"To know," intelligence, to grasp the significance of, to appreciate (in the senses of perceiving the value of something and understanding its legitimacy).
Zhi can be understood as a highly developed appreciation for how things hang together. A. C. Graham states that for Xunzi, "intelligence is what Anglo-Saxons call 'common sense,' the sort which values a synthesizing grasp of how things hang together above analysis, and which prefers not to push analysis further than needed to resolve issues arising in controversy" (Graham 1989, p. 254). In addition, zhi can mean "to realize," in the sense of having a robust kind of appreciation for the significance of something as a result of putting it into practice (xing). In this respect, it is like tihui, to learn through experience and embody. This should be contrasted with the idea of knowing something abstractly and then putting it into practice. Knowledge and practice are not separable, on this view. Xunzi writes, "One should study until one puts it [the way] into practice. To practice it is to clearly understand (ming)." This view was especially emphasized by the Neo-Confucian thinker Wang Yangming, who wrote, "A person who knows filial piety or knows respect for one's older brother must have already acted with filial piety or brotherly respect, only then can we say he knows them" (Chuanxilu, sec. 5).
Highlighting a different aspect of zhi, Lee Yearley offers a helpful contrast between a common Western understanding of knowledge and one assumed by ancient Chinese philosophers:
"Unlike most traditional Western thinkers who argue that immutable truths exist and that people's knowledge can correspond to them---a correspondence theory of truth---most classical Chinese thinkers see knowledge in a different way. For them, to know is to follow out a learned system of naming and evaluating, to be guided by a learned process of construing that we are taught when we learn a language. . . . Human beings are controlled by the language they use; they depend on what their language allows them to do. To know, then, is to make distinctions that engender attitudes that cause actions. What we seek, what we fear, and what we hope for arise from the language that our culture gives us. No objective truths exist to which one language can correspond; what exists are those ways in which particular groups use a language to divide up the world. . . . What we say, think, and do depends on the discourse of the particular group or culture we live in. Such a perspective severs any simple correspondence between language and the world, any simple relationship between things out there and our talk about those things" (Yearly 1983, p. 126).
Putting Graham's and Yearley's insights together, we can say that zhi entails both a "synthesizing grasp of how things hang together" as well as a constructive stipulation of distinctions. Rather than the synthesizing grasp serving as a foundation for a determinate analysis, the two sides of knowledge inform each other in the ongoing process of learning, as we play out the roles that we both inherit and create in a world we are both grasping and constructing.
Last Date Modified: 08/21/2007
Kurtis Hagen, e-mail: hagenkg@plattsburgh.edu