world was in late antiquity;^13 in India, Buddhist Yogacara and Hindu Advaita
Vendanta arose well into the medieval period; in Europe the great idealist
systems spanned the 1780s to the 1920s, building on the technical tools of
earlier generations. This idealist halfway house can be approached from several
directions. The bases of European idealism were religious universities on the
path to secularization; in Greece the idealists were generally moving in the
other direction. The Sung and Ming idealisms emerged in competition with
metaphysical systems dividing the intellectual field, sharing out the ingredients
of rationalistic philosophy and of religious transcendence that were available.
Idealism is of course not the only form of metaphysical abstraction. We
can draw the lesson more generally. It is often asserted that the Chinese
mentality is concrete and practical, with no taste for metaphysics. Yet meta-
physical abstractions were periodically created in China. It is true that early
positions are only ambiguously metaphysical. The Tao Te Ching and the
Chuang Tzu are skewed toward ethics, in the sense of how one should behave
and not behave rather than indicating what exists at higher levels of reflection.
The Tao Te Ching is skeptical rather than constructive; yet its skepticism about
what is nameable is the tool by which it develops its metaphysical implications.
And this is characteristic of metaphysics in general. Higher levels of abstract
reflection are reached by applying epistemological considerations to conceptual
problems. At least this is one route toward metaphysics, prominent in Greek,
Indian, and European philosophy. The issue in China is less the absence of
metaphysics than the rarity of sustained epistemological consideration.
Epistemology becomes a focus when an intellectual community is balanced
in debate, with sufficient continuity across the generations to give rise to
specialization in the techniques of argument. Sophistical debate is a typical first
step toward consideration of epistemology in its own right. Density of the
network structure in the time of the ancient Chi-hsia Academy and rival centers
produced a sophistical epistemology countered by positive assertions about the
conditions of knowledge, themes similar to what emerged in Greece under
comparable conditions. In both cases a variety of positions divided the intel-
lectual field. Metaphysical and epistemological strands in Mencius and Hui
Shih were the setting in which Chuang Tzu created his oppositional stance.
Over the next generations, the opposing epistemologies of the Mohist Canons
and of Kung-sun Lung became the backdrop against which the Tao Te Ching
could proclaim its negative metaphysics. When the destruction of intellectual
networks interrupted further development on the abstract level, philosophical
doctrines during the Han were carried on at a level closer to lay concerns.
When structural conditions were again favorable to skeptical and sophistical
debate, in the brief generations of the Pure Conversation circles of the Three
Kingdoms, abstract philosophy emerged again. The earlier cultural capital was
Revolutions: Buddhist and Neo-Confucian China • 317