N. Sivin
G. E. R. Lloyd

The Greek word phusis is the ancestor of the English "nature," based on natura, the Latin equivalent of phusis.

Our aim is to explore how Chinese investigators of the period from the late Warring States to the end of the Han (roughly 350 to +200, i.e., 350 B.C.E. to 200 C.E.) defined the problems they were interested in, and how they conducted their inquiries.

It is easy enough to find early Chinese discussions, in varied contexts, of the defining characteristics of humans, other animals and plants, or heaven and earth, of the patterns of things, of their spontaneous changes, and of other topics. What their technical terms refer to sometimes overlaps certain denotations of "nature" and its cognates in English. That does not, of course, justify discussing such terms as though they mean "nature" or, even worse, translating them that way.

There is nothing wrong with applying the English phrase "natural philosophy" to label thought about those aspects of experience that thoughtful people do not locate within their psyches or in society. It reminds us that, despite the hoary stereotype, some mandarins thought about more than virtue and promotion. It encourages us to notice what broad questions all those astronomers, physicians, alchemists, and so on were asking. But if we wish to know whether Chinese needed a word for nature, or a concept with the same boundaries, before modern times, the answer is no.

In early Chinese philosophic and scientific language, there are ways, sometimes simple ones, to say something more or less equivalent to each of the twenty or thirty senses of "Nature" and the forty or fifty senses of "natural" found in a standard English dictionary. Some historians write "Nature" when their ancient sources are actually discussing heaven or sky (t'ien, tian), heaven and earth or cosmos (t'ien-ti, tiandi), inherent pattern or principle (li), things (wu), the Way (tao, dao), human disposition (hsing, xing), or spontaneity (tzu jan, ziran). But these six taken together do not make up a counterpart of physis.

In modern Chinese, tzu-jan, a word made by combining two characters, means "Nature." We capitalize to make it clear we are referring to the mother of us all, not to the natures of individual things, which tzu-jan does not mean. Chinese borrowed this word in 1884 from Japanese, who were using it to translate Occidental textbooks.

Since there was no single concept in early China that corresponded to Nature, the fruitful question is what Chinese did invent.

Phusis as Problematic. Before we embark on our chief agenda, we should first remark just how complex and problematic early Western thought in this area is. Latin natura, from which modern European languages have derived their terms for nature, renders the Greek term phusis. Yet there was nothing natural, in the sense of obvious, straightforward and uncontroversial, in the introduction of that term to refer to the domain of nature in Greek thought.

There are four fundamental points, to which this first section of this paper will be devoted. First, the term applied to nature as a whole is not attested in the archaic period (8th-7th centuries BCE). Second, as used by the so-called natural philosophers (phusiologoi) and some medical writers it was a polemical term, designed to mark out a new style of inquiry from traditional beliefs and assumptions. Third, in the moral and political domain it was the subject of further controversy, between the proponents of different views of what nature comprised and how it was to be contrasted with its antonym, nomos, the term used for law, custom and convention. Fourth, a general agreement, among users of the term, that it should pick out the reality underlying the appearances, was not matched by any consensus as to what that basic reality was. We may now elaborate each of these four points briefly before turning to the relevant Chinese materials.

Phusis vs. traditional conceptions. In the earliest attested usage of the term phusis, the single occurrence in Homer in which it appears, it refers either to the character of a particular plant, or (more probably) to the way it grows. On either interpretation it is not a general notion of nature. The text in question is Odyssey 10 302ff, where Hermes shows Odysseus a certain plant named môly, which he is to use to counteract the magical charms of Circe (who would otherwise transform him, as she transformed his companions, into an animal). This is no ordinary plant. Hermes is not doing natural science. While there are plenty of acute observations, of the weather or the behaviour of animals, for instance, in Homer and in Hesiod, neither has a concept of nature as such. This is not to say that they or their audiences were unaware of the regularities of what we should call natural phenomena. It did not take Aristotle to point out that a human begets a human. But there is an important difference between making certain implicit assumptions and having an explicit concept.

Homer and Hesiod, like many Greek and Latin writers after them, attribute many different types of phenomena and events to the work of divine or demonic forces. Zeus sends rain and wields his thunderbolt. Poseidon is the earthshaker, and so on. When what came to be called the "inquiry concerning nature" (peri phuseos historia) began, in the 6th century, the idea of such personal interventions was ruled out. Already the poet-philosopher Xenophanes explains the rainbow (Iris) as a cloud (Fr 32) when it had commonly been assumed that it was ominous and that Iris was a messenger of the gods.

Both those conventionally labelled "philosophers" and certain medical writers were instrumental in promulgating this inquiry. It is the latter especially who provide our richest evidence concerning the polemics involved. Both Apollo and Artemis had often been (and indeed they continued to be) cast in the role of both senders of disease and healers. But a Hippocratic treatise that dates from some time at the end of the 5th century BCE is entirely devoted to the theme that what had been called the Sacred Disease is due to natural causes. On the Sacred Disease attacks those whom the writer calls "purifiers" for their belief that gods cause the disease and for their claims not only that they can identify which deity causes which variety of the complaint, but also that they can produce cures by means of charms and incantations. Advancing his own alternative view, he insists that this disease is natural; it has a phusis. His own explanation is that it comes about through the blocking of the veins in the brain, especially in phlegmatic patients, for phlegmatic patients suffer more than bilious ones, or so he claims. The idea is, of course, quite fanciful. Yet he has evidently substituted a natural, physical, cause, where his opponents had spoken of the gods as the responsible agents.

While the terminology of what is responsible or a cause, aitios, aition, aitia, appears both in his own account, and in the story of his opponents as he gives it, phusis, nature, is the key concept that distinguishes his own view. The purifiers do not, indeed they cannot, use it, for "nature" now delineates those regularities that are to be explained without invoking divine or demonic intervention. Talk of the divine, interestingly, is not now ruled out, but redefined. All diseases are equally divine as many of the philosophers held nature itself to be. But that move had the effect of denying that any kind of disease, or any instance of one, was specially divine.

The discussion in On the Sacred Disease is no mere intellectual debate. The writer does not just criticise his opponents: he abuses them, deploying, for that purpose, a rich vocabulary of denigratory terms, "charlatans" (alazones), "vagabonds" (agurtai) and the word that was originally associated with a tribe of Persians or with certain Persian priests, but that came to be the most general term for "magician," namely magoi. This debate was not just about the answers to abstract or theoretical questions, but about who could claim to know about diseases and to be able to cure them. In ancient Greece as in other ancient societies there were no legally recognised medical qualifications that could be appealed to in order to justify the right to practice. What was at stake was the issue of competing claims to such a right. On the one side were those who took their stand on a claimed ability to give naturalistic explanations and to bring about cures by naturalistic means. On the other were not just the "purifiers" attacked in On the Sacred Disease, but also those who practised in the shrines of various healing gods and heroes, chief among them Asclepius.

To judge from the evident popularity of temple medicine, including among members of the literate elite, right down to the +2nd century and beyond, their claim that god was on their side was believed to have as much credibility as any that the proponents of naturalistic medicine could advance. The latter may have all agreed that diseases are, indeed, natural phenomena, but they disagreed fundamentally both on the causal factors at work and on the treatments to use. Some favoured humoral theories, which took many different forms besides the well-known four-humour doctrine (blood, bile, black bile, phlegm) that Galen advocated as the "genuine teaching of Hippocrates." But others appealed to fundamental opposites (hot, cold, dry, wet, sweet, bitter and so on) or to other types of element theories or to such factors as "depletion" and "repletion." Besides, in the matter of effecting cures, we know from the remarkably honest records of practice set out in the Hippocratic Epidemics just how unsuccessful those doctors were in curing, or even alleviating, the more serious conditions they had to treat.

The philosophers, for their part, were not, of course, paid to heal. But they too competed for prestige. The debates were not just amicable exchanges about abstract issues, but the forum in which rival claims to superior knowledge were judged. In that context, too, as in medicine, "nature" staked out a domain over which the "natural philosophers" claimed competence in contradistinction to the skills or expertise associated with poets and wise men of traditional types. Yet as with the doctors, so too the philosophers agreed that what their inquiry was about was nature, but disagreed, in practice, over what naturalistic explanations to give for most of the phenomena they investigated. There were, to be sure, some exceptions to this. By the end of the fifth century BCE, there was, for instance, general recognition of the causes of both solar and lunar eclipses at least among the philosophers interested in the problem, even if among ordinary people such events still evoked amazement and consternation. But while eclipses came to be reasonably well understood in some quarters, the same was certainly not the case with earthquakes, lightning and many other phenomena that had been associated with the gods, where there were almost as many different theories, in the fifth and fourth centuries, as there were philosophers propounding them.

Nature vs. the supernatural. Phusis is the all-encompassing rubric that allowed the proponents of the new styles of inquiry to claim superiority over many traditional modes of knowledge. What is "against nature" (para phusin) could be accepted in the sense of the exceptions to the general rule (themselves explicable in terms of further factors), but not in the sense of the supernatural, for nothing stood outside nature as a whole. This was, of course, an assertion. The proponents of nature were not in a position to prove the negative, that the gods are not at work in this or that event, or in this or that type of phenomenon. Rather they stipulated that the supernatural was not only unnecessary, but to be excluded. Still, as noted, the naturalists seldom agreed among themselves on alternative explanations of many of the phenomena which had generally been attributed to the gods.

Phusis vs. nomos. The first Greek controversy opposed nature to the supernatural, a null class on the view of the proponents of nature itself. In the second, nature is contrasted with law, custom, convention (nomos). Nature here picks out what is universally true of humans, whatever society they belong to. But, as one Greek writer after another came to emphasise, human societies differ, not just in their customs, of dress, or diet, or marriage ceremonies, or the way they dispose of their dead, but also in their laws and views of right and wrong. But while a variety of authors used the phusis/nomos antithesis from the 5th century onwards, they disagreed about what each category included and the moral implications of the contrast.

Plato's involvement in the debate is evident from the number of times in different contexts he returns to the question. As for his own position on the issues, his theory of Forms sets up transcendent, objective, absolutes, for justice and the good especially. The cosmos as a whole is the result of the work of a benevolent divine intelligence, personified as the Craftsman or Demiurge in the Timaeus. The job of the human lawgiver is to imitate his activities and to secure the closest possible imitation of the Form of Justice.

In a comparativist perspective, this second controversy provides a vivid illustration of the extent to which, from the 5th century on, the Greeks were prepared to problematise the very foundations of morality and of political life. In practice there was very considerable diversity in the political arrangements tried out in different Greek states at different periods. That was not, to be sure, the direct result of the theoretical debates on the merits and demerits of democracy, oligarchy, monarchy, tyranny and so on, nor on the respective claims of nature and of convention to secure justice. Some theoretical disputes were just that, as we can see from the case of slavery, where no one drew the inference, from the view that slavery is not natural, that the institution should be abolished.

But some, such as Plato himself, saw the theoretical debates as potentially dangerous and disruptive. He attached most of the blame on the sophists who figure prominently in the dialogues in which he discusses the issues. They travelled from state to state giving lectures on whatever subjects anyone was prepared to pay to be taught, and they, in his view, were the real corrupters of youth not Socrates who was so accused. The trouble was that no amount of protesting, on Plato's part or anyone else's, resolved the moral and political debates on nature and convention, which continued, indeed, long after the Greek city-states lost their independence in the wake of the rise of Rome.

Controversies based on skepticism. Ongoing disagreements, fuelled by the competition among rival claimants to special knowledge, are the chief feature of the third and final controversy we should consider. "Nature," we said, corresponded to what is regular, that is, in principle, to the readily acceptable data or facts of the case, and one of the great strengths of the appeal to natures was that it did not invoke invisible, arbitrary, forces. But in practice it was not just the explanations of particular types of phenomena that were (as we have seen) disputed, but also the question of the fundamental constitution of physical objects. Those like Aristotle who thought of things as made up of earth, water, air and fire did at least stay close to what was in some sense observable even though we never encounter those simple bodies in a pure form. But others saw matter as constituted by indivisible atoms, differing only in size, position and arrangement.

Cosmological theories based on atomism or continuum theory proposed from the 5th century onwards were extremely diverse, yet another example of ongoing disputes that some Greeks protested were unresolvable. Nature, the very rubric used in the early days of Greek natural philosophy and medicine in order to undermine traditional beliefs, eventually came to be itself subjected to radical attack.

The Pyrrhonian sceptics, for whom our fullest source is Sextus Empiricus in the +2nd century, exploited the disputes among their dogmatist opponents (including for example both atomists and continuum theorists) to suggest that on every issue to do with underlying reality, there were equal, opposed, arguments on both sides. For every argument that might be proposed to suggest one view, there was an argument of equal strength to contradict it. The conclusion was not to assert that reality is unknowable (for that would be to fall into negative dogmatism), but rather to advocate suspension of judgement and living by the appearances.

If we may now take stock of this first section of our study, nature, in its Greek form phusis, was anything but a rubric that investigators could take for granted as adequately defining their subject-matter. The concept originated in polemic, in the attempts by those investigators to outdo the representatives of more traditional modes of wisdom, and it remained a disputed category in every area in which it was invoked, from cosmology and medicine, to ethics and political philosophy, down to the end of Greco-Roman antiquity.

But if it is well known that few of the theories and explanations produced in Greco-Roman antiquity were successful either in the sense that they form a durable part of what is accepted today, or even in the sense that the Greeks and Romans generally accepted them, were the Greeks not at least on the right lines in proposing that it was the natures of things that should be investigated? To that there is a response in two parts.

First, we should not underestimate the ongoing problems that the twin dichotomies of nature and society, and of the objective and the subjective, continue to generate in modern philosophy of science. Those dichotomies are sometimes identified as part of the Kantian, though in fact they are part of the Greek, legacy. Reference to recent numbers of such a periodical as Studies in History and Philosophy of Science confirms that much of the debate, not just between those who advocate the social studies of science and their opponents, but also between various types of realists and theirs, is concerned with attempts either to validate, or to redefine, subvert or bypass, those dichotomies.

But then secondly, the history of science in Greece as in other ancient societies shows that there was nothing inevitable about construing the central problem as the investigation of nature. The ancient Chinese did not in fact construe it that way.

What concepts did Chinese invent to describe what people experienced outside the self, society, and the realm of the gods? It is possible to answer this question by examining a number of inventions. The choice is bound to be arbitrary, but we will keep the arbitrariness within limits by choosing as few concepts as possible.

We will explore two crucial Chinese inventions. Tao and ch'i (qi) took on complementary meanings in Han writing, and remained central in cosmology and cosmogony. Neither became a purely physical concept. In fact the notion of a purely physical concept did not attract Chinese. But it is notable that in the Han period there was a consensus about their importance, and to a large extent about their meaning. Let us look all too briefly at how that consensus developed.

Philosophic and scientific collectivities used tao in propitiously complex ways. They acknowledged that there is one great Way, an organic tao that interweaves the individual ways of everything in the universe. For most but not all thinkers, as the Way of human society it also intermeshes the life trajectories of individuals.

An eloquent portrayal of the Way and its role in the good life and the good state became a trustworthy way to engage the attention of rulers. Spokesmen for any such view could compete for careers until 136. In that year the state narrowed its sponsorship of philosophic teaching to five ancient classics that many authors cited but the followers of Confucius particularly claimed. We can understand as an attempt to alter that decision Ssu-ma T'an's argument for his "lineage of the Way" as the most comprehensive guide to good government <XREF CH. 2 lb jia>.

In order to avoid confusion, it is necessary to be aware that Confucians and other philosophers were generic taoists, followers of ways. In fact contemporaries regularly applied the word tao to their teachings. In none of the jockeying for support (and vying to say what the emperor wanted to hear) did competitors draw attention to the fact that there were many discrepant Ways, personified in diverse masters. Nor did they suggest that it would be good for a plurality of Ways to coexist. All agreed that there was only one. The issue was whether you are right when you claim that your description of it is most adequate. The new state Confucianism of the last three centuries B.C.E. gradually redefined tao to center on the new unified, centralized empire and its foundations in the cosmic order. After the Han, promoters of Taoist and Buddhist religious movements further redefined this political role of the Way, borrowing back and forth with discreet abandon to compete for the support that Confucian teachings by then had largely lost.

We make no attempt to translate ch'i, which we have already seen used to refer to three pairs of climatic influences that can cause disease. Before the Han, the word was protean in its meanings: air, breath, smokes, mists, fogs, the shades of the dead, cloud forms, more or less everything that is perceptible but intangible; the physical vitalities, whether inborn or derived from food and breath; and every cosmic force that affects not only health but the seasons, flavors, colors, musical modes, and other phenomena.

Yin and yang were paired, complementary aspects of any configuration in space or process in time. The five phases were a set of fivefold aspects, also complementary, of configurations or processes. Thinkers over the centuries arrayed the five in many sequences to model normal processes of coming to be and growth (the mutual production order), antagonistic or pathological interactions (the mutual conquest order), and many other modes of activity, both human and in the external world. We will look further on at the complex circumstances in which the conception of phases evolved (p. ).

Han thinkers made ch'i the material and energetic basis of things and their transformations. In the sciences, it came into its own, and yin-yang and the five phases became its modifiers. What makes ch'i especially interesting is the ease with which it bridged the transition from humanistic thought to state cosmology and then to distinct physical sciences, and in doing so maintained the politically subservient character of the latter. To study yin-yang and the five phases in the evolution of the sciences without attending to these political uses would be like studying dermatology and pharmacology without first forming a general idea of the human body.

Phases. The Chinese ensemble of five phases, used like yin-yang to analyze processes and configurations, had no Greek counterpart. It had nothing to do with elements--a point muddied by the +17th-century Jesuit missionaries, who translated wu-hsing (wuxing) as "five elements" in order to portray them as poor approximations to Europe's scholastic four elements.

We find nothing resembling Aristotle's theory that every piece of wood or bone contains, as its elemental parts, earth, water, air and fire. Nor is there any suggestion of speculation along the lines of the indivisible atoms of Leucippus and Democritus. The "five materials" are just materials.

The term wu-hsing first appears in the "Great Plan" ("Hung fan,between 300 and 250), passed down as part of the Book of Documents (Shu ching, Shujing). This speech of advice to a king begins with Heaven's revelation to the legendary emperor Yü, who had rescued his realm from the primeval flood. The Plan is a panoply of fivefold and other numerological correspondences that form a basis for a new polity. These include the wu-hsing as water, fire, wood, metal, and earth. They are not primitive constituents, however, but a set of characteristic functions: "Water means soaking downward; Fire means flaming upward; Wood means bending and straightening; Metal means conforming and changing; Earth means accepting seed and giving crops. Soaking downward creates the salty; flaming upward creates the bitter; bending and straightening creates the sour; conforming and changing creates the pungent; giving crops creates the sweet." Although this seems to be the start of a chain, the speech moves on to other fivefold but unconnected matters, all of them relevant (so the speaker claims) to keeping order in the realm.

Tzu-ssu's writings are long lost, and there is nothing in Mencius that resembles the Five Phases, much less the term wu-hsing. The only clue is a set of categories that Mencius does use, namely the "four beginnings" (ssu tuan, siduan): "Feelings of commiseration are the beginning of benevolence (jen, ren); feelings of shame and revulsion are the beginning of righteousness (i, yi); feelings of modesty and yielding are the beginning of propriety (li); and feelings of approval and disapproval are the beginning of judgment (chih, zhi). Human beings have these Four Beginnings just as they have four limbs."

Nor does this exhaust the variety of fivefold categories. To mention just one more important example, in the surviving fragments of his writings, Tsou Yen used "five powers" (wu-te) ca. 300 as an important part of his theory of history. The sources consistently identify them as wood, fire, earth, metal, and water. Tsou wrote of them as emblems that determined the colors of court robes and other characteristics of court ritual differently for each dynasty. Although uncertain datings leave the matter unclear, he was evidently adapting these emblems to the reform of politics, and the rites on which the exercise of power was based. In his schema the five are not materials, or functions directly associated with materials, but markers of new beginnings within a cycle of dynastic succession.

The First Emperor, upon uniting China, explicitly adopted Tsou's five powers to regulate rituals and institutions by identifying his new regime with the power Water. The early Han court continued this Ch'in usage. The term "five powers" was still current ca. 100 during intensive discussions of how to change governmental practices. None of these uses pursued Tsou's original goal. They aimed, rather, at strengthening the authority of the state.

The larger exploration of which this essay is a part argues that the five phases developed gradually out of state-centered experiments in relating the cosmic, sociopolitical, and somatic good in the late Warring States period. These converged between the third and first centuries in a comprehensive unity in which the five phases and yin-yang became aspects aspects of ch'i. Chinese thinkers in that way created a common language to describe cosmic process and its analogues in the state and the body. Their struggle eventuated in a complex ensemble of concepts, tied together by the ideas that the cosmos is a dynamic harmony and that all sages know the same Way. Great diversity in the categories, and in the details of each, cannot obscure this broad consensus.

At the same time, this agreement was no straitjacket. Interpretation left leeway for a great deal of disagreement, experimentation and maneuver. Attempts from Lü Pu-wei on to make the emperor a ritualist rather than an autocrat drew on many philosophic currents, and molded important ambiguities into orthodox thought. Nevertheless, intellectuals' reliance on patronage and then on official status increasingly made the discussions one-way. Thinkers proposed; the ruler or his surrogates disposed. Han debate on topics outside of ritual and politics remained subdued or indirect rather than confrontational. Chinese philosophy, lacking the competitive abrasiveness that underlay the Greek variety, remained narrower in its range of exploration and more inclined toward general agreement on the most fundamental issues.

The knowable. The Book of Lao-tzu begins with two Ways (tao). There is the one that can be spoken of, that was the mother of the myriad creatures but is not the constant Way, and the nameless one, the beginning of heaven and earth, the Way that is constant. The passage goes on to say that

This is not meant to be natural philosophy. Nor is its topic cognition. It is about the difference between common experience and mystical breakthroughs. Again the Lao-tzu tells us that

Roughly a generation later, the Springs and Autumns of Master Lü (Lü shih ch'un-ch'iu, Lüshi chunqiu) turned the notion of the sage as ruler inside out to persuade the ruler to become a sage. A section on "Investigating Subtleties" begins with a remarkably abstract assertion:

"Autumn fur" is an animal's almost imperceptible downy hairs that by winter develop into new fur, a common metaphor for the subtle first stirrings of change.

The book shows no preoccupation with a hidden order of reality, inside or outside the world, that determines or explains the phenomena. Its concern is rather with social disorder, which begins small but grows quickly and disastrously if it is not dealt with. The order and chaos, survival and extinction, are those of states. The investigation is a practical matter of avoiding nasty surprises.

It is easy to find many similar passages in writings shortly before and during the Han. Our point is that the issue is never the unreliability of experience.

Specialist knowledge. Those whose livelihood comes from being able to predict the future, or to determine what has gone wrong within the living human body, must satisfy their clients that they have access to sources of knowledge not open to everyone. Chinese diviners and physicians do not generally stake their authority on the metaphysical foundations or rigor of what they know. Unlike the Greeks, they do not contrast specialist realities with lay appearances. The form of their justifications tends instead to be social. They appeal to initiation to separate insiders and outsiders.

Such justifications had two main components. The first was to trace the knowledge of a specialist group back to the legendary sage emperors who had originated human culture and granted it to their subjects. The profundity of medical as well as astronomical learning was guaranteed by the Yellow Emperor, who created and revealed the first canons, and the Divine Husbandman, who first tested and set down the healing virtues of medicinal plants. To people of the Han, their own emperor's ritual grant of the new calendar to them every year was analogous to these gifts.

This approach to justification is visible much earlier in astrology. Ssu-ma Ch'ien <XREF ch. 2 lb smt> explains the origins of astrology:

What, then, earned favor for astrologers and diviners before the Han? On that question we have much early evidence in the Tso Tradition. The answer is neither explicit claims to arcane knowledge nor empirical efficacy. Although the book frequently notes the success of prognostications, the credit does not belong to individual diviners.

To sum up, what made technical specialists (and advisors in general) outstanding was not the conceptual basis or content of their knowledge, a grasp of fact or truth inaccessible to others. What mattered was the origins of what they knew. It was specifically the chain of predecessors, all Possessors of the Way, that connected them directly to revelations of high antiquity. They did not demonstrate that they were fit to belong to this lineage by exceptional problem-solving skills, which their patrons and employers largely took for granted, but by adherence to social norms appropriate to their situation in life. Their superiors expected them to behave like other members of the elite.

Empty and full. These labels imply not only the value of something, but what knowledge one can have of it. Let us examine the dichotomy, quite different from the Greek appearance vs. reality, but similarly used in China.

"Cliques" reminds us that "empty words" is a tool of rivalry. It asserts that in what an opponent has said there is nothing worth taking seriously. Of course your quarry will not agree with you, at least if he is on hand to defend himself (which is seldom the case). That there is no objective way to settle the argument does not matter. At least you have had a crack at discrediting him, and have done so in a sagacious way that is not obviously "without saying anything of substance." Some rulers in any case savored stylish vituperation more than substance.

There is plainly a rough parallel between this controversial application of "empty vs. full" and the Greek use of "appearance vs. reality." But their consequences for thought are quite different.

The Greeks were generally explicit and confrontational when they pressed claims against rivals <XREF ch. 4 lb cfrt>. Because assertions about the certainty of knowledge were common currency, both sides in a given debate tended to elaborate and push as far as possible their own notions about reality. It is difficult to ignore a charge that your reality is mere seeming, and tempting to vindicate it by demonstrating that the confusion is actually your opponent's. One bold stroke in critical thought after another resulted from such ingenious contentions.

The Chinese dichotomy evolved for equally impolite uses in quite dissimilar circumstances. To call a belief "empty" had no more epistemological significance than to call it "shabby" or "silly." It usually amounted to nothing more than a charge of wrong-headedness. New critical arguments did not usually follow. This usage could have been developed in philosophical directions, just as, after the Han period, the other usage of hsu as "void" came to play an important role in Taoist and then Buddhist metaphysics. This did not happen. Chinese found the vituperative sense of "empty" adequate, and phrased their speculations about the character of knowledge in other terms that were not disputatious.

Once again we find that the patterns of Chinese philosophical argument, including prevalent techniques for reproaching, parrying, or dismissing opponents, are distinctive. They reflect, as we have come to expect, the circumstances and milieux in which intellectual exchanges took place.

Spurious resemblances. One more instance will prepare us to form a conclusion. Springs and Autumns of Master Lü contains a most interesting chapter on "spurious resemblances" (i ssu, yisi).

Yao, Shun, and Yü are sages, the ultimate brain trust, certified by the orthodox classics. Still, readers found it obvious that the three would need the advice of a herdboy to find their way through a swamp. Nor would anyone doubt that experience is pertinent to detecting phonies. The author did not find the notion of experience problematic. Neither did contemporary rivals or later scholars.

Master Lü seems at a glance to offer a curiously trivial resolution for the substantial problem of real vs. specious. But let us examine the context.

Rulers, the readership for which intellectuals yearned, generally were not enthusiastic about being subjected to rational suasion. No matter how respectfully philosophers treat them, rulers from Confucius' time to the end of the Warring States era appear in philosophic writings as well-intentioned dolts, too distracted by their own appetites and their own power to concentrate on anything else. Clever advisors kept trying to persuade them that a given policy was in their interest, but were as likely to annoy them as to compel them. Still, if one hoped to be an advisor, it was they, not some imaginary paragon, one had to advise.

Every essay in Lü shih ch'un-ch'iu, no matter what its topic, aims at stability imposed by the state. The passage just quoted is not epistemological in thrust. It speaks to the decision-maker who may nod off when confronted with the dilemmas of jade-cutters and sword-makers, but who takes a lively interest in detecting advisors who only pretend to be well informed. The anecdotes that make up the rest of the chapter all speak to that concern. Their shared emphasis on trusting experienced advisors is eminently practical. They might lose that practicality if they set civil servants arguing over whose experience was most like that of the mother of twins, in other words, over exactly what experience counts. A main aim of Lü shih ch'un-ch'iu, after all, is to persuade the ruler to cede authority voluntarily to his officials rather than acting unilaterally. In the absence of institutional constraints, that was his choice. Urging it on him entailed uniting officials rather than setting them at each other's throats.

This example from Master Lü, we submit, throws some light on why Chinese thinkers used "full" and "empty" to dismiss the ideas of rivals, and felt no need to elaborate them. When Greek Masters of Truth argued, the audience in their minds' eyes was all or some subset of their fellow citizens. Shortly before the Han, Possessors of the Way were hoping to be read and judged by aspirants to ultimate power. In the Han they were writing for the One Man, the Son of Heaven. Consciousness of either readership encouraged precision in moral, social and political categories, but it did not motivate an equal fastidiousness with regard to the foundations of knowledge, even when discussing abstractions. For those who sought a basis, revelation by an archaic sage-king provided an intellectually impeccable one that monarchs would appreciate.

In the sources that interest us, "full" and "empty" speak to a minuscule, powerful, and not at all academically inclined readership impatient with moves toward an elaborate epistemology or ontology. That leaves us reluctant to form an opinion on whether at that time but in other circumstances Chinese philosophers could have gone beyond the Mohists. At that time there were no other circumstances.

These few examples suggest that Chinese and Greek cosmology and science tended to take different paths to analogous ends, and that analogous paths tend to go in different directions. In accounting for these intellectual differences, we are forced repeatedly to acknowledge the importance of discrepant social circumstances. Let us summarize what our larger study has led us to conclude about how and why the science (and medicine) of the two cultures took such different forms as they gradually became distinct enterprises.

Surveying the sciences of two sophisticated cultures over the six hundred years from 400 B.C.E. to 200 C.E., we are quite aware that the traits that seem to us centrally important are not universal but general characteristics, and there are exceptions to all of them. In looking at many dimensions of thought and practice, we believe that how thinkers made a living, how they related to others, what they did, what their values were, and what they thought, made up a single historic manifold that can only be understood as a whole. We find this approach more useful than thinking of concepts and their contexts as two distinct things, or arguing that social dispensations caused intellectual ones or that ideas caused social change. In what follows we will summarize our views on the chief characteristics of the Chinese and Greek manifolds, and then on the aims, styles and milieux of their inquiries.

Characteristics. According to a widespread view of the history of science, one might expect that the content of systematic investigations in different cultures, once they were under way, would be the same, or if not, would rapidly converge. Both Chinese and Greek astronomers studied the skies to regulate the calendar and to determine the periodicities of eclipses and other phenomena; both Chinese and Greek doctors investigated the pulse in their endeavours to diagnose diseases. Yet even those similarities mask important divergences in assumptions about how the regularities of heavenly motions are to be understood, and about the internal functioning of the body.

Moreover, as we have seen, the fundamental concepts in play in China and in Greece are strikingly dissimilar. The Greeks focussed on nature and on elements. Both those concepts may seem familiar and obvious enough to us. However the first was an invention that served distinct polemical purpose: to define the sphere of competence of new-style "naturalistic" investigators and to underline the superiority of their views, in that domain, to the traditional beliefs of poets, wise men and religious leaders. Element theory concerned how material objects are ultimately constituted. Both natural philosophers and medical writers thought they needed to be able to answer that question in order to give sound explanations of other phenomena that interested them. Yet atomists and continuum theorists of various kinds ultimately could not resolve their disputes on that issue.

Chinese investigators had a very different set of fundamental concerns, not nature and elements, but the Way (or tao), ch'i, yin-yang and the five phases. Where Greek inquirers strove to make a reputation for themselves as new-style Masters of Truth, many Chinese thinkers--and some of the most prominent ones--had a very different programme, namely to advise and guide rulers. To that end they took over and redefined established concepts to produce an comprehensive synthesis in which heaven, earth, society and the human body formed a single universe of interacting universes. Comprehensive understanding of cosmic order served as the basis of the advisers' insistence on orderly behaviour even from rulers. Rulers, although not all of them abided by these limits, at least accepted roles as ritual mediators between heaven and earth and guarantors of good order in the cosmos. That served to legitimate their rule, a crucial matter for a new dynasty, and desirable at other times.

Livelihood. Philosophers and scientists in Greece as well as China sought employment and positions where their skills would be appreciated. Their prospects were from some points of view markedly dissimilar. Chinese rulers valued advisers and used them. This is already the case with the "guests" whom powerful lords collected at their courts in the Warring States period. Such guests depended on the continuing favour of their patrons. Under the empire, permanent positions proliferated in the increasingly important and effective imperial civil service. Of course not all Chinese philosophers and scientists were, or wanted to be, employed by rulers. But for many that was a viable ambition and a worthwhile goal.

The opportunities for Greek intellectuals were much thinner. Few held positions of much influence with statesmen, and there was no appreciable bureaucratic structure to the state until Roman imperial times. Greek philosophers and scientists occasionally received patronage. More often they earned their living by teaching or by practising useful skills such as those of the doctor, the architect or the astrologer.

The difference that this makes is, in places, fundamental. On the one side, the Greeks had few patrons to please, but, without official employment, had to fall back on their own resourcefulness. Their lack of access to centres of political power gave them greater freedom to engage in abstract speculation, and little option but to do so. The prospects in China of influence in the affairs of state required a certain circumspection. Those who fell out with rulers at the cost of exile, judicial castration or death include key figures in the development of cosmology, medicine, and astronomy.

The uses of cosmology. Although Greek thinkers had little political leverage, their cosmologies, like Chinese ones, reflect political ideas and have marked political associations and significance. They were generally similar in being value-laden; a further point of resemblance was the use of comparisons between the macrocosm and the microcosms of the state and the human body. The Greeks often saw these as individually analogous, the Chinese rather as three parts of a single complex whole.

Once we probe further, the differences are striking. In China there is general agreement that the ruler was the mediator between heaven and earth, responsible for the welfare of "all under heaven." Cosmos and the state form a resonant whole. The Greeks, however, disagreed on the best kind of political constitution, and on what type of political structure the cosmos was, or resembled. Some used macrocosm-microcosm analogies to advocate a notion of the cosmic dispensation but, in the cosmos as in the political world, ideas of monarchic order competed with oligarchic, democratic, even anarchic ones.

Expectations as to the public utility of scientists' ideas similarly diverged. The Greek attack on the determination of the solar year and the lunar month was accompanied by only half-hearted attempts to apply the results obtained. For the Chinese, by contrast, the regulation of the calendar was a matter of imperial charisma. There was every incentive to apply the most advanced knowledge, including support on an imposing scale through the imperial Astronomical Bureau.

Pluralism and deviance. Whatever their opinions about the virtues of particular rulers or emperors, the Chinese were united around the ideal of the benevolent rule of the wise prince. No alternative to that model of political order developed. In a social system that valued civil service above every other career, philosophers who wanted to be politically engaged--or simply respectable--understood the dangers of proposing alternatives to the current dispensation of power. Divergences of view were generally limited to areas of thought where the general welfare was not at stake. Such areas tended to be marginal to the wide extent of what the general welfare covered.

In Greece, pluralism was not just possible but mandatory. Aspiring intellectuals, whatever their field of interest, had to make a name for themselves and they often did this by aggressive innovation. There was nothing to lose, indeed everything to gain, by advocating new ideas in every sphere from politics through cosmology to abstract issues such as space, time, and the ultimate constitution of physical bodies. The Greeks entertained as many different solutions to the problems of speculative theory as they did to political questions.

The pluralism just described did not prevent many Greek writers from advocating the sternest measures to deal with those they disagreed with. They often spoke of them as deviants, malignant influences infecting the health of the body politic, and in need of drastic treatment. Those who took such an authoritarian line (Plato especially) pictured the true statesman as the doctor whose expert advice all were obliged to take--indeed should be constrained to do so. The only deviants to whom early Chinese sources apply a medical metaphor are ministers guilty of misconduct.

In Greece theories and practices were always as much a matter of dispute as any other topic by which individuals made their reputation. By contrast, Chinese anecdotes of experts tend to take their technical decisions for granted and emphasize their embodiment of social norms.

Private interest. In Greece, favouring one's private interest was acceptable: in China, it was unthinkable. Even the most rapacious Chinese officials mastered altruistic modes of justification. The tension between the identities of civil servants as tools of imperial control on the one hand, and, on the other, as representatives of a hereditary elite with interests opposed to those of the ruler, often has consequences, even if in the historical record it is largely unacknowledged.

Different attitudes towards private interest are responsible for another contrast. Astrology, like cosmology, consistently had implications for the state as a whole in China, but just as much for the individual in Greece. Indeed the sphere of operation for most Greek philosophers and scientists of every kind was the private, not the public, but until the collapse of Eastern Han government, Chinese preferred the latter.

The role of disagreement. Greek culture throughout the period that concerns us encouraged disagreement and disputation in natural philosophy and science as in every other field: the Chinese emphasised consensus. This was not because the Greeks were intrinsically disputatious and the Chinese essentially eirenic. Success in debate was how you made your name in Greece in a way that has no analogue in China.

This does not mean that the Greeks never saw eye to eye and that Chinese always did. A very few early Chinese thinkers were consistently critical, and many carped from time to time. Conversely Greek minds met on fundamentals often enough to make some aspects of their early thought cumulative, in mathematics and the exact sciences especially. But even when, in the Hellenistic period, philosophers and doctors formed more stable groupings, these were still locked in constant competitive debate.

Even when the Greeks agreed on certain ideas and practices, especially for medicine, they often insisted on different rationales or justifications. In China, general agreement was more common. Even so, doctrines were not highly standardised, and in medicine there was much room for elaboration on points of detail. Without a single educational or occupational structure to enforce one synthesis, general agreement on the outlines of doctrine never extended to its fine details. Multiple explanations of the same phenomenon, often inconsistent ones, remained frequent. Medical classics preferred not the leanest and most rigorous account but the fullest one, more adequate to the complexities of medical practice than what narrow consistency could yield. Chinese on the whole preferred to cascade levels of meaning than to seek a single cause ruling out all others.

Rhetoric and status. There is finally the question of the management of persuasion, or rhetoric, where issues of status are always in evidence.

For Greeks, whatever other purposes it served, oral contention was a tool of competition. Lacking sinecures or even secure employment, Masters of Truth depended on debate for fame and livelihood. Argument tended to be face to face, and the public was often expected to decide, just as the public determined the outcome of political discussion in the assemblies, and of litigation in the dicasteries. These customs had no Chinese counterparts.

Chinese Possessors of the Way generally strove for support by rulers, as "guests" in the late Chou courts, and as officials in the Han. Their interlocutors were not colleagues but patrons, who expected advice but did not feel obliged to act on, nor even to reply to, it. This relationship hardly made for lively philosophic exchanges, and few are recorded. Disagreements with other intellectuals, except on matters of state policy, were unimportant by comparison with Greece. Most philosophic polemics were originally written, and were directed at dead or absent rivals.

The text-based lineages of Chinese philosophy and science did not encourage internal disputes, except in affirmatively developing the ideas of intellectual ancestors. Masters often used argument among pupils as a teaching tool, but disciples did not lightly assume that their teachers were wrong. Chinese coteries, unlike Greek philosophical and medical sects, avoided publicly attacking each other. Hostilities were unproductive when teachers (not to mention parents) aspired above all to public employment for their pupils. Neither the esteem of all colleagues everywhere, nor public celebrity, could compensate for lack of access to appointments.

How individuals in China and in Greece responded to the complex traditions they inherited, how they obtained and used their own room for manoeuvre, negotiated their own positions, decided their goals and set about fulfilling them: these questions do not have single answers. Both societies offered aspirants to the Tao or to Logos a wide spectrum of possibilities.

To understand Greek or Chinese science, a comparison with the other provides a valuable and much underutilised resource. Neither China nor Greece had a monopoly of either the appropriate conceptual tools or suitable institutional frameworks for systematic inquiries into the heavens, the human body, or the cosmic dispensation as a whole. Each provides a remarkably rich potential for the pursuit of such inquiries. The hypotheses that our larger inquiry has yielded will need further testing, both in relation to these two societies and, where possible, further afield, to other ancient and early modern cultures. Yet this first collaborative exploration of Chinese and Greek science has, we believe, identified some fundamental parts of the answer to the question of why these societies produced the science that they did.