Debating ethical nominalism in Early Enlightenment thought on China

Abstract

AbstractThis article discusses debates about the normative implications of nominalism by considering significant Enlightenment assessments of China’s society and politics. Enlightenment universalism has been criticized as an insufficient bulwark against nominalist tendencies towards cultural or subjective relativism, and (in its Anglo‐French formulations) as responsible for the ills of modernity which need to be overcome by a ‘spiritual turn’ in Critical Realism. Yet in response to the nominalist aspects of the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (1588‐1679), the early Enlightenment thinkers Pierre Bayle (1647‐1706), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646‐1716), and the Baron de Montesquieu (1689‐1755) countered the nominalist denial of the reality of universal concepts while conceding the validity of multiple cultural perspectives on the social and political world. Each thinker attempted to reconcile certain universal ethical standards with the fact of cultural and epistemic diversity as demonstrated by China, with differing levels of success. Indeed, their considerations on Hobbesian nominalism and views on China are tied to conceptions of the social as a sphere in many ways independent of the political order—a general development in western social and political theory in the late seventeenth to eighteenth centuries. Thus, the links between their responses to ethical nominalism and conceptions of the Chinese social and political order shed crucial light on debates internal to Enlightenment thought relative to non‐European cultures, and in turn on the development of classical social theory. Furthermore, their anti‐nominalist universalist theories which nevertheless accounted for particular and often incommensurable cultural frameworks can be seen as early modern precursors to ongoing efforts to navigate between extreme versions of universalism and relativism, and as constituting ‘philosophical under‐labour’ for contemporary social theory.