Hermeneutical Excesses

Given the massive evidence, both internal and external, against strong mind-body holism, this chapter explores the reasons that the position has remained so popular and widespread. Common interpretative mistakes include monolithic views of cultures, mistaking theory for everyday cognition, and allowing normative or religious commitments to trump evidence. Part of the work of disentangling “partial truths” from the excesses of Sinologism or neo-Orientalism involves documenting the various ways in which acts of interpretation can, under the influence of prejudices or ideologies, go astray. These ways are often intertwined, and the individual types distinguished in the chapter below are not hard and fast categories. This chapter concludes by acknowledging that early Chinese views of the self and self and society are importantly different from modern Western views and can teach scholars much, but only if these views are not overly exoticized.

Embracing the Digital Humanities

This chapter argues that, now that we have the texts of our traditions in fully searchable, digitized form, we can begin to read them in new ways. Basic quantitative textual analysis methods are introduced, as well as more sophisticated methods such as word collocation, hierarchical cluster analysis, and topic modeling. The use of online databases to share scholarly knowledge is also explored. Although digital humanities techniques have thus far been of only marginal use, their potential is huge, and they can provide entirely new and important perspectives on our corpora. Quantitative textual analysis of the early Chinese corpus confirms and deepens the conclusion from qualitative analysis that the early Chinese were mind-body dualists.

Soul and Body

This chapter presents traditional archaeological and textual evidence against the strong soul-body holist position—that is, the claim that the early Chinese lacked any sense of a qualitative distinction between an immaterial soul and a physical body. This evidence includes afterlife beliefs as gleaned from mortuary practices and textual evidence drawn from both the received corpus and archaeologically recovered texts. The early Chinese appear to have distinguished between a relatively corporeal, physical body and a relatively incorporeal soul (or set of souls). The former was part of a material, visible world and was viewed ultimately as peripheral to the essence of one’s personal identity. The latter was the focus of ancestor cults, sacrifices, and oracles, and partook of an invisible, numinous world, qualitatively distinct from our own. The “specialness” of the next world and the beings that inhabited it lent to them, and to items and practices associated with them, a degree of numinosity that is not at all alien to conceptions of the holy or sacred in Judeo-Christian traditions. The chapter concludes with the argument that soul-body dualism is ultimately parasitic on basic mind-body dualism, which sees mental states or consciousness as somehow qualitatively distinct from the material world of things.

Introduction

The Introduction makes the case that the study of China is still dominated by “neo-Orientialism,” a combination of classic Orientalism with postmodern cultural relativism and a normatively positive view of the exotic East. It would be better to adopt an “embodied” stance that takes as its starting point basic commonalities among human beings and explores cultural difference against this shared background. The idea of a “holistic” early China, seen through the specific lens of mind-body holism, can serve as a good case example of how an embodied, science-humanities integrated approach is more helpful.

Mind-Body Dualism in the Textual Record

The xin is most commonly characterized in pre-Qin texts as a locus of thought and decision making, sometimes linked to cognition or moral emotions like worry or compassion, but primarily concerned with what we could very well call “reason.” Especially once we enter the Warring States, it is represented as at most only vaguely located in the body, with an extremely tenuous relationship to both the body itself and other bodily parts. It is reasonable to describe the xin as metaphysical, somehow free of the limitations of the physical world. Focusing on the term xin (heart, heart-mind, mind), this chapter uses qualitative textual analysis to make the case that early Chinese texts were written by people who embraced, at least implicitly, a “weak” form of mind-body dualism. This includes the idea that the mind is at least somewhat immaterial, qualitatively different from the other organs, and the seat of reason, free will, and the individual self.

Conclusion

It is time for naturalistic hermeneutics to replace the hermeneutics of the free-floating Geist, explained by nothing, explaining nothing, completely sui generis and shrouded in holy mystery. Once the shift from radical cultural-linguistic constructivism to embodied commonality is made, the landscape of comparative thought begins to appear in a very different light. Not only does comparison as a very project actually begin to make sense, but perhaps the ambitions of some of the early pioneers of comparative religion also begin to seem a bit less sinister or ridiculous. The conclusion sums up the case for a “naturalistic hermeneutics,” an interpretative strategy that begins from an assumption of embodied commonality between humans, and one that also takes advantage of both content knowledge and methodological techniques drawn from the natural sciences. The larger implications for the humanities and the future of the academy are explored.

Hermeneutical Constraints

The topic of this chapter is a body of work from various branches of the cognitive sciences suggesting that the tendency to distinguish qualitatively between bodies and minds—between physical objects subject to mechanical causality and agents capable of free will, planning, and intentionality—is a human cognitive universal. It develops reliably and early in human beings, a genetic inheritance shaped by the powerful adaptive pressures of social living. In addition, there is good evidence that this distinction between objects and agents reliability kicks off mind-body dualism, afterlife and soul beliefs, a perception of “meaning” in the world, and concepts of supernatural agency that share broad features across cultures and throughout history. These universals create suspicion of any claim that the early Chinese were strong mind-body holists. Relevant cognitive universals include Theory of Mind, concepts of psychological interiority, and basic supernatural, afterlife and soul beliefs.

The Myth of Holism in Early China

This chapter documents the various forms of holist claims made about early China, showing how they are grounded in the sort of extreme cultural and linguistic relativism that is characteristic of postmodernity. It then focuses on mind-body concepts because this binary in particular tends to be the locus of holistic claims about early China and therefore serves as a helpful lens for viewing holism in general. The chapter characterizes what I refer to as the radical, or “strong,” mind-body holist position, which holds that any sort of distinction between mind and body is entirely foreign to early Chinese thought. The chapter concludes with a brief review of both textual and extra-textual evidence against the various flavors of holist claims about early China.