On the Epistemology of the Senses in Early Chinese Thought (review)

In On the Epistemology of the Senses in Early Chinese Thought Jane Geaney attempts an analysis of the epistemological role of the senses in philosophical texts of the Warring States period1 in an examination that identifies vision, hearing, and the heartmind as the primary players in sensorial epistemology. The main challenge for her is that the primary questions in the Western epistemology of perception, namely that of the gap between appearance and reality on the perceptual side and the justification of beliefs on the epistemological side, are absent in Chinese thought, leaving Geaney the task of uncovering lines of thinking involving the senses and their relationship to knowledge. This challenge is overcome first by devoting a chapter to identifying the roles of the major senses involved in thought and action and second by identifying their mental integration in a subsequent chapter. When this task is completed, Geaney turns to a discussion of how her conclusions contribute to an understanding of a common issue in the thought of the Warring States period, namely that of names and their "filling." As a final chapter, she offers new interpretations of the epistemological foundations of four of her six early sources.

By surveying several early texts, Geaney provides broad evidence that knowledge in the Warring States was often stated in terms of, and even constituted by, hearing and seeing. She finds that this is true to the point of descriptions falling naturally into aural/visual pairs. A familiar line from the Lunyu (1:3) demonstrates the kind of evidence she provides: (It is rare for clever speech and an insinuating look to accompany benevolence). Considering that hearing and vision are a human being's most useful senses for picking up cues about the environment, it is not surprising that they are prominent in these texts, but it is rather striking to see this pattern of aural/visual pairing appear in passage after passage of the Mozi, Mengzi, Zhuangzi, and Xunzi under Geaney's fine-toothed comb. Checking the Laozi myself, I see that this pattern does continue with remarkable regularity, although not as a hard and fast rule.

With this emphasis on perception as knowledge, one would presume that, epistemologically speaking, the Warring States Chinese were naive realists. Geaney warns us against this presumption by noting that the conception of realism in the West arose in opposition to the notion of idealism and that neither of these theories, with their concomitant assumptions and arguments, is relevant to the thought of this period. Geaney suggests, instead, that the Chinese were realists who also took backgrounds and other hermeneutic connections into account in the creation and organization of knowledge, viewing the world by the important method of discrimination (bian). This claim of Geaney's, however, is presented as an opening remark and deserves more development and support than she provides.

In the very social philosophy of the times, the significance of knowledge garnered through hearing and seeing lies in judging the speech and actions of others. Geaney finds that this type of judgment often involves considerations of hearing speech and seeing actions, with the actions often held up as evidence for or against the reliability of speech.

Another of Geaney's important claims is that the heartmind has a triple role: (1) it verifies knowledge of the senses, (2) it stands as ruler of the senses, and (3) it is depicted itself as a sense. Each of these aspects of the heartmind is supported with textual evidence.

How do the implications of Geaney's theories play out in the texts themselves? Geaney takes her theory of aural/visual pairing and puts it to use in analyzing the relationship of ming and shi. She claims that this itself is an aural/ visual pair, ming being the aural element and shi the visual. This visual dimension of shi implies...