The Sociology of Philosophies

(Wang) #1

though they built on the philosophical texts that we may call the Taoist
tendency within the late Warring States period. This was a community of
textual scholars who revived much of the full range of texts as of about 250
b.c.e., and went on to develop them on an intellectual plane. It is as if these
thinkers picked up where the intellectual community left off its internal dis-
cussions, before the Ch’in and Han states narrowed the issues down to religious
and occultist themes appealing to lay politicians. The purest intellectuals of the
Han, the Old Text school, had been able to do little more than keep up an
ideal of scholarship and skepticism. Now, as an untrammeled intellectual
community formed again, metaphysical and epistemological dimensions were
explored in their own right as never before.
The “Taoist” philosophical classics became central for this group because
they were a springboard for metaphysical discussion. There is some resonance
between the older tradition of withdrawal and nature primitivism and the
aesthetic hedonism of the Seven Sages type (although there is reason to suspect
that they were not as anti-political as the ideology makes them out to be). The
metaphysics of the “Dark Learning,” by contrast, was largely formed in
opposition to mysticism. Wang Pi, Hsiang Hsiu, and Kuo Hsiang all declared
that Confucius was a greater sage than Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu—because he
never talked about non-being but manifested it in action (Fung, 1952–53:
170–173). Ho Yen and Wang Pi interpreted the Confucian classics in Taoist
terminology, and Hsiang Hsiu and Kuo Hsiang interpreted the Chuang Tzu in
a Confucian spirit. All these men were government officials, pursuing a syn-
thesis of rationalistic Confucianism with the classic Taoist philosophers. Their
work exemplifies the creativity of structural realignment, in which the effort
to combine positions seriously defended in the intellectual world forced them
to develop new levels of conception.
The last of the group, Kuo Hsiang (fl. 290–310), takes this the furthest.^20
For him the nature of the universe is change; hence it is foolish to worship the
doctrines of the past, such as Confucian ceremonies which no longer meet the
needs of the time. Kuo attacks religious beliefs in a creator, as well as the search
for magical methods of prolonging life, and even the practice of meditation,
declaring that the sage is not one who “folds his arms and sits in silence in the
midst of some mountain forest” (Chan, 1963: 327). Kuo instead is a naturalist.
Tao now gives way as a ruling principle to nature (tzu-jan), a spontaneously
developing principle immanent within things themselves. Moreover, Kuo does
not stand pat with the stance of the Dark Learning of the previous generation.
Philosophical arguments were reaching a new level of acuteness: ontological
claims were no longer merely asserted but were being scrutinized in terms of
a newly developing standard of logical analysis.
Kuo attacks Wang Pi’s doctrine that being comes from an original substance


Innovation by Opposition: Ancient China^ •^173
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