INTRODUCTION

What can we expect from the study of Chinese philosophy ?

« In the philosophical systems of the Hindoos and the Chinese there are still hidden treasures, in which the anticipation of scientific discoveries, the results of thousands of years of occidental research, is most striking.

Such are the words of Edward von Hartmann, the most famous living German philosopher. Much labour has been spent in Europe on the Indian Vedanta philosophy, which had such a marked influence on Arthur Schopenhauer.

« The Upanishads, says the author of the Parerga and Paralipomena, are the outcome of the highest human wisdom…. They afford the most remunerative and sublime reading possible in this world, which has been the consolation of my life, as it will be that of my death.

I do not see why the many germs scattered over the vast field of Chinese philosophy should not have a similar fertilizing influence on some philosophical European mind also. The deep impression caused by the Tao-tê-king will support my view. But much work remains to be done before Chinese philosophy will take its proper place in the history of philosophy. The burden of this task lies with us who are living in China and studying her language and literature, for, while great care is bestowed on all her sister languages in Europe and America, Chinese, the oldest of all, but the youngest in the curriculum of our high-schools, is treated as a step-child by public opinion. This paper is meant as a move in the direction just indicated.

In the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C. we can distinguish five different schools of thought in China. Their founders are Confucius, the moralist and ritualist, Chuang Tse, the mystic and pantheist, Mê Ti, the philanthropist and optimist, Yang Chu, the Epicurean and pessimist, and the sophists Hui Shih and Kung Sun Lung. The two latter schools must have had a very ephemeral existence. They left scarcely a trace behind them. Of the three former that of the Mihists for a long time held its own against the orthodox school of Confucius which at last succeeded in supplanting it.

The technical Chinese term for Sophist is pien shih, literally a disputant, a debater, a controversialist. The Greeks were wont to connect this same idea of controversy with that of Sophistic. Their sophists were past masters in the art of Eristic. They knew how to defeat their opponents by arguments. Protagoras averred that every proposition might be proved and refuted with equally good reasons, and later on the sophists used to teach their pupils the ordinary sophisms as a means to confound their antagonists. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle both opposed and despised the sophists, and their view has been adopted and for many centuries echoed by European scholars.

The Chinese regard their sophists in very much the same light. Chuang Tse says of them that by specious promises they impose on peoples’ minds and drive them into false conclusions, but that though they win the battle in words, they do not carry conviction into their adversaries’ hearts. Of Hui Tse in particular it is stated that he made it his chief object to contradict others, wishing to gain fame by defeating everyone. Yo Cheng Tse Yü, a disciple of Mencius, utters similar diatribes against Kung Sun Lung.

However, in spite of these withering judgments passed by their contemporaries of other schools, neither the Greek nor the Chinese sophists are mere impostors, as their antagonists would have us believe. They are true philosophers, and their standpoint is as good as that of many others. The Greek sophists were the first to philosophize on the subject, its perceptions, opinions and impulses. Most of them maintained the impossibility of a true objective knowledge. Protagoras held that man is the measure of all things, of those things which exist that they exist, and of those things without existence that they do not exist. Therein is but a relative truth. Things are as they appear to the observer, and they are so only to him, not to everyone ; because others are differently affected by the same things. Gorgias went a step further, and boldly asserted that there is nothing, and that, if there were anything, it could not be perceived.

Hegel and, especially, the historian Grote were the first to do away with the old prejudice that the Greek sophists were mere quibblers and jugglers with words, showing that their teachings are not at all lacking in acumen or originality, and that their rhetorical extravagances are but one side of their philosophy. Their Chinese compeers stand perhaps still more in need of a champion, for their writings are so quaint and paradoxical that at first sight people will feel tempted to condemn them as sheer nonsense. So far as I know, there has been only one foreign scholar who concerned himself with the Chinese sophists. Balfour devotes some pages to them in his Scrapbook, but treats only of Hui Tse, whom he knew from Chuang Tse. He fully endorses the latter’s strictures on the ‘arch-Sophist’ Hui Tse, which he calls dignified and to the point.

In the interesting catalogue of ancient works contained in the Han-shu, the sophists are very appropriately classed together with the Dialecticians of which altogether seven are enumerated : Têng Hsi, Yin Wên Tse, Kung Sun Lung Tse, Chêng Kung Shêng, Hui Tse, Huang Kung, and Mao Kung. The works of the three first-named are still extant, the others lost. Of these dialecticians Têng Hsi, Kung Sun Lung, Hui Tse, and perhaps Mao Kung, are looked upon as sophists. Mao Kung is said to have lived contemporaneously with Kung Sun Lung, of whom I am going to speak more in detail, and to have professed very similar views. Of Cheng Kung Shêng and Huang Kung we learn that they flourished about the time of Li Sse, the famous minister of Chin Shih Huang Ti [c. B.C. 208]. Huang Kung was a great scholar in Ch‘in and wrote poetry which was incorporated in the Collection of Poetry of the Ch‘in dynasty published in the Han dynasty.

From Cap. I, divided into two sections, which under the name of Yin Wen Tse has come down to us from the Han period and seems to be a genuine production of the philosopher himself or of his disciples, we can form a pretty clear idea of what the so-called dialecticians were like. The term dialectician may appear a little too high-flown. I use it in default of a better one, since it characterizes at least the line of argument peculiar to this philosophical school. Their dialectic is of the most rudimentary kind. From their unsystematical reasoning to the subtle logic of an Aristotle there is still a long way, yet in both cases the principle is the same. The Chinese mind has never risen above these rudiments and developed a complete system of logic, perhaps because it is altogether too illogical in itself.

… In order to get a clearer view of the Chinese sophists it would be well to draw a sharp distinction between sophisms and paradoxes. A sophism is a false argument, a faulty syllogism, comprising premises and conclusion. Such a sophism or fallacy is e.g. the following of the teetotaler :

« That which prompts man to rash and inconsiderate acts and ruins his nervous system is an evil. Wine does this. Therefore wine is an evil ;

or that of the fatalist given by Cicero :

« If it is man’s fate to recover from a certain sickness, whether he employ a physician or not, he recovers. If he is doomed not to recover, whether he employ a physician or not, he does not recover. In both cases there is fate. Therefore it is of no use calling a doctor.

A paradox is a proposition contrary to received opinion, which, though absurd in terms or appearance may yet be true in fact. — [Webster]. It is but the result, the conclusion of an argument, the premises being left to the imagination of the hearer. An excellent illustration is the famous dictum of Proudhon, ‘Property is theft’. The effect produced by a paradox on the mind of the hearer is very great. It puzzles him and compels him to think. He finds himself in the dilemma of either solving the problem or of admitting his own inability. Therefore many writers make use of paradoxes, some more, some less.

As regards the Chinese sophists, we find fully developed sophisms with major, minor and conclusion only in Kung Sun Lung. Of Têng Hsi and Hui Tse paradoxes alone have been preserved. These sophists were not the only inventors of paradoxes. The Taoist literature teems with them. Can there be anything more paradoxical than Lao Tse’s saying that

« perfect virtue is not virtue, therefore it is virtue. Common virtue never parts with virtue, therefore it is no virtue [Tao tê ching, Cap. 38],

or the assertion that

« not leaving one’s house one knows the world, not looking through the window one sees the ways of Heaven. The farther one goes, the less one knows. Thus the Sage knows without going out, names without seeing, completes without doing anything [Tao tê ching, Cap. 47].

We cannot be surprised that the Taoist philosophers uttering such sentiments were also sometimes called sophists by their adversaries.

Besides the sophists already mentioned, viz. Têng Hsi, Hui Tse, Kung Sun Lung and Mao Kung, Chuang Tse introduces one more, Huan Tuan, probably the same as Han Tan, mentioned by Lieh Tse, of whom nothing more than the name is known. We are no more fortunate in regard to another sophist, Tien Pa, who must have lived in Ch‘i about the 3rd century B.C. He found fault with the old emperors, and would dispute on the separation of hard and white and on the identity of like and unlike. Hundreds of people believed in him. Lu Chung Lien, the famous minister of Ch‘i, rebuked him, saying that he was like an owl, cursed by everybody. This remonstrance impressed the poor sophist so much that he never dared to talk any more, which is of course nonsense.

It is not improbable, that Chinese Sophistic is a product of Mihism. After Mê-ti died, his school split into three branches, which recognised as their teachers Hsiang Li, Hsiang Fu and Têng Ling. These schools, Chuang Tse informs us, regarded each other as schismatics, quarrelled over the ‘hard and white’ the ‘like and unlike’ and argued over questions of ‘odd and even’. Chuang Tse mentions Hsiang Li Chin and Têng Ling Tse, but not Hsiang Fu, and instead of them two others, Ku Huo and Chi Chih. Ku Huo is presumably only another way of writing Ku Kuo. The Lü-shih-chun-chiu speaks of one Tang Ku Kuo, a Mihist of the Ch‘in state, living at the court of King Hui [B.C. 337-311]. Another Mihist of the West, of the name of Hsieh Tse, went to call upon King Hui. Tang Ku Kuo, afraid lest his colleague should gain more influence over his royal patron than he, warned the king against him as a sophist, a consummate debater and dangerous character. The king then declined to hear him.

I find a further proof that the Mihists had sophistic tendencies in Chapters 40-46 in the work which goes by the name of Mê Ti. It was not written by Mê Ti himself any more than the works ascribed to Confucius, Chuang Tse or Lieh Tse were composed by those philosophers, but must have originated in the Mihist school or schools. It requires a thorough critical revision, for, as it now stands, it is a congeries of at least three masses of heterogeneous writings. The work gives Mê Ti’s teachings under three different forms, each chapter or book being divided into three parts, all treating the same subject. Those three corresponding chapters may be compared to the three synoptic Gospels, which also seem to have been derived from some common source. Perhaps we have in these corresponding chapters records of Mê Ti’s sayings handed down in the three Mihist schools referred to by Han Fei Tse. The final chapters [51-71, on warfare and tactics] have undoubtedly nothing to do with Mê Ti. Nobody could have denounced war in stronger terms than he has done, and it seems incredible that the same man should have taught the art of fighting and of attacking or defending cities. Neither can chapters 40-46 embody his views, for Mê Ti himself was no sophist at all, as we see from all the other chapters. Besides, he is never called a sophist by other writers, which would have been the case if he really had been one. Chapters 40-46 seem to contain aphorisms of the sophistic followers of Mê Ti. The text of these chapters is now so corrupt that it is almost unintelligible, and the few passages one can make out are absurd and childish. As the other philosophical chapters are perfectly consistent, we are perhaps justified in assuming that the pseudo-sophistical part of Mê Ti’s work is a clumsy later forgery intended to supplement the original chapters which have been lost.