China's Transition to Modernity

The New Classical Vision of Dai Zhen

Minghui Hu

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780295806068
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

The figure of Dai Zhen (1724–1777) looms large in modern Chinese intellectual history. Dai was a mathematical astronomer and influential polymath who, along with like-minded scholars, sought to balance understandings of science, technology, and history within the framework of classical Chinese writings. Exploring ideas in fields as broad-ranging as astronomy, geography, governance, phonology, and etymology, Dai grappled with Western ideas and philosophies, including Jesuit conceptions of cosmology, which were so important to the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) court's need for calendrical precision. Minghui Hu tells the story of China's transition into modernity from the perspective of 18th-century Chinese scholars dedicated to examining the present and past with the tools of evidential analysis. Using Dai as the centering point, Hu shows how the tongru ("broadly learned scholars") of this era navigated Confucian, Jesuit, and other worldviews during a dynamic period, connecting ancient theories to new knowledge in the process. Scholars and students of early modern Chinese history, and those examining science, religious, and intellectual history more broadly, will find China's Transition to Modernity inspiring and helpful for their research and teaching.

CHAPTER 1

THE MAN AND HIS TIMES

Individuality was subversive in imperial China. Dai Zhen’s 1776 book An Evidential Analysis of the Meaning of Terms in the Mencius (Mengzi ziyi shuzheng) would come to be recognized as a fully developed and systematically articulated vision of the new individuality in China, but when it was first published, it failed to arouse much interest—just the occasional condescending remark about a lowly scholar without an examination certificate speaking about challenging philosophical principles. It was not until the twentieth century that historians began to identify the text as the fusion of early modern individualism and objective methodology, a blow against the Neo-Confucianism that had dominated the intellectual and cultural scene in China for centuries.¹

In early modern China, individualism was not typically articulated in philosophical or political discourses. It was buried in commentaries on the classical scriptures. By conceiving of the individual as a social unit rather than a thinking or moral subject, Dai Zhen (1724–77) began to systematically articulate the social, economic, and biological needs of each individual in society. This intellectual agenda was cleverly disguised in his studies of ancient texts and appeared to conform to the acceptable practices in a rather long commentary tradition of the Confucian canon.²

Any articulation of individuality was, however, meant to challenge the existing imperial orthodoxy, political hierarchy, or social order. Why would Dai make this risky move? Situated in Huizhou, the commercial hub of eighteenth-century China, Dai did not belong to any corporate, military, or merchant lineage. He did not succeed in the civil service examination, and he did not become influential politically. In short, Dai did not enjoy any initial privilege accruing to local, commercial, and national elites in his times. While sophisticated drinking games and poetry composition were expected of polite society in the imperial capital, to which Dai relocated, his manner was ever serious, awkward, and stoic. Throughout his life, he never composed a poem in private or for social etiquette. As a misfit in literati society, Dai would not have socialized with the many “power elites” who controlled the intellectual agenda of his times. Dai took as his starting point the intellectual endeavors of Yan Yuan (1635–1704) and Li Gong (1659–1733), two critics of the Neo-Confucian orthodox view of self and society. Neo-Confucianism was a system of moral, social, and metaphysical philosophy first articulated in the twelfth century and later enshrined in the newly consolidated Ming dynasty elaborately at the beginning of the fifteenth century. The Neo-Confucian orthodoxy did not evolve without significant challenges in the following three centuries. Yan Yuan and Li Gong, in particular, provided an effective deconstruction of the core of Neo-Confucianism that made it possible for Dai to build a positive picture of how individual members of a society should and could weave their social, economic, or biological needs into a collective formation.³ This was a pragmatic, but not radical or subversive, intellectual move. Dai’s humble background surely affected how he viewed the structure of intellectual elites of which he became a part later in his career.

Dai Zhen has long been portrayed as a forerunner of modern individualism in China. The celebrated intellectual Hu Shi (1891–1962) was the first to detect this new approach to Confucianism in Dai Zhen’s writings. In The Philosophy of Dai Zhen (Dai Dongyuan de zhexue), published in 1927, Hu presented An Evidential Analysis of the Meaning of Terms in the Mencius as an intellectual tour de force that should have altered the course of intellectual history in China. Hu called it a “new philosophy” from which Dai could simultaneously attack metaphysics and pseudoscience. According to Hu, Dai’s methodology later became an indigenous embryo for an uncompromising and potentially revolutionary humanism. Dai not only broke down the distinction between textual and nontextual methodologies in the eighteenth century but also anticipated the nineteenth-century debates on the distinction between essences and tools in classical learning. It was Dai’s revolutionary stance, according to Hu, that kept his critics and even his followers from grasping his true message. In other words, Hu Shi reinvented Dai as a prophet of intellectual modernity in China.⁴ Mizoguchi Yūzō, an intellectual historian with keen comparative insights, dubbed Dai’s systematic formulation of individualism the “germination of modernity” (kindai no hōga), and he felt that it anticipated the emergence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of a scientific worldview based on the idea of “public principles” (gong li), which turned the normative structure of heavenly principles into a universal system of human values.⁵

Despite his laudable contribution, Dai remained a follower of Confucius after he rejected the imperial orthodoxy and Neo-Confucianism of his times to develop his classical vision. In what sense was Dai still a Confucian? The question is loaded with difficult political and intellectual implications. In political terms, few scholars in imperial China would have denied Confucius’s role as the mediator and transmitter of the ancient system of thought and value (dao), since that is in fact how Confucius characterized himself. When Li Zhi (1527–1602) cast doubt on the great teacher’s record, he was arrested for sabotaging the imperial orthodoxy of the Ming dynasty and committed suicide while in prison at the age of seventy-six. Unlike Li Zhi, Dai repeatedly attempted to pass the highest hurdle in the civil service examination system and sought employment as a staff member in the Qianlong emperor’s court (r. 1735–96), proof that political subversion was not his goal. Was he, then, a genuine believer in the Confucian canon? The answer should most definitely be affirmative. His commitment was nevertheless complicated in two senses: he turned into a fierce critic of the Neo-Confucian tradition in his mature years, as indicated by his An Evidential Analysis of the Meaning of Terms in the Mencius, and he disagreed with Hui Dong’s authoritative approach based on the Han dynasty exegetes, evident in his studies of the Palace of Light.

If he was neither a Neo-Confucian defined by the Qing imperial orthodoxy nor an original Confucian defined by the exegetical legacy of the Han dynasty, what kind of Confucian was he? Dai’s methodology, based on early modern European cosmography and spherical trigonometry, was the main tool for his reconstruction of the classical world. The combination of his technical methodology and classical vision shows that he was neither Neo-Confucian nor a conservative who advocated the return of the original Confucianism. He was, rather, a visionary thinker with distinction.

Dai and his admirers did not always share the same commitment to the Confucian canon; they did not always agree on how to interpret specific passages; and they probably did not agree on how to use empirical evidence for interpreting the classical texts. But they had a common utopian vision of the classical world and believed that their innovative methodology was the only way to realize that vision. The methodology they all shared accommodated early modern European sciences and adopted a more tolerant and inclusive view of “Western learning.” Their shared vision was to search for a cosmological and political order, and they all believed this vision was more splendorous and magnanimous than that of their Neo-Confucian predecessors. In other words, they developed a blueprint of the cosmological and political order of the classical world that they believed their Neo-Confucian predecessors had systematically and purposively distorted and ignored.

Despite their shared classical vision and innovative methodology, Dai and his admirers remained Confucians in the sense that they believed that the classical world, the essential touchstone for moral and political action, was accessible only via the ancient records mediated by Confucius. But they were quite certain that ancient records had been changed and damaged over time—the very reason why every effort had to be made to reconstruct them. They did not hesitate to seek in unexpected places the means needed to rebuild antiquity. On the contrary, that these “new” Confucians still operated within the interpretative paradigm of the Confucian canon should not preclude our appreciation of their innovative methodology and vision. Dai was, above all, the trendsetter and innovator in both.

Dai Zhen began life as a nobody. But he nevertheless managed to seize the attention of Beijing’s cognoscenti in 1755, and for over a decade he was the intellectual toast of the Lower Yangzi Delta. This came to a halt in 1777, with his move to Beijing after appointment to the imperial library project called The Complete Collection of Four Treasuries (Siku Quanshu), a post he occupied until his death. Dai rode the high tide of classical scholarship, but how his legacy was perceived has changed over time. Before 1870 he was principally regarded as an outstanding evidential scholar and mathematical astronomer; it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that he was elevated to serve as a critical thinker who freed China from its feudal past.

Dai considered Neo-Confucian orthodoxy to be insensitive and reified tools for political oppression. This should be understood, however, in the context of expressions such as “self and society” and “the private and the public,” which could be formulated only with the rise of new ideas of individuality. Dai, his followers, and his critics were all keenly aware of the political implications of his description of the relations among individuals as the basis of society. The study of individuality in China has shed new light on individualism as a modern ideology, and comparison of the histories of self and society in early modern China and Japan complement the study of these concepts in the framework of European liberalism.⁶ Dai’s new social philosophy was made possible by the methods he developed to explore the objective existence of the classical world.⁷

More importantly, Dai’s political vision was derived from his methodology, from mathematical astronomy to analytical phonology.⁸ All told, he produced twenty-two publications consisting of 2,129 pages (104 juan).⁹ Most of what he wrote can only be described as highly technical. Yet contemporary historians and philosophers have focused mainly on Dai’s political-moral philosophy, which accounts for less than 5 percent of his writings. The topics to which he devoted so much labor—mathematical astronomy, historical geography, analytical phonology, and historical etymology—have rarely been integrated into any investigation of his thought.¹⁰

Hu Shi was, once again, the first modern thinker to recognize Dai’s methodology. “Classical scholars of the Qing dynasty,” wrote Hu, “stressed how to ground their discourse. There were two distinct approaches to this. The first group relied on evidence, which could, according to Gu Yanwu (1613–1682), involve either direct evidence [ben zheng] or indirect evidence [pang zheng]. The second group relied on authority, meaning the use of ancient precedent to support their arguments. Hui Dong (1697–1758) and his followers belonged to the second group, and they worshiped the exegetes of the Han dynasty.”¹¹ Hu prized the achievements of the first group, asserting that without the development of robust techniques for evaluating evidence there would have been no true classical scholarship in the Qing dynasty. The second group—Hui and his followers—had blindly worshiped the authority of classical scholars in the Han dynasty, and insisted that all classical knowledge should follow and expand the ancient authority of Han classical scholarship.¹² The approach advocated by Hui and his followers can be best encapsulated by historian Kai-wing Chow’s phrase: a purist hermeneutics of classical scholarship.¹³

In Hu’s view, Dai made two revolutionary contributions to evidentiary methodology: he broadened the discipline’s scope by combining textual and nontextual evidence, and he maintained a zealous commitment to rebuilding the material base of the classical world. More importantly, Dai’s methodology became the groundwork for a new political philosophy. Dai’s followers and admirers usually invoked the honorific tongru (the complex associations of this term will be discussed later in this chapter) in referring to each other, a custom that Hu connected to the methodology of this new Confucianism.¹⁴

For example, Ruan Yuan (1764–1849), a high-standing official and a follower of Dai, called Dai a tongru and praised his colleagues Jiao Xun (1763–1820) and Lin Tingkan (1757–1809) with the same honorific because both Jiao and Lin brilliantly elaborated Dai’s methodology and argued eloquently against a “purism” hermeneutics of classical scholarship.¹⁵ Disinclined to attack Hui Dong’s academic orientation directly, they chose to deconstruct the idea of kaoju (lit., rectification through investigation) and the scholarship associated with it. Jiao put it bluntly:

It strikes me as bizarre that some classical scholars have invented a category called kaoju. Grouping thinkers in terms of chronology, they say that the scholars of the Tang dynasty are superior to those of the Song, and those of the Han are superior to those of the Tang…. Every word written by Xu Shen and Zheng Xuan [of the Han dynasty] is cherished like a rare and precious jade; no kaoju scholar would ever doubt their interpretations. I cannot help thinking that if this fashion carries on, kaoju scholars will eventually look either stupid or hypocritical. They will render ancient words unpronounceable and incomprehensible; they will also make the ancient institutions look trivial, burdensome, and utterly inefficient. They resemble those cowards and imbeciles obliged to rely on a powerful family rather than looking after themselves. These cowards and imbeciles brutalize and deceive the foolish and unworthy in the name of the powerful family, without ever being permitted to enter that family’s mansion and so [are] denied all knowledge of its rooms and hallways, the decoration on its walls, doors, and windows.¹⁶

For Dai, Jiao, and Lin, methods that were logically sound and based on evidentiary principles should hav...