Some Ancient Roots of Modern Chinese Thought: This-Worldliness, Epistemological Optimism, Doctrinality, and the Emergence of Reflexivity in the Eastern Chou

Dealing with China's oldest and second oldest intellectual documents ( Lun-yu and the genuine parts of Mo-tzu ), this paper views them as “laying” the intellectual foundations of China's axial civilization” and sharing a distinctive concept of knowledge, “epistemological optimism.” Epistemological optimism, in turn, was a necessary corollary of “this-worldliness,” the preoccupation, especially intense in the case of Lun-yu , with evaluating people and distributing sanctions in a morally perfect way during this life, as opposed to depending on a bar of judgment in the afterlife. The combination of “this-worldliness” with epistemological optimism has dominated Chinese thought to this day, in striking contrast to the major role of “epistemological pessimism” in the intellectual world of the modern West. Mo-tzu was more reflexive than Confucius. Yet instead of leading to “epistemological pessimism,” his reflexivity was combined with not only epistemological optimism but also his assumption that the development of doctrine can resolve all moral questions and bring about moral action. This paper also explores other ways in which Mo-tzu was a seminal thinker, one introducing words and ideas that are missing in Lun-yu , and that came to be commonplaces of Chinese thought. It also argues that the emphasis on evaluation found in the thought of Confucius and Mo-tzu must be considered when we describe how these two thinkers envisaged the relation between self and group, and its methodology differs somewhat from the approaches used in previous studies of Chou thought.