ideas were typically circulated in writing. Confucius’ sayings were written
down as the Analects by the generation of his pupils (ca. 470–430 b.c.e.); and
the texts known as the Mo Tzu and the Chuang Tzu clearly came after the
lifetimes of their eponymous authors, although in the case of Chuang Tzu they
certainly include some writing of his own. It is not that these thinkers claimed
to teach only orally. Confucius is credited with writing the Spring and Autumn
Annals, a historical work later subject to endless analysis for occult sig-
nificances; and the books of Hui Shih, earlier than Chuang Tzu, are said to
have filled several carts (Chuang-Tzu, chap. 33).^20 Similarly in Greece, Her-
aclitus, who shunned people generally, allegedly deposited his book in the
temple of Artemis at Ephesus. Whereas Socrates is famous for his personal oral
style, his contemporary Democritus is credited with 60 books, and by this time
there was an open market for books.^21
The significance of the breakthrough to writing is controversial. Eric Hav-
elock (1982, 1986) goes so far as to argue that Plato’s generation was the first
to become oriented to written texts rather than oral recitations, and that
philosophical abstractions were not possible until this transition was made.
But the Greek philosophical community goes back some six generations before
this, if in a context of a literacy still subordinate to oral ritualism. Havelock’s
argument does not apply well to the chronology of Chinese intellectuals, who
were oriented to written symbols very early, and constituted a kind of cult of
writing that began many generations before Confucius. The very identity of a
scholar was his familiarity with books, although this was most characteristic
of the earliest period (the rise of the Confucians around 500 b.c.e.), and again
after the establishment of the unified dynasties (221 b.c.e.). In between, the
importance of oral discourse increased, rather than decreased, as intellectual
life was shaped especially by the face-to-face debate at courts during the
Warring States period. Havelock overgeneralizes a model of primordial orality,
which he conceives as conservative ritual embedded in and upholding the
public social order; yet the oral discourse of an intellectual community need
be neither concretized nor conservative.
In principle, soon after the early intellectual networks arose, one could
acquire the important philosophical doctrines without personal contact with
the author. Personal closeness gave some advantage, of course, in times of
clumsy and slow channels of written publication. But it is striking, as we look
across the whole span of known history, that the pattern of personal connec-
tions does not change in any significant degree from the most ancient times to
the most recent. The personal chains are still there in late Greco-Roman
antiquity just as they are near the beginning. Wang Yang-ming’s network ca.
1500 c.e., when book publishing was quite a big business, is very little different
from Mencius’ 1,800 years earlier. The clincher is that the same kinds of
72 • (^) The Skeleton of Theory