1.1 Puett丨Notions of cosmology in ancient China and how the West got it wrong

Hello, my name is Michael Puett. I teach at Harvard University, and I'm a scholar of Chinese history, but explicitly from a comparative perspective. And I'm extremely interested in exploring how we should understand world history if we think comparatively. 

The goal of this segment will be to explore the cosmology of early China.The cosmological ideas that arose in early China have been seen by many scholars, including Hegel and Max Weber, as a key factor that inhibited in China the later emergence of modernity. As we will see, however, such scholarly accounts are extremely misleading. In contrast to such views, we will explore the emergence of cosmological ideas in China within a larger comparative perspective.

As we will see, such a comparative perspective will help us to understand cosmological ideas in China in a more convincing way, and will also help us to rethink some of the ideas concerning Chinese history developed by figures like Hagel and Weber. 

And I will be speaking today about notions of cosmology in early China. Let me say a few words about this idea of cosmology, which might at first glance sound a little odd. So, what we mean by “cosmology” are the ways that people in a given civilization think about the world around them, think about what inhabits the world around them, think about things like humans, obviously, but also things like gods, divinities, spirit, and ghosts, and also why these conceptions play out in significant ways in history. In itself, we will see this is going to be an exciting topic. It will certainly open up lots of intriguing questions for understandings of early China.

It is also intriguing for a larger reason as well. So, the study of cosmology in early China has had a varied and somewhat problematic history over the past two decades. Indeed, the very concept itself is a Western concept. It emerged as an attempt in the West by Western scholars to explore why, in their opinion, modernity had arisen in the West and why, in their opinion, modernity did not arise anywhere else. As we will see later, this is a very problematic approach to thinking about world history, and I will argue strongly, it is a false approach for thinking about China. Nonetheless, it has played a very significant role in conceptions about China.

And very briefly, that argument has gone along the following lines: the view has been that in China, and kind of uniquely in China, the argument goes, you see the emergence in the early period of China of a set of conceptions about the cosmos that were, on the one hand, very exciting and powerful for the emergence of the entire philosophical tradition in China, but that were also, according to these views, restrictive. Basically the view of several scholars in 19th and 20th centuries Europe and America went along the following lines: the claim was that the Chinese assumed a cosmology that was inherently harmonious. That larger cosmology because it was harmonious required humans simply to follow the patterns of that larger cosmos, and if they followed the patterns of that cosmos properly, they would lead a proper and fulfilled life. 

Moreover, there were seen to be things like spirits and ancestors in this cosmos, and they were part of this generally harmonious vision. So, the ancestors were inherently benevolent and supportive as long as we were benevolent and supportive of them. The spirits were generally benevolent and played a role in maintaining the harmonious cosmos. And both these ancestors and spirits therefore played a role in ensuring that we humans lived according to the proper patterns of the cosmos. According to this view, it led to what many thinkers have claimed to be an optimistic vision of the world where if they did well in life and properly follow these harmonious patterns, they would lead a happy and fulfilled life.

And that generally optimistic viewpoint that good behavior led to immediately good results led to the fluorescence of Chinese civilization. The further argument, however, given by many, many Western scholars was that despite all of that, the fact that, according to them, the Chinese believed in this harmonious cosmos meant that they never tried to understand the world. They never tried to change the world. They therefore never created science, and they never created a civilization aimed at remaking the world around them such that it could be improved, helped in some way. It led, in other words, to a belief among the Chinese that we should simply live within a pre-given harmonious order.

And therefore the argument continues: you never have the emergence of science and modernity in China. I've been speaking generally about a few scholars. Let me give a couple of important names to this larger discussion. So, versions of this argument begin in even the early 19th century with figures like Hegel, who literally argued all that I've mentioned. Perhaps the most influential is a figure named Max Weber, who very famously argued all that I just mentioned about China and then argued as the key contrast that in the West, on the contrary, you had the development through Protestantism of a kind of anxiety between a transcendent deity and humans. 

And out of that anxiety came a drive to remake the world, to recreate the world, out of which, according to Weber, came things like science, capitalism, and ultimately modernity. So, in contrast to the tension-filled cosmology of the West, China, from this argument, lived within a harmonious conception that ultimately restricted them. Amazingly, versions of this narrative continue even today. So, Max Weber was writing well over a century ago, and yet if you look at the popular press in the West, you will still see versions of this exact same argument. It has been, in short, from Hegel to the present day, a consistent view in the West of how to read China. 

This is particularly problematic for us because it is, number one, empirically wrong. This is a wrong conception of notions of the cosmos and of spirits and humanity in ancient China. It is also wrong because it is based upon a conception of history that has led to a severe misunderstanding of Chinese civilization in general. So, our goal in this course will be to rethink all of these issues. We will begin by exploring notions of the world, of the larger cosmos, of ancestors, spirits, and divinities in early China, and we will do so in a way that I hope will shed light on what is really going on with these conceptions, conceptions, as we will see, that operated radically differently from the ways they've often been portrayed in Western understandings.

We also, however, will do this from a comparative perspective. We will argue that the kinds of comparisons explicit in the case of a Hegel or a Weber, or even implicit with Western conceptions of China in general, have been based upon these comparative assumptions about how to read world history with its emergence into the modern world. And part of what is going to be intriguing as we study these notions of cosmology is we will begin to glimpse a better way of thinking comparatively about the emergence of civilizations. In short, we will not simply be exploring different conceptions of the cosmos in China than have often been portrayed, but we will try from that viewpoint to re-articulate what it would mean to really understand different civilizations, to understand different civilizations trajectories, and we will see to, ultimately, rethink the very, very dangerous, I would even say misguided, understandings of China throughout these past 3,000 years, very much up to and including the emergence of so-called “modernity.” 

This will be our goal, and to undertake this, the way we will do so is as follows: we will look chronologically at early China, beginning quite a long time ago, so beginning some three millennia ago, a period when, as we will see, notions of spirits and ancestors and even the world at large are really quite comparable to what you see elsewhere in Eurasia. And then we will explore how these ideas altered and changed, why they changed as they did, maintaining a comparative focus, and then using this to help us hopefully explore what really became important to China, why these ideas have been so misinterpreted and misunderstood in the West, and how we can hopefully better understand them in a more careful, historical, and yes, comparative context. Thank you very much for joining us. And I very much look forward to discussing all of these issues with you.