Aristotle Never Existed?: The Chinese Aversion to History - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Aristotle Never Existed?: The Chinese Aversion to History
by

Imagine my surprise upon learning, contrary to popular belief and received opinion, that the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle never existed. The vast Corpus Aristotelicum, including the Metaphysics, the Politics, the Poetics, and the Nicomachean Ethics — all medieval forgeries. Aristotle’s studies at Plato’s Academy, his founding of the Peripatetic school, his botanical and zoological research alongside Theophrastus on the isle of Lesbos, his stint as the head of the royal Academy of Macedon, his tutorship of the future rulers Alexander the Great, Ptolemy, and Cassander — all fabrications. His falling out with Alexander, his flight from Athens, his death and burial in Chalcis — never happened. The bronze sculpture of Aristotle cast by Lysippos around 330 bc — evidently a misattribution by the German archaeologist Franz Studniczka in his 1908 treatise Das Bildnis des Aristoteles. All this came as a rude awakening for me, and likely for you as well, dear reader, for it would seem that the very origins of Western philosophy and political science have been invented out of whole cloth. Is the better part of Western history itself a tissue of wanton falsehoods? And how could we have been so naïve for century after century? (READ MORE from Matthew Omolesky: November Nights: The Legacy of Henry Chapman Mercer)

This groundbreaking revelation, which could shake our civilization to the very foundations, comes courtesy of the distinguished Chinese scholar Jin Canrong, Professor and Associate Dean at the School of International Studies of Renmin University, former visiting professor at the University of Michigan’s Gerald Ford School of Public Policy, and author of some one hundred academic papers, six hundred mass media articles, and seven books. Jin is no mere dry-as-dust academic, however, serving as he does in the capacity of Chair Professor of the Forum of Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, Adviser for the United Front Department and Organization Department of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee, and Adviser on Public Diplomacy for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He is thus a public figure of considerable consequence, and while he is admittedly not a classicist, but rather a specialist in Sino-American relations, we can be sure that he has done his research, which he revealed in an October 2023 post on Douyin (China’s version of TikTok) laying out the evidence against Aristotle’s existence. 

Jin’s line of reasoning was attractively straightforward. Simply put, Aristotle “wrote too much.” He “just popped up, and what made it more suspicious was that he seems to have an all-encompassing body of knowledge, ranging from optics and ethics to economics and politics.” How could one man, Jin wondered, have written three million words in just one lifetime? Such prolixity raises practical questions, since “according to the analysis of some experts, three million words means that, even if all the sheepskins produced in one hundred years across the whole region — from the Mediterranean, Europe, to the Black Sea — were given to Aristotle, the materials would not have been enough.” We have long been fed the story that Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas, Maimonides, Averroës, and other medieval intellectuals based their critical organic method of philosophical analysis on the pioneering work of Aristotle. If Jin Canrong is to be believed, then those philosophers were actually the ones inventing Aristotle. Pierce the flimsy veil of Western history, Jin suggests, and you will doubtless find more insidious, heretofore unquestioned lies. It is not hard to see why his social media post went viral in communist and Han chauvinist circles. 

Now, if you wanted to quibble with Jin’s confident assertions, you might counter that Aristotle did not just “pop up” fully-formed, like Athena springing from the forehead of Zeus, but was instead born in the city of Stagira, and studied at Plato’s Academy from the age of seventeen to thirty-seven before being hired by Philip II of Macedon. You might point out that his body of work was really more like one million words, and that he was the head of a philosophical school and thus had access to a legion of research assistants and scribes. You might add that Aristotle would not have required “all the sheepskins” of the known world, since he would have been using abundantly-available papyrus. And you might note that, as the University of Pennsylvania’s Jeremy McInerney did in the aftermath of Jin’s controversial video, that “there is copious evidence of philosophers engaging with Aristotle’s ideas and even quoting his texts as early as the 3rd century [B.C.],” which would make it very difficult indeed for him to be an invention of the Middle Ages. Faced with those facts, you might even conclude that Jin’s Douyin post is one of the most ignorant and least convincing pieces of anti-Western communist propaganda you have ever encountered, and that Tsinghua University, the University of Michigan, and Renmin University should be ashamed for ever having employed someone who is either a shameless, mendacious ideological troll, or an imbecile.

“there’s a myth about Chinese culture — that it’s different from Western culture in its static nature and durability.”

 

The sort of pseudo-historical nonsense being peddled by Jin is reminiscent of the notorious “New Chronology” advanced by the oddball Russian triumvirate of Anatoly Fomenko, Gleb Nosovsky, and Vladimir Kalashnikov, amateur historical researchers who maintain that the civilizations of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome never existed, that written history began in 800 A.D., that Aeneas, while real, did not found Rome until 1380 A.D., and that Jesus Christ and Byzantine Emperor Andronikos I Komnenos were one and the same. These outlandish claims, proof more of a state of forensic lunacy than anything else, have evidently made their way to Red China, where He Xin, quondam researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, published his Research on the Pseudo-history of Greece in 2013, thereby inspiring other nationalistic historians skeptical not just of the achievements, but of the very existence of the classical world in the West.  Mainstream Chinese scholars like Peking University’s Gao Fengfeng have rightly dubbed these eccentrics “academic yihetuan,” in reference to the fanatically anti-foreign members of the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists who fomented the 1899-1901 Boxer Uprising. That a public figure with the resume of Jin Canrong has joined the modern-day yihuetan is disturbing and embarrassing in equal measure, and bodes ill for China’s future intellectual climate. (READ MORE: China’s Cultural Revolution: Has Its Violence Come to America?)

What is more, there is a distinct irony in this Chinese attack on Aristotle’s existence, as the dissident journalist Zhou Kexin, writing in the pages of Bitter Winter, wryly pointed out: “Aristotle seems to be much better documented than Confucius, whose existence is never put in doubt by the CCP and Xi Jinping himself.” It is a claim that would likely send Jin Canrong into an apoplectic state, but it is true all the same. Indeed the husband and wife team of E. Bruce Brooks and A. Taeko Brooks, translators and editors of The Original Analects: Sayings of Confucius and His Successors (1998), have argued that only sixteen of the sayings traditionally attributed to Confucius in the Analects can be traced directly back to the Master, with the rest accruing over the centuries. Taking a different approach, the University of Notre Dame’s Lionel Jensen, author of Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization (1998), considers Confucius to be more of a “literary trope,” one initially exalted not by the Chinese but by Jesuit missionaries, making him essentially a product of “centuries of relationship between China and the West.” The story of Confucius, according to Jensen, is the story of “how the sixteenth-century Chinese supplied the raw material, with storied forms of Kongzi that inspired the Western celebrity of Confucius and lent novel form to a contested European representation of science and theology; and how the imported nineteenth-century Western conceptual version of nationalism, evolution, and ethos lent a dimension to the nativist imaginings of twentieth-century Chinese, who reinvented Kongzi as a historicized religious figure.” 

These provocative arguments have not been well-received in China, for obvious reasons, but one Chinese professor, Aihe Wang, has acknowledged that “there’s a myth about Chinese culture — that it’s different from Western culture in its static nature and durability. It’s a kind of Orientalist myth. Anything that contributes to demythifying this point of view is very healthy.” Yet nowhere is that “Orientalist myth” more popular than in China itself. Xi Jinping is fond of saying that Chinese civilization is “the only uninterrupted one in the world,” so different from the West, with its dark ages and barbarian invasions and revolutions. Xi’s use of the word “uninterrupted” is certainly interesting, given the repeated invasions of the Chinese heartland by the Xiongnu, Jie, Qiang, Di, Xianbei, the Tangut, the Khitan, the Jurchen, the Shatuo Turks, and many other peoples besides, culminating in the Mongol Yuan dynasty and later the Manchu Qing dynasty. This is not to deny China’s remarkable cultural and linguistic continuity over the millennia, but there is an obvious reluctance on the part of the communist and Han chauvinist Chinese authorities to recognize the complexities of their country’s history, as evidenced by a recent controversy involving the Nantes History Museum.

Back in 2020, the curators of the Musée d’histoire de Nantes, located in France’s Pay de la Loire region, were laying the groundworks for a temporary exhibition of Mongol art — “Fils du Ciel et des Steppes: Gengis Khan et la naissance de l’Empire mongol — when they received word from their Chinese partners at the Inner Mongolia Museum in Hohhot that Yuan-era artifacts would not be made available if the French museum insisted on making reference to Genghis Khan, the Mongols, the Mongol Empire and its Pax Mongolica, or China’s Mongol-dominated Yuan dynasty. Bertrand Guillet, director of the Nantes History Museum, later described the ludicrous Chinese demands:

They told us, ‘Don’t use the words Genghis Khan, don’t use the words Mongol empire. You’ve used the phrase Yuan dynasty (which ruled China for a century from the time of Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan) — don’t use it.’ Well, that’s difficult. You can’t have an exhibition about Genghis Khan without mentioning Genghis Khan.

An alternative text provided by the Chinese authorities was filled with blatant historical revisionism, which Guillet deemed “unacceptable in terms of professional ethics, of historians’ ethics.”

And yet, in the case of the Nantes Mongol exhibit, we encounter a textbook case of what we might call “red fragility,” an inability to cope with the reality of Chinese history.

The Nantes History Museum opted to cancel the exhibition, and then worked with Mongolian institutions including the Shoroon Bumbagar Karakhorum Museum, the Erdennechuluun Purevjav & Nemekhbayar Nadpurev Collection, the Chinggis Khaan National Museum, along with the National Palace Museum in Taipei and other international collections, to put together an even more impressive and propaganda-free show, “Gengis Khan: Comment les Mongols ont changé le monde,” which opened on October 14, 2023 and will run until May 5, 2024. (READ MORE: Xi’s Counterfeit Confucian Dream)

How strange it is for a nation with an “uninterrupted” history to object to any mention of the Great Yuan, who ruled China from 1271 to 1368. It was under that dynasty, mind you, that some of the greatest works of Chinese theater were produced, masterpieces like The Orphan of Chao, The Soul of Ch’ien-Nü Leaves Her Body, A Stratagem of Interlocking Rings, and (my personal favorite) Autumn in Han Palace. And it was under the Yuan that landscape painting flourished as never before, owing to the genius of Zhao Mengfu and the Four Great Masters of the Yuan (Huang Gongwang, Ni Zan, Wu Zhen, and Wang Meng). There is one particular work of Yuan-era art, Wang Meng’s 1354 Dwelling in Seclusion in the Summer Mountains (夏山隱居圖), now part of the Freer Gallery of Art’s collection, that I seek out as often as possible. It depicts an appealingly sequestered environment in the wilds of Zhejiang Province, in which there lies a placid lake surrounded by a profusion of rounded mountain peaks and steep intervening valleys, all characteristic of the present-day Wulingyuan Scenic Area. As you run your eyes over this modestly-sized silk scroll (only 22-3/8 x 13-1/2 inches), your gaze will occasionally settle on a charming cottage nestled into a cove or hollow and sheltered by ancient cedars, pines and maples, and less often on a human figure — a man traversing a plank bridge, a mother and child peering out a doorway, a couple seated in a lakeside pavilion. Wang Meng’s supreme artistic achievement is to be found among the mountains, hills, and rocks looming above, which have been textured with virtuoso pima cun (披麻皴, or “hemp fibre”) brush-strokes, as if the painter had dragged strands of raveled rope across the scroll. It is an absolutely stunning landscape, one produced, if I may be permitted to belabor this point a bit more, under the Yuan Dynasty, during the reign of Toghon Temür, the last Khagan of the Mongol Empire, whose predecessors included Kublai Khan and Genghis Khan. These are historical facts, as undeniable as the existence of Aristotle, however much some cynical or benighted communist officials might object.

There is talk of the Nantes Mongol art exhibition traveling to museums in the United States, Australia, and elsewhere, which would be a welcome cultural development and a necessary rebuke to China’s genocidal regime. (Perhaps streets in the host cities could be renamed after Genghis Khan or the Great Yuan, much as European streets that run by Russian embassies have been given new names like Free Ukraine Street, Ukrainian Heroes’ Street, Kyiv Road, Plaza of Heroic Mariupol, and the like, although this may be too much to ask.)

In recent months we have seen Chinese so-called Wolf Warrior diplomats like Lu Shaye spout historically-illiterate nonsense about the sovereignty of post-Soviet states or the history of Chinese dominion over Taiwan, while academic yihetuan like Jin Canrong advanced pseudo-historical theories that would struggle to meet the scholarly standards of Ancient Aliens. And yet, in the case of the Nantes Mongol exhibit, we encounter a textbook case of what we might call “red fragility,” an inability to cope with the reality of Chinese history, doubtless stemming from a profound insecurity at the pathetically shallow historical roots of Marxism–Leninism–Maoism in comparison with the far deeper roots of traditional Chinese or Western history. Marxists are by their very nature unable to reckon with the lessons of history — Nicolás Gómez Dávila once observed that “a vocabulary of ten words is enough for a Marxist to explain history [un léxico de diez palabras basta al marxista para explicar la historia]” — and this is a weakness, I would suggest, that should be ruthlessly mocked and exploited going forward.

READ MORE from Matthew Omolesky:

The Cohesion of Error: Russia’s Rationales for War

‘Mere Memory’ Is Not Sufficient to Prevent Genocide

Matthew Omolesky
Follow Their Stories:
View More
Matthew Omolesky is a human rights lawyer and a researcher in the fields of cultural heritage preservation and law and anthropology. A Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, he has been contributing to The American Spectator since 2006, as well as to publications including Quadrant, Lehrhaus, Europe2020, the European Journal of Archaeology, and Democratiya.
Sign up to receive our latest updates! Register


By submitting this form, you are consenting to receive marketing emails from: . You can revoke your consent to receive emails at any time by using the SafeUnsubscribe® link, found at the bottom of every email. Emails are serviced by Constant Contact

Be a Free Market Loving Patriot. Subscribe Today!