Transcendence and Non-Naturalism in Early Chinese Thought by Joshua R. Brown and Alexus McLeod

Abstract

Reviewed by: Transcendence and Non-Naturalism in Early Chinese Thought by Joshua R. Brown and Alexus McLeod Thomas Michael (bio) Joshua R. Brown and Alexus McLeod. Transcendence and Non-Naturalism in Early Chinese Thought. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. 245 pp. Hardcover $115.00, isbn 978-1-350-08253-3. In the late 1980s, David Hall and Roger Ames first began to champion what they saw as the radical differences between Western and Chinese thought, which they presented with the provocative claim that Chinese philosophy was a tradition without transcendence. Their claim established an enduring framework within which professional research in the field has largely been directed. Regardless of whether their claim is right or wrong, one of its major consequences was to depict Chinese philosophy as, among other things, profoundly nonreligious in the common understanding of the term. This view is also in keeping with more long-standing cultural claims, often coming from the West, that China is a godless civilization, at least with respect to a transcendent creator god, and Chinese philosophy is currently treated as a tradition of respectable naturalism. Not only has this interpretive framework been adopted and absorbed by the greater part of recent scholarship, but there is also a steady stream of academic writings explicitly devoted to considerations of the absence of transcendence in China, sometimes discussed in terms of Chinese metaphysics. The new work, Transcendence and Non-Naturalism in Early Chinese Thought, co-authored by Joshua Brown and Alexus McLeod, is a recent addition to this growing body of literature. However, it is systematically directed at dismantling the claim that China is without transcendence, and it does so by primary reliance on a comparative methodology that seeks to overcome this othering of Chinese civilization as fundamentally different from that of the West; they write, “Our argument, then, is against the dismissal of non-naturalism and transcendence as adequate and helpful ways of understanding early Chinese philosophy” (p. 2). Early Chinese philosophical texts are relentlessly practical and typically written in a comparatively minimalist style that relies more on terse historical or natural allusion than prolix speculative reason. The theological thrusts embedded in their arguments are rarely given free expression and must be deduced indirectly. The outstanding feature of Transcendence and Non-Naturalism is its success in bringing depth and clarity to these sorts of indirectly articulated and semitheological claims concerning transcendence in early Chinese thought that scholars who deny its existence normally disregard or overlook. The book [End Page 161] accomplishes this through its comparative methodology that teases out various conceptions of transcendence at play in the thought of some of the heavyweights of Christian theology, including Augustine, Aquinas, Pseudo-Dionysius, and John Scotus Eriugena. These figures are used in the attempt to modify current understandings of transcendence in Chinese philosophical works in order to compel a rethinking of the claim concerning the absence of transcendence in early Chinese thought. Chapter 1 (together with the Introduction) discusses the current state of Western scholarship with respect to the pervasiveness of the claim about the absence of transcendence in early Chinese thought. It plainly lays out that in place of transcendence, contemporary scholars in the field normally approach early Chinese philosophy as a strict naturalism. They go on to state that their examination will focus on the Chinese concepts of tian (heaven) and dao and explore certain well-known passages from early Chinese writings to re-evaluate their specific philosophical orientations to transcendence or naturalism. Chapter 2 examines modern understandings of transcendence and naturalism. It argues that common understandings of transcendence are based on the conception of different ontological spheres of reality, or what the authors refer to as “contrastive transcendence,” and that they are the direct product of Enlightenment thinking and, more particularly, deism. They recognize most scholars of early Chinese philosophy as “modern naturalists (who) presuppose a historically unique (even novel) conception of transcendence . . . this deistic conception of transcendence and nature is, in fact, not representative of how transcendence typically functions in non-naturalistic traditions” (p. 2). The authors then begin their discussions of premodern conceptions of transcendence from the Western theological tradition to which they return throughout important sections of the work. They argue...