Between History and Philosophy: Anecdotes in Early China by Paul van Els; Sarah A. Queen

Author:Paul van Els; Sarah A. Queen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2017-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

6

From Villains Outwitted to Pedants Out-Wrangled

The Function of Anecdotes in the Shifting Rhetoric of the Han Feizi

HENG DU1

Anecdotes devoted to Confucius 孔子 (551–479 BCE) populate many chapters of the Han Feizi 韓非子 (Master Han Fei), but they paint a confusing picture. In this text attributed to Han Fei 韓非 (ca. 280–233 BCE), Confucius is at times admired as an exemplary figure,2 while at other times he is discredited, if not fully cast off into groups blamed for society’s ills.3 How might we account for such disparate and conflicting assessments? Contradictions in early Chinese texts are too ubiquitous to be a cause for surprise, but the jury is still out on how best to interpret them. In his companion to the Han Feizi, for instance, Paul R. Goldin discusses a list of possible explanations, such as multiple authorship, evolving philosophical positions, or a preference for pragmatism over philosophical consistency.4 Goldin’s list suggests that this is a complex problem that must be considered from many angles. My chapter, at the broadest level, draws attention to one neglected piece of this intricate puzzle, namely the patterns and systematic distributions underlying the apparent incongruence of early texts. I will demonstrate that—similar to Sarah A. Queen’s findings in her study of Confucius in the Huainanzi 淮南子 (The Master of Huainan)—Confucius’s metamorphosis in the Han Feizi is not random.5 Not only can we identify patterns among the Confucius anecdotes, these patterns can in turn help us map larger shifts throughout this text.

Stories involving Confucius, the most ubiquitous figure in the Han Feizi, are concentrated in the “anecdote chapters.”6 Clustered in the middle of the compilation, these chapters, with titles such as “Chushuo” 儲說 (Collection of Illustrative Examples), consist mostly of series of anecdotes. Even though they occupy over half of the compilation, they received far less scholarly attention than the more essay-like chapters. Such neglect partly stems from the reception history of the Han Feizi and other so-called Masters texts (zishu 子書) from the Warring States Period 戰國 (453–221 BCE), a genre of large textual compilations that began as writings attributed to various experts and teachers. Modern scholarship often sees these texts as “philosophy,” and examines them through the prism of a discursive tradition that tends to relegate narratives to an auxiliary role, as mere exempla (stories told to illustrate a moral point) supporting philosophical argumentation.7 In contrast, it is exactly narrative that takes center stage in the anecdote chapters of the Han Feizi. As heterogeneous conglomerates, they often obscure or even subvert any semblance of philosophical consistency.

Yet, as Christian Schwermann argues in his contribution to this volume, once we approach these anecdote collections on their own terms, we begin to recognize that they often function as “argumentative elements,” whose complexity far exceeds simple illustrations. Confucius’s predominance in the anecdote chapters already suggests the problem with reading all of these short narratives as exempla. In chapter 50, Confucius is identified as the head of the Han Feizi’s chief rival, the much-reviled Confucians (ruzhe 儒者, a term also translated as Classicists).

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