from the generation of the Sophists on. In both places cosmopolitan and
competitive networks broke through into abstract self-reflection.Originating Structures of Philosophy in China and Greece
The substantive contents of philosophy are different in China and Greece; the
similarities are at the level of the network structure. In both the law of small
numbers was operative early, as multiple factions emerged to fill the new
intellectual attention space. In both cases the precipitating conditions involved
political pluralism, the cosmopolitanism of commercial development and liter-
acy, and a breakdown of traditional religious practices.
For the Greeks, cosmological doctrines first became the object of attention;
the nature of the gods was considered, and the search was launched for the
constitutive elements of the physical universe. For the Chinese, naturalistic or
proto-metaphysical questions took a back seat initially to political and ethical
questions. Even when the intellectual community became more self-reflective,
Chinese philosophers built on the cultural capital already accumulated along
these lines. The Chinese entry point to metaphysical abstraction was the
question of human nature: whether it is selfish and asocial (as apparently in
Yang Chu), naturally benevolent and therefore socially responsible (in Men-
cius), or naturally evil and in need of control by rites (Hsün Tzu) or coercion
by laws (the Legalists). Even the development of a mystical cosmology in
Chuang Tzu and the Tao Te Ching was largely connected to questions of
whether to withdraw from civilized society; in the twist associated with “Lao
Tzu” at the time of the Legalists, withdrawal was made the essence of social
responsibility through the claim that the magical sage-king can order human
society through perfect quiescence. The nearest parallel to the Greek cosmology
of elements emerged late, with the Yin-Yang and Five Processes doctrines of
Tsou Yen (270 b.c.e.), and these too were connected with political questions
of the rise and fall of dynasties.
In Greece, philosophical contents went through almost the reverse devel-
opment, issues of ethics coming to the fore only after the intellectual commu-
nity acquired an internal density and hence a push to higher levels of abstract
self-reflection. Although the physis-nomos debate among the Sophists is some-
thing like the issue raised by Yang Chu, the question of human nature was
never the focus of debate in Greece as it was in China. There is a rough
equivalence between the continua of positions in each place. But the conven-
tional political participation extolled by Aristotle and the Stoics falls far short
of the worship of ritual and tradition which anchored the conservative end of
the spectrum in China. Toward the other end, the withdrawal into ataraxeia
counseled by Epicureans and Skeptics did not take on the mystical and magical
146 •^ Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths