On Ethics and History Read online

  Zhang shared the ethical particularism characteristic of Wang Yangming, a thinker who influenced Zhang deeply.18 Both insisted that correct ethical judgment is irreducibly protean and non-codifiable. However, their respective conceptions of why this is so and how one comes to judge correctly differ in important ways. For Wang, ethical judgment consists in the unimpeded operation of an innate moral faculty, which he called “pure knowing.” 19 If one’s pure knowing is functioning properly, it will spontaneously lead to the proper judgment, and this will initiate a seamless process of perceiving, judging, intending, willing, and doing. As he put it, there is a unity of knowing and acting. “real knowledge” is inextricably linked to action.20 In order to reach this ideal state of character, Wang advocated a process of self-cultivation that consisted primarily of efforts to remove the impediments that might be interfering with one’s pure knowing. He insisted that when carefully examined such obstructions prove to be various expressions of selfish desire and that a full and vivid recognition of the nature of one’s selfishness has the power to relieve its grip upon one’s heart-mind. All that one has to do is to “have faith” in the power of pure knowing and let it guide one to the Way.

  Zhang offered a quite different view. He discussed the non-codifiability of ethical judgment largely in terms of the ever-changing historical context within which human beings must act. Since circumstances constantly are shifting and transforming, one can’t apply any set principle or covering law to understand the moral order.21 Instead, one must take stock of the historical moment, and within this framework, the right kind of historian—one with “Virtue”—will discern what is right and what is wrong. In this respect, Zhang retains elements of Wang’s intuitionist theory of moral perception. As noted above, in order to develop this kind of ability one has to have the right stuff. Zhang believed that every person has particular natural talents, and some are fortunate enough to have a special gift for history. However, even those with the greatest natural talent must apply themselves to a rigorous course of study in order to master the skills and knowledge that enable them to refine and apply their enhanced sensibilities to the flow of historical events. In this respect Zhang differs from Wang. Ethical self-cultivation requires a demanding course of sustained intellectual training in the specific field of history. Echoing an idea seen in China’s first history, the Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji ), only such a person can both “understand the past and command the present.”22 Only one who has cultivated proper historical judgment can possess a complete and reliable ethical sensibility.

  III. A Brief Guide to the Essays and Letters23

  “On the Dao” is Zhang’s most comprehensive and important essay.24 It shares its title with several earlier works by different authors from various periods of Chinese history, but its most immediate inspiration is the justly famous essay by Han Yu with the same title.25 (A complete English translation of Han Yu’s essay can be found in the Appendix to this volume.) Like Han Yu, Zhang understood the title yuan dao to mean both “to trace the dao or Way back to its historical source,” and “to provide a complete analysis describing what it essentially is.” Of course, for Zhang, these projects were inseparable in principle—a view that Han Yu did not seem to share.

  In the course of “On the Dao,” Zhang presents many of his most distinctive and significant ideas. He traces the evolution of the dao through the three distinctive historical periods described above and explains why a grasp of this history is critical for understanding how past as well as contemporary thinkers misunderstand the nature of the dao and therefore act in misguided and unproductive ways. This points toward another similarity between these two essays: their polemical stance. Han Yu used his essay to throw down the gauntlet and challenge both Buddhism and Daoism as misguided and pernicious teachings responsible for the decline of Chinese civilization. His work ends with explicit and harsh recommendations for combating their purportedly malignant influences. Many regard Han Yu’s essay as a call to battle sounding the opening salvo of the neo-Confucian revival. Zhang’s essay is directed not toward threats from without but threats from within. His criticisms are aimed primarily at well-meaning yet misguided Confucians who misunderstood the very nature of the dao and therefore corrupted and misdirected the Confucian tradition. While more accommodating in tone than Han Yu’s diatribe, its essential message is no less radical.

  “On the Dao” is one of a group of twenty-three essays, eight of which are included in this volume, that Zhang composed in May of 1789, while residing in Taiping.26 Zhang had struggled to work out the central features of his philosophical system for much of his adult life, and as he reached middle age his various insights seem to have flowed together, reinforced the process of development and expression, and poured forth in a torrent of writing during this remarkably productive month in Taiping. Zhang himself recognized that the essays from this period marked a special moment in the course of his intellectual life; he is reported to have said that, “In all my life, I have never written anything better than these.”27

  Among the Taiping essays is our second selection, “On Learning,” a work in which Zhang continues to explore and expand upon the themes one finds in “On the Dao.” Zhang himself describes “On Learning” as a further elaboration of the major issues he discussed in “On the Dao” in his letter, “Reply to Shen Zaiting Discussing Learning” (Letter 1 below).

  “A Treatise on Teachers,” also written in May of 1789, is an explicit response to Han Yu’s well-known essay with the same title. (A complete English translation of Han Yu’s essay can be found in the Appendix to this volume.) Against Han Yu, Zhang argues that the highest kinds of knowledge can only be acquired from certain very special kinds of teachers. Zhang develops this idea into an intriguing distinction between replaceable and irreplaceable teachers. One can learn facts and techniques from the former, but if one is interested in the sense, style, and significance of the dao, one must seek the latter: a teacher who personally embodies this knowledge. Moreover, irreplaceable teachers can communicate this more esoteric type of wisdom only through direct and intimate interactions with their students or disciples. Invoking the style as well as the language of Chan Buddhism, Zhang insists on a “mind-to-mind transmission” of the Confucian dao.

  “Conventional Convictions,” the fourth Taiping essay included among our selections, explores what it is to arrive at legitimate moral judgments. It starts off by arguing that all convictions begin with doubt, but then takes several interesting and unexpected turns. Zhang argues that most people “know” in a shallow sense the same moral truths that morally wise people know, but that only the latter know the justifying reasons behind such judgments. Nevertheless, those who attain this deeper understanding must be on guard for a peculiar kind of moral failure. They must not succumb to the temptation to take their well-grounded moral knowledge as a private discovery or personal achievement; to do so distorts both the true character of any truth—that it is simply part of the dao and thereby belongs to everyone—and threatens to undermine the value of such truths—when people try to hide away such insights, control their dissemination, or use them to gain personal fame, wealth, or power.28 In some ways, Zhang can be seen as offering a variation on the well-known neo-Confucian distinction between “ordinary knowledge” and “real knowledge.”29 But while Zhang endorses the idea that real knowledge requires a well-tuned personal sensibility, his analysis tends to emphasize a greater difference in cognitive content than in affective sense as the feature distinguishing these two types of knowledge. Here we see another example of Zhang’s describing an idea that was dear to Wang Yangming—the distinction between ordinary and real knowledge—but offering a more intellectualist account than one finds in Wang. For Zhang, those with real knowledge understand the reasons why ordinary moral convictions are well grounded, but they avoid being affected by this achievement in ways that may shift the focus off the moral issue at hand and onto their personal achievement.

  “
The Difficulty of Being Understood” also was written during the same productive period. In this essay, Zhang argues that really knowing a person is not a matter of being able to recognize his appearance, manner, or name, but of seeing into and appreciating his heart-mind. As is clear in a number of his other essays, this ability is something that one can exercise not only in regard to one’s contemporaries but also toward those in the past. In fact, as noted in the first part of this Introduction, Zhang argues that such sympathetic understanding is essential for proper historical understanding.

  However, in “The Difficulty of Being Understood” Zhang’s main concern is with being understood oneself and only indirectly with the ability to understand others. He argues that real understanding is very hard to come by and not something that one should expect either from one’s contemporaries or from posterity. Zhang illustrates his points with a number of historical examples that show semblances or counterfeits of genuine understanding. Taken as a whole, the essay presents an analytical lament, bordering on an expression of despair, over ever really being understood or appreciated. In this respect, this essay echoes and clearly was inspired by the closing chapter of the Records of the Grand Historian, where Sima Qian expresses a similar complaint and vows to hide his work in a “famous mountain” to await a sympathetic future reader.30

  “The Analogy of Heaven,” another of the Taiping essays, offers a remarkable argument for the similarity between examples of what today we would distinguish as ethical and scientific knowledge. Given the fact that traditional Chinese astronomers did not fully understand the structure and movements of the heavens, it was inevitable that their attempts to predict regularly occurring celestial phenomena would, over time, come to grief. For example, without understanding the precession of the planets, their predictions about events like the summer and winter solstices would always begin to drift and soon become grossly inaccurate. They addressed such failures by adding intercalary months and other patches to bring the system back into alignment. Instead of seeing this predicament as a sign that there was something fundamentally wrong with the theory, Zhang—as well as other prominent Chinese thinkers—took it as a sign that there was something essentially incomprehensible about the operations of Heaven.31 Working from such a perspective, Zhang argues in “The Analogy of Heaven” that attempts to capture the development and expression of ethical norms with a formal, unvarying theory or system will develop similar problems over time, as Heaven is something beyond the ken of human beings—we only see traces of its workings in the phenomenal world—and its operation and future trajectory are things we can at best only approximate. The most we can do is sketch its basic nature, discern its general direction, cultivate ourselves to be sensitive to the inevitable drift that is bound to come, and be prepared to respond to and accommodate such deviations. While this argument does not present us with a wholly compelling account of the natural sciences, it can be seen as a very sensible stance toward the ongoing process of history.32

  “Breadth and Economy” was written sometime toward the end of 1789, and, as Nivison notes, it is often thought of and shares many of the same themes as the essays Zhang wrote in May of that year.33 Zhang sent a copy of this essay, along with a substantial “cover letter,” to Shen Zaiting. (A complete English translation of Zhang’s letter to Shen appears in the Letters section of this volume.) While similar in content to many of the essays written in May of 1789, “Breadth and Economy” is organized around a distinctive and perennial theme of Confucian scholars: how does one balance breadth of learning with a grasp of what is most essential? Taking its cue from Analects 6.27, the essay argues that there is no formulaic answer to this question but that such a concern must be part of how one approaches learning. Zhang’s particular account of this problem appeals to and takes shape around the structure of his speculative historical scheme. According to Zhang, it was relatively easy for those who lived during the Golden Age of the Zhou dynasty to master every aspect of the dao, because they learned about the Way in the course of their daily lives. In some sense, everything they did was an expression of the dao. However, such is not the case for those who live in the ages following the breakup of the Golden Age. For people of later times, learning about the dao is much more difficult; they do not spend their lives immersed in the ideal culture of the Zhou. Because of this disadvantage, they must dedicate concerted effort even to grasp a single, limited aspect of the dao. Given their particular historical location, contemporary scholars must approach the problem of breadth and economy differently; they must focus their attention and energies on some particular intellectual specialization. Once they master their chosen specialization, they then can build upon it, extending and broadening their understanding until they comprehend the entirety of the dao.

  Zhang composed “Virtue in an Historian” in 1791, and it offers his clearest attempt to describe a distinctive aspect of his view about the more subjective side of proper historical understanding. Zhang’s speculative historical scheme offers a unique account of the objective nature and course of history, but “Virtue in an Historian” seeks to explain a special quality or Virtue (de) needed in the person of a good historian. Nivison has pointed out that, like “Conventional Convictions,” “Virtue in an Historian” is concerned with the dangers inherent in understanding in general. As noted in our earlier discussion of the former essay, there is a human tendency to regard one’s insights as one’s personal property, but to do this is to commit a substantial moral error that can be the source of significant, bad consequences, both for oneself and others. In “Virtue in an Historian” Zhang describes this kind of mistake with language taken from the Zhuangzi. He cautions that as one comes to understand the dao, one must be careful not to let the human—i.e., one’s efforts to understand the dao—overshadow or interfere with its Heavenly—i.e., natural and spontaneous—character. Even the good intention of trying to assist the operation of Heaven can lead one astray. Any effort to help things along simply adds some unnatural element to the original, pristine state of things: polluting the Heavenly with the alltoo-human. 34

  As Zhang makes clear, historians have to be especially careful to attend to the inner workings of their own heart-minds. In addition to the general kinds of errors in understanding that Zhang describes in essays like “Conventional Convictions,” the nature of historical work—understanding figures from the past—requires historians to engage their emotions in the exercise of sympathetic concern. This kind of personal engagement also is in play when one evaluates the historical writings of others. When one’s emotions are aroused in the course of such imaginative identification with others, it is easy for these feelings to carry away good judgment and replace it with prejudice of one kind or another. Zhang feels that even the best historian cannot fully eliminate such distorting influences—for even the best are human—but a proper historian is aware of this tendency and on guard against it. Balancing sympathetic concern with a vigilant awareness of our tendency toward prejudice defines the twin imperatives informing Virtue in historians.

  “Virtue in a Litterateur” was written in 1796 and offers a complement of sorts to the similarly titled “Virtue in an Historian,” produced five years before it. In this work, Zhang is concerned with the more subjective qualities that those who specialize in literature must cultivate in order to be true to their chosen vocation. As in his views on the writing and appreciation of history, in “Virtue in a Litterateur” Zhang offers advice that applies to the litterateur as both critic of other writers and author of his or her own works. In either case, in order to perform well the aspiring litterateur must engage in a form of moral self-cultivation. One must be a certain kind of person in order to produce the ideal kind of writing. While there are significant similarities between the cases of the ideal historian and the ideal litterateur, there are also important differences in the way Zhang describes what is needed.

  In general terms, a litterateur needs to work on the same twin imperatives that are nee
ded for Virtue in an historian. Whether as critic or author, the litterateur needs sympathetic concern in order to understand the feelings and intentions of others, whether they are other writers or the subjects of one’s own works. As in the earlier case, this emotional engagement conceals a potential hazard, for one can easily be seduced by one’s own feelings into producing sappy, maudlin, or overwrought writing or reading these flaws into the work of other authors. In order to counter-balance the need for emotional authenticity, Zhang describes the kind of awareness and selfwatchfulness that he recommended in “Virtue in an Historian,” but in his later essay he develops this idea further and expresses it more clearly. Zhang counsels the aspiring litterateur to cultivate an attitude of reverential attention (jing ), a state of mind in which the spirited aspects of one’s nature—one’s qi—are collected and controlled. By combining sympathetic concern and reverential attention, the litterateur can be emotionally engaged but not overwhelmed or disoriented by his feelings. Possessing such Virtue, one can understand and appreciate the work of others and produce authentic and powerful writings of one’s own.