NEITHER ‘PRIMITIVES’ NOR ‘OTHERS,’ BUT SOMEHOW NOT QUITE LIKE ‘US’: THE FORTUNES OF PSYCHIC UNITY AND ESSENTIALISM IN CHINESE STUDIES

Were scienti?c systems the oracular revelations they sometimes all but pretend to be, it might be justi?able to take no note of the condition of mere opinion or fancy that preceded them. But the investigator who turns from his modern text-books to the antiquated dissertations of the great thinkers of the past, gains from the history of his own craft a truer view of the relation of theory to fact, learns from the growth in each current hypothesis to appreciate its raison d’être and full signi?cance, and even ?nds that a return to older starting-points may enable him to ?nd new paths, where the modern track seems stopped by impassable barriers. Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (1870)

In a 1986 review of Benjamin Schwartz’s The World of Thought in Ancient China, Angus Charles Graham attempted to capture the differences in approach he had with Schwartz. The differences represented something more than a personal argument between two leading Sinologists, for in explaining where he parted company with Schwartz, Graham was attempting to capture an important methodological divide in Sinology. This divide separated those who, in Graham’s own words, “prefer to think of the Chinese as like ourselves” and those who do not. The former, Graham added, tend “to see in Chinese thought, behind all divergences, an inquiry into universal problems, through ideas which transcend cultural and linguistic differences.” By contrast, the latter seek “to uncover, behind all the resemblances,

distinctions between key words which relate to culture-bound conceptual schemes and to structural differences between Chinese and the Indo-European languages.”1 Recent discussions of the state of the ?eld have largely echoed Graham’s assessment of the existence of two camps. In a critical account, Roger Hart notes that scholars have long been faced with two choices. The ?rst is a historiography “mired in universalism,” one that leads to a “pretentious dismissal” of Chinese sources and viewpoints. The other involves emphasizing the disjuncture between Chinese and European thought. Such an approach, however, runs across the problem of “reifying China and the West and further radicalizing the purported divide that separates them.”2 Hart’s views are largely consistent 1 A.C. Graham, “Review of The World of Thought in Ancient China,” Times Literary Supplement, July 18, 1986, p. 795. Also see Schwartz’s review of Graham, “A Review of Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China, by A.C. Graham,” Philosophy East and West 42.1 (1992): 3-15. 2 Roger Hart, “Translating the Untranslatable: From Copula to Incommensurable World,” in Lydia H. Liu, Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations, p. 47. For a variation on this view, see Edward Slingerland, “Conceptual Metaphor Theory as Methodology for Comparative Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion

with those found in Michael Puett’s empathetic but critical account of twentiethcentury studies of China. In To Become a God, Puett argues for the existence of two basic poles, or frameworks, around which scholarship on early Chinese thought and religion has developed. One pole emphasizes how the Chinese think like us. Such a position, as Puett correctly notes, derives from an evolutionary framework, one that mistakenly sees Chinese thought as developing through the same

evolutionary process found elsewhere. The other pole highlights the radical heterogeneity of Chinese and European modes of thought, explaining differences by reference to a “cultural essentialist” model.3 This paper revisits the historiographical question of whether there are two camps, as Graham and others have suggested. More broadly, it asks whether scholars who highlight commonalities between Chinese and European thought necessarily make recourse to evolutionary narratives and whether those scholars who emphasize or ascribe differences are necessarily essentialists. This paper falls into two parts. The ?rst examines two classic examples of works that epitomize what Graham thought of as the two poles, which can be characterized as evolutionist and essentialist. In this

connection, we look at the writings of Edward B. Tylor (1832-1917). As we see below, Tylor’s famous argument about the “psychic unity of mankind” resulted from his espousal of unilineal evolutionism, an in?uential theory that posited a single developmental trajectory for all human societies. We then turn to the early works of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (18571939), which provide a theory of cognitive relativity, undergirded by an essentializing conception of mentality. The second part of this paper reviews the approaches found in the works of three sinologists, Marcel Granet (1884-1940), Joseph Needham (1900-1995), and Angus Graham (1919-

1991), all of whom argued that Chinese thought exhibited a different logical structure than that found in Europe. Comparing the approach found in these three works with those found in Tylor and Lévy-Bruhl, we see that although these scholars incorporated aspects of earlier evolutionary and essentializing arguments, none of them, including Graham, can be placed squarely within either camp. In fact, all three of these scholars steered clear of the pitfalls of evolutionary and essentializing approaches.

PSYCHIC UNITY AND ITS EVOLUTIONARY BACKDROP: EDWARD B. TYLOR

In order to situate arguments about the disjuncture between Chinese and European thought, we return to the nineteenth century, to a thinker who appears to bear little relationship to modern Sinology, Edward B. Tylor (1832-1917). There are several reasons to begin with Tylor, rather than other in?uential exponents of 3 Michael Puett, To Become a God, pp. 7-8, 16, 145-200.

unilineal evolutionism, such as Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881). For starters, Tylor was reputed to be the founder of Anglo-American anthropology.4 Aside from this reason, there are two more signi?cant reasons to discuss Tylor, rather than Morgan. First, Tylor, together with another exponent of unilineal evolutionism, James Frazer (1854-1941), would prompt Lévy-Bruhl to formulate his theory of cognitive relativism, which would be in?uential to Sinologists. Second and more importantly, it is in his discussion of evolutionism that we ?nd Tylor’s theory of the “psychic unity of mankind.” To understand Tylor’s notions of psychic unity and unilineal evolutionism, we must bear in mind that he formulated them in response to polygenism. Epitomized by the “American” school of comparative anatomy, polygenism challenged what had arguably been received wisdom, the biological and psychic unity of all humans. Polygenist thinkers, such as Thomas Morton (1803-

1879) and Paul Broca (1824-1880), argued for multiple origins of human races. As George Stocking puts it, such a position largely sprang from an impulse that was “strong to de?ne the dark-skinned savages of the earth as separate species of mankind— especially in the context of the debates over Negro slavery, and of an aggressively expansive European civilization whose rapidly growing technological superiority was revolutionizing the terms of race contact all over the world.”5 Polygenist views also had implications for the way nineteenth-century thinkers understood cultural differences between peoples. Just as physical differences between groups re?ected primordial differences between races, cultural differences were understood to express differences in biological endowment and

intellectual capacity.6 Countering the polygenists, Tylor denied that there were essential differences between peoples. “It appears both possible and desirable,” Tylor wrote in Primitive Culture (1870), “to eliminate considerations of hereditary varieties and races of man, and to treat mankind as homogeneous in nature.”7 To be sure, Tylor was not denying the obvious fact that there were at least apparent differences between human groups; rather he was claiming that human groups

were the same because they were governed by the same natural laws, laws that imposed a uniform developmental trajectory for all.8 That developmental trajec 4 For an overview, see Stephen K. Sanderson, Social Evolutionism: A Critical History, pp. 1-35. 5 Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, p. 49. 6 Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution, p. 56. For a recent iteration of psychic unity, see Bruce Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations, pp. 653-83. 7 Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom, I: 7. 8 Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution, p. 70.

tory, Tylor argued, involved moving from lowly “savages,” through “barbarism,” before attaining the highest level of civilization.9 What varied between human societies was developmental pace. Following the dominant tradition since the Enlightenment, Tylor argued that, whereas some human societies progressed rapidly through various stages, other societies progressed either more slowly or stagnated at some point. The implications of Tylor’s reformulation of evolutionism were far-reaching. As Arland Thornton notes, in positing a single developmental sequence through which all societies pass, Tylor and others “substituted variations across space for variations across time, thereby converting spatial heterogeneity into homogeneous development.”10 In other words, the Australian native, like the Chinese scholar, represented an earlier or more primitive stage of development than his civilized counterparts—“living fossils,” as Robert Ackerman observes,

“to show man as he was thousands of years ago, before some or all the great intellectual and cultural advances that had (inevitably) led to the societies of the modern West.”11 One consequence of Tylor’s views on human difference was that they inclined him to stress the psychic unity of savage and civilized thought. For instance, the stress on psychic unity can be seen in Tylor’s position on language. In response to Frederich Max Müller’s (1823-1900) contention that savage

languages were radically different from those of civilized peoples, that they comprised “transformed metaphor” or poetic fancy, Tylor insisted that the two kinds of languages functioned more or less the same way.12 “Comparing the grammars and dictionaries of races at various grades of civilization,” he wrote, “it appears that, in the great art of speech, the educated man at this day substantially uses the method of the savage, only expanded and improved in the workings out of details.”13 Besides possessing the same basic linguistic tools as civilized men, Tylor went on to assert that savage minds were also profoundly ratiocinative.

Primitive thought, he opined, is thoughtful and consistent.14 The similarities did not stop there. Like modern scientists, the savage mind is caught up in the search for causes: “Man’s craving to know the causes at work in each event he witnesses, the reasons why each state of things he surveys is such as 9 Primitive Culture, vol. 1, pp. 26-27. 10 Thornton, “The Developmental Paradigm, Reading History Sideways, and Family Change,” Demography 38.4 (2001): 451; cf., Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution, p. 73; Victorian Anthropology, pp. 173. 11 Robert Ackerman, J.G. Frazer: His Life and Work, pp. 78-79. 12 Tylor, Primitive Culture, II: 445. 13 Tylor, Primitive Culture, I: 160. 14 See Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (pp. 154-55) for a discussion of Lubbock’s Origin of Civilization (1870).

it is and no other, is not a product of high civilization, but a characteristic of his race down to its lowest stage.” And not without comic effect, Tylor then went on to describe the extent to which such cravings consume the savage. “Among rude savages,” he commented, “it is already an intellectual appetite whose satisfaction claims many of the moments not engrossed by war or sport, food or sleep.”15 ESSENTIALISM: LUCIEN LÉVY-BRUHL Having discussed Tylor and his formulation of unilineal evolutionism, let us now turn to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and his alternative, cognitive relativism. LévyBruhl concerns us here for several reasons. One is that Lévy-Bruhl’s early work in?uenced Sinological arguments about the distinctiveness of Chinese thought. In hindsight, the fact that Lévy-Bruhl would prove to be important to twentiethcentury Sinology should not come as a surprise, given that Lévy-Bruhl purportedly became interested in the problem of mentalities when his friend Édouard Chavannes (1865-1918) sent him translations

of ancient Chinese thinkers. Much to his surprise, Lévy-Bruhl reportedly found the texts incomprehensible, and he then came to wonder whether there were modes of thought that were incommensurate with each other.16 Another reason is that Lévy-Bruhl’s work epitomizes the problem of essentializing mentalities, a problem that all of the Sinological works we examine attempt to address. Before going much further, it is necessary to explain what I mean by ‘essentialism.’ I am not using essentialism to refer to arguments that ascribe differences between groups or even accounts that deemphasize diachronic change. Instead, I follow Ernst Mayr (1905-2005) in de?ning essentialism in a more restrictive sense, as a form of typological or ideal-type thinking that comes out of ancient Greek philosophy. Such thinking, as Mayr notes, has two components. The ?rst is that it “postulated that the world consisted of a limited number of classes of entities (eide).” The second is that it maintains that members of each class must share an essence, which distinguishes them from members of other classes. Variance from the type, furthermore, is immaterial and irrelevant.17

15 Primitive Culture, I: 368-69. 16 Cazeneuve, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, p. 2. For an identical account, see Laurent Mucchielli, La Découverte du social, p. 341. The choice of the term “incommensurate” is Cazeneuve’s. To the best of my knowledge, Lévy-Bruhl did not himself use the term ‘incommensurate.’ 17 Ernst Mayr, “The Philosophical Foundations of Darwinism,” p. 491; cf. Mayr, “Introduction,” in Charles Darwin, On the Origins of Species, pp. xix, xx. For a very similar de?nition, see Stephan Fuchs, Against Essentialism, pp. 13-15. There, he characterizes essentialism as “the failure to allow for variation” and for positing “polar opposites, instead of gradations and empirical continuities.”

THE FORTUNES OF PSYCHIC UNITY & ESSENTIALISM IN CHINESE STUDIES 2

Before plunging into the content of Lévy-Bruhl’s ideas, it is necessary to issue a disclaimer because, in many ways, Lévy-Bruhl’s ideas, while in?uential, are dif?cult to de?ne. Writing in the posthumously published Notebooks on Primitive Mentality (Les Carnets) in the 1930s, Lévy-Bruhl acknowledged that he had been often unclear. “I frequently used the expression,” he remarked, “this mentality is not conceptual like ours, [my language] remained vague and certainly did not mean that primitive mentality does not form concepts. What I had imprecisely in mind was this . . .”18 Moreover, Lévy-Bruhl changed his mind during his long life. As one sympathetic interpreter, C. Scott Littleton, noted, Lévy-Bruhl was in some ways his own best critic, and the thoughts he expressed in The Notebooks represent his attempts to reformulate and re?ne earlier ideas in response to criticism.19 Putting aside the problem of de?ning his ideas, the targets of Lévy-Bruhl’s attack are clear enough, unilineal evolutionism, more generally, and Tylor, more speci?cally.20 For Lévy-Bruhl, two notions common to the English school were especially irksome. The ?rst was psychic unity—the unproven belief that “the human mind always and everywhere [is] homogeneous, that is, a single type of

thinker, and one whose mental operations obey psychological and intellectual laws which are everywhere identical.”21 The second was the evolutionist assumption of unilineal development. Such an assumption, Lévy-Bruhl complained in Primitive Mentality (La mentalité primitive [1922]), merely regarded ‘primitive mentality’ as belonging to an earlier phase that all societies cross in order to reach the present phase.22 Whereas Tylor insisted upon the psychic unity of mankind, Lévy-Bruhl emphasized the difference in mentality that existed between human groups. “Profound differences,” he emphasized in How Natives Think (Les fonctions

mentales dans les sociétés inférieures [1910]), exist: Primitive perception is fundamentally mystic on account of the mystic nature of the collective representations which form an integral part of every perception. Ours has ceased to be so, at any rate with regard to most of the objects that surround us. Nothing appears alike to them and to us. For people like ourselves, speaking the language familiar to us, there is insurmountable dif?culty in entering into their way of thinking. The longer we live among them, the more we approximate their mental attitude, and the more we realize how impossible it is to yield to their mental attitude entirely.23

18 Lévy-Bruhl, The Notebooks on Primitive Mentality, p. 127. Translation slightly modi?ed. 19 Littleton, “Introduction,” in How Natives Think, xxi. 20 Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, pp. 26-27. 21 How Natives Think, pp. 18, 27. 22 Lévy-Bruhl, Primitive Mentality, p. 141. 23 How Natives Think, pp. 44-45. Translation slightly modi?ed. For works that draw upon

To be sure, such an assertion was not unique to Lévy-Bruhl. In this regard, Lévy-Bruhl’s interest in showing how social groups fashioned minds in different ways was in line with two of his sociological colleagues, Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) and Marcel Mauss (1872-1950). In Primitive Classi?cation [De quelques formes primitives de classi?cation (1901-2; 1903)], Durkheim and Mauss argued against the view that basic categories of thought, such as time and space, were innate or simply the product of experience. Such categories, or collective representations, they asserted, were modeled after the structural characteristics of social groups.24 The differences between Tylor and Lévy-Bruhl went beyond mere emphasis, since Lévy-Bruhl argued that primitive thought obeyed altogether different laws of procedure from European thought.25 With this, Lévy-Bruhl went one step further than Durkheim and Mauss had gone several years before. Whereas Durkheim and

Mauss were content to argue that the contents of the mind varied according to social structure, Lévy-Bruhl asserted that the very way that minds organized or associated those representations differed.26 The minds of modern Europeans or “men of our kind,” Lévy-Bruhl claimed, were essentially reductionist; they analyzed or broke down impressions into discrete components. Such minds, furthermore, separated or distinguished things from their properties. By contrast, primitive minds were synthetic; they obeyed what he obliquely called the “law of participation.” Rather than reducing the world into discrete parts, the law of participation made primitive minds connect representations into an undifferentiated whole.27 This is why the primitive failed to distinguish between a person and his hair or his totem.28 Such mythical identi?cations or connections, Lévy-Bruhl insisted, were not the product of choice or conscious thought. “[[[Mythical]] connections] represent a language,” he remarked in Primitive Mentality, “that the primitive mind does not remember ever having

Lévy-Bruhl, as well as theorists of primitive thought, Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) and Rudolf Otto (1869-1937), see H. Frankfort et al., Before Philosophy, pp. 11-36. In addition to citing How Natives Think, Frankfort references Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms [Philosophie der symbolischen Formen II] and Otto’s Idea of the Holy. 24 Cazeneuve, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, p. 4; Needham, “Introduction,” xi; Mauss and Durkheim, Primitive Classi?cation, 8-9; 57; 82-84; 88. 25 How Natives Think, pp. 18, 27. 26 For the relationship between Durkheim, Mauss, and Lévy-Bruhl, see Emile Benoit-Smullyan, “La Pensée Chinoise,” American Sociological Review 1.3 (1936): 487-92; 487-88. For criticisms of Durkheim and Mauss arguing to the effect that they fail to distinguish between the capacity and content of the mind, see Steven Lukes, Émile Durkheim, pp. 447-48; Rodney Needham, “Introduction,” xxvi-xxvii. 27 How Natives Think, pp. 44-45. 28 Stanley Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion, p. 86.

learnt.”29 These connections “do not present themselves separately to the primitive mind,” he wrote, “nor are they analyzed and arranged in logical sequence by it. They were always bound up with preperceptions, preconceptions, [and] preconnections.”30 According to Lévy-Bruhl, because the primitive mind obeyed different laws of procedure, it was ill equipped for scienti?c thought. Citing examples from the ethnographic literature, Lévy-Bruhl noted that the habit of primitives to connect and con?ate impressions or events makes them indifferent to logical contradictions and thus “prelogical” (prélogique).31 Moreover, countering Tylor and Frazer, both of whom saw the habit of seeking causal relations as universal, Lévy-Bruhl argued that primitive minds entirely lacked notions of causation (and by this, he primarily meant the mechanistic or ef?cient kind).32 “There is something more and something different,” Lévy-Bruhl wrote, “it is not merely an artless

and erroneous application of the principle of causality.”33 The reason for this, he further noted, had to do with the fact that our notions of causation required “an invariable and irreversible order in time between the antecedent cause and the consequent effect.” Because primitive minds obeyed the law of participation, they were prone to con?ate or confuse, rather than individualize or rigorously distinguish, between the two.34 Thus, in the eyes of the primitive, signs such as the astrological or natural omens—the bird that accompanied spring and summer—were responsible for events, such as the change of seasons.35 Not surprisingly, Lévy-Bruhl’s ideas met with staunch criticism. In the English-speaking world, Lévy-Bruhl was attacked by E.E. Evans-Pritchard (1902-1973) and by the followers of Tylor, Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942) as well as another critic of evolutionism, Franz Boas (1858-1942), for his infuriating ethnocentrism, as well as his complete lack of ?eld experience. In France, Lévy-Bruhl was criticized by Durkheim, who rejected the possibility in Elemen

29 Primitive Mentality, pp. 59-60. Translation modi?ed. 30 How Natives Think, pp. 107-8. Translation modi?ed. 31 Lévy-Bruhl, Notebooks, pp. 8-9. 32 Richard Taylor explains mechanistic or ef?cient cause as “that by which some change is wrought.” His de?nition is drawn from Aristotle’s notion of four causes. The other kinds of causes are “?nal” cause (the “end or purpose for which a change is produced”), the “material” cause (“that in which a change is wrought”), and the “formal” cause (“that into which something is changed”). See Taylor, “Causation,” in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Volume I, p. 56. 33 How Natives Think, 75-76. 34 How Natives Think, 288; Primitive Mentality, pp. 90-91. 35 Primitive Mentality, p. 138.

tary Forms of Religious Life (Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse [1912]) that human thought could be concrete, rather than non-conceptual.36 In turn, Mauss complained about Lévy-Bruhl’s tendency to con?ate all non-European thought under a single category of primitive.37 Last, Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908- ) de?ed Lévy-Bruhl in Savage Thought (La pensée sauvage), where he reasserted psychic unity (or better still, he altogether questioned the distinction between modern and primitive thought).38 Stepping back a moment, it is clear that there are grounds for much of the criticism Lévy-Bruhl received, including the charges of

ethnocentrism. There are questions about whether Lévy-Bruhl deserved to be called a cognitive relativist. Did Lévy-Bruhl really posit, as Paul Stoller and C. Scott Littleton suggest, “that no one logic is necessarily superior to any other logic”?39 True, Lévy-Bruhl denied that we should treat non-European beliefs as more childish—that is, more rudimentary or primitive—versions of our own. But does the fact that he would deny “a fundamental connection between primitive and modern, past and present” imply that Lévy-Bruhl had much appreciation for non-European traditions? On the contrary, some passages in How Natives Think suggest that he did not. To take an extreme example, consider what Lévy-Bruhl said of the Chinese: Chinese scienti?c knowledge affords a striking example of this

arrested development. It has produced immense encyclopedias of astronomy, physics, chemistry, physiology, pathology, therapeutics and the like, and to our minds all this is nothing but balderdash. How can so much effort and skill have been expended in the long course of ages, and their product be absolutely nil? This is due to a variety of causes, no doubt, but above all to the fact that the foundation of each of these so-called sciences rests upon crystallized concepts,

concepts which have never really been submitted to the test of experience, and which contain scarcely anything beyond vague and unveri?able notions with mystic preconnections. The abstract, general form in which these concepts are clothed allows of a double process of analysis and synthesis which is apparently logical, and this process, always futile yet ever self-satis?ed, is carried on to in?nity. Those who are best acquainted with the Chinese mentality—like De Groot, for instance—almost despair of seeing it free itself from its shackles and cease revolving on its own axis.40 Another problem with Lévy-Bruhl’s work is that he failed to make a clean break with unilineal evolutionism—even in his early work, where this was a stated goal. First of all, like Durkheim and Mauss, he relied on evolutionist terminology.41 For instance, he spoke of primitive thought and the primitives (a

36 Steven Lukes, Émile Durkheim: His Life and Work, pp. 439-40. 37 Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, pp. 10-11. 38 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Savage Thought, p. 268; Structural Anthropology, p. 230. 39 Littleton, “Introduction,” vi; for similar views, see Paul Stoller, “Rationality,” in Mark C. Taylor ed., Critical Terms for Religious Studies, pp. 241-42. 40 How Natives Think, pp. 380-81. 41 For discussions of residual evolutionism in Durkheim and Mauss, see Lukes, Émile Durkheim, pp. 438, 456; Needham, “Introduction,” xvii-xix.

term which he admittedly did not fail to put in scare quotes, at least some of the time). Indeed, the decision to name his second major book on the subject, Primitive Mentality (La mentalité primitive), undercut his efforts to move away from treating non-European beliefs as a more rudimentary version of our own. Then there is his most unfortunate turn of phrase, prélogique. Despite his insistence that it did not represent “a kind of antecedent stage, in point of time, to the birth of logical thought,” this turn of phrase only reinforces the sense that primitive mentality was antecedent to logical thought. One could go on, as there is more, and the point hardly needs emphasis—but here are a few more, ?agrant examples: “progress,” “aggregates of the most advanced types,” “arrested development,” and “transitions to the higher mental types.”42 There are questions about whether Lévy-Bruhl was able to deliver on his own promise of providing an alternative

to unilineal evolutionism. On the one hand, this was his stated goal. In his notebooks, he reminds himself: Show that in order to treat of ‘primitive cultures persisting in the modern world’ there is no reason to make use of the evolutionist hypothesis, at least in its popular and simplistic form. Not to represent the primitive mentality as belonging to a phase which the civilizations traverse in order to pass through others successively and to reach the present which would be entirely distinct from the ‘primitive . . .’ Yet on the other hand, Lévy-Bruhl was not forthcoming on details that would explain how civilizations developed “in various directions.” So focused was he on delineating the differences between “men of our kind” and all others that he failed to see diversity among the

“primitives” and recognize that the differences between the nineteenth-century Chinese and Australian aborigines may have been as stark, if not more stark, than those separating the Chinese from contemporary Europeans.43 Had he been less bent on disproving Frazer and Tylor, he might have pressed his own arguments further and asked whether there were different kinds of ‘primitive mentalities’—and perhaps showed us what developmental trajectories non-European civilizations took. Most problematically, as Evans-Pritchard correctly noted, Lévy-Bruhl’s insistence upon the absolute disjuncture between European and non-European thought re?ected an essentializing view of mentality.44 As we saw above, Lévy

42 How Natives Think, pp. 379-380. 43 This problem in Lévy-Bruhl’s treatment of non-European societies was brought to my attention by Norman Yoffee (Private Communication, 6/29/05). 44 For Evans-Pritchard’s criticism, see Stoller, “Rationality,” pp. 241-42. For examples of passages in the early corpus that would suggest such a reading of mentality, see How Natives Think, p. 14; cf. pp. 67-68 (for comments that suggest that the uneducated European has a completely different mentality from that of the primitive); Primitive Mentality, pp. 59-60. I should note that this charge does not ?t well with later versions of Lévy-Bruhl’s understanding of the differences between modern and primitive mentalities, especially those presented in The Notebooks.

Bruhl believed that what distinguished primitive society from modern society were the laws of mental procedure that governed its members (participation or causality). What Lévy-Bruhl did not do in 1910 was consider the possibility that there could be more than one kind of law of mental procedure operating within a given society. Of course, Lévy-Bruhl was hardly alone, as this sort of fallacy—the failure to recognize variation within social groups or commonalities between them—appears to have plagued his contemporaries. After all, did not Durkheim and Mauss also fail to entertain the possibility, as anthropologist Rodney Needham aptly points out, that a society could employ more than one mode of classi?cation at a time?45 In response to such criticism, Lévy-Bruhl subsequently reformulated his more radical claims about the differences between modern and primitive mentalities. Later works, such as the Notebooks, reveal that Lévy-Bruhl himself had retreated: “Let us expressly rectify what I believed correct in 1910; there is not a primitive mentality distinguishable from the other [[[Wikipedia:modern|modern]]

mentality] by two characteristics which are peculiar to it (mythical and prelogical).”46 In fact, in the Notebooks, Lévy-Bruhl seems to have returned to the fold of “psychic unity.” The differences, he asserted, between primitive men and what he once referred to as “men of our own kind” did not imply an absolute break in mentality—mystical versus rational, participation versus causality. “From the strictly logical point of view,” he declared, “no essential difference has been established between the primitive mentality and ours. In everything that touches on ordinary, everyday experience, transactions of all sorts, political and economic life, counting, etc., they behave in a way which involves the same usage of their faculties as we make of ours.” The difference rather lay in degree: “There is a mystical mentality, which is more marked and more easily observable among ‘primitive peoples’ than in our own societies, but it is present in every human mind.”47

MARCEL GRANET: THE FRENCH CONNECTION Having laid out evolutionary and essentializing options for explaining cultural difference, let us now turn to the work of Marcel Granet (1884-1940). While Granet is still read today perhaps only by Sinologists, it is important to bear in mind that like Lévy-Bruhl, Granet was ?rst and foremost a sociologist. To be 45 Needham, “Introduction,” xvii-xix. 46 Notebooks, pp. 100-101. 47 Notebooks, p. 55.

sure, much of what Granet wrote admittedly does not read like sociology, as it refrains from making explicit cross-cultural comparisons, from using ethnographic analogy, and even from making more than the very occasional reference to the sociological literature. Yet according to Maurice Freedman, the problems Granet raised and the answers he devised were intended to illuminate not so much China so much as the general conditions of humanity. “La Chine, je m’en fous,” he reportedly said in class. “Ce qui m’intéresse, c’est l’Homme” (I don’t give a damn about China. What interests me is Mankind).48 And indeed, this should come as little surprise. Granet not only personally knew Durkheim, Mauss, and Lévy-Bruhl, but he was also closely associated with these ?gures. As a young man, he bene?ted from the patronage of Lévy-Bruhl, who used his in?uence to shield Granet from active military service during World War I. Later, Granet was to succeed Mauss as the president of the Institut Français de Sociologie.49 In the pages below, I will argue that Granet’s views on China incorporated elements of earlier works, in particular Lévy-Bruhl’s 1910 theory of primitive mentality.50 Yet, despite his indebtedness to older sociologists, such as Lévy-Bruhl, Granet was able to

transcend the limitations of his predecessors. He was able to create a robust and non-essentializing account of Chinese civilization, one that was able to account for the parallel trajectory Chinese society took and the distinctiveness of Chinese cultural forms while remaining sensitive to the existence of cultural variability. Before we can show how Granet’s approach represents an alternative to earlier, more essentializing or evolutionary approaches, we will have to demonstrate that Granet was in fact in dialogue with Tylor and Lévy-Bruhl. We look at two very in?uential works by Granet from the angle of their relationship to Lévy-Bruhl: a long essay, “Quelques particularités de la langue et de la pensée chinoise” (1920) and La Pensée chinoise (1934).51 There are two reasons why I have chosen to focus on these two works, rather than his other work on Chinese

48 Freedman, “Introduction,” in Granet, The Religion of the Chinese People, p. 29. 49 See Freedman, “Introduction,” p. 14; Terry Nichols Clark, Prophets and Patrons: the French University and the Emergence of the Social Sciences, p. 212. 50 Previous accounts of Granet have made much of the connection between Granet and Durkheim. See, for instance, Witold Jablonski, “Marcel Granet and His Work,” Yenching Journal of Social Sciences 1.2 (1939): 242; Haun Saussy, “Correlative Cosmology and its Histories,” pp. 20-23; Aihe Wang, “Correlative Cosmology: From the Structure of Mind to Embodied Practice,” The Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 72 (2000): 114; BenoitSmullyan’s review of La Pensée chinoise in the American Sociological Review 1.3 (1934): 487-92. 51 The 1920 article was originally published in Revue philosophique and later incorporated in a volume of collected essays, Études sociologiques sur la Chine. All references to the version printed in the Études sociologiques sur la Chine.

society and religion, for instance, his Festivals and Songs of Ancient China (Fêtes et chansons anciennes de la Chine [1929]) or his Chinese Civilization: Public and Private Life (La Civilisation chinoise, La Vie publique et la vie privée [1929]).52 First, the 1920 essay provided the basis for La Pensée chinoise, a monograph that addressed at length the differences between Chinese and European intellectual traditions. Second, by comparing the earlier essay with the book we can trace a clear but relatively unknown line of in?uence between Lévy-Bruhl and Granet—and, indirectly, between Granet and Tylor. Indeed, as Granet wrote in a footnote in the 1920 essay, “for this study, the analysis done by Mr. LévyBruhl on the principles of the American languages was a very useful guide. One can see that my conclusions accord for the most part with his.”53 Judging from comments he makes, Granet had nothing but contempt for unilineal evolutionism and “psychic unity.” This is clear in two ways. The ?rst is the fact that he took as his point of departure the assumption that China represents a fully evolved civilization, rather than a half-evolved or immature one. “Chinese civilization,” he wrote, “appears thus to have arrived at its maturity.”54 Second, we see Granet’s aversion to evolutionism in his critique of earlier accounts of Chinese civilization. Most accounts—including one German account that adopted some of Lévy-Bruhl’s

terminology—suffer from the tendency to “read history sideways.”55 They assume, Granet complained, that the European developmental trajectory is universal: They treat [the content of the Chinese tradition] as learned conceptions, susceptible, as a result, of being de?ned or quali?ed in an abstract fashion. In general, they begin by searching for equivalents in the conceptual language of our philosophers. They ?nish up ordinarily, as soon as they have presented Chinese ideas as scholastic entities, by declaring them altogether strange and without value. To them Chinese ideas appear to testify to the fact that Chinese thought emerges from a mentality that one would (to use readymade expressions that are fashionable) qualify as “prelogical” or “mystical.”56 Rather than treat Chinese thinkers as primitive precursors to their European counterparts, Granet proposed instead to examine Chinese traditions within their local contexts. The fact that these ideas supported a long-lived social and polit

52 The former has been translated by E.D. Edwards as Festivals and Songs of Ancient China. The latter has been translated by Kathleen E. Innes and Mabel R. Brailsfor as Chinese Civilization. 53 Granet, Études sociologiques, p. 102. Also see Freedman tr. The Religion of the Chinese People, p. 166 n. 31 for other references to Lévy-Bruhl in Granet’s corpus. 54 La Pensée chinoise, p. 584. 55 The work he alludes to is Heinrich Hackmann, Chinesische philosophie. 56 La Pensée chinoise, pp. 27-28.

ical order, he argued, “should be suf?cient to prove their value.”57 In other words, he aimed to evaluate these ideas, not according to some universal scale of intellectual progress, a scale that was at heart ethnocentric. Instead he judged these ideas according to their ability to hold a complex society together for millennia. Granet’s engagement with the critique of “psychic unity” and unilineal evolutionism is perhaps clearest from the ways in which Granet characterized Chinese thought, characterizations that heavily resembled Lévy-Bruhl’s description of primitive mentality. For example, in How Natives Think, Lévy-Bruhl contrasted the concrete or synthetic nature of primitive thought with that of the abstract or analytic nature of European thought.58 In his turn, Granet similarly concluded that, unlike modern European forms of thought, Chinese thought was concrete and was inherently “synthetic.” He claimed, “A study of the vocabulary highlights the prodigiously concrete character of Chinese concepts: virtually the entire totality of words connote single ideas, express manners of ways of perceiving, or an aspect as speci?c as possible.” The vocabulary, he went on to observe, lent itself to a way of thinking that was particular and

concrete, rather than abstract or general.59 Lévy-Bruhl’s in?uence on Granet was also apparent where Granet discussed causation. In several places, the fact that the ancient Chinese lacked notions of causation was assumed by Granet, rather than proven. The Chinese mind, he opines, “did not arrive at the idea of laws conceived according to the principle of causality.”60 The second work under consideration, La Pensée chinoise, reveals Lévy-Bruhl’s continued in?uence on Granet. For instance, Granet reiterated that Chinese thinkers lacked a distinct notion of causation, that they were immune to the principle of non-contradiction, and that the ancient Chinese failed to conceive of mind and body as distinct.61 More strikingly, in La Pensée chinoise, Granet went so far as to adopt Lévy-Bruhl’s characterization of primitive conceptions of time, space, and counting for his discussion of China. Lévy-Bruhl had argued that primitives did not share our abstract notions of time and space, that their propensity to see the world in

57 La Pensée chinoise, pp. 27-28; cf. 584-85. 58 How Natives Think, p. 174. 59 Granet Études sociologiques, pp. 102, cf. 117-18. 60 Études sociologiques, p. 140. 61 Granet, La Pensée chinoise, pp. 329-330-415. For Lévy-Bruhl’s views about the lack of mind-body dualism outside of modern Europe, see Cazeneuve, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, pp. 7-8; The ‘Soul’ of the Primitive (L’âme primitive [1923]), pp. 131-41; 232-33. In ‘Soul,’ LévyBruhl appears to be responding primarily to Frazer and Robert Codrington (1830-1922), but the view that the distinction between body and soul, mind and matter, is universal, appears to have originated from Tylor. For Tylor’s view that dualism is a universal belief, see Primitive Culture, I: 425-27; 456-57; 499-502.

solely concrete terms made them unable even to fathom the most basic numerical abstractions. “[H]owever paradoxical the statement may appear,” LévyBruhl wrote, “it is nevertheless true that for long ages primitive man counted before he had numbers.”62 In turn, Granet asserted that Chinese thinkers not only did not share our notions of space and time, but—and here the argument shows the undeniable in?uence of Lévy-Bruhl—they lacked notions of numerical abstraction. Even the writings of the numerologists revealed the same penchant for the concrete and synthetic. According to Granet, Chinese numbers were symbols or emblems. They could not have been “imagined except in relation to a concrete Space and Time.”63 The foregoing discussion raises the question of whether Granet’s emphasis on the

disjuncture between Chinese and European modes of thought suffered from the tendency to essentialize cultural difference. By some accounts, such an emphasis did. The sympathetic Maurice Freedman charges that Granet was guilty of creating an account that represented a “totalizing simpli?cation” of Chinese civilization. To be fair, for evidence of such a charge, one would not have to look very far in La Pensée chinoise. Granet certainly did not pay much attention to historical development and diachronic change. And then there was his penchant for making totalizing pronouncements. For instance, in his conclusion, Granet declared, “I

will limit myself to characterizing the Chinese way of life (moeurs) with the formula: neither God nor Law.”64 Or worse still, there is Granet’s bold assertion, “Never have the Chinese considered man in isolation from society; never have they isolated society from Nature.”65 Or, take another unfortunate utterance, “Daoism would not be Chinese if the idea of participation of man in Universal Order did not occupy the central place in it.”66 Yet Granet’s mature work steers clear of the pitfalls of the essentialism found in Lévy-Bruhl’s early work by moving away from mentality to explain differences between modes of thought. Mentalité, as we saw above, was the term preferred by Lévy-Bruhl. By contrast, Granet chose in La Pensée chinoise to explain differences between Chinese and Europe traditions in terms of guiding principles or ideas (les idées directrices). True, Granet’s terminological shift would appear to have been insigni?cant. He did speak of European idées directrices being the principles of non-contradiction and causation, whereas the 62 How Natives Think, p. 202. 63 La Pensée chinoise, p. 173. 64 La Pensée chinoise, p. 586. 65 La Pensée chinoise, p. 415. 66 Granet, The Religion of the Chinese People, p. 121.

Chinese had a different idée directrice, one distinct and even incompatible with the principles found in Europe: the notion of a total and ef?cacious Order.67 Yet upon closer examination, there was more to Granet’s decision to speak of idées directrices. Rather than representing the difference between Chinese and European thought in terms of ideal types or mentalities, this decision allowed Granet to explain the difference in terms of the relative prevalence of certain ideas or habits of thought within each respective tradition. In other words, whereas the young Lévy-Bruhl would say that it was impossible for the Chinese mind, past or present, or any mentality that belonged to the “primitive” type, to understand events according to the laws of causation, Granet would say that Chinese thinkers would have been much less likely to resort to mechanical causation in order to explain an event.68 Less likely is a far cry from impossible: although “neither the principle of contradiction nor the principle of causality has the in?uence of an idée directrice,” Granet emphasized, “Chinese thought does not

disobey either in a systematic fashion.”69 In the end, Granet’s approach could not have been more different from Lévy-Bruhl’s. Whereas Lévy-Bruhl’s discussion of mentalities overlooked variability within a tradition or society, Granet’s model was able to account for it. In fact, one could even go so far as to argue that Granet’s move from discussing mentality to idées directrices is crucial for understanding the structure of La Pensée chinoise as a whole. In La Pensée, Granet devoted long chapters to documenting the diversity in the Chinese tradition, including strains of thought that did not obey Order, the idée directrice he identi?ed as playing the most important role.70 To take one example of such a discussion, let us consider the case of the Legalists. As seen above, Granet maintained that the Chinese language was, by virtue of its lexicon, concrete. Because of this, its users were ill equipped to handle any kind of generalization or abstraction, both of which were required for conceiving of law, natural or otherwise. Despite this claim, he did

67 La Pensée chinoise, p. 28; 336; for the incompatibility of Order with the principles of causality and non-contradiction, see La Pensée chinoise, p. 28. 68 How Natives Think, pp. 72-76; Primitive Mentality, pp. 59-60; 89-93. 69 La Pensée chinoise, p. 28; 337-38; cf. p. 334. Granet’s approach to human difference is in line with other early-twentieth approaches, in particular, that of Franz Boas. Yet Granet does not indicate whether he read Boas (though it is hard to imagine that he did not). For the importance of variability to Boas’ study of cultural groups, see Yu Xie, “Franz Boas and Statistics,” Annals of Scholarship 5 (1988): 269-96 and Charles Camic et al., “The Statistical Turn in American Social Science: Columbia University, 1890 to 1915,” American Sociological Review 59 (1994): 773-805. 70 See La Pensée chinoise, pp. 419-551.

not deny that some Chinese thinkers emphasized the rule of impersonal law. Some did run against the prevailing idée directrice, if only to encounter resistance: Law, the abstract, the unconditional are excluded—the Universe is one—as much from society as from nature. Thus the stubborn hatred that the Legalists and the Dialecticians excited. Thus the contempt for everything that supposes uniformity; for everything that would allow induction, deduction, any form whatsoever of restrictive reasoning or calculation; for everything that would tend to introduce, into the governing of thought, of things, of men, anything mechanical or quantitative.71 Granet’s move away from an essentializing notion of mentality prompted him to seek a deeper explanation of the differences between Chinese and

European traditions of thought. In other words, if there were alternatives to Order, why did it become the idée directrice in China? In this regard, Granet suggested that certain paradigms acquire status as the Chinese idée directrice because of social arrangements or institutions. Here, care must be taken to distinguish Granet from Durkheim, Mauss, and Lévy-Bruhl, who would argue that primitive classi?cation systems were inspired directly by social relations. Yes, Granet argued, as his critics point out, that yin and yang—the most basic classi?catory scheme used in Order—were inspired by the opposition of men and women, an opposition that represented the most basic cleavage of society. And yes, he would say that the notion of Dao was largely inspired by the institution of the

hegemon (ba) during the Spring and Autumn-period (771-453 BCE). But whereas his predecessors saw ideas or classi?cation systems as merely re?ecting contemporary social relations, Granet saw a dialectical relationship between the two. For Granet, ideas are not, as Lévi-Strauss would later say, “the shadows on the wall of the cave”; instead, their prevalence re?ected their ef?cacy, that is, their ability to support and sustain social arrangements.72 Yin and yang thus did not re?ect the basic cleavage of Chinese society at the time that Order achieved dominance; rather, it re?ected the social organization of archaic village life, several millennia before. Similarly, the notion of Dao was inspired by a political institution of an earlier age, several centuries earlier. These ideas only became idées directrices when they proved useful for supporting the imperial order.73 Stepping back to contemplate the larger picture, it is clear that many aspects of Granet’s account of Chinese civilization will strike contemporary readers as

71 La Pensée chinoise, p. 590. 72 Lévi-Strauss, Savage Thought, p. 117. 73 La Pensée chinoise, pp. 25-26; cf. 584-85. For a misreading of Granet, see BenoitSmullyan, “La Pensée Chinoise,” p. 490. He misses the diachronic elements of Granet’s argument.

outmoded. For instance, one cannot help but wince reading the account of Chinese language and numeral systems. Not surprisingly, Needham and Graham would later write long and cogent refutations of this aspect of Granet’s work.74 And yes, one certainly can take issue with many of Granet’s larger conclusions. To cite but one example, are we to believe that there was a single idée directrice that dominated Chinese thinking through the imperial period, a period that spanned more than two millennia? And to think that Granet would let us imagine that the social and economic arrangements that supported the imperial order were fundamentally

the same over two millennia! Criticisms aside, there is much to appreciate in Granet, provided one situates his claims about China within the larger framework of early twentieth-century social sciences. While he certainly did not see himself as a theorist, Granet’s contribution should be understood in terms of his major in?uences—Durkheim, Mauss, and, above all, Lévy-Bruhl. Indeed, if we were to assign blame, one would be inclined to argue that Granet’s faults are mostly those of omission. He did not create an explicit methodology. And he refused to generalize or to provide a more systematic account of why and how any scholar of human culture might navigate the waters between evolutionism and essentialism, and how one might create an account that allows cultural variation, debate, and controversy to play a central role in a story of cultural difference.

JOSEPH NEEDHAM It is through Joseph Needham’s (1900-1995) second volume of Science and Civilisation in China (1954) that English readers ?rst encounter the theory that there was a radical disjuncture between Chinese and European modes of thought. As one might expect, there were a number of commonalities between Granet and Needham. Like Granet, Needham also argued that premodern Chinese thought exhibited a different logical structure than that found in Europe. Like Granet, Needham also attempted to articulate this position without falling into the trap of essentializing Chinese culture and society. But, as we will see below, there were also clear differences. In contrast to Granet, who eschewed explicit comparative analysis, Needham believed that the particularities of the Chinese case had to be examined in their larger global context.75 In part, these factors explain Needham’s very different solution to the problem of cultural 74 For Graham’s refutation, see below. For Needham’s, see Science and Civilization, Volume 7, pp. 95-198. 75 For Granet’s distaste for ethnographic comparisons, see Danses et Légendes, p. 36.

essentialism. Whereas Granet would emphasize cultural variability within China, Needham instead asserted human commonality as a solution to the problem of reifying the East-West divide. And in doing so, Needham would attempt to walk the ?ne line between reasserting psychic unity and arguing that China took a distinct developmental trajectory. Before we can explain how Needham’s work provides a solution to the problems posed by Lévy-Bruhl’s essentializing approach to cultural difference, it is necessary to establish that he was aware of such a problem. This much is not too dif?cult, as it is clear that Needham’s picture of China as an alternative cultural universe came from his reading of the French sociologists, who he may have ?rst encountered through Granet. In Science and Civilisation, we see that Needham acknowledged Lévy-Bruhl’s in?uence, if only grudgingly. “We are all greatly indebted to Lévy-Bruhl,” he wrote, “for one of the most interesting analyses of primitive thought.”76 We also see that Needham disagreed with Lévy-Bruhl, sometimes violently. “It would be hard,” Needham

complained of the text cited above (p. 14), “to ?nd a passage more misguided. By what right this eminent scholar, who could not read a single word of the encyclopedias which he was condemning, dismissed the scienti?c and technological achievements of that civilization to which his own owed so much, is not clear.”77 Needham also had other reasons to complain. For instance, he quibbled with Lévy-Bruhl’s characterization of Chinese thought, his con?ation of it with other non-European strains or traditions: “The point at which we have to diverge from Lévy-Bruhl’s analysis is where he proceeds to describe coordinative or associative thinking as a variety of primitive thinking.”78 Needham’s direct engagement with Lévy-Bruhl is perhaps clearest from the three ways Needham

characterized Chinese metaphysics or correlative thinking.79 First, Needham acknowledged that Chinese coordinative thinking—or to use a term he appears to have coined, correlative thinking—represented a different strain from that which we ?nd in Europe. “This intuitive-associative system has its own causality and its logic,” he observed. “It is not either superstition or primitive superstition, but a characteristic thought-form of its own[[[Wikipedia:emphasis|emphasis]] added].”80 Second, Needham identi?ed the absence of causation as one major difference between premodern Chinese thinkers and European thinkers living 76 Science and Civilisation, p. 284. 77 Science and Civilisation, p. 286. 78 Science and Civilisation, p. 284; cf. 286. 79 Science and Civilisation, pp. 284, 286. 80 Science and Civilisation, p. 280. The term ‘correlative thinking’ ?rst appears on p. 279. A search through the Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edition, On-line version) reveals that the phrase does not predate Needham’s usage in Science and Civilisation.

after Galileo. Premodern Chinese thinkers, he stated, tended not to organize phenomena according to sequential cause-and-effect relationships: In coordinative thinking, conceptions are not subsumed under one another, but placed side by side in a pattern, and things in?uence one another not by acts of mechanical causation, but by a kind of ‘inductance.’...The key word in Chinese thought is Order and above all Pattern (and, if I may whisper it for the ?rst time, Organism). The symbolic correlations or correspondences all formed part of one colossal pattern. Things behaved in a particular way not necessarily because of prior actions or impulsions of other things, but because their position in the ever-moving cyclical universe was such that they were endowed with intrinsic natures which made that behavior inevitable for them . . .They were thus parts in existential dependence upon the whole world-organism. And they reacted upon one another not so much by mechanical impulsion or causation as by a kind of mysterious resonance.81 Third, Needham basically agreed with Lévy-Bruhl that correlative thinking was incompatible with modern science. About ‘correlative’ thinking, he stated, “[O]ur proper conclusion seems to me to be that the conceptual framework of Chinese associative or coordinative thinking was essentially something different from that of European causal or ‘legal’ or nomothetic thinking.”82 While

Needham would have agreed with Lévy-Bruhl that correlative thinking represented an altogether different strain of thought from that found in some areas of modern European life, Needham clearly did not think that correlative thinking was a unique artifact of Chinese mentality. In ways that anticipated some of the insights of Lévi-Strauss in the 1960s, Needham emphasized that correlative thinking could be found everywhere, including Europe before the seventeenth century: “The idea that things which belong to the same class resonated with, or energized, each other, though so characteristic of Chinese thought, was not without parallels in Greece.”83 In fact, examples of correlative thinking, Needham pointed out, could be found in recent history, in an eighteenth-century version of Aristotelian four-element theory. “Anyone who is tempted to mock at the persistence of it [correlative thinking in China],” Needham remarked, “should remember that the founding fathers of the Royal Society spent much of their valuable time in deadly combat with the stout upholders of the fourelement theory of Aristotle, and other ‘peripaetick’ fancies.” In fact, he added, “One of the ironies of history is that the Jesuits were proud of introducing to China the correct doctrines of the four elements—just half a century before Europe gave it up forever.”84 81 Science and Civilisation, p. 281. 82 Science and Civilisation, pp. 284, 286; cf. 266. 83 Science and Civilisation, pp. 284-85; cf. 286. 84 Science and Civilisation, pp. 293-94.

Having shown that Needham avoided the problem of essentialism—or better still, of reifying East-West differences in his discussion of correlativity—we now need to confront another question: does the fact that Needham reasserted psychic unity, one of Tylor’s old premises, necessarily mean he also accepted unilineal evolutionism? On the surface, Needham’s discussion suggests that he might have. After all, this is what one would expect of Needham, given his avowed Marxism, and given the fact that Marxist views of history, by most accounts, can be characterized as unilineal evolutionist.85 Moreover, some of Needham’s language, in particular, his use of the term ‘primitive,’ suggests that he implicitly accepted the view that all human societies move through a set developmental sequence. Criticizing Lévy-Bruhl’s discussion of Chinese coordinative thinking, Needham complained, “primitive in the chronological sense it may well be, but a mere department of ‘participative’ thought it surely is not.”86 Needham’s residual evolutionism is also suggested by passages where he implied that the Chinese

stagnated in their development, while European thinkers moved beyond the correlative stage during the Scienti?c Revolution. “The only trouble about the Chinese ?ve-element theories was that they went on too long,” he wrote. “What was quite advanced for the +1st century was tolerable in the +11th, and did not become scandalous until the +18th. The question returns once again to the fact that Europe had a Renaissance, a Reformation, and great concomitant economic changes, while China did not.”87 Despite appearances, it is important to keep in mind that Needham explicitly rejected unilineal evolutionism.88 For instance, he commented, “It is, I think, very important to clear up this misunderstanding, for there seems no reason at all why we should assume a priori that China and other civilizations passed through exactly the same social stages as the European West. In fact, the word ‘stagnation’ was never applicable to China at all; it was purely a Western misconception.”89 In large part, Needham’s rejection of evolutionism appears to have resulted not from direct in?uence from Lévy-Bruhl but his own contact with Chinese Marxists, who challenged Stalinist evolutionary assumptions.90

85 Gregory Blue, “Joseph Needham,” 203, 211-212. For Needham’s exposure to Marx and Engels, see Robert Finlay, “China, the West, and World History in Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China,” Journal of World History 11.2 (2000): 275. 86 Science and Civilisation, p. 284. 87 Science and Civilisation, p. 294. 88 Needham, The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West, pp. 125-53; cf. Brook, “The Sinology of Joseph Needham,” 345. 89 Grand Titration, p. 213; cf. p. 206. Also see Blue, “Joseph Needham,” p. 198. 90 Blue, “Joseph Needham,” p. 212. For the background of debates about evolutionism within the Marxist historiographical tradition, see Timothy Brook, “Introduction,” in Brook ed., The Asiatic Mode of Production in China, pp. 3-34. The volume, not coincidentally, is dedicated to Joseph Needham.

Aside from disavowing unilineal evolutionism, Needham also attempted to explain differences between the contents of the Chinese and European intellectual traditions in terms of diverging paths of development. But whereas LévyBruhl attempted to ?nd a bold alternative to evolutionism, Needham proceeded gingerly, dismantling the evolutionary framework from within. He began, as Gregory Blue shows, by accepting most but not all of the developmental stages found in Stalinist versions of unilineal evolutionism: primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and socialism. Where he parted company with the evolutionists was with their assumption that feudalism was the same in Europe as it was elsewhere in the world: “[h]ow far and in what way,” he asked, “did Chinese medieval feudalism

(if that is the proper term for it) differ from European feudalism?”91 For Needham, the differences were vast. Whereas European feudalism in the middle period was inherently unstable, being “militaryaristocratic” in character, Chinese feudalism was essentially bureaucratic. And whereas European feudalism collapsed, a situation that allowed for the rise of capitalism and the Scienti?c Revolution, the Chinese system, blessed or damned by its stability, persisted.92 It was here, then, at this feudal ‘stage’ that the great divergence occurred, where China and Europe took separate paths. The fact that the question would arise at all as to whether Needham’s picture of Chinese history contained residues of evolutionism re?ects the dif?culties of reasserting psychic unity. In some sense, psychic

unity required Needham to take a comparative framework, to use broad categories and generalizations to express both commonalities and historical divergences. Such terminology often carried evolutionary overtones through force and habit. In defense of Needham, old habits are hard to break—but Needham appears to have been close to leaving aside such terminology. To be sure, that would have raised unsettling questions about the value of such broad categories as feudalism for explaining the particularities of the Chinese case. Yet the question would have saved him from allowing the reader to dream that Chinese and Europe intellectual traditions were more or less moving along the same rough path before Europe made that crucial transition to the next stage. Indeed, Needham’s discussions of correlative cosmology invite comparisons with Lévi-Strauss, who also attempted to disentangle psychic unity from unilineal evolutionism and who shared many of the same intellectual quandaries. To 91 Grand Titration, p. 193; cf. p. 196; Blue, “Joseph Needham,” p. 205. For a seminal critique of feudalism as a historical category of analysis, see Elizabeth A.R. Brown, “The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe,” American Historical Review 79.4 (1974): 1063-88. 92 Grand Titration, p.

start, one wonders whether Needham’s insistence upon psychic unity led him, like Lévi-Strauss, to con?ate heterogeneous phenomena.93 More speci?cally, one worries that in consigning both yinyang wuxing theory and four-element theory to the category of correlative cosmology, Needham failed to ask whether and how Chinese forms of ‘correlative cosmology’ may have differed from European variants. He also overlooked the possibility that correlative cosmology may have changed over time, both in China and in Europe. A comparison of Needham and Lévi-Strauss ?nally reveals that Needham did not press his insights about the universality of correlative thinking far enough. As we saw above, Needham was content to point simply to the existence of two thought-forms, correlativity and causation. The former amounted to proto-science; the latter was integral to modern science. In this regard, Needham implicitly accepted Lévy-Bruhl’s view that correlative cosmology was distinct from and incompatible with modern scienti?c thinking. By contrast, Lévi-Strauss pushed the critique of Lévy-Bruhl one step further. Human thought could indeed be divided along the lines of analogical and conceptual thinking (one detects echoes here of Lévy-Bruhl). But Lévi-Strauss questioned

whether conceptual thinking alone was suf?cient for scienti?c thought. On the contrary, Lévi-Strauss argued, both are necessary. “There are two distinct modes of scienti?c thought,” he wrote. “These are certainly not a function of different stages of the development of the human mind, but rather of two strategic levels at which nature is accessible to scienti?c enquiry: one roughly adapted to that of perception and the imagination: the other at a remove from it.”94 Likewise, one wonders why Needham did not push his own insight further and ask, as Graham would, whether there was also a place in modern science for correlative thinking. ANGUS CHARLES GRAHAM By the time we reach Angus Graham in the 1980s, the trail leading back to the debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries grows cold. The most important reason is that whereas Needham directly engaged Lévy-Bruhl, Graham furnishes only ?eeting references to social theory, the closest being a couple of passing references to Frazer’s Golden Bough, a few more to Karl Jasper’s (1883-1969) Origins and Aims of History (1953), and echoes of LéviStrauss, who appears to have been his chief inspiration. Instead, the focus of 93 Alan Jenkins, The Social Theory of Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 74; cf. Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, p. 21. 94 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Savage Mind, p. 15; cf. Structural Anthropology, p. 230.

Graham’s discussion is the China ?eld, and, in particular, Granet. Yet despite the lack of direct engagement with social theory, Graham shared many of the goals of Granet and Needham. Like Granet, Graham sought a solution to the problem of essentialism by paying attention to cultural variability; but like Needham, Graham reasserted psychic unity without resorting to unilineal evolutionism to explain apparent differences.95 To start, Graham agreed that the pervasive modes of thought found in traditional China (correlativity) exhibited a different logical structure than that found in Europe after the Scienti?c Revolution (causality).96 The former, he noted in a vein reminiscent of Lévi-Strauss, entails analogical thinking, that is, thinking through a system of similarities and differences and building chains of correspondences and oppositions. The latter entails analytic thought, thought that is capable of examining the systems of correspondence and oppositions embedded in analogical thought.97 While Graham agreed that the structure of correlative thinking was logically distinct from that

of causal thinking, he denied that the differences between Chinese and European intellectual traditions could be explained as those of differing mentalities. In this connection, he cited two arguments. First, echoing Needham, Graham emphasized that correlative thinking was not unique to the Chinese before the twentieth century. Examples of correlative thinking, he pointed out, could be found in Europe before and shortly after the Scienti?c Revolution. One only has to look at Renaissance hermeticism and cabbalism or to fantasts such as Fourier.98 Second, in a vein reminiscent of Granet, Graham emphasized variability within China. There was more than correlative thinking in China. Some ancient Chinese thinkers did indeed embrace causal thinking. “The [[[Mohist]]] Canons not only recognize the superiority of causal over correlative explanation,” he argued, “but exclude the latter from the art of ‘dialectic’ (bian).”99 As a result, we have no reason to believe that there was anything

95 For an earlier assessment of Graham’s work, especially in relation to psychic unity, see Wang, “Correlative Cosmology,” p. 117. 96 A.C. Graham, Yin-Yang and the Nature of Correlative Thinking, p. 6. While Graham does not explicitly say this, the fact that he would argue for the existence of multiple logics is implied by his statement, “In the West, the logic accepted as complete until the 19th century goes back to Aristotle, yet correlative thinking in the sciences prevailed right up to the Scienti?c Revolution about 1600.” 97 Graham, Yin-Yang, p. 2. 98 Yin-Yang, 23-24. For a recent iteration of the view that correlativity was the dominant mode of thinking for all people, including pre-seventeenth-century Europeans, see Steve Farmer et al., “Neurobiology, Layer Texts, and Correlative Cosmologies: A Cross-Cultural Framework for Premodern History,” Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 72 (2000): 51-52. 99 Yin-Yang, p. 11.

about the Chinese mind (or syntax, for that matter) that inhibited or discouraged causal or logical thinking.100 In fact, Graham adds, “[b]oth in China and in the ancient medieval west, one meets a great deal of casual explanation and skepticism of the excesses of correlative cosmos building.”101 If the prevalence of correlative thinking in China could not be explained in terms of a Chinese mentality, then was it to be explained in terms of differential pace of development—in other words, in terms of evolutionary stages? At ?rst glance, Graham’s assertion of psychic unity would suggest that he embraced or lapsed into the evolutionary framework. To begin, there is his language: like Needham and Lévy-Bruhl, Graham referred to correlative thinking as a ‘proto-science’ and causal thinking as an

inherent part of ‘modern’ science. Such language, it goes almost without saying, implied an evolutionary sequence. Then there is Graham’s explanation of why the Chinese failed to dislodge cosmology from correlativity, an explanation that fell back into familiar tropes about European progress and Chinese stagnation. There, like Tylor and other proponents of unilineal evolutionism, Graham’s discussion suggests that he accounted for differences between China and Europe in terms of uneven pace of development. Whereas the Chinese and Europeans were one in eschewing causal modes of thought for correlative ones before 1600, thereafter Europeans entered a second Axial Age while China, politically and culturally uni?ed, failed to recover the “iconoclasm” of the ?rst Axial Age. Unlike their Chinese counterparts, early modern European thinkers were roused, Graham wrote, to “the Faustian daring of committing ourselves fully to the forces driving

towards an unknown future.”102 The pace of European technological progress accelerated at an “unprecedented” pace, making all other cultures seem, Graham remarked, “stagnant by comparison.”103 Yet it is clear from comments Graham made elsewhere that he rejected the evolutionary framework but embraced psychic unity. In an essay about Needham’s work, Graham complained that the question of why the Scienti?c Revolution did not occur in China was evolutionist at base. “One does not ask why an event did not happen unless there was reason to expect it,” he commented, “and nothing in the conditions even of Europe in the sixteenth century justi?es thinking of the Scienti?c Revolution as an event due at a certain point 100 Yin-Yang, p. 25. For similar conclusions about the compatibility of classical Chinese with scienti?c or logical thinking (rather than causal explanation), see Needham, Science and Civilization: Volume 7, Part, II, pp. 183-84. 101 Yin-Yang, p. 7. 102 Graham, Disputers of the Tao, p. 5. 103 Graham, Disputers of the Tao, pp. 315-17.

THE FORTUNES OF PSYCHIC UNITY & ESSENTIALISM IN CHINESE STUDIES 245 of maturation, as though civilization were an organism with stages which it passes through unless its development is arrested.”104 We know furthermore that Graham rejected evolutionism because he denied that there were separate causal and correlative stages in the history of human intellectual evolution. In contrast to Needham, Graham emphasized that Europeans living after the Scienti?c Revolution did not make a clean break with correlative thinking. Traces of correlative thinking, Graham argued, persisted in the way Europeans not only processed knowledge but also in their use of homeopathic medicine and literary metaphor.105 Correlative thinking even had a place in scienti?c inquiry. “Even a modern scientist,” he noted, “is thinking correlatively . . . as long as, for example,

glimpses of a pattern in the properties of the elements have not yet brought him in sight of a law of periodicity.”106 In other words, all human minds employ analogical and conceptual modes of thinking; the difference between the ancient Chinese and modern European was simply one of degree. Correlative thinking, he claimed, is simply “more fully exposed in China,” whereas causal, analytic thinking has been “thicker and denser in the West” since the seventeenth century.107 Having rejected evolutionary explanations, Graham went on to explain Europe’s divergence from China or from correlative thinking as a result of historical contingency. In particular, he pointed to two kinds of contingency. The ?rst kind was the vagaries of textual transmission. In China, the works of the Later Mohists, which were logical and casual in structure—and congenial to the development of modern science—did not survive. By the fourth century of our era, the

time of the Neo-Daoist revival, the Mohist documents, Graham observed, “had already dwindled to the mutilated remains available today, and without the textual scholarship to work out their problems.” By contrast, in the West, “logic has been central and the thread of transmission has never snapped; there was always, even when there was very little else, the part of Aristotle’s Organon translated, just before it was too late, from Greek into Latin by Boethius.”108 The second kind of contingency involved geography. Unlike the Chinese, the early modern Europeans were exposed to a variety of traditions (or so Graham thought), some of which were responsible for preserving the causal thinking and logic of the Greeks during the middle ages, as well as combining Indian 104 Graham, “China, Europe, and the Origins of Modern Science,” in Shigeru Nakayama and Nathan Sivin, eds. Chinese Science: Explorations of an Ancient Tradition, p. 51. 105 Yin-Yang, p. 23. 106 Yin-Yang, p. 7. 107 Yin-Yang, pp. 19, 23-24; Disputers of the Tao, pp. 349-50. 108 Graham, Disputers of the Tao, p. 6.

numerals with algebra.109 Contingency, luck, and happenstance, rather than culture, language, or even inexorable historical forces, were the reasons why Europe took one path and China the other. Our foregoing discussion raises a question: can we chalk up the differences between Chinese and European thought simply to contingency? Although Graham was very successful in showing the limitations of earlier approaches to this problem, approaches that attributed these differences either to differential paces of development or to stark differences in cultural logic, his own solution left much to be desired. To begin, one can certainly dispute Graham’s facts. Was the major reason why the Chinese failed to develop a mechanistic view of the cosmos because they were culturally isolated before the

nineteenth century? Did, for instance, the Chinese simply have no access to Arab or Greek learning? There is certainly at least some evidence to the contrary. As recent studies have suggested, the Hui or Muslim population provided exposure to Arab (and indirectly, ancient Greek) learning in late imperial China. The translator and scholar Liu Zhi (1669-1730) even introduced Arab and Greek ideas about the brain as the locus of perceptive faculties to Chinese audiences.110 Then there is the question of whether we can believe that the Chinese failed to develop a full-?edged alternative to correlative system-building because of the vagaries of textual transmission. For one, Graham’s explanation begs the question of why the Mohist Canons failed, unlike other texts, to be transmitted, widely read, or patronized. Were there perhaps concrete political, social, or institutional factors that might account for the fate of the Mohist Canons? For another,

it is doubtful that the Mohists were the only thinkers in premodern China to prefer causal explanation, as Graham’s discussion sometimes seemed to imply. After all, did not Graham ?nd a great deal of causal explanation in ancient China, as well as in ancient Greece? This being the case, one suspects that the fate of casual explanation in premodern China could not have hinged entirely on the fate of the Mohist Canons. To put it somewhat differently, there was never so stark a choice between causation as found in the Mohist Canons and no causation at all. Certainly, there must have been deeper institutional factors that explain why correlative, rather than casual, explanations tended to fall upon receptive ears in ancient China. To anticipate a point made a decade later by Geoffrey Lloyd, would not thinkers in a society with juries, an institution responsible for formalizing the way citizens talked about cause (aiton), be more 109 Graham, Disputers of the Tao, p. 317. 110 Benjamin Elman, On Their Own Terms, pp. 146-47; Wolfgang Bauer, “Some Traditional Chinese Descriptions of Brain Organization and Functioning,” p. 6.

likely to elaborate an explicit theory of causation?111 Again, one’s mind asks for underlying social factors that might explain why Chinese and Europeans thinkers tended to ask different sorts of questions, why they often arrived at dissimilar solutions, and why they tended to prefer contrasting styles of reasoning. NEW DIRECTIONS Let us return to the question posed at the onset, that is, whether sinologists can be divided, as Angus Graham once suggested, into two kinds? While Graham’s characterization of the ?eld has a sort of succinct allure, I would argue that it is off the mark. In fact, scholars have had more than a choice between evolutionism and essentialism. Some, including the best early twentiethcentury scholars of Chinese thought, have been critically aware of the drawbacks of approaches that deny substantial differences between Chinese and European thinkers. At the same time, they have been wary of approaches that simply chalk up differences in intellectual traditions to stark discrepancies in mentality. Instead, these scholars—including Graham himself—have successfully navigated a middle course between one extreme and the other. The question will no doubt arise as to why study the work of scholars, such as Granet. One might argue that the challenges faced by mid twentieth-century scholars belong to another era and may not be relevant to the direction in which China studies is currently heading. After all, how many scholars actively argue against evolutionism or still invoke Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s arguments about primitive mentality today? More

problematically, one could raise questions about the current importance of scholars such as Granet, arguing that few scholars today feel comfortable making broad generalizations about cultural or intellectual difference. And indeed, judging from recent comments about the state of the ?eld, the Sinological—or perhaps better still, the scholarly—tide would appear to be turning decisively against those who insist that the ancient Chinese did not think anything like us. In fact, one commentator, Edward Slingerland, describes those who insist upon difference as engaging in “word fetishism” and a “crude sort of linguistic determinism” based on what is not a terribly plausible model for human cognition.112 Slingerland’s comments largely resonate with the complaints of anthropologist Ganaath Obeskeyere. Obsekeyere charges that scholars who posit a conceptual divide between any non-Western peoples and their European 111 Geoffrey Lloyd, Adversaries and Authorities, p. 106. 112 Edward Slingerland, “Conceptual Metaphor Theory as Methodology for Comparative Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 72.1 (2004): 5-6.

counterparts are guilty no less of Orientalism and perpetuating the “social scientists’ myth of the Other.”113 In response to this objection, I would like to raise several points. For starters, even scholars who sidestep the issue of whether the Chinese think “like us” nevertheless continue to live, if not in the shadows of Tylor and Lévy-Bruhl, in the shadows of the men who argued with them. Do we not still assume the existence of something called ‘correlative cosmology’—a term that Needham coined after reading Granet and Lévy-Bruhl? And do we not still debate the extent to which ancient Chinese thinkers employed casual, rather than correlative, modes of explanation—a question that was ultimately inspired by Lévy-Bruhl’s ?erce disagreement with the Tylor school? Arguably one of the points of studying the work of our predecessors is to illuminate the origins of our conceptual vocabulary, to understand the sources of our

intellectual preoccupations, and to shed light on the murky connections between current research problems and longforgotten debates. Another reason to read Granet and his interlocutors is that evolutionary and essentializing approaches still persist in ?elds that emphasize comparative approaches or that employ cross-cultural data. To date, essentializing approaches remain in vogue in the ?eld of cross-cultural psychology.114 By the same token, evolutionary models have yet to disappear from studies of China, as Michael Puett points out.115 Lest we imagine that evolutionism persists only in the China ?eld, it is important to bear in mind the recent admonitions of Norman Yoffee and Arland Thornton, who have pointed to the stubborn persistence of evolutionism in mainstream ?elds in the social science, such as archaeology, economics, and sociology.116 Psychic unity, ?nally, remains alive, especially in the ?eld of comparative philosophy where the search to locate ancient Chinese answers to ostensibly universal problems continues.117

113 Gananath Obsekeyere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, pp. 15-16 in particular. 114 For works that largely discount cross-cultural commonality or cultural variability, see Richard Nisbett, The Geography of Thought, and Brook Ziporyn, “Li (principle, coherence) in Chinese Buddhism,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 30.3-4 (2003): 501-524. 115 See Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China, pp. 13-14. See especially p. 13 for an explicit embrace of unilineal evolutionism. Also see Heiner Roetz, Confucian Ethics in the Axial Age, p. 28. For his discussion of the eight stages of ethical development, a framework directly inspired by child developmental models, see pp. 26-30. 116 Arland Thornton, Reading History Sideways, pp. 103-248; Norman Yoffee, Myths of the Archaic State, 4-21. 117 See, for instance, David Nivison, The Ways of Confucianism: Investigations in Chinese Philosophy; T.C. Kline III et al., eds. Virtue, Nature, and Moral Agency in the Xunzi; Paul Kjellberg et al., eds. Essays on Skepticism, Relativism and Ethics in the Zhuangzi; Xiusheng Liu et al., eds. Essays on the Moral Philosophy of Mengzi. For more strident views, see also Slingerland, “Conceptual Metaphor Theory”; “Virtue Ethics, the Analects, and the Problem of Commensurability,” Journal of Religious Ethics 29.1 (2001): 97-125.

Because of the long shadows of Tylor and Lévy-Bruhl, the need for methodological alternatives to evolutionism and essentialism is as pressing today as it was in the ?rst half of the twentieth century. Thus the purpose of reevaluating “antiquated” works may not be only to attain what George Stocking has a called a more “empathetic, contextual, and non-evaluative” understanding of the history of one’s ?eld.118 The exercise may be worth doing, as Tylor once remarked, in order to locate older starting points, starting-points that enable us to ?nd new paths “where the modern track seems stopped by impassable barriers.” But do any of these works provide alternative explanatory models to evolutionism or essentialism? On the one hand, as my discussion above reveals, these scholars clearly recognized the pitfalls of older frameworks and successfully managed to steer clear of them. Granet showed how Chinese social and intellectual development followed a very

different trajectory than that found in Europe while emphasizing diversity or variation within the tradition. Needham employed cross-cultural comparisons to demonstrate commonalities between the modes of thought found in the Chinese and European traditions. In doing so, he dispelled the idea that the disjuncture between Chinese and European modes of thought could simply be explained in terms of absolute differences in mentality. Borrowing from Needham, Graham used cross-cultural examples to demonstrate commonalities between traditions and, expanding on the insights of Granet, he emphasized cultural variation within China. On the other hand, one could also argue that all three of these scholars failed to provide a methodological alternative to either evolutionism or essentialism. Granet failed to elaborate his insight about the role that institutions play in producing cultural differences. By the same token, Needham relied upon the Soviet theory

of “bureaucratic feudalism” as an analytic crutch. Because of this, he failed to develop a comprehensive account of why some universal cultural forms become more pervasive in some societies than others. Graham, ?nally, exempli?ed the best and worst strains of Sinological approaches to the problem. Whereas his predecessors provided only partial explanations of the role of social institutions or structural factors, Graham altogether sidestepped the problem, chalking up differences in intellectual traditions to contingency. No doubt, a fully worked-out methodological alternative to either evolutionism or essentialism cannot be found in these works. That said, what we do glimpse is a new way of posing the question, a question that falls upon future scholarship to answer: If the Chinese were not simply ‘primitives’ or ‘others,’ how can we explain the differences between Chinese and European ways of thinking? 118 Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution, pp. 11, 91.

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