Between Disaster, Punishment, and Blame: The Semantic Field of Guilt in Early Chinese Texts by Thomas Crone (review)

This is an excellent book on an important topic, generally careful in its methodology and astute in its observations. This review will first summarize its arguments, as I understand them, and then try to push the arguments in constructive directions. In the process, I will offer a few minor objections, quibbles really, again in the hopes of moving this particular conversation along the useful tracks the author has already established.

The book opens with Crone’s findings: (1) that there are a range of words, some apparently older and some newer, to deal with the feelings we translate as “shame or guilt”;(2) that by current consensus Ruth Benedict’s division of cultures into “guilt” versus “shame” cultures does not accurately reflect the evolving accounts in different cultures for these feelings; (3) that the “language of blame” is technical language, used mainly by professionals who have been trained in its connotations; and (4) that the language of “disasters” (including solar eclipses and bodily ill-health) is closely tied to the language of retribution or bao 報 in concept clusters or semantic fields, so that talk of various disasters became part and parcel of talk about the moral pain occasioned by wrongdoing, intentional or not. Where Crone is critical of earlier scholarship, he is respectful and balanced, as with his criticism of Robert Eno (pp. 78–80). He is discerning, as when he discusses breaches of ritual “etiquette” as “not necessarily [breaches of] ethics” (though here I would have welcomed a more extended discussion).

Wisely, the author typically eschews talk of broad cultural shifts taking place in history (p. 14), given the difficulty of definitively dating many early Classics and masterworks, the lack of context for so many excavated materials, not to mention unprovenanced materials, and the obstructions presented by our capital-centered narratives to those of us who would reconstruct what is happening elsewhere. Still, Crone’s arrangement of sources occasionally implies a stronger connection than might be warranted, given the leaps over many centuries he makes in the passages he translates. It seems that he presumes that the linguistic range of the words he studies changes remarkably little over long spans of time, until he begins to distinguish the “moralizing” constructions from premoral (p. 126), a worrisome imposition on his sources. He is on firmer ground when he attributes the continual clash between claims, and the consequent elaboration and systematization of theories about moral pain, to attempts to resolve those tensions (pp. 39–40), usually by professionals liable to be summoned to high places to explain away the proliferating discrepancies. That elaboration is on view in the omen theories, which by and large the author chooses not to use in evidence, although they would support and further enrich many of his ideas.

Now onto specifics: The vocabulary words studied by the author suggest awareness of some person or persons having committed an offense. But does that mean, necessarily, that the awareness is always “inner,” insofar as I can deem myself to have committed an offense when the assembled party shrinks back in horror or shuns me in future meetings. This question is worth asking, if only because of Fingarette’s contention that the Analects (pace Analects 12/11) does not tend to speak often of internal deliberations. (Xunzi’s use of the nei sheng 內省, like that in the Liji or Zhuangzi, may suggest deliberation conducted out of public sight, but hardly the internal monologues of the Hamlet type, since it frees the junzi from anxiety about external threats.) Crone seems to invoke inner examination and hence inner turmoil, but Li Guang’s belated response to his lack of career advancement—his musings concerning whether he killed too many innocent people—hardly bespeaks an inner conscience (Shiji 190.2837-38); he regrets his actions, but only to the degree that he thinks the promotions he deserved were stalled. And yet Sima Qian celebrates...