A problem of Terminology and the Importance of Comparative Research
“What is the connection between magnetic attraction, acoustic resonance, the cycles of the moon and the changes of shellfish, and the moon and the tides?” This is the opening line of an article that I am currently preparing for submission. The article is a comparison of the Stoic theory of sympathy (sumpatheia συμπάθεια) and the Chinese concept of “resonance” (ganying 感應, also often called “stimulus and response”). In each tradition, these ideas are used as scientific or philosophical concepts which explain natural correspondences and the interaction of disparate objects from a distance. For the Stoics, sumpatheia explains how disparate objects of the cosmos are bound together. The entire cosmos is a living organism bound together with a single breath. For such reasons, there is a mutual influence between objects throughout the cosmos and movements in any part may affect the whole. The Chinese concept of ganying is often said to play a role that is largely analogous to Stoic sumpatheia.
The article covers several different aspects of sympathy and resonance, but the majority of the content concerns the reasons why thinkers from each tradition cite these concepts. It then discusses the way in which thinkers from each tradition cite lists of natural correspondences as evidence for their conclusions. I plan on discussing the philosophical arguments of these thinkers in a future post. In the current post, I would like to discuss a problem of terminology.
When I originally began this research project several years ago, my first thought was to do a comparison between the two traditions focusing on the fact that they often cite similar natural phenomena along with analogous philosophical concepts. As is common knowledge for scholars of early China, ganying is an important philosophical and technical concept that appears during the Warring States and becomes central to cosmological thinking during the Han.
Or so it would seem.
It was not until I had decided to do the comparison between the two traditions that it became clear how difficult a comparison of sumpatheia and ganying would be. Why? We have many examples in Greco-Roman texts of thinkers citing natural correspondences together with sumpatheia. The term (or sometimes variations) plays a central role in their philosophical discussions, and the concept is clearly defined. When one looks for examples of ganying, the problem of much more difficult.
I found that the term ganying is not found together with examples of natural correspondences found in early Chinese texts. Thus, the term is absent from any example that cites the phenomena that it is said to explain. It was after this discovery that I decided to look through the digitized linguistic corpus of early Chinese texts. I searched both Chinese Text Project (CTEXT) and the Center for Chinese Linguistic of Peking University 北京大學中國語言學研究中心. Both of these came up with the same results: from the earliest surviving extant texts to the end of the Han Dynasty (a period of several centuries), the term ganying only appears 19 times. However, several of these are repetitions. If we remove these repetitions, there are only 14 original instances of the term.
But there is something further. None of these 14 instances are cited as a technical term or a theoretical concept. In some cases, the two characters gan 感 and ying 應 are being used not as a single word, but as two characters in parallel. In most other examples, the term is being used as a causal verb with the meaning “to affect” or “to move”. Again, in none of these examples is there discussion of natural correspondences or other natural phenomena. There is thus no example of ganying being used as a technical term in combination with natural correspondences.
Note the problems with this fact. Charles Le Blanc once stated that
“the expression (i.e. ganying) was first applied, starting with the fourth century B.C., to the study of musical and acoustic phenomena, like, for example, the sympathetic vibration of two chords that are perfectly attuned.”
(Le Blanc 1994: 59)
It is commonly stated that ganying is a technical term. Yet, other scholars have noted that the term ganying appears not once in the Huainanzi 淮南子, a text which ganying is said to be a central concept. According to a recent commentary, gan appears 39 times while ying appears 151 times, “and the two terms are closely coupled in only a few instances.” This leads to the conclusion ganying was a critical idea necessary for ancient cosmologists, but that it had not become a stabilized technical term (Major, et. al 210). We thus have very different conclusions concerning the origins of the term and its appearance in Warring States and Han texts. If my conclusions are correct, the application of ganying as a technical term in any Warring States or Han text is an anachronism.
What term should we use? Scholars of early Chinese thought have noted the fact that the stimulus and response of different objects in the cosmos is based on the belief that “like attracts like”. The term in Chinese is “things of the same category move one another” tonglei xianggan (同類相感). The belief presented in many early Chinese texts is that all things in the world are divided into different kinds or categories (lei 類), often based on shared characteristics or a common physical make-up (generally things of the same category were believed to be composed of similar kinds or proportions of “breath” qi 氣). Thus, “resonance” is generally limited to the mutual influence of objects of the same kind.
This is correct. After searching through the digital corpus, I found over 44 instances of this technical term (though it appears in a significant number of different variations) in texts dating from the relevant periods. This term is also cited in lists of natural correspondences and used in philosophical arguments. For such reasons tonglei xianggan becomes the technical term used to compare with sumpatheia.
Why is this important? It may seem that by switching out ganying for tonglei xianggan, I am simply mincing words. Indeed, some scholars who use ganying also note that it is limited to objects of the same kind. Of course, other scholars have a much grander view of ganying, and this leads to some difficulties in our assessment of the arguments made by early Chinese thinkers. A few examples can help to make this point clear. In his research on the Huainanzi, Charles Le Blanc once made the following statement.
“Kan-ying (ganying) may be defined, in the final analysis, as the power of things to affect and to be affected in such a way as to bring about harmony. This power is based on the persistent affinity and attraction of things that were originally one, but that became scattered when the world began…As a dynamic pattern kan-ying expresses the full cycle of cosmological, social, and psychological integration. Its natural and universal character makes it binding for the cosmos as a whole and also for each and every one of the Ten Thousand Things issuing from the Tao.”
(Le Blanc 1985: 209)
We see the idea that ganying is defined as something that brings about harmony in the cosmos, and the concept is based on the belief of the original unity of all existence. We see such comments throughout modern research: ganying is connected with the organic unity of the cosmos and binds all things together. Several scholars such as James Behuniak have also argued that ganying is a special kind of causal theory, one that is not causation in the strict sense, but correlation (Behuniak 2019: 125-126). Le Blanc also notes that the Chinese theories of ganying are fundamentally different than Greek notions of causation and linear logic (Le Blanc 1994: 71-72). We thus find ganying being used to explain a wide variety of ideas even though the technical term is not present in ancient philosophical discussions. The issue is that if the idea is limited to “like attracts like” or the mutual influence of kinds, it is possible that it has much less explanatory power than sometimes has sometimes been stated.
There are other ways in which this influences the ways in which we understand ancient debates. Some scholars take ganying as a technical term that was used in debates by Han Confucians. In his work on Wang Chong 王充, Alexus McLeod states that Wang Chong seems hesitant on the usage of ganying:
“Wang Chong does not use the concept of ganying in the Lun heng, and he is carefully reticent about it—it appears only once in the entire work. Clearly, then, Wang was aware of the concept, and much of what he says and develops in his theory of tian seems to rely on aspects of ganying….While he does away with the notion of ganying, however, Wang implicitly retains a number of features of it in his own view…”
(Mcleod 2018: 198)
McLeod also references the single usage of ganying in the text, stating that it is used conventionally with “none of the technical meaning it is given in early Han texts.” (Mcleod 2018, 191 footnote 21) According to my own analysis, the instance of the word in Wang Chong’s work appears as a causal verb. This usage is in-line with several other examples found in other texts. The issue here is that ganying does not appear as a technical term in Han texts, and thus it seems odd to say that Wang Chong was reticent about it. Quite the contrary, Wang Chong mentions variations of tonglei xianggan several times in the text with reference to natural phenomena, and in some cases uses said natural phenomena in his own philosophical arguments.
So why is this important? I believe that if ganying were simply used as a modern term of convenience to describe an ancient Chinese idea, then despite being an anachronism, there would be little issue. The problem is that scholarship sometimes sees early Chinese philosophers themselves as using the term. This not only influences how we understand early Chinese thought, but it also influences they way in which we understand the debates of ancient Chinese thinkers.
Further, I believe that the findings of this research project show the importance of comparative philosophy. Speaking for myself, I would have never made this discovery if I had not decided to do an in-depth comparison of the terms sumpatheia and ganying. I believe that the project shows how comparative work can sometimes help to break us out of common ways of thinking about our own fields. My hope is that if this article gets published, that the discussions on the linguistic aspects of the term ganying will initiate some interesting discussion.
Works Cited
Behuniak, James. 2019. John Dewey and Daoist Thought. Albany: SUNY Press.
Le Blanc, Charles. 1985. The Huainan Tzu: Philosophical Synthesis in Early Han Thought. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Le Blanc, Charles. 1994. “A Chinese Interpretation of Reality,” in Gilles Bibeau and Ellen E, Corin ed. Beyond Textuality: Asceticism and Violence in Anthropological Interpretation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Major, John S., Queen, Sarah A., et. al. Translation and Commentary. 2010. The Huainanzi. New York: Columbia University Press.
Mcleod, Alexus. 2018. The Philosophical Thought of Wang Chong. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.