the cloud of knowing blurring the difference with china 2011

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THE CLOUD OF KNOWING

Blurring the Difference with China

Barry Allen

Small and inconspicuous things like clouds o dust speak volumes to a careul

observer o their principles, like this Chinese general:

When the enemy rst approaches, i the dust rises in streams but is

dispersed, they are dragging brushwood. I it rises up like ears o grain

and jumps about chaotically, chariots are coming. I the dust is thick and

heavy, swirling and turbulent as it rises up, cavalry are coming. I it is

low and broad, spreading and diuse as it rises, inantry are advancing.

When the army is small and the dust is scattered and chaotic, it means

the units are not closely ordered. I the troops are numerous but the

dust clear, it means the units are well ordered and the generals com-

mands systematic. I the dust rises to the ront and rear, let and right, it

means they are employing their troops without any consistent method.

When the army moves and the dust rises in streaks without dispersing,

or when the army halts and the dust also stops, it is because the generalsawesomeness and virtue have caused the units to be strictly ordered. I

when they decamp or set out their deployments dust rises up and fies

o, mount deenses against those places where it originated because

enemy orces will certainly be approaching in ambush there. Observing

Common Knowledge 17:3

DOI 10.1215/0961754X-1305373

2011 by Duke University Press

450

S ym po s i um : F u z z y S t u d i e s , P a r t 1

The author wishes to express his gratitude to Weng Hai-

zhen or indispensable philological assistance.


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51the enemy through rising dust is thus a technique or estimating the

enemys orces and seizing victory.1

These words speak to what Western strategists call the og o war. The blur to

which the unknown unknowns reduce clear vision is a danger that cannot be

evaded but only waited out with patience and caution. Remain in control while

awaiting clarity, and act as soon as clarity returns. Everything about the impene-

trable and unsettled that makes the og o war a problem or Western thought

is or the Chinese strategist a resource that wise commanders utilize to the hilt:

I you induce others to adopt a orm while you remain ormless, then you will

be concentrated while the enemy will be divided. . . . So the pinnacle o military

deployment approaches the ormless. I it is ormless, then even the deepest spy

cannot discern it or the wise make plans against it.2

For Chinese thought, the og o war is a cloud o knowing (rather thanunknowing).3 Blur is not an inchoate condition rom which one emerges, as it dis-

sipates, with relie. This og can be known and operated with, despite its seeming

like anything but an object unreied, unmappable, borderless, immeasurable,

vague, subtle, unsettled, a blur, uzzy and thereore a condition o strategic

blindness rather than advantage, according to the Western consensus. Not or

a moment does the Chinese strategist consider blur to be an obstacle to knowl-

edge. The cloud is like everything else he knows anything about. He has learned

to navigate its tenuous medium, to respond to its resonance and change with its

changes. Xu Dong, the general whose wise words on clouds o dust I quoted,

says that the acumen o strategists lies in penetrating the subtle amid unold-

ing change and discerning the concordant and contrary.4 Penetrating the subtle

means seeing a lot in little things. Discerning the concordant and contrary means

knowing the resonance among things, what amplies and energizes or (contrari-

wise) dampens the emergent and becoming.

A Chinese strategist will suspect conditions that seem clear or denitive,

which is what a Western thinker will expect a proper object o knowledge should

1. Xu Dong, in Ralph D. Sawyer, The Tao o Spycrat : Intel-

ligence Theory and Practice in Traditional China (Boulder,

CO: Westview, 2004), 45152.

2. Sunzi,Art o War, in The Seven Military Classics o Ancient

China, ed. and trans. Ralph D. Sawyer (Boulder, CO:

Westview, 1993), 168.

3. I am reerring o course to the anonymous teenth-

century Middle English monastic textThe Cloud o

Unknowing. The eponymous cloud is dened in chap. 3:

Lit up thin herte unto God with a meek steryng o

love; and mene Himsel, and none o His goodes. And

therto loke thee lothe to thenk on ought bot on Hym-

sel, so that nought worche in thi witte ne in thi wille

bot only Himsel. . . . This is the werk o the soule that

moste plesith God. . . . Lette not therore, bot travayle

therin tyl thou ele lyst. For at the rst tyme when

thou dost it, thou yndest bot a derknes, and as it were

a cloude o unknowyng, thou wost never what, savyng

that thou elist in thi wille a nakid entent unto God.

This derknes and this cloude is, howsoever thou dost,

bitwix thee and thi God, and letteth thee that thou

maist not see Him cleerly by light o understondingin thi reson. . . .

4. Sawyer, Tao o Spycra t,454.


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5. Most discussion here concerns one or the other o two

closely related words,zhandzh. They are close in use,

in pronunciation, and in written character, and are some-

times explained in terms o each other; or example in

Xunzi: O the means o knowing [zh], those that are in

people we call zh. Knowledge [zh] having its union we

call zh (chap. 22). Graphically, these are the same char-

acter, though withzh adding the sun radical. The graph

that the two words share is ormed rom the radicalshi

(arrow) on the let and kou (mouth) on the right, prompt-

ing the Shuo Wen, a Han etymological dictionary, to gloss

zh(to know) as to speak so as to hit the mark. Mod-

ern scholars nd a tendency to usezhas a verb (to know)

whi le zh is apparently uncommon as a verb but reely

alternates withzhin the nominal sense o knowledge

or wisdom.

6. The Huainanzi, trans. and ed. John S. Major, Sarah A.

Queen, Andrew Seth Meyer, and Harold D. Roth (New

York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 15.25 (612).

7. See Richard Rorty,Philosophy and the Mirror o Nature

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), and

Barry A llen, What Was Epistemology? in Ror ty and

his Critics, ed. Robert Brandom (Malden, MA: Blackwell,

2000).

seem and be. It must be a trick! a Chinese general will assume. Conditions o

clarity are invariably illusory, misleading, sometimes atal. Nor are the military

thinkers alone in esteeming such knowledge: this is the usual stance in Chinese

tradition; not strictly universal, there are exceptions, but it is the leading idea o

knowledge and o what makes it worth pursuing.5

In the words o theHuainanzi(or Book o the Huainan Masters), the commander must see singularly and know

singularly. Seeing singularly is to see what is not seen. Knowing singularly is to

know what is not known. To see what others do not is called enlightenment.6

Blur is not incompatible with knowledge. Blur is its rst condition and makes

knowledge inexhaustible.

I

The problems o knowledge that philosophers tend to be amiliar with prob-

lems o justication, skepticism, and the possibility o truth are not properly

the undamental ones o Western thought, despite their prominence in text-

books. These, as it were, ocial problems depend on seldom articulated assump-

tions concerning the value o knowledge. It is assumed that the best knowledge,

the knowledge that matters most to philosophy, has to be true; that this truth

should be understood ontologically, in terms o adequacy to being; and that its

enjoyment is a condition o happiness. Without these ideas about happiness, pur-

pose, and value, the textbook problems o epistemology are dicult to motivate.Yet the assumptions are not without diculty o their own, which has made

the problems o epistemology increasingly dicult to take seriously.7 The Chi-

nese do not share the problems o our epistemology, because they do not share

the evaluation o knowledge that made those problems perplex us. Knowledge

poses dierent perplexities or them. Their questions concern not the essence

o knowledge or its conditions o possibility but its point and value, what makes

knowledge sagacious and worth pursuing. These dierent questions respond to

dierent problems arising rom dierent imperatives. What makes them inter-


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53esting is that they emerge at points where Western thinking proves unexpectedly

problematic.

Western theories o knowledge tend to x on statements and belies sym-

bolic, linguistic, propositional entities and have developed highly technical

concepts o evidence, warrant, and justication, all to explain a comically smallpart o knowledge territory the part that is true, the truth. This contempla-

tive, logocentric approach, much avored in antiquity and never really shaken

rom later tradition, is counterproductive or understanding the contribution o

knowledge to the technical accomplishments o our civilization. The ingenuity o

technical culture, the range and depth o technical mediation, the multiplicity o

artiactual interaces in a global technoscientic economy demonstrate the reach

and depth o contemporary knowledge. But this knowledge resists logical analysis

into simpler concepts; it rarely climaxes in demonstrable truth; and it does not

stand to pure theory as mere application (or derivative how-to knowledge). The

best knowledge o our civilization is thereore unrecognizable in the epistemol-

ogy o the epistemologists.8 The exorbitant attachment to theoretical knowledge

comes with an epistemological indierence to art or techne. In all the leading

schools o ancient European thought, theoretical knowledge is the preeminent

value, science the noblest aspiration, and the proo o truth isthe answer to all

uncertainty. To really know this truth requires clarity and certainty, overcoming

everything uzzy about the empirical and ordinary. Knowledge thus becomes a

problem o access. There are two levels: the one we live on, everyday experienceand opinion; and the transcendent level beyond blur, which we have to access i

we are to know the truth. What makes knowledge a problem o access is the

decision that the best, philosophically most important knowledge is knowledge

o truth, and that truth is essence or being somehow present to the soul. These

decisions are taken over by later tradition with little dissent. Not until Nietzsche

at the end o the nineteenth century does Western thinking begin to change.

Nietzsche initiates the now prevalent skepticism about the correspondence the-

ory o truth.9 The American pragmatists, especially William James, indepen-

dently raise similar doubts. Today, most philosophers have abandoned the cor-

respondence theory, though not always or the same reason. What lesson should

we take rom the collapse o this ancient expectation concerning the nature o

truth? Nietzsche thought that without the ontological idea o truth (truth as

true to beings) the value o knowledge becomes dramatically problematic. Why

8. I develop this argument inKnowledge and Civilization

(Boulder, CO: Westview, 2004).

9. On the background to the argument about correspon-

dence and the place o Nietzsche, pragmatism, decon-

struction, and other postmodern responses, see Barry

Allen, Truth in Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-

versity Press, 1993).


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should we care about knowledge i it is not the truth?10 He does not pose this

question mockingly, assuming that there is no answer. He poses it to show that it

isa question that the answers we usedto give are untenable and to stimulate a

new philosophy o knowledge. He expects refection on the question to show that

philosophys ideal o enlightenment participates in the irrationality it claims toovercome. The passion or an enlightening truth has a religious quality; it seems

a way or atheists to still believe in God. To turn away rom religion because it is

unscientic and thereore untrue is not the triumph o reason over superstition. It

is a new superstition, or one whose superstitious quality is newly apparent, except

to those who still think truth is divine. Critical rationalists must awaken to the

unreason o rationalism, as they dutiully demystiy demystication and discover

that truth is a name or the will to power.11

Nietzsche called this predicament European nihilism. Plato sowed the

seed when he taught us to needsomething transcendent. Without it, all the good

things about us seem threatened by metaphysical ailure. The merely human,

tainted with the stigma o contingency, is worthless. Having inherited these

ontotheological expectations, we have a tendency to assume that, without a tran-

scendent reerence (reason, logic, being), knowledge collapses into nihilism, with

no real dierence possible between true and alse. In the ace o modern disbelie

about the transcendent, Western theory alls short o a convincing response to its

own nihilistic implications. Hence the postmodern, perhaps even post-Western

problem o knowledge: how to acknowledge the sel-destruction o Westernrationalism and get beyond the obvious relativistic, nihilistic implications; how to

understand the point and value o pursuing knowledge when we do not believe in

objectivity or a thing-in-itsel; how to remain cheerul and creative when truth,

as philosophy has tried to think it, does not exist. Epistemology may be pass,

but the philosophy o knowledge has never conronted more interesting ques-

tions. What is the value o knowledge, i not truth? What is the value o truth, i

not adequation or correspondence? What is the relationship between knowledge

and technical accomplishment? What is the relationship between knowledge and

wisdom? What makes technical, technological knowledge wise?

These are not classical questions. And although I do not think we have to

go to China or enlightenment, it makes an instructive excursion or anyone who

likes to see alternatives and to experiment with concepts. However, there is huge

disagreement among scholars about Chinese philosophy whether there even

is such a thing, whether it is at all comparable to Western philosophy, and what

10. Why Know: Why Not Rather Be Deceived? inFriedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter A.

Kaumann and R. J. Hollingdale ( New York: Vintage,

1967), 455.

11. See Nietzsche, On the Genealogy o Morality, thirdessay.


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55counts as philosophical in Chinese tradition.12 Some scholars think ancient Chi-

nese thought is so alien, its language so distant rom Western experience, that it

is unreasonable to expect signicant conceptual exchange between the two tradi-

tions. Others take the view that, with due caution, contemporary philosophy can

enter into the movement o Chinese concepts and bring some o their tendency toits thinking. I avor the latter view, and while I hope to avoid gratuitously reading

Western assumptions into cryptic ancient texts, I do subject them to questions

that their authors never dreamed o.

Some scholars think this approach is untenable. They would restrict schol-

arly usage to emiccategories, meaning those consistent with the viewpoint o the

culture under study. They disavoweticcategories, or concepts meaningul to

the community that studies the culture as i the only way to discuss Chinese

ideas rigorously is in terms the ancient Chinese might recognize as their own.13

For some orms o scholarship, that procedure is perhaps appropriate; but in phi-

losophy, it seems like a case o the tail wagging the dog. I think we should have

as many ways o reading the Chinese as we can invent. There should be a place

or conversations that orget whether they are emic or etic, that no longer know

whether they are Western or modern, that court blur and seek a hybrid quality

consistent with experimentation and creativity in concepts. That, and not disci-

plinary specialization, however global, is what it will take or Chinese intellectual

tradition to make a dierence to philosophy.

It is not important that we call ancient Chinese thinkersphilosophers. Weneed not assume they are engaged in a project similar to that o Western phi-

losophers. We do not require comparable intentions at all (and they are obviously

lacking). There is no word o ancient Chinese that we can translate asphilosophy.

Such a word did not exist until the nineteenth century, whenzhexue, combining

two Chinese characters, those or wisdom and study, was coined by a Japanese

scholar to reer to the philosophy o Western antiquity. It was only in response to

Western problems that philosophical ideas were rst identied in Chinese clas-

sics, constructing Chinese philosophy according to amiliar Western models

(idealism, realism, and so orth). Chinese scholars themselves think the results

were not all bad. Some issues were more aptly expressed as an upshot o these

comparisons.14 But the unrestrained construction o Chinese thought according

12. For a balanced treatment o the debate, see Carine

Deoort, Is There Such a Thing as Chinese Philosophy?

Arguments o an Impl icit Debate,Philosophy East and

West51.3 (2001): 393413.

13. See Mark Csikszentmihlyi, Ethics and Sel-Cultivation Practice in Early China, in Early Chinese

Religion, Part One: Shang through Han, 1250 BC 220 AD,

ed. John Lagerwey and Marc Kalinowski (Leiden: Brill,

2009), 1:519. For an emic approach to my topic, see Jana S.

Roker, Searching or the Way: Theory o Knowledge in Pre-

modern and Modern China (Hong Kong: Chinese Univer-

sity Press, 2008).

14. Tang Yijie, Constructing Chinese Philosophy inSino-European Cultural Exchange, inNew Interdisci-

plinary Perspectives in Chinese Philosophy, ed. Karyn L. Lai

(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007).


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to Western models, and the simplistic equation o terms rom the classics with

concepts o Western theory, are obviously untenable.

The Chinese aced a version o our problem in their own history, with the

introduction o Buddhism, a new religion in China, ater the rst century CE.

How should they translate the ormidable corpus o Indian thought, whose terseabstraction has nothing in common with any Chinese tradition? They did not

try to think like Indians and did not scruple over etic categories indeed they

used almost nothing else. The result was not naive scholarship but, instead, the

invention o Chinese Buddhism. This experience suggests that ancient Chinese

thought need not be reproduced in Western terms as i it were an object to be

true to. The challenge is to invent the context, and experiment with the terms,

in which philosophy is becoming global. Philosophy is not or is no longer West-

ern, or at least it does not have to be. It may have begun in the West (even that

is disputable), but philosophy cannot be reduced to its history. On the contrary,

philosophy has never ceased to question its own conditions and is now obviously

global which is to say, borderless, undemarcated, deterritorialized, a blur and

working through a new relationship to territory and to the globe.

Dissatisaction with epistemology is a part o this emerging dynamic. There

are by now many lines o fight in the theory o knowledge postpositivist, post-

structuralist, pragmatist, and eminist, to name a ew. I propose an even more

literal deterritorialization o the problems o knowledge in Chinese thought. We

do not need those problems to be ours to learn rom how they respond to theproblems they nd. Their innocence o epistemology is what makes them inter-

esting to the philosophy o knowledge. Innocence does not mean indierence

to perplexity about knowledge. The ancient Chinese had ideas about knowledge

because, as they thought about the problems that compelled them, they became

perplexed by knowledge by its dierence rom ignorance and error; by its rela-

tionship to wisdom and virtue; by its eectiveness and irreplaceable contribution

to civilization. These problems perplexed them precisely because the Chinese

have regarded knowledge as o surpassing value. That most philosophical o

Sinologists, Angus Graham, persuades me that reading this value into the texts

is not the result o a gratuitous Western bias. He says that the derivation o all

value rom the value o knowledge is one o the constants o Chinese thought,

or which to know is the supreme imperative.15 Put in the terms raised by the

present, inchoate symposium, we can say that uzziness is not the same as igno-

rance or navet. It is not an obstacle to knowledge but, rather, its condition o

possibility. Hence my title: The Cloud oKnowing.

15. A. C. Graham, Disputers o the Tao (Chicago: Open

Court, 1989), 134, 146. Elsewhere Graham calls knowl-

edge the ultimately unchallengeable imperative o Chi-

nese thought. Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical

Literature (Albany: State University o New York Press,

1990), 435.


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57II

Innocence o epistemology does not mean naive epistemology, as when scholars

speak o Chinas epistemological optimism.16 The Chinese have been said to rely

naively, optimistically, on lower standards than do Western theories o knowl-

edge and science. Is it really lower standards, though, or dierent priorities, di-erent standards? I you expect veridical knowledge o things in themselves, or the

apodictic demonstration o truth, or even just a robust experimental result, your

standards cannot be too high. But certainty is not the only value that knowledge

serves, and other values can be satised without xing on theory and truth.

The best knowledge, the knowledge o the sage, knows how to see the

evolution o circumstances rom an early point. When the development o cir-

cumstances is not so settled that it cannot be diverted, highly eective action is

practically eortless (provided you know how). The Chinese pass on the story

o a servant who oils a powerul duke and prevents a war merely by starting

a rumor.17 The knowledge o when and how to intervene is not deduced rom

principles or held in the mind as a representation or theory. The expression o

the knowledge is behavioral, practical, a response to circumstances that is at once

eortless yet highly eective.

The Chinese describe such action as wu wei, which literally means no

action or not doing but here reers to nonaction that is paradoxically active

and highly eective.18 The value o the best, most sagacious knowledge is to

enable action o that kind. Military victory is a problem not o orce but oknowledge a generalization that is especially true o the most desirable sort

o victory, the one that comes without a battle. Knowledge is not considered to

raise a problem o access. It is more like knowing how to swim than like an ocular

knowledge o presence; more like knowing a territory than seeing an object; more

like knowing the dynamic relations o things in an environment than contem-

plating a nished orm. How can we not be struck by a conception o knowledge

that evades transcendence without oreiting normativity or lapsing into dogma-

tism? The Chinese worry is not access but getting stuck.19 What we call objects

are processes and constantly changing. We must unlearn objectivity, not xate on

orms. Impartiality is its own reward. The point o detachment is not ocular, to

see better what was always there. Detachment is good as a means to the desired

fexibility, overcoming dierences that separate you rom the dao, the spontane-

16. See Thomas A. Metzger, A Cloud across the Paciic:

Essays on the Clash between China and Western Political Theo-

ries Today (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2005).

17. The story is told in Guanzi, trans. Zhai Jianyue (Gui-

lin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2005), chap. 51.

18. An authoritative study is Edward G. Slingerland,

Eortless Action: Wu-Wei as Conceptual Metaphor and Spiri-

tual Ideal in Early China (Oxord: Oxord University Press,

2003).

19. Franois Jullien, Detour and Access: Strategies o Mean-

ing in China and Greece, trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York:

Zone Books, 2000), 31011.


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20. Aristotle,Nicomachean Ethics1178b, in The Basic Works

o Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon ( New York: Random

House, 1941).

21. Conucius,Analects, with Select ions rom Traditional

Commentaries, trans. Edward G. Slingerland (Indianapo-

lis, IN: Hackett, 2003), 8.9, 8.18, 9.2. I ollow this trans-

lation throughout, and subsequent reerences are paren-

thetically embedded.

ous fow o changes. Instead o transcending perspectives, you become skilled at

never getting stuck in one. Blur becomes your mtier.

The prestige o pure theory in Western thought rests on identiable

assumptions. One is the assumption o Heraclitus, who was the rst to empha-

size that a common logos links human beings to the principle o order in thecosmos. What makes us rational and thereore human is the same logos, the

same reason, that makes the universe a cosmos, a rational system. Grasping that

system, apprehending it in thought, seeing all the parts cohere in one intricate,

nished cosmos o ends, is the only thought that Aristotle could imagine or a

god. The divine activity is the contemplation (theoria) o truth, and, he says, this

same divine contemplation is ourhappiness too. Happiness extends just so ar

as contemplation does, and those to whom contemplation more ully belongs are

more truly happy.20 Why is pure theory so good? Because in these epistemic

acts we actualize the best part o ourselves, the part with which we connect to

the source o ultimate value. It seems to ollow that the more we know about

what is logical or logos in ourselves (mind, reason, language), the better we can

know the truth o nature. Epistemology is usually considered a preoccupation o

modern philosophy, which o course it is. But modern philosophy could be obses-

sive about epistemology only because in ancient Greek thought it was established

that, by knowing more about the logos in us, we greatly improve our theoretical

knowledge o truth (episteme).

One might see a parallel here with ancient Chinese, especially Conucian,thought. The dierence between an accomplishedjunzi, a perected person, and a

commoner is thejunzis careully cultivated sel-knowledge. But the parallel goes

no urther. What sel-knowledge does or thejunziis to make him adept at com-

pleting things handling them as they should be handled, in a ceremoniously

appropriate way. Under any circumstance, he spontaneously, eortlessly uses

whatever comes to hand nobly, benevolently. That approach is ar rom Greek

thought, or which a knowledge o how to use things or handle aairs is too prag-

matic to detain a philosopher: it is techne, the second-class know-how o artisans

and mechanics. Kongzi (Conucius) shares the Greek condescension toward the

technical arts.21 He makes it obvious that, despite having trained in a crat as a

boy, he does not involve himsel in mechanics, extending even to the mechanics

o law or policy. Such work is narrow and takes a narrow mind to accomplish. He

compares intellectual specialization to the manuacture o a highly specialized

ritual vessel. A perected person is not a vessel (2.12), andspecializedis another


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59

22. Mengzi, with Selections rom Traditional Commentaries,

trans. Bryan W. Van Norden (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett,

2008), 7A13. I ollow this translation throughout, and sub-

sequent reerences are parenthetically embedded.

23. The Great Learning, in Daniel K. Gardner, The Four

Books: The Basic Teachings o the Later Conucian Tradition

(Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2007), 6.

24. Book o Rites, trans. Lao An (Jinan: Shandong Friend-

ship Press, 2000), 211.

word or unbalanced. The role o thejunziis to be the one whose balance bal-

ances others. As Mengzi puts it later, Anywhere a gentleman passes through is

transormed. . . . He fows with heaven above and earth below.22 Such people

are not superhuman. There is a process o sel-cultivation, a careully calibrated

transormation that Conucian teachers have down to an art and by which anyonecan become ajunzi, perhaps even a sage.

In the Great Learning, a Conucian text o the third century BCE (pos-

sibly rom Kongzis own school), it is said: From the son o Heaven down to

commoners, all without exception should regard sel-cultivation [xiushen] as the

root.23 First transorm yoursel, then transorm everything around you. Accord-

ing to the Conucian Book o Rites, a good ruler has three worries: that there are

important things he should know but has never heard o; that he has not properly

appreciated that which he hasheard o; and that he lacks the competence to put

what he has learned into practice.24 The answer to all three concerns is ceaseless

sel-cultivation. The goal is to become so at home with goodness and with cere-

monious proprieties that these become second nature. Your spontaneous hearts

desire can accord beautiully with the requirements o appropriate and noble

behavior or the circumstance at hand. It may take a lietime to reach that point,

but apparently it can be done: Kongzi tells us that by the time he was seventy

he could ollow his hearts desire without overstepping the bounds o propriety

(2.4) and thatis the highest achievement o knowledge. The point o learning

is not just to have knowledge but to be changed by it, and it is never a question orepeating a ormula. You must not be ashamed to admit that you do not know, nor

even to seek knowledge rom ineriors (5.15). To love learning means knowing

what you do not know, knowing the limit o your knowledge. Above all, one who

loves learning knows how to learn rom himsel and thereore never makes the

same mistake twice. To love learning is not merely to like it a lot, or to longingly

lack it, as Socrates longingly lacked wisdom. To come to love learning, to love

the process, is tosucceedin learning, to do it superbly well and reap the benet

o eectiveness and mastery in lie. To get to the point o sagacious knowledge

requires submission to the insights o other people and o the cultural heritage:

The Master said, I transmit rather than innovate. I trust in and love the ancient

ways (7.1). The element o trust relates to what distinguishes this love o learn-

ing rom pedantic antiquarianism: The Master said, Both keeping past teach-

ings alive and understanding the present someone able to do this is worthy o


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becoming a teacher (2.11). A recent symposium in these pages well denes this

attainment as improvisatory fuency in historical idioms.25

In Platos Symposium, Socrates is made to prove that one can love only what

one lacks. Conucian hao (joy, love, especially or learning) cannot be analyzed

in these terms. The Conucian joy in learning reminds me less o Socrates thanNietzsche and hisrliche Wissenschat. For Nietzsche, as or Kongzi, acquiring

and perecting knowledge consists in living a certain type o lie and is not a sep-

arable goal to which learning is a means. Plato holds knowledge and lie apart,

as he does knowledge and learning. Learning is strictly speaking impossible;

it is a misnomer or remembering knowledge that cannot be learned because

it is eternal, unchanging, and not subject to the blur the neither hereness

now nor thereness yet o becoming. Knowledge is, in Platos understanding,

discontinuous with the immanent plane o lie, requiring instead submission

to something universal and unconditional. The truth o this knowledge is not

measured by its value or lie (ourlie). It is measured by being: by whatisand

does not change. That such a truth is also very good or us, that it alone is last-

ing happiness, and so on that was a promise, a hypothesis, but never anything

that philosophers knew.

Sages are not stued with learning. They do not know everything. They

cannot explain the origin o the universe or why people have dierent destinies.

The knowledge o a Conucian sage is dened by the li, which is to say he knows

the appropriate way to handle circumstances as they arise. Undistracted by dis-interested curiosity, sage knowledge does not wander. There is no sage knowledge

outside the li, and no point to knowledge that does not translate into practice in

the li the proprieties inherited rom the ancient sages and ounders o civiliza-

tion. These proprieties dene the value o humanity, and humanity denes the

value o everything else. Asked about the meaning oren (usually translated as

benevolence or humanity), Kongzi says it is a matter o restraining yoursel and

returning to the rites [li]. Asked to elaborate, he answers, Do not look unless

it is in accordance with ritual [li]; do not listen unless it is in accordance with

ritual; do not speak unless it is in accordance with ritual; do not move unless it is

in accordance with ritual (12.1).

This admonition presumably includes the pursuit o disinterested inquiries

and the practice o dicult techniques, all o which must be checked against tra-

25. Roger Moseley, Mozarts Harlequinade: Musical

Improvisation alla commedia dellarte, in the symposium

Between Text and Perormance, Common Knowledge17.2

(Spring 2011): 338. On Conucian love o learning, I ol-

low the excellent treatment in Franklin Perkins, Love o

Learning in theLun Yu,Journal o Chinese Philosophy33.4

(December 2006): 50517.


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61ditional proprieties. Knowledge is valuable only when subordinated to humanity,

meaning subordinated to dignied and traditionally appropriate conduct. When

knowledge becomes disinterested, merely curious, or when its use is calculated,

we lose balance and stray rom the path o goodness:

The Master said, I your wisdom reaches it, but your Goodness [ren]

cannot protect it, then even though you may have attained it, you are

sure to eventually lose it. I your wisdom reaches it, and your Goodness

is able to protect it, but you cannot maniest it with dignity, then the

common people will not be respectul. I your wisdom reaches it, your

Goodness is able to protect it, and you can maniest it with dignity, but

you do not use ritual to put it into motion, it will never be truly excel-

lent. (15.33)

The li, the traditional rites and ceremonies, put knowledge into practice, whereit proves its wisdom in exquisite, eortlessly balanced, wu weiconduct. In its

philosophical sense, wu weimeans doing so little, so easily, that you seem to be

doing nothing at all. To have this quality, action must fow spontaneously; there

is no deliberation, calculation, or indecision. But spontaneity is not all there is to

wu wei, at least not or Conucians. Your nonaction must be graceul, dignied,

impeccable seemingly choreographed; and it must prove highly eective, with

nothing that circumstances require, or a balanced and harmonious response,

being neglected.This interpretation owu weiis controversial; the ideal is typically associ-

ated with thinkers we classiy as Daoists. Still, it seems to me that rather than

being the preoccupation o one, as against another, school o Chinese thought,

the value owu weiaction, and the value o knowledge as conducive to such action,

is common ground or Conucians, Daoists, the military philosophers, and (with

exceptions) the medieval Neoconucians. The dierences among them lie in their

understanding o whatwu weipresupposes as background conditions (especially

what sort o training) and exactly why this art o accomplishing without having

to do much is so valuable.

TheHuainanziis a Daoist-leaning work presented to Emperor Wu by his

uncle Liu An, king o Huainan, in 139 BCE. It is an encyclopedia o Chinese

thought collaboratively written by the nest masters o the early Han. The rst

chapter, entitled Originating in the Way, oers this comment on wu wei:

Sages . . . take no deliberate action [wu wei], yet there is nothing let

undone [wu bu wei]. In tranquility they do not try to govern [wu zhi],

but nothing is let ungoverned [wu bu zhi]. What we call no deliberate

action is not to anticipate the activity o things. What we call noth-

ing let undone means to adapt to what things have [already] done.

What we cal l not governing means to not change how things are


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62

naturally so. What we call nothing let ungoverned means to adapt to

how things are mutually so.26

When the text explains no deliberate action to mean not anticipating the activ-

ity o things, it emphasizes the importance o timeliness o knowing when.

For the sage deals with processes, not objects; or rather, he perceives that objects

are always in the process o becoming. An essentialist conronting an indenite

or unpredictable object may think o it as uzzy. But a uzzy object, i understood

as a process, is by no means an obstacle to knowledge. A sage waits patiently,

watchully, nonjudgmentally, and responds to whatever comes. When the text

explains nothing let undone I think that means to adapt to what is already

done and reers to the way in which things can be artully adapted, made to t in

and unction together. When it explains not governing to mean not changing

how things naturally are relying, that is, on what happens spontaneously itimplies thatwu weiaction is inconspicuous in its beginnings and irresistible in its

tendency, making the outcome seem inevitable and impersonal rather than the

result o a deliberate aim.

Finally, when the text explains nothing let ungoverned to mean adapt-

ing each thing to the others or (on an alternative translation) making use o the

mutual causation that obtains among things, it is, I think, reerring to action

that moves in alliance with the evolution o circumstances and does not rely on

external energy or orce.27

Wu weieectiveness requires an aptitude or readingthe subtle signs o incipience, the rst beginning o things, and a knowledge

o how circumstances unold, discerning crucial points where development can

be inconspicuously diverted. Such knowledge may be called oresight, provided

there is no suggestion o divination. The idea is not to possess the acts o the

uture and calculate; it is, rather, to aect the uture discreetly by knowing where

it is birthing and pliable. Such knowledge requires a kind o penetration, not

rom phenomena to essence, but rom the obvious to the subtle, the actual to the

virtual, the maniest to the latent.

At this point, it may be useul to survey some Chinese comment on this

kind o penetration in order to demonstrate its dominance in the tradition.

Good examples date to beore 300 BCE. According to Guanzi, a Warring States

period collection o treatises, sages are characterized by reacting to things when

they come into being. Thus, when something new comes, they will recognize it

according to the knowledge they accumulated. For, the text continues, heaven

and earth show symptoms at rst and sages can ollow them to achieve success. . . .

I they act according to these symptoms ully, they will succeed in obtaining

26. Huainanzi1.9 (59). 27. The alternative translation oHuainanzi1.9 is in

Thomas Michael, The Pristine Dao (Albany: State Univer-

sity o New York Press, 2005), 75.


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63the whole world.28 According to a line rom the Wuxingpian, a Guodian tomb

text rom c. 300 BCE: Knowing it by observing its inchoate beginnings is tian

[heaven/nature] (ji er zhi zhi tian ye).29Around 240 BCE, we nd the thought

recurring in The Spring and Autumn o L Buwei:

At the beginning the indications o order, disorder, survival, and perdi-

tion are as subtle and invisible as the new dawn.

The reason why sages are more outstanding than ordinary people is that

they can oresee the development o things.

Without thinking or talking about anything, they just wait patiently

or the right time. . . . The correct way to react to external things is

to remain quiet, let things take their own course, and be upright and

disinterested.

The importance o wisdom is to oresee the development o things

beore these changes ever take place.30

Numerous Han texts, representing various schools, attest to this continuity

o approach. A passage rom a Han commentary on the Zhouyi, the oldest core o

the Book o Changes(theI Chingor Yi Jing), argues that the sage uses the Way

o the changes to study the subtle, activating orces, and thereore he is able to

know the subtle, activating orces o all aairs. . . . Does not the one who knowsthe incipient [ji] possess spiritual power? . . . Thejiis the subtlety o movement

and the earliest omen o good ortune.31 In the ConucianMaintaining Perect

Balance (Zhongyong) o the same era, it is said: When a country is about to four-

ish there are surely some ortunate omens; where it is about to perish, there are

surely some omens o weird and monstrous things. . . . Whether the calamity

or blessing is imminent, the good and bad can be oreknown [xian zhi].32The

Huainanzi, previously mentioned, is a synthesis o views (o the second century

BCE) in which we nd the same point made: The collapse o the wall begins witha crack; i the sword breaks, there was denitely a nick. The sage sees them early,

thus none o the myriad things can do him harm.33 And again: Foreknowledge

28. Guanzi, 251, 917.

29. Wuxingpian5; cited in Haiming Wen, Conucian Prag-

matism as the Art o Contextualizing Personal Experience and

the World(Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), 142.

Paul Goldin suggests these manuscripts derive rom a sin-

gle tradition o Conucianism and are datable to around

300BC.Ater Conucius: Studies in Early Chinese Philosophy

(Honolulu: University o Hawaii Press, 2005), 36.

30. The Spring and Autumn o L Buwei, trans. Zhai

Jianyue (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press,2005),

16.6, 17.3, 20.8, 23.3.

31. Zhou Yi, Great Commentary; cited in Lo Chin-shun

(Luo Qinshun),Knowledge Painully Acquired, trans. Irene

Bloom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 50.

See Yi Wu, Chinese Philosophical Terms(Lanham, MD:

University Press o America, 1986), 96.

32. Zhongyong24, as cited in Wu, Chinese Philosophical

Terms, 114.

33. Huainanzi18.18 (742).


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and oresightedness, vision reaching to a thousand [miles] away, are the zenith o

human talent.34 Dong Zhongshu, the leading Conucian o the early Han, asks

and then answers: What is called knowledge [zhi]? It is to predict accurately. . . .

One who iszhican see calamity and ortune a long way o, and early anticipates

benet and injury. Phenomena move and he anticipates their transormation;aairs arise and he anticipates their outcome.35A passage rom Sima Qian, the

great historian o the early Han, concerns the genius o Zou Yan, whom Joseph

Needham calls Chinas rst man o science. Zou Yans wisdom was to exam-

ine small objects, and rom these [draw] conclusions about large ones, until he

reached what was without limit.36 In the Three Kingdoms period ollowing the

Han, Ji Kang (22362) writes, When knowledge [zhi] operates, oreknowledge

[qian shi] is established. When oreknowledge is established, the mind is opened

and things are pursued.37 The thirteenth-century DaoistBook o Balance and

Harmony (Zhong He Ji) denes this way o knowing as deep knowledge:

Deep knowledge o principles knows without seeing, strong practice o

the Way accomplishes without striving. Deep knowledge is to know

without going out the door, see the way o heaven without looking out

the window. Strong action is to grow ever stronger, adapting to all

situations. . . . Deep knowledge is to be aware o disturbance beore dis-

turbance, to be aware o danger beore danger, to be aware o destruc-

tion beore destruction, to be aware o calamity beore calamity. . . . By

deep knowledge o principle one can change disturbance into order,change danger into saety, change destruction into survival, change

calamity into ortune.38

Finally, the Ming dynasty Neoconucian Wang Yangming (14721529) writes,

along similar lines: The sage does not value oreknowledge [qian zhi]. When

blessings and calamities come, even a sage cannot avoid them. He only knows

the incipient activating orce o things and handles it in accordance with the

circumstance.39

34. Huainanzi11.7 (420).

35. Dong Zhongshu, as cited in David L. Hall and Roger

T. Ames, Thinking through Conucius(Albany: State Uni-

versity o New York Press, 1987), 5051.

36. Sima Qian, Shiji, as cited in Joseph Needham, The

Shorter Science and Civilisation in China, ed. Colin A.

Ronan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978),

14243.

37. Ji Kang, Answer to Jiang Jius Reutation o My Essay

on Nourishing Lie, inPhilosophy and Argumentation in

Third-Century China: The Essays o Hsi Kang, trans. Robert

G. Henricks (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press

1983), 38.

38. Book o Balance and Harmony, in Sun Tzu, The Art

o War, trans. Thomas Cleary (Boston: Shambhala,

2003), 7.

39. Wang Yangming,Instructions or Practical Living and

other Neo-Conucian Writings, trans. Wing-tsit Chan (New

York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 225.


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65III

An instance o what such writers mean by deep knowledge is no doubt in order.

I will take an example rom the Conucian tradition: rectiying names (zheng

ming), which is a project or reconstructing the whole o society by reconstruct-

ing the norms o language. It is also a stratagem or making the result seem tohave happened o itsel, without anyone proposing or directing it. Chinese tradi-

tion tends to view language as a way o relating to other people, rather than (as

in most Western theory) a semantic relation between a thing and its name. To

use words is to be skillul in drawing distinctions that could not exist without

language; or instance, between good and bad, right and wrong, or (or that mat-

ter) cousin and uncle. Skill with language makes you persuasive, meaning that

others like how you name things and come around to your point o view as i it

had always been their own. A well-made distinction can unite people o dierent

ranks and classes, but only when there is no slippage between the use o names

and peoples behavior. How people use names and what they can justiy doing or

not doing are, o course, connected. Norms or the use o words inorm norms

o behavior via the controlling unction o normative words. Take, or example,

ather. Modern Western society has largely disconnected this word rom issues

o propriety. Its principal meaning is now genetic. Suppose you could persuade

people to rerain rom this promiscuous use and restrict application o the word

to men who conspicuously ulll traditional expectations. Under those condi-

tions, it would be a solecism to call an obviously unlial man a ather. Such menwould have a dierent name, a word expressive o opprobrium, and it seems likely

that there would be ewer such men. Fathers would be motivated to be athers,

and sons sons.

Rectication means making right, making straight, aligning, correcting,

which implies that correct usage is known and has been departed rom; one rec-

ties words that have deviated rom known norms. The rectication o names is

more like a calendar reorm than the decision to adopt a measuring system (or

example, the metric), which would be more prooundly arbitrary.40 Reorming

an existing calendar means bringing the names o the months back in line with

the expectations o the seasons (so that December is a winter month and July a

summer one). To do so requires tracking the driting dates o the equinoxes and

solstices. A Conucian rectication o names must track social conditions and

adjust them where they all out o line with ancient norms. Generalize this rea-

40. For the contrast between calendars and metrics, see

May Sim, Ritual and Realism in Early Chinese Science,

Journal o Chinese Philosophy29.4 (2002): 495517. The

argument is developed in Sim,Remastering Morals with

Aris totle and Conuc ius(Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press, 2007), chap. 3.


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soning across language and you see that a thoroughgoing rectication o names

would work a great transormation, a return to normative usages. The question,

o course, is how to do so how to reorm a living language.

When there is slippage rom the norm, i rectication is not accomplished,

eventually there will be a crisis. As Kongzi puts it in the Analects: I names arenot rectied, speech will not accord with reality; when speech does not accord

with reality, things will not be successully accomplished (13.3).41 It is best to

modiy the situation o mismatch between behaviors and names ar in advance o

any crisis, while matters remain fuid and evolving and while the wise can eect

changes that seem to come about by themselves. Thus, rather than command

that all must use words in a newly prescribed (though classically sanctioned) way,

a wise ruler might begin with a relatively inconspicuous command or his own

ministers to issue and receive documents using only the revised or revitalized

vocabulary. Enorce this usage scrupulously and allow it to sink in, rom the min-

isters to the ocials, rom the ocials to the hundred clans. Eventually, anyone

who interacts with ocials at any level anywhere in the realm would be exposed

to the new usage and would have to conorm in order to placate administrators.

It would take generations beore illiterate peasants spontaneously complied, but

in time presumably everyone would ollow the new usage, which means that the

ancient norms would be reestablished. The ritual proprieties o the Zhou era

would live again, and no one would be aware o the change. To a Conucian, that

is the summit o political wisdom.It is interesting to compare the Conucian rectication o names with the

Western idea o a planned language (like Esperanto) and the logical reconstruc-

tion o language envisioned by the logical positivists. Rudol Carnap believed

that a properly normed language would make metaphysical statements gram-

matically impossible. That, or Carnap, would be a desirable result, because he

thought metaphysics was worthless compared to the demonstrable knowledge

o science. It is characteristic o rationalism to want as much as possible made

explicit and discursively reasoned out. There can be nothing subtle, nothing allu-

sive. Indirection and allusion seem like faws and impediments, and language

cries out or improvement. What seemed good to Carnap about Esperanto (he

was an Esperantist) was the promised boon in rationality when everyone would

use the same words in the same way.42 Never mind that it would take coercion

(however well meant) to achieve that result, and coercion as well to maintain it.

41. There is a good discussion o the historical context

oAnalects13.3, including the identity and circumstances

o Kongzis interlocutor Zilu, in Hui-chieh Loy, Analects

13.3 and the Doctrine o Correcting Names, in Con-

ucius Now: Contemporary Encounters with theAnalects, ed.

David Edward Jones (Chicago: Open Court, 2008).

42. Rudol Carnap, Intellectual Autobiography, in The

Philosophy o Rudolph Carnap, ed. Paul A. Schilpp (La Salle,

IL: Open Court, 1963).


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67But since the perection o rationality is apparently an inadequate incentive to

those who control the instruments o coercion (which is nothing new), we are let

with a beautiul idea, good in theory and useless in practice.

Kongzis rectication o names is not one step in an ingenious plan, all

analyzed and worked out in the sages mind. It is the decisive move in a game, aneective stratagem that inconspicuously compels the evolution o circumstances

to realize a normative order. The game itsel could be called Zhongyong, which is

the title o a Conucian work o classical or near-classical times. I ollow Daniel

Gardner in translating the title as maintaining perect balance.43 We probably

should not understand balance here in terms o equilibrium, as i equilibrium

were an ideal state, or the lesson o the work seems to be the opposite: the value

o maintaining constancy under conditions ar rom equilibrium. To elucidate the

value o wisdom, the best knowledge, the work deploys the idea o completing

things (cheng wu). Completing things seems to mean handling them well, using

them with dignied propriety and poise, nding their best t in the collective

economy o humans and nonhumans.44 What are the things that sages com-

plete? The usual Western explanation is to say that a thing is a substance,

a substantial being, a thing-in-itsel nished, ormed, present, identical with

itsel. In the Conucian tradition, the vision is uzzier: nothing is nally one thing

and not another, opposites become each other, everything becomes something

else. A thing, what we name, is not a substance but a rhythm, a fow within a

fow. There is no universe in itsel with a mechanics o its own, indierent tohumanity; or i there is, then Conucians do not see it: Things do not have inde-

pendently established principles. Unless a thing, in revealing itsel, resembles or

diers rom something else, contracts or expands, or ends or begins, then even

though it may appear to be a thing, it is not a thing (Zhang Zai).45 The propri-

eties o the human realm give things a normality and appropriateness they could

not have otherwise: things lack understanding and require us as companions.46

We complete things when interaction is wu wei as with fuency in the use o

tools or instruments. We complete things when we can interact without orc-

43. Tradition attributes the Zhongyongto Zisi, a grand-

son o Kongzi. Qing dynasty philology dates it to the later

Warring States period or possibly the early Han. Zhu Xi,

a Neoconucian scholar o the twelth century, began the

practice o collecting this work in a Conucian primer

called The Four Books, which became the core o Conu-

cian (and thereore Chinese) education down to the twen-

tieth century. On the date and authorship oZhongyong,

I ollow Tu Wei-Ming, Centrality and Commonality: An

Essay on Conucian Religiousness(Albany: State University

o New York Press, 1989), 13132; and Roger Ames and

David Hall,Focusing on the Familiar(Honolulu: University

o Hawaii Press, 2001).

44. On the collective economy o humans and nonhu-

mans, see Bruno Latour,Politics o Nature : How to Bring

the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cam-

bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

45. Zhang Zai, as cited in Anne D. Birdwhistel l, The

Concept o Experiential Knowledge in the Thought o

Chang Tsai,Philosophy East and West35 (January1985):

43.

46. Chu Hsi (Zhu Xi),Refections on Things at Hand, trans.

Wing-tsit Chan (New York: Columbia University Press,

1967), 77, 83. Also the earlier so-called Western Inscrip-

tion o Zhang Zai: All things are my companions.


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ing, thus permitting people to vanish into things, and things to dwell amicably

among us.

According to the Zhongyong, authority to know the good use o things

belongs to those who are truthul with themselves. Obviously, this kind o truth-

ulness (cheng) has nothing in common with ontological truth. It is not a logi-cal relation o being and representation; it is the normative orm o a relation-

ship among humans and nonhumans. Zhongyongsays that truthulness is the

beginning and end o things; without truthulness there is nothing nothing,

because the patterns and processes that things are remain virtual and incomplete

until they nd their ullness in a humane economy.47Zhongyongdeduces this

conclusion in an elegant sorites:

Only he who is most perectly truthul is able to give ull realization to

his human nature; able to give ull realization to his human nature, heis then able to give ull realization to the human nature o others; able

to give ull realization to the human nature o others, he is then able

to give ull realization to the nature o other creatures; able to give ull

realization to the nature o other creatures, he can then assist in the

transormative and nourishing processes o heaven and earth.

This conclusion is conrmed ten chapters later: Only he who is most perectly

truthul is able to put in order the worlds great invariable human relations, to

establish the worlds great oundation, and to know the transormative and nour-ishing processes o heaven and earth.48

The necessary and sucient condition o this truthulness seems to be the

absence o selsh desire. You must prove a disinterested motive to do the right

thing. You do not have to rid yoursel o desire, which is probably impossible; it is

only selsh, sel-regarding, conventionally egoistic, and obviously partial desires

that must go. Truthulness, then, comes down to impartiality (gong), an interper-

sonally authenticated reedom rom sel-serving interest. Western tradition tends

to assume that we are truthul when we accord with things as they are in them-

selves. In the Conucian tradition, knowing the truth o things is not a problem

o representation; it is a problem o use. We misuse and abuse things without a

truthul person on hand to establish norms. Whatever the circumstance, a pro-

ound person o accomplished knowledge handles it with nesse, not doing too

much yet leaving nothing undone. What makes this possible, according to the

Conucian explanation, is the cultivated spontaneity o a second nature a sec-

ond nature that returns you to your original nature beore sel-regarding desire

drove you o balance.

This doctrine o the mean (as Zhongyongis sometimes translated) seems to

47. Maintaining Perect Balance, 25; in Gardner,Four Books,

125.

48. Maintaining Perect Balance, 22, 32; in Gardner,Four

Books, 124, 129.


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69have little in common with Aristotles teaching o that name.49 Aristotle denes

the virtues as middle states between usually vicious extremes. While the Aristo-

telian mean is not calculated or arithmetical, it is a ratio that has to be estimated,

judged, and chosen as a reason or action. Conucians envision something more

circumstantial. Zhu Xi (11301200) says in a comment on the Zhongyong, Thereis no xed shape to the preservation o perect balance; it depends on the cir-

cumstances o the moment.50Zhong(middle, balance) is not a norm peculiar to

humanity, as Aristotles virtuous mean is. This balance is at once that o a person,

a community, an environment, all under heaven. For Aristotle, keeping the

mean, a lie o virtue, is most o our happiness, but happiness is not addressed in

the Zhongyongat all. Its concern seems to be harmony, including proper main-

tenance o humanitys relation to the nonhuman (heaven, earth, the ten thousand

things). Conucian wisdom thinks in oceans, encompassing opposite points o

view without dialectical reconciliation, because taking a single xed position

disregards a hundred others (Mengzi, 7A26). The contrary o Conucian knowl-

edge is not the alse but the partial. Wisdom has no goal; its value is to keep a way

open, to avoid accumulating obstructions, to sustain viability. Wisdom is not a

wayto the highest end (as i a place you might nally reach). Rather, wisdom is a

way to stay on course amid transormation, never halting, never stuck, maintain-

ing perect balance.

IV

Some discussion o an anti-Conucian interlude in Chinese thought that o

Mozi and Yang Zhu may help, at this juncture, to dene the unique quality

o Conucianism. Mozi was about a year old when Kongzi died. Mozi is thought

to have spent time in Conucian studies but has the distinction o being the rst

thinker o infuence to reject Conucian principles categorically. Little known

now in the West, Mozi in his day was a orce to reckon with. His school was a

community o scholar-knights organized as a private militia, lending their orce

to victims o military aggression, in accordance with their teaching against it.

Perhaps the school was too militaristic or the First Emperors liking, because

Mohism disappeared rom history around the time, 213 BCE, when the emperor

ordered a burning o books and (according to legend) a holocaust o scholars.51

Mohism was orgotten even in China until modern times.

49. See Andrew Plaks, Means and Means: A Compara-

tive Reading o Aristotles Ethics and the Zhongyong, in

Early China/Ancient Greece: Thinking through Comparison,ed. Steven Shankman and Stephen W. Durrant (Albany:

State University o New York Press, 2002); and Sim,

Remastering Morals with Aristotle and Conucius, chap. 4.

50. Commenting onMaintaining Per ect Balance2.2; in

Gardner,Four Books, 113.

51. A. C. Graham, Mo tzu, inEarly Chinese Texts: A

Bibliographical Guide, ed. Michael Loewe (Berkeley: Insti-

tute o East Asian Studies, University o Caliornia Press,

1993).


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The one thing that Mozi and Kongzi agreed on was how ar the Chinese

had allen rom the magnicent time o the early Zhou dynasty (about ve hun-

dred years beore). Kongzi did not have an explanation or why the sons o Zhou

had allen so ar, since it did not matter why; the question was what to do about

it. But Mozi thought the right solution required a correct analysis o the disorder.The people, he said, have allen into partiality, which or him meant irrationally

graded caring. There is no overcoming the troubles o the time until impar-

tiality in all things is restored. What is needed is not good men but impartial

care (jianai) and consistent standards (a). Mozi praised artisans or their dis-

crimination (bian) and regular standards (a), as well as or the useulness o their

products. Scholars and councilors, he argued, should be like that more work-

manlike, consistent, and useul. For Kongzi, skill (qiao) was apparently always

negative. Its connotations or him ranged rom deception, trickery, and narrow

specialization to vulgar sel-interest. Mohists restore the value o skill and artice

to the positive column: Achievement that is benecial to people [li ren] is said

to be skillul [qiao], and anything that is not benecial is said to be clumsy. 52

This was one o Mozis criticisms o the Conucians: they discredit technical

knowledge (whether that o humble artisans or masters o statecrat) and artistry

(including the art o war); and the same prejudice makes them denigrate experi-

ments and resist innovation.

A Western reader may nd some o these arguments amiliar and wonder i

Mozi is really comparable to any o our Western rationalists. Compared with theConucians he may be something o a rationalist, but his emphasis is not where

Western rationalists put theirs. He does seem to ask questions recognizable rom

Western philosophical contexts. What is the point o talking i there is no stan-

dard or assessing what people say? When one advances claims, one must rst

establish a standard o assessment. To make claims in the absence o such a stan-

dard is like trying to establish on the surace o a spinning potters wheel where

the sun will rise and set. Without a xed standard, one cannot clearly ascer-

tain what is right and wrong or what is benecial and harmul (35). Standards

are models to guide the perormance o norm-governed activities. For instance,

We need not select the bigger benet out o all the benets, but we must select

the lesser harm out o all the harms (44). Statements too what people say, or

their claims require a standard. First, we should make explicit exactly what the

point o discourse is: The purpose o disputation [bian] is to distinguish clearly

between right and wrong, inquire into the principles o order and misrule, clariy

the points o sameness and dierence, discern the patterns o names and objects,

judge the benets and harms, and resolve conusions and doubts (45).

52. Mozi, trans. Wang Rongpei and Wang Hong (Chang-

sha: Hunan Peoples Publishing House, 2006), chap. 49.

Subsequent reerences to chapters o this t ranslation are

parenthetically embedded.


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471Mohists make unprecedented eorts at logical analysis and explicit deni-

tion. For example:

Inerring [tui] is using what is the same in that which he reuses to accept

and that which he does accept in order to propose the ormer. (45)

The negation o something may proceed rom the negation o some-

thing similar to it, because only the things o the same category can

have common grounds. (41)

When one says that something is an ox and the other says that some-

thing is a nonox, they are oering contending arguments [zheng bi]. It is

impossible or both o them to win. As it is impossible or both o them

to win, one o them will certainly lose. (42)

And there are explicit suggestions or conducting disputation:

I someone gives a statement to say that it is like this, you should reute

him by a negative statement. (42)

Things o dierent categories are not comparable, or the measuring

standards are dierent. (41)

The value that these standards express is not logical validity or necessary truth

but something closer to verication. A well-made statement is veriable in the

sense that it is assessable, having a content that can be made explicit and tested.

This test is not o truth but o application. The standard or a serious state-

ment is Mozis three gauges: Is there a basis in the words and acts o the ancient

authorities? Is it veried by experience and observation? Is there application; can

you act on it to advance important goals? O course, application sounds ne,

but evil can be perormed as skillully as good can be. What are the important

goals? For that, Mozi has another standard. Goodness o application is deter-

mined by our supreme goals: Enrich the poor; increase the population; removedangers such as war; enhance social harmony. The three gauges and our

goals establish the standard to which Mozi holds his own and any other claim

to knowledge; and it is by appeal to this standard that he proves the imperative

o impartial care, which he demonstrates to have basis and verication and to

serve the goals he has set. Impartial care is thus more than simply a good idea;

Mohists call it the will o heaven. The Mohist seems to equate the heavenly with

whatever can be demonstrated to be supremely reasonable and benevolent. To

show how heavenly, how divinely sanctioned, impartial caring is, Mozi shows howbenevolent it is or the people. How could something so reasonable not be right,

or something so right not divine?


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Hence the temptation to recognize in Mozi the prole o Western rational-

ism: preoccupation with analytical explication; a demand or consistent standards;

an optimistic expectation that reason can rule. There is always a reason: I some-

thing is so there must be reasons [suo yi] why it is so (45); proper reasoning [l]

will dispel any doubt (41); those who are not in the right will comply with thosewho are in the right; those who lack knowledge will comply with those who have

knowledge. Lacking valid arguments [wu ci], they will acknowledge deeat (39).

Yet reason is not something Mozi has a theory o (compared, say, to Heraclitus

on the logos) and unlike Socrates, it is not on knowledge o truth that Mozi

stakes his optimism. What seems to give him condence is not belie in reason

but in the heart (xin), a presumption o benevolence, the goodness o contending

parties. I they are not good, they cannot be expected to behave reasonably: I

both parties are benevolent by nature, they will have no reason to become ene-

mies. . . . Seeing anything good they will be won by it (39). Not because they

are so rational but because they are good enough to respond impartially to the

prospect o impartial benet.

The work we have under the titleMoziincludes texts that entered the cor-

pus sometime ater the ounders work. These later treatises, reerred to as the

Mohist Canons, are the pinnacle o traditional Chinese logical and theoretical

thinking. For the rst time in Chinese literature, we have demonstrations apply-

ing explicit denitions and standards o proo, and the rst (sometimes the last)

Chinese thought on mechanics, optics, and epistemology, beore contact with theOccident. While these Canonsseem dedicated to the value o making as much

as possible clear and explicit, the texts themselves are anything but. They are

among the most obscure and conusing in Chinese tradition. Our understanding

o them is largely the result o the brilliant insights o translators and philosophi-

cal interpreters, above all Angus Graham.53

Ideas about knowledge in the Canonsare maniestly more explicit and theo-

retical than anything in other Chinese authors.54 These texts associate knowl-

edge and wisdom with capability (cai), clear vision (ming), thought (l ), planning

(mou,ji), and skill (qiao). They distinguish our capacities that must collaborate

in the completion o knowledge: cognition or intelligence (zhi), explained as the

means or aculty o knowledge; thinking (l ), explained as seeking by means o

intelligence (but not necessarily nding); knowing (zhi), explained as being able

to relate things to others and describe them. The Canonsmake an additional

three distinctions within the capacity orzhi- knowledge:

53. A. C. Graham,Later Mohist Logic , Ethics and Science

(Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1978).

54. Besides GrahamsLater Mohist Logic, my account o

Mohist epistemology draws rom Christoph Harbsmeier,

Language and Logic in Traditional China, in Science and Civi-

lization in China, vol. 7, part1, ed. Joseph Needham (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 33842; andLisa Raphals,Knowing Words: Wisdom and Cunning in the

Classical Traditions o China and Greece (Ithaca, NY: Cornell

University Press, 1992), 5367.


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473

Dierent sources o knowledge, including reports, explanations, and

experience. Explanation (shuo) is explained as making a matter clear (ming).

An example o knowledge by explanation is knowing that a cube will not

roll. Perception is explicitly ruled out as the source o such knowledge.

Perception is a source o data, but there is no knowledge without urtherrelating by thought and language: Knowing is dierent rom having a

pictorial idea. . . . When one knows, it is not by means o the ve senses. 55

It takes intelligence, a power o the heart, to make something o what the

senses provide. This is among the Mohists most infuential ideas and is

silently appropriated in later thinking about the senses.

Dierent branches o knowledge, including knowledge o names, o objects, o

relations between names and objects, and o how to act.

Dierent capacities on which knowledge draws, including a capacity to

sort and grade with names; a capacity to investigate things; skill at

dialectics, articulating distinctions and relations; an ability to apply

dialectical knowledge to action, which requires the mastery o names,

the understanding o objective standards, and knowledge o the relation

between names and objects.

Everything about the analysis is novel. Scholars had never seen their language

used with such regimentation and a tenacious will to make things explicit. The

Chinese made this experiment exactly once, however; and when Mozis schooldisappeared no one wanted to do it again.

For Conucians, ethical lie is a condition and source o knowledge; or

Mohists, knowledge is the source o ethics. Right and wrong is or Mohists a

problem o knowledge, o intelligence in devising policies, making their con-

sequences explicit and setting them in motion. To be a good ruler, you have to

know something, many things, a whole art o rulership. Conucians shudder at

the very idea: they reject technique and calculation. The most important thing

about a ruler is, or Conucians, his charismatic virtue, which they take to include

wisdom and wisdom is a kind o knowledge, though not the technical, manage-

rial, calculating knowledge o merchants or military commanders. It is precisely

that calculating knowledge that Kongzi discredits when he tells his disciples not

to be vessels (2.12). Above all, a king must not be a vessel, a specialist, a techni-

cian. He must work at sel-cultivation, never losing himsel in arguments about

the advantages o policy. I the ruler is not balanced in himsel, no clever policy

can balance the state.

As we learn about Conucian thinking by refecting on the opposition to it

55. Mozi, as cited in Harbsmeier, Language and Logic,

339.


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59. Maintaining Perect Balance30.3, as cited in Tu, Cen-

trality and Commonality, 86.60. According to Graham, one can nevertheless distin-

guish is and ought in Chinese; Studies in Chinese Phi-

losophy, 430.

61. Zhu Xi, in Needham,Histor y o Scientic Thought, in

Science and Civilization in China, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1956), 492.

62. Dai Zhen, as cited in Zhang,Key Concepts, 348.

duced and developed without injuring one another . . . the courses o the seasons,

the sun, and moon are pursued without confict.59 This inerence is an astute one

rom original becoming and irreducible plurality. Whata thing is has no substan-

tial and, as it were, local determination no nucleus o sel-identical substance.

Instead, what a thing is depends on which other things it relates to in a net-work and process without end. Nothing happens without resonance elsewhere.

Every change is simultaneously a maniold incitation and a multivalent response.

Resonance implies economies o energetic exchange, an immanent economy o

real multiplicity. There is no dualism; opposites include and transorm into each

other, and nothing is permanently raised above transormation or experience.

One implication o this view is that there is an optimal, though perhaps not one

unique, way or things to coexist a condition o mutual existence under which

things avoid provoking destructive responses (though that does not make them

indestructible). Instead, the regularities, which include timely destruction, are

part o the pattern, the fow o changes, the dao, and give each thing a natural

duration, whose power to absorb disturbance contributes to the stability o an

entire economy or ecology. Another implication is that what a thing is(the di-

erence it makes to an environment), and what itoughtto do or how itoughtto be

handled, belong together, grow rom the same conditions, and are not so indi-

erent as modern logic assumes.60 We cannot understand what a thing is without

understanding how it ought to behave in relation to others upon whose existence

it depends the norm o its interaction.This reading seems conrmed by later commentators. Zhu Xi, writing

more than a thousand years ater Mengzi, says, The blue sky is called heaven; it

revolves continuously and spreads out in all directions. It is sometimes said that

there is up there a person who judges all evil actions; this assuredly is wrong.

But to say there is no ordering principle would be equally wrong.61 Another ve

hundred years later, Dai Zhen, in a commentary on Mengzi, holds that nature

and obligation are not two things. I one considers the nature o something,

then the clearer one makes it without straying rom it in the slightest is what it

necessarily ought to be.62 The heart, heaven-sent, actuated byqi the same qi

that lls the 10,000 things is capable o knowing the right response to any-

thing heaven sends.Rightdoes not mean ecient or protable or even rational; it

means proper, or as things should be. The value o knowledge is knowing how to

nd that norm and handle things without confict. Mengzi is saying we discover

the norm by discovering ourselves. He careully distinguishes this right use, the


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477knowing o which is genuine knowledge, rom mere cleverness, o which Mengzi

is contemptuous: Those who are craty in their contrivances and schemes have

no use or shame (7A7). Cratiness is shameless, because, while it may be eec-

tive and clever, it is also meretricious and untrustworthy, serving bad as well as

good. To this technical, artisanal knowledge, Mengzi opposes liang zhi, pureknowing or, in an older translation, innate knowledge: That which people are

capable o without learning is their genuine capability [liang neng]. That which

they know without pondering is their genuine knowledge [liang zhi] (7A15).

Sel-cultivation is not so unnatural as Yang supposed, no more so than

weeding and watering sprouts. On the one hand, too, knowledge is not especially

important; on the other, the best knowledge (knowing how to do the right thing)

is innate and unrefective. What makes it best is not that it knows everything

but that it knows the best thing, which is how to maintain balance despite blur.

It takes diligent sel-cultivation to hold this middle, but doing so is more like

improvising music than matching a xed standard.63

V

Western theories o knowledge invariably discuss the senses. Whether sense is

inimical to knowledge (Plato, Descartes), or merely the beginning o knowl-

edge (Aristotle, Spinoza), or even its principal source and verication (Epicurus,

Locke), no Western theory o knowledge omits critical refection on the senses.The relationship between the senses and knowledge was not controversial or

thinkers o Chinas Warring States period; they did not eel the problem that

the senses raise or Western thought. Can we imagine how bafing Xunzi might

nd these words o Plato, his near contemporary? Everywhere in our investiga-

tions the body is present and makes or conusion and ear, so that it prevents us

rom seeing the truth. . . . It is impossible to attain any pure knowledge with the

body.64 Chinese indierence to this problem is not naive. Ontological truth is

not the essence o knowledge, and the senses are not expected to do the heavy

liting that our epistemology requires. Everyone in Chinese tradition agrees

that sense discrimination is an important discipline. There is no disdain or the

senses, no suggestion that they should not be trusted or that a better kind o

truth lies beyond them. The dierent senses have their strengths and weaknesses.

Sensations are not atomistic data with intrinsic qualities the Chinese are psy-

chological holists. A conscious sensation is a discrimination, a dierence within

multiplicity as Xunzi observes: Forms, colors, and designs are dierentiated

by the eye. Pitch and timbre, bass and treble, modal keys and rhythms, and odd

63. Observations o much relevance to these concerns

are ound in the symposium Between Text and Peror-

mance, Common Knowledge17.2 (Spring 2011): 221347.

64. Plato,Phaedo66e, trans. G. M. A. Grube, in Complete

Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett,

1997).


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479do and do it. Knowledge is not isolated rom the will, and not complete until put

into practice.

The knowledge o things is always going to be specialized: knowing a lot

about a little. Knowledge o things measures one against another; or instance, a

carpenters knowledge in comparing lumber and selecting the best pieces. How-ever, the specialized training required or this art is useless or measuring many

things together, which requires the dao as a standard. On that arcane instru-

ment, the Conucianjunziis a virtuoso not a specialist, mind, but trained to an

unspecialized metaexpertise that makes him good at orchestrating things. Xunzi

denes the sage as the artisan and manager o the Way (22.8). This sage lays

out all the myriad things and causes himsel to exactly match how each settles

on the suspended balance (21.6). How does the perected person become skilled

in the ways o the Way? Xunzi says it requires a prepared and disciplined heart-

mind. That means a heart become empty (xu), unied (yi), and still (jing) (21.8).

Emptiness here is an idea taken rom the Daodejing. Xunzi seems to learn rom

this work while rendering its terms more prosaic and precise. He explains a tenu-

ous, empty mind as one that does not allow the past to bias present experience. A

unied mind does not allow the perception o one thing to conuse the percep-

tion o another. A still mind is undisturbed by dreams and antasies, which also

bias perception. Obviously, or Xunzi, the obstacle to sagacious knowledge is any

bias, especially an obsession, prejudice, or one-sided view: It is the common faw

o men to be blinded by some small point o the truth and to shut their minds tothe great ordering principle [da li

the cloud of knowing blurring the difference with china 2011

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