Happy Fish and Royal Workers: Animals in Traditional Chinese Philosophy and Law

Abstract

Michel Foucault (1926–84), in the preface to The Order of Things: Archaeology of the Human Sciences , cites an entry taken from a certain Chinese encyclopaedia, The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge , in which animals are categorized as follows: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camel-hair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher and (n) that from a long way off look like flies. Foucault continues to say that thanks to the wonderment of this taxonomy, we can comprehend not only the exotic charm of another system of thought but also the limitation of our own.¹ What the taxonomy reveals, he says, is that there would appear to be at the other extremity of the earth we inhabit a culture that does not distribute the multiplicity of existing things into any of the categories that make it possible for us to name, speak and think.² Foucault writes that the fundamental codes of a culture — those governing its language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices — establishes for every man the empirical orders he will be dealing with and within which he will be at home.³ The stark impossibility of our thinking in this way, Foucault says, demonstrates the existence of an entirely different system of rationality.⁴