This book represents an attempt to think through aspects of the thought of Wang Chong of concern to and that may aid in the work in contemporary philosophy. Of necessity, I have left out a number of important issues, even ones of philosophical interest. I make no claims to be comprehensive here, and this is one of the reasons I don’t call this book a study of Wang Chong’s thought. I am focused on what I deem to be (which is, admittedly subjective) the most important or interesting of Wang Chong’s philosophical positions, and I attempt to recover, appraise, and develop these positions. This involves three different methods operative within each of the chapters, which I will try to be clear and keep distinct (even though, as with a lot of comparative and cross-boundary works, I suspect I will alienate numerous audiences).
The “sinological/historical” focus here will concern the attempt to recover facts about the textual history, cultural context, Wang’s motivations, views, and so on in a way keeping as closely as possible to the context of Wang Chong’s and Eastern Han thought. The “philosophical” focus involves two subfoci: the historical-philosophical, analyzing the theories Wang presents, along with the concepts included and the arguments Wang uses to establish positions, and the appraisal /appropriational, which considers the plausibility of these positions, possible objections and fixes, and their applicability to and usefulness in contemporary debates in philosophy concerning these concepts. It is this latter focus that in part explains my selection of certain aspects of Wang’s thought and certain positions for this book. The positions in the Lunheng of most interest to me, and I suspect that will also be of most interest to contemporary analytic philosophers, are those I focus on in this book. Even if use of this frame for Wang’s thought is artificial and anachronistic in some sense (which I can’t deny that it is), it is no moreso than using contemporary historical techniques to understand early Chinese thinkers, or even using modern languages like English, for that matter, to understand the thought of early Chinese thinkers. It’s unclear to me how the philosophical method of appraisal can be any more comparative or foreign, let alone “inauthentic” than any other method of appraisal and appropriation of these texts in use in contemporary academia.
The question confronts those who work in ancient Chinese thought—just how original or unique was Wang Chong, really? When Western thinkers first took notice of this interesting thinker, in the late nineteenth century with the revival of Chinese interest in his thought by critical Qing scholars, Wang was seen as an anomaly, a brilliant and completely unique representative of critical thought in the desert of scholasticism and scholarly conformity and stagnation that was the Han dynasty. Many authors spoke of Wang as representing the first stirrings of critical and even “scientific” thought in China. Even Joseph Needham, in the volumes of his magisterial classic “Science and Civilization in China”, contributed to this view of Wang as the arch “proto-scientist” of the Eastern Han. “Science”, of course , is a loaded word, as much now as it was back then. “Scientific” thought, as opposed to traditional, religious, or even philosophical thought, was supposed to be thought freed from the bias of background prejudices, information, and infection of traditions, literary canon, or environment. Of course, this pristine view of scientific thought has always been little more than a guiding myth. The inconvenient truth is that no one engages in intellectual work in this purely autonomous, disconnected, universalistic manner. All human thought is bound by human experience, tradition , history, and biological tendencies—including the “purest” science , the mechanics of Newton or the atomic theory of Bohr. To distinguish “scientific” from “non-scientific” thought outside of the actual practice of science is, in essence, to apply value categories generally fixed to the attempt to reject, criticize, or otherwise undermine tradition . And this is just what the earliest Western scholars to work on Wang saw going on in his work: Wang Chong as iconoclast , critic, and thus upholder of “scientific” thought.1 Although I will conclude that these scholars were not completely right about Wang, there was some sense in which Wang was a uniquely critical and less tradition-bound philosopher.
More recent Western studies, following the trend in Chinese scholarship, aimed to chip away this older view of Wang, emphasizing the ways in which Wang’s thought was typical of late Eastern Han thinkers, and in which he was influenced by the surrounding cultural attitudes, which were shifting from earlier views dominant in the Western Han.2 Indeed, there is good reason to see Wang as much closer to the norm than earlier scholars were able or willing to, as we see very similar views and sentiments expressed in the work of other Eastern Han thinkers such as Xu Gan, Xun Yue, Wang Fu, and Cui Shi (among others). A critical strain can be found in all of these authors, usually surrounding the same topics, and using similar methods to those of Wang Chong. Wang, of course, was the earliest of these thinkers, but not necessarily the most outstanding or unique in his adoption of these ideas and methods. Although I will conclude that these more recent interpreters are also missing something critical about Wang and that their views that Wang was simply a representative thinker cannot be completely accepted, there is also some sense in which Wang was not as far from the norm , as unique, as some interpreters made him out to be.
So why is Wang a philosopher we should care about, take seriously, or give priority to in a field of brilliant thinkers of the (Western and Eastern) Han like those mentioned above and many more? In short, what justifies a new book-length study on this enigmatic Eastern Han philosopher , who may be taken to have been fairly neglected in contemporary Chinese studies? It is important to note that, for all the familiarity with Wang among sinologists (I have not infrequently encountered scholars whose recognition of Eastern Han thinkers only extends to Wang Chong), there have been no book-length studies in English on Wang Chong since Western scholars first became acquainted with him in the nineteenth century.3
First, although Western scholars know of Wang Chong, they tend to know very little about his actual views, arguments, and philosophical import. Second, even in the extant non-English literature on Wang Chong, there has been hardly any consideration of Wang’s philosophical contribution, and a thorough investigation of his innovations of philosophical method, as well as his arguments, theories , and concepts. This book focuses on these issues. Third, much of the material on Wang Chong has presented him in light of one of the two above scholarly tendencies of the last century or so—that is, to read him either as arch-skeptic, proto-scientist and iconoclast extraordinaire or as a typical Eastern Han malcontent, writing on well-worn themes and, for all the hay he makes of truth and criticism , not diverging widely from the accepted views or methods of his time. Both of these views, I argue in this book, fail to capture the real Wang Chong and the import of his work. No doubt Wang did not intend to do something radically new, to completely break with the past or with tradition in his thinking about method and truth, and, indeed, like most of his contemporaries, he saw his project in terms of continuity with the content and methods of the ancients. Within this context, however, Wang’s actual work was highly innovative, and the method he devised was, if not completely unprecedented, a synthesis of a number of earlier strains of thought along with enormous creative work and innovation on Wang’s part, resulting in a fairly radical reinterpretation of the entire early Chinese philosophical tradition as a whole. Even if Wang Chong was not the “iconoclast ” earlier scholars claim he was (after all he unquestioningly accepts much from earlier thinkers and adopts more than a few tropes of his time), his thought was nonetheless highly innovative.
Of course, with his divergence from the tradition came some negatives as well. Wang Chong’s style makes his writing sometimes difficult to follow, because he does not follow the standard con...