The Affective and Practical Dimensions of Zhu Xi's 'Ge Wu' — Epoche C2
The text at issue: a commentary Zhu Xi wrote because he judged the original lost In 1189 Zhu Xi (1130–1200) put a preface to his Daxue zhangju 大學章句, his chaptered-and-phrased edition of the Great Learning 大學, and in it did something no commentator is supposed to do: having decided that the chapter expounding ge wu zhi zhi 格物致知 — usually rendered "the investigation of things and the extension of knowledge" — had been lost in transmission, he wrote a replacement himself and marked it as his own supplement (補傳). Everything the later tradition means by Zhu Xi's doctrine of ge wu descends from that short paragraph, and from the record of his conversations about it. It is therefore an unusually tractable text to test a claim against, and the claim I want to test is the received one: that Zhu Xi's ge wu is a detached, quasi-empirical procedure for extracting rational principle ( li 理) from external objects, standing in sharp opposition to Wang Yangming's (1472–1529) doctrine of zhi xing he yi 知行合一, the unity of knowledge and action, in which cognition, feeling and will are inseparable. My contention is that the supplement and its surrounding materials will not support the received contrast, because Zhu Xi's procedure has affective and volitional conditions built into it from the first step. But I shall also argue — against the version of this thesis I have advanced elsewhere, and against the way it is usually put — that the disagreement between the two men does not thereby dissolve. It relocates, and where it relocates is more interesting than the caricature. Where the received antinomy comes from The antinomy is not an invention of textbooks; it has a genealogy, and the genealogy explains its shape. Zhu Xi's commentaries on the Four Books — Analects , Mencius , Great Learning , Doctrine of the Mean — became the prescribed standard for the civil examinations when the Yuan restored them in 1313, and remained so until the examination system was abolished in 1905: close to six centuries in which a particular reading of ge wu was the reading a candidate had to reproduce. Bol's account of the movement's social history (2008) makes the point that this institutional afterlife flattened a programme of personal cultivation into a syllabus. An examinable ge wu is necessarily the cognitive part of ge wu , because that is the part a grader can mark. Wang Yangming's own biography supplied the antinomy's decisive anecdote. In 1492, aged twenty, and taking Zhu Xi's instruction with complete literalness, Wang set himself to investigate the principle of the bamboo growing in front of his father's residence. He and a friend sat before it for seven days, exhausted themselves and fell ill, and Wang concluded that the principle of things is not to be sought in things. He tells the story himself in the Chuanxilu 傳習錄, the record of his instruction translated by Chan (1963b), and it is the single most influential piece of evidence for the reading of Zhu Xi as an object-directed empiricist. It is worth noticing at once what the anecdote actually establishes. It establishes what the young Wang took Zhu Xi to mean, nearly three centuries after Zhu Xi's death; it does not establish what Zhu Xi meant. Wang's later polemics are directed at a doctrine he had first met as an examination orthodoxy. What the supplement says the investigation is for Zhu Xi's supplement describes a procedure in three moves, and the third is not cognitive in the ordinary sense. First, the learner encounters the things of the world and proceeds from the principle he already knows in them, pressing further. "Things" ( wu 物) Zhu Xi glosses as shi 事, affairs; the conversations recorded in the Zhuzi yulei , selections from which Gardner has translated (1990), make it plain that the range intended is reading books, weighing the conduct of historical figures, and responding to the human situations one is actually in — not the observation of bamboo. Second, the learner must "exert himself for a long time" (用力之久). Third, and abruptly, "one day there will be a breakthrough to integral comprehension" (豁然貫通), after which "the whole substance and the great functioning" (全體大用) of the mind will be fully illuminated. Two features of that description are fatal to the empiricist reading, and both are grounded in the text rather than in interpretation. The stated terminus is not a body of propositions about objects; it is a condition of the mind, described in the vocabulary of substance and function — that is, of what the mind is and of how it operates in response. A procedure whose success criterion is the transformation of the responding subject is not a survey. And the requirement of protracted exertion before an unpredictable breakthrough is not the epistemic profile of data collection, in which each observation adds its increment; it is the profile of a practice, in which nothing appears to be happening until something does. Gardner's monograph on Zhu Xi and the Great Learning (1986) traces how deliberately Zhu Xi constructed the text to carry this weight. Why must the procedure be piecemeal at all, if what is wanted is a change in the mind? Because of a doctrine Zhu Xi inherited from Cheng Yi (1033–1107) and made structural: li yi fen shu 理一分殊, "principle is one, its particularisations are many". There is one principle, but it is not available in the abstract; it is available only as the principle of this affair, this relation, this text. One cannot investigate principle as such, any more than one can encounter humanity apart from human beings. That is why the programme demands the long accumulation of particular engagements — and also why the accumulation can, in principle, tip over into comprehension of the whole. The two halves of the supplement, so often read as an awkward join between plodding empiricism and mysticism, are consequences of a single thesis about how a unitary principle is distributed. The affective precondition: reverential attention The su