The World of Thought in Ancient China

by Benjamin I. Schwartz

The center of this prodigious work of scholarship is a fresh examination of the range of Chinese thought during the formative period of Chinese culture. Benjamin Schwartz looks at the surviving texts of this period with a particular focus on the range of diversity to be found in them. While emphasizing the problematic and complex nature of this thought he also considers views which stress the unity of Chinese culture.

Attention is accorded to pre-Confucian texts; the evolution of early Confucianism; Mo-Tzu; the “Taoists,”; the legalists; the Ying-Yang school; and the “five classics”; as well as to intellectual issues which cut across the conventional classification of schools. The main focus is on the high cultural texts, but Mr. Schwartz also explores the question of the relationship of these texts to the vast realm of popular culture.

Genres: China, Philosophy, History, Nonfiction

490 pages, Paperback

First published March 9, 1985

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Benjamin Schwartz's book is an excellent overview of philosophical thought in early China, yet it's a difficult one to recommend. Though in several respects it serves as an introduction to the various schools that emerged in the first millennium BCE, as an immensely learned scholar of the subject Schwartz writes with a familiarity with the broader historical background than some readers are likely to possess. For this reason it's best to read this after having read a book like Patricia Buckley Ebrey's The Cambridge Illustrated History of China or Jacques Gernet's A History of Chinese Civilization to gain the familiarity necessary to appreciate fully his arguments.

If equipped with the necessary background knowledge, though, Schwartz's book becomes a highly informative examination of the formative ideas of Chinese thought. Beginning with the ancient rites of the Zhou period, he takes readers on a learned survey of the schools of early Chinese thought. Confucius is obviously at center stage, but all of the other major thinkers are featured and their ideas examined in a reflective manner. Schwartz's command of his subject allows him to offer a range of insights, upon which he elaborates with a textual analysis born of a deep reading of the classics. From this the reader gains an appreciation not just of the schools themselves, but of the discourse between them and the influence this exerted on the unification of China during the period. All of this makes for a book that is valuable reading for anyone seeking to understand Chinese history, even if it is one that should not be one that the read in order to start developing it.

[J.D. Steens · Rating 4 out of 5]

Key themes of Western philosophy - the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, the respect for others of Kant, the self-interested motivation in Locke, the absolute monarch of Hobbes, the power politics of Machiavelli - all appear in this book on the thought of ancient China in the philosophies of Mo Tzu, the legalists, Mencius, Hsun-Tzu, all of whom wrote four to two centuries before the start of the current era. This parallelism of thought suggests that philosophy reflects a common human condition that is independent of culture and that, in turn, reflects a common biology. Before we are Western or Chinese, we are humans who struggle commonly with the tensions created by self-interest; with the limitations and vulnerabilities of humanism; with the after shocks of raw power, ambition and greed; with minds that know that death is human fate; and with the uneasy balance between our need for freedom and the need for social and political order that makes such freedom possible.

These universal themes are, Schwartz notes, "refracted" through a distinctive Chinese cultural perspective. Confucius (d. 479) established the template for the many centuries of philosophy that followed. Confucius was primarily concerned with re-establishing the order of the past dynasties that were in turn direct manifestations of a transcendent world governed by God (Ti) and nature spirits. In that realm existed ancestors who never really died and who continued to influence events. The world operates by a normative order (Tao) and Confucius' task was to urge human kind to follow that order. His successors focused on why humankind deviated from that order, and how to get them back on the right path.

In contrast to this very public philosophy, the Taoists provided an alternative Chinese perspective. The concept of the Tao evolved from a divinely-ordered path for humans to follow in Confucius to a mystical, impersonal force that governs the manifest world in Taoism. The Taoists sought to fix oneself, not the world. The world would take care of itself. Man is plagued with a mind that is too big for itself, and seeks to separate man from the rational order of things. Mind freezes life, but life is change. We don't accept death, but fight it. We abstract the world of things and classify them as opposites whereas they are necessary for each other. Death goes with life, and aggression goes with passiveness. Life is not one or the other, but a balance. None of this is good or bad. It just is, and our task is to understand that so we can accept it and work with it. And this is the benefit of the human mind. The same mind that pushes man off the path of Tao can put him back on by rightly ordering (self-regulating) one's life.

Schwartz brings ancient Chinese thought to life. He gives it a contemporary relevance, and his book provides a healthy perspective from which to assess Western philosophy.

[Tony Gualtieri · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a brilliant synthesis of ancient Chinese thought as represented in the philosophical texts that have survived to the present day. The author is erudite, a bit abstruse, and full of intriguing links between these works and Western philosophers (MoTzu and Hobbes, for example). Although the book is a few decades old, the author seems conversant in then emerging ideas of critical theory, which he lightly refers to in a few asides. The depth of his cosmopolitanism is revealed the the opening pages where he references Clifford Geertz, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Edmund Burke along with Confucius and Mencius.

[Monty Milne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was intrigued by this as a result of a review by my GR friend Tony Gualtieri, who gave it five stars. The introduction is very heavy on literary theory and therefore virtually incomprehensible (at least to me). The rest of the book was hard going at times but I agree with Tony that it is enormously erudite and cosmopolitan.

On almost every page I was confronted with the otherness of Chinese thought. For example, Confucius is often thought by westerners to be “this-worldly”, but this is because we tend to see religion as being transcendent – which was not the case in ancient China.

Another interesting concept is the idea of “Li” – rites or ceremonies – which is central to Confucianism. There is an excellent analysis of the importance of even seemingly trivial and pedantic gestures. Whilst thinking about this, I remembered a curious episode from my youth. In my school, at morning assembly in the Great Hall the prefects carried out a strikingly choreographed ritual of marching up and down the serried aisles of boys collecting up various mysterious forms to be delivered to the senior prefects, who stood in a solemn phalanx and appeared to be masters of the proceedings in a way in which the academic staff were not. The Great Hall was entirely destroyed by an arsonist (luckily no one was hurt), and two years later, when it was rebuilt, I found myself as a new senior prefect responsible for resurrecting the same choreography of the assembly rituals. It was deliberately and self consciously absurd, because everything was now completely changed, including the layout of the new Hall, and so our resurrected ritual had no practical purpose. And yet it somehow gave me a great deal of satisfaction. I don’t think it is too fanciful to see this as an example of the kind of “li” of which Confucius would have approved.

There are other ways in which the thought of ancient China is not so strange. Admittedly, it is hard to connect with divinatory oracle-bone inscriptions, but the importance of family and hereditary legitimacy still strikes a contemporary chord – at least in Britain, as the events surrounding the death of the Queen and the succession of King Charles have demonstrated.

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my college intro to Warring States thought. It is very readable. But a large number of new archaeological discoveries has changed many ideas about Warring States.

[Victor Wu · Rating 5 out of 5]

What distinguishes Schwartz's magisterial study of classical Chinese thought from other works in the genre is (1) his sustained comparative engagement with both historical and contemporary intellectual touchstones in the Western tradition—Plato, Augustine, Hobbes, Machiavelli, Weber, Geertz, and Rawls, to name a few—and (2) his nuanced sociological understanding of the role of intellectual elites ("creative minorities") in relation to their societies and broader cultural context. The result is both a deeply scholarly survey of Chinese philosophy as well as a far more general reflection on the development and influence of ideas in history.

[Bendick Ong · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must-read for any serious scholar of ancient Chinese thought!