Early Chinese Philosophy of History

Abstract

This chapter discusses early Chinese explorations of what we would describe as philosophy of history, organized under three main headings. The first involves whether history has a cyclical pattern and what relationship that pattern might have to moral virtue: examples include the Mandate of Heaven, the cycle of the Three Dynasties, the five-hundred-year sage cycle, and cosmological correspondence theories. The second topic concerns narratives about the ancestral human past and in particular the ways in which early Chinese thinkers employed such narratives in service of their present-day policy positions. The final section outlines early Chinese philosophy of history writing broadly construed, including such issues as what information was recorded and for what function, why keepers of historical records might have been committed to truth-telling even in defiance of those in power, and what conventions early historians developed to cope with the tension between ethical prescriptions and real-world events. In general, Chinese historical thought was unabashedly presentist, pursuing historical knowledge not for its own sake but for the purpose of making wiser and better-informed decisions about the future.