Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China

Citation

Graham, A. C. (1989). Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China. Open Court.

Chapter Summary

The book runs to 502 pages, including a bibliography (pp. 447–467) and indexes, and is organised in four parts that follow the changing relationship between Heaven and the human world. It treats the Axial Period in China, the age of the classical Greek and Indian philosophers, during which China developed ways of thought that, in the words of a review quoted by the publisher, sustained its empire and its culture for more than two thousand years.

Part One: The Breakdown of the World Order

The first part begins at page 9 with "The Breakdown of the World Order" and treats the early thinkers as responses to the disintegration of the Chou social and political order. Its chapters present Confucius as the conservative reaction, Mo-tzu as "A Radical Reaction", the Yangists, the Shen-nung utopia, "The Sharpening of Rational Debate: The Sophists" (Hui Shih, Kung-sun Lung and the "white horse" argument) and Sung Hsing. The chapter on Mo-tzu includes sections on his tests of argument, his unifying principle of morality and the divisions of the Mohist school.

Part Two: From Social to Metaphysical Crisis

The second part moves from the social crisis to a crisis about the relation between Heaven and man. Two chapters are titled "From Confucius to Mencius: Morality Grounded in Man's Nature as Generated by Heaven" and "From Mo-tzu to Later Mohism: Morality Re-grounded in Rational Utility" (pp. 136–169). A further chapter, "From Yangism to Chuang-tzu's Taoism" (pp. 170–212), follows the Yangist line into the Taoism of the Chuang-tzu.

Parts Three and Four

The book has two further parts. Terms that recur across the volume as a whole include Hsün-tzu, the Legalists, Yin-Yang, the Five Processes, correlative thinking, proto-science and the Later Mohist Canons. Appendix 1 (pp. 382–387) classifies Chinese moral philosophies in terms of a "quasi-syllogism", a scheme in which awareness of everything relevant moves one's inclination towards a particular course of action.

Key Concepts

Part One

• The breakdown of the world order: the political and social collapse to which the early thinkers responded.
• Conservative and radical reactions: Confucius defending an order, Mo-tzu arguing for reform on grounds of benefit.
• Rational debate: the Sophists' arguments, such as the "white horse" discussion.

Part Two

• Morality grounded in Heaven-given nature: the Confucian line to Mencius.
• Morality re-grounded in rational utility: the Mohist line.
• Yangism and Taoism: the line that leads to Chuang-tzu.

Throughout

• Correlative thinking: Graham's Appendix 1 argues that ancient China did not share the Western assumption that analytic thinking can wholly escape dependence on correlative thinking.
• Quasi-syllogism: a scheme set out in Appendix 1 for classifying Chinese schools by how they answer questions about wisdom and about the pull of inclination.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A single, connected account. Reviewers quoted by the publisher stress that the book is comprehensive and lucid. The Philosophical Review judged it first-rate scholarship that is also accessible to the general reader, and the Journal of the History of Philosophy judged it the book to read for those who will read only one on Chinese philosophy.
• Attention to argument. The title and the chapter list present the thinkers as disputants, from the Mohist tests of argument to the Sophists' debates, with attention to the structure of classical Chinese.
• Bridges to Western philosophy. The Contemporary Review comment quoted by the publisher recommends it to anyone interested in the affinities between ancient Chinese and modern Western philosophy.
• A translator's authority. The publisher presents A. C. Graham (1919–1991) as considered by many to have been the leading world authority on Chinese thought, grammar and textual criticism, and the greatest translator of Chinese since Waley.

Limitations

• Dated apparatus. The book uses the older Wade–Giles romanisation (Chuang-tzu, Mo-tzu, Hsün-tzu), which readers used to pinyin will need to translate.
• Written in 1989. Scholarship since then is not reflected, and students should check recent surveys for newer discoveries and interpretations.
• Length and density. At 502 pages covering several centuries of thinkers, and with an analytic treatment of language and logic in the chapters on the Sophists and the Later Mohists, the book asks more of a first-time reader than a short survey does.

Where It Fits in the Course

Graham is the advanced treatment of Chinese philosophy on the course list. Bryan Van Norden's Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy is a shorter introduction, from Kongzi to Han Feizi, that presents each school's arguments and compares them with Western ideas; it is the better first book. The other volumes on the list concern India: Peter Adamson and Jonardon Ganeri's volume on classical Indian philosophy, Sue Hamilton's short introduction to Indian philosophy, Mark Siderits's analytical introduction to Buddhist philosophy and Michael Carrithers's short book on the Buddha. They are useful as a comparison with Graham's treatment of China in the same Axial Period, and Graham's own parallel with Greek and Indian thought makes such a comparison natural.

Read Graham after Van Norden and some primary texts in translation, and use him for the debates and the longer arc that the introduction does not give room to develop.

How to Use This Book

The book is for advanced undergraduates and graduate students, and for general readers willing to follow a long argument, who want a single account of how the Analects, Mencius, Mozi, Zhuangzi and related works argue with one another. Having read some of them in translation makes the book easier to follow.

A practical plan: read Part One in order, as the rest of the book depends on its picture of the breakdown of the order and the first reactions to it, reading the Mo-tzu and Sophists chapters with the Mozi and Gongsun Long in hand. Then read the chapters of Part Two paired with the Mencius and Zhuangzi texts they discuss. Treat Appendix 1 as a late reading of the whole, once the schools are familiar. Keep a table converting Wade–Giles names to pinyin before starting, and use the bibliography to follow up the primary sources.