Mind and Body in early China: Beyond Orientalism and the Myth of Holism by Edward Slingerland

In this book, Edward Slingerland criticizes and rejects a pervasive and widely accepted viewpoint in Chinese philosophy: holism. Simply speaking, holism is a non-discrete and non-analytic pattern of thinking that avoids the adoption of mutually exclusive and dualistic concepts such as mind-body, theory-practice, reason-emotion, and macrocosm-microcosm typically found in many Western philosophical theories. In the context of Chinese philosophy, it is understood as an interpretational framework where Chinese philosophy is characterized as a fundamentally and essentially non-dualistic system of thought. According to Slingerland, holism is not simply one of the characteristics of Chinese philosophy but a deeply rooted and broadly dispersed bias in comparative studies of Chinese culture, society, politics, religion, and psychology. He also believes that holism has a historical and intellectual root in the orientalism of modern Europe with its romantic obsession with exotic cultures of the East. Recently, holism gained its sustaining power from postmodernist and cultural constructivist interpretations of Chinese philosophy, where the incommensurable uniqueness or the alleged superiority of Chinese tradition is explained and emphasized from the perspective of cultural relativity and radical otherness. He sees holism at the foundation of this neo-orientalist approach. His goal, in this book, is to demonstrate that holism and its orientalist foundation are a wrong and biased way of understanding and studying Chinese philosophy, specifically early (pre-Qin) Chinese philosophy.

Slingerland's critical journey to holism and orientalism consists of three major routes. He analyzes (a) mind body dualism (b) in early Chinese texts (c) by utilizing traditional (i.e., textual interpretation), digital (i.e., quantitative analysis), and interdisciplinary (i.e., cognitive analysis) methodologies. He argues, contrary to what some comparative philosophers and sinologists believe, that mind body dualism is a prevalent and intuitive understanding of human beings in early Chinese philosophy. He demonstrates, through his textual and cognitive analyses of how people perceive the mind, soul, spirit, and supernatural agent, that this dualistic thinking is a common (cross-cultural) and intuitive (spontaneous) way of understanding the relation between the mind and the body. The book provides not only the usual content, i.e., philosophical and hermeneutical analyses of mind body dualism in early Chinese philosophy, but also methodological reflection on the adoption of digital methodology in the humanities and meta-philosophical discussion on comparative studies. Overall, it develops a unique interdisciplinary approach to Chinese philosophy to challenge and criticize what Slingerland believes are the ill-conceived and blindly followed ideas of holism and orientalism.

There are seven chapters in this book. The first chapter explains the nature of the myth of holism from the perspective of neo-orientalism. According to him, holism is not just a style of interpretation. It is a myth, something that many people believe without full justification. Like a Kuhnian paradigm, holism is widely accepted and discussed in Chinese philosophy but it has not been fully and rationally scrutinized. Slingerland wants to see if there is any ground to believe in a strong holistic tendency in Chinese philosophy. Specifically, he focuses on how holism affects our understanding of mind body dualism in early Chinese philosophy. He points out that many comparative philosophers and sinologists believe falsely or blindly that early Chinese philosophers have no conceptions of the individual self, disembodied soul, and afterlife because Chinese conceptions of the mind (xin 心) are radically different from those of Western philosophy. In the following chapters, he demonstrates that a strong mind body holism is a textually and cognitively inappropriate and incorrect way of understanding early Chinese philosophy. There are two general paths in Slingerland's arguments against holism: the textual argument and the cognitive argument. The textual argument consists of qualitative and quantitative analyses of early Chinese texts developed in the chapters two, three, and four. The cognitive argument in the chapter five provides empirical analyses of mind body dualism as a shared cognitive commonality of human psychology.

In the second and the third chapters, Slingerland provides his qualitative analyses to show that mind body holism is the exception rather than the rule in early Chinese philosophy. The early Chinese have clear conceptions of the spirit (shen 神), the soul (hun 魂, po 魄) and the afterlife that are distinguished from those of the physical body and the visible world (chapter 2). They thought that the mind (xin 心) is different from the body. Many early Chinese texts show that xin represents personal identity, psychological interior, moral agency, and cognitive deliberation (chapter 3). The fourth chapter provides quantitative analyses by utilizing digital methodologies such as collocation analysis, hierarchical cluster analysis, and topic modeling to demonstrate the strong and solid presence of mind body dualism in early Chinese texts. Slingerland also discusses the significance of the digital humanities in textual interpretation.

The fifth chapter discusses weak mind body dualism as a universal cognitive framework of folk notions of the person/agent and behavior/action. Unlike strong dualism which does not allow any mind body interaction, weak dualism allows limited overlap or interaction between the two. Slingerland believes that weak dualism reflects our deeply rooted, common intuition of the distinction and the interaction between the mind and the body. The sixth chapter discusses broad issues of textual interpretation in comparative philosophy from the perspective of naturalistic hermeneutics. He points out that strong dualism of the West and strong holism of the East are the two sides of the same coin minted by cultural essentialism, i.e., the obsessive search for the unity and the eternity of culture. As the completely disembodied and fully non-physical mind is a strange, unintuitive, and implausible notion of the mind in the West, the fully integrative mind-body complex is an equally inappropriate notion in the East. Once one realizes that there is a common cognitive foundation (i.e., weak dualism), one can understand that strong dualism and strong holism are equally deviant systems of thinking that do not explain the common folk notion of the mind. Different cultures and traditions, of course, develop and emphasize their own ways of understanding and distinguishing the mind and the body but they are only different variations (with different degrees and shades) of the same underlying foundation of weak dualism. The existence of common biological and cognitive foundations across different cultures and societies explains and promises the possibility of interpreting remote and foreign traditions, despite their seemingly incommensurable "otherness." In the last chapter, therefore, he concludes "Our embodied commonality, including a shared genetic heritage and fairly stable physical world, functions as a kind of conceptual bridge, providing us with access to the minds of those from other times and cultures…and constraints upon our hermeneutical activities" (p. 311). This naturalized approach to hermeneutics suggests that one should consider embodied commonalities such as the shared cognitive constraint of weak dualism in one's interpretation of early Chinese philosophy.

Slingerland does an effective job of providing relevant analyses and quantitative evidence in weakening or debunking the myth of holism. Specifically, his three way (qualitative, quantitative, and cognitive) criticism of holism is very powerful. Additionally, his vision and explanation of the synergistic cooperation between the humanities and empirical sciences are inspiring. Ever since W.V.O. Quine proposed innovating ideas of naturalized epistemology, diverse ways of integrating science and philosophy have been developed. However, the naturalization is often misunderstood as a reductionism or scientism that can threaten the integrity of the humanities. In this book, however, Slingerland presents an inspiring example of naturalized Chinese philosophy along the lines of cognitive science and the digital humanities without reducing everything into numbers and neuronal firings. Specifically, he is optimistic about the benefit for both science and the humanities that comes out of interdisciplinary and cooperative academic ventures (p. 20-21).

I have two comments on Slingerland's criticism of holism. First, to understand his arguments clearly, it is important to distinguish different forms of holism. The main target of his criticism is strong holism. There are, however, weak versions of holism that he believes acceptable and sustainable in certain contexts of philosophical discussion. To identify these weak positions of holism, consider, for example, the "slide" from "difference to différence," i.e., the unjustified derivation of a strong holistic statement from peculiar characteristics of Chinese philosophy (p. 272). Slingerland lists two such examples. According to him, a logical gap exists between (A-1) "A large part of who "we" are is defined by social roles, and we are essentially dependent on others," and (B-1) "There is no self, nature, person, or internal character" (p. 272).¹ The same kind of gap exists between (A-2) "Early Chinese did not embrace Descartes' view of a completely disembodied self," and (B-2) "They are blissfully free of dualism" (p.272).² When the gap is filled with the essentialist generalization, strong holism emerges as a uniquely incommensurable element of Chinese philosophy. That is, the slide is a process where the difference (weak holism) observed in A-1 and A-2 becomes différence (strong holism) in B-1 and B-2.

Interestingly, the holistic tendency of Chinese philosophy can be observed in some passages of early Chinese texts such as the Mencius 2A2. Slingerland does not deny it (p. 102). As long as passages of this type are not used to support strong holism through the essentialist generalization process such as the slide (p. 272), they can be understood and accepted as part of a prescriptive, imposed or aspirational philosophical view of an elite philosopher who wants to introduce and explain an alternative or enlightening understanding of reality. Similarly, more nuanced views of holism (non-essentialist, weak holism) can be found in the works of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (in his later writings), Marcel Granet, Joseph Needham, and A. C. Graham (p. 24) and these weak versions of holism should be carefully identified to understand Slingerland's criticism of holism. Therefore, "rejection of holism to overcome orientalism" is an overly simplistic summary of Slingerland's book because there are different shades and degrees of holism and some of them can survive his criticism. For example, the following positions are discussed in this book.

1. (1). Holism as a Prescriptive, Imposed, and Aspirational Principle: Holism is a prescriptive and imposed view of elite intellectuals or philosophers. It may not reflect the intuitive and spontaneous views of ordinary people.

2. (2). Holism as a Descriptive, Intuitive, Ordinary, and Cognitive Principle: Holism is a naturally developed cognitive pattern of ordinary human beings.

3. (3). Strong Holism: Holism is an essential and eternal nature of Chinese culture and philosophy.

4. (4). Weak Holism: Holism is a peculiar (i.e., non-discrete, non-analytic) philosophical tendency observed in some early Chinese texts but it is not necessarily an essential or eternal nature of Chinese philosophy.

5. (5). Strong (Cartesian) Dualism: The mind and the body are two distinct and qualitatively different categories or substances that exist independently and exclusive of each other.

6. (6). Weak Dualism: The mind and the body are two distinct and qualitatively different categories or substances but, sometimes, they interact and partially overlap with each other.

I think Slingerland accepts (1), (4), and supports (6) but he rejects (2), (3), and (5) in his interpretation of early Chinese philosophy. This clarification, I believe, will help many readers to understand the scope of his criticism of holism.

Second, Slingerland believes that Theory of Mind (ToM) is critically important in weak dualism (p. 221-223) because the qualitative distinction between the mind and the body cannot be made without some understanding of the nature and the function of the mind. He explains that ToM includes the understanding of others' volitional states (intentions and desires) (p. 225-226). However, Simon Baron-Cohen, a renowned autism expert whose works Slingerland cites (p. 221), believes that detecting and recognizing others' goal-directed states (through the Intentionality Detector, ID) and perceptual states (through the Eye Detection Device, EDD), although they are all related to and included in our common understanding of the mind, are not, strictly speaking, the proper part of ToMM (Theory of Mind Mechanism).³ It seems that Slingerland's ToM is different from Baron-Cohen's. This could be a matter of semantic difference or theoretical preference but it raises two issues in the context of weak dualism.

Baron-Cohen reports that autistic children who have compromised or impaired ability of ToM can understand others' volitional and perceptual mental states (i.e., intentions, desires, and sights).⁴ If autistic individuals can detect, recognize and understand others' volitional and perceptual states without the fully functioning ToM, ToM is not a necessary condition but perhaps a sufficient condition of mind body dualism. Undoubtedly, ToM is an important cognitive ability that underlies mind body dualism, but the relation between ToM and dualism can be specified further to explain autistic individuals' limited but partially capable ability to understand others' volitional and perceptual states. In addition, Slingerland argues that ToM is essentially related to the religious experience of supernatural agents, afterlife, soul, and promiscuous teleology (p. 248-262). This raises skepticism about the autistic individuals' belief in afterlife, soul, and supernatural agents. Because autistic individuals have impaired ToM ability, they may have major difficulty in imagining or believing in bodiless agents or divine beings. However, it has been reported by several psychologists and religious scholars that autism and religiosity have no confirmed relationship and, under certain contexts, autistic individuals may entertain thoughts on afterlife or soul, perhaps in a more focused and concentrated fashion.⁵ Although religious experience can be cultivated with cold cognition, i.e., deliberate thinking and effort (p. 261), it is perhaps possible for some autistic individuals to recognize a divine agent and to imagine his or her intention and volition with such psychological mechanisms as ID or EDD without fully developed ToM or fully deliberate effort. That is, the relation between ToM and religious experience should be studied and analyzed further to find necessary cognitive conditions of weak dualism.

These are just questions about the cognitive details of Slingerland's analysis of dualism, which, I don't believe, affect his overall argument against holism. Beyond these details, I think the book will draw broad attention and stimulate further discussion not only on holism but also on other related issues such as orientalism, cultural constructivism, and dualism in comparative Chinese philosophy. I think studies in Chinese philosophy and religion would benefit greatly from his broadly interdisciplinary and carefully balanced discussion of both the difference and the similarity of the East and the West without falling into strong, exclusive, and exotic forms of radical holism, dualism, and the incommensurable otherness. Therefore, this book is a stimulating contribution to the fields of Chinese philosophy and comparative studies of religion and culture. As Benjamin Schwartz states and Slingerland quotes (p. 324, n15), "difference is ever present but it is not ultimately inaccessible."⁶