YANG CHU'S DISCOVERY OF THE BODY

John J. Emerson

www.johnjemerson.com

Also at www.idiocentrism.com 

(At g mail dot com, I am emersonj. A version of this paper was published
 in Philosophy East and West, Volume 46-4, October 1996, pp. 533-566;
 for those with access, the published version can be seen at Ebsco online)

            In his own time Yang Chu (fl. ca. 370-350 B.C.) was regarded as a revolutionary thinker. Mencius considered Yang's doctrine to be one of the deadliest of the sophistries with which he was forced to contend: "The words of Yang Chu and Mo Ti fill the land."1  According to A.C. Graham, "[Yang's] intervention provoked a metaphysical crisis which threatened the basic assumptions of Confucianism and Mohism and set them in new courses."2

            Unfortunately, little solid information about Yang Chu remains: we know his thought only from a handful of anecdotes and quotations, all from hostile sources, together with a few later writings thought to be derived from his.  (This should probably come as no surprise:  in ancient China, books were most often compiled by state ministries of culture, and Yang's anti-state teaching was probably one of the main targets of the Ch'in dynasty burning of the books.)  Furthermore,  when we look at the material that does remain, we find ourselves wondering what all the fuss was about.  The Yangist doctrines, while pungent enough, seem simplistic -- on a par with the teachings of various other recluses and reformers in China and elsewhere, and hardly capable of provoking a metaphysical crisis.  Aloysius Chang believes that the well-attested material about Yang consists of only four items:

1.  "Each for himself": wei wo  為 我 . 

2. "Preserve life, maintain the real, don't get entangled with things."

3.  He would not sacrifice a hair from his leg in   order to profit the whole empire (or "in order to gain the whole empire" -- a different interpretation of the Chinese.) 4.  He would not serve in the army, nor would he remain in a besieged city.3

            The purpose of this paper is to show the philosophical interest of these doctrines.   I will claim that Yang's key innovation was the "discovery of the body".  During the Warring States period the relationship between the individual and the state was being redefined, simultaneously producing a new political order and a new sense of self.  By providing a physical definition of human nature,  Yang Chu freed the Chinese elite from the public ritual roles  (and to a lesser extent, from the clan identifications and traditional obligations to the spirits) which had till then dominated and defined them.  By treating public honors, court ceremonial, and feudal relationships as external conditions, he struck at the heart of the traditional ritual order defended by the Confucians.   Simultaneously, he made possible new, non-public, non-ritual forms of individual self-awareness and self-cultivation which were sharply different from the Confucian and traditional forms.

            From our Western point of view, the Yangist liberation was only partial,  and never succeeded in establishing either the "autonomous individual" or the "free citizen" in China; it is best called "privatism", rather than "individualism".  The change in Chinese life which can be attributed to the Yangists (and which was always resisted by the Confucians) was the valorization of private and family life at the expense of public and court life.  The "Chinese self" never ceased to be defined relationally, primarily in terms of kin relationships;  but for most Chinese (the Confucian elite always excepted)  the relation to the Emperor or to feudal superiors, and to public life generally, became an external and often onerous concern.  This change coincided, and effectively was identical with,  massive changes in governmental organization (initiated by government officials and military leaders),  whereby rational decision-making (cause and effect, end and means, military expansion, maximization of revenues) came to replace traditional, ritualistic patterns of action.  One consequence of this rationalization was to make government officials instruments of the crown, rather than ethically responsible, culturally splendid, and largely autonomous occupants of meaningful public positions.  One way or another, most early Chinese philosophers either participated in this transformation, or responded to it.

            In section I below, I will discuss Yang's "discovery of the body" in a comparative context, portraying ritual clan worlds within which the integrity of the individual, the identification of the person with his body, and body/ soul dualism were simply not present.  Sections II -- V will discuss Confucian  ritual politics and its roots in traditional clan ceremonial.  In section VI I will return to Yang Chu himself, reconstructing his doctrine and showing that,  however innovative it may have been, it was firmly grounded in the Chinese tradition.  Last of all, methodological questions will be discussed in appendices on "Social Constructionism" and "The Chinese Self".

I.

            Yang's "discovery of the body", which I have proposed as the key to his philosophical significance, seems truistic and mundane: who does not know that he has a body?  The essential clue which makes it possible to define Yang's accomplishment comes from a place and time far removed from ancient China.  The missionary Maurice Leenhardt reports on a much later "discovery of the body" in twentieth-century Melanesia: "Once, waiting to assess the mental progress of the Canaques I had taught for many years, I risked the following suggestion: 'In short, we introduced the notion of spirit into your thinking.' And he objected: 'Spirit? Bah!  You didn't bring us the spirit.  We already knew the spirit existed.  We have always acted in accordance with the spirit.  What you have brought us is the body.'" 4

            While the brute fact of the existence of human bodies has always been recognized,  the skin-bound individual, separated off from all others, has not always been thought of as the fundamental building-block of humanity. In archaic societies everywhere,  clans and similar groups  dominated human reality. Compared to these groups,  individuals were transient and derivative; they were not thought of as unities, nor were they invariably identified with their bodies.  Bruno Snell writes of Homeric Greece:  "We find it difficult to conceive of a mentality which made no provision for the body as such."5  "The new psyche, the 'soul', demanding a body to suit it, caused the term soma [originally 'corpse'] to be extended so that it ultimately was used also of the living body.  But whatever the details of this evolution, the distinction between body and soul represents a 'discovery' which so impressed people's minds that it was thereafter accepted as self-evident...."6

            The problem under discussion here is thus quite general: even in the West our common-sense identification of "persons" with "bodies" has not always been regarded as obvious.  In the remainder of this paper I will spell out several aspects of archaic "identity", with the help of Chinese, Greek, and Melanesian evidence.  (It is not my claim that these three peoples are closely related in any way,  and my use of some evidence from modern China does not mean that I think that there are no major differences between ancient and modern China -- as it happens, Yang's break defines one of these major differences. But the primary  contrast here is between the modern West and almost  everyone else.)

            In traditional societies such as Melanesia or ancient China, the "individual" is weakly defined.  Persons are distinguishable from one another, and individual personalities can be distinctive.  Yet in such societies a person is ontologically the sum of his various participations and identifications, and his "self", if there is such a thing, is defined in terms of a web of shifting relationships with specific others, human and non-human: relatives, ancestors, cohort members, totems, spirits, etc. Such a person can neither explain the relationship between his "self" in one context and his various other (often quite dissimilar) "selves", nor distinguish his own share of an "identity" defined in couple with another, nor say what it is that is common to all of his selves.  The most he can do is to explain why he is acting within a particular role, but this explanation will always be contextual: "Because he is my uncle," "because it is harvest festival", "we have always done it this way", etc. The individual essence or personal nature is dominated by its meaningful roles, and motivation and choice often do not even exist:  behavior is defined by custom, ritual, and situation.  (Whereas the individual self is the ontological substance in modern Western societies, the patrilineal clan -- represented by the powerful ancestral spirits, who no longer have bodies -- was the human substance in traditional China.)

            The "traditional self" is plural, diffuse, empty, and implicated with various "others" -- the diametrical opposite of the integral western identity with its power to enter freely into external relationships.  The nearest analogue to this "absence of identity" or "non-identity" in Western society is the old- fashioned wife and mother, who might say "we" -- meaning herself and her husband -- or "Jimmy" -- speaking for her son -- but who seldom speaks in her own name or acts in her own interest.

            The ancient Chinese believed that men have from two to seven souls (depending on the theory) : in the words of Maspero, "they knew that man has several souls, but they had scarcely any idea what became of each of them [after death]."  Much the same was true of the Greeks: "the complexity in the Homeric epic of the free soul psyche and the body souls thymos, noos and menos shows that Arbman's description of the soul as dual is limited, as one of Arbman's critics rightly observed.  Instead,  Greek soul belief might be characterized as multiple."7

            Just as they had several souls, ancient Chinese had several names.  "The names by which a Chinese is known are more various and complex than our own....The hsing  姓  and ming 名  [family name and personal name] together make up the name by which a Chinese is formally known....For social purposes the ming is replaced by the tzu  字  or 'style'.  In addition to these, many Chinese have a hao 號  or sobriquet."8 Creel -- who speaks of traditional China in the historical present -- actually oversimplifies: an eminent man would have several haos as well as a posthumous name, as well as a childhood name ("milk-name"), which often survived into adult life.

            In the same way, "the Canaque is obligated to have a different name for every domain which involves his person in various relationships and participations."9  In both societies, names are plural because identity is plural.  No consistency need be found among the various identities -- behavior in a ceremonial role is usually entirely different from everyday behavior;  a person might be generous within his family and grasping outside it, for example, or craven before his father, affable with friends, and arrogant with inferiors -- the multiple standards of conduct spoken of by Hsu.10  From the point of view of ego- psychology, members of these societies must be be said to suffer from "poor ego-definition", but it is more accurate to say that it is inappropriate to apply ego-psychology to societies which are institutionally anti-individualistic, and within which consistency of personality is not even regarded as desirable.11

            Both in Melanesia and in ancient China, the individual was often absorbed into dual relationships of participation, identification, or heierarchal encompassing.  The plural self results from the fact that these relationships are many; Marriot speaks of the "dividual", as opposed to the "individual": the person who is made up of parts shared with others, who can only be given a misleading separate definition by artificially and violently dividing him off from his essential relationships. Harre finds what he calls "symbiotic dyads"  also in Western society, though the mother-and-child is his only example.12 "Grandfather and grandson, in reciprocal positions identical with each other, participate in the same person which is diffuse in them."13 -- that was Melanesia, but it could equally have been a description of a traditional Chinese funeral, wherein the grandson of the deceased customarily "personated" him, taking on his identity and receiving, from his own father, the respect due his grandfather.

            In traditional societies the relationship is more real  than its members, and the isolated individual a broken thing:  in the words of Leenhardt, "One is a fraction of two."14 (The married couple again provides the Western analogue: in law husband and wife are "one person.")  In traditional societies there are many such "couples", each with its assigned domain: grandfather/ grandson, uncle/ nephew, older brother/ younger brother, lord/ vassal, etc.  Members of such couples lose part of themselves when the relationship dissolves and, like the newly-widowed, can thereby fall into confusion.

            The emptiness of the self rises from the fact that these relationships monopolize a person's life: the individual's area of exclusive ownership, personal control and free choice, as well as the space within which individuals interact freely as individuals,  is small or non-existent.  "As [the personage's relationships] are still latent, the space [representing the personal essences] appears empty.... We recall the emotion that floods a person addressed by the name of his totem....a reaction of psychic defense toward an utterance which is comparable to excessive familiarity."15  In China, too, "for anyone but his parents, or anyone in a similar position of great superiority, to call him by his ming [personal name].....would be very discourteous."16  Both in China and in Melanesia, personal names are vulnerable to curses and witchcraft and are taboo in a radius proportional to the person's eminence: a child probably will not even know his father's personal name.  The individual essence is secret, fragile, unnamable, and (because almost non-existent) incapable of definition.

            In such circumstances the socially and ritually defined self cannot be identified with the body and is not entirely dependent on the body.  This independence shows itself in various ways. The souls of deranged or sick persons wander far from their bodies, and shamans can send their souls to distant places, even to the world of the dead, at will.  The souls of the dead are real presences even after the body has decayed -- not in another world, but in this world in a hidden way.  Two beliefs common to both societies may be cited as evidence.  The first is revenge suicide:  "In death they seek a way of continuing their being, of affirming it more effectively than they could in the conditions of this world, and of returning it not to a place, but to a role in a society where it no longer has one -- a formidable role because on the transcendent plane, against which society is powerless."17  A second is the belief in the power of the dead really to appear in dreams, a belief which may explain a rather strange passage in Confucius: "The Master said, 'How utterly things have gone to the bad with me!  It is long now indeed since I saw the Duke of Chou in dreams'".18

            Just as the self is weakly defined, in such societies rationality, calculation, and the pursuit of individual interest are not encouraged.  This is not to say that they do not exist. But in the first place, the dense web of interlocking customary obligations made it difficult or impossible to follow a consistent rational plan without causing outrage by the neglect of one duty or another.  During traditional periods, even the strongest and most ambitious figures are often seen to vacillate or act counter to their interest -- for fear of defying custom. In these societies rational calculation is regarded either as lowly and undignified (as when women haggle at the market), or else as illegitimate (in public life),  and often arouses fear and suspicion.  Just as the word ssu "self"  私   can also mean "secret", "taboo", "unclean", "illicit", etc., the words for rationality and calculation tend also to mean "scheming", "conniving", "being two- faced", "conspiratorial", "secretive", etc.   While rational, self- seeking behavior did occur in these societies, there was no legitimate way of speaking of it and thus it could not be open but must be secret.  The individual self was weakly defined in these societies not only because non-individualist forms of identification were better developed, but also because self- assertion and the pursuit of individual interest were suspect and actively repressed.

            The "discovery of the body", wherever it occurs, is part of a reconfiguration of the self/ other, individual/ group, and private/ public relationships,  leading to a new sense of self: unified and not plural, detachable from context, freed from attachments and identification, autonomous and capable of rational choice, and unambiguously located in space and time. The ancestral spirits lose most of their reality,  and clan relationships become less dominant.  This development consists of a complex series of changes and is never quite complete (and probably never can be).  In the West this discovery led to a thoroughgoing individualism, and the Melanesians (ruled by French law and influenced by Christianity) also moved in that direction. As we will see below, however, in China the Warring States movement toward individualism was either incomplete, or else partly reversed during a later historical period.19

            II.

            In the previous section I described the Chinese plural self which preceded Yang Chu's "discovery of the body".  In this section I will discuss Chinese elite self-definition in the court life of feasting and ritual, showing how self-assertion, rational choice, and a unified sense of self were all problematic within this arena.

            For the Chou nobility, public life -- warfare, court life, and personal bonds with feudal superiors -- was the primary arena within which self-definition took place, and the Confucians hoped to bring China to order by purifying and regulating the court occasions within which rank and status were made manifest. Confucians believed that these festivities should be modeled on the traditional clan and neighborhood ceremonials within which the "natural human feelings" of affection, respect, and admiration were expressed.  This effort was traversed by a major fault line:  while these ceremonials were indeed effective at the local level, and while the court ceremonials were also genuinely powerful, the enforcement of the former pattern on occasions of the latter sort was problematic: the court and the clan are two entirely different social groups, both in their constitution and their function, and the more Chinese culture  expanded the more fictional the pseudo- kinship bonds became -- e.g., between the Eastern Chou and the semi-barbarous states of Ch'in and Ch'u, or with the usurper states of Chao and Ch'i).  All non-Confucian schools rejected the ceremonial model, proposing entirely different ordering principles.

            To begin with, it is has to be shown how the Confucian attempt to model the state on the family was plausible at all. First, the ancient Chinese family (or clan) was a political unit. The head of a clan was a political figure who had authority over his family and represented it in all public dealings, and he was treated by its members with respect and deference rather than with affection.20   The chia  家  ("family, house") was the smallest governmental unit -- compare our "House of York", etc.   Beyond collecting taxes, imperial authorities scarcely intervened at all in local affairs, which were left to village councils and the heads of the important clans  -- who exercised local authority far beyond the limits of their kin group.

            Second,  the "rituals" or "ceremonies" by which the Confucians hoped to attain order were feasts and celebrations: splendid events, the focal point of the Empire's wealth, beauty, luxury, and haute cuisine.  The traditional ritual form of these feasts was defended by the Confucians partly in order to prevent licentiousness and brawling, but especially in order to ensure that these celebrations served to reward true excellence, to renew the participants' commitment to the sacred truths expressed in the classics, and to reinforce legitimate authority.

These celebrations defined the dominant class.  Seating- arrangements were minutely calculated to display the relative statuses of the participants, and the distribution of the choice cuts of sacrificial meat was likewise done according to status.21  Participants at these festivities could tell at a glance not merely who was who and what was what, but also who they themselves were.  (This should not be hard for us to understand: even today, seeing-and-being-seen and what people say about you define status and success in Hollywood, in Washington D.C., and at the high school prom.)  The pursuit of honor, as publicly manifested in these feasts, and the concommittant avoidance of shame and disgrace (as manifest in humiliating punishments, mutilation, or execution, as well as by ignoble placement at festivals) was the dominant motive for the Chinese aristocracy.  Success and failure were without appeal;  there was originally little notion that a subordinate might have more "real worth" than his superior, and the rituals in any case required the inferiors physically to humble themselves.  All the many passages in the various classics saying that public disgrace need not be real disgrace are challenges to this system.  Yang Chu was one of the first to proclaim that real worth can be entirely independent of officially proclaimed shame and honor; to the extent that he was successful he greatly weakened the traditional system.22

            The grounding of the Confucian ritual reforms on archaic, non-state ceremonial is well-attested.  In the Li Chi  Confucius is quoted thus:  "When I look on the festivity in the country districts, I know how easily the royal way may obtain free course..... Distinction between the noble and mean is thus exhibited; the discrimination in the multitude or paucity of observances to different parties;  the harmony and joy without disorder; the brotherly deference to elders without omitting any; the happy feasting without turbulence or confusion -- the observance of these five things is sufficient to secure rectification of the person, and the tranquility of the state. When one state is tranquil, all under heaven will be the same".23  The Confucians, of course, transformed and developed this traditional model,  but I believe that the continuity with tradition was real.

            Neither the district ceremonial nor the Western Chou ceremonial as depicted in the Odes (Confucius' other model) allowed for self-assertion or self-expression.  Individuals were absorbed into their role in  the ceremonial as a whole, which furthermore was oriented toward tradition and the past rather than the present,  so that the primary players were not any of the living individuals present, but rather the ancestral spirits.  The body language by which the lower-ranking participants were required to humble themselves before their superiors was minutely described, and performances could not be off-hand or casual.  Furthermore, the automatic respect given to the elders who were the authorized interpreters of the tradition meant that it was especially the young and ambitious who were required to humble themselves.

            Since important political decisions were often made on ritual occasions,  it can be seen that the many passages in Confucius and Mencius protesting ritual irregularities are all attacks on the formation of illicit and irregular avenues to power and reward. Wherever Confucius is translated as objecting to "licentiousness", he should be understood to be speaking of bribery, graft, conflict of interest, and secret government. When Confucius becomes indignant when he is not invited to an event or when he does not receive his due share of the sacrifice,  he is objecting to his exclusion from decision-making and his supercession by private and illicit advisers.  When he protests the neglect of traditional sacrifices and the destruction of family altars (after the conquest of small states) he is objecting to an anti-traditional political reorganization.24

            While Confucian traditionalism can be interpreted as blindly reactionary or even superstitious, the Confucians were rational in a Durkheimian sort of way.25  The real issue in these cases of usurpation was always an attempt by a ruler or high official to take personal control of the ceremonials within which status and self are defined, at the expense of the traditional institutional order -- with the ultimate aim of gaining total control of the state. Confucius' traditionalism could almost be regarded as a form of constitutionalism: he supported traditional patterns because they reduced exploitation and precluded total control.

            In Western terms, of course, the "corruption" which Confucius was fighting was a modernizing process.  Military affairs and finance were rationalized, with a consequent neglect of chivalry, custom, traditional obligations, and moral scruples.  Agricultural practices were improved.  Sumptuary laws (which elaborately prescribed who was and was not allowed to possess the various categories of luxury items) were abolished or ignored.  The clans were weakened, so that each individual was obligated directly to the state.  And in turn, individuals rationally pursued their private interests within the limit of the law, with little regard either for tradition or for the feelings of the community.  The questions at issue in this struggle are of major importance for the study not only of Chinese social history but also in the broader context of world history.

III.

            The Confucians proposed that the great state occasions be strictly governed by the traditional standards for poetry, music, and ritual, the study of which was regarded as essential to the education of the gentleman.  In this section I will consider the functioning of these in China and Greece, with special attention to music (and to a lesser degree, poetry.)

            Chinese political thinking abounds with poetic, musical and aural metaphors26, and importance of music (which essentially included poetry) in Confucian thought is hard to overestimate.  In this section I will show how, in China and also in ancient Greece, music functioned to impede the development of self-awareness, rationality, and self-assertion, fostering instead the embodiment and enactment of traditional roles.

            Music and ritual were usually found together and combined to affirm traditional order, but their functions were slightly different.  Music was associated with feeling, the inner as opposed to the outer (represented by ceremony) and also by what is common or shared, as opposed to differences, which are also represented by ceremony.   (Hsün Tzu:  "Music is joy".27  Li Chi:  "Music comes from within, and ceremonies from without".28 Hsün Tzu: "Hence music brings about complete unity and brings harmony.29  Confucius: "It is from the Odes that the mind is aroused; it is by the rules of propriety that the character is established; it is from music that the finish is received."30)

            A number of references in the literature compare a happy society or a good man to an well-trained orchestra – notably Mencius' characterization of Confucius.  Elsewhere Mencius uses group enjoyment of music as a metaphor for the common good: "Mencius asked, 'Which  is more pleasant, to enjoy music by yourself alone, or to enjoy it with others?' 'To enjoy it with others', was the reply.  'And which is more pleasant, to enjoy music with a few, or to enjoy it with many'?  'To enjoy it with many'."31

            Confucius' own appreciation of music was intense: "When the master was in Ch'i, he heard the Shao, and for three months did not know the taste of meat.  'I did not think' he said, 'that music could have been made as excellent as this'".32  Elsewhere a passerby hears Confucius performing and comments "'His heart is full who so beats the musical stone'" -- later, however, accusing him of "'single-minded obstinacy'".33  He describes the next-to- last step of his own self-cultivation in musical or at least aural terms:  "At sixty my ear was attuned".34

            The following passage from the Li Chi illustrates the intimate connection between music and poetry, and gives evidence for the compulsive effect of music which I will argue is central to its importance in the Confucian scheme:  "Singing means the prolonged expression of the words; there is the utterance of the words, and when the simple utterance is not sufficient, the prolonged expression of them.  When that prolonged expression is not sufficient, there come the sigh and exclamation.  When these are insufficient, unconsciously come the motion of the hands and the stamping of the feet."35

            Eric Havelock's brilliant analysis of the political functions of music and poetry in ancient Greece, I believe, also applies to ancient China , and I will cite him extensively.  The rhythmic recitation of Hesiod and Homer was the primary method by which ancient Greek political (and other) values were transmitted and reinforced.  Just as the single Chinese word shih  師  named both the teacher and the music-master, in Greece "the school master, even in the days of Aristophanes, is still styled 'the harpist'...."36 According to Havelock, "mousike as a recognized 'technique' was a complicated convention designed to set up motions and reflexes which would assist the record and recall of significant speech.  The melody and the dance are thus the servants of preserved statement and are not in the oral stage of culture practiced very much for their own sake.  The dance, considered as part of the mnemonic apparatus, could be the partner of many varieties of preserved speech, particularly those we designate as ode, hymn, and dithyramb."37 (The relevance to the Li Chi passage requires no comment).

            In the Greek experience of poetry, the poet, the actor, the teacher/ singer, and the student/ listener all were related to the poem in the mode of identification.   "Hence Plato's mimesis, when it confuses the poet's situation with the actor's and both of these with the situation of the student in class and the adult in recreation, is faithful to the facts."38  The loss of self-control involved in this participation is marked out thus:  "The hurrying panorama is so constructed and sung that we are seduced into identifying with its doings, its joys and griefs, its nobilities and cruelties, its courage and its cowardice.  As we pass from experience to experience, submitting our memories to the spell of the incantation, the whole experience becomes a kind of dream in which image succeeds image automatically without conscious control on our part, without a pause to reflect,  to rearrange or to generalize,  and without a change to ask a question or to raise a doubt, for this would at once interrupt and endanger the chain of association.  When we summarized the effect of Hesiod's account of the pleasurable spell cast by the honeyed muse upon her audience, the effect he seems to be trying to describe we spoke of as a kind of hypnosis.... This is surely the reason why Plato so often describes the non-philosophical state of mind as a kind of sleep-walking, nor was he alone in passing this judgment.... [The Greek epics] could not supply the descriptive and analytical disciplines,  but they could supply a complete emotional life.  It was a life without self-examination, but as a manipulation of the resources of the unconscious in harmony with the conscious it was unsurpassed."39

            The consequences of this poetic mimetic mode of being for self-awareness were enormous.  "When confronted with an Achilles, we can say, here is a man of strong character, definite personality, great energy, and forceful decision, but it would be equally true to say, here is a man to whom it has not occurred, and to whom it cannot occur, that he has a personality apart from the pattern of his acts.  His acts are responses to his situation, and are governed by remembered examples of previous acts by previous strong men.  The Greek tongue.... cannot frame words to express the conviction that 'I' am one thing and the tradition is another; that 'I' can stand apart from the tradition and examine it, that 'I' can and should break the spell of its hypnotic force.... The doctrine of the autonomous psyche is the counterpart of the rejection of the oral  culture."40

            Grounding his work on Parry and Lord's studies of Balkan folk epics (which in turn were specifically motivated by similarities between these poems and those of Homer), C. H. Wang has already demonstrated the oral  character of the Book of Odes, and we know that the recitation of these poems at feast was indeed accompanied by music and pantomimes and dances.41  There are also many indications in the classical literature that the sage's influence was hypnotic or magical rather than rational.  "The Master said, 'The people may be made to follow a path of action, but they may not be made to understand it.'"42  "The Master said: 'May Shun not be instances as having governed efficiently without exertion?  What did he do?  He did nothing but gravely and reverentially occupy his royal seat'".43  "The character of the noble man is like wind, that of ordinary men like grass;  when the wind blows the grass must bend."44  "To govern by te 徳   is to be like the North Polar Star:  it remains in place while all the other stars revolve in homage around it".45 "With correct comportment, no commands are necessary; yet affairs proceed."46

            Ritual as training or behavioral modification is also expressed:  "The philosopher Yü said, 'They are few who being filial and fraternal, are fond of offending against their superiors.  There have been none who, not liking to offend against their superiors, have been fond of stirring up confusion.'"47  "When one listens to the singing of the odes and hymns, his mind and will are broadened; when he takes up the shield and battle-ax and learns the postures of the war dance, his bearing acquires vigor and majesty; when he learns to observe the proper positions and boundaries of the dance stage and to match his movements with the accompaniments, he can move correctly in rank and his advancings and retirings achieve order.... If one marches abroad to punish offenders in accordance with the way learned through music, then there will be no one who will not obey and submit; and if one behaves at home with courtesy and humility, then there will be no one who will not obey and be submissive.  Hence music is the great arbiter of the world...."48

            One final citation from Havelock:  "To this pathology of identification Plato now opposes the 'polity in oneself', the city of man's own soul, and affirms as he had in Book Three the absolute necessity of building an inner self-consistency. This becomes possible only if we reject the whole process of poetic identification."49  As we shall see, in China the escape from the ritual tradition to personal autonomy also followed a political model of self-governance.

            IV.

            The appearance of Chou Kung in Confucius' dream points to one of the main threats of Yangism to Confucian politics: we can be sure that the dreams of Yang Chu did not include meetings with ancient political heroes.   In ancient China, the ruler-minister relationship was often defined as an identification or couple as discussed above, and in fact was explicitly eroticized.  Mencius: "The desire of the child is towards his father and mother.  When he becomes conscious of the attractions of beauty, his desire is towards young and beautiful women.  When he comes to have a wife and children, his desire is toward them.  When he obtains office,  his desire is toward his sovereign."50

            The manifestation of this bond most familiar to westerners is samurai loyalty to the death ("iemoto"), which originated in ancient China, but which in recent centuries has been far more significant in Japan.51  Over the centuries,  eroticized expressions of the ruler-minister relationship (usually written in the persona of the abandoned wife) have been one of the staples of Chinese poetry: the poems of Ch'ü Yuan, a Ch'u courtier (ca. 300 B.C.) who committed suicide when his counsel was rejected, are the fountainhead of this genre.52  (Since the prince's favor in fact was,  for most Chinese poets, the only door to the recognition which they felt they deserved, a recognition which would make it possible for them really to be themselves, it is a mistake to think of the later developments of the theme as simply formulaic).

            Our Melanesian comparative framework also gives us an instance of such an identification.  Leenhardt describes the return of a Canaque chief:  "Some pressed their foreheads to his shoulders, others on his arms, still others lay down at his feet, and all sighed and wept."53  While familiarity of this sort seems un-Chinese, Lewis has suggested that relationships with the ruler in pre-Confucian China were much less formal than the Confucians claimed.54 At the same time, Lewis suggests that the eroticized devotion-to-the-death to the superior developed relatively late in Eastern Chou history,  mostly within the military and possibly under non-Chinese Ti influence.55

            Within this military ethic, a vassal was grateful to be allowed to die with his lord:  to do so was a privilege which was not automatically granted, and a vassal denied this privilege was ruined -- shamed (with his family) in the eyes of the world, utterly destroyed like a rejected wife.  Sworn loyalty to an individual seems to be an intermediate step between the ascribed traditional loyalties defended by the Confucians, and individual rationality of the Western (and Legalist) type.56

            Iemoto loyalty does not seem to have been a primary Confucian principle.  Where loyalty-to-the-death is alluded to in the Analects, it is only to excuse Kuan Tzu for not having lived up to this standard.57  From descriptions of Confucius' own public and ritual demeanor,  we can know what he thought ritual behavior should be:  grave, reverent, attentive, restrained, austere,  correct, and totally engaged.  He often speaks of "loyalty" chung  忠   and "respect" ching  敬 , but these indicate seriousness and unwaveringness rather than personal devotion.  Confucians expected ministers to rebuke their princes if required, and Mencius especially emphasizes the scholar's autonomy.  Correctness of performance, based on precedent, was the most important thing for Confucians;  sworn devotion to an individual could only interfere with this performance.58

            However, while the distinctions I have just made between traditional obligations, sworn personal bonds, and hired public service are important from the historian's point of view, to Yang Chu these were simply three different ways of identifying with the unreal (fame, luxury, tradition) at the expense of the real (nature, the body).  For Yang Chu this whole public world was external and null, more likely a hindrance than a help.  He ignored all public identifications and found value only in the private world.  His rejection of the ritual world can be thought of in part as a response to the corruption of public life lamented by Confucius, but his goal was not to rectify the public rituals but to avoid them. In this corrupted world, splendid ceremonials still dominated public life, but they had been stripped of their ethical content and ritual  meaning and were merely entertainments -- and risky ones at that. Because of this loss of meaning and because of the risks (dismemberment and death) involved in the new order, Yang Chu's rejection of public life and dedication to self- cultivation, originally a bold minority position, became widely persuasive.

We can now see how revolutionary Yang Chu's thought was. He proposed that the Warring States elite detach themselves both from the dying ritual universe and from the new rationalized forms of public life.  For him public life, which had previously been unchallenged as the focus of value, was of only derivative importance.  No loyalty was to be felt either toward feudal superiors or toward sworn masters, and high position and honors were not to be regarded as worth the risk.  While this newly- privatized self-definition was totally incompatible with all of the political systems of the period, it struck most sharply against the Confucians, whose system depended on the subjects' voluntary participation (since they had renounced the elaborate systems of reward and punishment advocated by the other schools.)  It is for this reason that Yang Chu was Mencius' primary target.

V.

            Before going on to Yang Chu himself, it is worth elaborating on the weak spots of the Confucian system.  The Confucian reform, with its overwhelming emphasis on family piety, ensured that the public interest would usually be neglected in favor of family interests -- notwithstanding Analects' many denunciations of this neglect.  If the state is regarded as a higher-level family and justified as such (rather than as a distinct source of order),  individuals will have few compunctions about favoring their real families over the essentially fictitious greater family.  Throughout Chinese history the usurpation of power and the embezzlement of tax revenue by the great families, both at the court and in the provinces,  has been the Achilles' heel of the central government.

            Lewis has described the outcome of this dynamic as "the downward flow of authority".   Over the centuries, real power had successively descended from the Chou emperor, to the hereditary local rulers, to the families of the (now hereditary) chief ministers, and finally to the officers of these ministers.  The first step in this process is for the ruler to confine himself to ritual, leaving practical tasks to the minister; the next is for the now-dominant minister (perhaps in the second generation) to usurp the royal ritual; and the final step is for the minister's officers to seize power.  Thus, when the ministerial Chi family usurped the royal rituals in Lu, they were setting the stage for their own lossof power to their steward Yang Ho.59

            By Confucius' time the majority of Chinese states were already ruled by usurpers and conquerors or by their heirs.  A few remaining legitimate rulers did have the sanction of long tradition, but even then, whatever the Confucians may say,  it is not really a "natural feeling"  for me to treat my great-great- great grandfather's brother's great-great grandson, with whom I have only the most distant relationship and little common experience, as if he were my uncle.60  Furthermore, by the time of Confucius the order of precedence based on the Western Chou heierarchy of several centuries earlier was entirely at odds with the real power relationships:  the wealthy, dominant state of Ch'u, which had joined the Chinese court late in the game, was  supposed to be subordinate to tiny rump states like Tseng with better pedigrees.

            The Confucian project amounts to an attempt to extend segmentary clan organization over an entire nation.  But even on a smaller scale such systems are notoriously susceptible to fission, and at a certain indeterminate kinship distance relatives are normally enemies.  Mary Douglas' discussion of the "memory hole" in Nuer kinship-claims illustrates this point.61  The Nuer customarily remember eleven generations of ancestors.  Of these, six are legendary and five historical.  The legendary founding ancestors provide the mythic grounding and distant affiliations of the clan, whereas the historical ancestors establish kin relationships with a very large number of living people.  Based on actual history, the remembered ancestors do not really reach back to the founding period, but the Nuer ritual system does not require any recognition of living relatives beyond those related through the fifth generation.  As a result, with every new generation the sixth-generation ancestor is customarily forgotten, while the fifth-generation ancestor is tacked on to the end of the legendary-ancestor chain as the (new) oldest historical ancestor - - only to be forgotten in turn by the succeeding generation.  And from this point on, relatives through the forgotten ancestor no longer need to be acknowledged.

            The Chinese custom is similar:  ancestral tablets beyond a certain generation are retired or lumped together, and relationships through that ancestor are no longer recognized.62   It can be seen that,  when it is supposed that the ruler of Lu should defer to the Chou king because the Chou founder had seven centuries earlier been the elder brother of the Lu founder,  we are obviously in the realm of the legendary ancestors, and the connection with "natural human feeling" is entirely fictitious.

            It is also true, as Lao Tzu points out (Ch. 39), that ceremonial produces strife as often as it produces harmony.  Ancient China was a striving society: the nobles of the Tso Chuan resembled Vikings or robber barons much more than they did legendary Confucian gentlemen.  The ranking system was inexact, leaving enormous leeway for disputes over precedence and producing (in Lewis' words) "a multitude of rivals for honor and power".63 In the Odes, feasts usually are depicted as dignified and orderly, but their degeneration into brawling is also shown.  The Confucians thought of this degeneration as a decline from the Western Chou perfection, but there is no reason to believe that the Chinese order had ever been very harmonious, and it is probable that Chinese court life had always alternated unpredictably between contentiousness and relative harmony. While brawling was not the desired state of this system, it was a state often to be expected.

            In Section II above I tried to show how Confucian ritual politics did have real power, and was not simply delusory.  In this section I have described the weak spots of the system, which are mostly connected to the difficulties involved in putting the system into effect throughout a nation as large as China and over long periods of time.   What is surprising is not that the system did not survive, but that it survived (albeit in hybrid Confucian- Legalist-Taoist-Buddhist forms) as long as it did: into the twentieth century.

            VI.

            In the Chinese tradition, Yang Chu appears as a caricature of selfishness -- the man who would not sacrifice even a hair from his leg.  In Western discussions of Chinese philosophy, on the other hand, he is a hero -- an early liberal or individualist (or perhaps even an anarchist, existentialist, or egoist), who might have shown the Chinese the way to freedom, if they had only listened.64  Both pictures are misleading.  The malicious intent of the traditional Chinese  portrayal of Yang is obvious enough,  but a look at the traditional roots of Yang's teaching will show that the Western scholars' admiration is also misplaced -- though Yangism does cast an interesting light on Western individualism and on liberalism.

            Yang Chu's doctrine was solidly founded on Chinese traditions of family piety older than Confucius. Traditional Chinese religion was a religion of life, fertility, and nurture. Sacrifices were thought of as food returned to the spirits in gratitude for the fruits of the earth, and long life, health, and descendants were the blessings prayed for by the devout.  (One of the Odes prays for "the fullness of life" mi sheng in language which prefigures Yangism.)65. To the ancient Chinese, a man's body (or life) was not his own, but belonged to his parents and ancestors.  It was his offering to them, and was impure if blemished or mutilated in any way.66  Since war, with all its perils, was always one of the main avenues to high position, and since mutilation was the customary punishment for failures even in civilian service, there was an inescapable tension between a man's duty to his ancestors and his duty to the State.

            Three of the four Yangist teachings listed at the head of this paper can be regarded as developments of orthodox themes. "Preserving life" is a further development of the Chou principle (endorsed by Confucius) of giving priority to "serving the living" (one's parents; ultimately oneself and one's heirs) over "serving the dead" (i.e., the spirits.)67  Yang's refusal to enter besieged cities also echoes a Confucian passage: "Such a one will not enter a tottering state, nor dwell in a disorganized one."68  Even his supposed refusal to sacrifice a hair from his leg to benefit the empire can be seen to be a transformation of a legend about the altruistic cultural hero Yü, who labored so diligently for the public good that he wore all the hairs from his thighs. Our version of Yang's refusal comes from hostile sources, but with the help of variants of the Yü legend we can guess at the original Yangist story: in many versions of the legend of Yü, Yü not only wore the hairs from his legs but also made himself lame;  and in all versions he went for several years without seeing his family.  The Yangist version of the story must have contrasted the good family man Yang Chu to the masochistic, inhuman altruist Yü representing the Mohists).

            Yang's principle "each for himself"  (為 我   wei wo:  literally "for me" or "act for myself") is more problematic.  However, it can just as well be translated "for us" or "for me and mine" : the word  wo  我 can be either singular or plural, and, as indicated by Hsu, can be used when speaking for one's family or clan.  Similarly,  the Chinese word translated "private" or "self" (ssu  私 )  distinguishes the taboo world of the body, the family, and women from the strict, all-male public world; it did not define a purely personal, individual, egoist world.69   It is not at all certain that Yang Chu or his followers rejected the burdensome obligations of the Chinese family. It was only the Mohists that Mencius accused of destroying the family:  he criticized the Yangists only for their lack of loyalty to the prince, and further argues that the Yangists, as fallen-away Mohists, would eventually return to orthodoxy.70  Arguably this was because he believed that the Yangists had not been able to accept the austere, anti-family universalism of the Mohists and would eventually be led by their still-intact family feelings to accept the traditional political roles which Mencius felt were derivable from natural family commitments.

           The various Chinese words used to express the Yangist positions all tend to bear out the theory that Yang Chu's teaching was familial -- privatist but not individualist.  These advocate  the nurturing, honoring, completion, or preservation of sheng 生  "life, what is born", or hsing  性 "nature, life-force", or shen  身  "the  body or person".  Sheng "what-is-born" implicitly evokes family attachments, while hsing "nature/life-force" (very closely related to sheng, which is often substituted for it) often means the inherited quality passed down through a family or clan.  (Both hsing and sheng are also cognate with hsing  姓   "family name.")  Thus, while "Preserve life" could mean "Keep yourself alive at all costs", it more likely means "Keep alive the essence that you have inherited from your ancestors,"  which entails not only self- preservation but also provision for heirs.  Even shen "body, person", which seems to mandate the individualist interpretation, fits into the familial framework: as mentioned above, in the Chinese tradition your body is not your own but is an offering to your parents and ancestors.

            Given the sacrificial aspect of "nurturing life", still another cognate of sheng "life" might be pertinent: sheng  牲 "livestock" -- originally  "sacrificial animals."  Chinese writing evolved in state and ritual contexts, and it is possible that this graph is the oldest of the series.  Sacrificial creatures represented various perfect essences which kept the spirits alive: one's own "life" or body should be one of these perfect offerings.

            While some of the later Yangists presented political theories which might be considered proto-liberal, and while the last two centuries of the Warring States period provide many interesting comparisons with early modern Europe, Yang Chu himself might better be compared to the classical Epicureans.71  Given Yang's links to the Chinese sacrificial tradition and considering the well-attested Yangist disciplines of self-perfection, a comparison with the self-care of retired Brahman householders might be closer still. Yang did not liberate the "individual" from his obligations.  What he did was to elevate private affairs (both family and personal) above public business.  This was an enormous break with the past and it certainly might have been a step in the direction of individualism or liberalism, but in itself it had quite a different significance.

            The Yangist shift (which coincided with the Legalist secularization of the state power and which was a reaction to the Mohist utilitarian absolutism) led in one direction to Taoism's selfless privatism, to the physicalist naturalism of the Yin-Yang school and of Chinese medicine, and to early contemplative attempts to channel the "mind" which was the body's counterpart;  in another direction it led to Shen Pu-hai's ritual cynicism, Shen Tao's bureaucratic-mystical empty self, and the Legalist forms of private property; and finally, by way of Mencius' advocacy of the internality of yi and the goodness of hsing to the whole panoply of Sung metaphysics.72  But that is another story.                          

APPENDIX I

            THE     CHINESE        SELF

            "The Chinese self" and "the individual in China" are familiar topics, and in this Appendix I will briefly run through the literature.  In this paper two differences are at issue:  first, the transition from one kind of Chinese self/ society to another, and second, the assumed background contrast between China and the West.

            In social science literature, context-dependent Chinese are frequently contrasted with autonomous Westerners.  For example, Max Weber asserted that the traditional Chinese lacked "an inward core" and lived by a process of "adjustment to the outside", going on to say that "a well-adjusted man.... does not constitute a systematic unity".73  The Chinese anthropologist F. L. K. Hsu calls Chinese ethics "situation-centered"  and  describes alleged ethical inconsistencies in Chinese life simply as "different kinds of language for different occasions -- which are not necessarily contradictory one to another".74   Ambrose King cites as characteristically Chinese Liang Shu-ming's "relation-based" (rather than "individual-based") definition of man.75

            Given what has been said about the social nature of self, however, these contrasts must be restated.  As Hsu has pointed out, "the concept of personality is an expression of the Western idea of individualism.   It does not correspond even to the reality of how the Western man lives in Western culture, far less any other man in any other culture."76  Slugowski and Ginsburg have argued that, even within the modern West, Erikson's theory of ego-formation is descriptively valid only for persons with a wide range of career and lifestyle options -- mostly middle-class males.77  Elsewhere Hsu states that "the meaning of being human is found in interpersonal relationships",78  and for Tu Wei-ming, "the self as center of relationships  is an open system..... to involve the other in our self-cultivation is not only altruistic; it is required for our own self development".79

            What, then, is the difference between Chinese and Westerners? Frank Johnson mentions the individualism, materialism, and rationality of the west, pointing out that "in the United States, the rhetorical belief in independence acts to conceal the complex interdependencies in family and social relationships".80 (Hsu also mentions this refusal to acknowledge dependency).81 To Hsu, in the West personal relations (even family relations) are voluntary and temporary,82  and the self is often defined in terms of things (including pets).83  He even goes so far as to say that the Western "ability to treat human beings impersonally as things is the secret" of western success.84

            Thus, while Westerners (like Chinese) are dependent on their context, the Western context encourages independent activity, allows the defining personal relationships to be forgotten or dissimulated, tends to define persons as things and to substitute things for persons, allows persons to be treated as means to an end, and fosters autonomy and independence.  What this amounts to is a way of life dominated by economic thinking and economic activity; the Cartesian view of the self rejected above is simply one of the assumptions justifying this way of life, and for that reason of limited value as an analytical tool.

            In traditional China, by contrast, dependency and relationship were emphasized, individual initiative was not fostered, and economic and instrumental thinking were discouraged.  The defining context of the person (Hsu's "layer 3") is different (and more "thinglike") for Westerners than it is for Chinese.85

            Thus,  differences between the contexts within which selfhood is defined lead to differences in the kinds of selves that there can be.  Yang Chu's innovation consisted simultaneously in a movement toward the development of a greater self-awareness and a change in the context within which selfhood was. defined.  Hsu has discussed the traditional Chinese concept of the "greater me" (ta  wo  大 我) and the "lesser me" (hsiao wo  小 我 ): "The latter referred to the individual's own desires and actions for him or herself, albeit they might encompass spouses or children.  The former referred to the individual's concern for the wider society and even humanity as a whole"86.  Yang Chu was thus China's first advocate of the "lesser me" -- the private life, including family and friends, defined in opposition to public life.

            In many ways the historical question has been misstated.  The Chinese contextual "self" is not strikingly different from the African, Indian, Japanese, ancient Greek, or Melanesian "dividual" or contextual "self".  It is the newly-arrived autonomous Western self which requires explanation.  I will return to this question in a later paper.

   APPENDIX II

SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM

            The methodological point of view of this article is social constructionism.  The social constructionists hold that personhood or selfhood must of necessity be formed within a network of relations with other already-existing persons within a given social or cultural framework.  Such relations constitute the self and are not added on externally to a pre-existing individual identity: without relationships, you are not a human being.

            This theory rejects several centuries of western philosophical attempts (from Descartes to analytic philosophy) to find and describe the individual inner essence or substance -- self, consciousness, mind, brain, etc. --  against which everything else, including other persons and even one's own body, counts as "the external world".   From this Cartesian starting- point, even the existence of the physical world and of other minds is problematic, and other persons can be treated simply as physical objects of a certain kind.

            The contrary (social constructionist) assumption holds that persons come into being within dialogue.  In the words of Rom Harre "For the individualists, the deepest problem is how intersubjectivity is possible, and their great philosophical problem that of our knowledge of other minds;  for collectivists, the deepest problem is how individuality is created and sustained in so thoroughly social a world.  For the former, individual being is given and social being constructed;  while for the latter, collective being is given and personal being is an achievement."87 John Shotter holds that "our ways of talking about ourselves can work, not only to relate ourselves in certain ways to other people, but to constitute or structure our being as living in this or that relation to others...." 88 "We have concentrated far too much attention upon the  isolated individual studied from the point of view of an uninvolved observer. We have failed to study the character of the sense-making procedure made available to us diffusely in the social orders into which we have been socialized, procedures which have their provenance in the history of our culture.  Such procedures, I want to argue, are constitutive of people's being in a very deep way...."89  It is a consequence of this view that persons of any given kind can only be found within societies hospitable to that kind of person,  and that if a social system changes significantly  (as it did in Warring States China), the persons to be found in that society will also become different.

            It is not a consequence of this theory that the effects must be one-way:  changes in an individual can lead to social changes.  And while the menu of possible relationships for any given person, as well as the definition of these relationships, was rather strictly limited in traditional societies such as the Chinese, there still remained considerable freedom of choice as to the selection, actualization, and performance of these roles.  In words of Ambrose King, "these social phenomena attest to the individual's freedom of action in constructing a personal relational network".90  The American psychologist G. H. Mead has also pointed out that a contextually and relationally defined individual is not passive: "The individual, as we have seen, is continually reacting back against this society.  Every adjustment involves some sort of change  in the community to which the individual adjusts himself".91

            Thus, social constructionism is not social determinism, whereby Society is somehow the cause (or whole) and the individual merely the passive, heavily programmed, blindly reacting effect (or part).  It might also be noted that social constructionism is not relativistic.  Social constructionists do not claim that there are an infinite number of possible social forms, all equally valid. Still less do they argue that, since social norms are merely social constructions, they are (because not natural, non- universal, unscientific, or unreal) in some way not binding.  On the contrary, social constructionism makes this kind of argument impossible:  all individuals are socially constructed, and all of the vantage points from which individuals can set themselves against society are also social constructions.

            Within the social constructionist framework, there can be "persons" without "selves".  The person is the role-playing individual as defined by his or her multiple roles.  The self is the person's self-description or "theory of self"; in traditional societies where individual autonomy and accountability are limited, such self-awareness can be virtually absent.  "Anthropological and historical evidence will be presented to demonstrate that what every society recognizes as human individuality in the form of persons is the Strawsonian sense of the embodied agent, that is, it has a common primary structure; there are very wide variations in secondary structure, that is, in the degree of singularity with which persons organize their experienced thoughts, feelings, premonitions, and plans as their own.  The most important evidence of all would be that of a tribe of persons without selves."92  It is one of the main points of this essay that Yangism,  in the context of the rationalizing social changes already mentioned,  marked one step in the direction of a sense of self within a culture where self-awareness had previously been weak.  A second consequence of my social constructionist method is that the political transformation of Chinese society during the Warring States period, and the increase of self-awareness and the rise of deliberate systems of self-care during the same period, should not be regarded merely as two developments which occurred at the same time,  but as two ways of describing a single process.

            It should finally be noted that the social constructionist approach to personhood is much closer to the Confucian approach to the question than it is to the vast majority of modern individualistic theories of psychology.

            NOTES