Here are a few excerpts from a short book review (about 2000 words) I just wrote for China Review International, of Wiebke Denecke‘s The Dynamics of Masters Literature: Early Chinese Thought from Confucius to Han Feizi. My review mostly touches on method, not so much on substance, of her analysis. However, if you thought you might be interested in reading the book, here is some indication of its contents.

******************************************

Wiebke Denecke. The Dynamics of Masters Literature: Early Chinese Thought from Confucius to Han Feizi. Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. xii, 370 pp. Hardcover $39.95, ISBN 978-0-674-05609-1.

Some academic philosophers and historians claim to study or “do” Chinese philosophy. Denecke takes aim in this book at understanding “first what modern proponents of a ‘Chinese philosophy’ have gained from creating a Chinese equivalent of philosophy for their time and concerns, and second what we may gain from framing our inquiry into this text corpus through the lens of other disciplines, questions, and concerns for our time” (3). So, the project is constructive and invites readers to seek gains from the inquiry. Ultimately, Denecke conceives of her project as friendly to the task of including Chinese thought in contemporary philosophical conversation, so long as the project of understanding those texts is itself seen as an important part of the learning process: “’Chinese philosophy’ should not be a toolbox of concepts and values that could give Western philosophy a fix. Instead, it is the translation process … both on the level of words and on the level of disciplines, that has the greatest potential to become productive in the future” (344-5).

Denecke’s position is nuanced, occupying space between a large group of comparativist philosophers who descend with perhaps too much utilitarian zeal on Chinese texts, picking and choosing concepts to add to their “toolbox,” and those postcolonial theorists who are horrified or bemused by what they regard as intellectual coarseness. A bit of context: there have been recent, notable criticisms from American, Chinese, and European scholars who question whether there is even such a thing to be referred to as “Chinese philosophy.”

. . .

Denecke focuses on the more germane categorization scheme for understanding the Warring States texts that have been dubbed “philosophical” since the Jesuits to the present, the indigenous genres into which Warring States texts were placed early on, in the Han dynasty. Denecke recounts:

The first label for texts by Early Chinese thinkers was simply zhuzi baijia 諸子百家 (“The Various Masters and Hundred Lineages/Schools”). This label was consolidated by Han dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE) bibliographers who divided them into various schools such as Confucians (Rujia 儒家), Mohists (Mojia 墨家), Daoists (Daojia 道家), Yinyang specialists (Yinyangjia 陰陽家), Legalists (Fajia法家), and Logicians (or, “Names-School,” Mingjia 名家). The name “Masters Texts” became one of the four headings of traditional Chinese bibliography: “Classics” (jing 經), “Masters” (zi 子), “Histories” (shi 史), and “Literary Collections” (ji 集). (23)

As indicated by the title of the book, Denecke focuses on texts that these Han dynasty bibliographers tagged as “Masters” texts. Since Denecke engages contemporary study of Chinese philosophy, she coins the phrase “Masters Literature” to refer to the corpus of “zi” (子) texts that have come, by and large, to be regarded recently as “Early Chinese Philosophy” – Lunyu, Mozi, Mengzi, Xunzi, Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Han Feizi. Such texts are set apart according to Denecke by their self-conscious constructions of “scenes of instruction,” “scenes of persuasion,” and “styles of reasoning,” all of which contribute valuable hermeneutic scaffolds.

Denecke’s rationale for focusing on Masters Literature is to reconsider “Chinese philosophy” since the 16^th century Jesuit mission, to “scrape away as much as possible of the disciplinary and conceptual baggage that has accrued on the surface of the Masters Texts” (29). Her blade for the task is a self-conscious adaptation of a much earlier anachronism than the one of the Jesuits, the anachronistic – by Denecke’s argument – construction of the Warring States texts by Wang Chong, the Eastern Han “polymath” (78). Wang produces an authorship categorization to distinguish the valuable literature that had largely been written prior to his own day from the debris that, in his opinion, littered the landscape of the Eastern Han. First, there were sages who wrote the classics and worthies who composed commentaries. Then, Wang distinguishes between “mundane scholars” (shi ru 世儒) who merely interpret rather than produce and “literary scholars” (wen ru 文儒) who write with substance and from a sense of vocation ( (81-3). Most notable in the latter group for Wang are the Duke of Zhou and Confucius. But Wang’s anachronism relies on at least two prior turns. As Denecke details, there were first, the introduction and discussion of the idea of “masters” as a category by Xunzi (in his chapter “Against the Twelve Masters” – fei shi er zi 非十二子) and later, the biographical treatment of the “master” as author by Sima Qian. So, taking all of these schemes into account, Denecke’s own avowed anachronism treats the personae of the “Masters” as resembling Wang Chong’s “literary scholars” but, following Qian somewhat, as represented by the Warring States texts that “…construct a common discursive space of contention through an intertextual chemistry that does not necessarily attack opponents directly, but inhabits, appropriates, and redefines their technical vocabulary” (89).

. . .