龚鹏程对话海外学者第二十四期：在后现代情境中，被技术统治的人类社会，只有强化交谈、重建沟通伦理，才能获得文化新生的力量。这不是谁的理论，而是每个人都应实践的活动。龚鹏程先生遊走世界，并曾主持过“世界汉学研究中心”。我们会陆续推出“龚鹏程对话海外学者”系列文章，请他对话一些学界有意义的灵魂。范围不局限于汉学，会涉及多种学科。以期深山长谷之水，四面而出。

威廉·马修斯博士

（Dr William Matthews）

威廉·马修斯博士（Dr William Matthews）

伦敦政治经济学院（LSE）的中国人类学研究员。

他对中国的《易经》占卜进行了民族志研究，并研究当代和早期中国的认知、宇宙学思想的传播和知识政治之间的关系。发表了关于中国占卜和本体人类学的文章和书籍章节，并且是《宇宙的一致性：通过中国占卜看认知人类学》的作者，该书阐述了易经宇宙学中的本体论和认识论。

广义上，他感兴趣的是，世界的明确概念在不同社会中如何变化，这种变化与社会组织的其他特征如何关联，以及它与人类认知的一般特征如何互动。他通过对中国宇宙学的研究来追求这些兴趣，结合人类学和历史学的方法，并对社会和生物人类学、认知心理学和汉学之间的跨学科交流保持强烈兴趣。

龚鹏程：您好！占卜，是全球所有民族都有兴趣的事，所以也都有其占卜术。其中，许多只占人的吉凶祸福、生老病死，例如有人生病了，请巫师来占卜，或由鸟兽动物之形迹，看是不是妖怪作祟、他们崇拜的祖先或鬼神发怒了。这些，虽偶尔涉及了万物有灵之类思想，但其重点还不是宇宙而是个人。

另外一些，则由大宇宙来看个人问题，如欧洲盛行的占星术。中国更是强调天人合一的，不只《周易》，民间流行的四柱推命、紫微斗数等等，大抵也根据干支地支、阴阳五行等所谓宇宙规律来推测人的吉凶祸福。您的研究，似乎即偏重这一面。而我很想知道您为何会对此深感兴趣？

对那些收惊、观落阴、圆光术、感应巫术、同类巫术，也就是不涉及大宇宙，而被现今学界称为巫术的部分，有些人类学家却十分热衷，您怎么看？

威廉·马修斯：龚教授，您好。我在长沙的一座寺庙附近做了八字咨询后，就对占卜产生了兴趣。我对它感兴趣的是占星系统的复杂性，特别是它所基于的相关系统（气、阴阳、五行等）。正因为如此，当我去杭州为我的博士论文进行实地调查时，起初是关于茶馆的，然后我把主题转向了占卜，并认识了一个当地的占卜师，他根据《易经》的六十四卦来进行六爻预测。最终，这为我探索自己在三个不同领域的兴趣提供了良好的途径：宇宙学（即人们的宇宙理论）、中国历史和文化（特别是从战国到汉代中国早期帝国的形成）以及认知（特别是推理和决策）。

我对占卜更感兴趣的另一个原因是，它为人类认知及其与人们如何理解世界的关系提供了一个有用的窗口。占卜一直是人类学界长期关注的话题，但往往是以其社会功能或以信仰体系来解释。随着时间的推移，特别是通过我对认知心理学的阅读和通过我的民族志研究，我对社会人类学和汉学中对占卜的很多标准解释产生了怀疑，这些解释将占卜理解为一种特定世界观的表现。当然，像和我一起工作的占卜者对世界有明确的宇宙观信仰——还有一些非常有趣的想法，即在不同的宇宙尺度上相似性和差异性如何存在，这极大地影响了我自己的思考——但如果认为这些信仰构成了他们认知的核心特征，那就错了——相反，它们是当人们停下来系统地思考世界时才有意义的信仰。同样，对于占卜的客户来说，宇宙论可能没有什么重要性——他们往往对解决疑问感兴趣，而且在被问及时往往不会坚持对占卜的功效或其基本理论持有 "信念"。相反，它是可以帮助决策的各种选择之一。

事实上，正如您在问题中指出的那样，许多占卜形式对宇宙一无所知，而主要是以工具的方式接近。分析它们时的危险在于，假设人们用动物内脏来做决定的事实意味着他们必须有某种宇宙概念，其中动物内脏与更广泛的宇宙原则有明确的因果关系——对于帮助做决定的占卜程序，没有必要进行这种假设。因此，从这个角度来看，研究占卜的一个非常有趣的地方是，它涉及到许多不同形式的思考和判断，并引发人们反思自己对世界的假设以及自己的思维过程。

I became interested in divination after going for a bazi consultation near a temple in Changsha. What interested me about it was the complexity of the system of horoscopy, and in particular the correlative system it’s based on (qi, yinyang, wuxing, etc). Because of this, when I went to Hangzhou to conduct fieldwork for my PhD, originally on teahouses, I switched topic to divination and got to know a local diviner who practised liuyao yuce/six lines prediction, based on the hexagrams of the Yijing. Ultimately this has provided a good way for me to explore my interests in three different fields: cosmology (i.e. people’s theories of the universe), Chinese history and culture (particularly the formation of the early Chinese empires from Warring States to Han), and cognition (especially reasoning and decision-making).

Another reason I am interested in divination more generally is that it provides a useful window on human cognition and its relationship with how people understand the world. Divination has been a long-term topic of interest in anthropology, but often explained in terms of its social function or in terms of belief systems. Over time, particularly through my reading on cognitive psychology and through my ethnographic research, I have become suspicious of a lot of standard explanations for divination in social anthropology and sinology, which understand it as a manifestation of a particular worldview. Of course, diviners like those I worked with have explicit cosmological beliefs about the world – and some very interesting ideas about how similarity and differences can exist on different cosmic scales, which has greatly influenced my own thinking - but it is a mistake to assume that those beliefs form a core feature of their cognition – rather, they are beliefs which make sense when people stop to reflect systematically on the world. Likewise, for divination clients, the cosmology might have very little importance – they tend to be interested in resolving a query, and often when asked will not commit to holding a ‘belief’ in the efficacy of divination or its underlying theory. Rather, it is one of various options which can aid in decision-making.

Indeed, as you point out in your question, many forms of divination say nothing about the universe but are primarily approached instrumentally. The danger when analysing them is the temptation to assume that, say, the fact that people use animal entrails to make a decision means they must have some sort of conception of the universe in which animal entrails are explicitly causally connected to wider cosmic principles – there is no need to entertain such suppositions for a divinatory procedure to help make a decision. So, from this perspective, one of the very interesting things about researching divination is that it involves so many different forms of thought and judgement, and provokes reflection on one’s own assumptions about the world and one’s own thought processes in turn.

龚鹏程：前一个问题，是想帮助读者理解您与研究土著人类学家的差异，现在我则想帮助读者理解您与汉学家的不同。因为我觉得您主要是认知人类学的研究，只是通过中国占卜看认知、宇宙学和文化传播之间的关系。与汉学家对《易经》和中国占卜研究颇有不同。您自己对此有何说明？

威廉·马修斯：的确，我并没有接受过正式的汉学训练，但我从社会人类学的训练、认知科学的阅读以及我所学的中国历史和古典汉语的各种课程来研究《易经》和早期及现代中国。虽然如此，我不想把自己的观点归入某个特定的学科，尽管它与认知人类学最为接近。这是因为从根本上说，我对人类是什么样的动物感兴趣，以及这如何影响他们形成社会的方式，这些社会随着时间的推移而演变，与想象世界的不同方式相互关联。从根本上说，这是一个经验性的问题，而且超越了任何一个学科的界限。我的印象是，对《易经》等感兴趣的汉学家的动机有点不同，他们比社会科学者更人文主义一些——他们的工作植根于非常深刻的语言学和语文学知识（比我深得多！），以及用他们自己的方式在当下文化背景中对文本进行解释。

对我来说，虽然《易经》本身很有趣，但最终它是一个更广泛现象的例子——是我可以探索案例研究的一个特定部分，以解决人类行为和历史变化的一般问题。说白了，我认为两种方法都是必要的。我认为认知人类学家帕斯卡尔·博耶（他的工作对我影响很大）对这种差异做了一个有用的比喻，那就是自然史和进化生物学。前者专注于对特定现象的细致记录，具有很强的经验性，而后者则是将经验数据系统化，形成一个可以解释其发生和变化的理论框架。

归根结底，要理解如人类社会这种复杂的现象，你需要两者。这其中有一个强烈的比较因素——虽然我可以只参考中国的情况来研究中国，但在实践中，我的动机是它与其他社会之间的比较。例如，为什么早期帝国国家使用的中国占卜倾向于对宇宙原则的自然主义关注，而罗马国家的宇宙学和占卜则从神的角度来理解？是什么解释了这里的共同点，例如国家首先使用占卜，又是什么因素解释了这些差异？我们不能纯粹用 "中国文化 "来解释《易经》——那是一种循环。为什么中国的 "文化 "会产生《易经》这样的产品？这是个有趣的问题。

Sure. I don’t really have formal training in sinology, but have approached the study of the Yijing and of early and modern China from my training in social anthropology, my reading of cognitive science, and various courses I have taken in Chinese history and classical Chinese. That said, I would not want to classify my own perspective according to a particular discipline, even though it most closely aligns with cognitive anthropology. This is because fundamentally, I am interested in the kind of animal humans are, and how that influences the ways in which they form societies which evolve over time and correlate with different ways of imagining the world. At root this is an empirical question, and one which goes beyond the boundaries of any one discipline. My impression is that sinologists interested in the Yijing, etc, are motivated by something a little different and more humanist than social-scientific – their work is rooted in very deep linguistic and philological knowledge (far deeper than mine!), and the interpretation of texts in their own terms and in their immediate cultural context.

For me, while the Yijing is of course interesting in itself, ultimately it is an example of a wider phenomenon – a particular part of a case study I can explore to address a general question of human behaviour and historical change. To be clear, I think both approaches are necessary. I think a useful analogy of this sort of difference, given by the cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer (whose work has strongly influenced mine), is between natural history and evolutionary biology. The former focuses on meticulous documentation of specific phenomena, and is strongly empirical, whereas the latter is about systematising empirical data into a theoretical framework which can explain their occurrence and variation.

Ultimately, to understand complex phenomena such as human societies, you need both. There is a strongly comparative element to this – whilst I could study China only with reference to China, in practice I am motivated by how it compares to other societies. For example, why did Chinese divination, as used by the early imperial state, tend towards a naturalistic focus on cosmic principles, while the cosmology and divination of the Roman state was understood in terms of gods? What explains the commonalities here, such as the use of divination by the state in the first place, and what factors explain the differences? We can’t explain the Yijing purely in terms of ‘Chinese culture’ – that’s circular. Why did ‘culture’ in China come to be such that it would produce products like the Yijing? That’s the interesting question.

龚鹏程：您与其他学科的交叉互动如何？

威廉·马修斯：我参与了各种跨学科项目，包括一个关于《易经》的图书项目，各种阅读小组，最近还客串编辑了一期关于占卜和本体论的《社会分析》，这是人类学家和古典学家的合作。非常重要的是，我还通过教学与其他学科接触——例如，一门关于中国的比较视角的课程，借鉴了各种社会科学学科，另一门关于不同学科的证据和论证的课程。

我认为有两个关键因素可以使我与其他学科进行有效接触。第一是对证据的批判性思考，以及从证据到论证的推理。无论自己的学科如何，我认为与科学哲学和社会科学的接触对发展这种思维是非常有价值的。这些学科的学者都接受过剖析论证的训练，严格审视证据的主张和标准，看到他们如何做到这一点并将其应用到自己和他人的工作中是非常有用的。第二是智力上的谦逊，特别是关于相邻的学科。例如，在社会人类学中，有一种明确的诱惑，即把民族志方法和一切的形成都看作是特定文化背景的产物，看作是处理社会现象的唯一有效方法。这不仅是明显的不真实，而且还可能蔓延到认为其他学科只是生产他们自己的文化产品，与现实没有什么关系，无论在哪里都可以找到。除了学科上的傲慢，这种思维还可能导致学科上的孤立，并最终导致无法认识到其他学科正在进行的相关工作。

I’ve engaged in various interdisciplinary projects, including a book project on the Yijing, various reading groups, and most recently guest editing an issue of Social Analysis on divination and ontology, a collaboration between anthropologists and classicists. Very importantly, I also engage with other disciplines through teaching – for example, a course on China in comparative perspective, drawing on various social scientific disciplines, and another on evidence and arguments in different disciplines.

I think there are two key things which make for effective engagement with other disciplines. The first is critical thinking about evidence and inference from evidence to argument. Regardless of one’s own discipline, I think engaging with the philosophy of science and of social science is extremely valuable for developing this. Scholars in these disciplines are trained to dissect arguments and rigorously interrogate claims and standards of evidence, and it is very useful to see how they do this and apply it to one’s own and others’ work. The second is intellectual humility, particularly regarding adjacent disciplines. For example, in social anthropology there can be a definite temptation to see the ethnographic method, and the framing of everything as a product of a specific cultural context, as the only valid ways to approach social phenomena. Not only is this manifestly untrue, but it can also spill over into thinking that other disciplines simply produce their own cultural products which have little relation to reality, wherever that might be found. Quite apart from disciplinary arrogance, this kind of thinking can lead to disciplinary isolation and ultimately a failure to recognise relevant work going on in other disciplines.

龚鹏程：能概括一下中国的宇宙学吗？

威廉·马修斯：我想您是指天、地、人合一的概念，最终是统一的现实的一部分，它在所有层面上由能量物质 "气 "组成，"气 "根据活跃（阳）和柔顺（阴）原则的消长，通过其五相（五行）的生产和破坏性循环和相互作用不断变化，从而产生众生的分化和他们随时间的变化。我在我的工作中把这描述为 "同源"——意思是不同现象之间的相似性可以用在不同规模上表现出来的气的共同基本配置来解释。

现在，我想强调的是，这是对宇宙的一种非常特殊的理解——在中国文化背景下产生的意义上，它当然是 "中国的"，但在上述术语中，只有占卜师等宇宙学专家，或今天对占卜、中医等感兴趣的人，才能真正理解为这样。在实践中，中国的宇宙学有很多不同之处——例如，上述说法没有提到神和鬼，但这些是大众宗教的基本组成部分。它也与中国广泛接受的各种佛教宇宙观不同，也许与道教的理解相似，后者与上述内容相似。其中有些主题是共同的，如强调平衡、变化，以及气和五行等概念。然而，这些思想随着时间的推移发生了变化——无论是在内容上还是在人群中的分布上。商代的宇宙观肯定是一种 "中国式 "的宇宙观，但在 "气 "成为一个概念之前就已经存在了数百年。同样，即使是像 "气 "这样的关键概念也随着时间的推移而改变，不同的思想家对其有不同的理解。归根结底，宇宙论是个人思想的产物，应该如此去理解。

I guess what you mean by this is the idea of Heaven, Earth, and Humanity ultimately being part of a unified reality, which is composed on all levels of an energy-substance qi, which continually transforms according to the waxing and waning of active (yang) and yielding (yin) principles via the productive and destructive cycles and interactions of its Five Phases (wuxing), thereby producing differentiation of beings and the changes they experience over time. I’ve described this in my work as ‘homological’ – meaning that similarities between different phenomena can be explained in terms of common underlying configurations of qi manifesting at different scales.

Now, what I want to emphasise is that this is a very particular understanding of the cosmos – one which is certainly ‘Chinese’ in the sense of emerging from a Chinese cultural context, but one which in the above terms is only really understood as such by cosmological experts such as diviners, or today, by those interested in reading about divination, Chinese medicine, and so on. In practice, cosmology in China varies a lot – the above account makes no mention of gods and ghosts, for instance, but these are essential parts of popular religion. It also differs from various Buddhist conceptions of the cosmos which are widely entertained in China, perhaps alongside Daoist understandings, which are similar to the above. Some themes are common to many of these, such as an emphasis on balance, change, and concepts such as qi and wuxing. However, these ideas have changed over time – both in terms of their content and their distribution within the population. The cosmology of the Shang was surely a ‘Chinese’ cosmology, but existed hundreds of years before qi was a concept. Similarly, even a key idea like qi has changed over time – and been understood differently by different thinkers. Ultimately, cosmologies are products of individual minds, and should be understood as such.

龚鹏程，1956年生于台北，台湾师范大学博士，当代著名学者和思想家。著作已出版一百五十多本。

办有大学、出版社、杂志社、书院等，并规划城市建设、主题园区等多处。讲学于世界各地。并在北京、上海、杭州、台北、巴黎、日本、澳门等地举办过书法展。现为美国龚鹏程基金会主席。