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Thesis Calling Wang Fuzhi a materialist hides more than it reveals

Lin Pei-shan Fellow
· 5 replies
Existence & beingChineseJapanese & KoreanNeo-ConfucianismWang FuzhiZhang Zai#labels#li#materialism#qi
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Its coordinates: 1.1 Ontology · 1.1.1 Substance Theory · 1.1.2 Universals and Particulars +2 more

Where it stands

Some older textbooks my students find online still call Wang Fuzhi (Chuanshan) a "materialist". The label comes mostly from twentieth-century scholarship that wanted ancestors for a materialist philosophy, and it has a respectable basis: Wang made qi the sole reality and treated li, principle or pattern, as the pattern of qi rather than a second kind of thing prior to it. That is a direct challenge to Zhu Xi, for whom li and qi are never found apart but li is in some sense prior.

My thesis is that "materialist" misleads more than it helps.

  1. "Materialism" belongs to a contrast between matter and mind. Qi is not on one side of that contrast. It is the stuff of rocks and of feelings, of bodies and of moral responses. Translators render it as vital force, material force or energy, and each rendering drops something.
  2. Wang's qi is patterned through and through. Calling him a materialist suggests a world of inert stuff pushed about by laws, which is the opposite of what he describes.
  3. His interest is moral and practical. He rejects the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness and any li floating free of concrete things because they lead people away from the actual world in which duties must be done.

So he denies the very distinction that "materialism" presupposes. I would rather call him a qi-monist and explain what qi is. Please tell me if I am being precious about a label that does useful work.

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5 replies

For the thesis 3

  1. Ji-woo Ryu

    For Fellow

    A Korean comparison supports you. Yulgok (Yi I) held that only qi issues forth and li "rides" on it, and he is sometimes described as leaning towards qi. Nobody in Korea would call him a materialist, because li is still there as the pattern that qi follows and the moral nature is still real. If the label fails for Yulgok, I doubt it fits Wang, who keeps li as pattern too. My students learn Toegye and Yulgok as the two classic positions in the Four-Seven Debate, and "materialist" would only confuse them.

  2. Javier Ferrandis

    For Fellow

    As the resident economist with Marx on the shelf: the label tells you a great deal about mid-twentieth-century historiography and very little about seventeenth-century Hunan. That said, "materialism" in Marx's sense is about practice and social production, not about a metaphysics of inert stuff, so in that narrow sense Lin's third point, about concrete duties, cuts the other way. Wang's attention to concrete institutions and history is exactly what attracted those readers.

    Helpful · 1
  3. Liu Mingqiao

    For Fellow

    Zhang Zai, whom Wang carried forward, said the Great Void is nothing other than qi. The Void is not empty space waiting for matter; it is qi dispersed, and things are qi condensed. In my taiji practice qi is not a substance I could weigh. It is closer to how a body is organised and alive. Calling it "matter" in English is like calling music "vibrating air". True, and missing the point.

    Helpful · 2

Against the thesis 1

  1. Chen Yuting

    Against Fellow

    I will push back a little. Whatever political motives the twentieth-century label had, the core claim it picks out is real: no principle without the concrete, no dao apart from the vessels. There is a famous line in his writings on the Changes saying that under heaven there are only concrete things (qi 器, "vessels", a different character from the qi of vital force). That is what most people mean by materialism, minus the European metaphysics of dead matter. "Naturalist" might be a better compromise than either "materialist" or "qi-monist".

    Helpful · 3
    1. Lin Pei-shan

      Fellow

      Yuting, I accept the vessel line is strong evidence and that the label is not crazy. I will revise: "materialist" is defensible only if one immediately says that qi includes what Europeans would call mind and value. Since that sentence is almost never said, I still prefer "naturalist" in class, and I will steal your compromise.

      Helpful · 3