Recently, I bought “A Concise History of Chinese Philosophy,” and I found it somewhat challenging to read, so I plan to organize my notes and questions after finishing each chapter in this post. Some notes are copied from the book’s viewpoints, simply summarized, while others are my own opinions, more subjective.
Chapter 1, Section 1
Chinese philosophical thought emerged alongside the formation of class society. China had already established a slave-owning state by the late Shang Dynasty. That is, a state governed by a caste clan (for example, the Shang was ruled by the Zi clan, and the Zhou by the Ji clan), and this caste clan also owned all slaves, thus forming the slave-owning class, with all slaves becoming racial slaves of the ruling clan. Additionally, within the ruling clan there were members of higher status than slaves, namely free citizens. Free citizens could not completely detach from labor like the aristocratic masters; they also engaged in productive labor and were used by the aristocrats for warfare.
Well-field system (井田制): A system of exploiting slaves, dividing land into squares for easier supervision of slave labor. During the Shang period, a paired plowing system was used, with two people pulling a plow. According to Wikipedia, one well was divided into nine squares; the eight surrounding squares were cultivated by individual farmers, with the income belonging to the farmers, called private land, while the central square was cultivated jointly by the farmers, with the income belonging to the aristocrats, called public land. I think this explanation is somewhat inaccurate. The cultivators here are slaves, and slaves are the private property of the slave owners. Would the income from private land truly belong to the slaves personally?
Under the brutal and reactionary slave system, slaves began to engage in class struggle, resisting the rule of the slave-owning class. To consolidate their rule, the slave-owning class used not only military and prison violence but also promoted their philosophy to deceive the people. Thus, the concept of the Mandate of Heaven (天命论) appeared. The core of the Mandate of Heaven is fabricating a nonexistent “supreme god” and claiming that this supreme god governs all things in the world. To understand the will of “Heaven,” people would consult oracles, but since this god does not exist, the results of divination are controlled by the slave-owning class, who can interpret them arbitrarily and fabricate so-called divine will (which is actually the will of the slave-owning aristocrats). The slave-owning class legitimized their rule by claiming it was “divinely ordained” and “the divine right of kings.”
Based on the fabricated supreme god, the slave-owning class further claimed that the Shang king was “the son of Heaven.” Because “Heaven” is the supreme god, people must obey “Heaven,” and since the Shang king was the “son of Heaven,” the representative of Heaven on earth, people were even more compelled to obey the Shang ruler.
It is worth noting that in the society under the current Confucian ruling class, idealism is prevalent again, with widespread divination and the cynical attitude of “trusting it if it exists, not trusting if it doesn’t,” along with scams like “fortune-tellers” and the so-called “fortune-telling manuals” and “Zhou Gong’s Dream Interpretation.” When some people face their own and others’ tragic situations without a way out, they sigh, “Ah, this is all fate.” But is it really “fate” that causes such misfortunes? No, fundamentally, it is because of the anger and resentment towards the corrupt government! After the restoration, the Confucian ruling class vigorously promoted idealism, indulged in religion, even in the 1980s, promoting “qigong” to numb the people, and also launched counter-revolutionary campaigns, dismantling the socialist economy, causing hyperinflation, and making people’s lives increasingly difficult. Where is the shadow of “Heaven” in all this?
The slaves bravely resisted the brutal rule of the slave owners. The fear of the Mandate of Heaven could not scare the revolutionary masses. Because slaves and free citizens accumulated scientific knowledge through productive struggle, naive materialism and naive dialectics also emerged, such as the theory of the “Five Elements” (五行) and the “Eight Trigrams” (八卦). The Five Elements theory regards metal, wood, water, fire, and earth as the fundamental substances of the world; the Eight Trigrams analyze the development and change of things from the perspective of contradictory aspects. I remember that later these two theories were distorted into idealism and used to justify superstitions, but I am not very clear on how exactly they were altered.
【This section ends here. The subsequent parts about the philosophy of the working people are relatively brief. I will supplement notes from “A Brief History of the Philosophy of the Chinese Working People” regarding this period later.】
Questions:
- How did the slave-owning production relations and the slave-owning class originate from primitive society?
- How exactly did the Well-field system exploit slaves?
- How did free citizens emerge? What is the relationship between free citizens and the slave-owning aristocrats (clan nobles)? When it is said that free citizens were used as tools for war, what does that specifically mean?
- How to understand the ethical concepts of “virtue” (德), “ritual” (礼), and “filial piety” (孝) in relation to the worship of Heaven and ancestral gods’ Mandate of Heaven ideology? How does this serve to maintain the slave-owning racial rule?
I just discovered that Luanma previously had a post with notes on “A Concise History of Chinese Philosophy,” citing it as a reference:
Continuing updates. This main post is to put forward my theoretical questions for answers. The version is from the must-read compressed package recommended by the forum.
- Here is a question I’ve pondered for a long time: What use is studying the history of philosophy, modern history, etc., for the current revolution? Because I have treated reading as a way to “improve personal cultivation,” that is, treating theoretical study like reading popular science books, whenever I come across something new that I never knew before, I just find it novel, “Oh, so xx is like this,” without thinking about how to apply what I have learned to the revolution.
- Page 9, why is it said that when rulers use virtue (德治) as the standard, it relatively reduces the mysterious meaning of the Mandate of Heaven (天命)?
- Page 10, why did the Zhou kings after the Eastern Zhou period become nominal rulers without real power? Is this only related to the decline of the authority of the Mandate of Heaven?
- Page 16, “Along with the increasing privatization of land, private industrial and commercial businesses also rose… These large industrial and commercial owners who still used slave labor mostly came from the supervisors of industrial and commercial slaves such as gongzheng (工正), shizheng (市正), jiazheng (贾正) during the Spring and Autumn period and earlier; they stubbornly defended slavery.” My thought is, shouldn’t the industrial and commercial owners arising with land privatization be a new landlord class? Also, I don’t understand the specific process of the rise of industry and commerce along with land privatization.
- Page 40, “Mo Di (墨翟) admired Dayu (大禹), he believed that ancient sage kings were like Dayu, working for the benefit of the people.” What kind of figure was Dayu?
- A question explained before in the reading group, but I forgot the explanation: Why did the Legalist landlord class advocate establishing a centralized feudal state?
I think it is because the Legalists needed to use the state machinery across the country to transform the slave-based economic foundation into a feudal economic foundation, so a strong state apparatus was necessary to implement feudal production relations and eliminate slave-based production relations. At the same time, centralization should be to prevent residual forces of local slave owners from rebelling.
I remember it was a tribal leader during China’s primitive commune period.
The purpose of studying history is to grasp the general laws of social development; the purpose of studying the history of philosophy is to understand the general laws of philosophical development. After mastering the general laws of social development, one can use them to guide their practice. By studying the history of philosophy, one can understand how various materialist and idealist philosophies that are now popular in society originated, what kind of influence they will have on society, and recognize the class nature of various philosophical struggles, thereby better refuting idealist philosophies.
This means that the Mandate of Heaven has shifted from an unconditional thing to a conditional one. In the past, the Mandate of Heaven unconditionally belonged to the royal family; regardless of whether the royal family was good or bad, they had the Mandate of Heaven, so there was reason to rule forever. With the concept of “virtue,” the Mandate of Heaven becomes conditional; if the royal family loses “virtue,” they will lose the Mandate of Heaven, and thus have no reason to continue ruling. This undoubtedly makes the Mandate of Heaven seem like something that can be gained or lost through human effort, which makes it less mysterious to people, turning it into something more closely related to human affairs.
At the end of the Western Zhou, the slave struggles dealt a blow to slavery, and feudal production relations began to emerge in embryonic form. Therefore, in order to gain hegemony in the Central Plains, various feudal lords also began to implement certain reforms during the Eastern Zhou, violating the Zhou royal family’s feudal system and strengthening their own power through alliances with the landlord class. Qi was the first to implement Guan Zhong’s reforms, using the power of the landlord class to establish centralized authority. As a result, Qi became the first hegemon during the Spring and Autumn period. Regarding this, because the Zhou Tianzi had almost lost all military power by the Eastern Zhou—having already been weakened during the Western Zhou by attacks from the Rong and Guoren uprisings, as well as slave rebellions—they were unable to use violence to stop the various feudal lords’ struggles for dominance, let alone hold authority over them politically and economically. Therefore, the loss of the “Mandate of Heaven” is merely a idealist explanation; the real reason lies in the fact that the slave-based feudal system centered on the Zhou royal family inevitably declined after being hit internally and externally, gradually being replaced by emerging feudal systems.
Slavery in the industrial and commercial sectors is the most stubborn because, in agriculture, large-scale slave escapes and uprisings made slave labor less profitable compared to the active use of feudal small producers. In the industrial and commercial sectors, using unpaid slave labor gives slave owners a greater advantage over small feudal artisans.
This is about the process of the emergence of private ownership from primitive society when studying the private state.
\u003e The development of productive forces led to the development of social division of labor, which became increasingly detailed, making individual labor more prominent, and specific divisions of labor resulted in fewer people—down to single individuals—completing tasks. Correspondingly, the scope of marriage became smaller, eventually leading to monogamy. Social and marriage systems must adapt to the social production and life. The family unit is also a production unit.
\u003e The collapse of primitive society was also caused by the development of productive forces. Division of labor made individual labor differences more apparent, and individual contributions to the collective increased, becoming more significant. As individual labor became more widespread, the clan-owned means of production, based on this ownership, was still distributed equally. Therefore, those who exerted more labor demanded more individual labor. Additionally, the increase in labor productivity in primitive society required division of labor over a larger scope. These conflicting contradictions (the contradiction between individual labor and primitive public ownership, the contradiction between significant differences in individual labor and equal distribution, and the need for broader division of labor versus the limited number and geographic scope of clan kinship) were inevitably resolved through the collapse of primitive communes.
\u003e Why did exogamy turn into kinship marriage? Because the labor of people of different generations produced differences. For example, the elderly were suitable for gathering and guarding the nest, while young adults were suitable for external productive labor.
This also explains the willingness of free people to emerge, which in economic terms is essentially owning means of production in a slave society—small producers who have not gone bankrupt. Free people and the slave-owning class belong to a feeling of both struggle and alliance. On one hand, small producers tend to polarize and be annexed by slave owners. On the other hand, they utilize war as a tool. Free people could participate in external wars and plunder slaves, thus achieving personal wealth. Therefore, in slave societies, armies with strong combat motivation and fighting capacity are generally based on free people.
This can be seen in Chinese ancient history. The Well-field system involved slave-owning aristocrats occupying land, and slaves being attached to the land, regarded as private property of landowning slaves. Slaves were forced to be bound to the land and organized for endless forced labor.
Ancient Chinese slave society was a racial slave society, with residual clan systems organized by blood relations. Accordingly, there was a corresponding clan concept. The worship of clan gods was essentially the worship of the authority of the exploiting class within the clan; the concepts of “Heaven” and “Mandate of Heaven” also serve this purpose, representing this authority as sacred, inviolable, and eternal, used to intimidate laboring people and prevent rebellion. The ideas of “virtue,” “礼” (li), and “孝” (filial piety) reflect blood relations, representing family relationships under private ownership. Since the exploitative system was organized based on blood relations, it naturally led to ideas such as children being filial to parents and subordinates obeying superiors.
There are two aspects of significance. One is that “learning from history can help us understand the rise and fall,” analyzing history clearly can provide experience for current society. For example, studying the struggle between Confucianism and Legalism helps understand how Legalist landlords used state power to fight Confucian landlords, and why Legalist landlords could not implement progressive political and economic routes. The other is theoretical significance: studying these can improve understanding of Marxism through comparison. For example, studying the history of philosophy ultimately involves comparing Marxist philosophy with historical philosophies; for reactionary philosophies, one can critique their errors, and for progressive philosophies, analyze their limitations. The history of economics is similar; it involves comparing and studying historical bourgeois political economy and learning how to use Marxist political economy to critique bourgeois economic theories.
Because the Mandate of Heaven is ultimately uncertain, with no objective basis; anything can be distorted or misinterpreted. Morality, however, is a reflection of social existence. Each person, based on their worldview, holds corresponding moral views, which contain more objective content than the theory of the Mandate of Heaven, thus reducing its mystical connotations.
By the way, why did Luosiding start studying the history of ancient Chinese philosophy? Had he finished the outline of Marxist philosophy before?
I haven’t finished reading the outline of Marxist philosophy yet; I still have one section in Chapter 4 of Part 4 and the entire Part 5 left to read. Currently, I plan to progress through several books separately, like in a reading group, and update my questions in the corresponding reading posts as I finish each section of a book. Also, Si Ba has posted a reading plan, which is just right for learning by competing with others. The main reason for studying this way is that I’ve been part of the forum for more than half a year but haven’t even finished one recommended must-read book, which is quite embarrassing.
Following my reading plan, I continue to update now. Recently, I suddenly noticed that the layout of this book is different from the recommended must-read book on the forum. Although the content is the same, the page numbers are different. So I have to mention the chapters where I found my own issues.
Chapter 2, Section 5, Laozi and Zhuang Zhou: Laozi and Zhuang Zhou, due to their declining slave-owning class status, have thoughts that are objective idealism and subjective idealism. Politically, they also advocate policies of fooling the people and regression, which I can understand. But I don’t understand what kind of practice Laozi and Zhuang Zhou are engaged in, are there some naive dialectical ideas?
Chapter 2, Section 6, Strategists, Name School, and Later Mohism:
- Gongsun Long called the attributes of matter such as color and hardness “independent existence ‘Zhi’”, and also said that all things under heaven are manifestations of “Zhi”. I don’t understand why the book says this leads to the opposite of materialism.
- How did socialist China’s evaluation of the Name School shift from “relativism” to “bearing naive dialectical ideas”? I remember in Li Da’s “Outline of Marxist Philosophy,” he directly labeled the Name School as relativist in the section on motion and rest.
- Chapter 2, Section 7, Xunzi and Han Feizi, representing the culmination of Legalism:
- How to understand the statement “In a class society, human nature is just class nature”?
- I don’t understand the paragraph criticizing Han Feizi’s absorption of dialectical factors from Laozi’s teachings. How to interpret “The reason why all things become all things is the generalization of the principles expressed by various things”?
- How does the “ritual governance” system not align with the interests of the emerging landlord class?
- Why does Han Feizi think that those who do not engage in farming or warfare—such as merchants and craftsmen—are social pests? Why did the Legalists adopt policies of heavy agriculture and suppression of commerce? Was it because the power of the slave-owning bourgeoisie in industry and commerce was strong at that time?
- Chapter 3, Section 1, The Struggle between the Qin-Han Dynasties and the Divination and Mysticism Theologies:
- Are there any landmark events marking the shift of the landlord class from implementing Legalist policies to Confucian policies?
- During the Western Han period, the landlord class implemented Legalist policies. Why did they still implement the “dual system” of commandery and kingdom early in the Western Han?
- Emperor Wu of Han, Liu Che, implemented state-run salt and iron monopolies. What was the impact of this policy? I don’t understand why this is considered a measure of Legalist policy.
Finally, a personal reflection on reading: first, I was very shocked to find that the ideas of later Mohism, the Name School, the Strategists, and others were so advanced. Then, I noticed that the first section of Chapter 3 mentions the historical cycle theory promoted by Confucian dogmatists, which immediately made me think of the current propaganda about the historical periodicity and the “Yan’an Cave” theory. It feels like a reproduction of the historical cycle theory. I hope that in the future, as my theoretical level improves, I can write an article criticizing the theory of historical cycles. Secondly, I feel that studying the history of philosophy should be combined with Chinese ancient history because the sections on the background of different eras are relatively few in the philosophy history, which mainly discusses the ideas of various schools. Also, the part about the philosophy of the working people in “A Concise History of Chinese Philosophy” is indeed as Fenghuo said, too little.
While researching, I found an article from the socialist period titled “A Tentative Explanation of Terms in the History of Chinese Philosophy,” which can serve as a reference when reading a concise history of Chinese philosophy:
中国哲学史名词试解(九十二条).pdf (920.7 KB)
Additionally, I found a paper called “Han Fei’s Critique and Transformation of Laozi’s Thought,” which can answer the questions in the post about Han Fei’s critique and transformation of Laozi’s ideas:
韩非对《老子》思想的批判改造_延风.pdf (217.3 KB)
Why hasn’t the screw learning post been reported anymore?
Uh, this week I will focus on theoretical study. My condition has been relatively poor since January, and I have almost degenerated my brain with indulgence, paying little attention to theoretical learning, which is actually a matter of attitude towards the revolution. Recently, I have been reflecting on my historical issues and my recent life situation.
Here are some updates on questions I find interesting:
- Section 1 of Chapter 5: The large landowning aristocracy in the mid-Tang Dynasty annexed land, leading to a large number of farmers fleeing, and the equal-field system was destroyed. Why is it also said that this gradually undermined the foundation of the feudal army?
- During the early Tang Dynasty (for example, under Li Shimin), wasn’t there a partial implementation of Legalist policies? When did the Tang Dynasty start to reconcile with aristocratic clans and large landowners?
- Why was there intense conflict between innovation and conservatism in the calendar system during the Sui and Tang periods?
- What was the purpose of establishing the imperial examination system during the Sui and Tang periods? Although the eight-legged essay had not yet appeared, did the exams still serve to uphold the interests of the feudal landowning class?
- Why, after the Song Dynasty, did many Confucian scholars, despite having influences from Zen Buddhism in their thoughts, outwardly oppose Buddhism?