Benjamin Schwartz's The World of Thought in Early China - background notes on the Introduction

The reading from Benjamin Schwartz's book has three components:  the Introduction and first chapter, which we will discuss in class, and the second chapter, which likely we will not.  The Introduction is, in particular, challenging reading, and this page should help make it more accessible.

One other challenging element, for some of you, will be that Schwartz does not use the pinyin transcription system.  He uses the older Wade-Giles system.  Pinyin is awful, but Wade-Giles is awfuller, and for those who are unfamiliar with it, you should consult the Wade-Giles transcription chart.  A number of our E574 readings use Wade-Giles, so you'll find the chart useful in the future.

Benjamin Schwartz (1912-1999) was neither a specialist in early China nor in philosophy.  He taught in the Harvard department of Government, and his research focus was the rise of Mao and the Communist Party.  But he frequently taught surveys of Chinese thought, and The World of Thought, published when he was in his mid-seventies, represents reflections he'd been making as a political historian for many decades.  Although he was very devoted to work that stressed the "problematique" of modernity (that is, he remained attached to large scale questions), his work does not show sympathy to contemporary theory.

Here's some background that will help you understand the point of Schwartz's somewhat oracular Introduction.

In his Introduction, Schwartz shows that he wants to address big issues, but does not want to commit to any theoretical orientation.  His starting point is Karl Jaspers (1883-1969), a figure in religious studies, whose first formulated the idea of the "Axial Age," noting that figures like Socrates, Buddha, and Confucius all lived at approximately the same time in the mid-first millennium BC.  Schwartz wants to justify his book, in part, as a contribution towards Jaspers' inherently comparativist project.

Like Jaspers, Schwartz is concerned with the ideas of the elite, and he is conscious that in the 20th century, social science has tended to view such thought (as Marx did) as a relatively superficial aspect of life - big thoughts are not generally viewed as the causes of human action.  Schwartz takes swipes at Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976), a one-time "behaviorist" writer who seemed to argue that ideas were not causes of action, and Clifford Geertz (1923 - ), who seems to make "culture" the determinant of meaning and action.  Schwartz wants big ideas formulated by "philosophers" to be important.  He writes in opposition to sociologically minded scholars like Max Weber (1864-1920), Karl Mannheim (1893-1947), and Jurgen Habermas (1929 - ), the historian Michel Foucault (1926-1984), and the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1908 - ), who developed sophisticated theoretical approaches towards analyzing human society and history without headlining "great men."  (Although Schwartz's approach is not really inconsistent with some of these people, especially Weber and Mannheim.)  What he does not like in these people is their apparent belief that we can ever achieve a type of objectivity in viewing the history of thought that makes those we study (the thinkers of the past) "merely" subjective reflections of their social environments.  Schwartz wants Confucius, Laozi, and that crew to have been historically significant.

Schwartz wanted to oppose his book to those who would make tradition or the common response patterns of human beings more important in explaining history than great human thinkers.  But he also wants to counter the ideas of Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941), who held that specific languages determine a great deal about what can be "thought" within any linguistic culture, and in his Introduction, the stand-in for Whorf is Chad Hansen, who published his rather Whorfian Language and Logic in Early China as Schwartz was working on his book.