Competing Systems 2a
Persistence of the Integral Presumption
(An Added Note)Scholars who work in rational fields may find this statement incredible. For them, I here quote two passages from standard 20c histories of Chinese thought. Each begins with a concession that Jang Sywe-chvng, Tswei Shu, and other critical scholars are correct, but continues with an excuse for not following the obvious lead which they have given to the subject. Or in the latter cased, with a denial that these differences are infact there, and an assertion that reading them as integral is after all the correct procedure.
Example 1 "The historian Jang Sywe-chvng has pointed out that the Gwandz, for example, mentions events occurring after the death of Gwan Jung (noted statesman who died [in] 0645, to whom the work is attributed), while the Han Feidz (attributed to Han Fei, a Legalist writer who died [in] 0233) contains a speech made by Li Sz disapproving of Han Fei's policy. it is therefore evident that these and other works contain sections that could not have been written by their supposed authors, but were probably composed by later followers of the same school. Jang suggests that the primary purpose of a writer of ancient times was to expound the doctrines of his school, so that the question of who was the actual author of the writing was considered as relatively unimportant. And for this reason the writings of any school were the collective work of that school, rather than the work of any one individual. This theory is probably correct. The conception of authorship was evidently not wholly clear in early China, so that when we find a book named after a certain man of the Warring States period, or earlier, this does not necessarily mean that the book was originally actually written by that man himself . . . The books now attributed to various Jou dynasty writers should therefore be regarded as products of their schools, rather than of the men themselves. . . . Much has already been done in the critical analysis of such works, so that, for example, we recognize today that such portions as the "Canon" and "Exposition of Canon" of the Mwodz (chapters 40-41 and 42-43 respectively) were probably not written by Mwodz himself."
"In the case of such sections as the Will of Heaven (chapters 26-28) and "Agreement with the Superior" (chapters 11-13) of the same book, however, no one dares to decide which parts of them came first and which were later additions. In treating the philosophy of the ancient period, therefore, the present work will simply try to indicate that, during this period, there existed certain schools of philosophy and systems of thought, but it will not attempt to determine absolutely whether these systems are always actually representative of the individuals by whom they were founded, or have been affected by later modifications."
- Fung Yulan (1934; tr Derk Bodde 1937): History of Chinese Philosophy, volume 1, pages 19-20.
Example 2 "The Analects themselves, however, remain the focus of fierce controversy. It is obviously a compilation put together in somewhat variant versions long after the Master's death. It contains not only the Master's sayings, but many of the utterances of disciples as well. Of the twenty "books," linguistic analysis indicates that some may belong to a much later period. Waley and others find many passages which they call non-Confucian and even anti-Confucian. He thus finds that the professed concern with how language relates to reality must be a later addition, since the "language crisis" in ancient China belongs, in his view, to a much later development of thought. Tsuda Sokichi, a radical and iconoclastic critic of the text, finds the work so shot through with contradictions and anachronisms that it is unusable as a source of the thought of Confucius."
"While textual criticism based on rigorous philological and historic analysis is crucial, and while the later sections do contain late materials, the type of textual criticism that is based on considerations of alleged logical inconsistencies and incompatibilities of thought must be viewed with great suspicion. The contradictions and inconsistencies of thought alleged by Tsuda, Waley, Creel, and others are often based on the unexamined intellectual assumptions of the translators and interpreters themselves. While none of us comes to such an enterprise without deep-laid assumptions about necessary logical relations and compatibilities, we should at least hold before ourselves the constant injunction to mistrust all our unexamined preconceptions on these matters when dealing with comparative thought. . . My effort to present one account of the underlying vision of the Analects is based on my belief that the text, taken as a whole, does actually convey a coherent vision of reality despite the lack of surface organization in the text."
- Benjamin I Schwartz (1985), The World of Thought in Ancient China, 61-62
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