On the Strangeness of the Greeks and Other Subjects: Part Two

Or, De Novitate Graecorum Dialogus

(In Part One of the dialogue, Antonius and Podius consider the oddity of Greek anti-natalism and discuss if Daoism is comparable to Dionysian worship.)

Jianghu, Mao and the Taiping Rebellion

Antonius: The subaltern world of the jianghu 江湖, inhabited by a class outside the bureaucratic rule of the scholar-gentry, is positively Bacchic. Have you read Water Margin? You can find some incredibly hardcore content in that book, no less gory and twisted like the Bacchae, such as cutting open the head of a four-year-old child in order to carry out a stratagem.¹ And unlike the ambivalence in Euripides, this kind of degeneracy is a trait of “heroic” characters whom the readers are supposed to sympathize with.

Podius: Yes, the world of Liangshan, the novel’s eponymous hideout, is gloomy and chaotic indeed, and deeds of extreme villainy are not beneath its protagonists. But on the last point, I believe some ambiguity is allowed because the story also makes clear that these characters are not ideal heroes. They are acknowledged scoundrels, thugs, often mass murders and, in more than one case, recidivist cannibals.² In this regard, they are somewhat like the heroes of The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, or The Godfather. They are bad men the reader roots for—but bad men nonetheless.

Antonius: Ironic you would call them “bad men”, because the word to describe the brotherhood means the exact opposite. They are called haohan 好漢 or “good men”.³ But these guys, and occasional gals, are “good” in a very specific sense. The code of jianghu glorifies people who put the brotherhood above all and defy man-made as well as natural laws. In order to be able to break away from all morality, the people of Liangshan have to be a believer in chaos. When Wu Song 武松 slaughtered an entire household at the Mandarin Duck Pavilion 鴛鴦樓 or when Li Kui 李逵, nicknamed “The Dire Whirlwind”, massacred hundreds of civilian onlookers at the execution grounds⁴, out of nothing more than a grudge or a sudden desire for catharsis, they become superhuman in a way. They are less men than embodiments of the dark, primordial forces of nature. It is precisely this chaotic impulse that underlies the worship of Bacchus.

Podius: But at least the world of Liangshan has its own set of rules. It is intelligible. Its heroes are not mad, whereas Bacchism glories in total unintelligibility.

Antonius: In a way yes, but the unspoken rule of Liangshan indulges in and glorifies men’s unbounded animalistic instincts. To use a legal term, there is no limiting rule that can be applied, so that a member of the brotherhood’s behaviour lacks an external standard of rationality. Actually, the conventional word for “hero”, yingxiong 英雄, also carries no moral valence but merely suggests “outstanding and masculine”.

Podius: On a tangential note, this idea of “masculine” is interesting here, considering how Dionysus is marked by his femininity.

Antonius: That is a good point, Podius. But the concept of xiong 雄 is not equal to conventional masculinity either. It can take on senses that are odd and sinister. There is this apocryphal story of Cao Cao 曹操, which is almost surely made up but has become immensely well-known through oral storytelling, and eventually canonized in the Romance of Three Kingdoms. In this story Cao Cao murdered the whole family of his benefactor who took him in as a fugitive, because he suspected that the knife in his host’s kitchen was meant to assassinate him; it turns out they were meaning to slaughter a pig to treat him to dinner.⁵ This is deeply psychopathic behavior, but generations of storytellers apparently found it fitting, and indeed representative, of Cao Cao’s character as a jianxiong 奸雄, or a “treacherous hero”. Alternatively, he is called a xiaoxiong 梟雄. The first character in this phrase xiao means a bird of bad omen, like an owl, a word that is usually reserved for a disreputable sort, the head honchos of a drug cartel for example. And in later sources this type of personality, typical of a founder of a dynasty, is referred to the grandiose phrase xiongcai 雄猜, which can perhaps be translated as “a master of suspicion”. In fact, the trait of jianghu heroes is hardly fictional; in chaotic times of dynastic decline when warlords vie for supremacy this behavior is common. One sees it recur in the interregnums that follow every imperial dynasty. But you were right about the subterranean nature of this culture of jianghu, that gets too often brushed off by grandstanding Confucians, and it persists to this day. It has found a natural modern exemplar in Mao and his comrades.

Podius: Mao’s world seems to have combined both the immorality of Water Margin and the cultishness of the Taiping Rebellion. There is a learned work, Antonius, by twentieth century sinologist Lucian Pye named The Mandarin and the Cadre. It seeks to analyze the political culture of Communist China from a psychological lens. It argues that traditional China hosted two dueling political cultures, irreconcilable, one elite and one popular. The Confucian literati embody the elite culture, but the Communist leaders, who tended to come from much humbler backgrounds, are representatives of this subterranean political culture, embraced by the masses but hidden beneath most of the sources from imperial Chinese history.

Antonius: I have skimmed that book, Podius, and while I agree wholehearted with this dichotomy and hail its insights into the character of the current regime’s founding men, I cannot help but feel disappointed by Pye’s strong presentist bias. He draws too much from the days of Mao and too little from the world before him—even when his generalizations are by and large correct and make for enjoyable reading. The result is that he undersells his thesis by passing over historical cases that might strengthen his claim. You may say this divergence of political cultures can be traced all the way back, through Hong Xiuquan 洪秀全 to Li Zicheng 李自成 to An Lushan 安祿山 and the Yellow Turbans 黃巾軍 and all the way to the rebellion of Chen Sheng 陳勝 and Wu Guang 吳廣 in late third century before Christ!

Podius: But I suppose the world of Water Margin still differs from the world of the Taiping Rebellion, doesn’t it? Calling oneself the younger son of God surely takes one’s campaign to a different level.⁶

Antonius: Are you implying that the latter was, in a sense, a sinicized Christian movement? You know, Podius, in the orthodox historiography of today’s China, the Taiping Rebellion is treated not so different from any other peasant uprising in history; the Christian element is more often than not eclipsed. This is probably because they are supposed to be the good guys, and it is unsavory to have the good guys be followers of a religion of Western imperialists. Of course, it is ironic that Mao’s version of Marxism-Leninism was also a fanatic adaptation of a Western belief system. Many rebels of more distant past mobilized the masses with religion that may have had roots or inspirations outside of China, but like the Taiping army, they manipulated religious doctrines to fit their own political purposes, and their cult-like modus operandi eventually merged with jianghu culture. There is actually much more to be said about this subterranean stream of tradition, perhaps in the form of comparative portraits of peasant leaders throughout history, like a variation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. But that is a topic for another day.

Life of Confucius and Kant’s Ladder of Virtue

Podius: Hence returning to the question of Greek rationality, I think we established that the nature of the Greeks was weird, and the Athenian nature was extra weird. More so than other Hellenic poleis, they were a people that trusted in arms of flesh; they appealed not to the power of the gods for success, but to the power of men. Yet only Athens gave us tragedy. If we want to be sententious, we can say that only after the rise of rationalism is tragedy possible.

Antonius: An excellent aphorism, Podius. I must write it down, along with our entire discussion today, and call it a dialogue on the strangeness of the Greeks.

Podius: That said, there is a kind of rationalism that was present since the beginning of Chinese thought. To wit, almost all major schools of pre-Qin philosophy believed that becoming a sage was the highest telos of human existence. Almost all saw sagehood as a process of social conditioning rather than an epistemological choice. The Confucians are the most adamant on this. Confucius gave an account of his own educational and spiritual journey from the age of fifteen onwards. There is no terrifying battle of the soul, or an awe-inspiring revelation on Saul’s journey to Damascus. In this way they are not unlike the Methodists: virtue comes from learning, and learning means forging habits, through repeated practice, taking one step at a time, in a slow and gradual way. This is what’s meant by the very first sentence in the Analects. Character is thus formed as naturally as eating one’s vegetables every day.

Antonius: This is indeed a deep point on virtue, Podius. Your last analogy to eating vegetables is an apt one; there was actually a Ming dynasty collection of maxims and folk wisdom called the “Vegetable Root Discourse”. Now, speaking of epistemological choices, I happen to have attended a beautiful lecture on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, given by the learned professor Katja Vogt of Morningside Heights. Professor Vogt explains the German philosopher’s view on morality in an ascending scale, a ladder of virtue, if you will.

Podius: What does the ladder consist of? Tell me, Antonius, and how does it relate to epistemology?

Antonius: So I heard from Professor Vogt, that Kant believed there to be four levels of moral attainment, in the ascending order of difficulty. At the bottom rung is knowing what the right thing to do is. In fact, given that Kant apparently believed morality is sufficiently derived from reason, which is innate to the human mind, he held that all men know what the right thing to do, provided that they think correctly and think hard enough. Therefore, knowing what is moral is the easiest thing in the world.

Podius: That does follow from his premise.

Antonius: Then the second rung, one step above the knowledge of morality, is doing the right thing, or the practice of morality. But the third rung, what is more difficult than doing the right thing, is to do the right thing for the right reasons.

Podius: For Kant then, it is easier to do the right thing for the wrong reasons rather than the right reasons?

Antonius: Precisely, Podius. Kant thinks there are infinitely wrong reasons for us to do the right thing, hence there is a multitude of vices hiding behind every virtue—for example, one may do the right thing in order to impress his friends, in order to win fame and glory, and so on. These impure motives would taint one’s practice of morality, and render doing the right thing alone insufficient.

Podius: It follows, I believe, that one must do the right thing for itself, namely that it is moral per se.

Antonius: Indeed, the only moral motivation to practice morality is doing it as a result of knowing that it is moral. Do you see, Podius, how the third rung actually combines the requirements for the two lower rungs?

Podius: That is right, Antonius. And what is the final and top rung on the ladder?

Antonius: Here is the rub—the top rung, according to Kant, and it is inhumanly difficult to accomplish, is to know that one does the right thing for the right reasons. This is the epistemological aspect of ultimate virtue; it is the secure knowledge of one’s own motivations. Indeed, when I first learned of this articulation of virtue, I thought Professor Vogt, and by extension Kant, was simply describing Confucian sagehood.

Podius: Interesting proposition! But again, Confucius describes the pathway to sagehood as a process, rather than the matter of knowledge in itself. The state of ultimate freedom, and crucially the knowledge of one’s freedom in virtue, only comes about after decades of experience. Unlike the Kantians, this does not treat virtue as something that is deductive. Confucian virtue is innate to the extent that everyone is capable of achieving it, but it is not a state that can be reasoned into being without a lifetime’s practice. I would say this is closer to a Christian, than a rationalist worldview.

Antonius: In other words, Confucianism lacks the a priori aspect of Kantian moral law, although it holds that there is good in human nature. Now that I come to think about it, reason and nature are also an interesting pair of concepts in classical philosophy. The Greeks apparently also believed that justice, which according to Socrates at least is reasonable and capable to be reasoned, stands in contradistinction to the state of nature, where justice is naturally the advantage to the stronger, as eloquently argued by Callicles in the Gorgias and Thrasymachus in the Republic. But Kant took this much further and established a metaphysic of morality that, from an outsider’s perspective, seems completely out of touch with reality or human nature! I suspect the Confucians would never comprehend such a rationalistic approach to human activity: they would appeal to one’s common sense, which is derivative of nature, even if that nature itself has not been examined.

Antigone and Mencius’ Dilemma

Podius: Yes, but the Greeks might not find this so antithetical to human nature. Rationalism in the Greek form was a defining feature and even the foundation of their political order. See how Antigone justifies performing funeral rites for Polynices on the grounds of natural law.

Antonius: Divine law, to be specific.

Podius: She seems to conflate the two. At the very least, she contrasts her version of justice against the version of the tyrant, Creon. Creon is a sort of proto-Schmittian who insists on the distinction between friends and enemies. His method is to deduce authority for the benefit of the city from certain first principles. Not only does he have laws, but he has a rational system behind them. Antigone does not have such complex arguments; she only appeals to the familial bonds being naturally stronger than citizenship. Hers is a much more primal instinct and natural urge. And in many ways was not this the nature of the Greek polis as a whole: a political community whose public demands supersede private—that is, natural and familial—claims?

Antonius: Yes, Antigone says it is in her “nature” to be joined in love, not hate.⁷ So here we have the contrast of law and nature, or nomos versus phusis, where Creon stands for the former, and Antigone for the latter. Interestingly, Confucianism has something to say about the same dilemma. But before I paraphrase the problem, let us entertain an interesting thought experiment. Let us pretend for a moment that we were Richard Hanania. After reading classical Chinese philosophy, we decided to rank all the philosophers in descending order of IQ.

Podius: Ha ha!

Antonius: I think Mencius would go right to the bottom of the pile. And probably Laozi comes next, then Confucius. Whereas the Legalists, Lord Shang and Han Fei, would rank on top.

Podius: What about Zhuangzi?

Antonius: That is the trickiest one—no one can really be sure where he is. It is like that bell curve midwit meme: he is either a genius or very dumb, and that ambiguity is probably his entire point. Given he does his bit so well, and is such an impressive writer, I tend to give him the benefit of doubt and suppose he is very intelligent. But let us return to Antigone’s problem. The reason I think Mencius is low-IQ is because once he was presented with a dilemma similar to hers. A disciple of Mencius asked him what would the legendary sage king Shun do, if his father was found guilty of murder.⁸ Should the sage king punish his father, which violates filial piety or phusis, or should he forgive him, which tarnishes the law or nomos. This is a very real and serious dilemma that every ruler has to face to some extent. Yet Mencius gave the most brain-dead answer possible. He says Shun should give up his power, flee the country, take his father along and go live in a hut by the sea and never bother himself with his official affairs again.

Podius: So, Mencius would be firmly on Antigone’s side, which makes sense. And we all know whose side the Legalists would be on.

Antonius: Indeed, Podius. The Legalists probably would not even need a decree from Creon to support his policy.

Another Oddity of the Greeks

Podius: However, I don’t think Mencius’ answer is brain-dead. He is essentially arguing that family is more important than politics, even when that means giving up a kingdom. And again, the Greeks are perhaps the weird one here, relative not only to the Chinese, but also the Hebrews. For them, family is the source of trouble. Family seems to symbolize disorder, whereas for Confucians, and practically everybody else, family is the source of order.

Antonius: I think you are onto something, Podius. Many Greek poleis have autochthonic origin myths, where they are said to spring from the earth, being all transformed from dragon's teeth or whatnot. In reality, they were probably all related in some way or other, but the city-states insisted on their independence from one another. I think this is symbolic of their detachment from familial or clan relationships: the creation of the polis as a new object of allegiance, a new entity that gives birth to politics. At an abstract level, we could even argue that this is the theme of Aeschylus’ Oresteia: family problems find their solution in the polis.⁹

Podius: This is unsettling, Antonius. How ill-natured is Western civilization, if, at its very roots, it opposes something as natural as the family!

Antonius: The Daoists are famously agnostic when it comes to family too. They don’t value it per se and can even be rather hostile to it.

Podius: Right, but there is something peculiar about Daoist belief. They call their version of detachment and abandonment a return to nature. But why would they call this isolation and frankly, pessimistic outlook to life “natural”? Isn’t it natural to have families instead?

Antonius: You are basically describing the Confucian justification of ritual in the Li Ji—as an appeal to natural human relationships.¹⁰ Perhaps this antagonism against human relationship can help to explain why Daoism evolved into Legalism, which seeks to dismantle family as the fundamental unit of society, and replace it with an strong-arm state instead.¹¹ But the relationship between family and state is the subject worthy of many tomes; let us leave it for another day. It has been a great pleasure as always to discourse with you, Podius.

Podius: Likewise, Antonius my friend.

1. Chapter 51, Water Margin.

2. For example, the landlady Sun Er-niang 孫二娘 (nicknamed “the Yakshini”) sells dumplings made of human flesh; see Chapter 27, Water Margin.

3. Admittedly, this phrase here takes on a specific, non-literal meaning: the most obvious evidence that we are not to take it at face value is that the few women at Liangshan are also included in the ranks of haohan.

4. Chapters 31 and 40, Water Margin.

5. Chapter 4, Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The famous Peking opera scene “Catch and Release of Cao” 捉放曹 is based on the same story, in which the cruelty of Cao is cast in an even more negative light.

6. Hong Xiuquan, the leader of the Taiping Rebellion, claimed to have had visions where he was the son of the Christian God and younger brother of Jesus Christ. He interpreted the vision to direct him of “demon worship”, in the form of Confucianism and Buddhism. The early Taiping movement had a strong iconoclastic element.

7. οὔτοι συνέχθειν, ἀλλὰ συμφιλεῖν ἔφυν. Sophocles, Antigone 523.

8. Mencius, “Jin Xin A 盡心上”. (Bilingual edition)

9. The blood feud of the Argive ruling family is finally resolved in an Athenian tribunal, see Aeschylus, Eumenides.

10. See also, Xunzi “On Rites 禮論” and Sima Qian, “Chapter on Rites 禮書” from the Record of the Grand Historian 史記.

11. The question of Daoism and Legalism is an intriguing one in early Chinese intellectual history; one of most explicit formulations can be found in the Record of the Grand Historian, where Sima Qian traced the genealogy of the ideas of Han Fei to Laozi. Typologically speaking, this may be analogous to Machiavelli’s inheritance from the Epicureans, especially Lucretius. For a more contemporary but more far-fetched example, compare also the rise of post-liberal authoritarianism (the “Dark Enlightenment”) from libertarian or libertarian-adjacent circles.