Correlative cosmology

What it asks

Things that belong together respond to one another. A note struck on one instrument sets a matching string vibrating across the room. Spring, the east, green, wood, the liver and a certain tone belong to one category, and what happens in one member of a category is answered in the others.

That is resonance, and the framework built on it is not a defective attempt at causal explanation. It is a different kind of order - classificatory and correlative, concerned with what accompanies what and with maintaining balance among complementary phases, rather than with what pushes what.

Reading it as failed science misses the point twice: it misses what it was doing, and it misses that the same framework produced a working medicine, a calendar and a theory of legitimate rule.

The recurring problems

What resonance is. Categories respond without contact and without a mechanism, and the tradition largely declines to supply one. Whether that is a lacuna or a considered refusal to posit hidden pushing is a real interpretive question.

Whether the correspondences are found or imposed. The correlations are elaborate and systematic, and critics within the tradition observed that a sufficiently flexible scheme can accommodate anything.

The political use. If ruler and cosmos correspond, then floods, eclipses and portents comment on government. That made the framework a constraint on rulers, which is one reason it was maintained - and it also made it an instrument, which is why sceptics attacked it.

Whether correlative thinking is one thing. The category was largely constructed by twentieth-century scholarship, and there is a serious argument that it groups together practices with less in common than the label suggests, and does so in a way that makes Chinese thought look more alien than it is.

How it developed

The elements assemble during the Warring States and early Han periods: yin and yang as complementary phases, the five phases as a cycle of generation and conquest, and the Yijing as a system of change already in use for divination.

Dong Zhongshu in the second century BCE produced the fullest synthesis, tying the cosmic pattern to the conduct of the ruler and making correspondence a doctrine of state.

The framework then organised an enormous range of practice. Medicine mapped organs, phases and seasons onto one another and reasoned about health as balance. Music, calendar, architecture and administration were all coordinated through the same categories.

It had its critics from early on. Wang Chong in the first century CE attacked portent theory and the assumption that heaven responds to human conduct, arguing that events occur of themselves - a sceptical position from inside the tradition and a corrective to any picture of it as uniformly credulous.

Neo-Confucian philosophy from the eleventh century absorbed the framework into a metaphysics of pattern and vital force, which is how it entered the tradition's most systematic philosophy.

The positions within it

Han correlative cosmology, Neo-Confucian metaphysics of pattern and force, Daoist cosmology, and the sceptical tradition that rejected portent reasoning. All are in the Schools section.

Where it stands now

Historically central and philosophically neglected until recently, partly because it was assessed as a rival to physics, which it never was.

Current interest is in what a non-causal explanatory framework is doing, and how a system organised around pattern, category and balance functions as an explanation at all. That is a question with parallels in structural explanation elsewhere, and it is more interesting than the verdict that it was wrong.