Female slaves in the Odyssey

Abstract

Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers contains an anecdote about a man who gathered material for a work on Chinese metaphysics from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It was no obstacle that, as Mr. Pickwick reasonably points out, the Encyclopaedia Britannica had no article on the subject. “ ‘He read, sir,’ rejoined Pott, laying his hand on Mr. Pickwick’s knee, and looking round with a smile of intellectual superiority, ‘he read for metaphysics under the letter M, and for China under the letter C, and combined his information, sir.’ ”If we ask why this story is funny, and why the method of research strikes us as bizarre, we might want to say that what is preposterous is the procedure’s additive nature, as though a combination were simply the sum of its parts, and as though the parts were not somehow altered in synthesis. What would Chinese metaphysics, after such an operation, look like? But there is such a thing as Chinese metaphysics, and if we cannot understand it this way, how can we? How do we bring together things that belong together without doing violence to them or to the specificity of their combination? What is “Chinese” about Chinese metaphysics, and what is recognizably metaphysical about a portion of Chinese thought? Conversely, it is perhaps possible to know about both China and metaphysics without knowing about Chinese metaphysics, but would our understanding of either be complete?