The Huainanzi and Liu An's Claim to Moral Authority (review)

By building expansively upon previous research while simultaneously contributing certain novel extensions of her own, in The Huainanzi and Liu An's Claim to Moral Authority Griet Vankeerberghen has constructed a uniquely inspired and insightful work. Vankeerberghen's study rests on a revisionist thesis, for she is convinced that the Huainanzi—certainly the most protean, renowned, and yet enigmatic of early or Western Han dynasty (202 B.C.-A.D. 9) texts¹—has been chronically misinterpreted. From this starting point, she develops over the course of her study a convincing set of sometimes elegantly crafted hypotheses, many of which are far-reaching in their implications. But at the center of all her deliberations— limning them even as it grounds them all—is the whole question of what ultimately constitutes the moral.

Vankeerberghen begins her book by recapitulating the two starkly dissimilar ways in which earlier scholars have interpreted the Huainanzi. One school of thought contends that Liu An, the alleged traitor-king of Huainan, at whose court the Huainanzi was written and edited, was distinguished mainly by his notoriety. The contention is that he was the last significant antagonist and victim in a continuous political power struggle waged since the beginning of the dynasty between the Han imperial court and the numerous consanguineous royal houses that it had originally enfeoffed (pp. 2-3). According to this first interpretation, the Huainanzi is foremost a textual expression of—and manual for navigating—this internecine jockeying for power. A second and contrasting interpretation is that the differences between the imperial court at Chang'an and the court at Huainan that led to the vilification of Liu An as a plotter of usurpation and to his consequent death by suicide in 123-122 B.C. were primarily differences of philosophical outlook. According to this latter view, Liu An was either justifiably or falsely singled out by the imperial court for the purpose of making him an ideological example. Scholars with deathly opposed points of view either legitimately prosecuted or deviously scapegoated Liu An precisely because the rival Daoist and Huang-Lao beliefs emerging at his court threatened to subvert the "official" Confucian ideology that was only in recent ascendancy at the court of Emperor Wu (r. 141-87 B.C.) (ibid.).

Finding this second interpretation too fraught with problems to be supportable, Vankeerberghen sides emphatically with the first interpretation. However, she also finds even this basically sound interpretation itself deficient, and it is her perceptive discernment of its deficiencies that leads her to make the largest three claims of her book. The first of these claims is that the authors of the Huainanzi text explicitly intended for it to be practically—rather than merely theoretically—applied politically. The second is that it is more enlightening to think of the text as broadly eclectic instead of restrictively Daoist and/or Huang-Lao in nature. Third and finally, Vankeerberghen contends that, despite being the work of many hands and thus comprising an anthology, the text "presents a single, coherent argument" (p. 3).² Vankeerberghen acknowledges that these premises of hers depart from the customary conventions of how the Huainanzi should be understood, but, once committed to them, to her credit, she does not shrink from the task of mounting the most compelling arguments she can in order to substantiate them.

Vankeerberghen offers a study that was designed to exhibit a balance between two different but basically interrelated emphases, with its six chapters equally divided between focused analyses of the political context of the Huainanzi (chapters 1, 2, and 3) and the philosophical underpinnings of the Huainanzi text itself (chapters 4, 5, and 6). For the most part, the book profits admirably from this arrangement. Chapter . is especially definitive, for it deftly establishes the intellectual milieu in which the discourse presented in the Huainanzi evolved. Vankeerberghen exposes us...