Introduction

Readers of ‘The China Syndrome’ might well feel inclined to complain of a glaring omission in its consideration of ‘guidance and constraint’. A moderate sceptic about the hypothesis could readily concede that the case-studies of the first chapter are effective against Sinological relativism, yet suggest that I have ignored the most massive presence in the history of philosophy: Aristotle. The contention is that his thought is permeated throughout by a variety of linguistic influences rarely recognised as such by Aristotle himself. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Categories. Although the Categories stands in the first rank of the Western philosophical tradition, its students ancient and modern are in doubt over its status. Is it (primarily) a work of dialectic; of semantics; or of ontology? The sceptic contends that this chronic perplexity is no accident. The Categories puzzles us because it, and much later philosophy in its wake, has indeed been guided and constrained by language. The moral of ‘The China Syndrome’ is that we should fight shy of formulating too specific a hypothesis concerning just how Greek (or Indo-European) leaves its mark on Aristotelian doctrines. We should nevertheless remain confident that a deep imprint is there, even without a detailed explanation of how it was made.

Introduction

My intention in this first chapter is to address a methodological presumption which, for better or worse, influences a great portion of the work done on Chinese philosophy, both in the West and in the East. I refer to the presumption that there is something distinctively Chinese about Chinese philosophy taken more or less in its entirety; that this feature (or these features) set(s) the path of its development; and that it (or they) must be invoked to account for whatever large and deep contrasts are perceived between it and that other strange monolith, Western philosophy.

The suggestion that we should pay attention to what is Chinese (in some very broad sense) in Chinese thought will sound rather bizarre to anyone not wedded to a radically abstract conception of argument – and will do so precisely because it is so resoundingly truistic.

In chapter 2 we watched Aristotle's Categories being transmitted to the Chinese as the focus of a monumental, centuries-old commentarial tradition. Even without the elaborate referencing system and syllogistic format of the original, much of the richness and power of this extraordinary exegetical machinery, with its forceful combination of authority and close reasoning, has come across in the Chinese version of the commentary – at times, it must be admitted, in the Chinese version of the Categories itself. For we have detected occasional blurrings between authorial text and explanatory armature which would be unacceptable today. It is tempting, of course, to ask whether that division was deliberately neglected; but perhaps this question would have been meaningless to the Jesuit, if he took his goal as conveying to a new readership ‘what Aristotle was really saying’. And that task could simply not have been accomplished (it was plainly assumed), whatever the audience, without the resources of a vast and sophisticated technical vocabulary and all its associated distinctions and definitions.

The reader's dominant impression must surely be one of enormous, and enormously ingenious, inventiveness: of language being put to new and difficult work with great skill and precision. (The list of Aristotelian Chinese jargon will reinforce that impression, if reinforcement is needed.) But the sheer scale of the achievement should not be allowed to dwarf or conceal signs of stress or mismatch, of forced or improper renderings, even, perhaps, of failures of translation, if they exist.

Francis Bacon was born in 1561, the fifth and last surviving son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper to Queen Elizabeth I, the second surviving child of his second wife. Left a widower in 1552, with six children under twelve to bring up, Nicholas had rapidly married Anne Cooke, one of five highly educated daughters of Edward VI's tutor, Sir Anthony Cooke, celebrated, like their father, for their learning and piety. All made extremely advantageous marriages: Margaret to a prominent goldsmith; Elizabeth to Sir Thomas Hoby and then to the son of the earl of Bedford; Katherine to Sir Henry Killigrew. Most significantly, Mildred became the second wife of William Cecil, later Queen Elizabeth's Principal Secretary of State. Thus Francis was kin to some of the most powerful and influential figures of his time.

This was just as well, since he had to contend, throughout his life, with the fact that his father left him inadequately provided for financially. Sir Nicholas was in the process of making suitable long-term purchases of land for Francis and his elder brother Anthony when he died unexpectedly in 1579. Had that settlement been complete, Bacon later claimed, he would have been able to devote his entire life to study, and his grand plan for an entirely new system of learning might have reached completion in his lifetime.

Preface

Those who have presumed to make pronouncements about nature as if it were a closed subject, whether they were speaking from simple confidence or from motives of ambition and academical habits, have done very great damage to philosophy and the sciences. They have been successful in getting themselves believed and effective in terminating and extinguishing investigation. They have not done so much good by their own abilities as they have done harm by spoiling and wasting the abilities of others. Those who have gone the opposite way and claimed that nothing at all can be known, whether they have reached this opinion from dislike of the ancient sophists or through a habit of vacillation or from a kind of surfeit of learning, have certainly brought good arguments to support their position. Yet they have not drawn their view from true starting points, but have been carried away by a kind of enthusiasm and artificial passion, and have gone beyond all measure. The earlier Greeks however (whose writings have perished) took a more judicious stance between the ostentation of dogmatic pronouncements and the despair of lack of conviction (acatalepsia); and though they frequently complained and indignantly deplored the difficulty of investigation and the obscurity of things, like horses champing at the bit they kept on pursuing their design and engaging with nature; thinking it appropriate (it seems) not to argue the point (whether anything can be known), but to try it by experience.

He became aware that the human intellect is the source of its own problems, and makes no sensible and appropriate use of the very real aids which are within man's power; the consequence is a deeply layered ignorance of nature, and as a result of this ignorance, innumerable deprivations. He therefore judged that he must make every effort to find a way by which the relation between the mind and nature could be wholly restored or at least considerably improved. But there was simply no hope that errors which have grown powerful with age and which are likely to remain powerful for ever would (if the mind were left to itself) correct themselves of their own accord one by one, either from the native force of the understanding or with the help and assistance of logic. The reason is that the first notions of things which the mind accepts, keeps and accumulates (and which are the source of everything else), are faulty and confused and abstracted from things without care; and in its secondary and other notions there is no less passion and inconsistency. The consequence is that the general human reason which we bring to bear on the inquiry into nature is not well founded and properly constructed; it is like a magnificent palace without a foundation.