Mind and Body in Early China: Beyond Orientalism and the Myth of Holism.

• Author: Smith, Hilary A.

Mind and Body in Early China: Beyond Orientalism and the Myth of Holism. By EDWARD SLINGER-LAND. New York: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2019. Pp. xiv + 385. $35.

Something is rotten in the state of Sinology, and Edward Slingerland aims to clean it up. The odor, according to Slingerland's Mind and Body in Early China, is Orientalism, and it is coming from scholarly accounts of early Chinese thought that emphasize its holism as compared with "Western" thought. These accounts may have different foci. He identifies a number of contrasts that anyone who has studied or taught about premodern China has encountered: the unique nature of written Chinese compelled a less mediated way of thinking about the world; Chinese thought was intrinsically more metaphorical than logical or analytical; Chinese thinkers were not interested in, or did not believe in, a transcendent creator or a reality that differed from appearances; Chinese thinkers cared only about resonance and not about mechanical causation; Chinese texts concentrate on processes, not fixed essences. All of them present Chinese ideas as incommensurable with, and superior to, reductionistic, mechanistic, alienating Western philosophy.

Slingerland sees this as neo-Orientalism. It differs from the negative forms of Orientalism that dominated the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--the notion that the Chinese were incapable of rational or scientific thought, for example. But he argues that this positive form of Orientalism is no less misleading or exoticizing than the old kind, and we need to root it out. The introduction and conclusion, along with the first and last chapters, lay out this broader argument and constitute about a third of the book.

The rest of Mind and Body in Early China aims to undermine one particular incarnation of holism claims: the idea that Chinese thinkers didn't distinguish between body and mind, but saw people as an indivisible, organic whole encompassing both mind and body. Slingerland calls this "strong mind-body holism." He argues that although early Chinese literati did not express anything like Cartesian substance dualism, in which the mind is a completely separate substance from the body and not subject to the physical laws that bind the latter, their work does reveal a "'weak' dualism." "Weak" mind-body dualism sees "mind and body as somehow qualitatively distinct and in at least potential tension," but also acknowledges that body and mind interact (p. 8). Chapters 2 through 5, which constitute the core of the book, explore four different types of evidence that Slingerland sees as relevant to proving that early Chinese thinkers were "weak" mind-body dualists.

These different types of evidence make Mind and Body in Early China distinctive. Chapters 2 and 3 deal with traditional sources in a typical way, interpreting archaeological artifacts and passages from pre-Han texts. But chapter 4 applies to the mind/body question digital humanities tools such as online concordances, team-based qualitative coding, collocation analysis through Mutual Information (MI) and T-scores, hierarchical cluster analysis, and topic modeling. And chapter 5 roams beyond primary sources altogether to explore what cognitive science is teaching us about how humans today perceive the world. Slingerland, who in an earlier book expounded on What Science Offers the Humanities (2008), here argues that Sinologists should pay attention to such scientific evidence because it can help us understand universal parameters of human perception and can prevent us from indulging in absurd readings of ancient sources. As he puts it, "any responsible hermeneutic journey into a text or artifact from another culture must... start from the basic assumption that body-mind systems in, say, the Warring States region of Chu, emerged into the world with much of the same factory-installed cognitive equipment possessed by, say, modern Vancouver-based body-mind systems" (p. 307). The past is a foreign country, in other words, but it is not another planet.

There is a lot to appreciate in Slingerland's book. The overall argument--that "it is not all up for grabs" (p. 311)--is compelling. Being alert to human universals is not facile common sense; it is in large part what makes historical work meaningful. Discovering how people with essentially the "same factory-installed cognitive equipment" managed under very different social, economic, and political circumstances to make different sense of the world is at the center of much humanistic research. And some of the examples Slingerland highlights from other scholars' work do seem unnecessarily exoticizing: Roger Ames's translation of xin as "bodyheartminding" (quoted on p. 289) or Chun-Chieh Huang's translation of shi [phrase omitted] as...