1. A Comparative History of World Philosophy From the Upanishads to Kant.......................................... Ben Ami Scharfstein .epub

Ben-Ami Scharfstein

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title:A Comparative History of World Philosophy : From the Upanishads to Kant author:Scharfstein, Ben-Ami. publisher:State University of New York Press isbn10 | asin:0791436845 print isbn13:9780791436844 ebook isbn13:9780585066936 language:English subject Philosophy, Comparative. publication:1998 date lcc:B799.S37 1998eb

ddc:109 subject:Philosophy, Comparative.

Page iii A Comparative History of World Philosophy From the Upanishads to Kant Ben-Ami Scharfstein STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS

Page iv Published by State University of New York Press, Albany c 1998 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America

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Scharfstein, Ben-Ami, 1919 A comparative history of world philosophy: from the Upanishads to Kant / Ben- Ami Scharfstein. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7914-3683-7 (alk. paper). ISBN 0-7914-3684-5 (pbk .: alk. paper) 1. Philosophy, Comparative. I. Title. B799.S37 1998 109dc21

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98765 43 10

Page V To my teachers and students

Page vii He who asks questions cannot avoid the answers. Cameroonian proverb

Page ix Contents

Rreface Aicknowledgments Chapter 1. The Three Philosophical Traditions 6hapter 2. The Beginnings of Metaphysical Philosophy Uddalaka, Yajnavalkya, Heraclitus, Parmenides ₡9apter 3. The Beginnings of Moral Philosophy Confucius/ Mencius, the Buddha, Socrates Chapter 4. Early Logical Relativism, Skepticism, and Absolutism Mahavira, Chuang- tzu, Protagoras, Gorgias, Plato

Chäpter 5. Early Rational Synthesis Hsün- tzu, Aristotle Chapter 6. Early Varieties of Atomism Democritus/ Epicurus/ Lucretius, "Guatama," and Nameless Buddhists ehapter 7. Hierarchical Idealism Plotinus/ Proclus, Bhartrihari enapter 8. Developed Skepticism Sextus Empiricus, Nagarjuna, Jayarashi, Shriharsha

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eñäpter 9. Religio- Philosophical Synthesis Udayana, Chu Hsi, Avicenna, Maimonides, Aquinas Bhapter 10. Logic- Sensitized, Methodological Metaphysics Gangesha, Descartes, Leibniz B6apter 11. Immanent- Transcendent Holism Shankara, Spinoza chapter 12. Perceptual Analysis, Realistic and Idealistic Asanga/ Vasubandhu, Locke, Berkeley, Hume Chapter 13. Fideistic Neo- Skepticism Dignaga/ Dharmakirti, Kant

Afterword Btes Bisliography

on Author Bodex

Page xi Preface

Because I hope that newcomers to the history of philosophy will be among the readers of this book, I have taken care to explain whatever I think they need to know. The book begins with the reasons for studying philosophy comparatively and with the difficulties raised by such study, and it ends with a view of philosophy that is personal but that rests on all of the preceding discussion. The philosophers dealt with represent certain attitudes, schools, and

traditions, but they are remembered most interestingly and accurately as individuals. So even though I have had to omit a great deal and make schematic summaries, I have in each instance tried to suggest the philosopher's style, density, and order of thought. In its later chapters the book tends to grow more difficult and elaborate, like the philosophies it deals with; but the early chapters prepare for the later ones, and, whatever the difficulty, I have always written as

simply and clearly as I can.

To avoid making a long book forbiddingly longer, I have limited not only the number of philosophers dealt with but also the range of thought by which each of them is represented. Plato, for example, is limited to his theory of Ideas and Kant (except in the later discussion) to his Critique of Pure Reason. In keeping with the needs of a particular comparison, I have sometimes drawn a broad sketch and sometimes entered into details.

When it has seemed natural, I have shared my own views with the readerthere is no good reason to pretend that I am a neutral, disembodied voice. But however I judge each philosopher's thought, I have committed myself to expound it with a minimum of bias.

My interpretations of individual philosophers are not meant to be new in any basic sense, and they are bound, as I have implied, by the old ideal of accuracy. Disproportions in the number of pages allotted to different

Page xii philosophers are not a measure of the importance I ascribe to them but of the varying need for clarification. If the quality of my accounts is uneven, this is at least to some extent a reflection of the unevenness of the literature on which I have depended. But though I have depended so much on others, for my part and, I hope, the reader's, what lies ahead is a genuine quest.

Page xiii Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to all the friends and friendly acquaintances who checked parts of my manuscript and saved me from more than a few mistakes and misapprehensions. They range from doctoral candidates to seasoned philosophers and scholars. In alphabetical order, without indication of their academic titles, they are: Yoav Ariel, who has spent much of his life in company with Confucius, Mencius, Chuang Tzu, and their contemporaries, and who made a meticulously close examination of everything I wrote on Chinese philosophy (except on Chu Hsi); Shlomo Biderman, who reviewed all I

wrote on Indian philosophy with a literary and philosophical sense for what matters most; Eli Franco, who reviewed almost everything on Indian philosophy and read and reread the text on Dignaga and Dharmakirti, in the light of his intimate acquaintance with both Bahmanical and Buddhist textsa rare double accomplishment; Lenn Goodman, who read the account of Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Maimonides with a scholar's exactness and a philosopher's acuity; Irene Iber, expert in the development of Chinese culture, who read an early version of a number of chapters and proposed amendments,

most of which I accepted; the late Yehuda Landa, who seemed to know Plato and Aristotle by heart, and who went over everything on Greek philosophy; Muhsin Mahdi, the editor of a number of Alfarabi's works, who was kind enough to check the account of Alfarabi and Avicenna; Galia Patt-Shamir, who preserved a Confucian courtesy in her comments on my account of Chu Hsi; Karin Preisendanz, who read the whole of the first chapter and the account of Upanishadic thinkers in the second, all with illuminating care, and who was my exceptionally painstaking savior in all that relates to Nyaya- Vaisheshika

thought; Hilary Putnam, who, with Ruth Anna Putnam, helped me decide on the plan for the book, and who made helpful comments on

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the book's Afterword; Ornan Rotem, who made scholarly and philosophical comments on everything related to Buddhist thought, his specialty, as well as useful comments on the book's first chapter and the Afterword, and who, for good measure, helped with matters of style; and Zvi Tauber, who, thanks to his scholarly knowledge of European philosophy, saved me from errors and was ready to play the role of the Western

philosopher open enough to take non- Western philosophy seriously. Finally, I thank my daughter, Doreet, for designing the cover of this book.

Page 1 Chapter 1 The Three Philosophical Traditions What, in This History, is Considered to be Philosophical?

There are three great philosophical traditions, the Indian, the Chinese, and the European. Before I describe them, I want to ask and answer, very briefly, what a philosophical tradition is, why I say that there are only three such traditions, and why it is best to study them together, as they are studied here, rather than separately or successively.

What is a philosophical tradition? A chain of persons who relate their thought to that of their predecessors and in this way form a continuous transmission from one generation to the next, from teacher to disciple to disciple's disciple. Or rather, because a whole tradition is made up of many subtraditions, it is one and the same tradition because all of its subtraditions share common sources and modes of thought and develop by reaction to one another. A tradition is by nature cumulative and it progresses in the sense that it defines itself with increasing

detail and density. I define the tradition as philosophical to the extent that its members articulate it in the form of principlesif only principles of interpretationand of conclusions reasonably drawn from them; and I define it as philosophical to the extent that its adherents defend and attack by means of reasonable argumentseven those that deny reasonand understand and explain how they try to be reasonable. As history demonstrates again and again, no philosophy is purely rational, pure rationality being an unreasonable, impossible ideal. Matters of religion,

communal

Page 2 loyalty, reverence for teachers, and cultural habits, not to mention individual psychology, have always limited rationality, so that philosophical subtraditions or schools are rational by tendency rather than in any absolute way. 1

I go on to my second question: Why say that there are only three great philosophical traditions? To claim this, one must put aside the correct but, for our purpose, insufficient definitions of philosophy as wisdom or as the group of principles, either stated or implied, by which any person or community views life. In keeping with the original meaning of the term philosophy, love of wisdom, philosophers, one supposes, have wanted to be wise, yet experience has taught that there is no good reason to think that they are necessarily so except,

circularly, by their own definitions, and no good reason to think that nonphilosophers cannot be equally wise, that is, perceptive, farsighted, and sagacious, in the ways that their particular lives have taught them. Nor is there any good reason to suppose that traditions that are not philosophical by the definition I have adopted have not had their own depth of sophistication and practical intelligence (which is implicitly also theoretical).

Let me pause briefly to give a few examples of what I mean by this last statement. The definition of philosophy that is adopted here implies that ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt had no philosophical tradition. This implication holds true even though the Mesopotamians' religious texts show that they were trying to grasp universal and permanent principles that lie below the surface of things. On the basis of these principles they erected often fantastic hypotheses from which they could extrapolate what could or should happen. A different,

more modest kind of understanding can be extrapolated from the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh. Like Greek drama, the epic warns against the attempt to overcome the nature of things. In the end, the hero gets, though maybe refuses, the advice (accepted by Voltaire's Candide) to relax his heroics, accept the unheroic pleasures of life, and submit to the fate of all humans. The quite dissimilar Dialogue of Pessimism is a debate of a man with himself in which he makes contrary judgments on

how he should act. It ends, it seems, with a skeptical, gloomy, yet humorous acceptance of all the contradictory positionswhat is good is bad and what is useful is harmful. As in Ecclesiastes, the reason appears to be that a human being understands too little to know what it is best to do. Like the wisdom literature of the Egyptians and Hebrews, that of the Mesopotamians teaches the lesson of a temperate acceptance of life and life's duties.2

All this suggests the intellectual accomplishment of the Mesopotamians, which is matched by that of the other great, equally ancient civilization, the Egyptian. To give one of many examples, the Egyptians

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explain the world with the help of the cosmic goddess Maat, who unites in her person the values of order, equilibrium, truth, and wisdom, and so keeps the world tolerable to the human beings who tenant it. Yet god as conceived by the Egyptians remains ambiguous in number: except for the twenty years during which the pharaoh Akhenaten tried to force monotheism on the Egyptians, god for them remained both one and many, always being discovered in new manifestations.

By their refusal to regard monotheism and polytheism as exclusive of one another, the Egyptians expressed their tacit conviction that nature has a certain unity but cannot be summed up in a fixed number of gods or forces. 3

All this, I repeat, is not philosophy as I mean it here. If we accept a more general definition and think of philosophy as wisdom in the face of the difficulties of life, we discover that "primitives," as we have miscalled them, can be our equals. Let me justify this judgment with the example of the answer given by an Eskimo shaman to the explorer Knud Rasmussen when Rasmussen pressed him

to justify his religion. Taking Rasmussen outside, the Eskimo first asked him why the blizzard was so cruel and then showed him a sick woman and asked why the innocent must suffer. When Rasmussen hesitated, the Eskimo said:

You see, you are equally unable to give any reason why we ask why life is as it is. All our customs come from life and turn towards life; we explain nothing, we believe in nothing, but in what I have shown you lies our answer to all you ask.4

This answer shows that a cold climate and apparently simple life can produce wisdom; but so can a hot climate, as is proved by African proverbial thought, at times as pointed as anything in La Rochefoucauld or Nietzsche. "Those who are absent are always wrong," says an African proverb; and "Wisdom is like mushrooms that come after you have finished eating (too late!)"; and "A healthy ear can stand hearing sick words."5

Such proverbs are akin to African dilemma tales, which put arguable, humorous problems to a group of listeners. Take the example of the Nigerian tale in which a blind man accompanied by his blind wife, blind mother, and blind mother-in- law, finds seven eyes. Two he gives to his wife, two he takes for himself, one he gives to his mother, and one to his mother-in- law. He is left with a single eye in his hand. If he gives the remaining eye to his

own mother, his wifewho is there looking at himwill make him feel ashamed, but if he gives it to his wife's mother, he will be afraid, because one's mother is not to be trifled with. The teller of the tale challenges the audience to make and justify the choice, which is not unlike the choices we try to work out in philosophical ethics or, more practically, in the medical dilemmas now discussed by philosophers

and hospital committees.6

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Why are such profound myths, clever proverbs, and dilemma tales not philosophy in the sense intended here? The myths are not because, relying on traditional narratives and on imagination, they do not usually make their meaning explicit and never justify it by careful reasoningthe meaning remains basically implicit. The Dialogue of Pessimism is not philosophy as meant here because the speaker does

no more than state the opposing views between which he is caught, the Eskimo's insight is not because it is not developed, and the African proverbs and dilemma tales are not, for the same reason, and also because they are not related with enough care to explicit principlesat least to principles by which situations may be analyzed .*

Yet mythology, debate against oneself, existential emotion, proverbial sharpness, and exercise in hard choices all join philosophy in the sense used here when, in keeping with the definition that has been adopted, they are argued out reasonably; or when the principles on which they rest are distinguished from the conclusions built on themor it is reasonably argued that there are no such principles; or when the methods of argument are themselves justified; or when the story, emotion, cleverness, or confrontation with oneself or others is put in a relatively unbroken sequence of reasonings. This spelling out of reasons is not necessarily to the good, or all to the good: The tendency of reason to devalue

what it has not succeeded in making verbally explicit and logically consistent makes it apt to miss a great deal to which imagination has given the form of mythology, religion, and art. Where abstraction displays clearly defined but skeletally bare principlesone logical lever openly moving anotherimagination, as tradition develops it, displays complex images and ambiguous relations that are less easy to analyze or enchain deductively but are far more suggestive.

*In a book that influenced many African intellectuals, the Belgian missionary Placide Tempels argued that the thought of the Bantus (of central and southern Africa) is a consistent, rational, and therefore "philosophical" vitalism based on the principle that all being is hierarchically organized force. Another influential figure, the Rwandan priest Alexis Kagame, argued that the Rwandaise language shows an implicit, particularly dynamic notion of structure.

Further, the French anthropologist Marcel Griaule attributed to the Dogon, of central Mali, a rich cosmology and a "metaphysics" expressed in rites and actions (Conversations with Ogotemmeli, p. 3).

In essential agreement with the restrictive definition of philosophy I have given here, Kwasi Wiredu, an Oxford- educated philosopher from Ghana, considers traditional African thought, however humanistic, to be only a "folk philosophy." An African philosophy distinct from traditional world- views is still to be created, he says (Philosophy and an African Culture, pp. 68, 3336). And the French-educated philosopher Paulin Hountondji denounces "ethnophilosophies" as European constructs unknown to the Africans to which they have been attributed and insists that the theoretical creativity of the African peoples, arrested by colonialism, is yet

to be liberated (African Philosophy, pp. 45, 54, 67, 101, 164).

Page 5 Why Are There Only Three Philosophical Traditions?

I have still not explained why I have said that there are only three philosophical traditions, the Indian, the Chinese, and the European. What about such others as the Jewish, Muslim, Japanese, and Tibetan? Well, yes and no, as philosophers say, these are and are not separate traditions. The matter is more complicated than it seems at first. To begin with, it is possible to argue that even the Indians, Chinese, and Europeans never arrived at points of view unified enough to justify classifying them as distinct traditions. In all three, there are obvious and unobvious points of cleavage. To mention only the most obvious, in India, the Indians who regarded

themselves as orthodox tried to delegitimize, that is, read out of their tradition, the philosophies they classified as unorthodox; in China, the Taoists mocked the tradition that Confucians revered, and during China's later history, orthodox Confucians saw Buddhism as deeply foreign to Chinese tradition; and in Europe, it is not hard to distinguish the different national traditionsphilosophy that is a French, English, German, Italian, or other tradition.

To justify classifying each of the three great traditions as distinct, one therefore has to show that it has a unity that prevails over all the internal differences it exhibits. Or if the attempt to show that unity prevails seems tenuous or subjective, one has to show that each of the three has pervasive habits of thought and a history of self- referenceof person to person, of intellectual group to group, of intellectual group to

authoritative person, tradition, or text, and so on. This would demonstrate unity in two separable senses, that of continuity and that of self- reference. Continuity is the relationship that makes everything subsequent in the tradition lead back to the same beginnings in time, place, or attitudethe Vedas, say, in India,

In contrast especially to Hountondji, Kwame Gyekye, of the University of Ghana, argues that there are cultural ideas common to the African peoples, so that it is justifiable to speak of African philosophy. African philosophers should therefore "turn their gaze on the intellectual foundations of African culture and experience. ... " (An Essay on African Thought, pp. 18990, 212 [quoted]).

It has also been argued that the distinction between folk philosophy and formal philosophy rests on a parochial idea that 'captures only the contemporary analytic tradition" (P. Ikunobe, "The Parochial Universalist Conception of 'Philosophy' and 'African Philosophy," pp. 19495, 207).

H. Odera Oruka, whose philosophical training is American, has conducted research in Kenya on what he calls "sage philosophy," which he regards as a logical, critical, didactic form of wisdom distinct from that taught by folk-sages, who are uncritical. He protests that it is only prejudice that grants a Greek sage such as Heraclitus the name philosopher but denies it to a contemporary African sage such as Mbuya Akoko (Sage Philosophy, p.

xxv). Okura's book contains brief life histories of seven Kenyan sages and interviews designed to exhibit the critical quality of their reasoning.

Bibliographical data for this footnote are given in note 6, above.

Page 6 the godlike culture heroes in China, and the Greek philosophers in Europe. Self- reference, in contrast, is the quality that makes any isolated statement or philosophy difficult to understand without setting it in the contextual web that determines what is internal to the tradition and what is external to it, belongs to another world of thought and, no doubt, action.

What obscures and what strengthens the unity of each of the three traditions? Even China, which alone of the three traditions has had a single government for much of its history, has undergone dramatic changes of dynasty and probably of the character we identify as Chinese; and, like India and Europe, it has always contained a great variety of territories, people, languages,

and cultural traditions. All the same, most Chinese thinkers have shared the same classical language, same historical reference points, and (in imperial China) same education, which was essential to their prestige and to their usual competition for government office.

The unity of India and Europe has been more tenuous. However, the great old classics of the one were Sanskrit and of the other were Greek and Latin, and just as classical Chinese was the learned language of educated Chinese, Sanskrit remained that of learned Indians and Latin of learned Europeans, so that, in each tradition, reference to the past would normally be to the same classical literature. As for Japanese thought, philosophically it depends mainly on the Chinese, as the

Tibetan depends mainly on the Indian, that is, Buddhist, while Jewish and Muslim thought, though each has its own history and dogmas, draw their philosophy proper from the same Greek and Roman sources and, in this limited but real sense, are part of the European tradition .*

Philosophy, it turns out, had just three territorial origins, three beginning languages, three historical pasts, and three webs of self- reference. That there have been just three major philosophical traditions is, therefore, a fact, a brute fact, I would say Whoever is so minded can emphasize the breaks in each and the vagueness at times of the borders between them,

*No doubt, pride in one's Jewish or Muslim heritage may prompt one to minimize this dependence on European, that is, Greek and Roman thought. The dependence is explained in chapter 9, which discusses, among other philosophers, Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Maimonides. Each of the three has his own, sometimes considerable degree of philosophical independence, but the thought of no one of them can be conceived without the Aristotelian and Neoplatonic principles that underlie it. As will be explained, the Muslims themselves

reserve the term philosophy for thought based on these Aristotelian- Neoplatonic principles. The often philosophical theology that departs from the principles is called kalam, which may be translated dialectical theology. For its logic, kalam depends on Hellenistic, especially Stoic logic, and for its practices of debate and its dissociative kind of atomismwhich denies natural causalityperhaps on Indian philosophy.

Page 7 borders like those of diffuse clouds; but the notions themselves of breaks and borders imply something that is single enough to be broken and separate enough to have borders of some kind. 7 Why Is It Best to Study the Three Traditions Together Rather than Separately or Successively?

As the interrelationship between human beings everywhere grows stronger and more visible, it grows more obvious that a point of view that takes account of no more than a single culture is to that extent provincial. This provincialism has been shared by persons of otherwise great intellectual distinction, too proud, I suppose, to realize how narrow-minded they were, or still are. I do not hesitate to say that anyone who believes that philosophy (in the relatively technical sense adopted here) has been confined to Europe is demonstrating

either ignorance or prejudice. So far as I know, this belief is never held by those who have studied Indian or Chinese thought with care.

Granted that there are three philosophical traditions and that interest in them all is justified, why claim, as I do, that is it best to begin by studying them together orto diminish the claimto begin by comparing characteristic examples of all three in revealing detail? One reason is that each of the traditions is so great in extent and depth that if any one of them really seizes your interest, you sink into it and the chances of studying another tradition

seriously are greatly diminished; and if you do take up another, it is likely to be as a subject of only minor interest. That is, by concentrating exclusively on any one tradition, you in practice tend to prejudge its importance and reduce the likelihood that you will be able to understand it in just relationship to the others.

A second reason for learning the three together is that you then become aware of a much greater variety of positions. The result is that every philosophy is seen in the light of more contrasts, and more contrasts yield a greater variety of interpretations and, it is reasonable to hope, a greater ability to modulate any point of view. And if the three are learned together, it is easier to explore the possibility that there are philosophical positions and arguments that are truly universal or that, taken together, make up a kind of periodic table

of the elements of philosophy. This possibility is one in favor of which, on pragmatic, psychological, and personal grounds, I myself incline. But the opposite, I should say, more romantic inclination, makes things even more interesting: By changing your eyes, you see thingsmeanings, relationships, and valuesto which you have so far been blind. A perceptive traveler in philosophy learns to grasp what has been invisible

Page 8 because it is too familiar or, on the contrary, too distant, and is led to take greater care in discriminating exact meanings.

Let me give an example: The Chinese philosopher Hsün-tzu, of the third century B.C.E., says, "The nature of man is evil; his goodness is the result of his activity," and the German philosopher Kant, of the eighteenth century, says, "The question here is: whether man is good by nature, or evil by nature, or whether he is by nature equally receptive to good and evil, according as one or another hand happens to mould him."

Anyone curious enough to explore the likeness between both statements must first learn their contexts. To begin with, one must ask what both mean by good, evil, and nature? And then one must ask how much of the similarity is the result of translation from, respectively, Chinese and German, into the same standard English? The questions are not trivial nor the answers simple. 8

Yet even if what I have been contending is true, there remains a practical objection, which is that no one knows enough to teach the three traditions together except very superficially. In answer, I admit that no person can know all three in great depthI certainly do not pretend to. Yet those who make this objection ought to think further and take into account that much the same argument applies to the history of even a single tradition. It is easy to make an arithmetical estimate to show that no person, however industrious, has nearly enough time to make a more than superficial study of the works of all the philosophers and schools considered important in either the Indian, the Chinese, or the European tradition. Our human limitations are such

that it is an accomplishment to learn even a single philosopher really well. How difficult it is to bend one's understanding to fit that of someone else, especially someone different in culture and experience, someone who may have written thousands of pages and made acknowledged and unacknowledged shifts of position and have shown all the coherence and incoherence of which a thinker is capable! If a fully adequate knowledge of the sources was required, it would be extremely unlikely that anyone could write a history of modern European philosophy or, for that matter, write any history of any kind of any extended period or large area. I have heard a specialist in Hellenistic philosophy say that it is now impossible for anyone to know even Greek philosophyscholarship

has grown too detailed. But since we have and need general histories, it stands to reason that they can be written only because their authors are ready to contend with their relative ignorance. Unless they were willing to do so, in history, as in other fields of learning, we would be left with the work of specialists too narrow to see anything whole and would be unable to see any subject in a wide yet relatively informed perspective. To study or write the history of philosophy of any tradition or period, one must be ready to omit very much, to take more

Page 9 than a little on the authority of others, and to try to make clear to oneself what is of great and what of less importance.

The total number of philosophical works that can possibly be studied by a historian who deals with all three traditions is no greater than the number that can possibly be studied by a historian of any one of them, so that the selectivity of the comparative historian must be greater, as must surely be the dependence on other scholarsthe mere linguistic competence demanded grows almost beyond human possibilities. I am confident, however, that once the philosophical

classics of each of the three traditions are more widely known, their strangeness in the other two traditions will wear off and the easier texts will be as accessible in translation as the easier native ones. The denser or more technical texts, whether native or foreign, will always need elaborate commentaries. 9 A Distant, Preliminary View of the Three Traditions

This first view of the three traditions begins with a chronological chart of the philosophers to be discussed here .* In choosing just these philosophers, I may have been influenced by their suitability for comparison. But this influence, conscious or not, can only have been marginal because most of those listed are indispensable to the traditions to which they belong and which they largely define; and though I hope not to forget the philosophers' individuality,

it is the part their ideas play in creating their respective traditions that I intend to emphasize. That is, I have ordinarily adopted what I take to be each tradition's retrospective view of its own development and of the contribution that each of its philosophers made to it. I must concede that a few of the persons who appear in the chartConfucius is the most conspicuous exampleare not philosophers by the definition I have adopted, but they belong here because they

are the fathers of their respective philosophical traditions. I must also concede

• A good many of the dates I give are doubtful, and some, especially of the Indian philosophers, are known only vaguelyall that is really known of the dates of Uddalaka and Yajnavalkya is that they precede the Buddha. As for the Buddha, there are scholars who go beyond minor adjustments of his dates and situate him a full hundred years later. In this chart, which aims at maximal simplicity, I have not allowed myself more than two question marks nor used the abbreviation c. or ca. to

indicate approximation. Vasubandhu may represent two philosophers rather than one, but this is not the place to discuss dividing him. While a number of undoubtedly great philosophers do not appear in this chronology, some of the philosophers I do write about are absent here because I could not stretch the notion of a great philosopher enough to include them. As explained in the text, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Mainmonides are considered to belong to the European tradition. For

the sake of a perhaps quixotic and merely relative neutralitythe birth of Christ is still the chronology's starting pointI use the abbreviations B.C.E. and C.E.

Page 10 that, to write a coherent history of a practical size, I feel compelled to leave out more than a few philosophers that I take to be great. Besides, the philosophers that do appear are not invariably great, and a number of them, chosen to represent certain points of view, might have been exchanged for others.

The italicized names on the chart are those of philosophers I should have taken up if I had wanted to make this history more nearly complete and, especially, if I had continued it up to our own times. In spite of their relatively early date, I do not deal with the Buddhists Hui- neng, Fa-tsang, and Dogen. This is because Hui- neng and Dogen, who are, respectively, Chinese and Japanese Ch'an (Zen) thinkers, are best compared with Europeans such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, these four comprising a group, as I see it, of postmetaphysical irrationalists. And Fa-tsang, with his

philosophy of all-in-all, would make a particularly interesting pair with Hegel. Now, to begin with, look not at the names of the particular philosophers but at the way in which the names cluster at some points and are absent at others (see Figure 1.1).

The names we see clustered at the top of the three columns express the fact that all three traditions went through an early period in which there was enough conflict and enough freedom to encourage the simultaneous appearance of many quite different points of view. Competition between these points of view stimulated the intellectual self-assertion that constitutes philosophy. In all three

traditions, this was a time of the breaking and building of social structures that encouraged adventurous intellectuals to think aloud, to play, pray, and dream in the mode of reasoning. In response to their own ambition or the urging of their disciples or rulers, they dueled with neighbors of like philosophical or other ambitions, neighbors who varied, according to distinctions then already drawn, from hidebound conservatives to wild radicals and

damnable sophists.

It is not chance that in the geographical areas of each of the three traditions there were then many small states rubbing shoulders in amity or enmity. In some of these statesin Europe, Athens is the best examplethe habit of freedom was strong enough for it to be possible to argue almost anythingthough in Athens, Anaxagoras, Socrates, and maybe others paid for the freedom they exercised. The upshot was that in all three traditions there were sages or intellectuals, typically with entourages of followers, to argue for or

against the already existing tradition of a golden age, for or against this- worldliness, and for or against altruism or egoism. However religious or traditional India and China may appear to later eyes, everything sacred and everything profane could then be mocked by those of a turn for mockery, or debated by those of a mind to debate. These wars waged with reasons led to the development of thought about

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Chronology of Great Philosophers INDIA CHINA, EUROPE JAPAN B.C.E. Uddalaka (? 8th cent.) Yajnavalkya (?8th cent.) Mahavira Heraclitus (599527) (fl. 500) Buddha Confucius Parmenides (563483) (551479) (b. 515) Mo-tzu Socrates (480390) (470399) Democritus (460370) Chuang-tzu Plato (4th cent.) (428348) Mencius Aristotle (371298) (384322) Pyrrho (365270) Epicurus (341270) Hsün-tzu Arcesilaus (298238) (315241) Han Fei-tzu (280233) Carneades (214129) Lucretius (9955) C.E. Nagarjuna Plotinus (fl.200) (205270) Sextus Empiricus (3rd cent.) Asanga (fl. 350)

Vasubandu (fl. 350) Proclus (410485) Bhartirhari (450510) Dignaga (480540) Hui-neng (638713)/ Shen-hui (670762) DharmakirtiFa-tsang (600660) (643712) Shankara (700750) Jayarashi Al-Farabi (fl. 800) (870950) Udayana Avicenna (fl. 1050) (9801037) Shriharsha Chu Hsi Maimonides (fl. 1150) (11381200)(11351204) Dogen Aquinas (12001253)(12251274) Duns Scotus (12661308) Gangesha William of (fl. 1320) Ockham (12851347) Raghunatha WangYang- (fl. 1500) ming (14721529) Descartes (15961650) Spinoza (16321677) Gadadhara Locke (fl. 1650) (16321704) Leibniz (16461716)

Berkeley (16851753) Hume (17111776) Kant (17241804) Hegel (17701831) Kierkegaard (18131855) Nietzsche (18441900) Peirce (18391914) James (18421910) Dewey (18591952) Husserl (18591938) Nishida Russell (18781945)(18721970) Wittgenstein (18891951) Heidegger (18891976)

Page 12 thought, by which I mean about the hows and whys of reasons and reasoning. Not only do we find the beginnings of an almost formal logic but, along with it, a conscious playing about with paradoxes, the players happy as children with glittering new intellectual toys, and a readiness to demonstrate virtuosity as such in the logic or rhetoric of debate.

The philosopher Karl Jaspers calls this period the axial age because so much on which human thought turns was originated in its courseours, he says, is another such age, the first in which history ceases to be a collection of local histories and becomes world history. 10 Jaspers takes as his starting point the eighth century B.C.E .; but if we restrict ourselves to the sixth and fifth centuries alone, we find not only the sages and philosophers listed in our chart, but writers, artists, and scientists who were equal creators of the three traditions, and, beyond these three, creators of other traditions, such as the prophets Ezekiel and Second Isaiah, who also helped

to extend human thoughtphilosophy taken in its broader, more simply human sense.11

I go on to the relative emptiness of the chart for Europe during the period beginning with the first century C.E. and ending (Muslims and Jews apart) in the thirteenth. It should not be supposed that there are no names to fill the gap, which reflects the judgment that these are not the names of the great creators of the philosophical traditions (for Europe, I have probably been unjust in omitting the leading Stoics and Augustine). As the chart implies, there was a great change in Chinese philosophy that took place when Buddhism became acclimatized to its Chinese home and when Confucianism had to reconstruct itself in competition with Buddhism. But this

intermediate periodintermediate from our position in timeis just that of the flourishing of Buddhist philosophy in India, as well as of its philosophical opponents, all of them sharpening one another's philosophical wits by means of their rivalry. It was through the now sophisticated Buddhist philosophy that India made the thought of China, Japan, and Tibet far more varied and subtle than before. For India, however, the chart becomes empty from about the twelfth century.

As compared with the crowded column of European philosophers, the near emptiness of the Indian and Sino- Japanese columns from the seventeenth century and on has an involved explanation, not all of which I am sure. At least some of it is likely to be the result of Western ignorance in general and my own ignorance in particular. I mean that the Indian and Chinese thinkers of this time have been studied in the West far less than their predecessors.

To the best of my knowledgeI've confessed my ignorancethe only classical Indian school that continued to be visibly creative, as opposed to just increasingly intricate, was the logic- emphasizing school, in this period called, with reason, the "New Logic" (Navya- Nyaya).

Page 13 The school of Vedanta may, more hesitantly, be added. But other classical schools also remained alive, and the verdict that their later work was uncreative may be the result of our inattentiveness to distinctions that they perceived and that we, too, may sometime come to perceive to be of genuine interest. Or perhaps we already perceive them so but are unaware that others have preceded us in recognizing their interest.

An example of possibly unjust omission is that of the Chinese "searchers for evidence." They were the members of a seventeenth- and eighteenth- century group of reform- minded thinkers. Using philology as their instrument, they hoped to recover ancient truths, purify them of later metaphysical dross, and, with these truths, go about reforming society. The "searchers for evidence" (k'ao-cheng) advocated the use of empirical criteria such as stone and bronze inscriptions,

genealogies, and chronologically precise biographies; and they discussed Chinese astronomy and mathematics in relation to the European. Some of them (such as Tai Chen [17241777]) tried to legitimize this European science by assigning it a Chinese origin. By and large, the skeptical and empirical tendencies of these thinkers served the purpose of reconstructing the antiquity they revered. Their closest European analogues were the Renaissance scholars whose passion was to recover and

relive Greco- Roman antiquity. But for all his courage and importance, Tai Chen seems to me not to show an intellectual intensity great enough to be classed as a great philosopher. However, my verdict may be the result of insufficient knowledge.

This whole late period, during which European philosophy flourished and non-European philosophy appears, rightly or wrongly, to have lessened its creative intensity is also the period that experienced foreign rule. Such rule may well have sapped the life of the Indian and then the Chinese philosophical tradition by weakening their social power and by impelling them in the direction of an at first necessarily crude encounter with Western thought. In India, Muslim raiders and

conquerors exercised an increasing influence from the early eleventh century. Some Muslim rulers were simply intolerant, while others were tolerant either out of conviction or for merely pragmatic reasonsthe extraordinarily tolerant emperor Akbar created a monotheism based on Hinduism and Christianity as much as on his native Muslim religion. In wartime, Muslim rulers often demonstrated their piety by desecrating or destroying Hindu temples, which in the villages were centers of

social life and of potential resistance. In retaliation, a Hindu rebellion was likely to result in the same treatment of mosques. The clash was not between peoples who felt themselves to be equals because, to the intolerant on either side, the other was composed of the uncivilized or dangerous, of infidels, as the Muslims saw the Hindus, or of barbarians, as the Hindus saw the Muslims. The fact that the center of

Page 14 the school of New Logic was in Northeast India, which had remained untroubled by the earlier, more fanatical Muslims, may help explain the school's continued creativity.

It is not a priori unlikely, as modern Indian Muslims have claimed, that the Hindus who willingly converted to Islam were those who felt themselves most victimized by the caste system; and the mystical sects of Islam might pull at already mystically inclined Hindus. But for Hindus generally, the contact with the Muslims was external because

the Muslim religion was imageless, ruled by dogma, and relatively egalitarian, while they, the Hindus, worshiped images and belonged to hereditary groupings, jatis, into which they were born and in which they lived, worshiped, worked, and died. To leave or be expelled from such a group was to become culturally naked and humanly isolated.

I have been speaking of the Hindus in relation to the Muslims, but when the British became dominant, as happened in the later eighteenth century, the results were just as complicated and hard to summarize as those of Muslim dominance. I allow myself to avoid any detail here and to say only that, in the long run, European thought proved to be a dangerous, sometimes demoralizing rival to the traditional thought of India. 12

In China, the first great outside influence, which came from India in the form of Buddhism, was quite peaceful. By about the fourth century C.E., Buddhism had been transformed from a foreign into a native, Chinese religion. However, in the eyes of orthodox Confucians it was offensive and even dangerous because, they argued, a Buddhist was encouraged as such to transfer allegiance from the family and from the Confucian hierarchy of

teachers and officials to the Buddhist monastery, and was encouraged, at least in principle, to renounce marriage and even the most usual and innocent animal pleasuresall the goals that most ordinary humans pursue without question. As it was actually lived, Buddhism proved far more pliant than such orthodox complainants could admit, and many individuals were Confucian and Buddhist (or Taoist) at once, with a feeling,

attested to by poets and artists, of inward wealth rather than inward contradiction.

As a result of the different form of life it encouraged, of the shift in allegiance it demanded of those deeply faithful to it, and of its heavy involvement in court politics, Buddhism aroused strenuous opposition and was subjected to persecution, though not of the most drastic kinds practiced in Europe. The monasteries' wealth was confiscated and their monks were dispersed, causing the decline of all but two

sects, Ch'an (Zen) and Pure Land.13 The Europeans who first influenced the Chinese were the missionaries. Their influence was mostly on the scholars or court officials who

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were intrigued by their foreign learning or by the clocks and other devices they brought with them. However, the missionaries were eventually expelled and their converts subjected to persecution. It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that a serious contest began between the Chinese who favored tradition and those who wanted to introduce Western learning or practices. This contest, like the contests elsewhere between

traditionalists and Westernized reformers, was fierce and bred great fears and hopes.

We have to leave such political contests and go back to philosophy proper and to the causes for its real or apparent loss of creativity in India and China. In both traditions, threats from the outside have led to repeated retreats inward. The kind of retreat I mean is to an orthodoxy that demonstrates its faithfulness to tradition by insisting on remaining fixed, that is, by ignoring or pretending to ignore the worth of everything that is foreign to it. Such a retreat was possible because the Indian and Chinese

traditionalists were unable to conceive that there could be languages equal in refinement and exactness to Sanskrittaken to be utterly sacred and beautifulor, in the case of China, to classical Chinesetaken to be incomparably superior in every wayand unable to conceive that there could be other philosophical cultures that might at all approach the richness and rightness of their own. As the Indians and Chinese understood it, their thought had undergone a process that began in inspired wisdom and

continued by way of the differentiation, refinement, and expansion that made each culture inexpressibly right and deep, so that those who had formed themselves by its means could retire into its depths without feeling any sense of narrowness, that is, of provinciality or loss of universal truth. Both the Chinese and Indian traditions of philosophy have functioned as "a sophisticated theoretical structure of self- universalization and self- isolation." 14 The European tradition, too, has usually

exhibited this narcissistic attention to itself. But this should not lead us to forget the obvious, that a community preserves itself by excluding from power any foreigners and foreignness that endanger its unity, such as it may be.

History shows that the Buddhists were able to look outward more than the Hindus but unable to survive in India itself. Deeply Hindu or deeply Confucian philosophers felt alienated from Buddhism. It was rare for them to acknowledge any need to consider a foreign tradition as if it could teach them anything of intellectual or spiritual value. By the twentieth century, of course, such a view had become

implausible to an increasing and finally dominant number of intellectuals. Despite what I have said, it should not be assumed that the Hindus isolated themselves completely from Muslim thought; but the mutual influences of various kinds were never of great importance to classical

Page 16

philosophy. Finally, however, whether earlier or later, Western thought, along with Western commerce and Western arms, became a subversive influence everywhere. The effect of the West became so dominant that a Hindu or Chinese was (and is) likely to accept Western values while insisting that his native tradition developed their equivalents earlier, or at least by itself: Everything

Western worth anything was already there in the Upanishads or The Book of Changes. To give a more subtle though more doubtful example, researchers into the intellectual life of seventeenth- century China point out, as I have implied, that it resembles European thought in being oriented (ironic word here) toward the critical, empirical, and even material. It is true that the Chinese have always

had an interest in history, philology, and archeology, all of them needed to subject documents and ideas to a critical analysis. But perhaps the researchers were tempted by the desire to show how far the Chinese tradition could go toward an educated empiricism by means of its own resources alone .* The play of pride and shame in one's tradition never disappears. And of course, both

Indian and Chinese nationalists have responded to humiliation by outsiders by stressing the essential superiority of their native thought. 15 Is the Conception of Philosophy the Same in the Three Traditions?

We are still not clear of initial problems. This is because in speaking of philosophy I have been making the perhaps mistaken assumption that such an enterprise or profession in fact exists in India and China. One interesting though much too simple way of testing the assumption is to ask whether terms for philosophy exist in Sanskrit and Chinese, and if they

appear to exist, whether their meanings are close enough to the

*Modern Western philosophy is said to have first entered Chinese intellectual life in the form of an article on Francis Bacon, written by Wang Tao (18221897), who collaborated with the missionary James Legge on a pioneering translation of the Chinese classics. Wang Tao's article on Bacon was published in 1873, and a translation of Bacon's Novum Organum, in 1877. In 1889, an essay competition in a Shanghai college ("supervised"

by Wang Tao) was based on the unusual question, in what does the Chinese way of "investigation things and extending knowledge" differ from and resemble that initiated in the West by "the Englishman Bacon," whose ideas "affected the writings of two other [English] intellectuals, Darwin and Spencer. Since their works have proven to be so beneficial, can you provide a detailed account of the sources of these influences?" The four answers that have been

preserved show a basic understanding of Bacon, and two of them, a basic understanding of Darwin as well. After the abolition, in 1905, of the imperial examination system, Bacon's ideas were widely accepted among intellectuals (Yuan Weishi, "A Few Problems. ... , =

pp. 16466, 17475).

Page 17 European meanings to justify their use as equivalents. Although I am committed to saying yes, this answer is not self- evident. The moment of word investigation that follows gives a useful reminder of the kind of difficulties that comparative philosophy faces.

It soon becomes evident that the Sanskrit or Chinese terms that Westerners have perhaps thoughtlessly used to translate philosophy and school of philosophy have meanings that are unique to their own languages. 16 This mismatching has sometimes been a source of both pride and shame, and it has made it easy to declare that not only the terms but also the subject matter and the institutions of the European tradition, such as its schools of philosophy, are unique to Europe. But while it is true that, by a philologist's standards, the terms themselves for philosophy are different in meaning, observation of their use shows

that this difference is not in itself crucial. It might have been crucial if each tradition had permanently fixed the technical meanings of its philosophical terms. Sometimes equivalents were stabilized by the need for exactness in translation. In Chinanotably in the seventh century under the direction of Hsüan- tsangSanskrit originals were translated by large groups of specialists. In Tibet, the meanings of Sanskrit terms came to be fixed either by usage or official decree: according to the late eighth- century Word Combination, misleading translations were revised and terms whose meaning "had to be fixed in

accord with an interpretation" were given official equivalents.17 All the same, the meanings of general philosophical terms have varied a good deal in all three traditions, so even though the terms' webs of relationship vary, there is a good deal of overlapping. As long as the likelihood of similarity-in- difference is understood and it is taken for granted that philosophically important terms are clarified when studied in context, no great misunderstanding need arise from the equation of a term like philosophy with the terms it translates. It can be just as misleading to be overexact, by

insisting on distinctions finer than the context makes necessary, as to be careless; and the level of abstractionof distance of terms from their local associationsshould be appropriate to the translator's particular aim.

Let me spell out what I have just said in enough detail to make the point convincing. I begin with Greece, where the term was invented.18 There, in Greece, the word wisdom (sophia) could be used, as it was by Plato, to distinguish between true wisdom and the false wisdom taught, he complained, by the sophists. Aristotle used the word to name the highest intellectual virtue,

which he contrasted with practical wisdom. As for philosophia, the love of wisdom, Socrates explains in the Apology that what he does is to persuade young and old to care less for body or money than for excellence of soul. Later, in the Phaedo, when he speaks of his impending execution by the Athenians, he explains that God has laid on him the

Page 18

duty of living a life of philosophy and examining both himself and others, and that because he believes that he has spent his life in this way, he is confident that he will be greatly blessed after death. For this reason, he goes on, all those rightly engaged in philosophy are training themselves for dyingphilosophy is the proper training for death! But philosophia is also used in the Platonic dialogues to name the search for true knowledge in the sense of the discovery of the unchanging principles of knowledge. Afterward, the Greek concept of philosophy

becomes whatever the history of Western philosophy had made it becomethere are very many variations.

Perhaps to our astonishment, we find no term in traditional India for philosopher as distinguished from sage, saint, or the like (for logician there is the rough equivalent tarkika). But there are two old terms, anvikshiki and darshana, that can be equated with philosophy. 19 The first of these, still sometimes translated by philosophy, appears to have meant a method of reasoning or science of investigation. Considered to be "a source of light for all sciences, an instrument for all activities,

a foundation for all religious and social duties," it was appropriated by the Logic School (Nyaya) as a self- description; but it continued to be used in the neutral sense of logical reasoning.20 Since it was associated with logic, the term could also be associated with sophistry and with secular, antitraditional points of view, and its nuances were sometimes unfavorable. The more orthodox or believing philosophers kept such analytic reasoning in its place by

insisting that it could always be corrected or refuted and therefore could not reach the absolute truth, which only the authority of scripture or intuition could establish.

It appears to me that, except for the Logic School, orthodox Indian philosophers were more likely to use logic in order to bare contradictions in their opponents' views than to establish their own positive doctrines. In the usual ways of metaphysicians, these doctrines were simply proclaimed at the start or were accepted as the revealed truth, the Veda intuited by the sages who founded their respective schools. The doctrines were then defended by logical counterattacks on those who had attacked them logically.

To interject my own opinion, I think that it was sensible of these philosophers to use logic to attack and refute rather than to prove, because logic finds flaws in reasoning but cannot build philosophies by its own power alone.

Darshana, the other Sanskrit term equated with philosophy, is taken etymologically to mean (the act of) seeing. When extended to mean realization, the term has been used to strengthen the presumption of Indians that their tradition is superior to the analytic, wholly theoretical interests they (mistakenly) attribute to Western philosophy in general.21 However, some

Page 19 Westerners have claimed that the difference between the Indian and Western terms shows that the Indian tradition has lacked the very concept of philosophy as the West has understood it.

In time, especially for the purpose of classifying their philosophies, most Indians came to prefer the term darshana to designate an Indian view, doctrine, or system. In the nineteenth century, when the Indians began to study European philosophy, they used darshana to translate philosophy. But not all of them have been happy with the translation. Sometimes they have complained that it helps to deprive Indian

thought of its native difference from Western ways of thought. Sometimes, too, they have proclaimed that all philosophy should be understood in the light of the spiritual doctrine of India, which defines philosophy more profoundly than philosophy itself is able tothe true (more than) philosopher is the seer.

What of China? 22 It turns out that China, too, lacked an exact equivalent to philosophy. The invention of a new term for it, by a Japanese, makes another illuminating footnote to comparative philosophy. The story of the term begins in 1862, when a young Japanese named Nishi Amane was sent to study in Leiden, from where he brought books by Comte, Mill, Montesquieu, Hegel, and other philosophers, along with the ambition to reform

Japanese thought in their light. Back in Japan, he joined a group of "Illuminists" dedicated to encouraging Western liberalism in Japan. One of the group said sarcastically that all that Japan had to be proud of was its scenery. Another member of the group favored Western science on the grounds that it was not Western but universal, and said, in addition, that only Western- style, constitutional government conformed

with human nature. As always, such sentiments provoked a conservative reaction.

Nishi himself, who favored and translated Mill's Utilitarianism, created (or transcribed phonetically into Japanese) much of the philosophical terminology the Japanese were to use. Long before, when preparing to lecture on Greek and European philosophy at the Center for the Investigation of Barbarian Books, he had tried to approximate the Greek meaning of philosophy by abbreviating the Japanese words science of questing wisdom into the term kitetsugaku.

But then he had applied the word to philosophy in the Western sense alone. Now he decided to coin a more general word. To this end, he analyzed the Western concept of philosophy and found a possible Chinese analogue, an old word composed of a character of two hands and an axe (meaning, perhaps, to break open, as with an axe) and another character, for mouth (meaning by using thought or speech). As a whole, the word means, roughly, to

speak with deliberation or to conceive. Having discovered the concept of philosophy, as he thought, in classical Chinese, Nishi felt justified in abbreviating his earlier term to tetsugaku, to be applied to philosophical thought universally, Sino- Japanese (Confucian,

Page 20 Taoist, Buddhist, etc.) and Western alike. Invented in 1874, the term proved very successful and was widely adopted in East Asia, including China, though only, of course, in its ideographic, pictorial form, the Chinese sound of which is transliterated che-hsüeh (in pinyin zhe- xe.) 23

Not only philosophy but also school (of philosophy) creates a problem. In Chinese, the nearest old term is chia, literally family, used in the sense of scholarly lineage, which implies that the task of those it designates, like that assumed by an Indian school, is to keep an intellectual and spiritual heritage. The Indian schools kept their heritage by a method that made their philosophies grow, like trees, in concentric rings of argument and counterargument. That is, although they supposed that their respective positions expressed a truth that was timeless, they kept

investigating it in increasing detail, mostly, it seems, to defend their versions of the truth against the always renewed objections of their rivals. Indian philosophers were likely to conceal their originality, much as did medieval Jewish, Muslim, and Christian philosophers, who had committed themselves to preserve rather than renew the truthMaimonides and Aquinas and their followers are good examples.

The view that one should concentrate on preserving an already revealed truth must often have lowered interest in the philosophical changes brought about by individuals. To the extent that it did so, the present history's concentration on individual philosophers reflects a distinctly Western rather than Indian point of view. But this statement, too, has to be qualified because the story of Indian (including Buddhist and Jain) philosophy, as the Indians themselves tell it, is filled with incredibly able heroes. Characteristically, the Chinese accounts are historicized, although they too

begin with mythically improved or invented ancestors.

Such comments on Indian, European medieval, and Chinese philosophers are not meant to imply that the present account succeeds in neutralizing the biasses of the modern West. Ifas I am not surethe desire to understand those different from oneself and the desire to go beyond stereotypes are predominantly Western, then I do not really want to escape completely. In any case, whatever our ideal, we cannot wholly avoid remaining the persons we early grew up to be.24

What I have told of the relation between the Indian, Chinese, and European terms for philosophy and school of philosophy implies that an exact correspondence of such concepts is impossible but that a working correspondence is not hard to reach. This is because, as I have noted, the old terms were subjected to such a variety of interpretations that if one wants to be as exact as possible, the meaning of every use, Indian, Chinese, and European, has to be worked out in detail. Such

understanding profits by conscious analysis, but the more usual and subtle

Page 21 learning is by way of the tacit understanding that comes with the actual study of particular texts .* Telltale Sign of Philosophy: Logic

Well- articulated reasoning, I have said, is the test of philosophy. The clearest overt sign of such reasoning is the adoption of logical rules, that is, rules by which to ensure the strictness of the reasoning. The ability to use an explicitly logical method can therefore be used as a criterion, though not the only one, by which to judge whether or not a tradition is truly philosophical in the sense adopted here. 25 Now if the basis of explicitly logical

thinking is the law of contradiction (of a pair of contradictory statements, one is true and the other false) then all three traditions are philosophical because they all not only recognize the law implicitly but use it at times in different conscious variants .** In ancient India an at least semitechnical use of the term mutual prohibition or contradiction (vipratishedha) begins some time between the fifth and third centuries B.C.E.26 The philosophers of the Logic School (Nyaya) assume the

law of contradiction in their discussions and give it practical expression in their arguments. Indian philosophers who qualify the law of contradiction for their own doctrinal reasons argue that there is a kind of negation that, not being exclusive, does not give rise to self- contradiction.27 Occasionally the law of

*"The correct method ... is not one of seeking a more or less literal translation for a word, but rather to find those homeomorphic equivalents which describe the possible correlative activity or activities in other cultures. ... Each real word in any language opens up a whole field of meanings, with diverse connotations and denotations, which is practically impossible to cover with another single word of another linguistic universe (Pannikar, "Sapathaprajna," p. 21 [see note 19 above]).

** The just preceding note (note 25) recalls a number of recent essays on the different philosophical conceptions of rationality. It seems to me that they all acknowledge that to be rational or (if a distinction is made) to be reasonable, one must think intelligibly. Intelligible thought implies consistency in the use of ideas, and consistency requires the use, implicit or explicit, of the law of contradiction. Philosophers like the Neoplatonists, Spinoza, and Hegel, who believe that

the world is or has a logical structure, may take the law of contradiction, along with all formal logic, to be subordinate to the inexpressible source of logic, or enveloped within a metaphysically higher kind of logic (for Hegel, see the compact account in M. Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992, pp. 26871). But these philosophers do their best to reason consistently. Of course, there are those who prefer to deny that logic has access to any reality. But to fit the

category of philosopher, a skeptic or irrationalist such as Chuang-tzu, Nagarjuna, Kierkegaard, or Nietzsche has to make an intelligible defense of the contention that reason, including the law of contradiction, is empty or misleading. The problem that arises, of the skeptic's overt self- contradiction, is dealt with here in chapter 8, on developed skepticism.

Page 22 contradiction or the companion law of excluded middle are stated explicitly. Both occur together in the following eleventh- century text:

There is no other sort, when there is mutual opposition. The opposed cannot be [in] one and the same, since the very utterance would be contradictory. A kind other than the positive and the negative is not possible, for they are of the nature of mutual affirmation and negation. By merely denying the positive, the negative is affirmed. 28

The ancient Chinese have a different cast of mind.29 Because their language is not inflected (its characters do not change their forms), they at first conceived of their sentences as only a succession of "names," as they called words. The earliest explicit recognition of the importance of word order in sentences or, rather, strings of words, occurs in a text of the third century B.C.E. When referring to

the logical relation between a pair of words, the ancient Chinese of a logical cast of mind may say that the words follow from one another or "dismiss" (are inconsistent with) one another, or that if one is inadmissible, so is the other. In one text, the law of excluded middle takes the form of the statement that when two men contradict each another in a disputation and one opinion is right ("fits the fact"), the other is necessarily

wrong (does not "fit the fact"). Use is made of the term pei to state that something is inconsistent, illogical, or self- falsifying. A good example is that of an ancient, logically inclined Chinese who, unhappy with Chuang Tzu's statement that to accept a proposition from one point of view is to reject it from another, retorts, "To deem all saying self- falsifying is self- falsifying"a retort that Chuang Tzu, always

logically brazen, shows he understands.30

Unlike either the Europeans or the Indians, the Chinese have no explicit, developed, formal logic; and they neither theorize about the truth as such nor are tempted to hypostatize it. It is said, quite rightly, that ancient, classical Chinese philosophy "does not generate any theory of something resembling the Euclidean process," and therefore has no basis for the use of a concept "strongly

similar to the core concept of reason." Taken together, the words no basis, strongly similar, and core make these words both hard to refute and probably misleading .* Whatever the exact

*The cited view is that of Chad Hansen. He concludes that Chinese thinking is "non- contrastively rational," by which he means that "no classical Chinese theorist is either a rationalist or an antirationalist." This seems to me closer to the elusive truth; only the unyielding no is not quite plausible. If Hansen would modify the sentence and say that no classical Chinese philosopher "is either a complete rationalist or complete anti- rationalist"a verdict that, on close analysis, fits all Indian

and all European philosophershe would be right. If he modified the sentence and said "is ever a rationalist or an anti- rationalist," he would be would be wrong. Chinese philosophers do have

(footnote continued on next page)

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description of their logic, the ancient Chinese of course have the verbal means to agree with what we speak of as a true statement and disagree with a false one. The Chuang Tzu book complains that "the disputers of this world all say: 'The finest substance has no form. The greatest thing cannot be encompassed."" The answer is the rhetorical question, Is that the reliably real state of affairs? 31 Naturally, the ancient Chinese use a variety of terms to express their sense of what is true, right,

or real. Tones omitted, the terms include shih, meaning be this, be it, be right, which pairs with its opposite, fei, meaning not be this, not be it, be wrong; shih, meaning be solid, be real, the opposite of which is hsü, meaning be empty, be tenuous, be unreal; jan, meaning be so, be the case, the opposite of which is fou, meaning be not so, not be the case; and so on.32

Though the Chinese had no developed formal logic, interpreted understandingly, their arguments seems as logically consistent as ours do; and it is not difficult to recast the more explicitly logical (Later Mohist) writing in European logical forms andrisking cultural distanceto recast them in syllogisms.33 Some of the Chinese were logically playful or logically serious enough to act the sophist and defend paradoxes. The following two paradoxes are reminiscent of Zeno: "No matter how swift the barbed arrow, there are times when it is

neither moving nor at rest"; and "Take a pole one foot long, cut away half of it every day, and at the end of ten thousand generations there will still be some left."34 The most famous of the Chinese sophists, Kung- sun Lung, was "a man of Chao who enjoyed hair-splitting and paradoxical talk." He wrote essays on themes such as "a white horse is not a horse," "ice is not cold," and "coals are not hot."35 His notorious exclusion of a white horse from among horses inspired an anecdote about an would- be tax evader: A man argued with a customs inspector that he did not have

to pay the tax on horses because the horse he was riding was not a horse but a white horse. Kung-sun Lung is right only if one supposes that white horse is conceptually so different from horse, so much a creature of another kind, that the term white horse

(footnote continued from previous page)

rationalistic impulses at times. See Hansen's "Should the Ancient Masters Value Reason," in Rosemont, ed., Chinese Texts and Philosophical Contexts, p. 192. In answering Hansen (in the same book, pp. 29197), Angus Graham finds more analytic sharpness in Chinese philosophy than Hansen is able towhere Hansen softens contrasts, Graham hardens them. In A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought, Hansen applies his view to the

whole of ancient Chinese philosophy. The controversy surrounding Hansen's views is taken up in the essays in Lenk and Paul, eds., Epistemological Issues in Classical Chinese Philosophy, and also in Peerenboom, Law and Morality in Ancient China, pp. 5761. Peerenboom (p. 60) is sure that the author of the Huan-Lao Boshu (Silk Manuscripts of Huang- Lao), written in the fourth or third century B.C.E., "is adamant that language corresponds

to reality" and "is concerned ... with the truth of the matter in the old fashioned sense of 'fitting the facts."

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cannot ever be subsumed under the term horse. Perhaps the sophist's trick was no more than to shift when under attack from the ordinary, paradoxical meaning of "a white horse is not a (kind of) horse" to "(the meaning of) a white horse is not (the meaning of) a horse." But, even if right, this solution is too easy to satisfy for long and Kung-sun Lung's paradox, as developed

in his simply worded but enigmatic essay, has proved an irresistible challenge to exegetes. 36

It is true that the early exploration of logical problems and paradoxes soon dies out, to be revived, in a different spirit, when Buddhism takes root. From the start, however, Chinese thought shares the logic implicit in the structure of the Chinese language. The extreme brevity and extreme ambiguity of the classical language are countered by context, to be sure, but also by fixed rules for word order and by a pervasive parallelism, supplemented by antithesis, of words,

phrases, longer passages, and topics.37 The lack of interest of later Chinese philosophers in logic as such is compensated for by their concentration on the lessons that history teaches for social and political thoughtin China, even the Buddhists were relatively uninterested in logic and, unlike the Tibetans, had few translations of logical works.38 This concentration, natural to persons who are themselves most probably in government service, is

used to exercise persuasion on others like themselves and, not infrequently, high officials or rulers, likely to be attuned to case histories and other historical evidence. In Europe too, historical evidence, which is not demanded for epistemology or metaphysics, finds its natural place in social and political theory and is drawn on, in the form of precedent, for legal purposes.

It is typical of Greek and most later European philosophers to make a sharp distinction between inductive reasoningthe accumulation of particulars in order to arrive at a necessarily uncertain generalizationand deductive reasoningat its most effective, the derivation of true particular conclusions from a true generalization or a universal. In contrast, Indian philosophers never make this sharp distinction. Deduction is to them incidental to the process of accurate induction. The explicit distinctions the Indians make are between reasons that are contradictory, or inconclusive, or

certain, certainty being established by the absence of counterexamples that would prove the induction to be doubtful. To formalize the process of induction, the Indians use their traditional reasoning procedure, usually, though misleadingly, considered to be a syllogism. It is natural enough to use the name syllogism because the Indian form has an appearance like that of a European syllogism. Furthermore, although in its complete guise, including a nonsyllogistic example, it has five rather than three members, it is easytoo easyto translate the Indian form into a Euro-

Page 25

pean syllogism with the usual two propositions followed by a conclusion .* Certainly, the name syllogism is applicable if we adopt Aristotle's very wide definition of a syllogism as "a discourse in which, certain things being stated, something other than what is stated follows of necessity from their being so." 39 However, the Greek problem is not the Indian one. The problem of the Greek syllogism is whether two propositions imply a third,

which is the conclusion deduced from them (as from "all men are mortal" and "Socrates is a man" it is deduced that "Socrates is mortal"). In other words, the problem is whether the "middle term" (the humanity common to all men and to the man Socrates) makes it logically necessary to ascribe the property in question (mortality) to the subject in question (Socrates). In contrast, the problem of the Indian form is whether or not one property (such as

"possessing fire"), occurrences of which have been reliably observed, pervades or encompasses another property (of "possessing smoke"), instances of which have also been observed. How, in our cognitive acts, do we infer this? the Indian asks. When we look at smoke, is our awareness of the cognitive structure, the "universal," of smokiness pervaded or encompassed by awareness of the cognitive structure of fieriness? Or: If we see smoke on a mountain

and know from other evidencelike the positive evidence of a kitchen stove and the negative evidence of a lakethat wherever and only wherever there is fire there is also smoke, then we know that the instance of smoke we see is accompanied, like smoke in general, by fire. The "proving property" of smokiness ensures that the

• In its complete form, used for debating mostly epistemological issues, the Indian "syllogism" has the following five members:

(1) Hypothesis: The mountain possesses fire. (2) Reason: Because it possesses smoke. (3) Example: Where there is smoke there is fire, as in a kitchen. (4) Application: This mountain is similar (possesses smoke). (5) Conclusion: Therefore the mountain is similar (possesses fire).

In practice, in "inferring for oneself," the Indian "syllogism" is usually abbreviated to: "This mountain possesses fire, because of smoke." Stated in a three- member form like that of the European syllogism, this Indian "syllogism" becomes:

(1) This mountain is a locus of smoke. (2) Every locus of smoke (instance of smoke- possession) is a locus of fire. (3) Therefore this mountain is a locus of fire.

Whatever pervadesfills, encompassessomething else occurs in all or more than all the loci of that something else that it pervades.

Nyaya philosophers are preoccupied with the attempt to give pervasion (vyapti) a detailed, fully satisfactory definition. Because the Indian form expresses the pervasion of one property by another, there is no need for the middle term of the Aristotelian syllogism. (Ingalls, Materials for the Study of Navya-Nyaya Logic, pp. 3233; Goekoop, Logic of Invariable Comcomitance, pp. 1112; Potter, ed., The Tradition of NyayaVaisesika up to Gangesa, pp. 180206;

and Wada, Basic Concepts in Navya- Nyaya, pp. 3236.)

Page 26

property of fieriness, which overlaps and contains the property of smokiness, is really possessed by the subject, the mountain that is the "property possessor." Note how in the Indian example there is a coincidence of the two senses of smoke and fire, the extensional sense, referring to the class of sites or objects (the places where there is fire or smoke) and the intensional sense, referring to attributes (of fire or smoke). The extensional

sense, that of the inclusion of one meaning- location in another meaning- location, is apparent in such a sentence as "Whatever is a locus of smoke is also a locus of fire." This can be translated into the statement that any instance of the class of smoke loci is included among the instances of the class of fire loci. But the Indian regards the locus as smoke possessing or fire possessing, that is, as having a certain quality or

property. He refers to cognitions and uses the language not of class and class membership but of occurrence and possession. 40 I have spoken of awareness as pervaded or encompassed. To pervade, which is literally to pass through, means, to penetrate or permeate. It conveys the sense that the termsthe smoke and fireare related to each other by their meanings. To encompass, to include by surrounding, conveys the terms' extensional relationship.

To the Indian thinker, the main, inductive function of logic is to ascertain with formal care if a certain property really belongs to a certain subject or if the connection is only accidental, imaginary, or illusory. His most difficult question is whether or not we can discover the conditions of pervasion for making an inference free of error. The insistence on an example agreed to by all, rules out of

discussion premisses that are not accepted by all as true. This is reminiscent of Kant's insistence that a geometrical proof must involve the actual construction of a geometrical figure.41

The Indian process of "reasoning for others" obviously merges logic as pure, formal reasoning with a theory of perception or cognition, the theory being clear enough to be represented as an abstract rule .* This makes the rules of logic into rules of perception as well.42 Likewise, the Indian insistence on an acceptable example fits the style of Indian debating and introduces into logic what in the West is separated as what we now call epistemology. Given the

factors that the Indians consider relevant to logic, it is not surprising that the Indian form is structurally so different from the European that it can reasonably be denied the name of syllogism;

• Put as such a rule, the elementary Indian logic of induction is this: "For any knower S, if S has a perceptual cognition, Fx, and then remembers the rule 'Wherever there is F, there is G' as instantiated in the uncontroversial case O, and then perceives in x the same F as before but this time as figuring in the remembered rule 'Wherever there is F, there is G,' then S will experience an inferential cognition of the form Gx, provided that there is no relevant hindrance" (Mohanty, Reason and Tradition in

Indian Thought, p. 111).

Page 27 but the convenience of the name has so far prevailed over the demand for terminological strictness. 43

There is some justification for considering the induction- oriented logic of the Indian philosophers to be a kind of deductionin a not very helpful way, Aristotle himself claims that induction is based on deduction.44 One of the usual forms of Indian logic (tarka), regarded as an aid to inductive generalization, is rigorous formal implication that begins from an if- then premise. But Indian inductive logic also becomes rigorous. This happens in the philosophy of the Buddhist philosopher Dignaga, of

the fifth or sixth century C.E., who recognizes that the validity of reasoning as such dependsas Aristotle recognizes it to dependon the rightness of its form, not the truth or falsity of its premises. As in Aristotle's logic, formal reasoning is taken by Dignaga to compel assent only when carried out in an ideal way. His logic tests whether or not the chosen property of one class of individuals is incompatible with (disjoined from), is in part compatible with (is "erratic" with

respect to, only overlaps), or is fully compatible with (completely fills or pervades) the property being considered of another class of individuals.45 Dignaga's logic is an attempt, conveniently represented by Venn diagrams, to match classes by their intensions. It confirms the absence of error in the inference by which the "arguable property" is shown to pervade the class of individuals with which the inference is concerned .*

It must in candor be added that Dignaga's logic, though an impressive achievement, is not very satisfactory and that the tests he sets for induction are so difficult that they have aroused the suspicion that they are designed to show that no actual human procedure could meet them with complete success, that is, make an unquestionable induction. The suspicion makes it possible to guess that Dignaga's logic is akin to a Buddhist's intellectual variety of meditation, that it is, in other words,

an exercise meant not for empirical assurance but for a stringent, dispassionate insight into the illusoriness of human judgment.46 My description of Dignaga's logic is too quick and vague to do more than indicate that it has a formal structure. In any case, by the time the

• In India, unlike Europe, "linguistics developed early and logic late. The earliest logical investigations in India pre- date the classical Nyaya and are due to grammarians such as Patanjali." Frits Staal, who points this out, suspects that there was no one comparable to Frege, Tarski, or Gödel among Indian logicians because these logicians never developed an artificial language. However, says Staal, the grammarian

Panini (fl. c. 400 B.C.E.) did so, though in a different way. "Panini is still regarded as the greatest linguist of all times. There simply is no other candidate. No one else has constructed an almost complete grammar of a natural language using linguistic principles in a principled manner" (Stall, "The Sanskrit of Science," Journal of Indian Philosophy 23.1 [March 1995], p. 88).

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New Logic School (Navya- Nyaya) flourished, in the fourteenth century, Indian logic was already abstract enough to be translatable into contemporary symbolic logic. But once it undergoes the translation, it loses interesting subtleties. 47 To the Nyaya philosophers, unlike (probably) the Buddhist, Dignaga, the point of complicating and formalizing the logic of induction is to show that freedom from error, or to put it as they do, the determination of invariable concomitance, is an achievable ideal for practical life. The Nyaya philosopher believes he can create a logical freedom-from-error formula, one that tells how to forestall the danger of a deviation (the logical contradictory of a pervasion) and so to make counterexampleseven future counterexamplesextremely improbable, even impossible (the philosopher may hope). But a theoretical formula can be difficult to apply, and if one wants to apply it perfectly, too difficult.

As the Indian philosopher is well aware, a deviation from an inductive conclusion is not self- contradictory and so always remains logically possible. Necessity is therefore weaker than as usually conceptualized in the West.48 *

As long as we see that Indian logic is meant to define the logical conditions for eliminating inductive errors, it seems unimportant if we classify it as inductive or deductive, or, for that matter, extensional or intensional. This issue of classification should not obscure the fact that the logic is an explicitly formal one (though, to draw a fine distinction, its formality is meant to convince rather than to reach a logically incontrovertible conclusion).

One logical characteristic does stand out as unique to European philosophy. It is the parallel between philosophical reasoning and Euclidean geometry, by which I mean the adoption of the idea that to prove something one must begin with definitions and axioms and continue, in

*Correspondingly, the intensive study of the logic of induction is earlier than in Europe. The first European philosopher, it is said, to recognize induction as an independent problem and discuss it elaborately was Hume. Despite Whewell, Herschel, and Mill, "it was left to Pierce in the late nineteenth century to bring out the value of hypothesis (calling it abduction and distinguishing it from deduction and induction)." Some traces of the link between causation and counterfactual conditionals are found in Hume, but "no detailed and systematic study of them is found in any Western writing before this

century. The same, further, applies to the principle of economy ... Similarly, a systematic study of inference to the best explanation is emerging only in some very recent publications" (Chakrabarti, Definition and Induction, p. 209 [see just preceding note 48]).

The ancient Indian logician's view has been put so: The "concept of an acceptable (set of) beliefs or theorems was relative in the sense that its intention lies in telling us which beliefs or theorems should be regarded as acceptable given a certain (default)- theory. But it was not meant to let us know whether a proposition should be accepted or not absolutely, without qualifications ... Indian theories of inference and proof were always closely linked up with epistemological issues" (Oetke, "Ancient Indian Logic ... ," p.

484).

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principle without error, by way of a chain of demonstrated proofs to a conclusion that cannot logically be denied. This method, historically most familiar in Spinoza's philosophy, goes back, of course, to the Greeks, especially Aristotle, and came into some vogue during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 49 But although European philosophers have often accepted the method as an ideal, it has been more effective in stimulating the metaphysical imaginationwitness Spinoza againthan in attaining its goal. Judged by its aim to attain certainty, it has always failed. The truth, I believe, is that philosophers, although often

very careful in their reasoning, do most of it by the same informal and fallible methods as laymen. Even if a philosopher agrees to accept the verdicts of logic, arguments can be restated in arguably defensible forms. Despite the deductive ideal they have often held, European philosophers, including Aristotle himself, have rarely tried and have nowhere ever succeeded in composing genuinely deductive philosophies; even in science, Newton's Optics is quite exceptional.50 The philosophers' difference from laymen lies less in the formal consistency of their reasoning than in their dependence on philosophical

tradition with its legacy of analyses and technical terms, which can give philosophies such a formidable appearance to outsiders. Seen from the inside, the philosophies are always vulnerable. Telltale Sign of Philosophy: Disputation

The subject of logic, which so often distinguishes philosophy in its professional aspect, is related to a social form that has often sustained philosophy as a profession. I am referring to philosophical debates conducted in accord with a set of rules. The object of such rules has been to ensure the contestants an equal opportunity, to define what kinds of reasoning are acceptable or unacceptable, and to provide a method for deciding the winner. Such

formal debates were held in all three traditions.

I begin with philosophical debating in China.51 We know that in the late fourth century B.C.E., philosophical disputes (pien) emphasizing logic and paradox were held, at least sometimes for no more serious reason than sport. As mentioned earlier, the interest in logic as such died out. In a later age, in the third century C.E., a more literary kind of discussion or debate came into vogue. The obvious reason was the politics of the time.

Intellectuals had been taught by their tradition that they were responsible for the morality of the government, but conditions were then so difficult for them that many became disillusioned with politics. Making what might be an anguished choice, not a few of them rejected traditional morality in favor of one or another kind of mysticism. One of these intellectuals writes

Page 30 in a poem that, having left riches and honor behind, his heart is ashes in a withered, immaterial, mystic house. Now, at last, he is able to forget his troubles; but can he be sure, he asks, that he can leave his social self and humanity behind and live in the mystic void alone. 52

Such intellectuals practiced what the Chinese called "pure talk." The phrase refers to the conversations in which the disillusioned intellectuals met to think and banter 'purely," free of the yoke of now corrupted social obligations. They took pleasure in the cleverness and irreverence of their banter, and they drank, took drugs (to prolong their lives), speculated on transcending moral doctrines by means of spontaneity, practiced unconfucian naturalness by

going nude, mocked the heroes of Confucianism, and talked anarchistically and Taoistically against despotism. What matters here is that some of their talk was in the form of debates, with a formal thesis, refutation, and rebuttal, and some was concerned with abstract subjects such as speculative cosmology, Taoistic or Buddhistic "nothingness," the existence of immortals, the identity and equality of all beings, and the like. The echoes of such talk and debates helped make the third

century a memorable one in Chinese intellectual history.

What of Greek and later European debates?53 In Greece, debates were essential to the political life of the democratic city-states, as we know best in the case of the Athenian assembly (ecclesia) and people's court (dikasteron). By the classical age, disputation had its teachers and handbooks. Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War contains political debates conducted, like those of the sophists, in pairs of contradictory speeches. Such debates are central to Aristophanes'

Clouds, the farcical yet bitter attack on sophistical argument and its supposed teacher, Socrates .* Plato's dialogues are, of course, largely composed of debates. He calls one type of debate eristic, by which he means argument for the sake not of truth but victory, and the corresponding art of winning arguments by means of fallacy, ambiguity, and other verbal fighting skills. Plato uses the term antilogy (anti-logia) for the technique of contradiction

by which one forces an opponent from a statement (logos) to its contrary or contradictory, a practice, he says, that amuses young men who enjoy tearing with words all those who approach them. Of the various forms of argument, Plato prefers dialectic, which aims at the truth beyond the senses.54 Aristotle, who elaborates on both the proper and the deceptive strategies of debate, makes it clear that in his own school there are debates conducted by rule,

• In Athens, the "city of words," persuasive speech "had become a desideratum of a uniquely intense and peculiarly Athenian kind, entailing nothing less than 'change in attitude towards the use of words in this period' and a privileging in the lawcourt of 'artificial proofs' ... that is rhetorical supporting arguments over 'inartificial' ones such as exculpatory oaths and evidence given under

torture" ("Fowl Play: A Curious Lawsuit in Classical Athens ... ," P. Cartledge, in Cartledge, Millett, and Todd, eds., Nomos, pp. 4950).

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the defender of a thesis being attacked by a questioner, who tries to push the defender to make a statement that is on its face untrue or absurd. 55 Aristotle assumes that philosophers have to learn argument by practicing ithe says that if we have nobody else to argue with, we ought to argue with ourselves; and he gives the advice not to argue with casual persons, because this will lead to a debased, merely

contentious kind of discussion.56

Despite the importance of debate to the ancient Greeks, its use in philosophy does not seem to have become as elaborately institutionalized as in medieval Europe. There, in university disputations held on subjects set in advance, a student would answer a question that the presiding master had put, and would then answer objections to the answer he had given. The "free questions" kind of disputation, which had no subject announced in advance, was open to everyone, and gave the opportunity to show off one's logical dexterity or play out

one's personal rivalries. All disputations were supposed to be based, as Aristotle had recommended, on commonly agreed presuppositions andas the medievals agreedon authoritative quotations, the arguments being developed by means of syllogistic or like reasoning. But formal disputation lost its vitality in the later fourteenth century, and it had no consistent parallel in the rough-and- tumble of European philosophy after the Middle Ages.

For debate, India was the most developed of the traditions.57 The rules were more elaborately worked out than elsewhere, and the practice of debating had a deep, culturally pervasive influence. To give some sense of the types and rules of debate, I follow the Logic School, which is nothing if not systematic. It divides debates into three basic types, those of discussion, disputation, and wrangling. In

the first of these, discussion, the persons engaged are set on attaining the truth rather than on winning. To attain the truth, thesis is set against thesis, proof is based, point by point, on a combination of evidence and argument, and no argument known to be untrue is usedwhat kind is true and what untrue is clearly specified. In contrast to Western philosophy, though not Western law, the rules of evidence

include a careful assessment of the verbal testimony relied on. The defeated side is said to harbor no anger.

Indian "disputation" is different in that it consciously aims at victory. For this reason, even though it holds to the same standards of reasoning as "discussion," it allows the use of "quibbles"ways of assigning argument- destroying meanings to the opponent's wordsas well as other tricks meant to demolish the opponent's case (tricks of the kind Aristotle deals with in his Sophistical Refutations). Finally, in "wrangling," a debater does nothing to establish his own position but only criticizes and condemns his opponent's arguments.

Because no thesis need be defended, this is the form of debate a thorough skeptic would have to chooseexamples will be given in the chapter on developed skepticism.

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Held in a monastery or a royal court, a debate between eminent philosophers was a great public entertainment. There are many well- known stories according to which the losers of a debate and his disciples became followers of the winner. It seems that a victory could determine the allegiance of a kinghe no doubt had political motives of which the stories tell us nothingand the dominance of the winning side throughout his realm. As an example we can take

the story, a typical glorification legend, that tells of the debating skills of the seventh- century Buddhist philosopher Dharmakirti. The story shows that a philosopher was expected to prove his greatness by overcoming and converting opponents.

To develop his skill against Hindus, the story says, Dharmakirti concealed his identity and studied with Hindu teachers. The most eminent of these was the great Mimamsa master, Kumarila. From him, Dharmakirti learned the art of refutation so well that in a three- month series of debates he, one by one, defeated and converted to Buddhism the five hundred experts in the six Hindu systems of

philosophy. Furious, Kumarila insisted that Dharmakirti debate him and demanded that, if Dharmakirti lost, he should be killed. But Dharmakirti refuted each of Kumarila's five hundred theses with a hundred arguments and converted Kumarila.

After further victories over other eminent philosophers, Dharmakirti went to Dravali, a center of Hindu learning, where he rang a bell and publicly challenged anyone there to debate him. Most of the local Hindu philosophers ran away, while others kept silent out of fear of defeat. Then the great Vedanta philosopher Shankara sent a message announcing that he wanted to debate Dharmakirti. In the presence of the king,

Shankara said to the assembled people that if he, Shankara, won, they would decide if Dharmakirti should be drowned or converted to Vedanta. But Shankara was repeatedly defeated and in the end had nothing more to say. He urged his disciple, Bhatta, an expert in logic, to go on arguing and defeat the shaven- headed Buddhist. Even if Bhatta lost, he said, he would be reborn as his son and go on fighting Dharmakirti. Then he

jumped into the Ganges and died. Dharmakirti converted many of Shankara's followers, while others ran away.

As Shankara wished, his death did not end the debate. For three years, Bhatta propitiated his god, for three years more he studied the Buddhist arguments and how to refute them, but he too was completely defeated and jumped into the Ganges and died. A thousand Hindus were then converted and others, including Shankara, reborn as Bhatta's younger son, fled to the east. What happened afterwards

to this reborn Shankara is not described, but Shankara was reborn still again, this time with a still sharper intellect and still greater debating skill, and aided this time by the full vision of his god. At the age of fifteen or sixteen, in the presence of the king and an audience of five thousand, he debated Dharmakirti a second time, with the same result and the same suicide by drowning.

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All the same, the debate was renewed. Toward the end of Dharmakirti's life, Shankara was born once again, now as the son of Bhatta's elder son, his intellect even stronger than before. On this occasion, his god gave him personal lessons and sometimes even merged with him and taught him still unknown arguments. A young prodigy of twelve, he refused to wait for more experience before debating Dharmakirti

because, he said, "Without defeating him there can be no real fame in debate." This time both the debaters agreed that the one defeated would adopt the other's religion. Neither Shankara's successive lives, nor his augmented intellect, nor the lessons he got from his god were enough. Dharmakirti won and converted him to Buddhism. 58 Of course, what actually happened in India was that Buddhism, not Hinduism,

was defeated.

Not everyone approved of public debates. The Buddha himself, whose manner was that of calm, authoritative reason, had stressed how cruel it was to attack opponents in debate and how useless it was to debate metaphysical questions. Metaphysical debate was useless to him because, on one interpretation, it dealt with insoluble problems, and on another, perhaps better one, because it prevented people from accepting the solution to existential pain that he was teaching. And besides,

why debate the questions with non- Buddhist philosophers, who had never learned the Buddhist truth? Such is the moral of the famous Buddhist parable of the blind men and the elephant, which tells of the king who assembled all the men blind from birth and let them feel an elephant. The blind men who had felt the elephant's head said he was like a water pot, those who had felt his ears said he was like a winnowing basket, those who had felt his tusks said he was like a plowshare,

those who had felt his trunk said he was like a plow pole, and so on. The blind men fell to arguing and fighting with their fists, a sight that delighted the king. The moral of the parable is: "The heretics who do not know good from evil or right from wrong, brawl, wrangle, and strike one another with the daggers of their tongues."59 *

*Philosophical debate is still an integral part of the education of a Tibetan aspiring to the degree of "spiritual guide" (geshe). "The primary method of examination is oral debate, in which a monk must be able quickly to size up a wide range of philosophical positions, defend any of them against any other, and trimph (or at least hold his own) in a no- holds-barred intellectual contest. The debates are generally very lively, with monks enthusiastically jumping, pivoting, shouting, and sometimes even pushing

their opponent. Some debaters will use techniques designed to undermine the assurance of their opponents, such as raising eyebrows in mock surprise, intending to cause opponents to question the wisdom of their positions. The stated purpose of the exercise is to develop the intellects of the monks, and it is felt that direct dialectical confrontation accomplishes this goal by training monks to defend philosophical positions, to think on their feet, and to critically examine their doctrines and positions" (J.

Powers, An Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism, Ithaca: Snow Lion Publications, 1995, p. 413).

Page 34 The Three Traditions in Themselves: Unique, Alike, and Neither

Having adopted a moderately stringent definition of philosophy, we have seen that philosophy did in fact exist in all three traditions and that, in all three, philosophers were consciously aware of logic and engaged in formal disputations. We have also seen that Chinese logic, though it developed for a brief period, remained mostly implicit and that Indian logic was never detached from epistemology. As for

disputations, in China, it seems, they were relatively infrequent and of indecisive importance; in Greece they were frequent, but their importance for philosophy is hard to estimate; in medieval Europe they were both frequent and important; and in ancient and later India they were frequent and sometimes of great social and perhaps even political importance.

On the surface, then, we find both general similarities and particular differences among the traditions. The natural question that follows is how deep the similarities and differences may go. In answering, it is possible to stress either similarities or differences, or try to strike a balance between the two. My own answer is that both the similarities and the differences run very deep and are of extraordinary interest, and that, to

confound the simplifiers, there is no similarity not tinged with difference nor difference not tinged with similarity.

To begin with differences, it is possible to take an extreme position and claim that each of the traditions is incommensurable with the others, that is, that no tradition can be grasped at all by means of the categories and habits of thought of the others. This extreme is empirically implausible and the attempt to argue in its favor entails its own denial: Whoever goes beyond the mere assertion and undertakes to explain how and why traditional Indians, Chinese, and Europeans wereand, to later interpreters, remainimpenetrable worlds apart, is most probably assuming the ability to enter into each of the worlds far enough to show that they are closed to one another. The

explanation explains what, it is claimed, is impossible to explain.

Therefore the belief in total incommensurability, if anyone really holds it, seems to me implausible and I will not deal with it any further here. 60 Besides, the relations between the traditions have not justified it. Yet there are claims that the differences are so pervasive that every crosscultural comparison of philosophies is necessarily a reductive one. One of the direct implications of such a claim is that each of the philosophic terms involved in a comparison has a meaning or group of meanings that a substitute in another philosophic language necessarily distorts; and it is implied that the successive distortions end in a basic misunder-

Page 35 standing of the philosophy as a whole. Possible examples of distortion are easy to point out. We have already mentioned the misrepresentation of the Indian "syllogism" by the Greek syllogism, the losses that occur in the translation of later Indian logic into symbolic logic, and the misleading attribution to the ancient Chinese of an understanding of propositions in the sense given them by Western logic.

The danger of misunderstanding can be illustrated with the help of some current interpretations of Chinese philosophy. Earlier, I suggested a comparison between the statements of Hsü-tzu and Kant that human beings are by nature evil. But Hsün-tzu's mode of argument, with its stress on ethical precedent and the exact application of terms, is not at all Kantian. Nor is Hsün-tzu at all Kantian when he recommends a way out of pressing ethical situations for which there are no accepted rules of conduct. In such situations, he advises, one should guide oneself by the indirect means the Chinese term

for which, t'ui-lei, has been translated analogical projection. To make such a projection, one must pay careful attention both to the issues involved and to the terms with which to characterize them, and then, having found the most appropriate traditional analogy, one must apply it to the situation in question. By projecting the analogy with such care, the situation is put into the measured, rational context that tradition has created. "Each analogical projection is basically an attempt to specify the concrete significance of tao, and it thus represents a

temporal mediation between the ideal of tao and the actual world." 61

In keeping with such an analysis, it is stressed that in the Chinese tradition problems are solved not by abstract reasoning but by the considered extension of old, historically fixed norms. Since everyone who denies the norms is taken to be unreasonable, rationality is measured by obedience to the norms.62 It is therefore the goal of all the most ancient Chinese philosophers to teach how language should be used to guide action effectively. They therefore see their task as the identification of a constant

tao, that is, a kind of discourse that guides behavior quite reliably.63 Western philosophy, it is argued, bases itself on the ideal of a Euclidean kind of proof, and on the ideal of the individual whose self-rule requires free rational choices, not tradition. In contrast, Chinese philosophy is based on the belief that language, which is created by convention, must be used to reinforce the social good. When thinkers such as the Taoists diverge from this model, they move not toward the "argumentative

theater" of other philosophers but toward poetry and painting.64 Suppose that for the moment we assume that there are great intellectual gaps between the philosophical traditions, gaps expressed by differences of the kind that I have just stated. If so, we can assume not only particular differences between Indian, Chinese, and Western logic, but also

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general differences between India, where interest has been focused on strategies of living and redemption, China, where interest has been focused on concrete ethical problems, and Europe, where interest has been focused on abstract proofs, theories, and entities. Do such not unfair assumptions separate the three traditions so widely that any direct comparison, guided, to

begin with, by surface likenesses, must prove illusory?

I think not. My counterassumption is that there is a level at which the differences between traditions grow less isolating and comparisons grow genuinely illuminating. I say this for the simplest of reasons: the biological likeness between human beings, the similarity of their social needs, and their similar ways of fulfilling themselves, intellectually and otherwise. Philosophies everywhere have been the more stringently logical counterparts of the social opposition between compliance and revoltoften simultaneously of both. In this not at all trivial sense, philosophies are alike, and therefore their comparison, if not

simplistic, can be rewarding. It is still a great challenge to demonstrate which logical forms are universal, or to show the similarity of the basic mechanisms of philosophical argumentwhich seem to me quite fewor of the basic elements of political thought or esthetic response. But whatever the challenge, the crudeness of the initial comparisons is the inevitable condition for learning how to refine them. The moral is only that the beginnings of understanding should not be mistaken for its final conclusions.

While the initial similarities between traditions may have a misleading simplicity, so may the initial contrasts. The (non- Buddhist) Indian philosophers are true to the Vedic tradition, one repeats; but they invariably interpret the tradition in favor of their school, their point of view, so that their faithfulness to tradition is not much more than the faith that tradition must verify what their group has made of it. Of all the Indian schools, only the Mimamsa,

meaning (School of) Investigation (to interpret the ritual intention of sacred texts) is seriously and literally faithful to the Veda's ritual injunctions. One may repeat that the Chinese philosophers, as well, are faithful to tradition. Yet in the relatively brief period, from the sixth to the third centuries B.C.E., when indigenous Chinese philosophy is at its most creative, only the Confucians, in no way then dominant, are seriously faithful to tradition. All the schools

appeal or at least refer to history, but invariably interpret it to support the particular positions they have arrived at. And European philosophers, who are said to be individualists, have often regarded themselves as faithful to a tradition. There were organized groups of philosophers faithful to Plato, or to Aristotle, or to Epicurus. Medieval philosophers were, of course, faithful to their respective traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Later, there

were considerable if relatively short-lived subtraditions of Cartesians, Kantians, and

Page 37 Hegelians. All told, if there is a great divide between East and West, it is not faithfulness to tradition as opposed to unqualified individualism.

Nor is the great divide the use on the Chinese side of analogy, projected or not. Analogy has been essential to the thought of everyone everywhere. The analogical projection of traditional moral judgments is the instrument by which tradition has developed as such, as witness, among others, the Talmudists and the thinkers of medieval Europe and Islam; and it has at all times been essential to

ethics, political theory, and the practice of law. 65

Nor is the European faithfulness to abstract entities and deductive ideals as great a divide as it may seem in a stereotypical polarization. Aristotle himself, the inventor of formal logic and a rationalistic proof of God's existence, does not fit the stereotype. Instead, he emphasizes that the "philosophy of human nature," by which he means the ruling art of politics (including ethics) is no exact, demonstrable science. This philosophy, he says, depends on

practical wisdom and on the early inculcation of good habits"The end aimed at is not knowledge but action."66 Furthermore, as I have pointed out, very few of the European philosophers who adopted the ideal of consistent deduction tried seriously to achieve it in their own philosophies. To be sure, syllogistic reasoning was very influential during the Middle Ages, but it disciplined the form of philosophy more often than it determined its substance. And so, for all

the differences between the three traditions, it is difficult to distinguish between them in terms of sweeping global abstractions such as traditionalism, or individualism, or dependence on analogy, or, in practice, on deduction.

I supplement this protest against excessively polarized differences with a few examples of interesting similarities: The ladderlike structure of nature that Aristotle describes is unmistakably like that of Hsün-tzu. Both the Greek and Indian atomists defend their belief that matter cannot be infinitely divided by arguing that unless matter is composed of atoms in some sense finite in size, the infinitely continued division of matter would end in the total

disappearance of matter. Greek and Indian skeptics often hit on the same intellectual mechanisms for refuting certainty of any kind. Sophists and materialists appear in all three traditions. 67 The standard Buddhist arguments against substance and, especially, a metaphysical self are essentially the same as those of Hume. A Buddhist philosopher and Kant both argue for a critical philosophy (in the Kantian sense) with essentially the same attack

on the ability of consciousness to give an objective representation of what is taken to be the external reality. But even if such examples are granted, they are fragments isolated from unique traditions. Does the uniqueness of each tradition not determine the uniqueness of everything that belongs to it? My answer is this:

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The practitioners of any one philosophical tradition are attuned to its subtleties and dismayed by a comparatist's possibly careless "It's all the same!" The philosophers' disputeswith themselves and their opponentsare in and through the tradition or subtradition that has come to constitute their intellectual substance. Because of its emotive, intellectual, and perhaps social effect, the difference over which a philosopher disputes with a near philosophical neighbor is likely to be of

great immediate importance to both; but for an outsider it is likely to be no more than an intellectually negligible quibble. As the person within a certain tradition sees it, to try to compare its philosophy with that of another tradition is like trying to play two discordant games at the same time. However, the comparatist is not the practitioner of any one philosophy but a theme- and-variation philosopher, whose interest is in the varieties of philosophies. Among other

questions, such a philosopher asks: What is the activity (or what are the activities) of which these philosophies are the varieties? The natural answer is: A common name implies some congruity. But in what, and how much, and why? And if philosophies and games prove to be incongruous with others of their respective designated kinds, why has language accorded them a misleading verbal congruity? Depending on how it is practiced, the comparatist's pursuit may

or may not be predominantly philosophical. The history of philosophy and the sociology of knowledge may be seductive, and neither is in itself philosophy. If the pursuit is philosophical, it is so in a special way. My conclusion is that the philosophical traditions are either unique or alike depending on one's position in relation to theminside or outsideand the standard of judgment one adopts, that is, the kind and degree of abstraction one allows oneself in order to deny or justify comparison.

Both sides are quite right, if one wishes, or neither, if one insists .* If we turn from these issues to the usual ones of metaphysics, we find certain striking differences between traditions. One of these concerns the belief in God. The later European philosophical tradition generally assumes an all-powerful creator-God, the Indian tradition often opposes it, and the Chinese tradition puts natural forces and Heaven in God's place.

*Although mathematics is comprised of a group of sciences of extreme abstraction, it has its own problems of loss of uniqueness as its level of abstraction rises. When two mathematical theories that have seemed merely analogous prove to be aspects of the same, more general theory, says the mathematician André Weil, "the separate identities are lost and with them the strange and wonderful sense of similarity and difference which attracts and perplexes the

investigator." Weil, who regrets the passing of analogy, with its illusiveness and mystery, into clear knowledge, has been influenced by Indian poetry and philosophy and connects his regret with the philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita (D. Reed, Figures of Thought: Mathematics and Mathematical Texts, Routledge: London, 1995, pp. 152, 180 [note 8]).

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To begin with Europe, from the Middle Ages on, most European philosophers have depended for their moral and metaphysical arguments on the belief in God, the creator and ruler of the universe. In the popular religion of India and China, reward and punishment by gods is usual, but in both traditions taken philosophically, there is an often impersonal attitude according to which reward and punishment are akin to what Europeans take to be natural law. More exactly, in some Indian

philosophical systems the powers and person of God are like those usual in Europe. In other Indian systems, God creates in that he rearranges matter, but matter exists as absolutely as he does; and in still other systems, the world-creator, the personal God who is the object of human devotion, is an emanation of (and identical with) the unqualified, featureless, unknowable reality that is God in the final sense. Though unknowable, he is of a nature much discussed by European philosophers and theologians. So

classical Indian and Chinese philosophy can be atheistic in the sense that they leave human fate mainly to impersonal forces that are intrinsic to the universe, that is, to matter, karma, tao, Heaven, or the Supreme Ultimate, and to the understanding, intuition, yogic exercises, or meditations supposed to affect, detach, abolish, surpass, or attain them.

From a Western standpoint, what is most strange about the Indian conception of God or gods is that some of the most devout groups have been totally atheisticthe gods they acknowledge are part of nature and subject to its laws. Much of Buddhism has been of this sort, though not consistently, and so has Jainism, and so has the orthodox, ritualistic school of Mimamsa.

To experience the energy a Mimamsa philosopher might put into the refutation of the belief in a creator- God, consider the following summary of arguments against such a God: In order to create the world, God would have to have the desire to create it; to have any desire at all, including the desire to create, he would need a body; if he had a body, the body would have to have been created by a preceding creator; if his body was eternal, the matter of which it was made would have to be as

eternal as he was; if it was possible for him to have no body, it would be impossible for him to influence matter, that is, the atoms of the world. Furthermore, if he had no body, he could not know anything, because to know something, just like to desire something, one needs sense organs, but sense organs, knowledge, and desire are all material; and so on. And if God created the world out of compassion, there was no one to be compassionate to before

living persons were created; and if he created them out of compassion, then why did he not create only happy beings? If he could not create only happy beings, he is not all- powerful. And if it is argued that we know he created the world because he said that he did, he may have said this only to

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emphasize how powerful he is; and so on. As for the holy words of the Vedas, the truth of which is self-evident and uncontradicted by experience, they need no author or guarantor other than themselves. Besides, no witness was present to see God create them; and so on. While later adherents of Mimamsa thought of God as the supervisor of the law of karma, that is, of rewards and punishments, it is clear that, to the Mimamsa philosopher whose views I have repeated, belief in a creator-God could only

weaken and denature religion. 68

India and all Buddhist countries are also distinguished from Europe by their belief in the law of karma, according to which every act committed with either a good or evil purpose is rewarded or punished, by the very nature of the universe, in either the present life or a future one, so that each person's fate is the accumulated result of previous acts going back indefinitely far. It is widely believed that a god or a Buddha of mercy may intervene to change one's

fate, and believed that under certain circumstances karma can be transferred, like money, from one person to another. But in principle, karma is understood as Europeans understand natural law. Philosophers worked out its theory in some detail.69

Yet despite the endless life and the possibility of accumulating the rewards granted by virtue of good karma, the ideal of the Indian philosophical systemsmaterialism and related skepticism exceptedis to break out of the cycle of birth and death. The Indians seem to fear not only the endlessly returning pains but also the exhausting pointlessness of cosmic circulation. The way out, as the orthodox systems and Buddhism and Jainism agree, is to end the cycle by getting rid of the ideas, emotions, and desiresthe worldly elementsthat perpetuate it, and then to remain in a transcendent state of rapture, if that is the right word, or, as others believe, of total

neutrality or higher indifference. The analogous ideas of Western religious philosophy are not developed with the same persistent attention to detail.

China differs both in its religion and its metaphysics (or protoscience). Its lasting native theories do not postulate God but only natural forces and the equilibria between the forces, which, if disturbed, have to be restored; otherwise, humans suffer disaster. The extreme Chinese reverence for ancestors is cultic, although in Western eyes such reverence is only weakly religious. This reverence is supported, especially among the

Confucians, by an impersonal, politicized cosmology. For the Confucians grow to be deeply concerned with the fate of the prevailing dynasty. This is because, they believe, its rise and fall are critical to the fate of all the Chinese; and because its rise and fall are determined by Heaven, which works according to infallible rules of justice. Sooner or later, the Chinese know, the dynasty will grow unrighteous, its vitality will be

sapped, and Heaven will decree that it be replaced.70

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This whole Chinese mode of thought, from which an omnipotent creator and lawgiver is excluded, construes nature, including humankind, as a web of forces in the changing rhythms of which everything moves and flourishes or decays. In addition, the parallel between microcosm and macrocosm is widely accepted. Chinese thought can therefore be classified as a species or group of species of organicism. The result is

that, unlike Westerners and many Indians, the ancient Chinese do not believe they are directed by a transcendent God who gives them orders from above. Instead, they see themselves as natural organisms pervaded by the nature that comprises them. One consequence of this attitude is that they have little if any of the idea of natural laws, in the sense of definite rules that God imposes on nature as he does on

human beings. There is no full Chinese equivalent to "And God said, 'Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and nights, and let them be lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth." 71

Once again, one should avoid exaggerated polarization. "Heaven," which is the Chinese equivalent of providence and the supreme principle of nature, is like the West's God in that it issues decrees, those, already mentioned, that determine the fate of dynasties. Though never regarded as a creator, Heaven was worshiped by the Chinese emperors and often somewhat personalized, like the earlier

Shang Ti, the God on Highthis is the term for God in Protestant translations of the Bible. Surprisingly, the philosopher Mo-tzu, of the late fourth or early third century B.C.E., expresses himself like a European philosopher who is justifying God's ways. Mo-tzu writes:

Moreover there is a basis for my knowing how generously Heaven loves the people. It is the fact that it [Heaven] has orbited the sun, moon and stars in order to illumine and lead [the people]. It has instituted the four seasons of spring, autumn, winter and summer in order to guide and untangle them. It sends down snow, frost, rain

and dew to grow the five grains, hemp and [mulberry leaves] for silk, thereby enabling the people to gain and be benefited by them ... It has created kings, dukes, marquises and earls, causing them to reward the worthy and punish the violent.72

Not only does early Chinese philosophy contain occasional passages implying that there is an organizer or ruler of the universe, but there are two known occurrences of the phrase laws of Heaven (t'ien fa), which in the one instance, relating to human affairs, can be translated natural law, while in the other, relating to the human body, the state, and the physical

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universe, can be translated laws of nature. 73 The general conclusion is that the absence in China of the idea of a lawgiving God and of laws of nature is not absolute and not reason enough for an unyielding contrast between the thought of China and Europe. Furthermore, it is clearly not true that organicism is Chinese rather than European. To sharpen the contrast is to forget that organicism of a kind is not unknown to Plato, that Aristotle is

strongly influenced by (non- reductive) biology, that the Stoics' universe is a form of organicism, that Leibniz believes profoundly in it, and that Kant makes philosophical use of it. It is Kant who states that "pure speculative reason has a structure wherein everything is an organ, the whole being for the sake of every part, and every part for the sake of all the others."74 There is no reason to go on to Schiller, Goethe, Schelling,

Hegel, and a host of estheticians and biologists in order to show that organicism, although always rivaled by analytic or reductive philosophies, has had a great influence on the history of European thought.75 The Three Traditions in Themselves: Spiritual Transcendence against Positivistic Curiosity?

The distinctions I have just made between the three traditions are of great importance to both religion and philosophy. I feel it necessary to supplement them with a warning, a warning against the most common distinction made between India or China, on the one hand, and Europe, on the other, or, more comprehensively, between East and West. As mentioned in relation to India, the distinction is as follows: Eastern philosophy is spiritual and integral with life, while Western philosophy is abstract, materialistic or positivistic, and split off from life. In one exposition of this view, it is said

that Greek philosophy studies society and man, which are the outer reality of human life, while Indian philosophy denies outer things in favor of an undeniable, ultimate, inner reality. Modern Western philosophy, it is said, represents the triumph of the objective or outward attitude, which, however helpful morally and politically, must be balanced by truly religious consciousness, which is the deeper, inward, Indian one.76

Such a view is seriously misleading. To see this, recall that in all three traditions, especially in the Indian and European, philosophy in the more technical sense came to be the province of specialists whose doctrines were usually unintelligible or pointless to most people, just as they are today. In each of the traditions, the tie between philosophy and religion remained strongalthough even in the medieval universities of Europe there was a clear distinction, often accompanied by a struggle

for influence, between the faculties of theology and philosophy. Typically,

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philosophers in all three traditions have claimed that their doctrines give those who study them a better understanding of what is true and worthwhile and how this desired goal can be attained. This holds true even of the positivists or materialists, well-known exponents of which are found in each of the traditions, and even of the philosophical skeptics in each of them, though not necessarily of the combative or playful reasoners we name sophists.

If we think of the Western philosophers listed in the preceding chronology, the opinion that they are concerned mostly with outward matters, meaning material, social, and political ones, can be plausibly held of only a few of the thirty- four, most unambiguously of two Greeks, Democritus and Epicurus, one Roman, Lucretius, and one Englishman, Hume, to whom Russell may possibly be added; and it can be made of the various kinds of positivism that were widely though far from

exclusively accepted by Western intellectuals from about the time of the French Revolution. But it cannot ever be made of Western philosophy as a whole. This is the fact.

The fact is also that, East and West, most philosophy has been concerned with salvation, whether this- worldly or other-worldly. However, the interest of Hindu and Buddhist philosophers in salvation is different because it is so often tied up with the belief that to live is basically to suffer. This attitude is not characteristic of Indian philosophy at the start but begins at about the time of the origin of Buddhismdid conditions then make it especially easy to draw attention to suffering?and

remains prominent in most of the classical philosophies of India, to which reason appears valuable mostly because it helps humans to escape suffering. Take, for example, the basic text of the classical school of Samkhya (samkhya means, roughly, enumeration of the categories of existence andextended to refer to a schoolthe school that analyzes by means of enumeration of these categories). The text begins by stating that because human beings

are tormented by the three kinds of suffering, they want to know how to get rid of it, something that can be permanently accomplished not by material or by revealed, Scriptural means, but only by a discriminating understanding.

Each Indian school having adopted different means for such a purpose, Indian philosophy can be understood, almost as a whole, as a kind of transcendent utilitarianism, one that does not exhibit curiosity for its own sake and seeks transcendent experience. Yet transcendent experience and intellectual conviction are not really separated by the Indians but (very often) supposed to support one another and, finally, to be in effect the sameSpinoza

uses a different machinery of thought, but is he so different in this particular conviction? European philosophy does not ordinarily lay so great an emphasis on sufferingthe Stoics, the Neoplatonists,

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and thinkers like Pascal and Schopenhauer are among the not infrequent exceptionsbut European philosophical thought, like the Indian, has usually expressed the hope for transcendence. And in thinking of the emphasis of Indian philosophy on suffering, we should remember that the suffering or, better, the negative quality it attributes to life, is not suffering in its merely ordinary sense but in that meant by Spinoza, having to do with the objective nature of the universe and

the philosopher's ability to distinguish between the transient, on the one hand, and the eternal on the other.

This need to be objective and renounce the suffering that results from the painful impermanence of everything worldly is the moral of the Buddhist parable about Kisa Gotami. When her young son died, she took his body on her hip and went from door to door asking for medicine to cure him but was met only with derision. When she asked the Buddha for the medicine, he in compassion told her to make a round of the whole city and bring him mustard seeds from any house in which no one

had ever died. When she failed to find even one such house, she understood that her boy was not the only person who had been overtaken by death, but that all things are impermanent and that death is a law common to all mankind. Seeing this, she became reconciled to death and cast her boy into the burning- ground. 77

It is doubly deceiving to make the distinction between philosophy as pure inquiry for the Europeans and as the science of liberation for the Indians or, for the Chinese, of morally differentiated action, moral merger with humanity, or intuitive unity with nature. Consider again the view that Chinese philosophy is interested in "erecting, initiating, motivating, and insinuating actions and action- oriented attitudes, not in describing a transcendent world independent of actions and

consciousness."78 Even if we take this description to be accurate, it remains true that the Chinese philosopher is at times motivated by curiosity and always by the desire to express himself and to create a body of interesting thought. It also remains true, I am sure, that the philosophers of India and Europe use their descriptions of transcendent worlds, and so forth, to insinuate actions and action- oriented attitudes. No philosophy is without its social dimension and effect.

I say this not because I suppose that Indian or Chinese thinkers agree with the Europeans who agree with Aristotle that the contemplation of the truth, the theoretical life, is the best of all lives. But Indian philosophy exhibits structures and refinements that, inspired or not by the need for liberation or defense against rival schools, lead to an analytical sharpness the exercise of which is its own reward; and the public victories it may bring

have an additional, this-worldly sweetness. Sharp and detailed

Page 45 as contemporary philosophers may be, it does not take much reading in the sources to learn that many of their Indian (and medieval European) predecessors were their matches.

This equality cannot be tested by resurrecting medieval Europeans, but it is still possible to question traditional Indian philosophers. Accordingly, not long ago, ar experimental five-day dialogue was held, in Sanskrit and English, between a group of Indian pandits of the Navya- Nyaya school and a group of contemporary, Western- oriented Indian philosophers. The participants were at first disconcerted to discover that "there were so to speak, no

philosophically uncommitted or neutral words in Sanskrit which could serve as even rough equivalents of what was sought to be conveyed through the English terms." 79 For the subject of the dialogue, the experimenters chose Russell's doctrine of propositions as expounded in the Principles of Mathematics (in a technical sense, propositions are ignored in Indian philosophy). Russell's main points were summarized, a Sanskrit translation was made for the pandits who knew no English, and translators into and from

Sanskrit were provided. Challenged to depart from the mere defense and exegesis of their traditional positions, some of the pandits suggested how Nyaya might be developed in new directions. Some of the pandits were later introduced to modern Western logic and some of the Western- oriented philosophers studied Navya- Nyaya logic. Each side is said to have developed a profound respect for the other and to have discovered philosophically exhilarating differences .*

The moral drawn is that a contrasting analysis that leads in a different direction and that over millennia gradually builds an imposing philosophical structure is something whose possibility one cannot even conceive if one is confined to a single philosophical tradition. One inevitably treats the only known tradition as the only possible one and hence as universally paradigmatic in character.80

I am convinced that the analytical sharpness and constructive complexities of Indian philosophy show the operation of curiosity working for its own, nondoctrinal, nonsalvational reasons, trying to build reality as it

*But given the pandits habitual defense of their philosophy, it is not surprising that (with the exception I note below) there was no obvious change in their positionchanges in the positions of the modern philosophers are not recorded. But each side in the dialogue appears to have arrived at an at least fairly clear understanding of the other, and the discussion is detailed, analytical, and pertinent. The pandit who at the end summarizes the Nyaya response holds that "the postulation of a separate kind of entity called

'proposition' is groundless" and adds that, if he understands Russell correctly, "such a theory does not deserve to go unattacked." Russell's temperament was such that, had he been available, he would not have foregone an answer, supplemented, no doubt, with a cutting witticism. (The quotations are from Krishna et al., eds., Samvada [see note 79, this chapter], pp. 21213.)

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can and solving the intellectual difficulties it has revealed in the process. The need for salvation stimulates philosophical thought but is also the opportunity and excuse for immersing oneself in the pleasure of exercising one's mind: When intense, philosophy is a habit of thought, a calling, and a passion, the stubborn search for either a detailed rational objectivity or a philosophical escape from it.

Not surprisingly, therefore, a sharp distinction between Indian salvational and Western nonsalvational philosophy is deceptive. Even recent European philosophy, whether of the Existentialist or Wittgensteinian kind, has searched for escape from unnecessary pain (for Wittgenstein himself, the pain that results from philosophical bewitchment by words). Or it has searched for salvation of a sort by means of the acceptance of one's own finiteness and death, or by means of the renewed illumination of

Being in a world darkened by objectivity, utility, and science (the first aim is that of the early Heidegger, the second, of the late one). How the Constraints of Orthodoxy Can Intensify Philosophical Reasoning

These last words are a reminder that both Wittgenstein and Heidegger come close to repudiating the whole of philosophy. But as was said in the beginning, their repudiation is considered philosophical when philosophy is defined to include reasonable arguments that deny reason, whether in general or in its philosophical guise. Wittgenstein remains a philosopher even when he tries to dissolve away the content of philosophy and leave only a critical method of

examining what is said, especially by philosophers, and Heidegger remains a philosopher even when he turns to poetry to reveal Being or, for the sake of that revelation, turns back to pre-Platonic thought. Chuang Tzu, Ch'an (Zen) monks, and Kierkegaard find their truths not by means of philosophical solutions but philosophically intractable paradoxes, although the reasoning more often implied than stated in Ch'an Buddhism is that articulated in earlier, more explicit Buddhist philosophy. All

these revelers in paradox draw their sustenance from the philosophy they repudiate. What, in its absence, would they have to say?

I have been making essentially the same defense for studying the orthodox philosophical theologies of Hinduism, late Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity as forms of philosophy. However, there is not only their religious orientation to consider, but their orthodoxy as such. By definition, religious orthodoxy and, for that matter, any orthodoxy, is opposed to the free use of reason and in this sense inhibits the pursuit of

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philosophy. A skeptic, disbeliever, or believer in reason alone is therefore apt to claim that religious orthodoxy is the antithesis of any philosophy worthy of the name. But as I have said in different ways, the ideal of reason alone has never been fulfilled. The problems with which philosophers have dealt have always been so far beyond a provable solution (as their critics have shown) that any stand a philosopher takes must incorporate assumptions, explicit or implicit, that are neither

proved nor, it has so far appeared, provable. Therefore whatever stand one takes (including the one now being taken) is incompletely reasonable or, to someone unsympathetic to it, arbitrary or foolish. Except for the rules or technical arguments whose power to convince is independent of any systemthe law of contradiction is the simplest examplea philosophy must reflect not reason as such but reason in accord with one's social heritage and individual

experience. From this standpoint, a philosophy is the intellectually formulated projection of a tradition or personality, or, to be more exact, of both at once.

Given the power to do so, orthodoxy suppresses any reasoning that conflicts with its dogmatically held tenets. But the human intellect is never wholly servile for long. The person who is orthodox and, at the same time, philosophical is like a musician or painter who creates within the confines of an accepted style. Particular dogmas and methods of thought being inescapable, the person's self-expression is limited to variations on the accepted position. Since nothing else is allowed, the creative impulse is

confined to the exploration of this position in increasing detail or intensity, by which I mean an intensively, even microscopically directed attention. The individual thinker then uses the permitted style of thought in order to express the most intensive variations allowed, often different enough in their variety or intensity to be fiercely resisted by unintensive or differently intensive thinkers. The restriction itself can act as a powerful stimulus. In the long run, therefore, even the most restricted style

allows original thought to live and, not infrequently, to flourish.

Of course, orthodoxy is not confined to religion. If we think of philosophical orthodoxy as, minimally, the commitment to remain faithful to a particular standpoint, then there have been many truly or ostensibly orthodox exponents of many great philosophers, the list of which ends for the while with Heidegger and Wittgenstein. What is lost by orthodoxy is compensated for, more or less, by what is gained. Considering the history of thought in

the light of human limitations, philosophers impoverish themselves excessively if they insist that philosophy should exclude thought that is dominated by traditional religion or by orthodoxy of any particular kind. One ought not to forget that philosophical attacks on orthodoxy are deeply indebted to itas I will repeat, the more truly independent the line

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of thought, the more likely it is to be primitive. In all three traditions, the attacks owe their structure and technical resources to the dogmatically developed thought that they intend to undermine. In the heat of battle against ar orthodoxy, the intellectual debt owed it by its opponents is not easy for them to acknowledge. Of course, an orthodoxy increases its ability to survive by making use of the resources its unorthodox opponents

put at its disposal. The Three Traditions in Themselves: Their Uniqueness of Style

Is it possible to grasp the differences between the three philosophical traditions in a summary way? I'm not sure that anyone in the position to accept the challenge ever resists it, but it's a mistake to put much trust in a formula designed to sum up any one of the three. To venture such a formula is to undertake an exercise in the disclosure of a nonexistent essence, to confuse the intricate variations within variations of intellectual history with the formulaic brevity possible to mathematics or the magical compactness ascribed to

mantras. How could an aphoristic sentence or two capture any tradition that has grown over thousands of years and has engaged persons of so many degrees of philosophical creativity and so many typeswise, sharp, scholarly, bibliomaniacal, confrontational, conciliatory, narcissistic, rebellious, compulsive, and just plain weird? True, many of these philosophers were in the service of teachers the contradiction of whom was a sin against reverence and loyalty. But the human lust to think as an individual is not easily

denied, and so what one could not say against tradition or in one's own name was attributed to an old sage or put down as a mere elucidation of the accepted text, until subterranean change after change made the tradition something it had never been before.

Yet in spite of the failure of the formulas, whose inescapable shallowness I have stressed, only a coward of a comparatist would evade the attempt to characterize the different traditions, to see them summarily, if only as a beginning on which to elaborate. After all, each of the three has its individuality, which can be recognized though not put into quite satisfactory words. One recognizes a fragment of Indian, Chinese, or European

philosophy as one recognizes a voice in a babble of voices or a face in a crowd, without any hesitation. The identifying characteristic may be the particular abstract message, but I think it is less usually the abstraction in itself, which is likely to have counterparts in the other traditions, as its style, which is in part comprised of its manner of approach to the subject, of the rhythm, emphasis, and style of compression

or expansion in which

Page 49 it progresses from idea to idea to conclusion (how does one give a description of a voice or a face good enough for it to be recognized?). Yet for the same reason that mathematicians recognize one another's styles in mathematics, there must also be something in the naturethe principles and the organizationof the logic per se by which to identify the philosophical tradition, perhaps the subtradition, and even the individual philosopher.

All that is quite vague. Can I describe, briefly and simply, some of the individual characteristics of the Indian, Chinese, and European styles of philosophizing? To make an answer more nearly possible, I confine myself to the standard or classical doctrines. Well, then, very inadequately, an Indian philosophical system is likely to depend on a source (which opens and closes with an invocation to the patron sage or god) that is so abbreviated that, taken by itself, it is near impenetrable. It is so brief probably because it is meant for

memorizing in a predominantly oral culture and certainly because it is meant for elucidation by a teacher and a commentary.

In a typical Indian discussion of a philosophical problem there is a systematic, if only formal fairness in that the text repeats and responds to the views of all the rival schools. The frequent compression of the text is likely to face the interpreter with the problem of deciding whether a statement represents the opinion of the writer or of the view the writer means to refutea mistake in identification is as serious as confusing yes with no. The to and

fro of argument is signaled by an armature of phrases such as:

But what is the proof ?; but in this case; well, then (how would you respond) if (we say) ?; if it were so, exactly this should also be the case; this is not right, because; but would this not be similar ?; no (this is not so) because; others, however, say; this is also incorrect; well, then (how do you respond) if ?; but how can there be ?; this is not so; well then, let us admit that; that (dilemma); and it is not so; but then, if; and one should not say; if one assumes that; well, then (let us say that); with this (argumentation); well, then (let us say that); that may be enough. 81

It is Indian style, as well, for the philosopher to put arguments in verse, accompanied by a commentary written either by himself, a follower, or, sometimes, a member of a rival school. The commentaries and subcommentaries are technical and often ambiguous because they are meant for teachers and students who are used to the issues and the style in which they have traditionally been put. Like the Indian philosophical treatises, they are, at their best, dry, direct, sharply reasoned, pious, and acidulousa

Page 50 laborious pleasure to those who have acquired the Indian taste. In accord with the Indian taste, philosophical texts are given an imaginative punctuation by means of stock analogies such as the rope mistaken for a snake, the shell mistaken for silver, the mirage of water, the hare's (nonexistent) horns, and the (impossible) son of the barren woman.

Because I cannot do so briefly enough, I refrain from reviewing the characteristic assumptions and modes of analysis of Indian philosophers, who, not unlike the Chinese, love to work with numbered categories. 82 But they have shown an ability far beyond any of the Chinese (except, maybe, the Buddhists) or Europeans to go explicitly inward and distinguish, often with perceptive care, between the objects, conditions, and functions of perception and conception. The kinds of perception between which they distinguish include those that are preverbal, postverbal, normal, abnormal,

illusory, supernormal, and divine, and of each separate sense and all the senses together; and include self- perceptions and perceptions of space, time, and universals. The kinds of cognition between which they distinguish include those of dreams, memories, recollections, recognitions, imaginations, reveries, and trances. They also distinguish between different desires, aversions, and emotionsemotions of attachment, clinging, yearning, lust, detachment, love, joy, anger, resentment, dejection, fear, greed, longing, conceit, hatred, forbearance, contentment, equanimity, tranquillity,

endurance, wonder, and rasa. And among kinds of consciousness, they distinguish between the subliminal, the supraliminal, the supernormal, and the transcendental.83

There is much that is artificial in this inward analysis, yet, all told, it shows how intensely the Indians are able to concentrate on these very elusive processes. It is not surprising that the Indians' fascination with inward life is related to their interest in transcendence and the yogic methods for arriving at it. Their earliest philosophy already shows an intense appreciation of the ability to dream whole rich worlds, a sign to them that the ego can, by itself, both create and identify itself with everything it experiences, which is to say, with all perceptible reality, which is (often) to say, with a cosmic ego in nature identical with the personal one. When a person is asleep, Indians explain, he is like a king, who

moves everywhere as he likesthe dreamer is everything that his self invents. This view of the power of the dreaming self makes it natural for the mystical Indians to believe that deep, dreamless sleep, which they take to be the highest level, is a way of attaining certainty and peace by going beyond the lower, dreaming consciousnesswhich still differentiates thingsand by leaving the individual unlimited by anything or anyone else, his borders having vanished in the undifferentiated common reality.

What of the style of classical Chinese thought? It is equally if not more compressed than the Indian, besides which it lacks many of the

Page 51 grammatical indications that are considered essential for clarity in Sanskrit or in Greek, Latin, and other European languages. Let me give as an example a short passage in which Hsün-tzu, in the course of his attack on the view that human beings are by nature good, defines what is meant by good and evil:

All men in the world, past and present, agree in defining goodness as that which is upright, reasonable, and orderly, and evil as that which is prejudiced, irresponsible, and chaotic. This passage is, on its face, fully intelligible; but try to understand the following approximately literal substitution of English words for Chinese characters. Needless to say, the Chinese is more compact and, in the original, unedited text lacks punctuation.

Everybody past- present Heaven- below's that-which called good-ones: alignment pattern equableness good-order are; that-which called evil- ones: One- sidedness irregularity turbulence disorder are. 84

Such clarity as is inherent in the Chinese language comes largely, as I have said, from the way the characters are organized. The characters march across the page in their fixed and parallel order and unchanging (uninflected) shape, like so many logical/ esthetic symbolseach symbol's meaning to be chosen from among a variety of possibilities in accord with the immediate context, the general context of

which is the whole of classical Chinese literature. The reader sees the phrases echo and enchain one another into rhythms and meanings such as these taken from Lao- tzu:

The whole world recognizes the beautiful as the beautiful, yet this is only the ugly; the whole world recognizes the good as the good, yet this is only the bad. Thus Something and Nothing

produce each other; The difficult and the easy complement each other; The long and the short off-set each other; The high and the low incline towards

each other; Before and after follow each other. Therefore the sage keeps to the deed that consists in taking no action and practices the teaching that uses no words.85

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To those who have not learned a classical text in the classical way, the text contains a set of riddles to be solved by finding the most probable combination of meanings and intended associations. The process is not unlike solving subtle crossword puzzles, because the texts, compiled by thinkers each of whose memories retained a great part of the classical literature, are quite certain to quote, paraphrase, or hint at other, unnamed texts the reader is assumed to know; if the assumption proves false,

the thinkerthe thinker's textabandons the reader as unworthy of any subtle understanding. 86 But there are also comparisons, stories, conversations, and historical instances to lighten the way.

As shown by the passage from Lao-tzu, the correlative style of Chinese writing and thought, with one thing or idea set alongside or against another, creates a rhythm like that of the changing correspondences by which, the Chinese believe, the universe functions. Subtlety rules even their frequent stereotypes. Take as an example the Confucian notion that human nature is good but requires considerable education, and that a familylike harmony, achieved by unequal but faithful reciprocity, is the social and universal ideal.

But the Chinese are very sensitive to the nuances of these deceptively modifiable stereotypes. The obtuse will miss the subtlety concealed within the platitude that allows it to enter another's mind without jarring it. As classical Chinese philosophers say, the correct application of language is the key to ethical behavior, because the mindthe heartacts according to the distinctions of the words it uses. Is this a hypersimple or hypersubtle view? Something of both, maybe. Taken as a whole and at its best, the Chinese view

expresses an ideal of actively personal and impersonal harmonizing like that achieved by the calligrapher who infuses the poem he writes, sometimes on the painting he himself has made, with the forces whose entangled contrariety catches and inspires an intensive quality of life.

I've forgotten Chinese queerness, crudeness, heartbreak, hatred, and other traits, which come to expression in philosophy as in other media; but I cannot say it all. Nor can I show in adequate detail that most of the indigenous Chinese philosophy was written not in a special philosophical language, but in the usual literary style, as essays, letters, conversations, and expansions of a master's words. I mention this, as I earlier mentioned the Indian style of commentaries and of treatises intended for technical precision, because European

philosophy seems to me to have been extraordinarily variedoften, like the Chinese, merging indistinguishably with literature in general, but often written, like the Indian, in learned styles impenetrable to laymen.

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Given the brevity I must observe, I can only hint at the great variety of European styles. The main point I want to make is that, the Middle Ages excepted, the philosopher's pride is more in his individual position than in his school, if he is at all willing to recognize himself as belonging to one. There is such a great variety of styles of philosophizing that it is much harder than for India or China to point out what is common to them. To say this in the form of a brief reminder: At the very

beginning there is the style of epic poetry chosen by Parmenides and, later and differently, by Lucretius. Also at the beginning, there is the contrary, aphoristic style, of Heraclitus, and, later, there are the aphoristic styles of Francis Baconan aphorism, he said, is a seed of thoughtand of Pascal, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. Toward the beginning, there are the drama style of Plato and the contrary style of (the surviving) Aristotle, who is always analyzing and always

discovering systematic connections but always correcting himself, so that he never gets to a finished system. There are the dialogue- treatises of Cicero, the discourses of Epictetus, and the meditations of Marcus Aurelius; and the style of free, imaginative, often eloquent composition of Plotinus and the copious commentary style of Proclus, carried over into the commentary style of the Middle Ages. But Proclus also has a Euclidean style, which

Descartes uses for a sketch and Spinoza elaborates in his Ethics. This Euclidean style is paralleled in later philosophers who, like Wolff, Hegel and, in one book, Wittgenstein, stress formal structure. Then there is the style of the free essay, which we find in Plutarch, in the quotation- patchwork intimacy of Montaigne, and in many others. The detailed treatise cannot, of course, be forgotten. In Kant and those who follow him, it is often made up of convoluted sentences,

furnished with special technical terms, that go from one deep difficulty to another. And now, to make the barest mention of the present, many write and think like the academic professionals they are, whether in the style of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, or some other philosophical mentor; but they nearly all aspire to the clear victory by argument that none of them ever wins.

Everything I have said up until now is by way of introduction, by way, that is, of reflection on the kind of work to be done, but it is not the work itself. If, as a result of the work, we will come to see that the philosophy of the other traditions shares a good deal with ours, this will teach us something we surely ought to know. But the discovery of what has been common to philosophically thinking humans is unlikely to invigorate philosophy as such. This is because the contemporary philosopher is far less

interested in recovering variations of old thoughts than in thinking ahead, as far and as exactly as possible, into unknown territory.

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What can push thought ahead in comparative philosophy is not the similarity one finds or misses but the strain one undergoes in the finding or missing, and, when a similarity is found, the strain in showing it for what it is and marking out its limits. It is possible for us to think ahead in the forms that we have inherited and, no less, in those that others have inherited, with our kinds of insight and theirs, so that the friction between them makes them sharper, more subtle

instruments of understanding than philosophers have had before. Will this possibility ever really tempt many of them?

Page 55 Chapter 2 The Beginnings of Metaphysical Philosophy: Uddalaka, Yajnavalkya, Heraclitus, Parmenides

From now on, this book will practice a moderate philosophical austerity. I mean that, with justifiable exceptions, each chapter will focus more on ideas than on personalities, circumstances, or social surroundings. This is for two reasons. The first is concern with the philosophers' influence on their respective traditions. It is natural for a tradition to ignore philosophical views that turn out to be inconvenient, and to turn the philosopher into a character

given the same name as the original but recreated, as in a play, to fill the role the tradition requires. I hope to protect the individual against this eviction from his thought, but I am also committed to explain what tradition made of it.

The second reason for focusing mainly on ideas is to allow us to begin at a level of abstraction high enough to allow the ideas to be compared at all. This freeing of the ideas for comparisonequivalent to the clearing away of "noise" that makes the exact sciences possiblerequires us to disregard as temporarily irrelevant the ideas' simply local or individual characteristics. Otherwise everything to be compared has a raggedly individual shape that makes clear analysis problematic or, strictly speaking, impossible. A truly full analysis would be an endless recital of inexhaustibly many details and inexhaustible nuances of quality. 1 But once we have compared the abstracted ideas, we can qualify them in order to make them as individual or local as we prefer. To

consider the ideas inherently beyond comparison is to negate their intended nature as abstractions. But

Page 56 when they are scrutinized in close detail, they become more individual and begin to reveal the extent to which they share in the uniqueness of those who held them. The Theme: The Search for What Is Primary, Basic, or Real

Now that these preliminary remarks have been made, I can state the theme of the present chapter. The theme, which neither philosophy nor religion has ever abandoned, is the relation between the unity of the world and its variety, and between its permanence and the changes it undergoes. These four traits can be paired in another way to express the theme as the relation between unity and permanence and between variety and change. Together, the four

conceptsunity, variety, permanence, changeare involved in any attempt to understand how and why the world is or appears to be as we experience or appear to experience it. To think about the four concepts is to be attracted, almost by instinct, to the further distinction between what is primary, basic, or real, and what is secondary, dependent, or unreal.

Considering that human beings, even highly philosophical ones, are practical as well as theorizing creatures, the attempt to understand is also an attempt to gain a practical goal, which is power in some sense, whether over nature, over others, or over oneself. These goals, the search for which is guided by curiosity and example and driven by desire, are, of course, evident in the four philosophers we are about to discuss. They do not distinguish or distinguish

very little between the theoretical and the practical, or, in the Indian instances, between the theoretical, practical, and ritual. Yet in each of these individuals we catch sight of the philosophical impulse as it first becomes visible to us in the history of civilization. Whatever traditional ideas these individuals may have inherited, there is the (maybe misleading) feeling of the creation of something philosophical from nothing philosophical; and however naive or arbitrary the

expression of this impulse may seem to us now, it shows the thrusting boldness of the human intellect as it begins to awaken to its power to create and destroy by means of purely abstract thought. Uddalaka (8th [?] Century B.C.E.): Everything Is the Subtle Essence, the Existent

This first encounter with Indian philosophers has five protagonists: Uddalaka Aruni (son of Aruna), his son Shvetaketu, his student Yajnavalkya, Maitreyi the more philosophical of Yajnavalkya's two wives

Page 57 and king Janaka of Videha, the Bihar of today, who was Uddalaka's disciple and Yajanavalkya's patron. 2 Their discussions dealt with here, discussions of unknown and unknowable authenticity, are from two ancient Upanishads, the Brihad- Aranyaka Upanishad (Great Secret Teaching of the Forest) and the Chandogya Upanishad (Secret Teaching of the Chandogyas).3 *

I have chosen to represent Uddalaka's and Yajnavalkya's ideas by means of some justly famous passages. The relative clarity of my accounts of these passages and the sharpness of contrasts I derive from them seem to me to be possibly misleading. If one wants to understand such old, sacred texts, one ought to be wary of later interpretations, usually meant to support one or another traditional position. Even if one has the philological ability to interpret the texts on their own, in the light of only earlier or presumably

contemporary texts, there is much that must remain inexact, if not mysteriousevery clarification or expansion risks too violent reduction of mythical or quasi-mythical conceptions to merely logical form.

Regardless of the moderate philosophical austerity adopted here, it would be cruel to resist an anecdote that fixes a philosopher in one's memory. I therefore take the liberty of repeating a traditional story of how Uddalaka got his name: After his teacher sent him to repair a breach in a dike, he failed to return. His teacher then went to the site of the dike and called out. He heard him and got up out of the breach, in which he had been

lyinghe had been able to stop it only with his own body, he explained. Because he opened the breach again by getting up, the teacher gave him the name Uddalaka, Puller of the Stop, and said: "Since you obeyed my word, you shall obtain the highest good. All the Vedas will be manifest to you and all the books of the Law."4 Of Uddalaka's son Shvetaketu, his partner in the memorable series of dialogues to be discussed, I repeat only

that he is said to have broken the rule for orthodox students by insisting on eating honey. Uddalaka is the person I would like to dramatize as the first philosopher. He may have lived earlier or later than the date I assign him, the eighth century B.C.E., but it is safe to assume that he preceded the earliest Greek philosophers. Much of his philosophical thought comes to expression in the

*The term Upanishad, used as the name of a kind of text, has most often been taken by scholars to mean confidential instruction, secret teaching, or secret text. Other meanings are secret word and secret significance. The word is made up of upa (near), ni (down), and sad, an etymology that indicates that the original meaning was probably a sitting near (a teacher, for instruction). However, the

philosopher Shankara, who is discussed in a later chapter, derives the meaning of upanishad from destroy (because it destroys inborn ignorance) or from conduct (toward Brahman). There seems to have been no ancient canon of Upanishads, but collections of them were in time formed, first one of 34, then another of 52, and, much later, one of 108. For further information on the term and on its

sources, see note 3, just preceding.

Page 58 conversations between him and his son Shvetaketu. Because his ideas make a more natural impression in the context of these dialogues, my paraphrase echoes something of their form.

The dialogues form a series of lessons in which Uddalaka teaches Shvetaketu what he failed to learn during the twelve years of study from which he has just returned, now twenty-four years old and full of conceit. 5 Has he learned what is of true importance? To test him, Uddalaka asks him if he has learned the rule by which the yet unheard could be heard, the yet unthought

could be thought, and the yet not understood could be understood. To Shvetaketu's question what the rule is, the father answers that it is the one by which a person can know everything made of a certain substance by knowing only a small portion of it, for instance, everything made of earth by knowing a single one of its clods.6

Uddalaka goes on to teach an early Indian theory of the origin of the different substances and of the universe they make up. According to his theory, there are three basic elements, each of which is a power or, as he also calls it, a divinity. The elements are heat (which is also light), water, and food (food meaning plants). This choice of

elements shows that Uddalaka is thinking primarily of the cosmic elements that become the elements that make up living things, that is, the living things' heat and the water and food they need for their existence.

Uddalaka is following precedent when he begins his account of the origin of things with the primal Existent (sat) or the primal Being, which is what exists solely and completely by virtue of its own power of existence. He contends that the Existent cannot come, as some think, from the Non- Existent, from Nothing (asat), the unordered chaos that others assume preceded the cosmos, which is by nature

ordered.7 As the sequel shows, he believes that the Existent or the Being is alive, that is, has the conscious desire to be many"to propagate" powers, or, to use a more cautious term, to emanate powers from itself. The Existent, Uddalaka believes, is these powers' own power of existence. Following a traditional theme, Uddalaka is in effect arguing that there must be some fundamental something by virtue of which anything can

at all exist. In accord with this tradition, he believes that the process of creation is catalyzed by the conscious and at least vaguely personal desire to create. The ruling analogy, I suppose, is that of a father longing for children. This longing aside, much the same problem concerning primary and secondary existence arises in European philosophy, very explicitly in the odd- sounding questiona tribute to the stubbornness

of curiosityWhy is there anything at all? To return to the scene of primal creation, because the Existent had the desire to become many, it emanated heat/light from itself. Then heat/light, having the same desire, emanated water from itselfwhich explains why a

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person sweats when hot. Having the same desire, water emanated food from itself, which explains why there is plenty of food when it rains. Then the Existent or the Being had the desire to make individual things. In Indian thought, as it happens, ar individual person or thing is made up of an inward nature or "name" (naman) and an outward appearance or "form" (rupa), that is, a visible (colored) shape. Thinking in

terms of such an analysis into name and form (nama- rupa), Uddalaka explains that the Existent entered into heat, water, and food (that is, plants), as their life, with this essential living part of itself, its own living self. In entering, it caused each of these elements to contain something of the other two, so that what we actually see is not wholly composed of any one element but of the triad of elements in different proportions.

Fire, for example, contains not only heat but the other elements as well. But we know Fire basically when we know its indwelling nature of fire, which is visible in the redness of its red form. Therefore, Uddalaka concludes, whoever knows the three elements knows the truth of everything visible, which is made of them alone. 8 His idea that to understand anything one must understand the elements

that make it up continues to be an elementary, irreplaceable tactic of thought.

In accord with his doctrine of elements, Uddalaka tells his son that human beings, too, are composed of heat, water, and food, each of which has three different degrees of fineness. The highest human functions are composed of the finest degrees of the elements: the organ of thought is composed of the finest degree of food, the life-breath of the finest degree of water, and speech of the finest degree of

heatthe doctrine is, at least in part, a vitalistic materialism. To demonstrate the truth of this theory, Uddalaka makes an experiment by asking Shvetaketu to stop eating for fifteen days. At the end of the fifteen days, Shvetaketu finds himself unable to recite the hymns, sacrificial formulas, and chants that he knows by heart. His father explains that it is as if a great fire in Shvetaketu has burned

out and left only a firefly-sized ember. When Shvetaketu eats again, as his father orders, his organ of thought is renewed by the food that makes it up, and he remembers everything he is asked.9

In the context of the Indian speculation of his time, this three-element doctrine of Uddalaka is a highly original invention. Because the text of Uddalaka's instruction was well known and because its teaching resembles later Indian doctrines, it is reasonable to assume that it influenced them. But Uddalaka is most vividly remembered by tradition for his doctrine that the essential component of everything that lives is one and the same invisible Self or Atman (in deference to the

translation I am using, I capitalize atman only here). As he teaches the doctrine to his son, Shvetaketu, each time he finishes a demonstration that everything is without exception constituted by this reality, he drives the point home by

Page 60 repeating, "That is you!" "tat tvam asi," words that were to become a cardinal formula of a number of Indian schools .*

Uddalaka explains himself: When a human being sleeps, he enters into his own, that is, he is united with the Existent. A bird tied by a string flies in one direction after another but finds no resting place until it alights just where it is tied, in the same way as the human being's thought- organ (manas)

flies in one direction after another but finds no resting place until it alights on the life- breath, just where it is tied. 10

Shvetaketu says, "Tell me more," and Uddalaka answers with the analogy of the rivers flowing from ocean into ocean, in each ocean becoming indistinguishable. Uddalaka then gives the analogy of honey. The bees make honey, he says, out of the juices of various trees but reduce this juice to a unity, and no one of the juices can distinguish itself as that of a particular tree. Just so, when any creaturetiger, lion, wolf, boar, worm, moth, gnat, or mosquitomerges with the Existent, it no longer knows that it is a particular individual but feels merged with the Existent.11

Shvetaketu again says, "Tell me more," a phrase he repeats before each new lesson his father gives him. Pointing to a great tree, Uddalaka says that because it is through and through pervaded with living Self, wherever it is hacked, in its middle, which is alive, or at its top, which is alive, its sap will flow out of it. If life leaves one of its branches, that branch

withers, and if life leaves the whole tree, the whole tree withers. "What loses life dies, but life itself does not die."12 From all the examples he has given, Uddalaka draws the same conclusion: "That which is that subtle essence is nothing other than this universe. That is the real, that is the self (atman), that is you, Shvetaketu!"13

The lesson is extended with the help of a fruit from a banyan tree. Following Uddalaka's directions, Shvetaketu extracts fine seeds from the tree's fruit and splits one of them. When Shvetaketu finds nothing that explains anything inside the seed, Uddalaka says, "Because of that subtle essence that you do not perceive this great banyan tree continues in existence," and he ends again with the formula, "That is you, Shvetaketu!"

*This traditional translation is now disputed, and "That's how you are" is suggested in its place. The argument for the change is that, by the rules of Vedic grammar, "the neuter pronoun tat ('that') cannot stand in apposition to a masculine noun or pronoun (here tvam, 'you'), even when the antecedent of 'that' may be a neuter word. Thus, if the author had wanted to assert the identity between

'that' and 'you,' he would have used the masculine of 'that'; the phrase would then have read sa tvam asi ... The phrase, therefore, does not establish the identity between the individual and the ultimate being (sat), but rather shows that Shvetaketu lives in the same manner as all other creatures, that is, by means of an invisible and subtle essence." However, "it may also ... to some degree, indicate the cause of his existence,"

as it does in the analogy, given just below, of the subtle essence of the seed of the banyan tree (Olivelle, Upanisads, p. 349, drawing on the grammatical analysis of J. Brereton). The ambiguity allowed seems plausible and the "to some extent" allows a less dramatic persistence of the hallowed old meaning.

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Then, following his father's directions, Shvetaketu puts salt into water and waits a day. Told to bring the salt to his father, he tries to touch it in order to take it out but fails because the salt has all dissolved. Following his father's directions, Shvetaketu verifies this by tasting it from one side and anotherthe water is salty everywhere. The lesson is that although the Existent is not perceived, it is everywhere.

It is the subtle essence that is this universe, the truth, the self, and Shvetaketu as well. 14

Uddalaka strengthens his lesson by describing the process of dying: A dying man is able to know his relatives as long as his speech does not retreat into his organ of thought, his organ of thought into his life- breath, his life-breath into his heat/light and his heat/light, into the highest power, the divinity. After this succession of retreats has taken place, the dying person no longer knows his relatives

because his life has retreated into the subtle essence that is the Existent and has vanished from his body. Uddalaka repeats the refrain, "That is you, Shvetaketu!" and repeats it again at the end of the final lesson, which is an analogy of a different kind: Unlike a lying criminal who undergoes the ordeal of grasping a heated axe, a person who is not guilty and covers himself with the truth, the real,

does not perish but is released by his accusers.15 This seems to mean that in covering himself with truth, the innocent man is delivered from danger by his coincidence with the Existent.

To summarize the series of lessons: By using analogies and empirical observations, Uddalaka has shown that this whole varied world arises and continues to exist, like a banyan tree, from the invisible essence that he calls the Existent or the Being; has shown that the Existent, like salt dissolved in water, is present everywhere even though it is imperceptible; has shown that the disappearance of consciousness in death is a step-by-step return to the imperceptible

Existent; and has shown that the truth, the real, can protect a person who is undergoing a judicial ordeal. Although later ascribed a much broader significance, this last lesson seems meant only to give an explanation of why judicial ordeals are able to distinguish between the guilty and the innocent .*

*The traditional controversy concerning Uddalaka's phrase "That is you!" can be put simply enough, though it will become clearer when the relevant philosophy, that of Shankara, is discussed. Shankara gives the phrase a far- reaching interpretation: The self, the atman, is completely indistinguishable from Brahman, so that to think of them as in any way different is to be under the spell of illusion. Other schools dispute this interpretation. For example, that of Ramanuja (C.E. 10551137) claims that for the self to be a particular form of Brahman or

to be essentially dependent on Brahman is not the same as to be absolutely identical with it. The phrase that is you is therefore taken to mean that although God dwells within the human soul, there is a real difference between him and human beings. Otherwise their individual identity would be annihilated, which is absurd. (See J. B. Carman, The Theology of Ramanuja, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974, pp. 12425; and E. Lott, Vedantic Approaches to God, London: Macmillan, 1980, pp. 2837.)

Page 62 Yajnavalkya (8th [?] Century B.C.E.): Reality Is Experienced in Deep Dreaming But Can Be Described Only by Negation

Yajnavalkya is represented as the great expert in ritual procedures and secrets, a man who strikes fear into those who dispute such matters with him. 16 He follows Uddalaka here because of the sources that describe him as Uddalaka's student. Endowed with a poetically philosophical cast of mind, he at times makes the impression of blatant pride. Once, when asked by King Janaka, the patron of philosopher- ritualists, if he has come

to the debate for the sake of the cattle put up as the prize or for the sake of questions with subtle solutions, he answers frankly, "Both, O great king."

Like Uddalaka, Yajnavalkya insists that all existing things comprise an invisible unity, one that words, he is sure, are too limiting to express. Together with King Janaka, he explores the nature of reality. As a favor to the king, he allows him the privilege of asking any question he wants. Aiming at a truly revealing answer, the king begins by asking, with apparent innocence, what it is that serves as light to men here in this world. He is first given a series of obvious answers: the sun; and when the sun sets,

the moon; and when the moon sets, fire. Then, when the king asks what serves as a light when the sun sets, the moon sets, and the fire is out, he gets the less obvious answer, speechbecause, even in the darkness, a person moves in the direction of a voice. Then the king asks a deep question: What serves man as a light when the sun and moon have set, the fire is out, and speech has ended? Yajnavalkya answers, the Self. This is because, Yajnavalkya says, "It is by the light of the self that man sits, walks,

works, and returns home." The king asks what the Self is and gets the answer: The Self is the light that is the inner person (purusha) lodged within the heart. He consists of intelligence, which is the inner light within the vital breaths. This inner person has two states, one in this world, and one in the other. When he is born and attains a body, he is joined with evils; when he dies, he abandons evils. But there is a third state, that of dreams. In this state, this person sees both the evils of this world and the joys of the other.17

Yajnavalkya goes on: When the inner person, the Self, falls asleep, he takes material from the waking world, cuts it down and builds it up, and so is able to dream by his own radiance and light. In sleep, the inner person proves that he is able to create everything for itself: wagons, teams of horses, roads; joys, delights, happinesses; pools, rivers, lakes. He creates this all for himself,

"For he is the Creator." He takes many forms, has his pleasure with women, laughs, and, it seems to him, sees terrifying sights.18

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Like a great fish that swims from the closer to the farther banks of a river, the inner person, the Self, alternates between the dream state and the waking state. The highest dream state is that of desireless, dreamless sleep, in which the inner person can be entirely at peace, as unconscious of anything inner or outer as a man embraced by a beloved woman. Unaffected by good and evil, nothing exists for him any longer, no father, mother,

worlds, gods, Vedas, sacrifices, nor anyone who is by nature blame- worthy or praiseworthy. This is because there is no longer any difference between the person who senses and knows and that which is sensed and known. When sensing and knowing, this person does not really sense or know: there is no longer anything separate for him to sense or know. 19

This description by Yajnavalkya of the passage from the state of wakefulness to that of conscious dreaming and then to an unconscious, unitary state was to be incorporated into the Indian theory of the four states of the self, which are: waking; shallow, dream-filled sleep; deep, dreamless sleep; and union with the ultimate (Brahman) that underlies everything.20 To make a comparison with a Greek view of dreaming, in Homer's epics, dreaming is represented as passive and the dreamers are visited,

they believe, by dream figures that exist independently of themselves"the Greeks never spoke of having a dream, but always of seeing a dream."21 * In the Indian tradition, too, dreams may be seen, but Yajnavalkya believes that dreams are active projections of the self. To him, this is evidence that dreaming shares the creative nature of reality in itself.

The subject of sleep and dreams having been ended, Yajnavalkya explains the nature of death to the king. He does this rather fearfully, because the king has been extracting too many of his secrets from him. Death is preceded by coma. The sensory powers, which are the different life-breaths, are received by the soul- person that (according to an old belief) lodges in the eye, and they descend together

into the heart. The heart's tip lights up, and by its light the Self leaves the body along with

*One should always beware, I suppose, of making such contrasts too categorical. "In Homer we find only a very special kind of dream. The dreams in Homer are 'literary dreams' used to further the story and, as such, cannot be taken as informing about the whole real dream- experience of the early Greeks ... Homer only reports those dreams with a message," of a kind related to the Gods and purported divine messages ... "Although we do not find in Homer the activities of a dream soul, its absence does not necessarily presuppose its nonexistence" (Bremmer, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul, pp. 1820).

As might be expected, Indian philosophers have many different theories of dreaming. Some believe that dreams are created independently of the external sense organs and some that they are memories of waking experience. Different physiological causes are recognized and external stimuli are often taken into accounta sleeping man may dream that a light brought near his eye is a bonfire. (See Sinha, Indian Psychology, vol. 1, chap. 5; the example is from p. 320.)

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the central life-breath and the sensory powersthe other life- breathswhich together comprise consciousness. The Self, which has got rid of this body and cast off ignorance, weaves a new form for itself, whether of god, man, or another creaturethe Self is really Brahman and therefore consists of everything that exists. In its succeeding life, the Self becomes something that accords with its particular actions and its conduct in general, whether good or evil. But the life-

breaths of someone who is without desire, who desires only the Self, collect within him. Being Brahman himself, he attains Brahman while still in this world and becomes immortal. 22

Describing the Self by a series of negations, Yajnavalkya says it is not, not (neti, neti)not graspable, not destructible, not attached, not disturbed by anything good or evil done by himself, not tormented by what he has not done. Whoever knows this truth remains "controlled, at peace, patient, full of faith." When he knows the truth, "everyone comes to be his Self" and "he becomes

the Self of everyone." Subduing all evil, he is free of evil, free of age, free of hunger, and free of thirst.23

In the end, Yajnavalkya decides to become a wandering ascetic. Maitreyi, his wife with an interest in philosophical discussion, asks him a last question: If all the wealth of the world was mine, would that make me immortal? After he answers "no," she asks what she should do with that which does not make her immortal. He answers that she is dear to him and so she should weigh his words with care. He says: A husband is not dear for himself, nor is a wife dear for herself, nor are sons, possessions, the brahman caste, the warrior caste, the world, the gods, the Vedas, the sacrifices, the creatures, dear for

themselvesnothing such is dear for itself. Everything that is loved is loved for love of the Self, the atman. Everything that is seen, heard, thought, and meditated on is the atman.

Yajnavalkya begins to explain by giving a list made up mostly of human activities and what includes them: the sea is the sole location of all water; the different kinds of sensation are located, respectively and solely, in the skin, the nostrils, the tongue, the eye, and the ear; all resolves are located in the thought organ, all sciences in the heart, all deeds in the hands, all journeys in the feet, all delights in the genital organ, all evacuations in the anus, and all speechspeech as holyin the Vedas. By his own line of reasoning, Yajnavalkya should have ended this list with the ultimately inclusive place, the Self, which is the sole location of all things. For the great element, the Self, he says immediately afterward, is nothing but a mass of intelligence with no boundaries, in the same way as a lump of salt is nothing but a mass of flavor with no inside or outside. Arising out of the elements, the Self perishes into themmeaning, it seems, that like salt dissolved in water, it enters into them and cannot be separated out

again. "After death there is no consciousness"consciousness does not separate out again.24

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Maitreyi does not understand this last sentence, so Yajnavalkya goes on explaining: The Self is certainly not destroyed. If there was somebody other than the Self, one could see, smell, taste, talk to, hear, think of, touch, or know something else. But when in death all of someone has become just the Self, what means are there by which the Self could see, smell, taste, talk to, hear, think of, touch, or

know; and what or who would be there to be seen, smelled, tasted, talked to, heard, thought of, touched, or known? By what means could one know the Knower, apart from whom there is nothing and nobody? Having explained the subject of immortality, Yajnavalkya leaves. 25 Heraclitus (fl. 500 B.C.E.): Nothing Is Still

Heraclitus is immodestly critical of men both great and small.26 To him, learning is not enough for understanding, nor is poetic imagination enoughHomer, he says, should be expelled from the poets' competition and be beaten with a rod. It is reported that when the people of his city, Ephesus, asked him to make laws, he refused on the grounds that the city was too much in the grip of a bad constitution. Whether true or maliciously invented, the end assigned him by tradition sounds as if it was

repayment for his pride and his disparagement of others: Having become a misanthrope, he wanders about on the mountains, where he lives on grass and herbs, but this makes him sick and, when his disagreeable attempt to cure himself fails, he dies.27

What is left of Heraclitus is a set of striking, often barely comprehensible aphorisms. These may have been no better connected or more intelligible in antiquity, when he was called "the dark "and "the riddler." To show of what fragments I have pieced together my account of him, I follow each of them by its standard number.28 As I have intimated, Heraclitus makes frequent, usually lapidary complaints. He states, complainingly, that people hear like the deaf and are absent while present (1).

Even after they hear the true account, the logos of how all things come to pass, they fail to comprehend (2). But he, Heraclitus, went in search of himself (28); and he has come to know that nature loves to hide (10). One truth he discovers is that all things are one (36). For the universe always was, is, and will be an ever-living fire that is kindled in measures and in measures goes out (38). The world arises from this fire, the sea first and the earth from the sea (39). All things are in repayment for fire and fire for all things, in the same way

as goods are in repayment for gold and gold for goods (40). The cosmic exchanges are kept within their proper limits by the Furies, who

Page 66 are the ministers of Justice (44). This justice of limits is needed because things always change in the way other and still other waters flow on those who step into the same rivers (50).

With respect to politics and ethics, Heraclitus says that people must fight for the law no less than for the walls of their city (65). Of life in general he says that it is best that human beings should not get all they want because health is made sweet by disease, satiety by hunger, and rest by weariness (67). The world is such that war is the father and king of all, making some slaves, others freeeverything occurs and is judged by conflict (83).

Of souls, says Heraclitus, the dry one is a gleam of light and wisest and best (109). What awaits men at death, they cannot imagine (84), the living and the dead, the waking and the sleeping, and the old and the young being transposed into one another (93). Whole and not whole, convergent and divergent, consonant and dissonant, from all

things one and from one thing all (124). They all are ruled by the divine, this "wise one" who knows the plan by which it steers all things through all things (54). This divine is alone, willing and unwilling to be spoken of as Zeus (118). All of Heraclitus' views invite explanation, but here I need go into only those that concern the logos, god and the cosmic fire, and change.

Logos is a common Greek word for speech, account, and reason. In one especially ambiguous aphorism (31), Heraclitus says that thinking is shared by all, and in another (35) that the vital principle or soul, the psyche, has no limits. Maybe he means that, like fire, the soul is universal because it reaches everywhere or that because all things are alive, they are within the soul's reach. To logos as a

cosmic principle Heraclitus assigns the function of creating order in the warring tensions of the world.

From logos we go on to the divine and to the cosmic fire. The divine, which Heraclitus personalizes as "the wise one," possesses the plan by which all things are steered. The wise one is alone in the sense of being unique or supreme and, as such, fits and does not fit the traditional conception of Zeus and might be called, just as appropriately, by other names. His thunderbolt is his fire that orders and guides by means of the oppositions, the polar strife, of all:

fire will discern and catch up with all things as they move from diversity to full unity and back again (11922). 29

Finally there is the doctrine of the universality of change, which gives Heraclitus his fame in the history of philosophy. His metaphor of the river whose waters are always changing has already been cited. His best known version of the metaphor is that one cannot step twice into the same river (51). Cratylus, whose Heracliteanism is said to have reduced him to silencebecause, maybe, words imply permanencehad words enough

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to criticize Heraclitus and say that it is impossible to step into the river even oncepresumably because the river changes too fast at every point to ever be the same river. 30 It is reasonable to interpret Heraclitus' metaphor to mean, as Plato and Aristotle agree, that while a river continues to have the same form, its contents are always changingchanging in a way, Aristotle adds, that escapes perception. Plato expresses this Heraclitean idea when he says that a man is called the same from childhood to old age even though everything of him has changed, his hair, flesh and bones and blood, and all his

body.31 A like idea of the preservation of identity in change is implied when Heraclitus speaks of the continuity between the sleeping and the waking and the living and the dead. It is in this vein that Plato declares that opposites come to be from opposites, as when souls are born from the dead.32 As best we can now make out, in holding that all things change, Heraclitus means that because even static-seeming things eventually change, they too are subject to the laws of tension, opposition, and process. Parmenides (b. c.515 B.C.E.): What Is, Cannot Not Be

Parmenides was a native of Elea, a city-state in southwest Italy.33 He is said to have been the first to declare that the earth is spherical and situated in the center of space, the earth having no reason to move in one direction rather than another. He is also said to have made laws for his city that were so good that every year the citizens insisted that the magistrates they elected should swear to abide by his laws. In Plato's dialogue given Parmenides'

name, we are told that Parmenides, then a distinguished looking man of about sixty-five, visited Athens together with his disciple Zeno, who was nearly forty. An independent source speaks of Zeno's presence in Athens, and, whether or not Parmenides accompanied him, the date Plato assumes for the dialogue must be about 450 B.C.E. Plato tells us that Socrates, then very young, heard Parmenides develop some

magnificent arguments and impressed Socrates as having an altogether noble sort of depth.34

The fragments of Parmenides that remain are some hundred and fifty lines from a long poem, one that draws on the Iliad and the Odyssey for the form of its verse, its vocabulary, and its images. The fragments come from four successive parts of the poem. In the prologue, the poet, drawn by "sagacious" mares and escorted by the daughters of the sun is brought into the

presence of an unnamed welcoming goddess. She says to him that he must be informed both of persuasive reality and of the mistaken

Page 68 beliefs of mortals. 35 Is Parmenides using the goddess merely as a literary device or does he mean to say that his words are inspired? I find it hard to decide.

The diction in which the goddess lays down her proofs is obscure, so the poem faces the reader with one puzzling statement after another; but the general tenor of the argument is almost clear, and later philosophers have made a great deal of it. The goddess contrasts the path that leads to the truth with the usual, false path taken by mortals, whose bewilderment makes them deaf and blind. The goddess tells Parmenides to gaze steadily and not cut off being from

being, not to be misled by "an unseeing eye and a noisy ear and tongue."36 Ordinary mortals follow both paths, but the choice between them is stark and exclusive. It is the choice between what is and "cannot not be" (between "what is" and what "is not for not being") and what is not and cannot possibly be (what "is not" and "must needs not be")37 * The goddess clearly implies and almost enunciates the law of contradictiona proposition cannot be both true and

falseand the law of excluded middlea proposition can be only true or false. She argues that whatever there is for speaking and thinking about either exists or does not; but if the speech or thought are to make sense, their object can be only what exists. The nonexistent can neither be thought nor spoken of intelligibly.38 In other words, it is self- contradictory to assert that what does not existwhich is nothing at all can really be the object of intelligible thinking. One cannot really

refer todirect one's attention atwhat does not exist: to say that something, some thing, is nothing, no thing, is self- contradictory. Therefore (just as in Euclidean geometry) the impossibility of choosing one of two possible alternatives makes the choice of the other alternative logically necessary:

*Parmenides' is (esti) is very difficult to translate because it has no subjecthe does not say what, if anything, is. Does is here mean that which is, or there is something that is (real or true), or there is existenceexistence exists? It is almost amusing to see how much trouble so few simple Greek wordsesti and einaigive the translators of Parmenides' fragment 2. Take, for example, the following four contemporary translations: "What is there to be said and thought must needs be; for it is there for being, but nothing is not" (Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, p.

247). "The onethat [it] is, and that [it] cannot not be ... The otherthat [it] is not and that [it] needs not be" (Gallop, p. 55). "The one, that a thing is, and that it is not for being ... the other, that a thing is not, and that it must needs not be" (Coxon, p. 52). "How it is and how it is not possible that it should not be so" and "how it is not and how it is right that it should not be so" (Mourelatos, p. 71).

Mourelatos, who explains the problems involved in detail (chap. 2 and appendix 2), regards Parmenides' esti as an example of "speculative predication," predication that more or less combines the is of identity (which simplifies by eliminating distinctions) with the adjectival is (is really) of discovery and with is as the copula of classification. Speculative predication answers the question, What is it? by giving an answer that is meant to be a final explanation.

(See The Route of Parmenides, pp. 5661.)

Page 69 What is not nothing must be something, that is, it must exist, and is there to be spoken of and thought of.

I have put the contrast between the Way of Truth and the Way of Seeming, as the two paths are usually called, more clearly than Parmenides' syntax allows because here, as elsewhere, his struggle to put new abstract ideas into metrical form results in extreme syntactic obscurity. But one point can be immediately and certainly clarified. When the goddess refers to what is not, she is not thinking of dreamed objects or imagined objects such as mermaids but is implying something far more extreme, that the objects we sense and

speak of cannot, in truth, be spoken of or thought, because they cannot exist at alllogic shows their existence to be impossible. Their existence is impossible because of their plurality and change. To take a Greek example of alternative possibilities, this is because to speak of hot and cold requires us to say that when it is hot now, it is not cold. As has been established by the goddess, the reference to what is not is a nonsensical one. All such pairs of alternatives are therefore impossible. In truth, all mortal talk of

the sensible world is meaningless because it implies a self- contradiction, or is no more than a dim, hardly comprehensible echo of true, comprehensible talk.

Having said thisif the suggested interpretation is rightthe goddess proceeds to prove that being is ungenerated and imperishable, entire, unique, unmoved, and perfect. 39 Her argument is as follows: Whatever is, is now all at once and one and indivisible. To drive this home, the goddess asks, What origin can there be to look for, how and from what might whatever exists have grown, and what necessity could have urged

whatever exists to begin and spring up from nothing? Being, she reminds us, can never not have been, either in whole or part. If it once existed only in part, that of it that did not exist would have been nothing; and if it came into existence altogether, it would have come into existence from nothing. The truth is that what exists now cannot have not existed in the past. For similar reasons, it cannot possibly not exist in the future. What is cannot arise from

what is not, because what is not cannot be at all. There is, therefore, no genesis.40 And if, all the same, something did arise out of nothing, no reason could be given for its arising at one particular time rather than another because no reason at all for arising is involved. So whatever is must exist now, all at once and continuously, and in the past and future as well.

Not only does what is exist as a continuous indivisible whole, but it must be all equally existent or, literally, "full of what is."41 In other words, it can have no qualitative or quantitative gaps but must be the same throughout all of its being. That is, it cannot have any degrees, cannot exist any more at one point than another. From this the conclusion

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is drawn that it cannot change in any quality because a change of white to black, for instance, like any other change, would require white to perish and black to come into existence. So what exists must also remain firmly where and what it is; and it cannot change in the sense of moving, either. 42 The goddess also insists that what exists must not lack anything. It is not

lawful, she says, that being should be incomplete, that is, defective.43 Since not- being lacks everything, she probably means that to be incomplete in any way is to be nonexistent in that way, which is impossible for being, which has been "bound fast by fate to be entire and changeless."44

Having proved that what exists cannot go in or out of existence, change in any way, move at all, or be incomplete, the goddess reaches the rather mysterious conclusion that being is "in a state of perfection like the volume of a spherical ball," which is in every direction equally related to its center. If the goddess means to say that being is a real, space- occupying sphere with a limit in space, she may have difficulty answering

the question, What lies beyond the boundary of the sphere? It makes more sense to suppose that in referring to a sphere she means only that whatever exists must be perfectly symmetrical in every way: being is qualitatively like a sphere in being equal with itself from every view and in every respect: it is a self- determined perfection.45

Having finished teaching the truth of the unchanging fullness of being, her "reliable discourse," the goddess says to the poet that she will also order her words deceptively and teach him about what mortals have taken to exist.46 Does she mean to create a theory of pervasive illusory phenomena or secondary reality, of the kind so usual in Indian thought?47 Maybe she wants no more than

to equip the poet with the most persuasive cosmology that mortals can create so that he should be better prepared to show its inadequacy.

I am afraid that, given the evidence at our disposal, we cannot explain why Parmenides (or his goddess) makes theto him (or her)self- contradictory cosmology of nothing, which follows in the poem. Like the other ancient Greek cosmologies, that of Parmenides is of interest to the historian of thought, but I will not go into it at all because it is only Parmenides' doctrine of what is that has given him his great influence. Despite the

difficulties in interpreting him, it is clear that he gives the first example of the use of consecutive formal logic designed to reach a metaphysical conclusion. His conclusion is metaphysical in a double sense, because it assigns to logic the power to contradict the most evident testimony of the senses.

I will not go into the plausibility of Parmenides' argument, though I take it to be specious. Together with his fragmentary thoughts, the historically, grammatically, and philosophically complicated verb to be

Page 71 became central to European philosophy. Nothing more need be said of his view because so much of the subsequent history of philosophy is a commentary on it. Discussion

There are two obvious ways in which to compare Uddalaka and Yajnavalkya with Heraclitus and Parmenides. The first is by means of the societies in which they lived. 48 The second is by their conviction that all things are one.

What was alike in the respective societies of these Indians and Greeks? The two Greeks, at least, were city dwellers; but both the Indian and Greek philosophers lived among a population consisting mostly of farmers and herders. In India, the old organization by tribes (tribal organization in Greece, too, was old and influential) was giving way to small kingdoms. Indians and Greeks alike were organized in clearly if not very rigidly hierarchical class structures. The hierarchy of the Greeks was

headed by aristocrats and by the generally wider, usually hereditary, class of citizens, who were of various degrees. The hierarchy of the Indians was headed by warriors, among them the king, and by prieststhat is, brahmans. At the times in question, both Indian and Greek life was caught up in a process of social and economic transformation. The process inspired controversy and a questioning, sometimes radically innovative attitude, evidence for which is given by the four philosophers.

Considered as individuals, all four are proud, intellectually competitive, and oracular. Perhaps, too, there is something analogous in their thought, for instance, the tendency to see abstractions as metaphysical realities, because Sanskrit and Greek are analogous languages.

The most general difference between the two pairs of philosophers is also a function of their social surroundings. It rests on the sharp difference between the Indian monarchy, with its ruling king and priests, their power symbolically rooted in religious ritual, and the independent Greek city- state, with its ruling aristocrats and citizens, their power rooted in a civic constitution. Not surprisingly, therefore, the source of the earliest Indian philosophical tradition lies largely in religious ritual,

while that of the Greek is related to civic life. The reasons why the Greek city- states developed in such various, often consciously invented or reinvented ways, and why they became relatively free religiously are too complex to repeat here. But their growingthough still relativefreedom from religion can be exemplified by the fact that, about 600 B.C.E., a Cretan city-state could justify its constitutional decisions by saying that they were "pleasing to the

Page 72 city,' and that, at about the same time, Solon felt no need to attribute his code to the gods. 49

When I say that the source of Indian philosophy is mainly ritual, I mean, to begin with, that men such as Uddalaka and Yajnavalkya are brahmans (the word is accented on the first syllable), members of the social order that masters the sacred doctrine of Brahman (accent on the last syllable). Not all persons of this period who engage in philosophical dialogues or disputations are brahmanson one memorable occasion, King Janaka demonstrates that he is

superior in understanding, first to Shvetaketu and then his father, Uddalaka. It seems reasonable to assume that members of the ruling order with a particular interest in religious matters were likely to believe that, important as these matters might be to them intellectually, they were all- important to their rule and to the prosperity of their land. But the texts give no evidence that King Janaka's quest for knowledge was meant for political or social advantage.

The overriding concern of the brahmans with ritual thought explains much of the manner in which they philosophize. The ideas of Uddalaka and Yajnavalkya that have been singled out are not in themselves ritualistic; but even when the two go beyond ritual problems, they organize their thought on analogical patterns of an Indian ritual type. This is because ritual to the brahmans is a set of techniques by which they imitate or, rather, perform cosmic processes in order to impel them to work to human advantage, so the brahmans are always

trying to connect ritual acts and formulas more effectively with the unseen sources of reality. For this purpose, they undertake complicated speculations and turn up esoteric correspondences of very many kinds .* As they see it, the universe is a profound riddle compounded of lesser riddles the solutions to which are the powerful analogies they intuit or learn from others.

The medium of early Indian philosophy is therefore very often the correspondence or analogy. It is this, Uddalaka says, that proves the omnipresence of the subtle essence, the Self, that constitutes everything

• Such identifications, deductions, and correspondences are really "equations in terms of a more or less consistent classificatory system. They are the key- stone of the brahmanic science ... When 'the man who knows' understands one of the entities which are declared identical he knows, and wields power over, the other or the others ... The priest who kindles the sacred fires is the spring, and that is why there are forest- fires in spring" (Gonda, Vedic Literature, p. 372).

In all the ritual equations, the connecting concept is Brahman. Derived from the root brh, meaning to be firm, to be strong, and the like, Brahman is that by which everything is supported and by and in which everything is metaphysically identical. Brahman can therefore be seen as a connective power that is condensed into the enigmas the brahmans try to solve. These enigmas are "the equation between human behavior and natural phenomena, the connection between rite

and cosmos" (Smith, Reflections on Resemblance, Ritual, and Religion, pp. 7172, depending on L. Renou, "Sur la notion de brahman").

Page 73 alive. The Self is revealed by the uniformity of honey, by the life that pervades the banyan tree, by the salt invisibly present all over the watereverywhere one finds resemblances that lead beyond themselves to the Self. As Yajnavalkya puts it, everything on every scale but the last, incommensurable one is found to be metaphysically encompassed within something identical with it but superior to it (like fractals, each of which breeds an endless sequence of identical forms on different scales and makes extraordinary patterns on patterns).

Traditional religion and ritual are clearly less important for the Greek thought that concerns us. That is, in Heraclitus and Parmenides, as in the other of the earliest Greek philosophers, there are evident echoes of Greek religion, but these are never as close as are the Indian exercises in ritual piety or magic to the thought of Uddalaka and Yajnavalkya. In the Greek city- state there are no dominant priests to make their preoccupations central to life at all times. Those responsible for religious practice are probably citizens like the others, members of an intellectual

elite all familiar with one another and apt to influence one another. We do not know what intellectual company Heraclitus had in Ephesusassuming that he wanted human company at allor Parmenides had in Elea, so, to avoid anachronism, we had best forget that the poets, playwrights, historians, mathematicians, doctors, orators, and philosophers lived in one another's company in later Athens. In India, professional knowledge, the grammar, medicine, law, and other specialties of India in Upanishadic time, all serve or coalesce with religionsuch is the impression

conveyed by the sources, which are themselves religious. 50 Unlike the Indians, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and the other Greek philosophers of the time make much use of models taken from the work of craftsmen, doctors, and mathematicians. It appears significant that the Greek term for knowledge is episteme, meaning (true, scientific) knowledge, theoretical knowledge, and, as well, manual skill, so that knowing has the sense of skillful doing.51 Skillful doing in morality, like that in artisanry, is constructive and therefore good; and the skillful deed is based on the

plan in the craftsman's mind, as Socrates was to emphasize, or in the understanding of the moral person. When I say that the philosophy of the early Greeks is heavily influenced by their interest in civic politics, I mean that there are many reasons for them to engage in political thought. One reason is the need to devote effort to decide in advance just how the colonies they establish should be organized. A second reason is the contact between city-states with different forms of governmentconstitutional monarchy, oligarchy, and democracyand the frequency of constitutional upheavals. A third reason, perhaps the most fundamental, is the nature of the more democratic citystates, in which citizens share the tasks of government and themselves make the

Page 74 important political decisions, which they, of course, debate among themselves. Greek citizensa minority of the population, one should rememberdevelop the feeling that they rule themselves and have to invent their own institutions and regulations as they themselves think best.

Although Heraclitus and Parmenides are not, as we know them, primarily political, they have an interest in the laws of their states. Heraclitus scorns most men, says that "one man is ten thousand if he is the best," and contends that the Ephesians deserve to be hanged because they drove out their best man; and he also believes, as I have said, that "the people must fight for the law as for their city wall." And Parmenides is regarded by his fellow citizens as a

legislator whose laws cannot be bettered. 52 In the light of the political color of Greek thought, it is instructive to compare Heraclitus' ever-living Fire and his triad of logos, justice (dike), and god (Zeus) with Uddalaka's primal Existent and the triad of heat, water, and food the Existent propagates, and, as well, with the invisible essence that is the life and inseparable unity of everything. The contrast is almost that between the universe conceived in relation to fundamental

civic law and conceived in relation to fundamental human biology. Yajnavalkya's dyad of Self and Brahman are really a marvellous monad conceived mainly in relation to the psychobiology of living things and the mystery of their death. Parmenides' Being stands apart in that it is wholly static in itself and cannot possibly have any effect. It is the substance of the cosmos conceived in terms of the sharp oppositions of nascent Greek logic.

Heraclitus' Fire, Uddalaka's Existent, and Yajnavalkya's Self are still archaic, and they share degrees of either desire or consciousness. Logos and Justice are, however, close to impersonal. Logos is the more or less mathematical rule of proportion by which change functions. And Justiceguaranteed by Zeusalso means compensation and legal proceedings, and is by nature related to the legal codes of the city-states, which are defined in writing. The Indian concepts imply a world order but are not immediately related to ethics (except as ritual acts), certainly not to the behavior of free individuals, the idea of which

seems foreign to the ancient Indians. The relation of the Greek concepts to the civic life of the city-states becomes open and at times dominant in philosophy, but only in a later age, that of Socrates.

It is notable that the Indian pair of concepts reflect subjective experience far more than do the Greek. Yajnavalkya's idea of the Self is saturated with a richness of experience extrapolated from every conceivable human pleasure and ability to perceive, conceive, remember, and dream (though not from evil, lack, or pain, which are found along with pleasures only in the inferior stages of experience, those of waking and

dreaming). As Yajnavalkya conceives it, the Self embraces the imagined maximum of human inwardness. Its inwardness is imagined so complete that its object

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is identical with its subject: words are unnecessary, inexpressive, and, to be paradoxically exact, are impossible; for the Self's "experience" is inexpressibly free of the subject-object relationship. In compensation, if that is the right word, for the lack of such an intense inwardness, Heraclitus has a sense of the enormous complexity of the world, that is, of its tensional "warfare," and a belief that Zeus's thoughts are inexpressibly beyond what is possible to human

beings. Not surprisingly, then, it is characteristic of Greek (and later European) philosophers to devote far more detailed thought than most Indian philosophers to ethical and political problems. However, relatively unintrospective as it is, Greek thought is more distant than Indian thought from the intimate interior of human experience. This generalization needs to be qualified, but it holds broadly true. 53

Now for the Indian and Greek identity of things: Thinkers such as Uddalaka and Yajnavalkya reach the conclusion that the differentiation of things is inexplicably but necessarily overborne by their identity. Uddalaka's Existent remains "identical" with its unceasing emanations. Yajnavalkya stresses that everything aliveisn't everything in some sense alive to him?is intelligence, which is consciousness, which is the Self, which is Brahman, and therefore is consciousness, which contains everything as

the sea contains all the water that emerge from it and reenter it. This old Indian theme of cosmic unity requires Uddalaka and Yajnavalkya to try to demonstrate that the universe is one despite its many forces, functions, objects, and persons that it contains or appears to contain. For Uddalaka, the Existent is not the essence of things simply, but is heat/ light, which is water, which is food (plants), and is the namesandforms that constitute all individual things. To the imagination, this unity in the Existent may be not

unlike the view of modern physics that, in the final analysis, matter and energy are the same and comprise everything of every kind that exists.

Yajnavalkya's scheme has been described in his account of dying. His privileging of consciousness apparently rests on the Indian perception, not at all foreign to Europe, that to try to think consciousness away is much the same as to try to think oneself away and, in doing so, to make the world vanish along with it and cancel out the very thinker who is thinking of himself thinking himself away. This has the psychological quality of an impossible suicide, equivalent to the most extreme violation of the law of contradictions. Fully realized consciousness is already conceived asparadoxicallyenclosed all within itself, with no separate object to be conscious of. Though superlatively conscious, it is not conscious of anything. Is it, then superlatively "unconscious" consciousness?

I conclude this chapter by returning to its theme, the attempt to understand the relation between the unity and the variety of the world,

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between its permanence and change and, equivalently, between what is basic or real and what is not. Heraclitus and Parmenides give answers that are, with respect to the absoluteness of the world's unity, very similar to the Indians', and are in other respects very different. It is interesting though not relevant to early Indian thought that Heraclitus' Fire, like the fire of later Indian doctrine, is the power in whose flames the world repeatedly appears and vanishes. There is even a striking image

in Heraclitus of the self as an inner light that matches an equally striking one in which Yajnavalkya responds to King Janaka. Heraclitus says, "A man strikes a light for himself in the night, when his sight is quenched. Living, he touches the dead in his sleep; waking, he touches the sleeper." Equivalently, when the king asks Yajnavalkya what serves man here as a light when the sun has set, the moon has set, the fire is extinguished, and speech has ended, Yajnavalkya answers: "The Self, O king ... For it is by the

light of the Self that he sits down, walks about, does his work, and returns home." 54 But these passages reflect less of similarity of doctrine, I feel, than of poetic apprehension .*

As for Parmenides, the polarity he conceives is that between truth and being, on the one hand, and falsehood and variety, on the other. His being, like that of the Indians, necessarily exists, its necessity established by the law of contradiction. For the first time in philosophy, existence is proved by sheer logic. In this sense, logic is the universal principle of both truth and existence.

Uddalaka proves the true, undeniable existence of the Existent in these words:

*The importance in Indian thought of fire, the god Agni, makes suggestive comparisons possible. Heraclitus' cycle of fire everlasting that is kindled and goes out (fragment 37 in Kahn) is like the Indian cycle of worlds that begin and end in fire. There is even a fragment (43A) that attributes to Heraclitus belief in a cycle, like those of later India, of great cosmic years each a flood for winter and a world conflagration for summer; but such a fragment can be suspected of being Stoic

rather than Heraclitean. At any rate, there is some likeness between Uddalaka's cosmic process in which the heatits form the red of firebecomes water, which becomes food (in India associated with earth), and Heraclitus' cosmic process (as I take it to be) in which fire becomes sea and sea becomes earth (fragments 3839 in Kahn). There is a report that Heraclitus said that as fire thickens it turns moist and condenses into water, which thickens and

condenses into earth (Diogenes Laertius, Lives 9.9). The Upanishadic conception almost always has a ritualistic analogy or purpose that distinguishes it from the Presocratic. In India, what fire does is assimilated to the ritual of sacrifice. Shvetaketu is taught that "this world ... is a sacrificial fire; the earth is its fuel, the fire is its smoke ... In this fire, the gods make an offering of the rain. Out of this sacrificial offering arises food" (Brhadaranyaka Upanisad 6.2.11, in Deussen, Sixty Upanishads ... ,

vol. 1, p. 527).

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Now some say: The non- existent only was this universe in the beginning, one alone, without a second; from that nonexistent the existent was born ... How could the existent be born from the non- existent, as they say? On the contrary, the existent only ... was this universe in the beginning, one alone, without a second. 55

In the same vein, Parmenides' goddess says that she will not allow him to say or think that "anything is not; and then what necessity in fact could have urged it to begin and spring up later or before from Nothing? Thus it must either be entirely or not be at all."56

The logical point of Uddalaka's and Parmenides texts is abstractly the same. But while Uddalaka must assume, along with Yajnavalkya, that the Existent or Being cannot be added to or subtracted from or begin or end, his Existent has desires, and emanates the population of the world as if it was bearing children. Parmenides, however, takes the crucial logical point to prove that change of any kind is impossiblea notion so obscure that I assume we do not really

understand his pointand likens this unchanging truth or reality to the complete symmetry of a sphere. The resemblance in philosophies is unmistakable, the difference profound. Heraclitus' cosmic fire is alive; but his logos, like Parmenides' one, has a nature that resembles that of the concepts of mathematics or physics, not of human desire or consciousness.

Yet there is a philosophically fateful similarity to add. Parmenides already thinks of ordinary experience as wholly illusory. Uddalaka and Yajnavalkya say nothing of this kind that is so radically explicit. Uddalaka's one and only Existent is the origin, life, and support of the protean, multifarious world; and Yajnavalkya's Brahman, though it can retreat from multifariousness into superlative unity, is that for the sake of which everything else is loved. But Uddalaka's thought and, more so, Yajnavalkya's lead easily to a

philosophy for which the sensed, variable world is an illusion, and so the two will be taken by later Indian philosophers to be prototypical monistic mystics.

Page 79 Chapter 3 The Beginnings of Moral Philosophy: Confucius/ Mencius, the Buddha, Socrates Theme: Confucianism, Buddhism, and Socratism Bear the Imprint of Their Inventors' Characters

The desire to concentrate on ideas more than on persons or circumstances should be relaxed for Confucius, the Buddha, and Socrates, whose enormous influence has stemmed at least as much from their characters as from their ideas. Confucius was not a philosopher but a sagea title he denied he deservedand a humane and forceful teacher. His acutely sensitive concern for decent, stable human relations made a profound impression on his direct

students and, in timefostered by rulers who found in him an often excessively moral allyon the Chinese tradition as a whole. Like Confucius, the Buddha cannot be recovered in historical detail, but no one can read the early Buddhist dialogues without feeling his profound sympathy with human suffering in every sense and his stubborn desire, that of someone who was by nature an analytical and yet empathic physician, to help humans to cure

themselves by neutralizing their desires. And Socrates (for whose view I suggest the equivalent name of Socratism) exerted his still active influence on the European tradition less by his abstract ideas, which were few and not very developed, than by the resoluteness with which he forced people to take moral stock of

Page 80 their actions, by the calm courage with which he faced the charges against him, and by the eminence of his philosophical disciples, especially Plato, in whose dialogues he continues to live as our close intellectual neighbor rather than a merely literary creation. Confucius (551479 B.C.E.) and Mencius (371289 B.C.E.): Backward- Looking Hierarchical Humanitarianism

According to the traditional biography written by Ssu-ma Ch'ien, ConfuciusKung Fu-tzu (Master Kung) in Chinesewas born in a poor family of noble descent. 1 His father died soon after his birth. The love for ceremony that saturates his thought began early; even as a child he performed play sacrifices and ceremonies. As a young man, he studied the traditional history and literature, with the evident purpose of becoming a government official. However, his career was cut short by his scruples.

Having been advanced in the country of his birth, Lu, from post to post, he was made Grand Secretary of Justice. In this office, he had a corrupt minister executed, with the result that Lu became peaceful and safe. But his success made Ch'i, a neighboring state, afraid that Lu might grow too strong. Ch'i therefore sent Lu's ruler the gift of pretty dancers and fine horses. The gift so distracted the ruler from his duties that Confucius was prompted to resign. A more prosaic reason for the resignation is given by

Mencius, who reports that Confucius was not given his share of the sacrificial meat of a ritual.

Together with a few disciples, Confucius then wandered from one court to another, often answering rulers questions on good government but never given an actual post. After some thirteen years of wandering during which rulers ignored or repulsed him or criticized his views, he lost his desire for office. His time was spent in studying the old form of worship and social intercourse, which he felt had degenerated, and tracing the history of the early dynasties. At

the age of sixty-eight, realizing that he would never get the chance to put his political ideals into practice but unwilling to die without accomplishing something creditable in the eyes of posterity, he used existing historical accounts and state archives to write the annals called Spring and Autumn. In these annals, he chose his words so as to imply approval or criticism of the acts he described, because his hope was that unrestrained rulers would learn shame and self- restraint from it, and that a

great king might some day appear, read the book, and adopt the principles it implied. Hoping to reform society by means of the ways of the ancient kings, "he set forth his writings so as to constitute the institutions, usages, and laws for the whole world" and "handed down to posterity the comprehensive record of the Six Classics."2

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To his three thousand students, seventy-two of them considered advanced, Confucius taught the old poetry (interpreted as moral lessons), and the old historical documents, rites, and ceremonies (including the related ceremonial music). He proposed to teach his students the knowledge, attitudes, and skills needed to make them administrators good in every sense. Character, he taught his students, was of extreme importance; and he exhorted them to avoid merely facile solutions,

not based on an understanding of the ordinary people whose welfare was at stake. Irrespective of their origin, his students were required to learn to become persons who were morally and politically exemplary. Their training included the specialized artsritual, music, archery, charioteering, calligraphy, and mathematicsbut only as these served the virtues of an "exemplary person."

It is said that Confucius taught about four things: literature, human conduct, being one's true self, and honesty in social relationships. As such teaching required, he also denounced or avoided arbitrariness of opinion, dogmatism, narrowmindedness, and egotism. His teaching was not much occupied with the subject of the will of Heaven or of the profit to be gained by the conduct he recommended; and he would try to stimulate a person's thought only if he believed that the person really wanted to find out the truth. In private life, he was gentle and refined, we are told; in places of public worship and at courts he was eloquent and yet careful in his

words; and everywhere his conduct was careful and considerate. As a teacher, he took full advantage of the individuality of his students .* His biographer comments that, unlike those who, famous during their lives, came to nothing after their deaths,

Confucius, who was but a common scholar clad in a plain gown, became the acknowledged Master of scholars for over ten generations. All people in China who discuss the six arts, from the emperors, kings, and princes down, regard the Master as the final authority. He may be called the Supreme Sage. 3

It is generally agreed that Confucius' voice is most clearly heard in his Lun Yü or Selected Sayings, the book that has come to be known in the

*Not everyone appreciated Confucius' ability to adapt his advice to different persons and conditions. Writing about 80 C.E., the literal- minded, often rationalistic Wang Ch'ung complained of Confucius' inconsistency in thought and action. According to the (unreliable) text of the Analects, he said, Confucius gave incomplete, inexactly phrased, or contradictory answers to his disciples, and so there are matters on which

"later generations have been left in doubt." Furthermore, complained Wang, unlike a sage, Confucius was unable to accept Heaven's fate with equanimity, and he let his sympathy for others interfere with the consistency of the rules he himself set (M. Nyland, "Han Classicists Writing in Dialogue about Their Own Tradition," Philosophy East and West 47.2 [April 1997], pp. 14243).

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West as the Analects (the numbers in the following account refer to it by book, "chapter"sometimes only a single sentenceand, when necessary, by sentence within the chapter). An often disorderly collection of twenty "books" of different dates put together by his students or students' students, the Analects has a generally authentic ring. This is because the conversations in it are so nearly ordinary, so obviously meant for particular interlocutors asking particular questions, and so unsystematic that it is hard to believe that they were remembered as anything but the talk of the unforgettable teacher. In the Analects, Confucius is still an ordinary,

unpretentious human being and not the all- knowing sage into which he was later transformed. The only praise he allows himself is that he loves the learning he wants to transmit, that he always tries to go on observing and learning in order to improve himself, and that he insists on the traditional morality. But for all his love for tradition, he prefers, he says, to reject moral preconceptions and remain undogmatic and flexible (18.8, 9.4). An advocate of simplicity, he finds joy, he says, in eating coarse rice, drinking water, and pillowing himself on his elbow (7.16).

For Confucius, the only sure reward the good man may realistically hope for is his own self-respect (2.4)trying to identify which K'ung was being talked about, a gatekeeper once asks if he was the one who kept working away at something hopeless (14.38). The gatekeeper's question is apposite because to Confucius, taught by his frustrations, worldly success is uncertain, as is, apparently,

survival after death. A disciple says that the heavy burden put on the good man ends only with his death (8.7), while Confucius himself says that the good man's benevolence may require him to accept death (15.9). Those whose strength is inadequate fall out along the way (6.12). To a disciple who asks about serving the gods and the spirits of the dead, Confucius answers that he, the disciple,

cannot even serve man, so how can he serve the spirits? When the disciple persists and asks about death, Confucius answers that the disciple does not understand even life, so how can he understand death (11.12). But Confucius shares the old belief in the "decree of Heaven" in the sense of an impersonal cosmic justice that establishes the destiny of every individual and dynasty. This justice may be quite

mysterious and can only be accepted (12.5, 11.7). The matter of self-respect is of quite extraordinary importance to Confucius and, thereafter, to all Confucians. I would like to exemplify this by way of a somewhat conjectural interpretation of the first sentence of the Analects, which reads:

The Master said, "Is it not a pleasure, having learned something, to try it out at due intervals? Is it not a joy to have

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friends come from afar? Is it not gentlemanly not to take offense when others fail to appreciate your abilities?" (1.1)

These English words do not translate the peremptoriness of the Chinese question- formpu I ... hu? which does not allow a negative response. The sentence therefore shows some internal tension. Why did whoever complied the Analects choose it to open the book? To answer, one should recall that among Confucius' students there were those who had abandoned their lives as merchants, family members, military men, and court officials. But although they dedicated themselves to

study, as Confucius prescribed, judged externally, they failed to get the social and political status that was their aim. It is therefore natural for them to ask what point there is in being a member of the Confucian community. Confucius reassures them by saying in effect: we have both the pleasure and the psychological defense of progress in study, joy in friendship, and moral ability not to take offense when unappreciated.

What is most important, Confucius is implicitly saying, is the relation of a person with himself, his ability to receive a friend from whom he has been parted for a long time and take joy, not alone in his friendship but in his transformation for the better. What proves to be essential in this self- recognition is the steadfast goodness (jen) for which Confucius uses the image of the mountainfor knowledge he uses the image of water. The happiness he finds in the presence of others is the negation of Taoism (taken

up in the next chapter) with its preference for the asocial solitude of "nothingness." Confucius and Confucianism begin in social relations and enter into politics naturally and by conviction. All thislearning, humanity, society, and politicsare, in theory, divorced from the expectation for any reward but an internal one. In taking such a position, Confucius is the first thinker we know of in Chinese history to divorce philosophizing from particular situations. Consequently,

his Analects is the first Chinese book we know in which the tie to the particular situation is to a great extent broken and timeless moral and humanistic generalizations are made. 4

The particular subjects that Confucius stresses may be summarized under the following headings: goodness; superlative character; superior character; filiality; respectful keeping of the rites; truthfulness; the rectification of names; and rightness. I take these up briefly one by one. Goodness, benevolence, humanity

One of the terms that Confucius uses often is jen (pronounced ren; a different Chinese character from the similarly transliterated word for man). This has the broad sense of good or (ideally) human, having the virtue of humanity (but not, in the Analects, kind or tender- hearted). As Confucius means it, the term includes a great

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many good qualities. It applies to someone who is unselfish, courteous, diligent, unworried, observant of ritual, able to overcome his own egotism, brave, and loyal, and also wise, wise meaning sure about the difference between right and wrong and a good judge of character. It is possible for a person to be born with all these qualities, but such superlative humanity is most likely to be the result of study. Unlike his disciples, Confucius does not find any recent paragons of

such goodness, which he ascribes in full only to the ancient, godlike sages such as the Emperor Yao, whose contagious influence alone was enough to make others moral (8.19). He himself does not presume to be a sage, he says (27.34). However, when some high official remarks that Confucius is surely a sage because otherwise he would not have so many skills, Confucius does not protest and says that the official understands him well; but he takes care

to deny that his many skills are the mark of the sage and explains that, unlike an exemplary person, a chün-tzu, he is skilled in many menial things because, when young, his circumstances were humble (9.6). Superlative character

To Confucius, the sage's level of humanity, sheng jen, characterizes only the traditional ancient creators of civilization. 5 But though he refuses to rank himself with them, to his disciples he is surely the sage because he is the living repository of the ancient virtues he teaches. As has been implied, the sage is not an easily described ideal but, rather, one of a group of human paradigms. Perhaps the term itself can teach us something of what it means to be a sage. The termthe Chinese charactercontains the radical meaning ear, which creates an association with hearing, with someone whose ear is attuned or

in accord, as Confucius says of himself (4.2). In the Analects, to hear (wen) is used very oftenfar more often than to seeto mean to learn.6 * Perhaps, then, a sage is implicitly someone who hears with particular sensitivity, who hears the nuances of his message and of the responses to it, andfrom their words and manner of expressionhears what other people are and communicates to them what they should be. As Confucius says, whoever does not understand words, does not understand people (20.3). The words of the sages

*A word of caution: It is all too easy to mistake a term's etymology for its meaning in use. Furthermore, in Chinese, a semantic and a merely phonetic element of a worda charactermay be difficult to distinguish. However, in the present instance it is helpful to know that the oldest Chinese etymological dictionary, Explanations of Simple and Compound Characters (Shuowen chieh-tzu), compiled about A.D. 100, defines sheng as "to communicate with, to be

conversant with, to penetrate, to connect," and adds, "It derives semantically from erh ... 'ear."" Etymology apart, the character sheng has often been understood in terms of a differently written but homophonic word meaning to sound, or sound, or voice. "Hearing the sound," an ancient source says, the sage "knows a thing's nature and conditions" (Hall and Ames, Thinking Through Confucius, p. 258).

Page 85 are to be held in awe, he says, because, like the decree of Heaven, they transform the world (16.8). Exemplary character

The word for this quality is chün-tzu, which is derived from ruler, chün. Meaning, at first, the descendant of a ruling house, chün- tzu comes to apply to any member of the upper classes. Then the term is extended to anyone whose superiority is not only of birth but also of character and, finally, superiority of character alone. Someone is therefore a chün-tzu (often translated gentleman, but who now knows

what that is?) if he behaves with decency, openness, and care. Yet the connection with ruling is retained because such cultivation of character is undertaken in order to help pursue an official career, though never, to Confucius, at the expense of principles. Service in government, for the welfare of the common people, is the exemplary man's duty (13.1920). To the question how to

govern well, Confucius answers that what is needed is enough food, enough weapons, and the trust of the common people. To the further question, which of the three is most important, he answers, the weapons should be given up first, and then, if necessary, the fooddeath has always been with usbut not the trust, because without trust, the common people have nothing to stand on (12.7).

The chün-tzu is serious, flexible, helpful, respectful, and always on the side of the moral and the good in others; and he is never arrogant or extreme in word or act (1.8, 12.16, 4.18). A true chün-tzu is free of violenceas his composed face showsis trustworthyas his honest face showsand, in word and tone, avoids coarseness and unreasonableness (8.4). Such good character is a matter of holding the delicate balance between too much and too little of the good qualities. This balance is created by the love of learning that teaches one to consider things carefully, that is, in the

light of precedent, good sense, and the understanding of human nature (17.8). When Confucius says, "There is one single thread binding my way together," the disciple who understands him explains that the Master's way is to use oneself as a gauge, that is, to assume that one's own reaction is a gauge for that of everyone else (4.15). Three times in the Analects Confucius says (or is said to have said), without elaborating, that one should love one's fellow men (1.5, 17.3 or 4, 12.22). It is possible that the words fellow men apply primarily to exemplary, cultivated humans, but the

object is always to rule by understanding, by example, and by inspiring trust. The ruler corrects his subjects, but to do so effectively, he must himself act correctly (13.6). If he does, the people, guided by virtue and the rites, will have a sense of shame and reform themselves (2.3). Filiality: Confucius' term, hsiao, refers to piety toward both one's dead ancestors and one's living parents. Such piety contrasts with the recommendation of the philosopher Mo Tzu (468376 B.C.E.) that one

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should love and care for everyone equally. To the Confucians, love for the members of one's family comes first, because, the Confucians are sure, love decreases with familial, social, and geographical distance. The most essential family relations, as Confucius believes, are those between a father and his son and between an older and younger brother. The very root of a man's character, he holds, is to be a good son and an

obedient young man (1.2). Ceremony and music

In Confucius' eyes, the "rites" are rules that reflect the moral insight of the past and that ought to govern life in every respect. Rites understood in this broad sense include not only ritual matters such as sacrifices and seasonal observances, but also rules of correct behavior. Rites are close in Confucius' view to literature, the poetry of the Odes, for example, which are sung and which, he thinks, are to be interpreted as moral lessons. Rites are also close to music, for the most part as it performed for court ceremonial and sacrifices. At its best, music is a performance whose perfect beauty is the

perfect medium for its perfect goodness. Correspondingly, wanton music, like subversive talk, is morally dangerous (3.25, 15.11, 17.1011). Beautiful music is moral, that is, has a moral effect, because it is a harmonious, harmonizing medium (3.23, 25). According to a famous passage of the Analects, Confucius once heard such good, beautiful music that for three months he was unaware of the taste of the meat he ate and said that he had never dreamed that music could reach such heights (7.14). Truthfulness, faithfulness, reliability (hsin)

This virtue requires the keeping of promises and faithfulness to one's own words and resolutions. Therefore the chün- tzu is ashamed if, by boasting, he allows his words to outstrip his deeds (14.2728). Men in antiquity were wary of speaking (4.22). The chün-tzu puts his words into action before he speaks them out (2.13). The rectification or ordering of names

This phrase, which occurs in the Analects has been suspected of reflecting the concerns of a later time, but the Analects often refers to the issue itself, which is close to that of faithfulness and is heavily emphasized in the Confucian tradition. Because Confucius is faithful to the old royal house and its morality, he is very antagonistic to the encroachments of the feudal nobles on the king's authority, which, by Confucius' time, is no more than nominal. To preserve the old order and morality,

Confucius insists that all definitions of functions and prerogatives be carefully preserved, so that when he is asked by a feudal ruler about government, he answers that the key is for the prince to be a prince, the minister a minister, the father a father, and the son a son. A ruler who does not follow the proper Way of a ruler does not merit the name, and a minister who neglects the responsibilities of his office

Page 87 empties the concept of the office of its content (12.11). When names are not used correctly, what is said sounds unreasonabledoes not fit the situationacts are not carried out as they should be, propriety and music fail, punishments do not accomplish what they are intended for, and the people have no idea how to act (13.3, 5). To Confucius, the ordering of names is a performance whose correctnessconformity with the traditional but sensitively adapted standardis the condition for maintaining an effective and truly human society. 7 Rightness, rectitude

This general virtue, yi, applies to the moral rightness of an act under particular circumstances, not to the frame of mind or character of the person who carries out the act. An absolute standard, it is the objective counterpart of true goodness or humanity.

Next to Confucius himself, MenciusMeng- tzu in Chinesehas been the most revered of Confucian teachers.8 As happened with Confucius, his father died when he was young. Among the anecdotes about Mencius and his mother, there is a famous one that tells how she impressed her son by cutting the web she was weaving in order to demonstrate that to be indifferent to one's studies is to cut the web of learning, a lesson which, being Mencius, he

took deeply to heart.9

A great deal of Mencius' life was spent as an adviser in different courts of a still much divided, increasingly war-ridden China. Intent, like Confucius, on extolling the Sage Emperors, he could not get along with the rulers of his own times and he retired to Confucian studies and the company of his disciples. His position as the model Confucian, officially recognized only in the eleventh century, must rest largely on his deep compassion for the common man and his bitterness against those who care more for war and

politics than for the people who suffer because of them. Extraordinarily radical for a Chinese in showing such compassion and bitterness, he goes so far as to say that bad rulers ought to be deposed (Mencius, 5.B.9, 7.A.31). He also hopes that if the natural virtues are cultivated well enough, the Mandate of Heaven may change for the better and a cycle of good order will replace the bad.10 A good king, he says, is overdue, but Heaven has not yet so decided, and he is alone in his times to work for the coming of a

cycle of peace and order (7.B.38.14; 2.B.13.45).

Although Mencius depends on Confucius, he is far more the philosopher. His conversations, compiled by his students, are more developed and his reasoning appears conscious of the dialectic already deployed by other Chinese philosophers. Much of his most famous doctrine, an extension of the concept of true goodness (humanity), is that humankind is good by nature and that its goodness ought to be reflected in the humanity of the government.

It is of extreme importance to him that this truth

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should be realized so that the moral capacity of everyone is developed. The chun- tzu, he says, retains his original, true heart, the purpose of learning being to repossess it (6.A.10, 6.A.11); but everyone shares in an innate, disinterested compassion, which Mencius puts in the hypothetical example, famous in China, of a man who suddenly sees a young child about to fall into a well: "He would certainly be moved to compassion,

not because he wanted to get into the good graces of the parents, nor because he wanted to win the praise of his fellow villagers or friends, nor yet because he disliked the cry of the child (2.A.6)." 11

This innateness of morality is the subject of an extended debate between Mencius and one Kao-tzu, who holds that righteousness (yi) is not innate, but "external," by which he means that it is learned. According to Kao-tzu, the appetite for food and sex is natural, and so, too, is affection for a brother; but human nature itself prefers neither good nor bad any more than water by nature flows east or west. So when he sees an old man, whose age is unrelated or

external to his own life, he treats him with the deference due him because he has been taught to do so, not for any other reason. The man's oldness is as external to him as his perception that the man is white.

Mencius answers Kao- tzu image by image and point by point. Water, he says, shows no preference for east or west but by nature flows down in the same way as a man by nature does goodalthough, just as water can be splashed up or forced to stay uphill, a man, in contradiction to his nature, can be made bad. White is the same white whether it is the white of feathers, snow, or jade. But when the word nature (hsing) is used to apply to different living things, the sense of the word is

affected by the kind of living thing of which it is the nature, whether a dog, an ox, or a man. In such cases, the identity of the generic term does not imply identity in fact: animal nature is not the same as human nature. 12 Mencius is evidently arguing on the basis of the doctrine expressed by logicians of his time who insist on exactness in distinguishing between analogies of different kinds: "A small square is analogous to a large square; a small horse is analogous to

a large horse; but inferior intelligence is not analogous to superior intelligence."13

Mencius does not suppose that the innateness of moral feeling is enough by itself to make human beings moral. What he believes is that the energy (ch'i) of growth in general is also the energy of moral growth; but while moral energy develops independently of a person's will, it flourishes or decays as the person's acts are in or out of moral accord with it. The result is that any human being will be moral if guided to think and act along moral lines; but even though spontaneous acts of kindness are

natural, education and effort are necessary to develop the human virtues fully.

Page 89 Mencius' view that human beings are innately good came to dominate Confucianism, even though the great Confucian philosopher Hsün-tzu (298230 B.C.E.), whose opinion I have cited along with Kant's in the first chapter, argues, in agreement with Kao-tzu, that Mencius does not understand the difference between human nature and what humans can acquire only by means of conscious effort. 14

The Buddha (563483 B.C.E.): Waking Up to No Self

He has a host of names, of which the familiar the Buddha will be used here.16 However, even early Buddhists believe that he was preceded by other Buddhas, meaning Enlightened Onesthe root budh means to wake, to perceive, to understand. Before the Buddha leaves home, his personal name (in tradition) is Siddhartha. When he is an ascetic, his fellow ascetics call him Gautama, meaning, it seems, of the Gautama clan, a name also used by brahmans in referring to him; and he is often referred to as Gautama Buddha to distinguish him from earlier presumed Buddhas. Another name

current in the Buddha's time is Shakyamuni, Sage of the Shakya tribe. When he preaches after his enlightenment, he refers to himself as the Tathagataperhaps then a name for spiritually accomplished personsmeaning (the one) thus gone .* His disciples may call him by such names as Lord, Great Sage, Victor, or, more impressively, Perfectly Englightened One, or, most impressively of all, Unsurpassed and Perfectly Englightened One. That is not all, but I think he has been named more than enough for the still human if superlative person he was presumed to be in his own

lifetime. 16 The story of the Buddha's life is told and retold in lovingly fabulous variations. 17 The beginning goes back far before his conception, though I begin only there. The start of his conception is his entry into the womb of his mother in the formas she dreams but as also happens in factof a white elephant with a silvery lotus in its trunk. To understand the

• Thus gone is the literal meaning, to which thus come was assimilated. Perhaps the term originally applied to a person who would no longer be reborn, as in the question, Does a Tathagata exist after death? Used by the Buddha to refer to himself, it was soon confined by Buddhists to him, and then later applied to Buddhas generally. Etymology and conjecture apart, in early Buddhism, the term has meanings like perfected

one, i.e., someone who has attained wisdom or "suchness" and can lead others to it. In Mahayana Buddhism, tathagata is given metaphysical and cosmic senses that are inappropriate to the present context. (See Vetter, The Ideas and Meditative Practices of Early Buddhism, p. 8, note 2; and Horner, trans., The Middle Length Sayings, vol. 1, pp. xviixviii.)

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dream, the king summons sixty-four eminent brahmans, who explain that it means that a son will be born who will become either a universal king or a Buddha. At the moment of conception, all the ten thousand worlds shake, everyone, however maimed, becomes whole, everyone speaks mildly, and all flowers bloom. After ten months, the Buddha emerges, spotless

and pure, walking out of his upright mother as if coming down a stair.

During the Buddha's childhood, he goes into a spontaneous meditative trance while he is watching his father and others engaged in ceremonial plowing. His father, disturbed by the prophecy that the child may become a holy man, tries to keep him preoccupied with pleasure and gives him a palace for each of the three seasons, forty thousand dancing girls, self- sounding musical instruments, and a

beautiful wife, who bears him a son. But the king's attempt fails as a result of the four outings in which, on successive occasions, the prince sees an old man, a sick man, and a dead man, learns that he, too, will grow old, sick, and die, and then meets a monk who praises renunciation. At home in the palace, he wakes to see his beautiful singers asleep and repulsively grinding their teeth and muttering or showing their

loathsome nakedness; the magnificent apartment seems to him like a cemetery. On his great shining white horse, to whose tail his faithful charioteer clings, he flees the palace. He is nineteen years old at the time, or, by a variant tradition, twenty-nine.

The next dramatic set of episodes concerns the Buddha's life as a seeker after truth. Two meditative trances do not lead to enlightenment. Attended by a group of five wandering ascetics, he then undertakes austerities for six relentless years. 18 Trying to dominate his mind, he clenches his teeth and presses his tongue against his palate with such force that sweat pours from his armpits. He breathes through his nose and ears till his head aches fiercely. He holds his breath till he

feels as if a butcher was cutting through his stomach and he burns as if he was set over a fire. He eats so little that his ribs stick out like the crooked rafters of an old shed and when he touches the skin of his belly he takes hold of his spine. But he still is not enlightened.

Then the Buddhanot yet the Buddharemembers the rapturous meditation of his childhood. He asks himself, Could this be, perhaps, the way to enlightenment? and thinks, Why should I be afraid of this happiness that has nothing to do with objects which awaken desire and nothing to do with harmful qualities? 19 So the Buddha chooses the way of meditation again. Too weak to meditate, to the disgust of the five ascetics he takes some rice and milk and grows strong enough to meditate (in the same way as Yajnavalka was able to remember after he broke his fast). Quieting his mind, he rises from meditative stage to stage until he gets rid of joy and anguish and is calmly

mindful and gains enlightenment. He is thirty or, by

Page 91 the variant tradition, thirty-five. He now sees himself in his former lives, now knows how beings arise and pass away, now knows about pain and how to destroy it, is now emancipated from sensual desire, the desire to exist, and ignorance. He has had no teacher but has enlightened himself. He is now the Buddha.

At first the Buddha is reluctant to teach others because he is sure they will not understand himignorant of the truth, they are too inflamed by the lusts of life. But having become all compassion and therefore able to venture outside of himself, he realizes that people are different from one another and that at least some of them can learn, and he gains confidence and decides to help others. 20 Seeing the five ascetics in the Deer Park, he tells them he is now a Tathagata and convinces them of this by means of the

sermon, his first, that he preaches to them. The sermon is against the two extremes, of pleasure and of ascetic pain. He states the four noble truths: the first, that all life is painful (or, by an alternate translation, is suffering); the second, that the cause of pain is the multiple craving that leads to rebirth, life, and death; the third, how pain is ended and craving renounced; and the fourth, how to get to the end of pain by the joint means of right views, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood,

right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. * I will no more than mention the Buddha's subsequent preaching throughout central India, the growth of his community of monks, or the plots against him by his evil disciple Devadatta, the first schismatic. But the events that precede his death and his death itself are cardinal to understanding who and what he is.21

His favorite disciple, Ananda, becomes afraid that the Buddha will die without teaching all he knows, but the Buddha tells him that he is now eighty, that his body is as rickety as an old cart, and that he has always

*I have used the word pain more often than its alternative, suffering, because it seems to me to have a wider scope, that is, to reach the level of suffering only when it is acute. If one distinguishes pain from suffering in terms of modern neuropsychiatry, then suffering is the more appropriate word, because some persons can undergo considerable pain in a physiological or psychiatric sense without responding to it by suffering in the emotional sense. For example: Someone who has undergone a brain operation to relieve physical pain or who has

suffered damage to the prefrontal brain may undergo physiological painfeel in painbut not suffer from it, that is, remain cheerful because unconcerned with the pain. In the state of what is called "la belle indiffrence," persons in an extremely inconvenient or difficult situation (such as hysterical blindness or a wholly incapacitating paraplegia) may remain quite unconcerned with it. And the rare person born with no ability to experience physical pain may remain unperturbed even when cut, burned, or otherwise injured. (See A. R. Damasio, Descartes' Error,

New York: Putnam's Sons, 1994, pp. 26267; R. Melzak and P. Wall, The Challenge of Pain, rev. ed., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982, pp. 29498A. M. Nicholi, Jr., ed. The New Harvard Guide to Psychiatry, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988, p. 252.)

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taught all he has to teach, so his disciples now have to take refuge in themselves and in the truth. His life, he knows, is drawing to its close, but he goes on traveling and teaching. A grateful listener invites him to a meal the Buddha knows is tainted but he eats it to honor the man's hospitality and becomes deathly ill. Calmly, he predicts the time and place of his death and asks that his body be ceremoniously burned, like that of a dead king. Then he addresses his

assembled disciples asking that word should be spread of his impending death so that anyone who wants to visit him for the last time will be able to. Then, just before his death, he stands before his assembled disciples and he says once, twice, and three times that if any one of them has any doubt or misgiving as to him, the Buddha, the doctrine, the path, or the method, he should ask, without excessive reverence for the teacher, because this is the last chance to question him. They remain

silent. His last words are that all composite things pass away and that they, the monks, should continue striving vigilantly. Entering into a meditative trance, he rises up, then down, and again up the ladder of trances and dies in the last, nirvanic stage. There is a terrifying earthquake, the heavens thunder, and Brahma, the highest of the gods, breaks into praise of the Buddha and his teaching.

I have now told as much of Buddha's traditional story as space allows. As scholars have proved by attempting the impossible, there is no way to get behind the legend to the historical person, at least to more than the barest outline of his life. We cannot avoid remaining doubtful of the storyteller's protected prince and the formulaic series of adventures by which he is set on his religious quest. Furthermore, there is no

way of knowing which of the words attributed to him are really his, because everything he is said to have said is only what his disciples claimed to remember. And the Buddha can hardly have spoken in the enormously repetitive style of many of his dialogues. All the same, the early Buddhist literature portrays a Buddha- person with sympathetic traits. One is his love of truth and dislike of coercion.

It is easy to believe that the historic Buddha, like the mythical one, had this respect for the truth. His modestly human truthfulness is expressed in a tale in which the Buddha- to-be is one of three brothers who try to get the keeper of a lake, who, unfortunately, no longer has a nose, to give them some of the lotuses that grow in the lake he guards. Two of the brothers try to put him into a giving mood by telling him that his nose will grow back if he is generous. He gives them nothing. The

future Buddha disagrees with his brothers and says that only fools say that noses grow back, because a nose once lost is lost forever. His truthfulness gains him the lotuses. 22

Page 93 Of the many doctrines of early Buddhism, I will take up the four that appear to me of the greatest philosophical interest: the Buddha's "rationalism" in relation to the limits he sets on metaphysical discussion; his doctrine of selflessness, that is, of no soul; his conception of a human being as an interrelated series of psychophysical processes; and his ideal of nirvana .*

The Buddha's rationalism as related to the limits he sets on metaphysical discussion 23

Some of the Buddha's opponents believe in the authority of their scriptures and traditions, some in critically reasoned metaphysics, and some, like himself, in the intuitive grasp of the truth. There are early Buddhist texts that deny that anyone, even the god Brahma, is omniscient.24 There are other, probably later, texts in which the Buddha is taken to be omniscientto know everything in past, present, and futureand others in which he limits his

extraordinary knowledge to his past births, clairvoyance, and the way to nirvana. In still other texts he speaks modestly and says that there are some questions the right and wrong of which one cannot settle without making qualifications. When he is asked how, in view of the contradictions between different authoritative persons, truth can be distinguished from falsehood, he answers that one should not be guided by hearsay, common opinion,

tradition, the authority of scripture, speculation, attractive theories, or the impression made by the personal merits or authority of a master. The only guide should be one's own ability

*All of the evidence I draw on here for the Buddha's doctrines comes from the canon of the Theravada ("Teaching of the Elders"), which has remained widespread in Southeast Asia. Confinement to this evidence is natural because, of all the schools of Hinayana ("Small Vehicle"), only Theravada has survivedthe name Hinayana was invented by Mahayana ("Great Vehicle") to express

contempt for what it took to be an inferior doctrine, but it has proved too convenient to fall into disuse. The only other Hinayana school of whose canon much survives (survives in Sanskrit, Tibetan, and mostly in Chinese) is that of the Sarvastivada ("The Teaching that All Exists"). Luckily, in what concerns us in the present chapter, the doctrines of Theravada and Sarvastivada appear to be fairly similar.

The literary character and relatively simple doctrine of the Hinayana sutras (discourses attributed to the Buddha), which are consistent with what we know to have begun as a purely oral teaching, have led most scholarsin agreement with the Theravadinsto regard Hinayana as the original form of Buddhism, out of which the more literary and complex Mahayana sutras developed. But if we take into account that both the Hinayana and Mahayana texts were

first put into writing about the time of Christ, it remains possible, as some scholars maintain, that Mahayana, having continued the tradition of the Mahasangikas (the "Majority Group" that split away early from the other schools), may be no more distant than Hinayana from the historical Buddha's doctrine. Mahayana accepts that the Theravada sutras, written in Pali, were in fact taught by the Buddha, but it takes them to express a doctrine meant only

for those unable to understand the fuller, more accurate Mahayana truth. (See N. R. Peat, "The Historical Buddha and His Teachings," in Abhidharma Buddhism to 150 A.D., ed. K. Potter, Delhi: Banarsidass, 1996, pp. 2326.)

Page 94 to recognize what should be rejected, rejected because it leads to misfortune and suffering. 25 If this passage is consistent with others in which faith in the Buddha is praised, it is because the Buddha insists that, regardless of scripture or teacher, a person should come to recognize what is better and worse and not rely on uncomprehending faith. Faith comes by way of the words the Buddha speaks; the truth is something that is heard from him, who is saturated with it.26 There is no sign that the Buddha thinks that he himself is ever wrong.

The Buddha often rejects philosophical debate that deals with problems that appear to him not only, perhaps, insoluble but also distracting from the great, soluble one of pain. Systematized neatly, these problems appear in the Buddha's discourses as four sets of contradictory theses: the world is eternal, is not eternal; the world is finite, is not finite; the self or soul is identical with the body, is not identical with the body; and the

Tathagata exists after death, does not exist after death, and neither exists nor does not exist after death. These theses reflect the views of various teachers or schools of the Buddha's time.27

On one memorable occasion, when a disciple complains to the Buddha that he is dissatisfied because these questions have been ignored, the Buddha answers with a simile: It is as if a man was shot by a heavily poisoned arrow but refused to allow the doctor to draw out the arrow until he knew the name, clan, color, and village or town of the man who shot him, and until he knew with what kind of bow, bowstring,

and arrowof what the arrow was made, what feathers it was shafted with, and so on. The chances are, says the Buddha, that the man would die before he got the information. Whatever the answer to the metaphysical questions, the fact is that there are birth, aging, dying, grief, suffering, and despair. He has not explained the metaphysical problems, he says, because they do nothing to calm, give the necessary insight, or

lead to nirvana.28

On the surface, the metaphysical questions the Buddha refuses to consider resemble Kant's antinomies (which will come up later). It has been assumed that, like Kant, the Buddha considers them beyond the limits of human intelligence. But it is nowhere stated in the Buddhist dialogues that these questions do not, in fact, have categorical answersexcept insofar as there are no merely verbal solutions. For example, the alternative logical

possibilities relating to the existence after death of the Tathagata miss the elusive, no doubt ineffable truth because what pertains to nirvana is beyond the ability of our concepts to grasp. The Buddha's doctrine of selflessness or no soul (anatman)29

The Buddha denies that human beings have permanent selves or souls. This denial is in direct contradiction to the view of Uddalaka, Yajnavalkya, and most non- Buddhist Indian philosophers. As against the others, the Buddhists

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contend that everything, composite or not, is impermanent. To make this contention plausible, they analyze the individual human beingbody and mind togetherinto components or functions of five kinds, five groups or aggregates (skandha in Sanskrit, khanda in the Pali of the texts under discussion) .* The groups or aggregates are the following: the physical body (as furnished with sense organs); sensation (classified as pleasant, painful, and neutral); perception/ conception (the creation of

mental images and ideas); volition (the forming of impulses, predispositions, attitudes); and consciousness (the power to recognize and judge). As usually translated, the list is: form (rupa, body as visible), sensation (vedana), perception (samjna, in Pali, sanna), mental formations (samskara, sankhara), consciousness (vijnana, vinnana). Because everything in all of these groups is in constant change, the Buddhists argue, the person, who is wholly composed of them, is

necessarily in constant change.

This analysis is a decisive factor in the Buddha's argument against a permanent self. If the self, the atman, he says, was the all-powerful, indestructible existence that non-Buddhist philosophers take it to be, it would have to be identical with (or included in) one of the five groups that constitute the human being. If, for example, the self was the body, as a materialist would hold, the body would not be subject to sickness or any other imperfection. The Buddha repeats this argument for the other

"groups," including, finally, the most likely candidate, consciousness. But consciousness, too, is subject to imperfection and impermanence and is unable either to be or avoid being however one pleases. 30

A second argument against a soul/self begins in a discussion of trance, understood to be the temporary cessation of consciousness. How is this cessation to be explained? Some say it is without any cause or condition; some say that a person's self is consciousness, which comes and goes; and some say that powerful brahmans or gods draw consciousness in and out of a person. But the state of trance is best explained not as

*"The dialect of Middle Indo- Aryan which is found in the texts of the Theravadin Buddhists and usually called 'Pali' by European scholars is nowhere so called in the Theravadin canon." Apparently, "the name 'Pali' is based upon a misunderstanding of the compound pali-bhasha 'language of the canon' ... The commentaries state that the language spoken by the Buddha, which is the language of the canon, is Magadhi. This is referred to as the mula-bhasha, the root language of all languages, and the language which a child would speak naturally if it heard no other language spoken

... What we know of Magadhi as described ... in later times ... enables us to say that Pali is not Magadhi," though the Buddha is said to have preached in Magadha on occasion. At the councils held to recite the canon, its language must have been more or less normalized. "Since this normalized language was an 'ecclesiastical' one, recited by monks who spoke in a variety of languages or dialects, there is no necessity to assume that it coincided exactly with any one particular spoken language" (Norman, Pali Literature, pp. 14).

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anything having to do with a consciousness- soul that comes and goes or that is inserted into or taken out of a person .* Trances, says the Buddha, are the end result of a natural process, as we see when we consider how training influences some ideas to arise and others to pass away. Training shows how, at each meditative step, consciousness of a particular kind arises while the preceding kind ends. When the meditator reaches the highest stage of

consciousness, he may come to think that conscious thought of any kind is an inferior state and may stop thinking and imagining, and "so he touches cessation." This cessation of conscious ideas has been achieved gradually, step by step, by means of a causal processa soul has nothing to do with it. 31

A third kind of argument used by the Buddha is aimed against the idea that the self is material or, more seriously, that it is consciousness in the sense of consciousness identical with knowledge. This view is wrong, the Buddha argues, because experience shows that knowledge is conditioned: it must have a cause, that is, it must be learned. First consciousness arises and only then does knowledge arise. Therefore consciousness must be one thing and knowledge

another.32 Even if the self was regarded as a formless soul made of consciousness, consciousness would arise first and knowledge would arise out of it. A person always recognizes that knowledge has come to him as the result of one cause or another.

A fourth argument used by the Buddha against a fixed self of any kind, material or immaterial, is reminiscent of a famous section of St. Augustine's Confessions. Consider the temporal nature of the self as it is experienced: A person believes that he once existed in the past, exists in the present, and will exist in the future. Once, the past that is now unreal to him was real. But the once real past has become unreal and

the once unreal future has become real in the form of the present; and there still

• Consciousness translates sanna, which can also be translated perceptions (as in Walshe, Thus Have I Heard), giving the passage a different resonance. Not only do the Pali terms not match English ones exactly, but until they are fixed by scholastics, they show a great deal of semantic overlap. It may be misleading to give a fixed interpretation of the still untechnical terms of earlier Buddhism. Early texts use two words, sanna and vinnana, for ordinary consciousness or perception. In later,

scholastic doctrine, sanna is specialized to mean the nonmaterial process by which the sense organs "touch" their object, or to mean the effect that impact produces by the coming together of the object of sensation, the sense organ, and the sensation. Vinnana comes to be the dominant word for ordinary, discriminating consciousness. In Buddhist fashion, vinnana is said to depend completely on the conditions that cause it, and to disappear along with them; but it is

also said to descend into the mother's womb and to transmigrate from individual to individual. Each sense organ is granted its own vinnana. In later, scholastic Buddhism, its main function is to gain a first, vague perception of matter. (See E. R. Sarathchandra, Buddhist Psychology of Perception, pp. 428; and Johansson, The Dynamic Psychology of Early Buddhism.)

Page 97 is the future, at present unreal, time. Which time is fully real? The words we use for our selves at each temporal stage of our experience are mere names or conventional designations, good only for ordinary talk. There is no fixed self or substratum; there are only qualities that keep changing in their causal order as they influence one another. 33

The no-self theory creates intellectual problems, the most immediate of which is the nature of whatever it is that is affected by karma and transmigrates. The answer is a theory of continuityresembling that of Heraclitus or contemporary physicsexemplified by a stream of water or a flame, which change constantly and yet remain in form the same continuous stream or flame. The developed answers to the problem of continuity belong to a later period and will not be pursued here. The Buddha's conception of the human being as an interrelated series of psychophysical processes34

The Buddhist holds that a human being is nothing other than a chain of interdependent processes. This chain of causation is called "dependent origination" or "dependent co- arising." It consists of twelve linked processes that form a spiral- like succession of existences. Each of the twelve processes of one segment of the spiral arises from the process that comes before it. What is of interest here is not the doctrine in its exact detail, which must appear to us somewhat arbitrary, but the psychophysical

vision.

For the record, the following is the most usual form of the chain: Each process- stage or link is impermanent, without any selfthe permanent reality that is assumed by philosophical opponents. A process comes into existence from the preceding process and goes out of existence just as its predecessor does. Ignorance, which starts the whole process, is the condition for mental formations, which are the condition for consciousness. In turn, consciousness is the

condition for nameandform (namarupa, body), nameandform for the six senses, the six senses for sense contact, sense contact for feeling, feeling for craving, craving for grasping, grasping for becoming, becoming for birth, and birth for old age and death, distress, grief, suffering, sorrow, and unrest.35

To make this scheme easier to grasp, we might eliminate the details of its progression and put it quite generally: A person begins as a complex transmigrating consciousness that descends into the mother's womb and plants itself and grows there, watered by its cravings, in the field of its actions. Impelled by the force of its desiring, this consciousnessseed of the person collects images, sensations, and activities, and so prepares its own birth. After it is born, it continues to crave stimuli and gather karma and memories and prepare its next birth; or it can become more independent of stimuli, more understanding, purer, emptier, so

that the life- creating force will be diminished and less likely to go on to a new rebirth.36

Page 98 Such a conception is modern because everything in the person interacts with everything else, because knowing is joined with craving and both are joined with remembering, because conscious and unconscious processes run into and affect one another, and because the embryo craves and collects experiences no less than the child and the finally old man it becomes. In spirit, the whole is not unlike modern neuropsychology and developmental psychology. 37 *

The Buddhist ideal of nirvana38

The word nirvana, which is composed of nih (out) and va (blow), has the literal meaning of blowing out, and is used to signify transcendent calm not only by Buddhists but by Hindus and Jains as well. In Buddhist use, nirvana always signifies the ending of sorrow, suffering, or pain, as the word duhkha is variously translated. Often described with the help of words such as without characteristics and deathless, nirvana is taken to be the result of the successful effort to extinguish one's sense of

self and escape from the suffering that is inherent in embodied existence. Early Buddhist literature makes it quite clear what nirvana is not. It is not death, which is only an incident in transmigration. Nor is it a condition possible to reach only at or after deathit can be attained, as the Buddha attained it, during one's lifetime as "nirvana with phenomenal existence." Nor is nirvana an Indian heaven, an impermanent abode that one enters and leaves. Nirvana is nowhere. The Buddha explains that if a fire would go

out and someone would ask in what direction it went, east, west, north, or south, the answer would have to be that direction was not at all relevant. "Exactly in the same way ... visible form, feeling, apperception, dispositions and perception, by which one could designate a Tathagata, are now given up and once and for all uprooted. 'Come into being' does not apply, 'not come into being,' does not apply, 'come into being as well as not come into being' does not apply, 'neither come

into being nor not come into being' does not apply."39 All the same, the idea of nirvana is not, or not consistently, all negative. The idea of blowing out that the word embodies relates it to the

*Compare the Buddhist view with that of the neuropsychological researcher who writes: "The neural basis for the self, as I see it, resides with the continuous reactivation of at least two sets of representations. One set concerns representations of key events in an individual's autobiography, on the basis of which a notion of identity can be reconstructed repeatedly, by partial activation in topographically organized sensory maps ... The second set of representations underlying the neural self consists of the primordial representations of the individual's body ... At each moment the state of self is constructed, from the ground up. It is an evanescent

reference state, so continuously and consistently reconstructed that the owner never knows that it is being remade unless something goes wrong with the remaking" (A. R. Damasio, Descartes' Error, New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1994, pp. 23839).

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blowing out of a fire. There is an ancient Indian idea according to which fire exists invisibly before it has been kindled and after it has been extinguished, changing only its form or modality. In one Upanishad, a comparison is drawn between Brahman and fire, whose material form is not perceived when the fire lies latent in its source, the firewood, but remains there in its invisible, subtle form until caught again by means of the firedrill. 40 It is therefore not surprising that in some Buddhist texts what does not exist is

interpreted as is not perceived and nirvana is understood to be a pure, subtle, everlasting "island" or "realm." In fact, in early Buddhist literature, phrases used by the Brahmans to describe the joy of atman merged with Brahman are used by the Buddhists to describe nirvana or the joy of the meditator on its verge. Even in early, relatively unmetaphysical Buddhism there is some tendency to see nirvana as the perfect dimension of existence; and there is also, perhaps, the beginning of a view of nirvana

as a something beyond space, time, and causality.

To reach nirvana is always to undergo a dramatic change arrived at by meditative concentration and intellectual insight. In nirvana, all needs and emotionsobsessive sensuality, incessant change, irrelevant speculationare replaced by total calm, insight, and freedom. Consciousness is now undisturbed and the mind fluctuates only superficially, so that sensation no longer leads to emotions and desires, karma is no longer accumulated, and there is nothing to flow on into a new existence. These early, perhaps inconsistent views of nirvana become the province of debate and help

divide Buddhism into rival schools of thought and practicea complex matter that will not be discussed here.

This is the moment at which a too- brief word should be said about the Buddhist perception of life as suffering. This perception divides Buddhism from Confucianism and, in its uncompromising intensity, from most Western thought. The logic of Buddhism obviously depends upon its account of the painfulnessthe painful resultseven of pleasure, and on the universality of the law of karma, which itself depends upon belief in transmigration. But the Buddha does not expect of laymen what he expects of those who want to become, like

himself, fully dispassionate and compassionate. To laymen he preaches that morality, in the usual sense, will gain them great wealth by careful attention to their affairs, a reputation for good conduct, self-assurance among people of every kind, a death without anxiety, and a place after death in a heavenly world.41 To an ordinary laymen, the Buddhist master of dispassion and compassion is less a person one wants to emulate than a distant ideal, which may influence one's thought and conduct, but probably in a subtle rather than obvious way.

Page 100 Socrates (470399 B.C.E.): Gadfly by Induction

Socrates' father was a sculptor and his mother a midwifeSocrates calls himself a midwife of the soul. 42 In his youth, he studied geometry and astronomy. He was notably brave, as was proved in three military campaigns; at Potidaea, it is said, he won the prize for bravery. His moral integrity was proved when, under the democratic regime, he refused to put the unprecedented proposal to condemn all the generals who had won a naval battle but failed to rescue two thousand men from their wrecked ships. A second proof of moral

integrity was his refusal, under the new oligarchy of the Thirty, to call Leon of Salamis before them for execution without trial. He also showed a rather truculent modesty, and when the oracle of Delphi called him the wisest man in Greece, he said that the pronouncement was hard at first to understand. Aristophanes must have found the pronouncement unintelligible, for to him Socrates was the image of socially destructive, self-important absurdity.

Socrates' wife Xanthippe, famous in antiquity as a shrew, bore him the son Lamprocles .* Myrto (if it is true that he was ever married to her) perhaps gave him two other sons. He was or became poor. Xenophon reports that it was Socrates' regular habit to dance because he thought that such exercise kept the body in good condition, and that in his old age he learned to play the lyre. Although he had a Silenus face

and an unbeautiful body, he was magnetically attractive. Plato called him the bravest, wisest, most upright man of his time, and Xenophon, the best and happiest of men.

The most notable event in Socrates' life was the trial for impiety that ended in his execution. About fifty years earlier, the philosopher Anaxagoras had been exiled from Athens, ostensibly for saying that the sun, regarded as a deity, was no more than a fiery stone; Protagoras is said to have been convicted of impiety and his books burned in the marketplace; Aristotle left Athens rather than face a trial on political grounds, it

appears; and

• The relations between Xanthippe and Socrates gave birth to misogynous, often cautionary tales. When Abelard promised to marry Heloise, she tried to dissuade from a step she thought would disgrace him, burden him, and prevent him from philosophizing. She exhorted him to "remember Socrates' marriage and the sordid episode whereby he did at least remove the slur it cast on philosophy by providing an example to be warning to his successors. This too was noted by Jerome, when

he tells this tale of Socrates in the first book of his Against Jovinian: 'One day after he had withstood an endless stream of invective which Xanthippe poured out from a window above his head, he felt himself soaked with dirty water. All he did was to wipe his head and say: "I knew that thunderstorm would lead to rain'''" (Abelard & Heloise, trans. B. Radice, London: Folio Society, 1977, pp. 2930; the translation is also published by Penguin Books).

Page 101 there are other, though doubtful stories about philosophers' trials. Yet speech was then relatively free in Athens(Plato's) Socrates declares that there is more freedom to talk in Athens than anywhere else in Greece. 43

Socrates seems to have been regarded by many Athenians as one of the intellectuals, often foreign, who were subverting democracy and respect for traditional values. The animus against Socrates had both political and religious grounds. Political suspicion was aroused by his association with Critias, the leader of the cruel oligarchic uprising, and with Alicibiades, who despised democracy. It was easy

to assume that Socrates' teaching had been responsible for their conduct .* It has often been said that the amnesty for the oligarchs made it inexpedient to level any openly political accusation; but this is not certain.44 In any case, the charge against Socrates was restricted to a religious one. The charge was that Socrates refused to recognize the gods recognized by the state and introduced

other, new daimonanew daimons, that is, divinities or, perhaps, new "daimonic" practices. The actual wording of the indictment may be that preserved in the text of Diogenes Laertius:

This indictment and affidavit is sworn by Meletus, the son of Meletus of Pitthos, against Socrates, the son of Sophroniscus of Alopece: Socrates is guilty of refusing to recognize the gods recognized by the state, and of introducing other new divinities. The penalty demanded is death.45

As far as we know, such a charge was the first of its kind ever made in Athens. It is unlikely that the religious accusation was aimed at any beliefAthenian beliefs were many, various, and unsystematizedbut it may have been aimed at neglect of the public religious practices that honored the gods on whom Athens depended. What is most obviously pertinent, however, is the prohibition against the unsanctioned introduction of

• The decision to prosecute an old man for saying and doing what he had been saying and doing unmolested for so many years must have been a response to the wounds of recent history: a lost war, a lost empire, an oligarchic coup. The problem is to decide whether the Athenians' diagnosis was more specific'Socrates taught subversives'or more general'Socrates embodies the moral malaise that has brought Athens low'" (Parker, Athenian Religion, pp. 201202).

Xenophon reports that Socrates' accuser (perhaps the sophist Polycrates) held that Socrates encouraged his associates to despise the established constitution by saying that it was foolish to appoint public officials by lot rather than ability (see the Protagoras 319b), and that such arguments incited young men to despise the established political order. Xenophon says that the accuser also argued

that Critias and Alcibiades, having become associates of Socrates, had done the city great evil (Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.2.9, 12). But Polycrates' accusation against Socrates was published years after Socrates' trial and he is not mentioned as among those "who wrote the indictment" (Brickhouse and Smith, pp. 17374; see also Parker, Athenian Religion, pp. 206207).

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new public cults, meaning, ordinarily, the worship of a god not yet officially recognized. Socrates' references to his inward sign or "divinity" may have been taken to imply worship of such a god. This "divinity" is Socrates' daimonion, as it is called in two Platonic passages, or, as called elsewhere by Plato, Socrates' divine sign or customary oracle, or, most simply, his inner voice. Later supposed to be a "genius" or spirit, the daimonion seems to be

only an instinctive voice or sign that warns Socrates not to say or undertake something particular, often quite trivial. At least once, however, the sign has the more general effect of keeping Socrates away from politics. The daimonion has no dogma to teach and warns not of moral consequences but of misfortune. 46 But the jurors may have understood the daimonion to be a strange oracle that only Socrates, a lone

individual, could consult. Such a privileged consultation might be doubly incriminating to those who suspected his political leanings and resented his sharply critical presence.47 The conclusion of the trial and the imminence of death elicit from Socrates the view, so foreign to the Greeks of his time, that one "ought not return injustice for injustice or do ill to any man, no matter what one may suffer at their hands" (Crito 49d).48 *

Socrates' most obvious traits as a philosopher are his manner of argument by persistent questions, his profession of ignorance, and the use of the questions and the profession to attempt to gain an exact understanding of virtue. In Aristotle's words:

Socrates believed that knowledge of virtue was the final aim, and he inquired what justice is, and what courage and every other kind of virtue. This was reasonable in view of his conviction that all the virtues [kinds of excellence] were sciences, so that to know justice was at the same time to be just; for as

• "It was not the Athenian custom to disguise hatred, and neither party to a case hesitated to declare his adversary deserving of death ... The attempt to retaliate upon an enemy being justified ... successful retaliation was a joy, and failure a horror; a man might be respected for attempting revenge and denigrated for making no attempt." But "obstinate insistence on justice" was sometimes repudiated in favor of "kindly magnanimity" (Gorgias, fragment B6). Sometimes, a

considered tolerance influenced political conduct. When democracy was restored in Athens in 403, it was decided that it was best "not to recall ills," meaning, not to bear grudges or retaliate. These words are later described (by the Athenian orator Aeschinas) as "the noblest words which civilization can utter." The Athenians' magnanimous decision gave them great satisfaction.

Protagoras, a relativist, insists on distinguishing between rational punishment, meant to deter, and "mindless vengeance" (Plato, Protagoras 342ab). Yet Aristotle continues to believe that one should do good to friends and evil to enemiesto do good to enemies is as objectionable, he says, as to do evil to friends (Topics 113a29). Aristotle believes that it is just, and therefore noble, not to come to terms with one's enemies but to take revenge on

them (Rhetoric 1367a1920). (See Dover, Popular Morality in the Time of Plato and Aristotle, pp. 182 [quoted], 191 [quoted], 193); and Vlastos, Socrates, pp. 18789.)

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soon as we have learned geometry and architecture we are architects and geometricians. For this reason he inquired what virtue is, but not how or from what it is acquired. (Eudemian Ethics 1216b) 49

To Socrates, virtue (areté) as a whole is made up, as he says, of manliness (courage), moderation, justice, piety, and wisdom.50 To understand these is a matter of supreme importance because, despite his profession of ignorance, he is convinced that virtue (areté) is knowledgeto have courage, for example, is to know and, because one knows, to act on what really is and is not to be feared. To do wrong is

to be ignorant, and to be ignorant is not to know how to live or be happy, while to be virtuous is to know how to live well, that is, to be happy, a self- justifying goal not at all the same as merely having pleasure.51

The Socrates we know best, the one who appears in Plato, cannot be cleanly separated from his creator. But the earlier, more Socratic dialogues tend to be shorter, more bantering, and more optimistic in spirit. And, name apart, the Socrates of the earlier dialogues is different from the Socrates of the later ones. To put the difference in negations, the earlier Socrates, the one I am considering to be Socrates, does not deal with other than moral issues, does not claim to know anything, reaches few and only very general

conclusions, does not philosophize except by questioning and refuting others, does not believe in separately existing (Platonic) Ideas or Forms, is not, until after his trial, much concerned with life after death, and expresses religious belief only in the daimonion, in the oracle, in an undefined moral god, and, sometimes, in uncharacterized "gods."52

Socrates' philosophic traits run together in a way unprofitable to separate. When in the course of searching for the exact definition of a virtue, he questions someone, he will often ask which of the two of a pair of traits is better, for example, whether justice is better than injustice. He himself never or almost never says what any of the virtues are because, he claims, he does not know and hopes to

learn by eliciting the truth from the person he is questioning. He bears down on those he questions, even rudely, always convicting them of giving examples rather than viable definitions and of reasoning circularly. Always, they break down under his questioning, sometimes because of the possibly dubious intellectual tactics he uses.

The nature of Socrates' intellectual tactics is a delicate matter, not only because of the honor in which we hold him but because, if he himself thought them questionable, he might regard them as in themselves an obstacle to the truthcan a sophistical distinction be used to harry someone into eliciting a possible truth from himself? The matter is particularly

Page 104 delicate because Socrates is an inveterate ironist and one is not always sure (I am not always sure) if he is not being so marginally ironical in relation to himself that he can say opposite things and, probably with qualifications, mean both. 53

Consider, in this light, Socrates' repeated declaration that he knows nothing, that he has nothing to teach, that he does not engage in politics. This means, as he says, that he is not a craftsman, doctor, orator, or other specialist and therefore has no special knowledge to impart, and that his inquiries do not touch directly on political matters. But he does believe and argue that wisdom and virtue

should be practiced. He says, forth- rightly, "To do injustice and to disobey my superior, god or man, this I know to be evil and base" (Apology 29b).54 And once, referring to his statement that men would rather do than suffer injustice, he even asks whether it has not been proved that what he said was true (Gorgias 479e). Carried beyond his usual profession of ignorance,

he adds that "these things," his relevant conclusions, have been, to speak crudely, "clamped down and bound by arguments of iron and adamant." Then, qualifying, he goes on that, with respect to himself, his position is always the same: he does "not know how these things are," but he has never met anyone who has spoken otherwise of injustice without being ridiculous (Gorgias 508e509a).55

Socrates' reference to arguments of iron seems no more than a brief moment of logically excessive enthusiasm. Still, if he knows that he knows nothing, why does he always seem so sure of himself? Maybe he professes ignorance because he refuses to use the word know to characterize his own beliefs, which are justified, he thinks, by their ability to withstand argument, but reserves the word

for the self- evident, logically guaranteed certainty that Parmenides, for one, attributes to true philosophy. Or perhaps he thinks that to know is to have a godlike grasp of the whole of moral knowledge, with all its interrelated virtues .* Under pressure, when facing the jurors who will decide his fate, Socrates explains that, in a human sense, he does know something. The oracle named him

the wisestthe most knowingof men, he says, because he is better as he isneither wise with the knowledge that the craftsmen have nor ignorant with their

• By one interpretation, Socrates thinks that what he knows is true in the sense that it has stood up to argument and is consistent with other plausible beliefs, but that this is not logically self- evident and not enough to prove his beliefs to be absolutely true (Vlastos, "Socrates' Disavowal of Knowledge," in Socratic Studies). By another interpretation, Socrates is conscious of how little he knows of the sum total of truths that is necessary for certainty to be reached (Penner, "Socrates and

the Early Dialogues," pp. 14344. See also Brickhouse and Smith, Plato's Socrates, pp. 3038).

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ignorance or the ignorance of others. He is better than all those who believe that they are wise about everything. Very likely, what God means by his oracle is that human nature is of little or no worth, so that anyone is wisest if, like this fellow, Socrates, he realizes that, in respect to wisdom, he is truly nothing (Apology 22d-23a). 56 *

Now consider the way in which Socrates questions his interlocutors. Not only is he persistent, but he rejects both hypothetical arguments and attempts to argue merely for the sake of victory. Say what you really believe, he says, do not agree with any view against your own opinion (Crito 49d) or adopt different arguments for different occasions (Gorgias 482a). Along with sincerity, he demands consistencyregardless of others, he refuses to be an out-of-tune lyre, discordant with himself (Gorgias 482bc). As one distinguished Athenian general, Nicias, explains to another, Lysimachus:

Whenever anyone comes face to face with Socrates and has a conversation with him, what invariably happens is that, although they may have started on a completely different subject at first, Socrates will keep heading him off as they're talking until he has him trapped into giving an account of his present life-style, and of the way he has spent his life in the past. And once he has him trapped, Socrates

won't let him go before he was well and truly cross- examined him on every angle. (Laches 187e-188a)57

First, Socrates gets his partner in conversation to say what he thinks about some virtue; he presses him for more statements; he shows his further statements to be inadequate and to lead to contradictions or circularity. Almost always, he refutes, according to Plato with invariable success. Abstracted from its twists and turns, the process is roughly this: Socrates asks what some virtue is. His interlocutor answers with an ex-

*I use both wisdom and knowledge to translate sophia. In its early use, sophia most often means skill. For its later use, the most convenient translation is usually wisdom. But this translation can be misleading because the Socratic sophia does not mean wisdom in its most usual sense, that of the breadth of view or the equanimity or tolerance that reflect experience or prolonged reflection. Instead, it means the kind of competence the craftsman shows in the

pursuit of his craft and Socrates seeks in a more general form by way of the understanding of the virtues. In his early, more Socratic writing, Plato is said not to distinguish in principle between episteme (knowledge as opposed to belief), phronesis (ethical wisdom or insight), techne (skill, craft), and nous (intelligence). The opposite of sophia is not so much foolishness as ignorance (agnosia) or, especially, conceited ignorance (amathia). What Socrates thinks that he, like other

humans, lacks is God's (perfect) knowledge. To know oneself is therefore to know that one is only human. (See Strycker and Slings [who translate sophia with cleverness or understanding], Plato's Apology of Socrates, pp. 6268, esp. note p. 61.)

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ample. Asked for a standard by which to recognize the virtue, the interlocutor gives a definition. Socrates shows that the definition conflicts with some idea on which both he and the interlocutor agree (the holy cannot be simply what the gods love because the gods disagree). The interlocutor changes his definition (the holy is what all the gods love). Socrates asks a question that suggests the direction he thinks is right (is the holy loved by the gods because it is holy or is it holy because they love it?). Socrates wants to know, he says, what the nature and reality of the holy is. Eventually, after long leading questions, very brief answers, and more attempts at definition, the interlocutor admits

his ignorance. He does not know, he agrees, because his initial definition has been shown to conflict with beliefs that both he and Socrates accept without question. As long as these beliefs are not shown to contradict others that he acceptsunless someone unbinds and looses the relevant argumentsthe beliefs are to be regarded as true (Gorgias 509a). Speaking logically or empirically, they may not be true, Socrates admits; but at this point he appears sure of himself. He continues "examining," "investigating," "inquiring," "questioning," until what is, in effect, his refutationrefutation by question and answer, the Socratic

elenchusleads to a deduction from his interlocutor's belief that contradicts that belief: his interlocutor is refuted out of his own mouth. 58

Does Socrates constant practice of refuting imply a general hostility to others, or is it a recurring demonstration for himself of his superiority over the people he questions? Speaking psychologically, I cannot answer. In the Apology Socrates contends that it is the gods who have imposed on him the duty to understand himself and others. Like a gadfly stinging a noble but sluggish horse, he wants to shame the Athenians into realizing that the virtue of the soul is more important than anything else. His death will not release

them from the duty of examining their lives. Other, younger, harsher men will follow him and trouble them the more (Apology 23ab, 29de, 39c).

If Socrates confined himself to questioning others in order to demonstrate their unhealthy moral ignorance and if he thought of himself as not knowing anything beyond doubt, the Socrates who appears in the dialogue Meno is a new, more Platonic one. There is no evidence that the mature Socrates was ever much interested in mathematics. In the Meno, however, he shows thathelped by adversarial questions, by leading questions, and by the crucial diagonal line he drawsthe apparently ignorant slave boy he is questioning has an intuitive knowledge of geometry. The problem in the demonstration is a decidedly technical one: What is the side of a square with an area double that of a

square with sides two feet long? This problem, related to the Greek discovery of the incommensurability of the diagonal, is discussed with the help of specialized terms taken from the then developing field of axiomatized geometry. What is

Page 107 new is Socrates' elaborate use of geometry (of "the application of areas") to show how moral philosophizing should proceed, his willingness to borrow the method of hypothesis from the geometers, his emphasis on recollection of what the soul has always learned in its many previous lives, and his implication, so foreign to the Socrates described earlier, that reasoning can lead to mathematically infallible moral conclusions. 59

Aristotle gives a plausible account of Socrates' philosophical accomplishment: By questions that help to overcome Heraclitus, Socrates leads to Plato's theory of Ideas and his, Aristotle's, theory of essences. As Aristotle explains, Heraclitus' doctrine that all sensible things are in a state of flux makes it impossible for knowledge to exist unless there are entities other than sensible ones (Metaphysics 1078b). Having said this, Aristotle summarizes the limited but pioneering contribution of Socrates. It is that Socrates

was the first to try to find a general definition of the moral virtues, and because the starting point of all logical reasoning is the essence, Socrates inquired into the essence of things.

There are two innovations which may fairly be ascribed to Socrates: inductive reasoning and general definition. Both of these are associated with the starting- point of scientific knowledge. But whereas Socrates regarded neither universals nor definitions as existing in separation, the Idealists gave them a separate existence, and to these universals and

definitions of existing things they gave the name of Ideas. (Metaphysics 1078b 1732)60

Naturally, this summing up of Socrates' innovations is colored by Aristotle's sense of the progress of philosophy. But the impression that Socrates made on people had little to do with Platonic Ideas or Aristotelian essences. It was not these that persuaded Antisthenes to walk to Athens every day to hear Socrates. He walked the five miles because Socrates was so impressively hardy, so much a

wrestler, so (unlike Plato) without conceit, so sure that virtue was teachable, so remote from evil, so deserving to be loved.61 The early Christians such as Justin Martyr thought that Socrates should be considered a Christian because, like them, he defied the state, exhorted people to become acquainted with the still unknown God, and suffered a martyrdom he could have escaped.62

Because Socrates was in everything an individualist, the individualists among philosophers, ancient and modern, have measured themselves against him, whether with praise or blame. Nietzsche shifts from unqualified admiration for Socrates' wisdom and courage to the rhetorically sharp question, why Socrates was a monomaniac with respect to morality. Severely but not unreasonably, he adds that all the Socratics, including

Plato,

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are opposed because of the profound instinct that human beings cannot be made better by telling them that virtue is demonstrable and asking them for reasons. 63 Kierkegaard makes the point that Socrates is invulnerable to punishment by society (as Kierkegaard himself wants to be). The Athenian court, he says, failed to understand that it could not inflict punishment on Socrates, because Socrates, knowing nothing at

all, did not know death to be harsh and painful.64 Kierkegaard, who cultivates one kind of silence by means of anonymous publication and another by embracing paradox, particularly admires Socrates' silence, his refusal to give answers:

For the observer, Socrates' life is like a magnificent pause in the course of history: we do not hear him at all; a profound stillness prevailsuntil it is broken up by the noisy attempts of the many and very different schools of followers to trace their origins in this hidden and cryptic source. With Socrates the stream of historical narrative, just like the river Guadalquivir, drops underground for some distance, only to rush out again

with renewed power.65

Bertrand Russell, himself rebellious, atheistic, and scientistic, admires Socrates' courage but criticizes him for wanting to prove the universe agreeable to his own ethical standards. This desire, says Russell, is treachery to the truth, for which Socrates should be consigned to a long residence in a scientific purgatory.66 Wittgenstein, who sees only pain and illness in the questions philosophers ask, finds Socrates beyond

reparation. "Reading the Socratic dialogues," he says, "one has the feeling: what a frightful waste of time! What's the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing?"67 To end, as is only fair, with a more appreciative judgment, I cite Karl Popper, who favors pointed, unrelenting questions and responsible freedom:

From Socrates' apology and from his death there sprang a new idea of a free man: the idea of a man whose spirit cannot be subdued; of a man who is free because he is self- sufficient; who is not in need of constraint because he is able to rule himself, and to accept freely the rule of law.68 Discussion

Confucius, Mencius, the Buddha, and Socrates talk about matters of concern to ordinary persons and adopt a way of argument, didactic

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or agonistic, that is natural to conversation. * They all often proceed by the simple iteration of examples. Of course, there are differences among the strategies and aims they pursue in conversation: Socrates invokes the arguments that demonstrate the essential identity of all instances of each of the different virtues; Confucius invokes the sages whose words and acts demonstrate the variation and socializing power of the different virtues in

different situations; and the Buddha invokes the analyses that dissolve the illusion of fixed objects and selves and show how the different virtues can join one another in curing human suffering. But at its most philosophical, the conversation of all three is usually about something, some quality, principle, supposed reality, or method being searched for, defined or applied more exactly, or, in the Buddhist case, perhaps denied. Such conversation is mostly in the mode of argument

from analogy that Aristotle calls induction and finds exemplified in Socrates.

Let me give examples taken from among those already cited, this time, for exactness sake, word for word. The first is from the discussion between Kao-tzu and Mencius on whether or not the feeling of humanity is inborn. Mencius, it will be recalled, is making the point that the use of the same word, nature, should not be taken to imply identity in what it

designates. Its sense changes when it is applied to human, moral issues. Similarly, the meaning of a morally used term such as rightness varies with the object to which it is applied, unlike a term such as whiteness, which is morally indifferent.

"Treating as white" is the same whether one is treating a horse as old or white or a man as white. But I wonder if you would think that "treating as old" is the same whether one is treating a horse as old or a man as elder? Furthermore, is it the one

*"Just as Confucius keeps at a prudent distance from cosmological or religious speculations, so Socrates, in Cicero's formula, is the Greek who 'drew philosophy away from the hidden secret of nature' in order to apply it to the duties of ordinary life." Furthermore, both avow their ignorance, and neither presents himself as the possessor of a doctrine (see Analects 2.17; 9. 7). Neither makes speeches nor talks much, yet both train disciples zealously (Analects 7.18). "For, while

recognizing that they are not the guardians of any wisdom, they draw from deep within themselves the consciousness of a vocation that surpasses them (that comes from 'Heaven,' from the 'demon') and gives them confidence to face the threats of their contemporaries ... Finally, while showing the same respect for established religious practices, they both seem to aspire to a more internal religion, of which their own moral experience makes them aware (see Analects 7.34) ... But one does not see

Confucius pretending to adopt his adversary's position, as Socrates commonly does in order to push his interlocutor to develop it to its end and, by doing so, to make its incoherence or inananity suddenly appear (the situation of 'aporia')" (F. Jullien, Le détour et l'accès: Stratégies du sens en Chine, en Grèce, Paris: Grasset, 1995, pp. 25354).

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who is old that is dutiful, or is it the one who treats him as elder that is dutiful? (Mencius 6.A.34.) 69

Compare this conversation with that between Socrates and Meno on what virtue may beon the unity of the different instances of each virtue, Meno has just admitted that there are many kinds of virtue, and Socrates is making a point exactly the opposite of Mencius' because he wants to discover the common nature of the virtues, not the difference possibly concealed by their common name:

Do you think it is only true of virtue that it is one thing for a woman, another for a man, and so on? Or is this also true of health and size and strength? Do you think health is one thing for a man, and another for a woman? Or is health, if it is to be health, the same character everywhere, whether in man or anything else? (Meno 72de)70

In the following example, the Buddha uses the technique of examining instances to see if atman can be discovered by means of its inherent impregnability and omnipotence. He believes he is conducting a decisive, that is, complete induction because, as he and his interlocutors are agreed, he is basing his reasoning on an exhaustive enumeration of the components that make up a human being, so he repeats the same argument with respect to body, sensation,

perception/ cognition, volition, and consciousness. Since the argument is everywhere identical, I give it for consciousness only, with the omission of the self- evident answers given by the listening monks:

If consciousness were the soul, this consciousness would not be subject to sickness, and it would be possible in the case of consciousness to say, "let my consciousness be thus, let my consciousness be thus." Now because consciousness is soulless ... it is not possible in the case of consciousness to say, "Let my consciousness be thus, let my consciousness be thus" ... Is it fitting to consider what is impermanent, painful, and subject to change as,

"this is mine, this am I, this is my soul?"71 In each of the three examples I have cited, there is a search to find, verify, or falsify a real definition or true concept. All the examples are relevant to what the Confucians, beginning with Confucius himself, see as the "rectification of names." If one reads these examples in their context, one sees that it is the Buddhist who makes the largest assumptionthat the enumeration of what constitutes a person is accurate and exhaustive.

Page 111 In the examples given here, Mencius and Socrates are on about the same level of sophistication (the geometrical examples of the Meno go much further, of course). The equivocal nature of concepts may be clearer to Mencius, but Socrates pursues his argument at greater length and with more energy. Seen now, all the arguments are primitive. I mean not that they are mistakenthey can be remade on a higher level of sophisticationbut that they are very incomplete.

We have seen that the knowledge that is sought is not the same. The Buddha searches for the knowledge that overcomes pain, and Socrates, for the knowledge of the essences of the virtues, which he believes will necessarily transform those who know them. But Confucius searches not for knowledge in any abstract sense, but for historical paradigms of goodness, whose moral stature he wants to analyze in

order to be able to assimilate and teach it. So Socrates searches for fixed, still undiscovered definitions, to clarify morality that is still only instinctive and therefore inconsistent; the Buddha teaches the fixed laws he has discovered for escaping pain, including the law that nothing in ordinary life but the law itself is fixed; and Confucius teaches traditionally fixed but neglected truths, which he presses home in tautological-

seeming maxims: the ruler must be a ruler, the subject a subject, the father a father, the son a son (Analects 12.11). 72

The human attractiveness of the four protagonists of this chapter rests, I think, on their combination of moral with intellectual responsiveness, on their fatherly, teacherly, tenderly objective concern. Measured though he is, Confucius requires his fellow men to love one another, and he says forthrightly, "Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire" (Analects 15.24).73 Mencius insists that "whoever is devoid of the heart of compassion is not human" (Mencius 1A.6).74 The

Buddha exhorts monks not to kill any living thing, to lay aside the cudgel and sword, and to live in compassion and kindness to all living things.75

Confucius' remarks are directed toward the educated, who are at least potential officials. As usual, Socrates lends his words intimations of justice: he says that doing ill to anyone is always wrong in order to explain his refusal to flee the city that has unjustly sentenced him to death. And as usual, the Buddha means to help his monks on the road to enlightenment. Confucius, with a vivid sense of near failure, looks for his reward in his own approval of his actions and the approval of still unwritten

history; the Buddha, theoretically above reward and punishment, gets his satisfaction from the help he give others and his certainty of nirvana; and Socrates, who hopes to be rewarded by God, also says that he is answering to his own conscience. Despite their differences, each of these fathers of philosophy is willing to give up everything, including lifethe Buddha, this particular lifefor the sake of his sense of the humane and the just.

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Of the four, only the Buddha leaves testimony of a severe struggle with his own desires and doubts, but he, too, arrives at certainty and, like the otherseven the Socrates who knows nothing for sureteaches in the mode of certainty. Each of the teachers lends his disciples the assurance that disciples need and the certainty that virtue, being identical with

knowledge, can be learned from them and give at least inward peace and security.

Page 113 Chapter 4 Early Logical Relativism, Skepticism, and Absolutism: Mahavira, Chuang- tzu, Protagoras, Gorgias, Plato Theme: Can Being, Negation, and Becoming All Be Reconciled?

The Existent of Uddalaka is superlatively creative life, the Self of Yajnavalkya is superlatively internalized experience, and the being of Parmenides is logical, superlatively fixed existence. All three philosophers create an antithesis between what unchangeably is or remains unchangeably what it iseven as the universal creative forceand between what becomes or changes or (in Parmenides' case) appears to become or

change. As against these three believers in beingvitalistic, selflike, or logicalthere is Heraclitus. Heraclitus, it is true, says that all things are one, but in the sense that the cosmos is a living fire that is lit and goes out by some law of proportions that determines how fire and all things "requite" one another. To Heraclitus, the world is a perpetually dynamic process: what seems to remain the same is really in incessant changeonly the law that governs change remains the

same. When Heraclitean doctrine takes a radical turn in Cratylus (fifthfourth century B.C.E.), the contrast between being and becoming reaches an extreme the starkness of which invigorates the philosopher in Plato. But being of the philosophers contrasts too flagrantly with ordinary experience to attract any but a special kind of

Page 114 thinker. Change and uncertainty are everywhere too obvious. Furthermore, the clashes between different points of view remain too obviously unresolved for any doctrine, whether of static being or of change, to remain unchallenged. The result is that ordinary doubts develop into relativism and skepticism, whose partisans speak in this chapter along with their special enemy, Plato.

A word on the two terms I have just used: The relativist, who claims that nothing can be understood except in relation to its context, is not the same as the skeptic, who says that nothing can be known without serious doubt. The one says: Each moral position can be philosophically justified in terms of the person or group that holds it. The other says: no moral position at all can be persuasively justified in any simply rational way. But relativism has most often abetted skepticism by showing that commonly held opinions

are doubtful because they are merely relativeif there is no justification that is good everywhere, there is no justification that is good in general, so that anyone who is aware of this can suppose that skepticism has won its case. Historically, therefore, extreme relativism and extreme skepticism join, and they are opposed by their enemies as if they were a single evil meant to subvert tradition, decency, common sense, and philosophical understandinga formidable sum of fears!

Here, in the present chapter, Mahavira and other early Jains teach a relativism of viewpoints and a synthesis of being and becoming, along with belief in the adequacy of the way in which they do so and belief in the truth, of course, of their religion. Protagoras represents relativism along with belief in progress and in the teachability of virtue. Gorgias represents the (verbally) immoderate skeptic or the revealer of the paradoxical potential of strictly

philosophical language. Chuang-tzu, just as clever, is extremely relativistic and makes a sharp opposite to Plato, who is usually extremely opposed to relativism and skepticism. However, both philosophers, having learned to be discriminating about negation, make an extraordinary attempt to reconcile all the extremes. 1 Mahavira (599527 B.C.E.): Viewpoints, Maybes, Qualifications

Jainism is named after the twenty- four "conquerors" or jinas in whom tradition sees the origin of this religion.2 The last of the jinas, the surely historical personage and founder or, perhaps, reviver of Jainism, is Mahavira, a title meaning Great Hero. Mahavira's life overlaps that of the Buddha, and much in their careers and religion is parallel. As in the story of the

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Buddha, it is foretold that Mahavira will be either a universal monarch or an all-knowing saint. Like the Buddha, Mahavira finds his way essentially alone. His parents having died, at the age of thirty he gives away all he owns and becomes an ascetic. During his twelve years as a naked wanderer, the privations he inflicts on himself are sharpened by those inflicted by other human beings and by nature. He never loses patience or gives in to hatred but, like a hero in battle, withstands everything. He

meets and for six years is friendly with the ascetic Gosala, founder of the Ajivikas, an ascetic and deterministic sect; but the friendship turns to hatred. One summer night on the banks of the river Rujipalika, after twelve years, six months, and fifteen days of his ascetic search, when he is forty-two years old, Mahavira meditates and reaches a state of complete enlightenment. He is now omniscient, a jina, with perfect knowledge of what he has known imperfectly before. For the next thirty

years he preaches his doctrine. He meets the same kings as the Buddha, but never the Buddha himself, and the Buddha, we know, condemns his teachings. 3

Like the Buddha, Mahavira puts great emphasis on suffering. Suffering, he says, is the result of the bondage caused by ignorance, and ignorance is the desire that attaches humans to sensuous things. Human beings, so he preaches, should learn to be free from emotion and desire and should practice noninjury. In injuring

others, he teaches, one injures oneself: "You yourself are the (being) which you intend to kill; you yourself are the (being) which you intend to ill-use; you yourself are the (being) which you intend to insult."4

Mahavira does not take the Buddhist way of meditation on the absence of self but of harsh penancewhich, he believes, annihilates karmaand of self-restraint, equanimity, noninjury, and nonattachment. All these, he insists, break the tie between one's infinitely conscious "life" and the matter that obscures its knowledge and bliss and keeps it in bondage.5

For our present purpose, Jain philosophy is particularly interesting because of its advocacy of the doctrine of interrelatedness or non- onesidedness (anekanta- vada), which is largely made up of the doctrine of viewpoints (nyaya-vada) and the doctrine of maybe (syad- vada). These articulate the position that everything has innumerable aspects. Reality cannot be fully described from any one viewpoint, so that many views, each with its necessary qualification, are true at the same time.

Were these doctrines formulated by Mahavira himself? As in the case of the Buddha, it is not possible to distinguish between his own and his early followers' views. It is possible, however, to distinguish earlier from later sources and set aside any that were obviously elaborated much later.6 Of Mahavira himself, we can be sure that, out of concern not to

cause

Page 116 suffering, he refuses to force a truth on anyone because even this act results in suffering. A Jain monk is therefore forbidden to be careless and categorically assert or negate statements, and a wise man is enjoined to explain with the help of conditional expressions. Jainism is unusual in assuming that if someone thinks in a different way, there must be a plausible reason for the difference.

It follows that for Mahavira there are plausible reasons for opposite philosophical views. When asked by a disciple if the world is eternal, Mahavira answers yes, it is eternalit has never ceased to exist, exists now, and will always existbut it is also noneternalit regresses, progresses, and regresses again in temporal cycles. 7 To the question whether the world is finite or infinite, Mahavira answers from four points of view. From the point of view of substance, he

says, the world is one and, in this numerical sense, finite. From the standpoint of area, it is finite because, in keeping with the Jain cosmology, its length and breadth are known and its area can be calculated. From the standpoint of time, however, it is infinite because it has never ceased and will never cease to exist. And from the standpoint of modification, the world is infinite, that is, beyond numerical calculation, because it has countless modifications of color,

smell, taste, touch, figure, heaviness, lightness, and other, formless modifications. Likewise the soul is both finite and infinite. It is finite because, being one, it is countable, and also because, by Jain belief, it has parts and a knowable size. But the soul is infinite because, by Jain belief, it is eternal and so has "infinite modifications of knowledge, infinite modifications of direct insight, infinite modifications of character, infinite modifications of formless quality. It has

no end at all."8

It is evident that Mahavira practices what Buddha sometimes recommends: he separates an unanswerable because ambiguous question into several straightforward, answerable ones. In the examples above, it is clear that Mahavira is pointing out that to answer a question, one must know in what respect its terms are being used. To give another example from Mahavira's conversation, when asked if the soul is identical with the body, he answers: It is identical in that it suffers from injuries to the body, but it is different in that

it outlives the body. Changeable in one sense, it is static in another.9 Once this is understood, it is possible to answer contentious philosophical questions both yes and no, with the provision that each answer is from a certain viewpoint. One viewpoint can be positive, another negative, and a third, both positive and negative.

According to the doctrine of viewpoints or standpoints (nyaya- vada), clearly formulated by about the second century A.D., there are five philosophical standpoints, which are: "the common person's view, generic view,

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practical view, linear view and literal view." 10* The common person's view is inexact because, taking things from a remote conceptual distance, a person may see in a forest only woodtrees only as material for building or for fuelor, looking from very close by, the person may see the forest in terms of the hole stumbled into, the forest becoming for the while a place in which one stumbles. Or, to give another, simpler interpretation, the common person's view is any statement that, in a rough and

ready sense, can be understood but is vague. Or, the common person's view is inexact because it does not distinguish between the generic and the particularwhen you see a bamboo or say bamboo you are probably not thinking of what exactly distinguishes bamboos (technically a variety of grass) from various kinds of trees or other tall plants.

The generic view collects various instances under a general heading. To give directions, it may be enough to say, "Turn when you get to the tree," without specifying which particular tree or kind of tree. By this view a particular city is considered only a collection of many buildings. Or, in an absolutist philosophy, the result may be the statement that "everything

is only being." The practical view concentrates on function and (says the old commentary) explains by the use of metaphors: these trees are a treasure (when cut and sold). The practical view was later understood as the practical complement of the general view, that is, as a particularizing standpoint: "I don't want a fruit. I want a mango."

The linear ("straight thread") view takes as real only what exists here and now, what a thing is at the moment. A thing's past and future modes are not considered real. While the old commentary does not say so, this would be the view ascribed to the usual Buddhist analysis.

The fifth, verbal or literal view, takes words at their face value and assumes that their particular meaning signifies what is real:

Even changing the gender, number, word- ending or tense of a word is thought to change its meaning and, therefore, to change the object to which it refers. So it is not appropriate to use words in different genders, number etc., to refer to the same object or event.11

*These are the words of the Jain thinker Umasvati, probably of the second century A.D. He is held in reverence by both of the two Jain sects, the Shvetambara and the Digambara, but their received texts of Umasvati are somewhat different. A variant of this sutra (set of aphorisms) adds two standpoints, the etymological view and the actuality view, making a total of seven, which is the number accepted by

the developed Jain tradition. The five- view variant seems the more ancient. (See the translator's introduction to Umasvati, Tattvartha Sutra p. xxiii, and his remark on p. 27.)

Page 118 Likewise, two words with different etymological origins cannot mean exactly the same thing. Every word has only one meaning and every meaning only one word that fits it; there are no absolute synonyms .*

I am not sure that I have not intruded late or foreign meanings into my explanations, but the idea that we see and refer to things from different viewpoints is in itself quite clear. The doctrine of viewpoints is a complement to that of maybe or in a sense (yes) (syad- vada). 12 Perhaps the first Jain to put the doctrine of in a sense in a developed philosophical way is Kundakunda (fourth century C.E.). He uses the doctrine to solve the problem of being or permanence as against becoming or change. This he does by means

of a synthesis of the two: A substance is anything with qualities and modifications that originates, persists, and decays without changing its "own-nature," its nature as sat, being (the discussion of Aristotle will return to a similar notion of substance). Whatever originates, says the philosopher, must be destroyed, and vice versa; but both processes are impossible unless something underlying them continues to exist.13 As a commentator of Kundakunda explains, to make a pot, one destroys a lump of clay, but both the destruction and

the origin are a persistence of clay substance. If not for this persistence, which connects and makes possible destruction and origination, the changesthe destruction of the clay, the origination of the potcould not occur because they either would have no cause or have an absurd, illusory, nonexistent cause.14 Therefore, as the Jains sayconsidering the relation between origin, destruction, and persistencefrom one viewpoint, a thing is; from a second viewpoint, a thing is not; and from a third viewpoint, a

thing both is andin turnis not. A further, more entertaining possibility is that, in contradiction to logic, a thing is andsimultaneouslyis not, making it indescribable.15 To sum up in the words of a sixth- century Jain logician:

All the standpoints are right in their own respective spheresbut if they are taken to be refutations, each of the other, then

*Since nouns are inflected in Sanskrit, the king in the sentence "The king (raja) sees the boy" can be said to have a different meaning than in the sentence "The boy sees the king (rajanam)." Furthermore, the king as he was is now nonexistent and therefore quite different from the king as he is. Time can change meanings also in the sense that a cook is literally a cook only when cooking, not when sleeping.

Finally, when we refer to the king as rajan we refer to him as one who has the royal insignia, but when we refer to him as bhupa we refer to him as one who protects the earth. (See Matilal, The Central Philosophy of Jainism, pp. 4546.)

The doctrine that there are no absolute synonyms is also held by the Greek sophist Prodicus, who takes care to distinguish between such terms as esteem and praise, will and desire, doing and making, and fearless and brave. (See Plato, Protagoras 337a and 340a, Charmides 163b, and Laches 197b.)

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they are wrong. But a man who knows the "non-one- sided" nature of reality never says that a particular view is absolutely wrong. 16 Chuang- tzu (4th c. B.C.E.): Saying Says Something but Not Something Fixed

Writing during the second century B.C.E., the historian Ssu-ma Ch'ien tells us that Chuang-tzu was a native of Meng, that his personal name was Chou, and that he was employed in Lacquer Garden (either a garden or the city given its name).17 The historian tells us that King Wei of Ch'u, who reigned from 339 to 329 B.C.E., was so impressed by Chuang- tzu's reputation that he invited him

to become prime minister, but Chuang-tzu refused because the position was dangerous and because he preferred to follow his own inclinations: "His chief doctrines were founded upon the sayings of Lao Tzu ... His literary and dialectical skill was such that the best scholars of the age were unable to refute his destructive criticism of the Confucian and Mohist schools."18

The kind of impression Chuang-tzu made on one of his disciples (how remote we cannot tell) can be gathered from an anecdote about his lack of political ambition: Finding him wearing a coarse, patched gown and shoes tied up with string, the King of Wei remarks that Chuang- tzu has fallen into a miserable state. No, says Chuang- tzu, not into a miserable state but into poverty and unlucky times. Haven't you seen how a monkey

swings and frolics in the cedars, catalpas, and camphor trees? he asks. But when it's among prickly bushes and trees, he goes on, it moves cautiously and keeps looking aside and quivering in fear. It's not that its sinews have gone stiff, but the situation doesn't allow the monkey to show how agile it is. If I'd lived under a degenerate ruler and unscrupulous minsters, how could I avoid falling into a miserable state? The

proof is that Pi-kan had his heart cut out by the tyrant Chou.19

The book named Chuang-tzu seems to have been compiled during the second century B.C.E., but the text as we now have it goes back to about 300 C.E., by which time many of its words were already obsolete. Since it represents a number of distinctly different positions, contains anecdotes describing Chuang- tzu in the third person, and ends with a survey of

philosophy in which he is spoken of in the third person, it is an obviously composite book. In spite of Ssu-ma Ch'ien, who thinks that Chuang- tzu is a disciple of Lao Tzu, the pairing of the two in the same, Taoist school was relatively late. This is clear from the "inner chapters,"

Page 120 written by Chuang- tzu himself, in which Lao Tzu is a minor figure, mentioned only twice. 20

The original distance between the nebulous figure or figures of Lao Tzu and the rather more definite one of Chuang-tzu is of importance for the interpretation of Chuang Tzu's thought. This is because Chuang-tzu is often understood to believe in Lao Tzu's kind of ineffable "constant" tao (way, path, nature). Chuang-tzu does often speak of tao, but as usual in ancient Chinese, the text has neither the definite article the nor any indication of singular or plural, so it is

only by a translator's decision that tao can be transformed into the (one) tao, or, alternatively, into the plural, taos. Such a choice signals a decisive turn in interpretation. It appears to me that, as a whole, the text of the inner chapters is more naturally taken not as a denial of surface appearances in favor of a single mystic reality, but as a subtly individual, skepticalbut incompletely skepticalkind of relativism, with the relativistic/ mystical refusal to see the world

either as many or as one because, as Chuang-tzu holds, it is misleading to describe it numerically .*

The exposition of Chuang-tzu that follows is based largely on the book's second chapter, its most remarkable combination of poetry and abstract argument. The subject of the chapter is the spontaneous reciprocity of things, the falsifying of this reciprocity by unnatural, divisive distinctions, and the way in which relativism can equalize the distinctions that humans have tried to impose on nature. Chuang-tzu's

relativism is one that favors the unprejudiced acceptance of all natural possibilities. What

*Chad Hansen, who favors an interpretation of Chuang- tzu that is not mystical or monistic but wholly relativistic, writes: "Dao [tao] remains a general term in the Zhuangzi [Chuang-tzu], not a singular one. The Zhuangzi contains references to great dao, extreme dao, mysterious dao, the ancient king's dao, its, his, or their dao, emperor's dao, human dao, human dao, the dao of governing, moral dao, the dao of long life, the master's dao, the dao you cannot (or do not) dao, the

gentleman's dao, this dao, authentic dao, artificial dao, my dao, ancient dao, the Yellow Emperor's and Yao and Shun's dao, Shendao's dao, Confucius' dao, and Mozi's [Mo- tzu's] dao. He speaks of learning, hearing, saying, forgetting, having, lacking, losing, gaining, naming and daoing dao" (Hansen, A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought, p. 268).

Hansen's interpretation, which is both radical and consistent, does not seem to me to fit the text well enough, but his insistence that tao is not a singular but a general term is in most instances hard to refute. In any case, since the language does not require Chuang-tzu to go beyond a general tao, unqualified by the, a, or any number, there is usually no reason for him to concern himself with a problem that English forces on the translator.

Hansen takes pleasure in the theory that he is the Utah-born reincarnation of Chuang- tzu. But since Chuang-tzu does not believe in any authority, he would not approve of deferring even to himself as an authoritative interpreter of his own thought. (See Hansen, A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought, pp. xxi.)

Page 121 he argues against is artificality, which he takes to include anything fixed in language, logic, morality, or vision of the world.

The chapter begins with the musings of one Tzu- ch'i of Nan- kuo. He is leaning on his armrest and looking up at the sky. He sighs vacantly. He has lost his counterparthis companions, his wife, himself, who can tell? Someone there asks him what this condition of Tzu-ch'i can be. Can the body be made to be like withered wood and the heart/mind like dead ashes? The man leaning on the armrest is not the same as the one who was leaning on it before. Tzu-ch'i answers, I

have lost myself. He is hearing, he says, the winds, the shouting whistling, screeching, moaning noises of nature, the pipes of Heaven. These are the sounds of the myriads of things that, unlike the pipes blown on by men, are allowed to be themselves. Who can their blower be? What were they all born from? Are they separate from myself? It seems that they have a true master, but we have no clues to it. There is something there, but it is without any form. 21

This summary misses the great poetic exuberance of the original but serves to introduce two subjects, that of spontaneous, indeterminate mutuality, and that of the real and yet indeterminate meaning of words. The musing questions go on: Let me consider if anything rules myself, the body I am. Of its hundred joints, nine openings, and six organs, which are your kin, which your servants? Or are you equally pleased with them all? If so, maybe

there is no one among them that can rule, or maybe they take turns being rulers and servants. Or maybe there is a true ruler among them. To look for one and not be able to identify him neither adds to nor detracts from his genuineness.22

The words that have been used, with their ruler-servant distinction, have not clarified anything. Well, words are not just a blowing of breath. Whoever uses words, says something with them. But what he means by them is not yet determined. Do they, in fact, say anything? Or are they useless attempts? If we take them to be different from the twitterings of fledglings, is there or is there not a clear distinction? The

Confucians and Mohists argue: How can tao be hiddenthere are distinctions between genuine and false. How can words be hiddenthere are distinctions between yesthat's itand no. How can tao go on and not be present? How can words be there and not be acceptable? But tao is hidden by petty formulations, words, by the show of glory. And so there are the yes-no distinctions of the Confucians and Mohists, who each

say yes to the other's no and no to the other's yes. If we do want to

Page 122 contradict, to say yes to someone's no and no to yes, clarity, illumination, is needed. 23*

As the sophist would say, everything can be seen from contrary viewpoints. There is nothing that cannot be said to be thatto be otherand nothing that cannot be affirmed to be this. That or this, whichever way you see something provokes the contrary way of seeing it. And so the negation of otherness comes out of affirmationthat comes from thiswhile this, affirmation, comes out of that. The that- this relation is explained by the theory of simultaneous births, the theory that opposites arise simultaneously. Births are

simultaneously deaths, and deaths are simultaneously births .** Likewise, what is allowable from one standpoint is, from another, simultaneous standpoint, not allowable, and vice versa. Anything from any standpoint can be affirmed or denied of anything from another standpoint. Circumstances that lead to yes, affirmation, that's it, also lead to the opposite, no, negation. The sage, however, does not accept the simultaneous splitting of acts and positions into this and that, but illuminates them all by the light of

Heaven, says both yes and yes and no to everything. Then every this-affirmation is also a that, and vice versaneither is split away from the other and neither is simply affirmed or denied. The ideal condition in which neither this nor that holds, where

*To fall into the spirit of these paraphrases, it may help to take account of three simple but critical words, pien, shih, and fei. The word pien means to argue alternatives, to dispute. A cognate word, transliterated in the same way, means to distinguish or to discriminate in the sense of discoursing in a discriminating, rational way. In rational discourse, one distinguishes the correct alternative, shih (this, is this, this-yes, yes) from fei (is not, no). Applied to the ethical problems, those which most concern Chinese

thinkers, shih and fei mean morally right and wrong, or fitting and unfitting. Given a different, more logical nuance, shih and fei mean true and false, or, as verbs, to affirm and to deny. To get beyond mere opinion, one tries "to hit right and wrong adequately." (See Roetz, "Validity in Chou Thought," pp. 8586; Graham, disputers of the Tao, p. 36; Wu, The Butterfly as Companion, p. 159.)

Of course, Chuang- tzu is answered in scornful kind. For example, the Confucian Hsün-tzu (3rd century B.C.E.) repays Chuang- tzu with the words, "Chuangtze was prejudiced towards Nature, and did not know man" (The Works of Hsüntze, trans. H. H. Dubs, London: Probsthain, 1928, p. 264 [book 21]).

** The last chapter of Chuang-tzu lists the paradoxes of the sophist Hui Shih. One of them is the following: "Simultaneously with being at noon the sun declines, simultaneously with being alive a thing dies." These and other paradoxes appear to depend on Hui Shih's use of the idea of the dimensionless point. If something ends at the same point at which something else begins, the ending and beginning are simultaneous, so life is simultaneous with death. The births and deaths of the text above are metaphors for all beginnings

and ends. If they are also meant for literal births and deaths, these may be considered simultaneous because, at every stage of life, something of life vanishes, and sofrom one point of viewlife consists of constant small dyings away that culminate in a great one, which is itself, at one point, simultaneous with life. But this explanation is little more than a guess. (See A. C. Graham, Later Mohist Logic, Ethics and Science, Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and London: School of Oriental and African Studies,

1978, pp. 58, 341.)

Page 123 both join and there is no opposition, is called the pivot of tao (tao shu). This pivot is set in the midpoint of its circleis it the world's circle?so that the direction of the motion around it, now yes, now no, leaves the pivot just as it is. At the pivot, we find the illimitable state of the interdependence and mutuality of judgments and things. 24

The distinctions made by reason and morality all lead to paradoxes. Where to begin? Try to think of any beginning: There is what begins. So there is also what-has-yet- to-begin of what begins. And so there is also what- has-yet-to- begin of what-has-yet- to-begin of what begins. The admission that there is what there is, implies that there is also what is not (not yet)something implies nothing, which is the state of the (some) thing's absence but is also the

potentiality for a something. This implies that there is what-has-yet- to-begin of what is not (yet). This implies that there is what- has-yet-to- begin of what-has-yet- to-begin of what is not (yet). (We've fallen into two infinite regresses, each of which implies the other, the one regress beginning with an actual beginninga somethingand what preceded it, and what preceded what preceded it, and so on, and the other regress beginning with what did

not begina nothingand what of the same nothing-kind preceded it and preceded what preceded it, and so on.) To continue: Suddenly, because we have something, we have nothing. But I do not know which of the two, something and nothing, is or is not (does nothing or a [possibly pregnant] absence or potentiality exist, or exist on a par with something?). And I do not know if, in referring, I have really referred to something or to nothing.25 *

Begin again. Try now to think of the unity of things. It has been said (by the sophist Hui Shih) that heaven and earth count as one unity. True, the myriads of things and I together make one. Now that I have called them one, have I not said something? But by calling them one, have I not added the word one to the total one of things? And the one and the one make two, and the

two and the first one make three; and so on, beyond

• To Chuang- tzu, as to other early Taoists, nothing is what we can take to be a positive concept. I have been careful to use something and nothing here rather than existence and nonexistence. The Chinese words in question are yu and wu. Yu means have, there is, something; and exists, existence. Wu, the opposite of yu, means not to have, there is not, nothing; and nonexistence. The dominant sense is that of having or not having, so something and nothing are often convenient translations.

Chuang-tzu's nothing is not nonexistence in the Western sense but is potentially something. Yu meaning nothing describes what is limited or imperfect; when tao is said to be nothing, it is the nothing that precedes the distinction between something and nothing. That is, the whole, out of which everything comes, is indeterminate and limitless, neither something nor nothing. When the void (nothing) is added to something, there still

remains what-has-yet- to-begin-to- be. But serious metaphysical arguments over yu and wu are considerably later than the present text, the paradoxical force of which may depend on the plasticity of the terms wu and yu. (See Graham, Chuang-tzu, note pp. 5253; and Disputers of the Tao, pp. 41011. Wu, in The Butterfly as Companion, objects [note, p. 164] and uses existence and nonexistence freely.)

Page 124 what a skilled calculator, let alone an ordinary person, is able to sum up. 26 Altogether, those who distinguish between alternatives leave out what is not included in either alternative. The sage embraces them all without discrimination; most people make the distinctions. And so I say that to make distinctions is to fail to see something.27

Who knows what's right? People who sleep in the damp get backaches and paralysis, but do eels? People up in trees tremble and draw back with fear, but do monkeys? People eat animals that feed on hay or grain, deer eat grass, centipedes relish snakes, and owls and crows crave mice. Baboons mate with gibbons, bucks go with does, eels roam with fish. Mao Ch'iang and Lady Li were

admired by people as beauties, but fish that saw them plunged deep, birds that saw them flew high, and bucks and does that saw them leaped away. Which of all these knows what is the right place to live, the right food to eat, and the right kind of beauty? From my standpoint, the rules of benevolence and duty, the paths of approval and disapproval are tangled and confused. How can I understand the

distinctions they make? 28

Are we arguing? But arguments cannot really be settled. Suppose I argue with you and you win, are you really right and am I really wrong? And if I win, am I really right and you really wrong? Or is one of us right and one of us wrong? Or are both of us right or both of us wrong? And if I and you can't settle the argument between us, others will be equally in the dark. Who can tell us what is right? If the judge shares your opinion, how can he decide which opinion is right, and if he shares mine, how can he

decide which is right? And if he shares both our opinions, how can he decide which is right? And if I, you, and another man can't arrive at a mutual understanding, can we find anyone else?29

Is anything really distinguishable from anything else? Can dreaming be distinguished from wakefulness? Once Chuang Choul myselfdreamed a butterfly. So flitting, flitting, he was a butterfly, visibly doing as it pleased, not aware of Chou. Suddenly, he awoke. Then he was utterly and completely Chou. But he does not knowdid Chou dream the butterfly or the butterfly dream Chou. Chou and the butterflythere must be a distinction. This is what is called the transformation of things.30

Chuang-tzu's dream story is less easy to interpret than it may seem at first.31 It is possible to assume that the point of the story is that experience is so fluid, so easily transformative, that the attempt to make a strict division between butterfly and human and waking and dreaming only puts us into a dilemmawe cannot rationally decide exactly what we are or in which state. It is therefore wisest to escape the dilemma by enjoying the transformations without attempting to divide them from one

another. It is possible and, I think, preferable to go beyond this interpretation. The story concerns two very different creatures, a human and a

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butterfly, and two distinctly different states, of waking and of dreaming. The dreamer (in Chuang-tzu) thinks it/he is awake and does not reflect that it/he may be dreaming. Only the awakened human makes this reflection: To begin with, he is surely himself and awake, but then he reflects and becomes uncertain what he is and in what state. He cannot make the final separation, which is also perhaps one between the genuineness or solidity of waking experience and the illusiveness or nothingness of dreaming. The conclusion is not that the distinctions should be

disregarded but that they should be accepted as inevitable, as part of the creative bounty of nature. The fact that only waking human beings are reflective does not tilt the balance in favor of being human and awake, because it is just this condition that raises the problem of identity and shows it to be insoluble. Chuang-tzu's solution is to accept everything without prejudicevarying identities, varying states, and reflective doubtsso that, in the end, he believes, there are only the many distinctions and spontaneous mutual transformations.

I am afraid that this interpretation, which fits the butterfly- dream well, does not fit a later passage, in which Chuang-tzu speaks of the great or ultimate awakening from the dream of life. He adds that Confucius (called, without respect, by his familiar name) is a dream and then tells his auditor, "I call you a 'dream'I, too, am a dream."

Without himself undertaking to explain the mystery of dreams, Chuang-tzu says that once in a great while a sage appears who understands it. 32

This passage, helpful to those who see Chuang- tzu as a full- fledged mystic, reflects his lovenot unlike Plato'sfor vividly metaphorical, mythlike stories. Chuang-tzu is not constructing a system andagain, not unlike Platomay well have moved from one point of view to another without committing himself fully to any. However, all things considered, it appears most likely that Chuang-tzu does not (usually) object to

distinctions as such. They cannot be avoided, and so, naturally, should not be avoided; they are the variety of life. But distinctions should never be allowed to rule and become exclusive.

Trying, always unsystematically, to express how we can think about things without lapsing into rigidity, Chuang-tzu uses such phrases as "lodging words" (yü yen), "weighty words" (chung yen), and "goblet words" (chih yen). To use "lodging words" is to "borrow a standpoint outside in order to sort a matter out," to "lodge" for a while at someone else's standpoint. When you adopt the other person's way of seeing things, he responds. In giving up your own position for the while, you put the responsibility for the standpoint on the other person. But lodging does not exclude

weighting. One 'weights' what one says by giving it the weight of experience. The

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weightiest words are therefore those of a venerable teacher, though age alone is far from enough to grasp the root and branch of things. As for "goblet words," they are responses that remain spontaneous and adaptable. The name apparently comes from the kind of goblet that when too full tips over and then rights itself. To spill over in the sense of goblet words seems to be to speak in such natural words and

with such spontaneous changes of meaning that no one is confused, because the meaning turns itself right side up as the words flow on naturally. It says most when it says least. Let the stream find its own channels. 33 The last chapter of the Chuang- tzu book says that Chuang- tzu

was not arrogant toward the myriad things. He did not make demands with a "That's it" and "That's not," and so he got along with conventional people ... Above, he roamed with the maker of things; below, he made friends with those for whom life and death are externals and there is neither end nor beginning.34

Protagoras (485410), Gorgias (483376): Man Is the Measure of Everything, Words Capture Only Words

Plato, who emphasizes the negative connotations of the word sophist, sees them as mercenaries who sell their logical and rhetorical skills without caring for the truth.35 According to Xenophon, Socrates called them prostitutes for selling their intellectual favors.36 In Plato's Sophist there is a hunt for a definition of the sophist that makes him out to be the hired hunter of rich young men, the retail merchant of learning as soul nourishment, the athlete of specious debating, the

(perhaps useful) purifier from conceits that block understanding, and the counterfeiter of philosophy. With all the elements of sophistry joined in comically miscellaneous definition, sophistry turns out to be

the art of contradiction making, descended from an insincere kind of conceited mimicry, of the semblance- making breed, derived from image making, distinguished as a portion, not divine but human, of production, that presents a shadow play of words. (Sophist, 268c)37

The sophists are too free and freely contentious to accept Plato's fixed, eternal principles. Professional knowers and teachers, they come from all over Greece to Periclean Athens not to profit from philosophical truth but from rich clients and an active intellectual life. By Socrates' time,

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they are professional teachers who give a higher education to those who can afford to pay for it. This education furnishes information on many subjects, including the science of the times. It is particularly useful to those who are anxious to achieve success in the courtroom and in politics. Although, like Confucius and Mencius, the important Greek sophists have their retinues of students, they are less concerned, broadly speaking, to improve their character or increase their wisdom than to teach them

the arts of persuasion. These arts include rhetoric and argument by antithesis, especially in what concerns politics and ethics. To this end, they teach how to analyze problems into their components, each of which can then be considered and dealt with separately, pro or con. Generalizations about the sophists are likely to be misleading because they are individuals, not to say, individualists, each with his own specialties. But their very presence serves to put old dogmas and ways of

conduct in question.

Much the most famous sophist is Protagoras of the city of Abdera. He appears to be close to Pericles, who chooses him to write the code of laws for the Athenian colony of Thurii. In Plato's dialogue named after him, he is treated humorously but with respect, even affection. An arguer by profession, Protagoras claims the ability to make the weaker argument the stronger. According to Aristotle, Protagoras holds that contradictory statements

about the same thing are true, and that it is possible either to assert or deny something of every subject (Metaphysics 1007b18). It is in keeping with this position that Protagoras' lost work On the Gods began, we are told, with words that led the Athenians to banish him and burn his books .* The possibly fateful words are: "Concerning the gods I cannot know either that they exist or that they do not exist, or what form they might have, for there is

much to prevent one's knowing: the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of man's life." 38

• Diogenes Laertius (9.52) reports that because of the introduction to Protagoras' book, saying that the existence of the gods was unknowable, the Athenians expelled him, had a herald collect all the copies of his works, and burned them in the marketplace. Philostratus also reports (Lives of the Sophists 1.10) that the Athenians banished Protagoras. But according to Sextus Empiricus (9.5556), the Athenians voted the death penalty, after which Protagoras fled and then died at sea. Hard as it is to ignore

these reports, it seems strange that Plato can know of such drastic punishments, openly debated and voted on, and yet have Socrates state in the Meno (91e92a) that during Protagoras' forty years of practice as a sophist and up to the presenta dramatic date of about 402 B.C.E.his reputation has been consistently high. This is not to deny that Aristophanes' Clouds and other evidence shows that conservatives felt menaced by the views of both philosophers and sophists, not a few of

whom compounded their philosophically unsettling radicalism by their sinfully foreign birth. (See Burkert, "Athenian Cults and Festivals," pp. 24648, and Ostwald, "Athens as a Cultural Centre," pp. 36769.)

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Protagoras' lasting impression on European philosophy comes from the statement, as reported by Plato, that "of all things man is the measure, of things that are that they are, and of things that are not that they are not." To give an example, the same wind seems cold to one person and not to the other. Because the degree of cold appears different to each person and because appearance and perception are the same,

everything that appears to anyone is real in relation to him. In other words, reality is determined individually. 39 * Plato's Socrates asks: If this is so, by what evidence can he and his partner in discussion be sure they are awake rather than asleep and dreaming the conversation in which they are engaged?40 If it is the individual's experience that determines reality, Socrates continues, why did Protagoras

not say that the measure of all things is the pig or the baboon? Why did we stand in awe of him if, in fact, he was no more intelligent than other men or even a tadpole?

Speaking in Protagoras' name, Socrates answers: A wise man is one who can change someone to whom bad appears. The doctor cures the sick man to whom food is distasteful. In the same way, the sophist uses his discourse to change someone's state that is, for that person, depraved, unsound, or sickly to a sound, healthy state. The difference is not one between falsehood

and truth but between worse and better.41

Gorgias, a native of Leontini in Sicily, travelled a great deal, but often stayed in Athens. He died at the notable age of at least one hundred and five (of the philosophers dealt with in this book, only Hsün Tzu comes near to competing with him in longevity). He was admired for his rhetorical and sophistical skills, which earned him high feesunder the influence of rhetoric, he claims, all are made slaves not

by force but willingly.42 With rhetorical emphasis, he praises the powers of speech and says:

The effect of speech on the condition of the soul is comparable to the power of drugs over the nature of bodies. For just as different drugs dispel different secretions from the body, and

• Protagoras was later charged with contending, in effect, that the wind is both cold and warm, each person perceiving one of the two coexisting contradictory qualities. The charge rests on his saying "that the reasons [logoi] of all appearances are present in the matter, so that the matter is capable, as far as lies in its own power, of being everything that appears to everybody. For the man whose condition is natural grasps, out

of what is contained in matter, what can appear to those in a natural condition, whereas the man whose condition is not natural grasps what can appear to those in his condition" (Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism 1.216; trans. Sprague, ed., The Older Sophists, p. 11). Both Democritus and Plato object to Protagoras relativism on the ground that he is bound by his doctrine to admit that if every person's opinion is true for that person, then

those who hold that Protagoras is wrong are right for themselves (Theaetetus 171a). (See Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement, pp. 107109.)

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some bring an end to disease and others to life, so also in the case of speeches, some distress, others delight, some cause fear, others make the hearers bold, and some drug and bewitch the soul with a kind of evil persuasion. 43

Gorgias teaches the habit, Plato says, of answering any question in a fearless, confident style. "For he offers himself for questioning to any Greek who wishes, on any subject he pleases, and there is no one he does not answer."44 Not all Athenians admired him. A line in Aristophanesno lover of intellectualsnames Gorgias as one of the rascally race of sycophants who live by their tongues and who, when sacrificed anywhere in Attica, have their tongues cut out.45

In addition to various orations, some on political matters, Gorgias wrote a book called On the Nonexistent or On Nature. A surviving fragment of this book is the most sustained example we have of the technically exact reasoning of the sophists of the time. In this fragment Gorgias says that the truth concerning the real world cannot be transmitted by words (or thoughts, or reasonings, as logoi may be translated). This, he says, is because words can never be the reality they appear to capture about

the world. The purpose of his argument is not self- evident .* It seems to me that it is intended to display the power of tricky logic to force assent to even absurd conclusions. I say this because it appears immediately self-refuting to argue in order to persuade others that arguments cannot be conveyed from one person to anotherGorgias says elsewhere that skill in logoi can be used in a good cause. But since Gorgias' reasoning is apparently meant to show that a Parmenidean kind of logic of it is and it is

not is self- refuting, the idea that tricky logic can be led absurd conclusions is an example of the very point he is trying to make. In any case,

*One question is whether or not the argument takes the verb to be in a purely existential or in a predicative sense. Unfortunately for us, in Parmenides and even Gorgias it may retain something of both senses. A closely related question is whether the argument is about the reality represented by the verb or about the difficulties involved in the verb's use. If it is about the reality, the argument may be a reduction to absurdity of ontological pronouncements like those made by Parmenides. But if the argument is about predication,

then Gorgias "is arguing that there is no way in which the verb 'to be' can be applied to a subject without contradictions arising and he is thinking primarily of statements about phenomena." On this interpretation of Parmenides' argument, the contradictions he and the other Eleatics identify in the use of negative statements are extended by Gorgias to positive statements as well. (See Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement, p. 96.)

Since I see no way by which to decide between the interpretations, I adopt what seems to me to be the simplest hypothesis: The argument is, at once, about the verb to be and the reality it represents. What it demonstrates is that, when used by a sophisticated enough sophist, logical, especially Eleatic language can be led to absurd conclusions.

Page 130 his arguments, patterned on Parmenides- like antitheses, create a logical mechanism, often borrowed by subsequent skeptics, for putting causation into doubt.

According to Gorgias' argument, which will be quoted later, nothing really exists. Having demonstrated this radical thesis to his own satisfaction, or enough for the sophistical purpose of his argument, he goes on to reason that even if anything exists, it cannot be known by thought, and if it can be known by thought, what is known cannot be transmitted to anyone else. In complete contradiction to common sense,

Gorgias argues so: It is our eyes that determine what is visible; we do not deny the existence of visible things because we do not hear them. By analogy, if thought, like vision and hearing, was its own criterion for existence, everything we think should be known to exist simply because it is thought. But this is absurd because we think of many impossible things. Therefore the testimony of thought cannot have the veridical force of that

of the senses; and we must conclude that whatever, for the sake of argument, we assumed to exist cannot be grasped by thought.

Gorgias ends his argument by contending that even if anything exists and is grasped by thought, it cannot be communicated. The reason is that if we assume that there are externally existing objects of vision, hearing, and the senses in general, the visible things among them are apprehended by vision, not hearing, and the audible ones by hearing, not vision. How, then, can things seen or heard be revealed to another person? After all, the means by which we believe we reveal them is

logos, which is speech or thought; but logos is not the same as the existing things it is supposed to reveal. Actually, therefore, we reveal to others not external existing things, but only logos (speech or thought), which is quite different from them; for just as visible things cannot become audible, so the assumed external things cannot become our logos; and because they are not logos, they cannot be revealed to another person. 46

I cut Gorgias' argument short to summarize it: Each sense is the unique medium for what it alone can convey. In other words, each sense is unlike any other sense and is unable to convey what any other sense conveys. The medium of words, too, is unique and is different from that of any of the senses, which alone convey external realityspeech or thought cannot convey what the senses do. One kind of speech may be

better than another, but speech is unable to convey external reality because it cannot be that reality. To convey external things, words or thoughts would have to correspond with them, or be the same as they are, or, briefly, to be them. But this is impossible, for words or thoughts are too different from things, so what is cannot be thought or expressed. Parmenides had identified being, thinking, and saying.

Now Gorgias

Page 131 separates them by making them radically and paradoxically incompatible with one another. Plato (428348 B.C.E.): The Friend, the Critic, and the Reconciler of Ideas 47

There is a group of old stories that assign Plato, like the Buddha, a miraculous birth. In Plato's case it is said to be by the agency of Apollo and, some versions say, by way of a dream (Christian authors claim that this story shows that there were instances of virgin birth in ancient Greece). As an omen of future eloquence, bees left honey on the infant Plato's lips.48 A more credible story tells that young Plato first intended to write tragedies, but on his way to enter his tragedy in a

competition, he heard Socrates and threw his play into the fire.49 From that time on, the story says, Plato, then twenty years old, was Socrates' pupil. The story may remind us that, to Plato, writing is a problematic. Socrates wrote nothing, but Plato, who wrote a good deal, retains a suspicion of written words because, as Socrates says in a dialogue, these words talk as if they were intelligent, but if you ask books anything about what they have said, they just repeat

themselves. Writing, which is indiscriminate and gets unfairly treated, needs a parent to come to its help; so writing is not really serious but a pastime good for memories in one's old age. Better to select a person of the right kind, says the Socrates who is Plato, and by dialectics sow words based on knowledge and able to defend themselves and lead on to blessedness. At best, writing is a way of reminding those who already know the truth that

the only serious lessons on justice, honor, and goodness are those written in the soul of the listener.50

Such words may explain why Plato never writes any system but always varying dialogues in whichafter the first, Socratically indecisive onesa teacher and a disciple usually find their dialectical way toward a truth of the sort that may well vanish when written down. Speaking of himself in the third person, Plato is careful to mention that he was present at Socrates' trial and, again, that he was not present at Socrates' deathreporting on the event, Phaedo says that he thinks that Plato was ill at the time.51 But

Plato does not otherwise participate as a character in the dialogues he writes and we can be sure of little about his own preferences except that they change as the characters he invents or half-invents talk themselves into as close an imitation of true dialectical conversation as one can arrive at in written-down philosophy. Therefore we cannot summarize Plato's system of philosophyno such system exists in the dialogues taken as a wholebut only note how his preoccupations change with each

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different cast of characters and how the writer Plato shifts from comedies of philosophical ignorance to dialectical dramas favoring the hypothesis of Ideas, immortal souls, virtue as harmony, and a universe ruled by justice. As Plato grows older, the problems and solutions he deals with grow more complex, the expositions grow more technical, and the favorite hypothesis, that of Ideas, is subjected to sharp criticism though never abandoned. Aristotle at

one point speaks of the account Plato gives in his so-called unwritten teaching, and Aristotle is reported to have said that Plato lectured on the one Good .* There is no reason to doubt this report; but the unwritten teaching, whatever it was, cannot be reconstructed from anything so vague. Besides, there is no good reason to suppose that Plato considered his unwritten teaching more important than his dialogues, or that his

unwritten views were more fixed than those that his dialogues teach. 52 He remains a creator who speaks through always different situations and voices.

If any conception can be singled out as Plato's almost constant philosophical preoccupation and heritage, it is that of the Idea or Form. In Greek, the terms eidos and idea mean appearance, shape, or form, and take on the additional meaning of characteristic property or type.53 As I have said, Aristotle explains that Plato was attracted in his youth to the radically Heraclitean doctrine of Cratylus that everything sensible is always in flux and cannot really be

known. Having accepted Socrates' belief in the universalthe general definitionin ethical matters, Plato applied the belief more widely. He claimed, says Aristotle, that because sensible things were always changing, general definitions can only be of something else, which he called Ideas. He said that sensible things are named and given their identities by means of their relation to the Ideas, a relation he called participation. Unlike Socrates,

Plato and the Platonists give their universals or general definitions a separate existence.54

The separating off of certain general ideas into a realm of their own was not a new philosophical practice because the Pythagoreans had already separated off numbers from everything physical. That is, they had equated numbers with geometrical shapes and musical intervals and considered the numbers to be either actual (though nonphysical) constituents of nature or laws of relationship imported into nature. Put very freely in

*The report is by Aristoxenus, who says that Aristotle used it to show that a lecturer should, unlike Plato, preface his lecture so as make his audience receptive to what follows. "Themistius reports the anecdote to illustrate the point that the true philosopher does not seek public acclaim and that his discourse has the same force whether delivered to a crowd or in solitude

... Simplicius

also makes mention of the lecture on the Good and reports that Xenocrates, Speusippus, Aristotle, Heracleides, Hestaiaios, and others were present and wrote up the notes that they took during the lecture" (Reginos, Platonica, p. 125).

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the latter sense, the Pythagoreans' basic notion is that there are numbers in themselvessay two, four, and six, or better, the abstract natures twoness, fourness, and sixness, and so on, of numbers in themselves. These abstract essences are, each one alone and in relation to the others, so perfectly exact and so completely unaffected by time and placethey neither age, break, nor vary from one locale to anotherthat they must be regarded as quite different from

physical objects. Physical objects have numerical qualities, a definite number and numerically specifiable size, weight, and so on. But physical objects are also invariably subject to aging, breakage, and inexactness and have none of the purity of numbers in themselves. The physical objects' numerical qualities and relationships cannot come from the objects themselves but must depend on the qualities we know exactly in numbers in

themselves, the nature of which is, so to speak, imported into or shared by material objects. Nature is discovered to obey, so to speak, the immaterial, absolute laws of mathematics. Therefore the Pythagoreans say, as Aristotle reports, "that things themselves are numbers," or, more conformably to the account I have been giving, that existing things owe their being to the imitation of numbers. 55

In his dialogues, Plato compares or identifies an Idea (a Form) with a plan or model, or with a number or ideal geometrical shape. An Idea is like the plan by which, for instance, a house is made. More exactly, it is the eternal model (paradeigma) of which the physical object (the aistheton) is a kind of copy (eikon). In the Timaeus, Plato thinks of the world as the work of a god- craftsman who makes everything from Ideas, which he uses as plans

for universal creation. Like mathematical objects such as numbers or ideal geometrical shapes, the Ideas are in no place and not subject to time, even though all physically existing things are copies of them and "participate" in them. Sensible objects are always changing, fluctuating, impermanent. Knowledge, on the contrary, has to be stable in order to be knowledge at all; if its very nature would change as a physical change was taking place, there would be no

knowledge because there would be no stable person to know and nothing stable enough to be known: "If that which knows [the soul] and that which is known [the Idea, the Form] exist forever, and the beautiful and the good and every other thing also exist, then I do not think that they can resemble a process of flux (Cratylus 440b)."56

Of course, an Idea is not the same as that to which it lends itself. To give one kind of example (reminiscent of but contrary to Uddalaka's doctrine), heat and fire are not the same, nor are cold and snow, but fire can never as such admit cold nor snow heat, so that the name of the Idea is always attached as a distinguishing characteristic to whatever always has the Idea.

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The Ideas are grasped by reason. Human beings come to know them by bringing dispersed particulars under a Formfor example, the many instances of love under the Form of Loveand, by means of this ability to collect like instances, they see what belongs together and learn to be clear and consistent in their thought. Because a comprehensive Idea contains others of narrower scope, the philosopher divides the comprehensive Idea according to its "natural joints" until a

contained Idea has been divided off clearly (Phaedrus 265de). This method of collection and division, to which Plato gives the name dialectic, is the germ of the notion of scientific classification.

Plato needs and tries out hierarchical schemes of Ideas. In the Republic, the Good is the highest, in the Symposium, the Beautiful, and in the Parmenides, the One. In the Sophist, to which I will return, he takes up the problem of how the Ideas are related to one another. This problem may be dramatized as that of the celestial architect who has to decide which Ideas are needed to make a

world, and once he has chosen them, how to combine or blend them, all without violating the laws of logic, which are those of possibility. Plato takes on quite a job and, being no demiurgos, is not up to it; but for a merely human being, his efforts are quite remarkable.

Actually, in creating and recreating his hypothesis of Ideas, Plato becomes quite aware of its difficulties. He exposes these in the Parmenides, in which a young, hesitant Socrates defends the hypothesis in a discussion with Zeno, Parmenides' disciple, and then, more searchingly, with Parmenides himself. In Plato's sense of the word, Parmenides' critique is a dialectical one, that is, it considers

the Ideas from one viewpoint, another, and then another, testing each viewpoint for weaknesses and venturing cures until a tentative solution emerges. As logical laws are applied to test the hypothesis, Socrates falters. Sometimes Parmenides puts in a positive, helpful word, and in the end he lays the failure of the arguments in favor of Ideas to Socrates' youthto defend Ideas, he says, one

has to have both wide experience and natural ability. Parmenides even adds that if someone denies that there are Ideas of existing thingsa character for each single thinghe is denying the necessary sense of a thing's sameness with itself and "will utterly destroy the power and significance of thought and discourse" (135c). 57 So while the hypothesis of Ideas has been shown to be subject to

various dilemmas, it seems to be assumed that they can be overcome.

I abbreviate all this argument between Zeno, Parmenides, and Socrates but retain its very simple vocabulary and its characteristic transitions. To begin at the argument's beginning: Speaking for Parmenides, Zeno defends his teacher's belief in absolute unity by saying that things cannot be many because, if they were, they would be both like and unlike one another, and

Page 135 this is a logical absurdity. True to Parmenides' radical way of arguing, Zeno identifies the logical characteristics of likeness and unlikeness with the whole nature of objects that are alike (in being identical with themselves) and unlike (in being unlike other objects). Zeno points out that an object cannot suffer the coexistence in itself of sameness and difference.

Socrates answers by distinguishing sharply between the logical characteristics in themselves, that is, the Ideas, and the objects that share in them: Opposite Ideasheat and cold, equality and inequalitycannot qualify one another, but they can simultaneously qualify sensible objects. In this vein, Socrates answers Zeno that the difficulty is solved if there are two separate and different Ideas, one of likeness and another of unlikeness, of which things get certain shares, so that some could be both like and unlike. The Ideas suffer no changeone

and many are always what they arebut I, Socrates, am one and many, with a right side, a left side, a front, a back, and so on, so that I, who am one by being Socrates, am also many (127d130a). 58 Parmenides enters the discussion and says that Socrates separates characteristics, such as the Just, the Beautiful, and the Good, from the things that share them. What, he asks, about Man, or Fire, or Water (Uddalaka would accept these Ideas, though his names are not identical with Ideas).

Socrates says he is perplexed about these possible Ideas; and he gives the same answer to the following question if there are separate Ideas of ridiculous things such as hair, mud, and dirt (130a131a).

Parmenides then asks if each thing that gets a share of an Idea gets a share of the whole Idea or gets only a part of it. How, he asks, can the same one thingthe Ideabe wholly present in many things and therefore separate from itself? What can sharing be if the sharing is of a kind that does not diminish what is shared, as it would have to diminish it if what was shared was either the whole Idea or a part of it? If we share in the Idea at

all, what is left of it for itself? If anything shares in a part, that part is unique to what shares it and is unlike other parts in other things that share the particular Idea. But if participation is neither in the whole Idea nor in part of it, in what sense can there be participation at all? If things did participate in the whole of an Idea, the Idea would be separated from itself.

Socrates answers: The Idea could be like one and the same day, which is in many different places at once and yet not separate from itself (131ac). But, asks Parmenides, can such an Idea as largeness in itself be divided into parts that are larger and smaller? And what about something being given a small part of the equal? Will it be equal to anything by means of a share of equality that is less

than equality itself? And if a small

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object gets a share of smallness, will the addition of the smallness make it smaller than it was? And what about the pluralizing of every Idea? asks Parmenides. For example: If largeness is large as are the large things that share in it, then the likeness between largeness in itself and something that is large is still another largeness, and so largenesses will multiply without end (131d132b).

Socrates answers: But what if each of the Ideas is a thought that exists nowhere but in minds, so it can remain one and not be multiplied?

No, says Parmenides, the thought has to be of something known to exist, which is not merely a thought, and to be common to a number of things, and it is this common nature that is the Idea. Furthermore, if the Idea is a thought, because it is the same Idea all over, whatever is composed of thoughts must be purely thought, nothing else (132bc).

Socrates answers: But still, Parmenides, the Ideas are paradigms fixed in the nature of things that things resemble.

But then, Parmenides answers Socrates, if the likeness that is in us is different from likeness in itself, there will be likenesses of likeness without end: there will be the Idea, Likeness; there will be the things that are like each other; and there will be the likeness in the things that are like each other. Parmenides adds: The greatest of the difficulties is this, that the relations between the Ideas are confined to one another

and therefore are not the same as the relations among ourselves, including such relations as are supposed to be gained from sharing in the Ideas. A slave is the slave of his master, not of the Idea of Master, any more than the master is master of the Idea of Slave. So Ideas such as Beauty in itself and the Good in itself are unknowable for us. Persons are related to persons and objects, while Ideas are related

to Ideas. So if Ideas are what we take them to be, they are unknowable to us because they pertain to the absolute truth, not to the truth as we know it in our world, which is relative only to the things that exist in our world. Only the god has exact enough knowledge to know the Ideas. But what the god knows is not the same as knowledge among us, SO knowledge in the god's world and knowledge

in our world are separate, strangely enough (132d134d).

Parmenides' conclusion is that Socrates has a noble, even divine impulse toward argument but has undertaken to mark off Ideas too soon, before he has been properly trained (135d). Parmenides is begged by those present to play what he calls the "laborious game" of hypothesizing and show them what proper training is like. He proposes to begin with his own hypothesis about the one and what must follow if one is or one is not (136a137b).

Parmenides' training exercisesthe source of wisdom to the Neoplatonists but a matter for endless, inconclusive debates among modern interpretersdo not concern us here.

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In the Sophist and other late dialogues, Plato takes up the difficulties shown in the Parmenides and tries to fit Ideas to one another and to the world more plausibly. In the Sophist, he works out a scheme to show how Ideas can participate in and exclude one another, and how such relations and nonrelations between Ideas are reflected in the world of phenomena. According to Plato's scheme, a set of very general Ideas dominates the rest, and Ideas are

made up of interwoven elements (remember Uddalaka's much simpler formulation).

Taking on the guise of an Eleatic Stranger, Plato says: Some of the Ideas (now called Kinds) combine with one another, and some do not combine; and some combine with a few others and some with many; and some pervade all. Movement and Rest, for example, are incompatible with one anotherif combined, Movement would come to a standstill and Rest would be in movement (251c252d). The Ideas combine or not just as the letters of

the alphabet combine or not, the vowels being especially good for pervading the others. And just as the art of the musician is needed to understand which sounds can or cannot be blended, a science is neededthat of dialectic or philosophyto distinguish the different Kinds (Ideas) from one another and discover how one Kind unites many others or runs through and divides a Kind into other Ideas. Reality and the Ideas that together make it up,

have a structure that philosophy can make clear (252e254b).

The Stranger then establishes that there are five very important Kinds: Being (or Existence), Rest and Motion, and Sameness and Difference. It is hard to tell if by Motion the Stranger means physical motion alone or also the self-motion of life elsewhere attributed only to souls. Whatever he exactly means by the term, he says that Rest and Motion can never blend with one another because if they did, Motion would be at rest and Rest in motion; but both Rest and Motion surely are, so it is clear that

Being blends with both. But though each blends with Being and also with Sameness, Being and Sameness are distinctbecause while Rest and Motion both are, both exist, they are not the same as one another but distinguished by Difference. And so on (254d255d).

One point more, having to do with the tricky matter of is and is not: The Eleatic Stranger says that each Idea clearly is; but since, by the nature of Difference, it is neither Being itself nor any Idea it is different from, every Idea not only is but also is not. Actually, even Being is not, meaning, is not any other Idea. Parmenides is therefore wrong in saying that that which is cannot not be. Why? Because in

establishing that even Being is not, all that we establish is that it is different from other Ideas. When we say that something is not tall we mean that it is shorter than or equal to something else. In the same way, what is not beautiful is contrasted not

Page 138 with what does not exist but with what we take to be beautiful. When we say that something is not, we mean not that it does not exist at all but that it is different from whatever we are going to mention. So Father Parmenides is refuted (and Father Mencius, with his stress on the equivocality of words, is vindicated) (255e259b).

Plato's changing doctrines show the difficulties a philosopher runs into in analyzing and judging the world by means of logic that is assumed to be identical with reality as such. At this point I stop my discussion of Plato, without venturing a contemporary analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of his theory of Ideas or of the arguments repeated from the Parmenides, which often have the sound of sophistry-by- antithesis but which Plato

later often retains or tries to remedy. My excuse for stopping at this point is only that this is not primarily a book of critical analysis, and I have to stick fairly close to my job and not dissipate it in something else .* Discussion I begin with a memorandum consisting of brief, sometimes abbreviated quotations:

Mahavira: The world is, Jamali, eternal ... The world is, Jamali, non- eternal. 59

Samntabhadra (600 C.E.): A thing is existentfrom a certain point of view. It is non- existentfrom another point of view. It is both existent and non- existent in turnfrom a third point of view. It is indescribable (simultaneously existent and non- existent)from a fourth point of view. It is existent and indescribablefrom a fifth point of view. It is non- existent and indescribablefrom a sixth point of view. It is both existent and non-existent and indescribablefrom a seventh point of view.60

*In a discussion of various interpretations of the Sophist, a scholar adopts what he calls "the indeterminacy position" meaning that there is no demonstrably true interpretation of past philosophical texts but only a range of "more and more plausible interpretations." I do not know if this scholar wants to imply that, in contrast with past texts, those of living philosophers are not subject to such indeterminacy. Could a resurrected Plato give a true interpretation of his own philosophy? Who, as Chuang-tzu would ask, would be the right judge of the demonstrationPlato would be prejudiced in his own favorand what judge would be the

right one to judge the judge to be right? (See Pelletier, Parmenides, Plato, and the Semantics of Not-Being, chap. 1 [p. 6 quoted].)

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Chuang-tzu (and Hui Tzu): No thing is not "other," no thing is not "it" ... Hence it is said: "'Other comes out from 'it,' 'it' likewise goes by 'other,"" the opinion that 'it' and 'other' are born simultaneously. However, "Simultaneously with being alive one dies," and simultaneously with dying one is alive, and simultaneously with being allowable something becomes unallowable and simultaneously with being unallowable it becomes allowable. (chap. 2) 61 *

Protagoras: He said that of all things the measure is the man, meaning simply that what appears to each person also is positively the case. But once this is taken to be so, the same thing turns out both to be and not to be, and to be bad as well as good, not to mention the other opposites. (Aristotle, Metaphysics 11.6)62

Gorgias: The nonexistent does not exist; for if the nonexistent exists, it will both exist and not exist at the same time. Moreover, the existent does not exist either. For if the existent exists, it is either eternal or generated. If the existent is eternal, it does not have any beginning, and not having a beginning, it is without limit, and if it is without limit, it is nowhere. Moreover, neither can the existent

be generated, for if it has come into being, it has to come either from the existent or the nonexistent. But if it is existent, it has not come to be, but already exists. (On the Nonexistent or on Nature).63

Plato: We have not merely shown that the things that are not, are, but we have brought to light the real character of "not- being." We have shown that the nature of the Different has existence and is parcelled out over the whole field of existent things with reference to one another; and of every part of it

that

*The ambiguous brevity of the above translation represents the very terse original relatively well. A more expanded, less ambiguous translation reads: "Everything is 'that' in relation to other things and 'this' in relation to itself. We may not be able to see things from the standpoint of 'that,' but we can understand them from the standpoint of 'this.' Therefore, it may be said that 'that' derives from 'this' and that 'this' is dependent upon 'that.' Such is the notion of the cogenesis of

'this' and 'that.' Nonetheless, from the moment of birth death begins simultaneously, and from the moment of death birth begins simultaneously. Every affirmation is a denial of something else, and every denial is an affirmation of something else' (Mair's translation, p. 15).

I do not understand the "nonetheless" of the next- to-last sentence of this translation.

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is set in contrast to "that which is" we have dared to say that precisely that is really "that which is not." (Sophist 258de) 64

These philosophers play with negation as if it was the key to every room, lighted and dark, full and empty, in the home of being. Aided by negation, they study how concepts are related to one another, are related to everyday reality, and are related to human judgment. Their study requires them to answer whether or not philosophical concepts contradict what most people take their experience to be. Hence the clash between, on the one side,

an objectivizing philosophy, which accepts changeless truth as the unperceived but sole reality, and, on the other side, relativistic and skeptical philosophies, which refuse to go beyond the rival values, disorder, and doubt they see everywhere. What Mahavira, Chuang-tzu, and Plato all learn from the clash is to use the term nonexistence to mean other than. But Plato by no means forgets the sense in which the nonexistent

is impossible; Mahavira (or the Jains) understand self- contradiction both in the sense of the illusory and the inexpressible; and Chuang- tzu, who rejects the logical sense, plays with the others.

Of the philosophers discussed here, Protagoras and Chuang- tzu appear concerned less with relativism in general than with ethical and other forms of evaluation. While it is not certain if Protagoras means relativism to apply only to individual humans or also to humans as compared with other species, Chuang-tzu applies it happily to both individuals and species, and, going further than Protagoras, is his own kind of anarchist. Both he and

(probably) Protagoras say that it is possible to assert and deny something of every subject, that is, that contradictories can both be true, a view that the later Jains include in their doctrine of viewpoints.

Compared with both Protagoras and Chuang-tzu, Gorgias, taken literally, is a skeptic who doubts the most elementary abilities of sensation, perception, conception, and learning. Taken less literally, he is demonstrating the impotence of a philosophically common kind of language. Taken literally, his intellectual tactic resembles that of Parmenides (and, later, Descartes) in that he conceives of sensory perception and of thought (put into words) as closed realms unable to make contact

with each other (though Descartes, of course, allows thought to take extended things as its objects). That is, empirical abilities such as sensory perception and verbal thought are conceived almost as if they were logical contradictories such as (for him) existence and nonexistencean approach that Plato criticizes in Parmenides and himself tries to escape. Or perhaps Gorgias too is demonstrating the need to escape.

Mahavira, or rather the typical Jain philosopher, has much of the relativist in him but is, at bottom, a refined absolutist because he insists that his particular understanding of relativity is quite correct; yet he sug-

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gests more than he allows himself to believe. Like the older Plato, Kundakunda tries to create a synthesis of abstractions that fits the problem of being and becoming. The Jains are engaged, after their own fashion, in the same work as the participants in Plato's Sophist. Freeing themselves from the tyranny of the logical yes or no, they join with the aging Plato and the ageless Chuang-tzu in learning

how these antithetical terms can be applied at once to the same thingfrom a certain standpoint.

Chuang-tzu bears at least some comparison with Socrates. Both of them are familiar with the paradox- breeding logic of sophists and both take advantage of this knowledge to combat the sophists. Socrates uses ordinary craftsmen as his favorite examples of people who, when confined to their trade, know exactly what they are doing. Chuang-tzu makes a similar choice, of a butcher, whose intuitively easy but exact work he describes in knowing

detail, down to the need of the less expert to replace the knife that gets chipped because they lack intuitive dexterity. 65 Socrates speaks of his warning daimon (which, according to Xenophon, does more than warn), while, according to one translation, Chuang-tzu speaks of the "utmost man" as "daemonic"the Chinese word is shen, spirit; another translation speaks of "the ultimately arrived man" as "spirit- filled."66 In both cases, Greek and Chinese, the source is

supposed to be mysterious, more than human, and beyond the reach of reason. The last and deepest resemblance is the frequency in both Socrates and Chuang- tzu of the persistent but unanswered question and the readiness, even eagerness, to profess ignorance.67 It is Chuang- tzu who asks, "How do I know that what I call knowing is not ignorance? How do I know that what I call ignorance is not knowing?" And againbut in a question

about ineffable tao"Is it by not knowing that you know? Is it that if you do know you are ignorant? Who knows the knowing which is ignorance?"68

Now there is no doubt that Chuang-tzu is, if not a mystic, closer to mysticism than Socrates, who has such strong aspirations for rational knowledge. But both Chuang-tzu and Socrates have an unflinching readiness to proclaim their ignorance as itself an important kind of knowledge. The unfrightened ignorance of both in the face of death also seems psychologically akin to me. In the Apology, Socrates wonders if to die is like a dreamless sleep, which seems good to him, or like a journey to the

place of the great dead, with whom he will be able converse. Then, as we cannot forget, come the last, defiant words to the jurors, "Who of us goes to the better is unclear to all but God." Chuang-tzu's question is: "How do I know that loving life is not a delusion? ... How do I know that the dead do not wonder why they ever longed for life?"69

It seems to me that in both Socrates and Chuang-tzu this fearlessness reflects not some fixed, saving truth, but the certainty of a person who has thought and felt things through to the end that is possible to him:

Page 142 the fear is conquered, or at least lessened, by the fearlessness of the attempt to understand or (for Chuang- tzu) to coincide with, and, as a result, to give in toor take pleasure or confidence inwhat cannot be understood.

Still, it cannot be pretended that Chuang- tzu and Socrates are very much alike in their basic philosophical views, because the one is a relativist in morality and the other takes morality to be objective. In relation to Plato, I should like to begin by saying the obvious, that Chuang-tzu, the nearly complete relativist, and Plato, very often, it appears, the complete absolutist, are opposites. Although Plato remains interested in the relativist's arguments, he even plays with something like the idea of the

rectification of names, in his case, the idea that each segment of reality has exactly one matching logos, and that names or words in general have an inherent rightness. 70 Chuang-tzu detests such ideas. Yet there is something alike in the two, an impulse not to be so consistently onesided as to miss what is (in Chuang- tzu's case) sometimes steady or (in Plato's case) often changing. On the balance, therefore, Chuang- tzuwithout, he would say, conscious effortand

Platowith acknowledged conscious effortare doing the trickiest, most difficult intellectual work of all the philosophers who share this chapter. Seen in perspective, their work is to create a reasonable synthesis of relativism and skepticism with what is, in Plato's case, metaphysically fixed or, in Chuang-tzu's case, just stable enough to explain why people can communicate and, with luck, chance, purpose, or intuition, understand one another. Chuang-tzu's interest in alternatives and refusal to decide between them,

which, at least superficially, resembles the Socrates of Plato's early dialogues, offers a challenge truly like Plato's: What is the position, if any, with which he identifies himself?

As between Chuang-tzu (in my description) and Plato, I would choose the former for subtlety, by which I mean the ability to come closer to the abstraction- resisting qualities of human perception, thought, and conduct, and Plato for power, achieved in his case by testing, that is, by internally debating, far- reaching abstractions both separately and in different combinations. Is it incidental that both he and Chuang- tzu are richly imaginative and think of philosophizing

as a kind of play, which, to be serious, needs the freedom to explore without any self-imposed limit? On changing, playful impulses, they vary the characters that appear and vanish, the themes that are taken up and dropped, and the literary modalities they use, from logic chopping to more human talk, to metaphors, and to tales. These impulses force the reader on into small whirlpools of contrariety and abstraction and on again into the current of

imagined talk, some small, some big. But Chuang-tzu, unlike Plato, never turns stern; his often happy, even rhapsodic kind of relativism is unique. To make fittingly odd

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comparisons: I find something of a parallel for Chuang-tzu's human grotesques in Rabelais or Dickens, and, for the relativizing breadth of his sympathies, in Montaigne, and, maybe, for his unrestricted and ecstatic acceptance of everything natural, Walt Whitmaneach of these, of course, far more profuse than Chuang- tzu, the original and the derived together. For his readiness to move with the natural wind and his insistence that everything be allowed to be

itself, uncaged in alien rules and systems, he breaks through whatever bars may confine Chinese thinkers to their own great but only Middle Kingdom.

One last comparison, this one in mystical quality, something I would like to distinguish from mysticism in any formal sense: Like Uddalaka, Yajnavalkya, and Parmenides, Plato often requires us to reverse the commonsense identification of reality with what the senses show us. The four philosophers I have just named, especially Parmenides and Plato, are men with both highly poetic and highly logical minds, capable of inventing a poetically logical or

logically poetic way of grasping the world and of distinguishing between the more and less real in it. They end in something that is at least close to a logically defended mysticism. The same can be said of Chuang-tzu, although his particular poetically logical sense draws him not at all to abstract principles and little to a ruling unity but to an unburdened naturalness, a radical freeing of self that drives him, too, in the direction of mysticism, in his case toward empathy with

the unseen forces of nature, which are no different from ourselves because they are our immediate natures as well.

Page 145 Chapter 5 Early Rational Synthesis: Hsün-tzu, Aristotle Theme: The Conceptual Integration of Cosmos, Society, and Individual

Most of the philosophers so far discussed unify the world by reducing its intricacies to a single, sweeping, easily wielded idea. This process of what may be called disintrication draws attention by its ruthlessness. The philosopher's imposed simplicity accentuates how much has been sacrificed and stimulates others to invent concepts flexible enough to allow intricacy to return, though

hardly enough to fit the world whose measure they are meant to take. Uddalaka, Yajnavalkya, and Parmenides each knows a truth so great that it overwhelms other possible truths (Heraclitus, who also speaks in sweeping truths, remains too enigmatic for me to put him confidently in the same disintricating company). And Confucius, Mencius, Buddha, and Socrates each have a method for salvation

that rests on very nearly a single themethat of Confucius and Mencius on the formation of a superior, reverent character, that of the Buddha on the cure of all pain by means of a studied, full dispassion, and that of Socrates on the disclosure of the nature of the virtues. Mahavira, Chuang-

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tzu, Protagoras, and Gorgias attack such single- minded certainties, Mahavira by his viewpoints, Chuang-tzu by his relativizing, Protagoras by his individualizing, and Gorgias by his parodic attack, using the philosophers own methods, on all philosophical certainties. Plato attempts to integrate the human being into the world, but he is often held captive by the prejudice that there are no concepts by means of which change can be known. Both Hsün-tzu and Aristotle represent a moment in the development of tradition in

which philosophers are able to get over their intoxication with powerful principles and abstractions. Conscious of the philosophers who preceded them, they are able to reach a more cautious, plausible balance. For this they have to take account of the individual, of society, and of the world that encompasses them. The systems of Hsün-tzu and Aristotle are early not only in time but in their unfinished quality. They show a sense of the whole and have concepts to connect concepts and form hierarchical

relationships, but, considered structurally, their systems are unfinished. They change from occasion to occasion and not infrequently at least seem to contradict themselves. These flaws in system show that the philosophers are negaged not only in exhibiting but also in exploring the truth. But for whatever reasons, including the editorial hand of their students, the systematic thought of both philosophers leaves their systems more nearly potential than actual .*

It seems to me no accident that the tentative syntheses of Hsün-tzu and Aristotle are predominantly secular. Each of them seems to be living in a rare kind of hiatus between forms of belief that in one serious way or another disavow rationality, and sobecause they avoid religious dogma, mysticism, and magicthey deserve the epithet rational. It quickly becomes obvious that Hsün-tzu's rationality, like that of the other pre- Buddhist Chinese, lacks a detailed

equivalent to Aristotle's logic and science. The interest in comparing the two philosophers therefore lies in some of their general attitudes, in their views of language, in their ethical thought, and in their ability to create broad syntheses, however incompletely systematic, at an early stage of their traditions' development.

*Speaking of Aristotle's concern for system, a scholar says: "First, he constantly employs a whole framework or network of concepts, in terms of which he formulates the problems of a given field ... And second, in working in any one domain he seems to carry with him a web of specific theory developed in other domains so that the ramifications of one part of knowledge on other parts of knowledge are always near the

surface" (Edel, Aristotle and His Philosophy, p. 30). Another scholar says: "I do not suppose that the whole Corpus expresses a unified philosophical system; and in particular I have argued that Aristotle changes his mind on some fundamental issues about the nature of his arguments. None the less, I eventually suggest that his later works develop views that are connected enough to count as

systematic" (Irwin, Aristotle's First Principles, pp. 471, 480).

Page 147 Hsün-tzu (c. 310c. 210 B.C.E.): Goodness Is the Result of Conscious Activity

Hsün-tzu lived during the aptly named Warring States period. 1 Its lack of stability and its endless hostilities explain why he so detested corrupt rulers and emphasized the need for a society made stable by inbred, ritually supported Confucian principles. As a Confucian, he believed that a ruler took on a responsibility that should be carried out in the spirit of the traditional founders of civilization, the virtuous sage-kings. By his mid-

thirties, Hsün-tzu's reputation had earned him the title of "most eminent elder scholar" in the state academy of Ch'i.2 It was no doubt his reputation as a scholar of political conduct that led to his invitation to several courts, notably that of Ch'in, whose great potential he was able to recognize. But the king of Ch'in rejected his advice that, to succeed, a ruler should rely not on the force of arms but on rectitude, particularly his own, and should

nurture filial piety and human welfare. Although the king praised Hsün-tzu's advice with a polite "well argued," he took the opposite, warlike course, for a time with disconcerting success. It is not surprising that Hsün- tzu, unlike most Confucian thinkers, undertook to study the principles of war.3

Taught by the victory of the three armies that had united and succeeded in defeating Ch'in, Hsün- tzu argued that their success depended on true, intelligent loyalty rather than blind adherence to instructions. Such loyalty was needed, he realized, because there were no sage kings in his time; to be effective, political advisers would now have to learn the art by which to counter the mediocrity of actual rulers.4 His own political fortunes varied as he was appointed, dismissed, and reappointed as a magistratereappointed in spite of his sardonic protest that a king (poor king!) is in so difficult a position that he deserves the pity even of a leper. He hoped to counter the linguistic and therefore moral confusion caused by the sophists and reinstate the correct use of "names." After the treacherous

assassination of the de facto ruler of Chu, the state in which Hsün- tzu served as magistrate, Hsün-tzu was abruptly dismissed. He now began to stress the need for stringent, objective "law" and exactly calculated punishments, and to advocate economy in government and the priority of fundamental occupations over those that he took to be merely parasitic.

By then in his middle seventies, Hsün-tzu retired to devote himself to teaching and preaching. This was the time when the state of Ch'in, under the extraordinarily bold leadership of its king and of Hsün-tzu's student, Li Ssu, made a rapid conquest of the whole of China and took dramatic steps to unify its culture. Offered a nominal position by Li Ssu, Hsün-tzu refused it with the prediction that his student "would fall into

Page 148 unfathomable disasters," as he did. When Hsün-tzu died, he was at least in his late nineties; he may have reached the age of one hundred. 5

As a writer, Hsün-tzu is orderly, serious, and intense. Although the text of his works sometimes seems pieced together, there is little evidence in it of interpolation.6 Two of his educational principles were to have great practical success. The one was that learning should be based on the recitation of the (not yet standardized) Confucian classics. The other was that learning should above all aim to produce Confucians of exemplary character. Hsün-tzu's explicit influence remained powerful only during the short-lived dynasty of Ch'in (221206 B.C.E.) and its successor, the earlier Han dynasty. His dour view of human nature and the influence of his students on Ch'in, which became a byword for cruelty, must have helped lead to the later dominance of Mencius.7 Yet whether or not one admires him or his principles, Hsün-tzu is the most wide-ranging, well-integrated, and rationalunsupersititiousof the early Confucians, in

fact, of all early Chinese philosophers.

The Confucian ideal that Hsün-tzu nurtures has three human levels: that of the scholar, that of the superior person (the chün-tzu), and that of the sage, a rare and ancient human paragon. In Hsün- tzu's view, what a scholar studies and commits to memory is the epitome of human experience. It is the scholar's ability to assimilate this experience that allows him to become a

true human being rather than an animal. Hsün-tzu insists that study should leave its mark on behavior. Anyone who fails to grasp that moral obligations are one with the principles of humanity has not mastered the learning he professes.8

To explain Hsün-tzu's thought, I take up six of its themes: (1) The nature of language and discussion; (2) rationalism; (3) the contention that man is evil; (4) the organization of society; (5) immoderation; and (6) self- cultivation. 1. The nature of language and discussion

As might be expected, Hsün- tzu emphasizes the need for the "rectification of names" or, in more normal English, the correct use of names, that is, words.9 He recalls with what care for tradition the great kings fixed names for punishments, titles, and ceremonies and favored words that were already current. Having said this, Hsün-tzu gives examples of the definitions of words such as (human) nature, emotions, awareness, and knowledge.10 To understand Hsün-tzu's concern for the uniformity of words, one must remember that the Chinese

language was not yet standardizedthe Ch'in empire, which enforced standardization, was just coming into existence. To tamper with language, Hsün-tzu says, by "hairsplitting wordings" and making up new ones on one's own authority is as socially damaging as forging credentials or tampering with weights and measures. Careless language confuses the grasp of the realities to which words refer, multiplies arguments, and blurs the distinction between right and wrong.11

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To explain, Hsün- tzu goes back to the way in which names (ming), that is, words, are initially assigned their meanings. To name things, one uses the testimony of the senses and begins by classifying those "that belong to the same category of being or have the same essential characteristics," as the senses testify. 12 The eye distinguishes shapes, colors, and designs; the ear distinguishes pitch, timbre, modal keys, rhythm, and noises; the mouth distinguishes sweet and bitter, salty and bland, pungent and sour tastes; the nose distinguishes the various scents; and the body distinguishes pain and itching, cold and heat, smoothness and

roughness, and lightness and heaviness. And the heartthe minddistinguishes all the various emotions.13

Given this evidence, we name particular things. If a single name is not enough, we use a compound one, and we go on to more and more broad or general terms until, when we reach a term such as things, we can go no further. Sometimes this process is reversed and we go from the most general term to words like bird or animal, which distinguish broadly, and draw distinction within distinction until we stop because there are no further distinctions to be made. Because the

names given have no intrinsic rightness for their purpose, they have to be agreed on; and if they grow customary, they are accepted as appropriate. In using the names, one must be careful to retain them when the same things appear in different places or when things undergo some transformation but remain essentially the same.14

Naming alone is often not enough. When a name alone is not enough to convey the defined meaning, the meaning is completed by explanation. When the explanation is not completely understood, dialectics comes into use, that is, alternatives are discussed or argued. Given the names, which define different realities, we link them by stringing them together into compositions. "When both the use and the links between names are grasped, we are said to

know the name." When names are used correctly, as they have been defined, when propositions conform to explanations, when explanations conform to the mind, and when the mind conforms to the Way, the true qualities of things are clearly conveyed.15

Divisions and differences should be made but not so as to introduce errors. Inferences should be made from the characteristics of the category of a thing, but not to the point of introducing fallacies. Then when we listen, it will conform to good form, and when we engage in dialectics, we will fully express all that inheres in things.16

Hsün-tzu is confident that the sophists' arguments can be countered by testing their statements in the light of the essential function of naming, of the testimony of the senses, and of dialectics, which is the logic of argument. To know the function of naming, he says, is to exclude a statement such as "to kill a robber is

not to kill a man." To use the testimony

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of the senses is to exclude paradoxes such as "mountains and marshes are level." And to make proper use of names and of dialectics is to exclude paradoxes such as "the flying arrow does not pass the pillar" and "a white horse is not a horse." 17 It is of extreme importance to resist the sophists' misuse of language, Hsün-tzu believes, because when they

trade on the disparity between words and realities, they turn intellectual into moral confusion by depriving the mind of its ability to control desirethe mind is simply blinded. Clarity of thought is necessary for people to act as they believe is right; as a general rule, they all accept what they think is allowable and reject what they think is not allowable. There is no

example of anyone who understood the Way and did not follow it.18 2. Rationalism

Philosophical Chinese of Hsün-tzu's time think of the cosmos as made of a number of great forces, each with its role in a harmony of reciprocating opposites.19 The forces include Heavento Hsü-tzu, the dominant forceand Earth, which sustains what Heaven begets. The forces also include the antithetical pair, Yin and Yang, whose alternations and modulations cause change in everything. There is also the energy substance of the cosmos, ch'i. Finally, there is li

(pattern), which is the principle of rational, that is, hierarchical order. Unlike those who think that li rules in the cosmos as a whole, Hsün- tzu confines it to human life. It is the chün-tzu, he believes, who supplies the (moral) pattern that Heaven and Earth themselves lack.20 To Hsün-tzu, the Way or TaoTao in the singularis not usually a natural force but the unvarying principle by which a human being weighs the alternatives of good and evil.

The cosmos made up of these forces or principles is considered by most Chinese of Hsün-tzu's time to be predictable by means of omens, manipulable by magic, and responsive to human behavior. Hsün-tzu rejects the magic, the omens, and the responsiveness. His rationalism may not be fully consistent: to him, Heaven, his synonym for nature, is still colored by the same sense of ruler that we find in our own phrases, "nature decrees" or "the laws of nature." But though not quite all of a piece, his

rationalism or naturalism is very emphatic .*

*Heaven is t'ien. Knoblock, whose translation I have used extensively, often prefers the translation Nature, so I have often followed him. Knoblock explains: "The word is a common term and is used in this book in several different senses; thus it is best translated by a different word for each separate meaning, even though the Chinese conceived all of them as 'one thing.' The abstract, objective tian [in Pinyin transliteration] is translated 'Nature'; when a moral, directive sense is implied, the

word is translated 'Heaven'; and where celestial events are involved it is rendered 'heaven.' Further, in many contexts, particularly where man is contrasted with Nature, tian is short for tiandi, 'Heaven and Earth.' The idea of 'Nature' is the philosophical rationalization of the older, fundamental notion of a directing Heaven" (Knoblock, Xünzi, vol. 3, p. 3). Maybe it would be best to use Heaven everywhere, leaving the ambiguity unresolved except as (one thinks or sees) it is resolved by context. (On the

varying, possibly contradictory senses of Heaven in Hsün-tzu, see Eno, The Confucian Creation of Heaven, pp. 15465.)

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The course of Nature, says Hsün- tzu, is constant. It is not affected by either good or bad emperors. If the response to its constancy is good government, there will be good fortune. Having adapted to its course, you will be well off, your nutrition will be complete, and you will not be troubled with disease; and you will be able to survive floods and droughts. 21 But Heaven itself does not respond

to human beings. It does not suspend the winter because men dislike the cold. "You pray for rain and it rains. Why? For no particular reason, I say. It is just as though you had not prayed for rain and it rained anyway." Falling stars, creaking trees, and eclipses of the sun and moon are not evil portents but natural events, the results of the changes of Heaven and Earth and the mutations of Yin and

Yang. What are to be feared are such human portents as bad plowing, poor weeding of fields, and the failure of crops that causes grain to be imported and sold at high prices and cause people to die by the roadside of starvation.22

But although Hsün-tzu, unlike Confucius and Mencius, regards Heaven as indifferent to human beings, he stresses that it has given them faculties they can use to their own, human advantage. When he says this, he sounds like an optimistic evolutionist or an exponent of the so-called anthropic principle, by which one draws attention to the special conditions for human development that Nature has

provided.23

According to Hsün- tzu's vision of the world, the human emotions and faculties, each of which is different and necessary, are the work of Heaven. For this reason they are rightly called Heavenly (for Heavenly the reader may substitute natural [with a small n] and both gain and lose something). Likewise, the heart or mind, which lodges in the center

and rules the faculties, is called the lord provided by Nature. The decrees of Nature or the Heavenly dictates establish that only whoever lives in accord with the nature of the human species will be fortunate.24

Knowing this, the sage, the perfect manthe counterpart of Chuang-tzu's sagedoes not try to penetrate into the work of Nature. Instead of indulging in this competition with Heaven/ Nature, he preserves the heavenly accomplishment by purifying his natural "lord," rectifying his natural faculties, completing his natural nourishment, and nourishing his natural emotions. In this way, he completes what Heaven has achieved. For "Heaven has its seasons; Earth its resources; and Man his government. This, of course, is why it is said that they 'can

form a Triad." When a man tries to be something more or different from the human member of this triad, he suffers from delusion. Each of the myriad things grows by means of its harmonious relation with Nature. We see the result but not the invisible, formless process by which Nature achieves it. One needs to be a sage to act without trying to understand of Heaven what cannot be understood.25 More strongly, and, for emphasis, in rhymed verse, Hsün-tzu writes:

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Instead of magnifying Heaven and contemplating it. Why not domesticate and curb it? Instead of being subservient to Heaven and singing its praises, Why not curb its decree and put it to use? Instead of looking out for the seasons and awaiting their bounty, Why not respond to them and make them serve you? ... Instead of contemplating things in their independence, Why not make them a pattern from which none escapes? 26

This time there is no qualification, nothing one should refrain from understanding. If one can forget that the words are written in rhyming Chinese characters and in the context of a faithful Confucianism, one is reminded of Francis Bacon. Hsün-tzu, too, has a method, at least a rhetorical one, by which, he supposes, individuals can achieve empirical results, escape uncertainty, and fulfill their basic desire. To achieve all this, they must accept reasonable limits, avoid any obsessive

interests, rely on the natural unity of the mind, and find the most effective ways of overcoming doubt. Hsün- tzu enumerates many causes of doubt: Darkness obscures vision, drunkenness disorders thought, a pressed eyeball gives double vision, and distance diminishes size. One learns not to use moving water, with its deceptive reflections, as a mirror, or to accept the testimony of a blind man that there are no starsdoubtful means cannot settle doubts.27

Everyone has a natural, inborn understanding, and it is part of the natural order of things that they can be known. But the search to understand the natural principles of orderof ethics or of sciencewill fail unless one takes care to limit the search. The reason is that, to be productive, thought must be well focused, undistracted, and not too emotionally forced. Therefore, when humans pursue their desires, they should deliberate carefully, distinguish the relevant from the irrelevant,

always "considering the long view of things and thinking of the consequences."28 An undisturbed pan of water reflects one's face clearly, but not when stirred by the wind. One must keep the rational principle clear and not allow things to tilt it and muddy the truth. For Hsün-tzu is sure that "if one guides the mind by li [in the sense of reason] and nourishes it with clarity and does not allow any extrinsic things to upset it, then the mind is quite capable of determining right and wrong and resolving

doubts."29 3. Man is evil: Hsün-tzu says "Man's nature is evil; any good in humans is acquired by conscious activity."30 It is this view for which Hsün-tzu is best known and most violently denigrated in the Chinese

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philosophical tradition .* Just as nothing profoundly metaphysical is intended by Mencius' "human nature is good"a statement that occurs, directly or indirectly only twice in his writingsnothing profoundly metaphysical is implied in Hsün-tzu's "man's nature is evil"a statement he makes only, though repeatedly, in the chapter that bears this title. It seems as though Mencius' infrequent but rhetorically effective words on human goodness arouse Hsün- tzu to use rhetorically contradictory ones. Hsün-tzu

is led to such rhetorical emphasis just because both he and Mencius think rather alike. Both hold that ordinary human beings need a thoroughgoing education. The difference is primarily that Mencius says this in a believing, optimistic temper, and Hsün-tzu, in a way that one can interpret as either realistic or misanthropic. Whatever the interpretation, to Hsün-tzu the difference is profound, and he is very blunt in his attack on Mencius:

Mencius considered that "since man can learn, his nature is good." I say this is not so. It shows that Mencius did not reach any real understanding of what man's inborn nature is and that he did not investigate the division between those things that are inborn in man and those that are acquired. As a general rule, "inborn nature' embraces what is spontaneous from Nature, what cannot be learned, and what requires no application to master. Ritual principles and moral duties

are creations of the sages. They are things that people must study to

*"Man's nature is evil" translates hsing o p'ien. Evil is o (fourth tone) in the Wade- Giles transliteration, used in this book, and e in Pinyin. The dictionary meanings of the character are bad, evil, wicked, vice. There is a related meaningin effect, another wordhate, hatred; and there is a related group of words referring to ugly or deformed people. Out of curiosity, I have consulted ten ostensibly independent translations, dating from Legge's in 1861 to Hansen's in

1992 and Knoblock's in 1994. Of the ten translators, only two, Cua, in 1985, and Graham, in 1989, prefer bad. Graham translates, "Man's nature is bad, the good in him is artifice." I suppose the translation chosen depends on euphony and contextbad suggests the kind of language used of or by a child, while evil may suggest, as it should not, an Augustinian kind of original sin. Hsün-tzu's text goes on to say, in Graham's translation, "from birth he has jealousy and hatred in him" (Graham,

Disputers of the Tao, pp. 24546). Watson (p. 157) translates, "He is born with feelings of envy and hate." If this is what Hsün-tzu believes, the translation bad is too weak.

Hansen takes up the suggestion that the often repeated phrase or the chapter that contains it is interpolated. He believes that "it is a partisan interpretative gloss" and, whether it is so or not, its translation misleads modern readers by reminding them not of Confucian but Christian or Buddhist views. (See Hansen, A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought, pp. 33637, and p. 417, note 84; and Graham, "The Mencian Theory of Human Nature," pp. 5759. On the

condition of the text, Knoblock writes only, "The order of the text of this book [book 23] is seriously disturbed" [Xunzi, vol. 3, p. 280].)

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be able to follow them and to which they must apply themselves before they can fulfill their precepts. What cannot be gained by learning and cannot be mastered by application yet is found in man is properly termed "inborn nature." What must be learned before a man can do it and what he must apply himself to before he can master it yet is found in man is

properly called "acquired nature." This is precisely the distinction between "inborn" and "acquired" natures. 31

Hsün-tzu's explanation is that human beings are born acquisitive, envious, and full of the desire to see and hear. If they are allowed to indulge in these wants, they become aggressive and greedy, they violate the natural order of class distinctions, and a cruel tyranny develops. Making an analogy that became famous, Hsün-tzu writes:

A warped piece of wood must first await application of the press- frame, steam to soften it, and force to bend its shape before it can be made straight ... Now, since human nature is evil, it must await the instructions of a teacher and the model before it can be put right, and it must obtain ritual principles and a sense of moral right before it can

become orderly.32 4. The organization of society

Human beings have no choice, says Hsün- tzu, except to organize themselves into a society. If authority is equally distributed, there is no unity, so if society is not divided on hierarchical principles, the result is quarreling, chaos, insecurity, and a weak, fragmented state. Ritual principles are therefore necessary. These are, we know, the filial relation between son and parents and brother and brother, and the equivalent relations between social

superiors and inferiors, that is, between the ruler and his subjects. A true ruler is someone able to organize humans so that everything finds its proper place and is done at the proper time, so that the common people are unified and worthy men offer their services to the government. In everything, a sense of order and humanity is necessary, as well as patience and common sense. More particularly, it is necessary to guard the

natural environment, to censor writing and music with care, to administer adequate and just punishments, to provide for moral education, and to attend to agriculture and commerce. And finally, it is necessary that the king himself behave decently and intelligently. Hsün-tzu suggests the assignment of clear responsibility to each of the important officials, up to and including the king himself, who is not the right

person to be king, he says, if the world is not unified and the feudal lords are rebellious.33

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I have stated all these requirements of good government briefly, but because of current interest, I recall some details of the precautions Hsün-tzu recommends for the care of the natural environment. For example, he wants laws enforced for conserving the grasses and trees, fish and turtles, and other edibles of the mountain forests, lakes, and marshes. With respect to the marshes, he urges that nets and poisons be banned

during the season when the turtles and fish are depositing their eggs, so that they remain abundant. And with respect to the mountain forests, he urges that they should not be cut when they are flowering or putting out new growth, so that the forests are not denuded and people have enough timber. 34 5. Immoderation

Hsün-tzu makes a sustained attack on immoderation of all sorts. He begins by saying it is a common human flaw to be blinded by attention to some small point of the truth. Such blinding, he says, comes from many sources: desire or aversion, interest in the beginnings or ends of things, or in what is remote or near, or in breadth or shallowness, or in the past or present. Unlike the single-minded sages, feudal lords now follow different theories of government

and philosophers teach a hundred different doctrines. 35

Among the philosophers Hsün-tzu considers to have been blindly onesided, he recalls: Mo- tzu, who was blinded by his interest in utility from understanding ritual gradation and form; Shen Pu-hai, who was blinded by his concern with the technique of ruling from understanding the role of knowledge; Hui-tzu, who was blinded by his interest in propositions and his assessment of everything by logical argument from understanding realities; and Chuang-tzu, who was

blinded by his reliance on Heaven (Nature), on things as they simply occur, from understanding human beings. But Confucius, humane and wise, was free of obsession. Therefore his study of the methods of producing order can be considered the equal of that of the great ancient kings. "Such are the blessings of not being obsessed."36 Self- cultivation

This ideal leads to Hsün-tzu's treatment of the theme, common in China, of cultivating oneself. He relates the theme to current attempts to prolong life and he recommends controlling the "vital breath" (ch'i) as a way of cultivating character and strengthening self. Possibly referring to breathing exercises, he says that if the vital breath is conserved by the reduction of one's desires and by proper foresight, it nurtures the mind. But if one lacks unity of

purpose, the vital breath is dissipated in undisciplined action and vehement emotion, and one grows old prematurely. Therefore one should calm one's impulsiveness and unify excessively penetrating knowledge with the qualities of ease and sincerity.37 According to Hsün- tzu, apart from a good teacher and the reduction of one's desires, the most potent cure for what ails human beings is ritual

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(in the broad Confucian sense). 38 To preserve order and by order to preserve life and ability, one should choose a journey with an end, avoid sophistical debates, and find a worthy model for one's life. "When your emotions find peace in ritual and your knowledge is like that of your teacher, then you will become a sage."39

This ideal of a path of moderation, study, internalized decency, and studied decorum may not appear especially attractive now, in an age that does not value decorum highly. However, Hsün-tzu testifies that the ideal makes possible an intensely pleasurable peace of mind and a resoluteness that expresses inner power. When the chün-tzu

has reached the limit of such perfection, he finds delight in it. His eye then finds greater enjoyment in the five colors, his ear in the five sounds, his mouth in the five tastes, and his mind benefits from possessing all that is in the world. Therefore, the exigencies of time and place and consideration of personal profit cannot influence him, cliques and coteries cannot sway him, and the whole world cannot deter him. He was born to follow it, and he will die

following it.40 Aristotle (384322 B.C.E.): The Primary Objects of Desire and Thought Are the Same

Aristotle was the son of the physician of King Amyntas of Macedon, the grandfather of Alexander the Great.41 At seventeen, he went to Athens to study in Plato's Academy. A stranger, without a citizen's rights, he sometimes found it difficult to remain there. It is reported that he left the Academy while Plato was still alive, but we know he felt close to him, as he shows

when he says that he finds Ideas difficult to criticize because they were introduced by his friends.42

When King Philip of Macedon was looking for a tutor for his son Alexander, he turned to Aristotle. It is plausible to assume that, like the Confucians and Plato, Aristotle would be happy to advise a ruler or future ruler. The Politics has a passage that might have been directly addressed to Alexander. It says that the inhabitants of the cold areas of the world are spirited but unintelligent and unskilled, and although relatively free, they are politically

unorganized and incapable of ruling over others; and the natives of Asia are intelligent and inventive but, lacking spirit, are always in a state of subjection. But the Hellenic race, which is intermediate, is both high spirited and intelligent. "Hence it continues free, and is the best governed of any nation, and if it could be formed into one state, would be able to rule the world."43 Aristotle addressed a book to Alexander

Page 157 Cicero says he has itand gave him the advice, which he did not follow, to "play the part of a leader to the Greeks and of a master to the barbarians, [to] care for the former as friends and kinsmen, and treat the latter as beasts or plants." 44

After an absence from Athens of many years, Aristotle returned and for twelve years conducted mostly biological research, lectured, and collected a large library. His institution was at least as scientific as philosophical in our sense. It would be strange and unreasonable, Aristotle says, if we did not get great satisfaction from contemplating the works of nature when we are able to make out their causes"in all natural things there is something to move

wonder."45 Very aware of the intricacy of the world, he assigned different assistants to different lines of research, including botany, medicine, the history of the exact sciences, and mathematics and astronomy (which went together).46

When Alexander died in 323 B.C.E. and the Athenians hoped to regain their independence, Aristotle's Macedonian connection was enough, it seems, for a charge of impiety to be leveled against him. Rather than undergo a trial, he left Athens for Chalcis, where he died after about a year, at the age of sixty- three. In his will, he leaves his daughter and son, Nichomachus, in the care of a guardian, asks that his freedwoman, who has shown him steady affection, be taken good