History of Chinese Philosophy/Chapter 1

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History of Chinese Philosophy

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Chapter 1: Prologue — The Nature of Chinese Philosophy and Its Place in World Thought

1. Is There "Philosophy" in China? The Derrida-Hegel Question

The question whether China possesses a genuine philosophical tradition is both absurd and unavoidable. It is absurd because for over two thousand years, thinkers in the Chinese cultural sphere have engaged in rigorous, sustained, and extraordinarily sophisticated inquiry into the nature of reality, knowledge, ethics, politics, language, and the good life — precisely the domains that define philosophy in any tradition. It is unavoidable because the institutional and conceptual history of the discipline of "philosophy" in the modern academy is inseparable from the history of European intellectual hegemony, and the exclusion of non-Western traditions from the philosophical canon has been not an oversight but a deliberate and theoretically motivated act.

The roots of this exclusion run deep. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose lectures on the history of philosophy delivered at the University of Berlin between 1819 and 1831 did more than any other single work to establish the canon of Western philosophy as a developmental narrative, was explicit in his judgment: China, like India, possessed "thought" but not "philosophy" in the proper sense. For Hegel, philosophy required the emergence of free, self-determining subjectivity — the capacity of spirit (Geist) to reflect upon itself and to recognize itself as the ground of all reality. Chinese thought, in Hegel's assessment, remained trapped in a "substantive" mode of consciousness in which the individual was absorbed into the undifferentiated totality of the state, the family, and the cosmic order, never achieving the moment of negation and self-differentiation that constitutes genuine philosophical reflection.

Hegel's verdict was enormously influential. It shaped the institutional structure of philosophy departments throughout the Western world, which until very recently offered no courses on Chinese, Indian, African, or indigenous American philosophy. It informed the great encyclopedias and reference works of philosophy, from which non-Western traditions were systematically excluded. And it provided a theoretical justification — wrapped in the imposing apparatus of dialectical logic — for what was in practice a parochial equation of "philosophy" with "European philosophy."

The twentieth century saw numerous challenges to this exclusion, but also some notable reinforcements. Martin Heidegger, whose engagement with East Asian thought — particularly Daoism and Zen Buddhism — was deeper and more sustained than is sometimes acknowledged, nonetheless maintained that philosophy was "in its essence Greek" and that a "Chinese or Indian philosophy" was a contradiction in terms, even as he sought in Daoist and Buddhist concepts resources for overcoming what he regarded as the nihilistic impasse of Western metaphysics. Jacques Derrida, in a celebrated exchange with Chinese scholars in 2001, provoked controversy by suggesting that "China does not have philosophy, only thought" — a remark that, whether intended as a provocation, a compliment, or a statement of historical fact about the Western origins of the term "philosophy," revealed the persistence of the Hegelian exclusion in the heart of the poststructuralist tradition that had ostensibly deconstructed all such binary oppositions.

The response from scholars of Chinese thought has taken several forms. Some have accepted the exclusion and argued that Chinese thought is better understood as "wisdom" (zhihui 智慧) than as "philosophy," pointing to the practical, transformative, and existential orientation of Chinese intellectual traditions as evidence that they belong to a different genus than the theoretically oriented, argument-driven enterprise that constitutes Western philosophy. Others have rejected the exclusion outright, arguing that it rests on an illegitimate conflation of "philosophy" with "Western philosophy" and that the Chinese tradition contains all the elements — rigorous argumentation, systematic theorizing, critical self-reflection, engagement with fundamental questions about reality and value — that characterize philosophical inquiry in any culture. Still others have sought to complicate the binary by showing that neither "Western philosophy" nor "Chinese thought" is the monolithic entity that the debate assumes, and that the diversity within each tradition is at least as great as the differences between them.

This history adopts the last of these positions. We use the term "Chinese philosophy" without apology or qualification, understanding "philosophy" not as the proprietary achievement of one civilization but as a universal human activity — the sustained, critical, and systematic inquiry into fundamental questions about reality, knowledge, value, and the good life — that has taken different but equally valid forms in different cultural contexts.

2. The Term Zhexue (哲学): A Japanese Coinage and Its Chinese Reception

The Chinese word for "philosophy" — zhexue (哲学) — is itself a product of cross-cultural encounter. The term was coined in 1874 by the Japanese philosopher Nishi Amane (西周, 1829–1897), who combined the classical Chinese character zhe (哲, "wise" or "sagacious") with xue (学, "study" or "learning") to translate the Western concept of "philosophy" — itself derived from the Greek philosophia (φιλοσοφία, "love of wisdom"). Nishi had studied at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands from 1863 to 1865, where he encountered Western philosophy for the first time, and his terminological invention was part of a broader effort to create a Japanese philosophical vocabulary capable of rendering Western concepts into East Asian languages.

Before Nishi's coinage, there was no single Chinese term that corresponded to the Western concept of "philosophy." This was not because there was no philosophical activity in China — there manifestly was — but because the Chinese intellectual tradition organized knowledge differently. The closest traditional equivalents included yili zhi xue (义理之学, "the study of principles and meanings"), xingli zhi xue (性理之学, "the study of nature and principle"), daoxue (道学, "the study of the Dao"), lixue (理学, "the study of principle"), and xuanxue (玄学, "the study of the mysterious"). Each of these terms, however, referred to a specific school or tradition within the broader Chinese intellectual landscape, not to a general category of inquiry encompassing all of them. The traditional Chinese classification of knowledge, embodied in the bibliographic catalogs (yiwen zhi 艺文志) of the dynastic histories, divided books into four categories: classics (jing 经), histories (shi 史), masters (zi 子), and collected writings (ji 集). Philosophical texts — in the Western sense — would have been found primarily in the "masters" category, alongside works on military strategy, agriculture, medicine, divination, and other practical arts.

The term zhexue entered Chinese usage in the late 1890s and early 1900s, primarily through the mediation of Chinese students who had studied in Japan. By the time of the New Culture Movement (1915–1923) and the May Fourth Movement (1919), the term was firmly established, and "philosophy" had become a recognized academic discipline in Chinese universities, with departments, curricula, journals, and professional associations modeled on Western patterns. The founding of the Department of Philosophy at Peking University in 1914, with a curriculum that included both Western and Chinese philosophy, was a landmark event in this institutional history.

The adoption of zhexue was not without its ironies and tensions. By accepting a term coined to translate a Western concept, Chinese intellectuals implicitly accepted the Western framing of the question — the assumption that "philosophy" was a clearly defined enterprise whose presence or absence in China could be determined. This created a paradox that has haunted Chinese intellectual life ever since: the very act of claiming that China possesses a "philosophy" seems to concede that the Western concept is the standard by which Chinese thought must be measured, while the act of denying that China has "philosophy" seems to concede that Chinese thought is somehow inferior to or less rigorous than its Western counterpart.

Some of the most creative Chinese thinkers of the twentieth century — notably Mou Zongsan (牟宗三, 1909–1995) and Tang Junyi (唐君毅, 1909–1978) — sought to resolve this paradox by arguing that Chinese philosophy was not merely a regional variant of a universal enterprise but a distinctive mode of philosophical inquiry with its own internal logic, its own standards of rigor, and its own contributions to make to the global philosophical conversation. For Mou Zongsan, the central contribution of Chinese philosophy lay in its account of "intellectual intuition" (zhi de zhijue 智的直觉) — a form of direct, non-discursive knowledge of reality that Kant had declared impossible for finite beings but that Chinese thinkers, particularly those in the Buddhist and Neo-Confucian traditions, had developed in sophisticated and systematic ways.

3. Comparative Philosophy and Its Challenges

The attempt to understand Chinese philosophy on its own terms while also placing it in dialogue with Western philosophical traditions has given rise to the field of comparative philosophy — one of the most intellectually demanding and methodologically fraught areas of contemporary thought.

The pioneers of Chinese-Western comparative philosophy — Hu Shi (胡适, 1891–1962) with his pragmatist reading of ancient Chinese logic, Feng Youlan (冯友兰, 1895–1990) with his neo-realist reconstruction of Chinese metaphysics, and Fang Dongmei (方东美, 1899–1977) with his broadly idealist comparative framework — all studied in the United States or Europe and brought Western philosophical categories to bear on Chinese materials. Their approach, which might be called "comparative philosophy from the Western side," has been enormously productive, yielding classic works such as Feng Youlan's A History of Chinese Philosophy (中国哲学史, 1934) and A Short History of Chinese Philosophy (1948) that remain standard references to this day.

But this approach has also been criticized for distorting Chinese thought by forcing it into Western categories. The American philosopher Roger T. Ames, working with David L. Hall, developed a sustained critique of what they called the "comparative fallacy" — the tendency to assume that Western philosophical categories (substance, essence, being, truth, rationality, autonomy) are universal and then to "find" them in Chinese texts, rather than attending to the distinctive conceptual vocabulary and argumentative strategies of the Chinese tradition itself. Ames and Hall proposed instead a "Deweyan pragmatist" reading of classical Chinese philosophy that emphasized process over substance, relation over essence, and aesthetic over logical order, arguing that Confucian and Daoist thought offered a genuine alternative to the dominant metaphysical assumptions of the Western tradition.

Henry Rosemont Jr. pushed this critique further, arguing that the very concept of "philosophy" as it is institutionally and intellectually constituted in the modern Western academy — with its emphasis on propositional argumentation, formal logic, and the theoretical justification of beliefs — is too narrow to encompass the Chinese intellectual tradition, which is centrally concerned not with "what we should believe" but with "how we should live." Rosemont proposed that Chinese thought is better understood as a form of "practical wisdom" or "spiritual exercise" — a tradition more akin to what Pierre Hadot described as philosophie comme manière de vivre in the ancient Greek and Roman context than to what contemporary analytic philosophers mean by "philosophy."

The British philosopher Angus C. Graham offered yet another approach, combining meticulous philological scholarship with analytical philosophical rigor in his landmark Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China (1989). Graham argued that Chinese philosophy could and should be studied with the same tools of logical analysis used in the study of Western philosophy, but that doing so required a deep understanding of the linguistic and cultural context of the Chinese texts — an understanding that most Western philosophers lacked and most sinologists were not trained to provide. His work demonstrated that the ancient Chinese philosophical schools engaged in highly sophisticated argumentation about logic, language, ethics, and metaphysics that could stand comparison with the best of the Greek tradition.

Chad Hansen's A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought (1992) proposed a radically different reading of the entire Chinese philosophical tradition, arguing that Chinese thinkers were primarily concerned not with metaphysics or psychology (as Western-influenced interpreters had assumed) but with the philosophy of language — specifically, with the question of how language (ming 名, "names") relates to the world and how competing systems of naming (dao 道, "ways" or "discourses") can be evaluated. Hansen's linguistic-analytic approach was controversial but enormously stimulating, forcing scholars to reconsider fundamental assumptions about what Chinese philosophers were actually arguing about.

Bryan W. Van Norden, in his influential Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto (2017), made the case for the inclusion of Chinese (and other non-Western) philosophy in the standard philosophy curriculum with particular force and clarity. Van Norden argued that the exclusion of non-Western philosophy from the Western academy was not merely intellectually indefensible but ethically irresponsible — a form of "intellectual imperialism" that impoverished the philosophical education of Western students and reinforced unjust power structures. His work, combined with the broader movement for diversity and inclusion in academic philosophy, has led to significant changes in philosophy curricula in North America and Europe, though the institutionalization of non-Western philosophy remains uneven and contested.

4. Philosophy, Religion, and Wisdom in the Chinese Tradition

One of the most persistent challenges in the study of Chinese philosophy is the relationship between philosophy and religion. In the modern Western academy, philosophy and religion are typically treated as distinct disciplines with different methods, different standards of evidence, and different institutional homes. Philosophy is understood to be a purely rational enterprise that relies on argument and evidence rather than faith, revelation, or authority. Religion is understood to involve belief in the supernatural, participation in ritual practices, and membership in a community of faith. While the boundary between the two is often contested — particularly in the philosophy of religion and in the study of medieval Western thought — the distinction itself is taken for granted.

In the Chinese tradition, this distinction is far less clear. Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism — the "three teachings" (sanjiao 三教) that constitute the pillars of Chinese intellectual life — are simultaneously philosophical and religious. Confucianism encompasses sophisticated metaphysical, ethical, and political theories, but it also includes elaborate ritual practices, ancestor veneration, a concept of the sacred (embodied in the notion of tian 天, "Heaven"), and a tradition of spiritual cultivation aimed at the transformation of the self. Daoism includes the highly abstract metaphysics and epistemology of the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi, but it also encompasses a vast tradition of liturgical practice, alchemical experimentation, meditation techniques, and communal worship that constitutes one of the great religious traditions of the world. Buddhism arrived in China as both a philosophical system of extraordinary sophistication and a religion with monks, monasteries, rituals, scriptures, and a promise of salvation.

The attempt to separate "Chinese philosophy" from "Chinese religion" is itself a product of the modern encounter with the West. When Chinese intellectuals of the late Qing and early Republican periods set about constructing "Chinese philosophy" as an academic discipline, they typically did so by extracting the "rational" or "philosophical" elements from the Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist traditions and leaving the "religious" elements behind. Feng Youlan's A History of Chinese Philosophy exemplifies this approach: it treats Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism as systems of philosophical thought, largely ignoring their ritual, devotional, and institutional dimensions. This strategy had the advantage of making Chinese thought legible to a Western audience accustomed to the philosophy-religion distinction, but it also distorted the traditions it purported to describe, creating what some critics have called a "philosophical fiction" that bore only a partial resemblance to the living intellectual cultures of China.

More recent scholarship has sought to overcome this distortion by studying Chinese thought in its full complexity, without imposing the Western philosophy-religion distinction. The concept of "self-cultivation" (xiuyang 修养 or gongfu 工夫) has emerged as a key unifying theme — a practice that is simultaneously intellectual, moral, physical, and spiritual, and that bridges the gap between what Western categories would separate as "philosophy" and "religion." The Confucian practice of jing (敬, "reverence" or "mindful attentiveness"), the Daoist practice of zuowang (坐忘, "sitting and forgetting"), and the Buddhist practice of chan (禅, "meditation") are all forms of self-cultivation that involve both philosophical reflection and transformative practice, and that cannot be adequately understood within either the "philosophy" or the "religion" category alone.

5. The Sources: Classics, Commentaries, Anthologies

The study of Chinese philosophy rests on a distinctive body of sources that differs in important ways from the sources of Western philosophy. While Western philosophy since Plato has been dominated by the individually authored treatise — the Republic, the Nicomachean Ethics, the Meditations, the Critique of Pure Reason — Chinese philosophy has been shaped by a different set of textual genres, each with its own conventions, its own mode of argumentation, and its own relationship to authorship and authority.

The most important category of Chinese philosophical text is the jing (经, "classic" or "canon"). The Five Classics (Wujing 五经) — the Yijing (易经, Book of Changes), the Shijing (诗经, Book of Odes), the Shujing (书经, Book of Documents), the Liji (礼记, Book of Rites), and the Chunqiu (春秋, Spring and Autumn Annals) — formed the core curriculum of traditional Chinese education and the textual foundation of Confucian philosophy. To these were later added the Four Books (Sishu 四书) — the Lunyu (论语, Analects), the Mengzi (孟子, Mencius), the Daxue (大学, Great Learning), and the Zhongyong (中庸, Doctrine of the Mean) — which from the twelfth century onward served as the primary texts of Confucian philosophical education. The Daoist canon (Daozang 道藏), compiled in its definitive form in 1445, contains over 1,400 texts spanning more than a millennium. The Chinese Buddhist canon (Dazangjing 大藏经), first printed in its entirety in 983 CE, contains thousands of sutras, treatises, commentaries, and other works translated from Sanskrit and Pali or composed in Chinese.

A second crucial category is the commentary (zhu 注 or shu 疏). Chinese philosophical thought developed to a remarkable degree through the practice of commenting on earlier texts. The great commentarial traditions — Zheng Xuan's (郑玄, 127–200) commentaries on the Confucian classics, Wang Bi's (王弼, 226–249) commentary on the Daodejing and the Yijing, Zhu Xi's (朱熹, 1130–1200) commentaries on the Four Books — are not merely secondary scholarship but primary philosophical works in their own right, in which the commentator uses the earlier text as a springboard for the development of original ideas. The commentary tradition reflects a distinctive feature of Chinese philosophical culture: the conviction that philosophical innovation is best achieved not by breaking with the past but by reinterpreting it, and that the authority of the ancients and the creativity of the present are not in conflict but are mutually reinforcing.

A third category is the anthology or compendium, in which the sayings and writings of a master are collected, edited, and organized by later disciples or editors. Many of the most important Chinese philosophical texts — including the Lunyu, the Mengzi, the Zhuangzi, the Xunzi, and the Hanfeizi — belong to this genre. The composite and editorial character of these texts poses special challenges for interpretation: questions of authorship, dating, textual integrity, and the relationship between different layers or strata of the text are often unresolvable, and scholarly debate about these questions has been ongoing for centuries.

6. Key Reference Works and Scholarly Orientations

The modern study of Chinese philosophy has been shaped by a number of landmark reference works that continue to define the field.

Feng Youlan's (冯友兰) A History of Chinese Philosophy (Zhongguo zhexue shi 中国哲学史, 1934), translated into English by Derk Bodde (1952–1953), remains the most comprehensive single-author survey of the field. Written from a broadly neo-realist perspective influenced by the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, it covers the entire history of Chinese philosophy from its pre-Confucian origins to the early twentieth century. Despite its age and its well-known biases — it privileges rationalist and metaphysical strands of the tradition at the expense of practical, political, and religious dimensions — it remains an indispensable starting point for any serious student of the subject.

Mou Zongsan's (牟宗三) philosophical oeuvre, including his Nineteen Lectures on Chinese Philosophy (中国哲学十九讲, 1983) and his three-volume Mind-Body and Nature-Body (心体与性体, 1968–1969), offers the most philosophically ambitious attempt to reconstruct the Chinese tradition from within, drawing on Kantian and Hegelian categories while arguing that Chinese philosophy — particularly the Lu-Wang school of Neo-Confucianism — had achieved insights that Western philosophy had not. Mou's work is demanding and sometimes obscure, but it represents the high point of the New Confucian philosophical project.

Angus C. Graham's Disputers of the Tao (1989), already mentioned above, is the finest study of pre-Qin Chinese philosophy written in English. Graham combined unrivaled philological expertise with genuine philosophical sophistication, producing readings of the Mozi, the Zhuangzi, the Later Mohist Canons, and other texts that remain authoritative decades after their publication.

Chad Hansen's A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought (1992) offered a provocative alternative to Graham's readings, interpreting the entire history of pre-Qin philosophy through the lens of philosophy of language and proposing that Daoism — not Confucianism — provided the most coherent theoretical framework for understanding Chinese thought.

More recent contributions include Bryan W. Van Norden's Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy (2011), which has become the standard English-language textbook; Karyn Lai's An Introduction to Chinese Philosophy (2008), which emphasizes comparative and thematic approaches; and the monumental Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries on individual Chinese thinkers and concepts, which provide authoritative, up-to-date summaries of the state of scholarship on specific topics.

In the Chinese-language scholarly world, the field has been transformed by the work of scholars such as Chen Lai (陈来), whose studies of Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism and ancient Chinese thought have set new standards of philological rigor and philosophical depth, and Zhao Dunhua (赵敦华), whose comparative work on Chinese and Western philosophy has been widely influential in the PRC.

7. Periodization and Methodology

The periodization of Chinese philosophy is a matter of ongoing scholarly debate, as any division of a continuous tradition into discrete "periods" inevitably involves simplification and distortion. Nonetheless, most scholars recognize a broadly similar set of major periods, differing primarily in where they draw the boundaries and how they characterize the transitions between them.

The scheme adopted in this history is as follows:

Part I: The Age of the Philosophers (ca. 1600–221 BCE) encompasses the pre-philosophical foundations of Chinese thought in Shang and early Zhou cosmology and the extraordinary flowering of philosophical schools — Confucianism, Mohism, Daoism, Legalism, the School of Names, the Yin-Yang school, and others — during the Spring and Autumn (770–476 BCE) and Warring States (475–221 BCE) periods. This era, often compared to the "Axial Age" theorized by Karl Jaspers, represents the foundational period of Chinese philosophy, when the basic concepts, problems, and methods of the tradition were established.

Part II: Imperial Orthodoxy and Its Challengers (221 BCE–589 CE) covers the establishment of Confucianism as state orthodoxy during the Han dynasty and the diverse philosophical responses to that orthodoxy, including the "Dark Learning" (Xuanxue 玄学) movement of the Wei-Jin period, which drew on both Confucian and Daoist sources to develop a sophisticated metaphysics of "non-being" (wu 无).

Part III: The Buddhist Transformation (ca. 1st–10th century CE) traces the arrival of Buddhism in China and its gradual transformation from a foreign religion into a fully sinified philosophical tradition, culminating in the great schools of Chinese Buddhism — Tiantai, Huayan, Chan (Zen), and Pure Land — that represent some of the most original philosophical achievements of the Chinese tradition.

Part IV: Neo-Confucianism and Late Imperial Thought (960–1911) covers the Neo-Confucian synthesis of the Song and Ming dynasties — the "rationalist" (lixue 理学) wing of Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi and the "idealist" (xinxue 心学) wing of Lu Jiuyuan and Wang Yangming — as well as the critical and evidential scholarship (kaozhengxue 考证学) of the Qing dynasty and the intellectual crisis of the late Qing.

Part V: Modern and Contemporary Philosophy (1911–present) examines the radical transformations of Chinese philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including the May Fourth critique of tradition, the New Confucian movement, Marxist philosophy in China, and the diverse philosophical currents of the reform era and beyond.

Part VI: Branches of Chinese Philosophy and Part VII: Philosophical Traditions and Global Dialogue offer thematic and comparative perspectives that cut across the chronological narrative, examining Chinese contributions to logic, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics, and placing the Chinese philosophical tradition in dialogue with other world philosophies.

Methodologically, this history seeks to balance three imperatives that are often in tension: first, the imperative of historical fidelity — the obligation to understand Chinese thinkers in their own terms and contexts, rather than through the lens of later interpretations or foreign categories; second, the imperative of philosophical engagement — the obligation to take Chinese philosophical arguments seriously as arguments, evaluating their cogency and exploring their implications, rather than merely describing them as historical artifacts; and third, the imperative of comparative awareness — the obligation to situate Chinese philosophy within the broader landscape of world philosophy, noting both parallels and differences with other traditions, without reducing any tradition to a mere reflection of another.

These three imperatives correspond roughly to three scholarly orientations that have shaped the modern study of Chinese philosophy: the sinological, the philosophical, and the comparative. The sinological orientation, exemplified by scholars such as Benjamin Schwartz, A. C. Graham, and Michael Loewe, emphasizes philological precision, historical context, and textual scholarship. The philosophical orientation, exemplified by scholars such as Mou Zongsan, Feng Youlan, and more recently Stephen Angle and Tongdong Bai, emphasizes systematic reconstruction, conceptual analysis, and engagement with philosophical problems as living questions. The comparative orientation, exemplified by scholars such as Roger Ames, David Hall, Mark Siderits, and Evan Thompson, emphasizes cross-cultural dialogue and the mutual illumination of different philosophical traditions.

No single scholar can master all three orientations equally, and every history of Chinese philosophy — including this one — inevitably reflects its author's particular combination of strengths and limitations. What we can promise is a conscientious effort to honor all three imperatives, and a frank acknowledgment of the places where our account falls short.