Рецензия на монографию Кобзева А.И.

Kobzev, A.I., "The Teaching About Symbols and Num­bers in Classical Chinese Philosophy", Nauka, Vostochnaya Literatura Publishers, Moscow, 1993, 432 pp.
 
Few people would wish to dispute the significance of comprehending traditional Chi­nese philosophy for understand­ing Chinese culture as a whole. Yet the question one has to ask oneself in that case is how deep our knowledge of classical Chi­nese philosophy does go and how adequate our reading of this tradition can be.
 
The book by A.I. Kobzev offers to the reader an all-round study of the logical and methodological basis of philosophic and scientific learning as it took shape in the course of the spiritual tradition develop­ment in China. The appearance of this comprehensive study of Old Chinese logic and method­ology (or, to use the author's terms, of protologic and nu­merology) may be said to con­stitute an essential logical stage in the development of historical and philosophical Sinology in this country. While for a re­search tradition to form it is necessary to look into the views of individual thinkers, examine individual texts and build up a "critical mass" of translations, the next phase implies a pro­found analysis of the issues connected with the category and notional apparatus and its philosophical charge (exem­plified by A.I. Kobzev's book "The Teaching of Wang Yangming and Classical Chi­nese Philosophy", Moscow, 1983), and that is followed by a turn towards methodology and metatheory.
 
As a theoretical pre­requisite for his present re­search, A.I. Kobzev used V.S. Spirin's study of a special structural textological method applied to the analysis of Chi­nese texts which was further elaborated by several Russian Sinologists. The author de­scribes the method as "basically a way of singling out and ana­lysing the nonlinear (two-dimensional, as a rule, but pos­sibly also three-dimensional) structure of a canonical, or canon-congruous, text with a theory pertinent semantics of its own which constitutes an inalienable component of the given work's general contents" (p. 11). The book focuses on the study of the conceptual and methodological basis of these structures treated within the framework of the numerological "teaching about symbols and images" (xiang shu zhi xue).
 
The book examines three types of objects that make up, according to the author, the foundations of Chi­nese numerology.   They are geometrical shapes or "symbols" represented by the trigrams and hexagrams of "The Book of Change"; "numbers" found in the digital diagrams "he tu" and "luo shu"; "ontological hypostases" of the "symbols" and "nu­mbers" expressed in character signs — the "yin-yang" binary and the "five elements" (wu xing) (see: pp. 1, 339-340). The author's opinion is that these "symbols" and "numbers" are the result of a formal combinatorial analysis, act as a type of variables allowing for different content interpretations, and combine to form complete lin­ear sequences and spatial pat­terns, i.e., graphic schemes of a higher order, with the help of rigidly formalised procedures (pp. 339-340), whereas the numerological methodology that relied on them used to have a fairly high degree of formality, formalisation and universality.
 
What I would like to emphasise in particular is that although the book's main con­tents are devoted to the issues of philosophical methodology, the universality of numerology in Chinese culture renders this work interesting to a very wide range of Sinologist readers, all those who go in for a non-philosophical text analysis, or study material monuments of ancient culture. The method of structure and text analyses, as applied to monuments of Chi­nese culture, has been devel­oped and successfully used by numerous  scholars in this country, which can be seen, for example, in the records of the Society and the State in China theoretical conference made over the last 15 years. The book contains a profound theoretical analysis of not only the numerological  "teaching about symbols and numbers", but also of   protologic,   an alternative trend in the Old Chinese philo­sophical methodology developed by the later Maoists, the school of  names  and  Xun  zi. The author is critical of the term "Chinese  logic",  pointing out that   these  structures possess certain features which make it impossible to describe them as logic in the proper sense of the word (such as the absence of logical formalisation, orientation towards eristic problems, strong dependence of the form of in­ference on the language form of the utterance and its compo­nent terms, etc.). Whereas in terms of theory the numerology-protologic alternative has a cultural analogue of Pythagoreanism    versus Aristotelian logic, respectively, in the his­tory of West European philoso­phy, in terms of concrete his­tory the ways of the two civilisations have diverged in com­pletely   opposite   directions — Pythagorean    numerology in Europe has become a curio of the thinking of the past, while in China the "teaching about symbols and numbers" based on   Confucian   orthodoxy has successfully ousted protologic.
 
Of considerable scientific inter­est is the comparison of the Chinese and European logical and   conceptual   structure of philosophy A.I. Kobzev makes in his book (Chapters 2 and 3). Among the reasons for stunting the development of formal logic in China the author names the absence  of a  letter alphabet which  has slowed  down the logical   formalisation process, the absence of properly devel­oped philosophical idealism, the dominance  of   naturalist phi­losophy and the absence of es­sence dialectics as distinct from sophism and relativism, which is normally associated with the absence of the notion of logical identity and contradiction. The author's argumentation in fa­vour of the idea that the Old Chinese methodology was based on the notions of similarity and opposition, in contrast to the European kind  based  on the notions of identity and contra­diction,   will   give   food for thought not only to historians of Chinese philosophy, but to anyone engaged in the serious study of  cultural  and philo­sophical comparativistics. (This bears out Victoria Lysenko who listed A.I. Kobzev among Rus­sian comparative philosophers; see:     Victoria    G. Lysenko, "Comparative Philosophy in the Soviet  Union",   in Philosophy East and West, Vol. 42, No. 2, Honolulu, 1992).
 
This book written with a high degree of professional­ism focuses on the analysis of Chinese methodology, but it is also a type of "mirror" for the Western logical thought. Simi­larly to the Chinese thought which did not begin to form a more or less distinct idea of its own specific nature until the end of the 19th century, pro­ceeding as it did so from its self-comparison with Western philosophy, the West stands to gain in its self-knowledge by absorbing the general theoreti­cal basics of the Chinese thought.
 
The chief question likely to arise after the book by A.I. Kobzev has been read consists in the problem of possible synthesis between the philo­sophical traditions of China and the West. The answer to that in the book is implicitly in the negative. To sum up, the reason is that the borrowing of ideas would inevitably entail a con­flict between the cultural methodologies, given the per­fect fusion of Chinese philoso­phy and Chinese science on the basis of the non-logical numerological methodology, with the concepts of Chinese philosophy being "two-valued", which "combine within themselves the conceptual, notional and theo­retical knowledge with the practical, deontological and axiological norms, and do it or­ganically and even sensuously" (p. 212). The contradiction (or should I say opposition?) be­tween logic and numerology leaves little hope of success in the   matter   of intercultural synthesis between these philo­sophical traditions.
 
What is happening, then, to the traditional type of Chinese philosophy at present, and what is it to expect in the future? China has no alterna­tive to assimilating Western science with its logical and methodological basis; nor can philosophy and its methodology keep out of this process. This means that, subsequent to the loss of its original methodologi­cal foundations, Chinese phi­losophy will enter a kind of "post-classical" period, endeav­ouring to preserve its set of content issues but seeking to express them through the Western logical and methodo­logical instrumentation. An­other possibility perhaps is China developing a certain in­tegral, and at the same time "amphibious", philosophy which will combine its own methodology and the borrowed variety, that is, numerology and Aristotelianism. The latter hypothesis is not easy to visual­ise, if we recall that the im­pressive capacity of Chinese culture for assimilation was determined, among other things, by its methodological basis now considerably under­mined by contact with Western science. The author himself ap­parently favours not J. Need-ham's idea of the universal global science of the future but rather the views of N. Sivin who stresses the highly specific nature    of    Chinese science which cannot be reduced to Western "analogues".
 
It is also very important to understand the actual "inertial" manifestations of the traditional methodology in modern China's science and life. A.I. Kobzev argues that the most general criteria of ra­tionality developed by Chinese culture "are singularly stable and have not become things of the past along with the old so­ciety and state, which is proved, for example, by the entire spectrum of reformist slogans in the new China, from Sun Yatsen's 'three popular principles' to Zhou Enlai's 'four modernisations'" (pp. 17-18). Upon reading these lines, one is tempted to continue the enu­meration, mindful of the sig­nificance for the Chinese out­look of "three" (the sky, the man, the earth), "four" which is fundamental to the yijingist tradition, and "five" correlative with the "five elements", and come up with a whole series of "numerologically correct" slo­gans in new China. The list will comprise the "three checks (of the class origin, work and will for struggle) and three kinds of regulation (organisation, ideol­ogy and style)" practised by the Chinese Communist Party in the 1940s; the "three big de­mocracies" (in politics, the economy and the military af­fairs); the fight against the "three types of abuse" in 1951-1952 (corruption, wastefulness and red tape); the "five un healthy manifestations" (spirit of officialdom, decadence, ex­travagance, arrogance and deli­cacy); the criteria of the "five main things" owned by the working masses (a sewing ma­chine, a bicycle, a radio set, a clock and a watch); and also the "five great movements", the "struggle against five abuses", and so on, and so forth. It would appear, how­ever, that the connection be­tween these slogans and the classical "teaching about sym­bols and numbers" was not al­together straightforward and explicit, alongside a numerological interpretation of the five-star symbol on the Chinese national flag. On the other hand, the time-resistant dura­bility of the Confucian ethical and social doctrine that has be­come apparent nowadays sug gests, nonetheless, a hidden presence (possibly only frag­mentary already and largely incomprehended) of numerological complexes in the Chi­nese consciousness.
 
A.I. Kobzev's book is built on the study of classical text structures; the author makes critical use of the works of lead­ing Chinese and Western re­searchers; there are extensive references and illustrative mate­rial (appended to the book are 81 charts and diagrams and a table of characters and graphic sym­bols). Unfortunately, the text is not free from misprints. On page 52, where it should say "in static terms", the actually printed word is "statistical", to use the name index one has to add "2" to page numbers, while the source index has, for some reason, christened analysts "anatolics".
 
Ст. опубл.: Far Eastern Affairs. № 4-5, 1994, p. 185-189.