学儒序: Learning from Scholars Preface

This will be the first entry in what might become a series (if I feel like it, and I'm not too lazy), in which I look for a grain of personal truth and importance in Confucian philosophy - primarily the last millennium of Confucian scholarship that is generally termed "Neo-Confucianism." I come to this topic as at best "half a bottle of vinegar" (banping cu 半 瓶醋): I am not a philosopher, nor an intellectual historian, nor - until recently - particularly interested in this realm of thought. "Until recently" because three separate epiphanies/habits of mind have since drawn me to think on and write on this topic:

1. Lots of things that are generally seen as ridiculous or malicious must have some substance of value. Most "bad" things that persist in human society must have been considered "good" at some time or in some place. Probing the history of how they came to be seen as "bad" is interesting, but I am more concerned with first establishing the core of value that was once seen in them.
2.  People will pay more attention to your (my) writing if you (I) write about things that are useful to them. I've realized that my writing has veered into the abstract, the meandering, and (too frequently) the uniformed. Better I write about something I know and that might be useful to people.
3. But if I wait until I am an expert in something to write about it, I will never write anything.

There are lots of things that have attracted my attention because of the first reason. Everything from sins (which I have written on, if poorly) to eating meat (which I am still attempting to write on) to feudalism, superstition and venality (which I hope to write on) have come to be seen as generally "bad."Confucian scholarship in general, and Neo-Confucian orthodoxy more generally, also fall in this category; they have been blamed for everything from oppression of women to the failure of China to develop "science." Yet for much of the past 2500 years of history, this system of thought and belief was at the core of the most consistently successful civilization on earth.

Thinkers from Confucius and Mencius to Han Yu and Liu Zongyuan to Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi to Wang Yangming were among the smartest, most driven intellectuals of their times. Their importance to Chinese thought and civilization rivals that of philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, Jesus, St. Aquinas, Descartes and Kant to the West. Reading the decline of the China in the 19th and early 20th centuries as an outgrowth of their thought strikes me as ridiculous. If the fall of the Qing Dynasty is Zhu Xi's fault, then Jesus is equally to blame for the European Dark Ages. It seems to me that if eight centuries of (mostly) men in the biggest civilization in the world (not to speak of the influence in Korea, Japan, etc.) saw something of value in Zhu Xi's writing, we probably should try to figure out what.

This brings me to the second point, which is that there may be some utility in my writing about this. Much of what has been written on Confucianism focuses on the early developments, particularly the Analects of Confucius, the Mencius and the Book of Changes. This makes some sense - as with the Bible or Plato, much later writing focuses on interpreting or responding to the classics. Nonetheless, Confucianism as it comes to be known to us today is largely the product of the 11th and 12th century renaissance and reinterpretation, particularly as transmitted through the work of Zhu Xi. While there is some substantial scholarship on this movement, much of the specialized work is highly uneven. More importantly, this development of "Neo-Confucianism" is handled reductively if at all in books for the wider audience. Therefore, I think there is some utility in explaining and addressing these ideas in plain language and in terms of more specific questions.

Finally, as mentioned above I am far from an expert on this topic. Nevertheless, I have read relatively widely and spent some time trying to understand these ideas. In some ways, it is probably better that I am not an expert: I will avoid highly technical discussions of nuance in large part because I don't really understand with that much nuance. In another respect, I think my experience of learning Neo-Confucian thought is somewhat similar to many historical scholars. For most students in imperial China, Confucian and Neo-Confucian texts were part of the orthodoxy that they needed to learn to pass the examinations that would lead to government service. Similarly, I was first driven to study these texts for pragmatic reasons: because I need to know about them to pass the general examinations for my PhD. At the same time, many former scholars became interested in the Confucian cannon for personal and philosophical reasons - they saw the classics as a set of tools to help them interpret and respond to the world. Somewhat despite myself, I too have become interested in the perspective offered by these texts: I recently cited the Doctrine of the Mean to a family friend interested in psychology, and I quoted the Great Learning to my grandparents in expressing my thanks for all they have done to provide opportunities for our family. In both cases I, like my Chinese predecessors, was using the language of these books to give structure to my thinking.　More to the point, generals are coming up and it seems as good as any way to study.

Gods, demons and historical agency

In seminar this week, we are discussing the following question: "Do animals have historical agency?" This strikes me as one of the great red herrings of environmental history (see also “commons, tragedy of the”). Agency carries so many different meanings in such different contexts that this question seems aimed at prompting knee-jerk opposition from a historiographical constituency that may not actually exist.

Let us try to unpack what this question might actually mean:

A. Do animals effect history? I think we would be hard pressed to find a contemporary historian who does not think that non-human actors can have a role in changing the course of events. Even the most anthropocentric must concede that horses had a role in the course of warfare, or that people care about national symbols like the bald eagle.

B. Do animals effect history (independent of humans)?  Many historians have never particularly considered this question, and to me it seems a moot point. In the modern world, there are effectively no animals that exist independent of anthropogenic interventions. Everywhere, animals are interdependent in a web that includes humans. In the rare contexts where this is not the case, I am not sure that we (as historians) especially care what animals do.

C. Do animals effect history (in seemingly unpredictable ways)? This is how I would interpret Brett Walker (sometimes, especially in Toxic Archipelago) and Timothy Mitchell (in "Can the Mosquito Speak?"). It is a more productive phrasing of the above question, that avoids the problematic [modernist] assumption that factors can be manipulated independent of one another. The answer is yes, clearly animals display what might be mathematically termed “chaotic” or “nonlinear” behavior. Wolves that had coexisted peacefully with humans suddenly start attacking them. Or conversely, humans that had previously coexisted peacefully with wolves suddenly start attacking them. But if this type of agency extends beyond humans to other animals, surely it also extends to phenomena like weather, currency markets and machines. If we begin talking about all of these phenomena as having “agency” it lends them equivalence that harkens back to the days of ghost in the machine and money demons coexisting with gods and men. This may carry narrative power, but I do not think it is analytically coherent.

D. Do animals effect history (through their unique symbolic power)? This seems to be where Harriet Ritvo’s main argument lies. Animals do form powerful discursive symbols. And we know that symbols have sociohistorical power. But this still fails to differentiate animals from other powerful symbols like - again - weather, currency markets and machines.

E. Are animals psychosocial/moral actors? I think this is the provocative position that Walker aims at (in Lost Wolves). The most convincing answers to this question do not come from history, however, but from the zone where evolutionary biology melds into anthropology, and psychology. Walker does make interesting use of this, combined with his personal musings. I would argue, however, that the implications here lie more in the realm of moral philosophy than in history. Walker is making a normative case - that animals should be treated as moral actors - rather than a historical case - that the moral nature of non-human animals changes the way they function historically.


Questions:
1. Does the psychosocial/moral agency of non-human animals change the way they function as historical actors? To me, this is the position that must be demonstrated before animal agency becomes an interesting question. Walker takes aim at this, and succeeds to some degree in posing humans and wolves as part of the same continuum; but I do not think he succeeds in showing that animal agency E causes animal agency C or D, merely in conflating the three.

2. Why stop at animals? We have seen Mitchel suggest (perhaps) that plasmodia and bugs have agency, and Walker argue that chemicals do as well. McNeill pêre et fils have both written about the historical power of diseases. Elsewhere, Michael Pollan (in Botany of Desire [and see also]) has suggested that plants are agents. But why stop there? Complex machines, markets and weather are chaotic systems. Even abstract phenomena like ideas and evolution behave in ways that are predictable only in retrospect. They may not have type E agency, but it is not clear that type E agency effects the broader course of history. Maybe agency is a useful way of talking about complex phenomena.

3. If we talk about weather, markets, wolves, diseases, concepts and corn as all having agency -  effecting events in seemingly unpredictable ways, being readily anthropomorphized, having symbolic power - aren't we back to a sort of polytheistic religion? And is is a problem if this takes us back to gods and demons? Contemporary theorists - Manuel de Landa and Bruno Latour, to name two - suggest that drawing clear epistemological division between natural and social processes obscures important commonalities and hybridities. This is not to say we should throw up our hands at complexity, or ascribe too much in the way of human characteristics to non-human processes - modern science and social science are not without successes. But it does suggest that we should not be so quick to look down our noses at premodern modes of thought.