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Philosophy in Greece and China

The philosophies of Greece and China reflected their distinctive social practices. The Greeks were concerned with understanding the fundamental nature of the world, though in ways that were different in different eras. The philosophers of Ionia (including western Turkey, Sicily, and southern Italy) of the sixth century B.C. were thoroughly empirical in orientation, building their theories on a base of sense observation. But the fifth century saw a move toward abstraction and distrust of the senses. Plato thought that ideas — the forms — had a genuine reality and that the world could be understood through logical approaches to their meaning, without reference to the world of the senses. If the senses seemed to contradict conclusions reached from first principles and logic, it was the senses that had to be ignored.

Though Aristotle did not grant reality to the forms, he thought of attributes as having a reality distinct from their concrete embodiments in objects. For him it was meaningful to speak not just of a solid object, but of attributes in the abstract — solidity, whiteness, etc. — and to have theories about these abstractions. The central, basic, sine qua non properties of an object constituted its "essence," which was unchanging by definition, since if the essence of an object changed it was no longer the object but something else. The properties of an object that could change without changing the object's essence were "accidental" properties. For example, the author is sadly lacking in musical talent, but if he suddenly were to have musical talent, you would still think he was the same person. Musical talent, then, is an accidental property, and change in it does not constitute change in the person's essence. Greek philosophy thus differed greatly from Chinese in that it was deeply concerned with the question of which properties made an object what it was, and which were alterable without changing the nature of the object.

The Greek language itself encouraged a focus on attributes and on turning attributes into abstractions. As in other Indo-European languages, every adjective can be granted noun status by adding the English equivalent of "ness" as a suffix: "white" becomes "whiteness"; "kind" becomes "kindness." A routine habit of Greek philosophers was to analyze the attributes of an object — person, place, thing, or animal — and categorize the object on the basis of its abstracted attributes. They would then attempt to understand the object's nature, and the cause of its actions, on the basis of rules governing the categories. So the attributes of a comet would be noted and the object would then be categorized at various levels of abstraction — this comet, a comet, a heavenly body, a moving object. Rules at various levels of abstraction would be generated as hypotheses and the behavior of the comet explained in terms of rules that seemed to work at a given level of abstraction.

But still more basic to Greek philosophy is its background scheme, which regarded the object in isolation as the proper focus of attention and analysis. Most Greeks regarded matter as particulate and separate — formed into discrete objects — just as humans were seen as separate from one another and construed as distinct wholes. Once the object is taken as the starting point, then many things follow automatically: The attributes of the object are salient; the attributes become the basis of categorization of the object; the categories become the basis of rule construction; and events are then understood as the result of objects behaving in accordance with rules. By "objects" I mean both nonhuman and human objects, but in fact the nature of the physical world was of great concern to Greek philosophers. Human relations and ethical conduct were important to the Greeks but did not have the consuming interest that they did for the Chinese.

A peculiar but important aspect of Greek philosophy is the notion that the world is fundamentally static and unchanging. To be sure, the sixth-century philosopher Heraclitus and other early philosophers were concerned with change. ("A man never steps in the same river twice because the man is different and the river is different.") But by the fifth century, change was out and stability was in. Parmenides "proved," in a few easy steps, that change was impossible: To say of a thing that it does not exist is a contradiction. Nonbeing is self-contradictory and so nonbeing can't exist. If nonbeing can't exist, then nothing can change because, if thing 1 were to change to thing 2, then thing 1 would not be! Parmenides created an option for Greek philosophers: They could trust either logic or their senses. From Plato on, they often went with logic.

Zeno, the pupil of Parmenides, established in a similar way that motion was impossible. He did this in two demonstrations. One is his famous demonstration with the arrow. In order for an arrow to reach a target, it first has to go halfway toward the target, then halfway between that and the target, and then halfway between that and the target, etc. But of course half of a half of a half... still leaves the arrow short of the target. Ergo, visual evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, movement can't occur. The other "proof" was even simpler. Either a thing is in its place or it is not. If it is in its place, then it cannot move. It is impossible for a thing not to be in its place; therefore nothing moves. As communications theorist Robert Logan has written, the Greeks "became slaves to the linear, either-or orientation of their logic."

Not all Greek philosophers were logic-choppers out to prove change impossible, but there is a static quality even to the reasoning of Aristotle. He believed, for example, that all celestial bodies were immutable, perfect spheres and though motion occurs and events happen, the essences of things do not change. Moreover, Aristotle's physics is highly linear. Changes in rate of motion, let alone cyclical motion, play little role in Aristotle's physics. (It is partly for this reason that Aristotle's physics was so remarkably misguided. Gordon Kane, a physicist friend of mine, has identified a large number of physical propositions in Aristotle's writings. He maintains that the great majority of them are wrong. This is especially puzzling because Aristotle's Ionian predecessors got many of them right.)

The Chinese orientation toward life was shaped by the blending of three different philosophies: Taoism, Confucianism, and, much later, Buddhism. Each philosophy emphasized harmony and largely discouraged abstract speculation.

There is an ancient Chinese story, still known to most East Asians today, about an old farmer whose only horse ran away. Knowing that the horse was the mainstay of his livelihood, his neighbors came to commiserate with him. "Who knows what's bad or good?" said the old man, refusing their sympathy. And indeed, a few days later his horse returned, bringing with it a wild horse. The old man's friends came to congratulate him. Rejecting their congratulations, the old man said, "Who knows what's bad or good?" And, as it happened, a few days later when the old man's son was attempting to ride the wild horse, he was thrown from it and his leg was broken. The friends came to express their sadness about the son's misfortune. "Who knows what's bad or good?" said the old man. A few weeks passed, and the army came to the village to conscript all the able-bodied men to fight a war against the neighboring province, but the old man's son was not fit to serve and was spared.

The story, which goes on as long as the patience of the audience permits, expresses a fundamental of the Eastern stance toward life. The world is constantly changing and is full of contradictions. To understand and appreciate one state of affairs requires the existence of its opposite; what seems to be true now may be the opposite of what it seems to be (cf. Communist-era Premier Chou En-lai's response when asked whether he thought the consequences of the French Revolution had been beneficial: "It's too early to tell").

Yin (the feminine and dark and passive) alternates with yang (the masculine and light and active). Indeed yin and yang only exist because of each other, and when the world is in a yin state, this is a sure sign that it is about to be in a yang state. The sign of the Tao, which means "the Way" to exist with nature and with one's fellow humans, consists of two forces in the form of a white and a black swirl. But the black swirl contains a white dot and the white swirl contains a black dot. And "the truest yang is the yang that is in the yin." The principle of yin-yang is the expression of the relationship that exists between opposing but interpenetrating forces that may complete one another, make each comprehensible, or create the conditions for altering one into the other.

From the I Ching: "... For misery, happiness is leaning against it; for happiness, misery is hiding in it. Who knows whether it is misery or happiness? There is no certainty. The righteous suddenly becomes the vicious, the good suddenly becomes the bad" (I Ching, xxx).

From the Tao Te Ching: "The heavy is the root of the light... The unmoved is the source of all movement" (Chapter 26).

Returning — moving in endless cycles — is the basic pattern of movement of the Tao.

To shrink something
You need to expand it first
To weaken something
You need to strengthen it first
To abolish something
You need to flourish it first
To take something
You need to give it first (Tao Te Ching, Chapter 36)

Aside from Taoism's teachings about opposition, contradiction, change, and cycles, it stood for a deep appreciation of nature, the rural life, and simplicity. It was the religion of wonder, magic, and fancy, and it gave meaning to the universe through its account of the links between nature and human affairs.

Taoism is the source of much of the philosophy behind the healing arts of China. Physiology was explained on a symbolic level by the yin-yang principle and by the Five Elements (earth, fire, water, metal, and wood), which also provided the explanations behind magic, incantations, and aphrodisiacs. The ubiquitous word was ch'i, meaning variously "breath," "air," or "spirit."

Confucius, who lived from 551 to 479 B.C., was less a religious leader than an ethical philosopher. His concern was with the proper relations among people, which in his system were hierarchical and strictly spelled out. Each member of each of the important relationship pairs (husband-wife, etc.) had clear obligations toward the other.

Confucianism has been called the religion of common sense. Its adherents are urged to uphold the Doctrine of the Golden Mean — to be excessive in nothing and to assume that between two propositions, and between two contending individuals, there is truth on both sides. But in reality, Confucianism, like Taoism, is less concerned with finding the truth than with finding the Tao — the Way — to live in the world.

Confucianism stresses economic well-being and education. The individual works not for self-benefits but for the entire family. Indeed, the concept of self-advancement, as opposed to family advancement, is foreign to cultures that are steeped in the Confucian orientation. A promising young man was expected to study for the government examinations with the hope of becoming a magistrate. If he did, his whole family benefited economically from his position. Unlike most of the world until very modern times, there was substantial social and economic mobility in China. Everyone who lived long enough would see families rise far higher than their origins and others sink far lower. Perhaps partly for this reason, Confucians have always believed, far more than the intellectual descendants of Aristotle, in the malleability of human nature.

Confucianism blended smoothly with Taoism. In particular, the deep appreciation of the contradictions and changes in human life, and the need to see things whole, that are integral to the notion of a yin-yang universe are also part of Confucian philosophy. But the dominant themes of nature and the rural life are much more associated with Taoism than with Confucianism, and the importance of the family and educational and economic advancement are more integral to Confucianism. These thematic differences are reflected in paintings on porcelains and scrolls. Characteristic Tao-inspired themes would include a picture of a fisherman, a woodcutter, or a lone individual sitting under trees. Confucian-inspired themes would center on the family, with pictures of many people of different ages engaging in shared activities. Different individuals in ancient China, and for that matter in contemporary China, would likely emphasize one of the orientations more than the other. This might depend in part on station in life. There is an adage holding that every Chinese is a Confucianist when he is successful and a Taoist when he is a failure.

Buddhism came to China from India hundreds of years after the classical period we are discussing. The Chinese readily absorbed congenial aspects of Buddhism, including what had been missing in Chinese philosophy, notably an epistemology, or theory of knowledge. All three orientations shared concerns about harmony, holism, and the mutual influence of everything on almost everything else. These orientations help explain why Chinese philosophy not only lacked a conception of individual rights but, it sometimes seems (at least after Buddhism began to exert an influence), an acknowledgment of individual minds. A twelfth-century neo-Confucian wrote, "The universe is my mind and my mind is the universe. Sages appeared tens of thousands of generations ago. They shared this mind; they shared this principle. Sages will appear tens of thousands of generations to come. They will share this mind; they will share this principle."

The holism common to the three orientations suggested that every event is related to every other event. A key idea is the notion of resonance. If you pluck a string on an instrument, you produce a resonance in another string. Man, heaven, and earth create resonances in each other. If the emperor does something wrong, it throws the universe out of kilter.

The concern with abstraction characteristic of ancient Greek philosophy has no counterpart in Chinese philosophy. Chinese philosophers quite explicitly favored the most concrete sense impressions in understanding the world. In fact, the Chinese language itself is remarkably concrete. There is no word for "size," for example. If you want to fit someone for shoes, you ask them for the "big-small" of their feet. There is no suffix equivalent to "ness" in Chinese. So there is no "whiteness" — only the white of the swan and the white of the snow. The Chinese are disinclined to use precisely defined terms or categories in any arena, but instead use expressive, metaphoric language.

In Chinese literary criticism there are different methods of writing called "the method of watching a fire across the river" (detachment of style), "the method of dragonflies skimming across the water surface" (lightness of touch), "the method of painting a dragon and dotting its eyes" (bringing out the salient points).

For the Chinese, the background scheme for the nature of the world was that it was a mass of substances rather than a collection of discrete objects. Looking at a piece of wood, the Chinese philosopher saw a seamless whole composed of a single substance, or perhaps of interpenetrating substances of several kinds. The Greek philosopher would have seen an object composed of particles. Whether the world was composed of atoms or of continuous substances was debated in Greece, but the issue never arose in China. It was continuous substances, period. Philosopher of science Joseph Needham has observed: "Their universe was a continuous medium or matrix within which interactions of things took place, not by the clash of atoms, but by radiating influences."

So the philosophies of China and Greece were as different as their respective social life and self-conceptions. And the philosophical differences are reflective of the social ones, in several respects.

Greeks were independent and engaged in verbal contention and debate in an effort to discover what people took to be the truth. They thought of themselves as individuals with distinctive properties, as units separate from others within the society, and in control of their own destinies. Similarly, Greek philosophy started from the individual object — the person, the atom, the house — as the unit of analysis and it dealt with properties of the object. The world was in principle simple and knowable: All one had to do was to understand what an object's distinctive attributes were so as to identify its relevant categories and then apply the pertinent rule to the categories.

Chinese social life was interdependent and it was not liberty but harmony that was the watchword — the harmony of humans and nature for the Taoists and the harmony of humans with other humans for the Confucians. Similarly, the Way, and not the discovery of truth, was the goal of philosophy. Thought that gave no guidance to action was fruitless. The world was complicated, events were interrelated, and objects (and people) were connected "not as pieces of pie, but as ropes in a net." The Chinese philosopher would see a family with interrelated members where the Greek saw a collection of persons with attributes that were independent of any connections with others. Complexity and interrelation meant for the Chinese that an attempt to understand the object without appreciation of its context was doomed. Under the best of circumstances, control of outcomes was difficult.

Science and mathematics, as we'll see next, were fully consistent with both social behavior and philosophical outlook.

Copyright © 2003 by Richard Nisbett

Tags: Psychology & Psychiatry

About the Author

Richard E. Nisbett, Ph.D., has taught psychology at Yale University and the University of Michigan, where he is the Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished University Professor. He has received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the William James Fellow Award of the American Psychological Society, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2002, he became the first social psychologist in a generation to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences. The coauthor of Culture of Honor and numerous other books and articles, he lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.