§99. A Word
The modern Chinese expression translating “experience” is jing yan, an expression introduced by Japanese scholars to translate Erfahrung in Kant. The written character combines jing—the warp of woven cloth, and by extension a rule or canon—with yan, testing.
A canon for testing. Despite being adapted by Japanese scholars for European translation, the jing yan character is attested in earlier Chinese literature, always with the sense of a decisive test. For instance, in the sixteenth-century Journey to the West, Buddha has a magic potion capable of restoring dead plants. The impudent Monkey challenges him to a test. A willow is cut into pieces and burned, the potionEmpiricisms. Barry Allen, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197508930.001.0001. applied to the ash, and the willow restored. There was jingyan, a trial or test and an experiential proof. In medical texts, jingyan usually describes well- respected formulas of drug preparation, formulas whose effectiveness is tested (jing yan fang).2
A related expression with yan, testing, occurs much earlier in the late-classical Xunzi.
Those who are expert at theorizing about antiquity will certainly show how their ideas tally with the situation of the present. Those expert at theorizing about Heaven will certainly support their notions with evidence about the human condition. As a general principle, what is to be prized in the presentation of a thesis is that there is consistency in the structure of the discriminations advanced to support it and that there is evidentiary support for the thesis which shows that the facts accord with the reality like the two halves of a tally fu yan). Thus they will sit on their mats to propound their theories, will rise to show that they apply comprehensively, and will stand up straight to show that it is possible for the ideas they have propounded to be put into practice.3
Scholars say that fu (tally) connotes trustworthiness, the word originally signifying a section of bamboo broken into two matching pieces capable of verifying the bearer to the other.
A variation appears in Xunzi's contemporary Hanfeizi. “An assertion without testing through matching is a foolish one” (wu can yan er bi zhi zhe yu ye). Both philosophers think that the best verification for a statement is useful application. Hanfeizi is clear about this. “The intelligent lord in listening to speech must weigh up its utility and in observing conduct must ask that it be effective. In that way he will not talk of empty and outdated studies nor adopt cunning and deceptive conduct.”4Wang Chong, writing some two centuries later, says that “in affairs there is nothing more intelligent than effectiveness, and in discussions there is nothing more certain than proof.” The best proof is “experiential evidence” (xiao yan). “Anyone who discusses affairs and speaks contrary to fact or not in conformity with experiential evidence, even though the theory sounds wonderful and is rich in ideas, yet it is wholly untrustworthy.” He criticizes Daoists on this ground. “The Daoists speak of spontaneity but do not know how to substantiate their claims by evidence; thus their theory of spontaneity has not yet proved trustworthy.”5
The idea that serious statements should be subject to experiential testing goes back to a still earlier source in the philosophy of the Mohists, whose founder, Mo Di, was a young contemporary of Confucius. The sect is unique in Chinese thought for their advocacy of impartial standards, which they think should replace partial human judgment everywhere. In service to their ideal, Mohist scholars carried out pioneering research in optics, logic, methodology, and epistemology. Apart from a devoted sect, however, few intellectuals warmed to the project, and when the school disappeared from history (it seems not to survive the Han dynasty), their innovations fell into oblivion until modern times.
The Mohist ethos requires one to be aware of opportunities for impartial benefit to improve the world. One should watch for these opportunities, use one's intelligence, apply one's learning and discipline, and do all one can to improve the world.
All the important actions of public life should fall under the scrutiny of explicitly reasoned norms, and that includes making statements, especially about what is good or bad. “To assert, one must establish norms. To assert without norms is comparable to establishing the directions of sunrise and sunset from on top of a rotating potter's wheel: which alternative is to be judged right or wrong, beneficial or harmful, cannot be plainly known.” As a solution Mozi advances what he calls the “three gnomons” (san biao). A gnomon, as in a sundial, casting a shadow and verifying the angle and height of the sun, is his image of a canon for normative verification. The three gnomons are the test of root, the test of origin, and the test of use. A well- rooted statement repeats what ancient sage kings have already said. Proper origination requires a statement to arise only after “investigating the realities perceived by the ears and the eyes of the hundred clans.” A statement is useful if it can be applied in administration to benefit the state and the people.6The Mohist treatise on ghosts offers an example of their approach to verification. It begins by establishing the urgency of the topic. The primary cause of disorder in the world is reliance on might over right. It ought not to happen; it is partial, therefore contrary to heaven and against nature. So why do people do it? Mo Di says, “It is all because people have developed doubts concerning ghosts and spirits.” With this diagnosis we also get a prescription. “If we could just persuade the people of the world to believe that ghosts and spirits can reward the worthy and punish the wicked, then how could the world ever become disordered?” Of course the persuasion has to be righteous, which raises the problem of an impartial standard for existence.7
He tells the disciples that in the proof of ghosts, “you proceed in the same way as in any other case of determining whether anything exists or does not exist; you must take as your standard the evidence provided by the eyes and ears of the people.
If there really are people who have heard and seen something, then you must accept that such things exist.” He reiterates: “If someone has heard it, has seen it, one says that it exists; if no one has heard it, has seen it, one says that it does not.” He does not leave it at that, describing a method of sampling to ensure that the voice of the people is rightly conveyed. A reliable sample must be one village of a size specified in terms of families, thus not a set of unrelated individuals; and it must be selected without knowing in advance what their beliefs are or what their experience has been. Having identified the sample, the people must be asked whether they have seen traces or heard of spirits. In Chinese as in English, this “heard of” is ambiguous between audition and reputation, and the author does not say what counts as the trace of a spirit. Nevertheless, Mozi expects the investigation to support the statement that ancestral spirits watch us all the time.8The gnomons concur, the existence of ghosts is impartially well founded. It is well rooted because (as Mozi shows) the sage kings knew about spirits. It arises properly because it summarizes realities perceived by the ears and the eyes of the people. And the proof of spirits is useful for the boon to morality when everybody feels they are constantly watched. Mozi thus proves the existence of ghosts by the same “empirical” reasoning he uses to disprove the idea of fate, which is his school's criticism of the Confucians, who (they say) are fatalists, a doctrine Mozi refutes: “From olden times until now, from the time that people have been born, has any of them heard the sound of fate (ming) or seen the body (ti) of fate? Of course, none of them has.” Therefore fate does not exist. No other judgment is well founded.9
Experience enters into the explanation of knowledge in the Mohist Canons. With the terseness characteristic of these texts, the canon on knowledge reads:
Knowledge (zhi).
By report (wen), by explanation (shuo), by experience (qin). Of the name, of the object, of how to connect them, of how to act. Having received it at second hand, “by report.” That if square it will not rotate, “by explanation.” Having been a witness oneself, “by experience.”10We are told of three sources of knowledge and four objects. As to sources, we may acquire knowledge by receiving a report; or by understanding an explanation, as in knowing that because of its shape a cube will not roll; or by experience, as when we witness something. Another canon says that if, standing in a yard, you are told that a thing unseen in the house is like something that you see before you, then “what is outside, you know by experience; what is in the room you know by explanation.” As for the objects of knowledge, they are four: knowledge of a thing's name; knowledge of the thing; knowledge of the connection between name and thing; and knowledge of how best to engage with a thing so designated.11
Is this empiricism? It shares the interest in a test for speech worth taking seriously, holding statements to a norm of experiential verification, with the proof of a statement's value being felicitous application. Mozi makes a start on explicating methods of verification, and while the distinctions are primitive, it is not a stretch to compare this work with Democritus, an approximate contemporary. It expresses a tendency that could have become a kind of empiricism, had it not been lost. Apart from some unconscious or unacknowledged borrowing, this school and its questions have no future in traditional Chinese thought.
Not all the philosophers of Chinese tradition approved holding statements to an experiential norm or expecting verification by use. These ideas are more uniformly held among authors associated with the so-called school of laws (fa jia), China's administrative philosophy, of which Hanfeizi is the culmination. Xunzi is a Confucian work, but the detestation Mencius expressed toward Mozi and the obsession with “profit” (li) diminished the appeal of experiential verification in later Confucian thought. The Daoist thinkers had no use for the idea at all. They were uninterested in putative tests for statements worth taking seriously because they did not think any statement was worth taking too seriously. If you can put it in words and test it, it cannot be wise or worth saying.12