Emperor Whisperers

David Roman

Description

Emperor Whisperers charts a comparative history of the two largest strains of ancient philosophy, from the first millennium BC to around AD 500. The book examines how

philosophy arose from atheism in both China and Greece but entered a cul de sac when atheism spread from the elites to the middle classes. China’s philosophy evolved to oppose law with morals, which created a mandarin class of “emperor whisperers,” while Western philosophy was complicated by competing political systems that were only harmonized by the triumph of the Roman Empire. As antiquity came to an end, imported new religions – Buddhism and Christianity – reintroduced faith into elite thought and kickstarted the Middle Ages.

Sujets

• Asian Studies
• Social Science
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Religión
• General officer
• Social sciences
• History of China
• Chinese
• Asian
• Religion
• General
• History
• Classics
• Greece
• China

Informations

• Publié par: Academica Press
• Date de parution: 11 avril 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781680538243
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Emperor Whisperers:
A Comparative History of Ancient Chinese and Western Philosophy
David Roman
Academica Press
Washington~London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Roman, David, author.
Title: Emperor whisperers : a comparative history of ancient chinese and western philosophy | David Roman
Description: Washington : Academica Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023934793 | ISBN 9781680537321 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781680538243 (ebook)
Copyright 2023 David Roman
For Maurice, whose fingerprints are all over this book.
“It is only when there is class struggle that there can be philosophy.” (From Mao Zedong’s Talk on Questions of Philosophy, Aug 18, 1964)
“You give me bad advice, my friends, when you do not allow me to think the man who commands thirty legions to be right about anything he chooses.” Favorinus (80-160 AD), Roman sophist
Contents 1. Intro: Point Deer Make Horse and the Modern West 2. The Hundred Schools and the Pre-Socratics 3. Confucius and the Sophists 4. The Confucian schools and Socrates 5. Lao Zi and Plato 6. Mencius and Aristotle 7. Dong Zhongshu and the Cynics 8. The Three Kingdoms and Seneca 9. Xuan Xue and the Christians 10. Buddha and the City of God Index
1. Intro: Point Deer Make Horse and the Modern West
When Alexander the Great died, his entire empire, which he had himself created, hung in the balance.
Macedonia had evolved from peripheral Greek state to the most powerful kingdom in Europe in a matter of years, thanks to a series of reforms conducted in earlier years by Alexander’s father Philip, focused on stripping the landed nobility of all its privileges, and setting up a centralized bureaucracy to effectively transmit the will of the royal house. A rationalized system of punishment and rewards turned the peasants into very effective farmers and soldiers, and soon the other traditional states were swept away by Alexander, who pretty much ran out of enemies to fight.
Alexander was able to conquer all the other states and build a unified empire because he had invented royal absolutism. But his death left a big open question; at the time, the crown prince, Demeter, was up with the army in the northern frontier. The emperor had died while touring the provinces, and with him was a younger son, Alexander Junior, whom nobody expected to inherit the throne.
The only ones who knew about Alexander’s passing were Ptolemy, one of Alexander’s closest companions and ministers, and the prime minister, Hephaiston; they both were with him and his younger son during the tour.
Ptolemy didn’t like the crown prince Demeter very much. He had reasons to think that Demeter hated him, and would execute him as soon as he became emperor himself. So Ptolemy went to Hephaiston and proposed a plan: let’s seize the advantage before Demeter hears the news, and make Alexander Junior the new emperor instead, before Demeter can react.
Even though Hephaiston also had reasons to fear Demeter, he took some convincing, as did Alexander Junior himself. When they eventually they got on board with the plan, they sent a forged imperial edict ordering Demeter to kill himself. Which, somewhat strangely, he did, despite opposition by his entourage. With Demeter out of the way, the three got back to the capital, and set up Alexander Junior as emperor.
Soon thereafter, Ptolemy found some excuse and executed Hephaiston and all his family, then took his prime minister position. Hephaiston obviously knew too much. Ptolemy later proceeded to execute all of the emperor’s brothers and sisters, so there was no contest about who had the right title to the crown. Alexander Junior was secure in his throne; but then he started to be a little uncooperative with Ptolemy who, after all, had just murdered most of his family.
A rebel called Cassander then started a revolt, and the empire struggled to suppress it. The Emperor blamed Ptolemy for the mess and he had a point. But Ptolemy didn’t like that. He came to think that maybe they should have a change of emperor, but he couldn’t be sure he could pull it off.
At this point, Ptolemy brought a deer into the palace. He grabbed it by the horns, called the emperor to come out, and said:
“Look your majesty, I brought you a fine horse.”
“Surely you are mistaken, calling a deer a horse. Right?” the Emperor, who was not amused, responded.
Then the Emperor looked around at all the ministers. Some didn’t say a word, and stood there just sweating nervously. Others loudly proclaimed what a fine horse this was. Great horse: naturally prime minister Ptolemy, who got rid of Hephaiston and the entire imperial family out of the way without a care in the world, had the best taste when it came to equine animals.
A small bunch did protest that this was a deer, not a horse. Those were summarily executed soon thereafter. And Alexander Junior himself was murdered some time later.
Now, anyone with even a smattering of knowledge about Alexander the Great’s life has realized this never happened as told. Ptolemy, in reality a general, wasn’t a scheming minister, and Hephaiston, Alexander’s lover, had died some time before the great man’s own passing in 323 BC.
But this story did happen, in ancient China. We just changed the names of the main actors, and the location: if you go back to re-read and put the correct names in, the story is, insofar as historians can tell, entirely truthful. For “Alexander” one should write “Qin Shi Huangdi, the first Emperor;” the smart predecessor who built up his bureaucracy was “Shang Yang;” for Demeter, the crown prince who was convinced to kill himself, fill in “Fusu;” for Hephaiston, the prime minister tricked into conspiring and then removed out of the equation, “Li Si;” for the hapless Alexander Junior, who never did understand why people insisted on calling a deer a horse, “Huhai.”
The smart, evil Ptolemy is, of course, not the ancestor of Cleopatra VII, queen of Egypt and lover of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, but “Zhao Gao,” a scheming court eunuch. And Cassander, the rebel, was in reality “Liu Bang,” the founder of the Han dynasty that would run China during much of the period discussed in this book.
The purpose of this sleight of hand is to call attention to the significant similarities between the social, political and military circumstances in ancient China and the Classic civilization around the Mediterranean. It’s not surprising that such similarities led to the development of parallel systems of thought, and philosophies, on both sides of the then-known world.
If one must compare, indeed the best historical tradition in the world is that of China. The imperial government has put lots of people and resources into writing history there for three thousand years. And one of the results of this emphasis is that scribes and thinkers have left a lot of interesting stories about important patterns in political history and philosophy.
This is partly the result of a key advantage of the Chinese language, based on syllables (represented by characters) that sometimes stand for a given thought or idea and sometimes need to be coupled with other syllables to make complete words. Chinese also lacks articles and prepositions as commonly understood in European languages.
The combination of characters allows the Chinese to create catchy phrases, which makes them much more accessible to the public’s memory. For example, in the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping popularized the vaguely anti-Maoist slogan “seek the truth from facts,” which is a bit cumbersome in English but extremely easy to remember in Chinese: 实事求是 ; “shi shi qiu shi.” This is why any decently educated Chinese knows the name of the story of Zhao Gao and his deer/horse: “point deer make horse” or 指鹿為馬 (“zhi lu wei ma”).
This story made it into the Records of the Grand Historian, written by the peerless Sima Qian, a contemporary of Rome’s dictator Sulla, around 100 BC. Sima Qian is also, interestingly, our main source for the life and works of Confucius and many other Chinese thinkers and politicians.
Through Sima Qian, “point deer make horse” became part of common knowledge for those involved in Chinese intellectual life. From then on, every time that somebody tried to pull off a similar stunt, opposing ministers could say “you, sir, are simply trying to say a deer is a horse,” which could get other lukewarm ministers to wake up and support you. Or you would get killed or purged with your whole family.
The concept has never been quite as popular in the West. When Emperor Caligula appointed his horse Incitatus as priest around AD 40, and announced plans to make him a consul next, Romans of the era were scandalized; Suetonius, a later historian, cites the episode as an obvious example of Caligula’s derangement.
However, as classicist Mary Beard has suggested, 1 it’s entirely possible that Caligula was indeed trying to play a “point deer make horse” trick with Incitatus and other similar scandals of the time. Caligula may have been looking to see which senators would play along and show subservience, and which of them insisted that a horse wasn’t a deer, and thus were to be included in the list of potential enemies.
The same idea, in a much-watered version, appears in the more modern tale by Hans Christian Andersen, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” 2 about a kid who insists that the emperor is not wearing any new clothes, like everyone says out of flattery and fear, but is indeed naked. Two key distinctions with Chinese tradition must be made here, even at this very late juncture: first, Andersen’s tale is fiction, not history like Sima Qian’s; second, the hero kid is acting out of a pure heart, daring to say the truth against the powerful, and is vindicated at the end, which says a lot about modern western sensitivities. 3
This lack of familiarity with, even rejection, of well-known concepts among the Chinese is one reason why virtue-signaling