APPENDIX 1
£1. The Clustering of Contemporaneous Creativity
Contemporaneous Creativity
The typical pattern throughout world networks is for philosophers of a similar
level of creative eminence to cluster in the same generations. For China, the
main exceptions are the following:
Major Year Secondary
Confucius 480 b.c.e.
450 Tseng Tzu
Mo Ti 420
380 Yang Chu
80 c.e. Wang Ch’ung
950 Ch’en T’uan
1480 Ch’en Hsien-Chang
Wang Yang-ming 1520 Lo Ch’in-shunCases are not counted as mismatches which arise only through arbitrary
placement of borderlines in ranking or between generations.
The most important isolates are the two earliest major philosophers on the
chart, Confucius and Mo Ti, and the last, Wang Yang-ming. These are truly
major figures; especially the first two, whose names dominated Chinese thought
in one case for several thousand years, in the latter case several hundred. But
here we may be victim of a retrospective illusion. As I have discussed in Chapter
4, the philosophical work of these two men was rudimentary; it was their
lineages which gradually built up their towering reputations. Confucius and
Mo Ti are more important as founders of organizations and symbolic figure-
heads than as intellectual creators. Thus in the next generation after Confucius
the most noted name is Tseng Tzu (listed as borderline minor), who is merely
the best remembered of the leaders of some seven or eight organizational
lineages which branched off at that point. Confucius, Tseng Tzu, and the other
minor figures of this time ought to be taken as a movement, none of whose
reputations would have survived without the others.
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