the Mohists of the time: the most tightly disciplined group of its day,
it nevertheless had split into three factions (Chuang Tzu, chap. 33; Graham,
1978: 22–24). Their disputes included logical and conceptual problems (“dif-
ference and sameness,” “the incompatibility of odd and even”) which they
took seriously enough to call one another heretics. In the generation around
250 b.c.e., the split had been mended by a new synthesis.^9 The great work of
reforming their alliance, the Summa of the Mohist position, was the Canons.
It has the conceptual acuteness, comprehensive scope, and systematization that
are characteristic of creativity in the synthesizing mode. The notion that the
“Chinese mind” is incapable of abstract logical argument is refuted by the
existence of the Canons. This very ideology of interpreting Chinese history
became possible only because realignment in the intellectual networks at the
time of the Han dynasty eliminated the Mohist tradition.
The Canons’ approximate contemporary, the Tao Te Ching, is a synthesis
on the other side of the field. Playing on the same kind of oppositional appeal
as Chuang Tzu, it is a much more unified composition than the compilation
later put together under Chuang’s name. It shows more sophisticated con-
sciousness of its philosophical opponents, turning the tools of the School of
Names into a device for transcending names, and the techniques of argumen-
tative sophistry into substantively meaningful paradox. It is also a political-re-
ligious synthesis, weaving together the older primitivists and anti-ritualists with
the newer themes of occultist direction of the state. But whereas Tsou Yen’s
Yin-Yang school proposed to intervene on the magical-concrete level of divi-
nation, the Tao Te Ching incorporated a more properly religious mysticism
with its sage-ruler emanating cosmic powers, the te of meditative withdrawal.
It is a mark of its synthesizing success that the Tao Te Ching was to become
a favorite of many subsequent factions; even the Legalists in the very next
generation could find a use for it in legitimating the smoothly operating
bureaucratic system of rewards and punishments that would allegedly make
society operate as effortlessly as the tao in nature (Schwartz, 1985: 343–345).
Part of the synthesizing success of the Tao Te Ching is its ability to be read in
so many ways; as Holmes Welch (1965: Foreword) remarked, no translation
can be satisfactory because no translation can be as ambiguous as the original.
It would be inaccurate to say that the author took a preexisting mysticism and
wove other doctrines into it, for it seems clear that there was no explicitly
formulated—and thereby metaphysical—mysticism before this time. A philo-


Innovation by Opposition: Ancient China^ •^151
Free download pdf