Contenu du sommaire : Divination et rationalité en Chine ancienne

Writing and divination during the Shang dynasty After a brief exposition of the main techniques of divination using bones and tortoise shells which were practised during the Shang dynasty (14th-11th century B.C.) in China, this article reviews the main endeavours to describe the relationship between this practice and the religious beliefs of that period. It is shown that pieces of evidence bear witness to the fact that the inscriptions engraved on bones and shells were not in themselves of the nature of divinations or incantations according to their textual characteristics. The hypothesis proposed here is that the act of divination in its practice and the act of writing from all its linguistics dimensions correspond to two artefacts and correlate in fact to two different types of rationality.

The oracular rhetoric of the Zuo Chronicle This article is a study of predictive discourse in the Zuo Chronicle attached to the Spring and Autumn Annals (ca. fourth century B.C.). After ascertaining features of this type of discourse that place it as a literary genre halfway between the discursive arguments of counsellors and the oracular pronouncements in divinatory consultations, the author analyses its bearing on the composition of the work as a whole. Then, he examines the links between the oracular rhetoric of the Chronicle and the role of scribes in pre-imperial China on one side, and the intellectual trends during the Warring States period on the other.

Divinatory practice, conjecture and rationalist criticism during the Warring States period In ancient China, there is a continuity between the evaluation of hints furnished by reality and the decipherment of hexagrams obtained by means of milfoil divination. Thus when someone like Han Fei criticizes divination, his goal is not only magic and superstition, but a mode of knowledge that claimed to offer a shortcut to the confrontation with reality.

Exegesis of the Confucian classics, especially of the Changes Classic (I-Ching) and the Spring and Autumn Annals (Ch'un-ch'iu), is connected to the arts of divination in several ways : it may be plausibly traced back to divinatory origins, may perform some of the same social and intellectual functions as divination, and is based on similar assumptions about the nature of the source (the classic or the divinatory set).

In terms of social and intellectual background, the physician-authors of the Huangdi neijing (Inner Canon ; compiled ca. first century B.C.) belonged to the same milieu as diviners, astrologers, and other specialists in technical arts. Analysis of relevant passages in the Inner Canon in the light of recently excavated manuscripts that treat of medicine and divination reveals the extent to which the theory and practice of medicine in the Inner Canon were influenced by contemporary divinatory traditions. The manuscript evidence provides the basis for new and more exact interpretations of the Inner Canon, and allows us to gain a broader perspective on the development of early Chinese medicine.

While the administration of justice and divination were not linked in the legal code itself, this does not mean the practices themselves were unconnected. An examination of debates over the appropriateness of interpreting results arrived at through technical procedures in both areas shows that by the Han these practices were conceptualized in similar ways. A concrete example of this similarity is the influence of the duality of hard and pliant, central to milfoil divination, on early discussions of the development of ethical judgement in a judicial setting.

The part played by divinatory schemes in the codification of Chinese law Chinese criminal laws were not codified before the third century A. D. The exegesis of the Yijing by the School of Mysteries inspired Zhang Fei with three principles which served as the foundation for the classic Chinese codification from the Tang on : owing to its basic pattern, the code is a complete set providing for any offence ; the names of the punishments follow rules whose cohesiveness articulates all parts of the code ; laws incorporate « reasons » allowing them to be applied to unforeseen cases.

Mesopotamian questions on divination The author prepares the ground for a comparative approach to Chinese and Mesopotamian divination : motivations of the invention of writing, writing as a range of techniques apt to create new possibilities of social action, the respective roles of the king and the exorcist, divination and multiple rationalities, divination and the writing of history.

The author outlines the objectives of the research program on divination initiated in the 1950s. His own comparative remarks then bear on the rhetoric commonly employed by various groups in China and Greece, respectively, to stress either the continuity or the contrast of their own activities with divinatory practice. To this end, he delineates the available Greek sources and points out the diversity of attitudes expressed in them with respect to divination. The paper stresses how the rhetoric of demarcation, assisted by the development of epistemological analysis, sometimes concealed actual continuities between the practices.