The briefest history of Chinese thought will include an account of not only yin-yang theories, but also theories of the Five Elements, which may even predate them. Many writers nowadays substitute "Processes" or "Phases" for the traditional translations "Elements" or ''Ways'', to convey the notion that water, fire, wood, metal and earth are dynamic, and that their name, "wu
.nIT,
is more literally rendered "Five Goings". [See Graham 1989 325] Here I shall merely use capital letters to confine the meaning to this specific use, but "element" is appropriate in Baien's case as he compares that theory with the Western theory of the four elements, which had entered China with the Jesuit missionaries and for several centuries seems to have represented the backwardness of West em thought.Although Baien comes to use a radically revised notion of yin and yang, he has no truck at all with Five Element theories. In the following passage from he attacks the cyclical theory of generation and destruction according to which the Five Elements "conquer" each other in tum, and in one direction only: water .-,. fire .-,. metal .-,. wood .-,. earth .-,. water .-,. ....
Now, in contrast to is very derivative, despite its absence of direct
references to previous writers. This passage is very similar to one by the Chinese scholar Hsieh Chao-che ( 1 567- 1624) [Elvin 1994], and we do not know how many other writers may have said the same. Baien says:
In the Five Element theory the function of the elements is explained as the interplay of destruction and generation. The thousand affairs and the ten thousand things are all accounted for in that way.
On the contrary, by destruction and generation the end of one is the beginning of another. It is simply the reciprocal coming and going of the one yin and the one yang that gives rise to generation and decay. Water conquers fire, but fire also dries up water. Fire conquers meta� metal also resists fire. Metal conquers wood, wood also has metal carve it. Wood conquers earth, earth also rots wood. Water makes wood grow, wood also holds water. Wood makes fire, fire also warms the air to make wood grow. Fire produces earth and earth contains fire. Earth produces met� and metal rusts to become earth. Metal is produced by water but water contains metal
If the only things on earth that form bodies are wood, fire, earth, metal and water, and
things with spirit, one might as well say that there are six elements. Or if animate things
are said to possess the five elements, why not say that the five elements themselves are provided with the five elements? The five elements are insensitive, but sensitive beings
are also said to consist of the five elements. If they consist of the five elements, the
cyclic theory of destruction and generation must be abandoned. Furthermore, if the five
elements are assigned to the four directions and the centre, they can only apply
between the north pole and the equator ... ["Water and Fire" 1 750]
Pemaps Baien's criticism of Five Element theory was directed more against doctrines ofhis
own time, than against the theory at its fullest development in Chinese thought. In the he condemns Five Element theory as false or merely speculative: "Blindness and
deafuess delude people. Speculative explanations have power over people, and speculation has
lured them into the school of the Five Elements. II 6] and lilt is not surprising that
people who are confused mistake hacks for good horses. For example, the school of Five Elements merely classifies things, but yin and yang doctrine is a theory of contrast. ".
10]
We cannot say that Baien did not appreciate the classificatory function of Five Element theory. His criticism of it was that mere correlative classification is not science, and science should supersede it. In 1 778 he says in Kizanroku (the record ofhis second visit to Nagasaki):
The Chinese books, and others, deal with the
Western theory of four elements. The Chinese have five elements: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water; the Indians: earth, water, fire, wind, and air. The theories are different in form but the same in essence, each of them is nothing but a scheme by
which natural phenomena are explained. I 1065]
Nevertheless, this later criticism that Five Elements theories are "mere classification II is less
severe than the charges he laid against them in those earlier passages from In the
descriptive catalogue, ("Plants of Japan"), by Baien's predecessor, Kaibara
Ekken, and intended throughout to have a bearing on pharmaceuticals,
ill
uses theheadings "Water", "Fire", "Metal (precious stones)" and "Earth (ordinary stones)" in that order. The omitted Wood, of course, was no doubt too broad, as the other nine volumes and
the appendix all deal ",ith herbs and trees. Ekken follows Li Shih-chen ( 1 5 1 8- 1593) in this to
some extent, but revises Li's classifications where they seem impractical [Inoue 1970 50 I] In
Li's (liThe Great Pharmacopoeia"), the first of its fifty-two volumes deal
with water, fire, earth, and metals, followed by precious stones and ordinary stones before
proceeding to the numerous volumes on the vegetable and then the kingdoms. In WY:li
("Notes on the Principles of Things "), which was a direct source of material for Baien, Fang I-chih discusses the triviality of the whole issue of how many "elements" there are, [1967 Ch. 1 10] Notwithstanding, Fang too finds it convenient to follow his discussion with a page or so on water, fire, wood, metal and earth, in that order. The obvious disadvantage of the Five Element system of classification was practical rather than theoretical, that is, its very limited usefulness for extensive botanical classification, and its quite obscure relation to the
animal kingdom, the "spirit" and "sensitive beings" that Baien mentions in the passage from above.
Today, a discussion of yin and yang as the basis of an ordered pair of columns of terms, and classification according to the Five Elements, may bring to mind Graham's essay Yin
and his revised discussion of this in [1989 3 19].
The correlations that Graham has chiefly in mind are binary classifications according to yin and yang, and five-way classification according to the Five Elements. Graham talks however not of
than aspects of the schematic of ideas. Elsewhere Graham himself denies the suggestion that thought processes were different once, to be gradually replaced by better more "scientific" thought processes, rather late in the case of the Chinese. [Graham 1989 3 17] However, when they use them as schemata, followers of traditional yin-yang or Five Element classifications might be equally well described as "associating". Anything can be associated
with anything: some associations are individual, such as the synaesthetic association of colours
with pitch; and some are institutionalised, the name "Archimedes" is widely associated with the
cry "Eureka", whether or not Archimedes ever uttered it.
Instead of correlative and analytic it is more straightforward to speak of correlating and analysing. Ironically, Graham finds examples of "correlative thinking" in Gilbert Ryle's
but Graham does not notice how close he comes to suggesting two ghostly "mental" processes, a suggestion of which Ryle would have strongly disapproved. For
example, Graham says: " ... before we begin to think analytically in sentences we may already be said to "think", in the broad sense that we are already patterning experience and expecting the filling of gaps in the pattern." [1986 1 7] We are on much firmer philosophical ground if we confine ourselves to presenting ideas schematically, by correlation and by analysis, rather than speculating about the mental processes that have brought this about.
In contrast to merely associating them together, when it comes to "correlating" some
phenomena as yin, and the opposite phenomena as yang, correlation implies association on the basis of some grounds. Where correlation is grounded association, then analysis also is
required to uncover those grounds.
The above is an objection to Graham's terminology only, derived from Granet. Graham himself corrects Granet's assumption that "the mode of cosmological thinking in China was the mode of all thinking" [Graham 1986 8] by offering overwhelming evidence from Chinese
philosophers who did not correlate at all Further, Graham points out that causal explanation was no more foreign to the Chinese ancients than to any other group of people.
Correlation can be an aid to causal thinking, a brief reflection on the phenomena listed in the
Yang colunm from [p. 157 above] will show this, for example: hot, fire, sun,
shines, scatters, rises, etc, modem laymen at least know there are causal connections here, whether or not they can state them Graham says that correlative thinking is not illogical, it
assumes something like a principle of induction: "The more the simi1arities within and differences between parallel structures, the more there are likely to be." Graham gives the example that if two species oflobsters resemble one another and differ from two species of frogs, all "unopened", we can expect them to resemble and differ in the same way "opened". [1986 38] From this I take it that we might expect a scientific analysis offire, heat and rising to reveal further connections among them, and further differences from water, cold and sinking. For us, biological classification goes hand in hand with uncovering the evolutionary story. And Graham's observation that what 'proto-science' lacks and needs to become science is not causal explanations, which have always been around, but some understanding of empirical testing, makes good sense:
Our position however is that there never was a serious prospect that piecemeal causal explanations would interrelate in a completed order until the "Discovery of how to discover" about 1600, when the West suddenly stumbled as though by accident on the winning combination of mathematised laws of nature with testing by controlled
experiment. Up to 1600 the choice was between the cosmos of correlative thinking and no cosmos at all. That all schools of Chinese philosophy of the classical period
refrained from pushing correlative thinking beyond the limits of verified experience by no means released them from this choice. They had to remain content with the barest outline of a cosmos, not much more than Heaven and Earth (or, at the very end of the period, the Yin and Yang) generating and destroying the ten thousand things through the cycles of the four seasons .... " [1986 1 8]
Graham's attempt to match Saussure's "syntagm and paradigm" (via Jakobson and Derrida) with yin-yang lists does little to illuminate "correlative thinking". Nevertheless, it would be
difficult
to disagree with his general statement about a resemblance between sentences and his yin-yang lists when he says: "Any sentence, in Chinese or in English, is floated on a sea of unformulated simi1arities and contrasts." [ 1986 23]The terms "attribute", " property", "predicate", can hinder understanding of ancient Chinese cosmogonies in general, and yin-yang theories in particular.
1. Yin-yang theory occurs so widely in the Sino-Japanese tradition that as a single doctrine it is very vague. As cosmic principles yin and yang have been variously interpreted as negative and positive, inferior and superior, and female and male. The "negative and positive"
interpretation cannot be interpreted as presence and absence, yin and yang are always equally present in the universe.
2. Baien retains the terms "yin" and "yang", but considers his own theory to be radical. He revises some of the old Chinese pairs of opposites via jor; criteria, on empirical grounds. Baien's pairs cannot be written out in two vertically parallel master lists, headed with "yin" and "yang" or any other pair of terms. In his effort to reflect the real universe he found he needed the much more flexible devices that I have called the jor; shift and the whole pair shift . . Yamada is right that in their main sense, Baien's yin and yang are not dynamic. But he is wrong in concluding from this that Baien's universe is static. On the contrary, it is
fundamentally dynamic, and the terms "yin force" and "yang force" play a large part in this dynamic picture.
Baien uses "yin" and "yang" in two senses. In one sense they play a fairly minor role in associated with the physical sense of "warm ki and cool ki". In the other sense they peIVade thejori system, standing as names for "one and one", and functioning as an unordered pair of pure variables. "One and one" also applies to "heaven and earth", but this pair always has a determinate content. For example, when applied to <Jcj and object>, lei is definitely heaven and object is definitely earth.
3. Baien rejects Five Element theory altogether. In the Preface to he descfloes the theory as "mere classification", and hence inadequate for scientific method.
The phrase "correlative thinking", in contrast with "analytic thinking", is often used to descnoe the yin-yang and Five Element doctrines, but "thinking" can be a misleading term in this
connection. The correlation involved is association on determinate grounds, and to appreciate these grounds analysis is also required.