Organizer and Chair: Michael Nylan, Bryn Mawr College
Discussant: Michael Loewe, Cambridge University
Even today, the vast majority of writing on Han dynasty thought borrows (consciously or unconsciously) from the Sung neo-Confucian assessments for its view of Han intellectual life. As a result, Han thinkers are usually characterized as unduly credulous, derivative, or inept. All of the three papers to be presented for this panel challenge that stereotypical view, in one way or another. In her paper Dr. Agnes Chalier, for example, would emphasize the striking "modernity" of certain scholastic modes of inquiry employed in Han, a "modernity" which she would compare with that found in the work of the best ancient Greek philosophers. Dr. Anne Cheng's paper suggests not only the innovative character of the dominant political and cosmological discourse formulated in Han, but also the powerful influence that the Han literati response exerted upon intellectual life for the entire course of later imperial Chinese history. Dr. Nylan's paper argues that mainstream classical scholars in Han were no strangers to either skepticism or doctrinal controversy, even if their critical stance was inevitably tempered by political loyalties and cultural assumptions.
Also in contrast to prevailing stereotypes, which tend to treat Han thought as an aberration in Chinese philosophy, all three papers proposed for this panel intend to place Han thinkers squarely within an ongoing tradition. The papers by Chalier and Nylan look backwards, to trace the antecedents of Han thought; the paper by Cheng examines the creation of a distinct scholar-official class, which was to continue in China until the twentieth century. In the spirit of Michael Loewe's work, all three papers consider the "crisis and conflict" generated by early Chinese intellectuals, as they devised a series of responses to the distinctive realities of contemporary political power in the light of their own classical training. This panel, then, seeks to set the stage for a new era of research on Han classicism, which should prove to be of interest to a great many scholars in related fields.
Anne Cheng, CNRS National Centre for Scientific Research, Paris
It was during the Han dynasty (206 B.C-A.D. 220) that the structures of the Chinese empire were established for the following two millennia. The destiny of the Chinese "intellectual" seems to have been largely determined during that period, within the larger process of centralization of political power. What was the socio-political pattern to which the "literati" (shi) category referred for self-identification? In the absence of anything approaching our notion of the "civil society" (usually conceived in contra-distinction both to the state and to some sort of religious order), the social, political, and religious representations seem to be fused into an overall cosmological representation: As individuals, human beings are subsumed under the category of cosmological Man in the triad Heaven-Earth-Man, whose prototype is not the citizen, but the sovereign, the only incarnation of political power.
In such a context, could the relationship between the "intellectual" and political power ever be considered in terms other than those of submission? The intellectual (at least as the term has been understood in the West since the l9th century) is characterized by his individual autonomy within civil society and by his critical stance as "society's conscience," a stance which is fully realized in its opposition to the political power structure. In Han China, the absence of "intellectuals" thus defined appears to be linked, from a socio-economic point of view, to the absence of a civil society capable of confronting the power of the state and of supporting an autonomous status for the intellectual. During this inaugural period of imperial China, then, the intellectual could only define himself in his relation to political power, which was represented not by a community of citizens or by an institutional set-up, but by the emperor.
As to the religious dimension, here again there seemed to be no proper alternative for the shi, for there was no clergy or autonomous institution of a specifically religious character. There was also no clear distinction between the Confucian literati of the imperial bureaucracy and the fangshi ("experts in esoteric arts"), as both groups shared certain skills and a general outlook.
The Former Han emperors, in bringing the whole intellectual world under their control, nevertheless managed to induce it to take an active part in the elaboration of the great Han holistic vision. That vision was conveyed by a common discourse informed mainly by cosmological conceptions. That vision turned all the philosophical intuitions of the preceding Warring States period into ideological formulations. But the Han literati proceeded to work out their own critical stance within this cosmological consensus. They even made use of the concept of omnipotent Heaven as an instrument of criticism directed against imperial power. Significantly enough, the alienation of the literati from the center of power during the Later Han expressed itself as disillusionment regarding the validity of the Heavenly Mandate conferred upon the Han.
Agnes Chalier, Cambridge University
In this paper, I will consider the role of questioning as a mode of testing knowledge in the text known as Lunheng (Discourses Weighed in the Balance). My aim is to explore objections and contradictions in Chinese thought through Wang Chong's interpretation. Rather than looking for a uniform picture of Early China, I will emphasize the point that there was not a static consensus of views among Chinese thinkers, but a lively interplay. Lunheng, among other writings, is a text which belongs to the 'critical' sources of Chinese culture and it demonstrates that such sources are able to bring original ideas and a new point of view to our understanding of the Chinese world. This paper shows that the world of ancient China had many contradictory voices.
The first part of this paper will contain an empirical question put by Wang Chong. The question is linked to the dispute concerning rainfall in early China. He asks, "On what basis do they base their affirmation that the rain sacrifice is necessary?" I will distinguish two differing contemporary approaches concerning the necessity of the rain sacrifice: one teleological, the other mechanistic. Such an analysis of the question (teleological vs. mechanistic) can also be found in Early Greece, as Aristotle shows in his Physics II.8. A recognition of such a debate in early Chinese and Greek texts allows us to assess the similarities and differences between the ancient Chinese tradition and other cultures.
In the second part of my paper, I will examine Wang Chong's formulations of inquiry and follow his investigation into the distinction between fact and fiction. We can turn to his example of rainfall in order to make intelligible his approach to the textual matters which concern his own tradition. I will discuss his remarks on the literature available at the time and his critical commentary on the correct and false statements contained within.
To conclude, I will outline the modernity of Wang Chong as a philosopher. By 'modernity,' I mean the adoption of a perspective which comes from a logic of scientific discovery through questioning, demarcation and outcome. We might well find that Wang Chong is not only a writer of interest to those studying ancient China, but also a scientific thinker who could stimulate discussion within today's scientific community.
Michael Nylan, Bryn Mawr College
In a recent paper published in T'oung pao, Nylan suggested the need for modern scholars to go beyond traditional paradigms for Han thought (which are phrased most typically in terms of chin wen/ku wen, Confucian vs. Taoist, superstitious vs. skeptical) to find more useful and more accurate characterizations. This paper, a first attempt on Nylan's part to build a new paradigm, focuses upon the work of four renowned Han classicists: Yang Hsiung (53 B.C.-A.D. 18), Wang Ch'ung (27-97), Hsü Shen (d. ca. 110), and Ying Shao (d. ca. A.D. 203). Even a preliminary review of the work of these four masters suggests the range and variety found in works of Han classicism. Tradition assigns each of these four classicists to the ku wen "school," and each of the four clearly relished "asking questions and posing difficulties so as to perfect the sayings of the former masters." At the same time, these masters made quite distinctive choices in style and subject of argumentation. Such differences tend all too often to be overlooked in our attempt to discover their ku-wen affinities. This paper therefore seeks to:
Looking beyond the work of these four individuals, this paper acknowledges that its larger goal is to persistently question three main stereotypes about Han thought:
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