Reviews
The Unproblematic Confucius (3)A REPLY TO PROFESSOR WATSON
Professor Watson suggests that “the present state of our knowledge of early Chinese literature” does not permit the sort of confidence in our own results for which he implicitly faults us. But how current is he with “the present state of our knowledge?” In addition to our book, The Original Analects (Columbia, 1998), which he was kind enough to mention, and to the 1994 overview which was mentioned in that book, there have since appeared:
(a) archaeological confirmation of our accretional model for the Dau/Dv Jing (Philosophy East and West, Vol. 50, No.1 (2000), 141–46),
(b) further studies of the Analects (Bryan Van Norden ed., Confucius and the Analects: New Essays (Oxford 2002) 163–215),
(c) an accretional model for the Mencius (Alan K L Chan ed, Mencius: Contexts and Interpretations (Hawaii 2002) 242–81,
(d) and for the Zuozhuan (Oriens Extremus v44 [2003/2004] 51–100), all of the above being
(e) congruent with each other and to an extent also with the previous work of Rickett on the Guanzi (Princeton, 1985, rev 2001; 1998).The result is a consistent chronology for the major 04th and 03rd century texts. It creates no new problems, and by providing for the passage of time between early and late layers of the texts, it solves many old problems of internal incoherence which must otherwise bedevil the reader of the Analects, or of any classical text. To these problems (such as the encounter of Confucius with rude recluses from another century), Professor Watson seems to offer no solution. But when a theory can cover the material without internal contradiction, and when it explains problems which are otherwise inexplicable, it seems reasonable to repose a certain working confidence in the result. We invite Professor Watson to consider that result, not indeed in time to affect his book, but at least in time to help him with his section of the survey course. There he can bring out the context of LY 18:6–7, surely the most eloquent statement ever made about the duty of public service in evil times.
The survey course itself Professor Watson describes with great charm. And no, we wouldn’t change a word of it. Let the students read their Dante, savoring the rhymes, responding to the pathos, acquiring the rudiments of a sentimental education. So far from troubling them with Guido da Polenta, when they come to Canto V, we would instead put Tchaikovsky’s Francesca on the phonograph.
But there are texts and texts. Machiavelli’s Italian is beautiful too, but is it reasonable to read Il Principe just for that pleasure? Or for its occasional crumb (perché la fortuna è donna) of crackerbarrel wisdom? The Analects is terribly in earnest about right and wrong ways to govern the state — in earnest in more than one way, but we have already covered that. Are those details, and the tremendous panorama of the total war bureaucracy taking shape outside the window of the text, irrelevant to the understanding of the text?
And are they irrelevant to the needs of the future citizen? The world needs people who know how the world works, and it suffers instead from people who have no idea, or wrong ideas, about how it works. The League of Nations collapsed in part because it was built on romantic misconceptions about the period in which Confucius lived. Shouldn’t the Analects be allowed to bear full witness to that world, and to the dizzyingly different worlds which rapidly succeeded it, and not be played instead for its easily assimilable nuggets — the wisdom Confucius of the fortune cookie?
We think so. We urge so. There should indeed be gentle beginnings, in the green student’s acquaintance with the rest of humanity. But there should also come a time when that student is capable of taking the grownup stuff straight. For this transition, so devoutly to be wished, we continue to find that Professor Watson’s Analects points no path.
E Bruce and A Taeko Brooks
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
21 Oct 2012 / Contact The Project
