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Science and Civilisation in China. Volume 7, Part 1: Language and Logic

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DOI: 10.2307/2649372

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Review
Reviewed Work(s): Science and Civilisation in China. Volume 7, Part 1: Language and Logic
by Christoph Harbsmeier and Kenneth Robinson
Review by: Rudolf G. Wagner
Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 104, No. 5 (Dec., 1999), pp. 1644-1645
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association
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 1644 Reviews of Books
ages coexist in the present and attempt to ask different
sets of questions: What are phenomena? How do they
function? How do they come about? "Different infor-
mation idioms respond to different informational
needs," Hobart and Schiffman write (p. 265).
Not surprisingly for a book whose key insight con-
cerns the relationship between information and ab-
straction, the argument here is often abstract-at
times perhaps too abstract and too detached from
social and economic contexts. Although the authors
describe their work as an "essay," it is not the sort of
essay one casually skims through. Rather it is, as they
acknowledge, an "essay" in the sense of a trial or an
attempt. Given the frankly speculative quality of some
of their arguments, specialists in some of the areas that
Hobart and Schiffman survey will no doubt disagree
with particular interpretations. Still, even the most
finicky will have to admire the stunning range of
coverage-from Mesopotamia and the Greeks to Des-
cartes and Denis Diderot to Alan Turing and John von
Neuman-as well as the enormous erudition and
originality of this work. Its most important contribu-
tion surely lies in its difficult and sometimes elusive
attempt to give a history to phenomena that many
believe are either timeless (information) or entirely
new (the information age). Our era may have given us
the "Chief Information Officer," but it certainly did
not invent information itself.
Roy RoSENZWEIG
George Mason University
ASIA
CHRISTOPH HARBSMEIER. Science and Civilisation in
China. Volume 7, Part 1: Language and Logic. Edited
by KENNETH ROBINSON. New York: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press. 1998. Pp. xxiv, 479. $115.00.
In the grand undertaking to insert China's history of
science into a narrative hitherto mostly focused on the
West, the "Science and Civilisation in China" series
begun by the late Joseph Needham in 1954, the present
volume can claim a special place: it deals not with one
of the sciences in China but with the prerequisite for
science discourse, which is logical argumentation.
Christoph Harbsmeier asks whether literary Chinese
as a language provided the operative tools to articulate
science, and whether China developed a logical
method. The traditional summary denial of both ques-
tions has received a more systematic exposition with
Chad Hansen's Language and Logic in Ancient China
(1983).
Harbsmeier benefits from his broad familiarity with
the relevant literature (including Japanese and Rus-
sian contributions); years of research on Chinese
grammar, rhetoric, and logic informed by an "anthro-
pological" approach that studies them as cultural
practices; and a knowledge of the original sources and
the scholarship concerning the European history of
language and logic that allows him to make learned
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 1999
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comparisons far beyond the easy references to a
helplessly essentialized "West" often found in Chinese
studies.
The anthropological approach notwithstanding,
Harbsmeier comes out against a theory of an n-
number of logics, each functional in its given environ-
ment. Different cultures, languages, and times can and
will express logical connections differently, and might
develop and explore them to different degrees, but the
rules of logic, like those of mathematics, are not
reduced to the cultural context of their origin. In an
analysis that interweaves overviews of the historical
development and synthetic presentations of contempo-
rary scholarship with original research, Harbsmeier
extracts from the rich written record of the formative
phase of literary Chinese (between the fifth and second
centuries B.C.E.) the logical features implied in the
language such as negations, quantifiers, and logical
connectives, as well as those elements that would allow
for unambiguous and complex argumentation. While
these differ from those in Greek, they provide suffi-
cient instruments. Linguistic practice, however, fol-
lowed a cultural preference for implicit rather than
explicit logical connections and developed refined
rhetorical features such as parallelism and rhyme
rather than complex sentence structures.
The language does provide logical concepts such as
necessity, contradiction, property, or subsumption, but
even where they were developed most systematically,
namely in the later Mohist tradition, they did not
harden to form a terminology of logic. To the evidence
concerning the presence of a concept of the sentence
one might add the "translation" of archaic phrases into
the contemporary Chinese koine as done by Zhao Qi
(second century) for Mengzi or Wang Bi (226-249) for
Laozi. Here, the sentence truncations could not be
clearer. The practice of logical argument again was
present, but those relying on this way to prove their
point rather than on other forms, such as appeals to
the authority of the classics, never dominated the rules
of discourse, even though they prompted their (often
"Confucian") opponents such as Xunzi to copy some
of their method.
The section on logical theory nicely points out the
reasons for this lower cultural status of an argumen-
tation based on formal logic. Its practitioners (Deng
Xi, Hui Shi, Gongsun Long, or the Mohists) inhabited
two spaces in the order of things of the Warring States
period: they either were hired by the courts as intel-
lectual acrobats to provide with their funnily irrefut-
able sophisms ("a white horse is not a horse") enter-
tainment such as acrobats and dwarves did, or they
used their skills where the difference between sub-
stance and form is most easily exploited, namely law,
offering their services for money regardless of the
justice of the case. In the first instance, their perfor-
mance would be remembered in countless anecdotes
(of which the volume provides an ample supply)
without gaining much weight in circles where the
normative concepts guiding state and individual were

developed; in the second instance, they would be
branded as rats boring holes into the dikes of virtue,
vermin to be eliminated at whatever cost. In neither
instance did logical argumentation gain enough pres-
tige to attract the leading lights of the time. Logic
never managed legitimately to separate from content,
and the Warring States' "sophists" had few successors
in imperial China.
The second moment for logic came in the seventh
and eighth centuries with the famous Xuan Zang's
translation of the Buddhist Nyayapravesa. It remained
bound to its function, which was to overcome those
who doubted Buddhist teachings. Comparing the San-
skrit terminology and diction with Xuan Zang's Chi-
nese translation, the author argues that the latter with
its newly made terminology and explicitness of argu-
mentative connections surpasses the original in clarity.
Xuan Zang's interest prompted some students, such as
Kui Ji, to study Buddhist logic and comment on the
Nyayapravesa. Again, the language is there to articu-
late the extremely complex Sanskrit argumentation,
the concepts are there or they can be made, the
training and attention is there without which the
exercise would have been futile, and for a moment,
even the prestige was secured by Xuan Zang. But again
formal logic never separated from its religious content,
and it did not spread. In time, the Nyayapravesa was
handed around as a curio, an obviously brilliant but
perfectly ununderstable work. The story of Chinese
logic thus follows the logic of so many other fields in
this series.
This book had a sad fate. It is a fragment of a larger
work that did not come about. Work on it was seem-
ingly broken off before many of its synthesizing and
narrative parts were fully integrated into a cohesive
argument, and a decision was made to publish it as is
rather than never. Harbsmeier warns the reader that
work basically ended in 1985 and that nothing was
added or changed after 1988. Rich new textual finds as
well as a wealth of new studies touching on its subject
have appeared in the meantime. It retains its value
through the wealth of the literature presented and
especially through the hitherto unpublished segments
informed by the author's own original research.
RUDOLF G. WAGNER
University of HeidelbergNeither Zhang nor Hu Shi sought to equate ru with
Another problem in the second part is Jensen's
LIONEL M. JENSEN. Manufacturing Confucianism: Chi-
nese Traditions and Universal Civilization. Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press. 1997. Pp. xv, 444. Cloth
$59.95, paper $19.95.
This book aims to challenge current views of Confu-
cianism, calling into question its conceptual coherence
as it is used in the West. Lionel M. Jensen is troubled
by the various contemporary uses made of "Confucius"
and "Confucianism" by academicians and politicians:
those who explain the success of East Asian economic
expansion in the 1980s and 1990s, and others who seek
to interpret "Confucianism" and "neo-Confucianism"
AMERICAN HISTORICAL
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Asia 1645
in terms of spiritual and philosophical significance
compatible with those of the West. He criticizes their
interpretive ads as products of the "desire of the
interpreter" (p. 17). For Jensen, they are all fabrica-
tions in the history of what he calls "the manufacturing
of Confucianism."
Part one of the book focuses on the seventeenth
century, when the Jesuits, especially Matteo Ricci,
attempted to turn Kongzi into Confucius and his
teachings into Confucianism, a monotheistic religion
and a metonym of "real" Chineseness. The meaning of
these discursive symbols, however, are not what the
ancient Chinese knew as Kongzi and his teachings. By
situating the experience of the Jesuits in a translingual,
transcultural, and global context, Jensen does an ex-
cellent job in highlighting the hybrid nature of the
Jesuits in China. He argues convincingly that the first
generation of Jesuits in China were trying to become
Chinese. It is the concept of "Jesuit Chineseness" that
distinguishes Jensen's analysis from previous studies of
the Jesuits (p. 80). But Jensen is mistaken to claim that
"Confucius" was not a phonetic transcription of a
Chinese term Kong fuzi (Master Kong). In fact, a late
Ming play did use Kong fuzi to refer to Kongzi (Xin
bian Kong fuzi zhouyou lieguo dacheng qilin ji).
In the second part, Jensen argues that this Jesuit-
Sino product became the major inspiration for at-
tempts to create a new Chinese nation through "rein-
venting Kongzi as a historicized religious figure" in the
twentieth century (p. 5). The argument is built on an
extensive analysis of two texts: Yuan ru by Zhang
Binglin (1868-1936) and Shuo ru by Hu Shi (1891-
1962). Jensen argues that "the critical scholarship of
the early-twentieth-century 'Chinese, in effect, repro-
duced the seventeenth-century Jesuit equation of Con-
fucianos and Chineseness" (p. 177). This argument is
problematic and reductionist, for Jensen has skipped
the revival of classicism in the early Qing and devoted
less than a page to eighteenth-century scholarship on
the "Confucian" classics. Jensen makes the dubious
claim that "the contentions of guwen and jinwen schol
ars alike defined Chineseness through Kongzi" (p.
177). Contrary to Jensen's claim, Zhang Binglin, the
towering guwen scholar, defined Chineseness in terms
of the "Han race" (Hanzu), history, and language.
Chineseness.
silence about the views of the nineteenth-century
Protestant missionaries who produced a vast Chinese
literature criticizing Confucianism. James Legge, the
renowned missionary-scholar, criticized Confucius as
"unreligious," for he had identified "God with a prin-
ciple of reason and the course of nature" (Legge, The
Four Books [1966], p. 100). Legge's rejection of Con-
fucianism as a religion was shared by Max Weber
whose interpretation of Confucianism influenced
scholarship on the role of culture in the modernization
of China. Weber argued precisely that Confucianism
was not a revealed religion but a rationalist ethics.
REVIEW DECEMBER 1999