Mind and Body in Early China: Beyond Orientalism and the Myth of Holism

Slingerland, Edward. 2018. Mind and Body in Early China: Beyond Orientalism and the Myth of Holism. New York: Oxford University Press.

 

Slingerland rejects the strong holism in the study of early Chinese thought. It is a stereotype that regards Chinese as alien Other. It is cultural relativism. (p.5) It is actually a type of Orientalism. In particular, with regard to the mind-and-body problem, Slingerland believes that “human beings are innate mind-body dualists” (p.7), regardless of west and east. “the argument of this book is that it is precisely our innate (and probably mistaken) mind-body dualism that causes us to portray early China as exotically holistic.” (p.9) In a word, the author holds a weak mind-body dualism to interpret early Chinese thought. (p.13)

 

To demonstrate that, Slingerland lays out his evidence in three respects. (1) Qualitative analysis (textual analysis); (2) Quantitative analysis (so-called “digital humanities”); (3) cognitive science.

 

Part 1

Max Webber claims that Chinese thought lacks transcendence. “Contemporary neo- Orientalists have, on the other hand, inverted Weber’s normative hierarchy, portraying Chinese immanence as a moral strength.”(p.34)

Regarding linguistic differences, some scholars discover that the Chinese lack concern with truth and falsity to the nature of the classical Chinese language. (p.37) [真理问题]

Strong mind-body holism: (1) there is no distinction between mind and body in Chinese philosophy. (2) xin (heart) is a normal organ, the same as other organs. (pp.40-42)

This World and The Next: The Sacred and the Transcendent in Early China (p.93)

“The eye can gaze to the limits of its perception, but it cannot wander completely free of the shackles of the physical world.” (p.119) [眼睛的局限性]

 

Part 2

“To summarize the results of this study, although xin is often portrayed as the locus of emotion as well as other cognitive abilities in the Pre-Warring States period (roughly 1500 bce– 450 bce), by the end of the Warring States there is a clear trend whereby the xin is less and less associated with emotions and becomes increasingly portrayed as the unique locus of “higher” cognitive abilities, such as planning, goal maintenance, rational thought, categorization and language use, decision making, and voluntary willing.” (p.155) [足见孟子以心言情的特殊性！？]

Figure 4.4 (p.156)

“I was very much surprised by the sharp reduction in xin as locus of emotion in the Late Warring States. … the Mencius (in this regard, an atypical text).” (p.160) [重要的观察！]

 

Part 3

The study of human religiosity is called the “cognitive science of religion” (CSR). (p.248) Stuart Guthrie’s book, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (Guthrie 1993), is seen as marking the beginning of the CSR as a field. (p.249) “Cross-cultural archaeological evidence strongly suggests that religious belief and practice are a basic human universal.” (p.250)

“As Bryan Van Norden has observed, philosophical Cartesianism constitutes only a small portion of the Western philosophical tradition and is no longer seriously defended by most Western philosophers.” (p.277)

 

Conclusion

“If the study of Chinese thought is to move out of the ghetto and engage with the broader academic world, it is necessary to ground it in a more realistic model of human cognition and culture-cognition interaction. I hope that I have demonstrated in this book how a naturalistic hermeneutics, formulated in terms of embodied cognition and a dual-inheritance model of gene-culture coevolution, provides precisely this sort of model.” (p.326)