The Distinction Between Northern and Southern Scholarly Styles: From Gu Yanwu to Deleuze's Rhizomatic Growth

Both of these phrases actually come from the Analects, but later generations used them to comment on the differences between southerners and northerners. Let me search for the exact source.

Found it! The passage you remember wasn't said by Wang Fuzhi, but by the early Qing scholar Gu Yanwu.

Found it! The passage you're looking for was written by Gu Yanwu (courtesy name Tinglin), from his famous work Rizhi Lu (Records of Daily Knowledge), Volume 13. The original text is:

The illness of northern and southern scholars—"Eat all day without using their minds—how difficult!" This describes the scholars of the north today. "Gather all day without their words touching upon righteousness, fond of showing off petty cleverness—how difficult!" This describes the scholars of the south today.

Gu Yanwu borrowed two sentences from the Analects to criticize the respective faults of northern and southern scholars:

Northern scholars' fault is "eat all day without using their minds"—eating their fill all day, not using their brains at all, lacking ambition. (The original sentence is from Analects, Yang Huo.)

Southern scholars' fault is "gather all day without their words touching upon righteousness, fond of showing off petty cleverness"—gathering all day to talk loudly and at length, but never getting to the real issues, and they love to show off their petty cleverness. (The original sentence is from Analects, Duke Ling of Wei.)

Gu Yanwu was a native of Jiangsu, served in the Southern Ming, and later traveled north for over twenty years. He had personal experience of the academic atmosphere in both regions, and combined with his unshakable grief over the fall of his nation, he made this assessment.

So your memory of the content regarding north and south is correct, but the speaker is not Wang Fuzhi, but his contemporary Gu Yanwu. The two are both counted among the "Three Great Thinkers of the Late Ming and Early Qing," so it's easy to confuse them.

The meaning of Gu Yanwu's passage is actually quite straightforward. He was criticizing the prevailing atmosphere among the nation's scholars at the time, with each region having its own problems.

Northern scholars' problem is "eat all day without using their minds"—every day they eat and drink their fill, but their minds are empty. They don't delve into learning, don't think about the principles of governing and benefiting the people, and just muddle through life in a daze. Simply put, they are lazy. Their bodies are well-fed, but their spirits are barren.

Southern scholars' problem is "gather all day without their words touching upon righteousness, fond of showing off petty cleverness"—every day a group of them gets together, lively and noisy, but everything they say is trivial nonsense, not a single word touches upon truly meaningful principles. Worse still, they love to show off their petty cleverness and play tricky mental games. Simply put, they are superficial. They seem active and smart, but it's all just a facade; they have no real learning.

Finally, Confucius's original text follows both with the phrase "难矣哉" (nán yǐ zāi), meaning "how difficult"—implying that even a sage would find such people hopeless.

Gu Yanwu said this against the backdrop of the recent fall of the Ming dynasty. He was deeply grieved and believed that the nation's scholars were to blame: northern scholars were too numb, southern scholars were too flashy, and none of them were truly doing practical work or pursuing real learning. This aligns perfectly with his consistently advocated philosophy of "jīngshì zhìyòng" (statecraft)—learning must be useful, must solve practical problems, rather than either just waiting for death in idleness or engaging in empty talk and bickering.

Great question. I only gave you those two sentences earlier, but taken out of context, they can indeed be oversimplified. Let me find the full context of this passage.

Now I have the complete context. This passage is far from a simple "scolding"; it is embedded in a very rich argumentative structure in Volume 13 of the Rizhi Lu (日知录). Let me clarify it for you in full.

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The theme of Volume 13 is "mores of the age" (世风), that is, the rise and fall of customs and scholar-official ethos. Gu Yanwu makes a layered argument in this volume, and "The Illness of Northern and Southern Scholars" is just one short section, immediately following another entry, "The Loss of Northern and Southern Customs." To understand it, you must look at what comes before and after.

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First layer: A reaffirmation of the Six Dynasties scholar-official ethos (often overlooked)

Gu Yanwu says that critics generally consider the Six Dynasties to have a frivolous and superficial atmosphere, corrupting moral integrity and customs—this is certainly true. But upon careful examination, he finds that Six Dynasties scholars did several things that later generations could not achieve: revering family taboos, esteeming clan status, being cautious in marriage, distinguishing social ranks, and upholding public opinion (清议).

This is a very important affirmation. Gu Yanwu means that although the Six Dynasties scholar-officials revered metaphysical speculation and indulged in unrestrained freedom (which he indeed criticizes), they had bottom lines. They valued moral integrity and righteousness, and society had a spontaneous moral evaluation system—"public opinion." Even where the court could not reach, local evaluations (鄉評巷議) still constrained people. Therefore, even though the country was fragmented and the state fell, people's hearts and the nation's strength still had something to rely on—this was precisely the merit of these few things in remedying and maintaining order.

Then comes the negation: Once these traditions are lost, on the surface the legal net becomes tighter, but in reality the path of honor and shame narrows. Family taboos are no longer observed, clan status is disregarded, marriage is careless, social ranks are confused, public opinion is neglected—and thus shameless individuals frequent the houses of the powerful, and moral integrity is completely lost.

You see, Gu Yanwu's logic here is not simply "the ancients were good, the present people are bad." He is saying: Even an era generally considered "bad" (the Six Dynasties) had structural forces worth affirming that maintained society's moral bottom line. And his own era (late Ming to early Qing) had lost even those forces.

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Second layer: The distinction between the fall of a dynasty and the fall of the world

This is the origin of the famous phrase "The rise and fall of the world is the responsibility of every individual" (天下兴亡，匹夫有责). Gu Yanwu distinguishes between "the fall of a dynasty" (亡国, change of dynasties) and "the fall of the world" (亡天下, when benevolence and righteousness are blocked, and people are about to devour each other). He believes that the Wei-Jin metaphysical discussions were the starting point of "the fall of the world"—the great principles were obscured, and people could no longer distinguish between father-son relations and ruler-minister righteousness.

This is the core lens of his entire argument: He is not concerned with the survival of any particular dynasty, but with whether the moral order itself is still functioning.

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Third layer: "The Loss of Northern and Southern Customs"—historical tracing

Immediately following is the entry "The Loss of Northern and Southern Customs": The scholars of Jiangnan are frivolous and extravagant, which is the legacy of the emperors of Liang and Chen; the people of Hebei are violent and murderous, which is the lingering poison of An Lushan, Shi Siming, and others.

The crux of this entry is that the respective faults of the north and south are not innate, but caused by history. The problems of the south can be traced back to the extravagant court atmosphere of the Southern Dynasties, and the problems of the north can be traced back to the rampant militarism after the An Lushan Rebellion. There is an implicit affirmation here—human nature itself has no north-south distinction; it is institutions and history that shape people into different forms.

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Fourth layer: "The Illness of Northern and Southern Scholars"—the passage you are looking for

"Those who eat their fill all day without using their minds—how difficult it is! Such are the scholars of the north today. Those who gather all day, talk about nothing righteous, and delight in petty cleverness—how difficult it is! Such are the scholars of the south today."

Note several key points:

First, he is using Confucius's words, not his own invention. These two sentences come from the Analects (Yang Huo and Wei Linggong respectively). Confucius originally used them to criticize two types of people, without any north-south distinction. Gu Yanwu assigns them to the north and south as a diagnostic operation—he is using the sage's yardstick to measure the current illness.

Second, the three characters "难矣哉" (how difficult it is!) are extremely important. This is not ordinary scolding, but a Confucian sigh. "难矣哉" means "such people, (to achieve anything) is too difficult!" There is regret and helplessness, not simple contempt. In the context where Confucius said this, even playing chess is better than doing nothing, even doing something is better than empty talk—this is a tone of frustration with someone who fails to meet expectations.

Third, the two illnesses have different emphases, implying different perceptions of their respective potentials. The problem with northern scholars is inaction—they have conditions (well-fed) but do not use their minds; it is a waste of energy. The problem with southern scholars is misguided action—they are energetic and socially active, but their direction is completely wrong; their intelligence is used in the wrong places. From Gu Yanwu's perspective, these two illnesses are actually two sides of the same coin: one is physical presence but spiritual absence; the other is spiritual activity but direction lost.

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What is Gu Yanwu's lens?

Putting all this together, Gu Yanwu's perspective can be summarized as "practical statecraft" (经世致用). His entire evaluation system is built on one criterion: Does your learning, your words and deeds, truly benefit the world?

Through this lens, his affirmations and negations become clear:

He affirms that although Six Dynasties scholars engaged in metaphysical talk, they maintained public opinion and moral integrity; historically, anyone with true learning and true responsibility, regardless of north or south, deserves respect. He negates that his contemporary scholars, whether north or south, have lost this power. Northerners do not even think; southerners think but all their thoughts are crooked.

And the title "The Illness of Northern and Southern Scholars" itself implies an affirmation: He regards these people as "scholars" and holds them to that standard. He is not evaluating the lifestyle of ordinary people, but raising higher expectations for intellectuals. Precisely because you are a scholar, you should not "eat your fill all day" or "talk about nothing righteous." The premise of this criticism is precisely respect for and affirmation of the scholar's mission.

Finally, Gu Yanwu himself was a native of Jiangsu but traveled in the north for over twenty years. He is not scolding the north from a southern standpoint, nor the reverse. He is a person who has experienced both sides, and with the pain of national subjugation, he lets out a long sigh toward the entire scholarly community.

This is a very precise reading.

You've grasped a structural element: Gu Yanwu used two different sayings of Confucius, not the same one, to criticize the north and south. This choice itself constitutes intertextuality.

If the north's illness is "eat all day without using their minds," it implies that the northerners' problem is not "their words don't touch upon righteousness"—they hardly speak at all. Conversely, when northern scholars do speak, it might actually be simple, not cunning, and perhaps even capable of touching upon "righteousness." Their illness lies in silence, in inaction, not in a wrong direction. It's like the engine has stalled, not that the steering wheel is turned the wrong way.

If the south's illness is "gather all day without their words touching upon righteousness, fond of showing off petty cleverness," it implies that the southerners' problem is not "not using their minds"—they use their minds too much, just in the wrong place. Southern scholars are active, gregarious, discursive, and intellectually engaged. They have intellectual enthusiasm, social density, and an impulse to express themselves. These things are not bad in themselves; they are even necessary conditions for an academic ecosystem. The illness lies in this energy not being directed towards "righteousness," but being dissipated in petty cleverness.

So, the complete picture implied by placing these two sayings together is:

The north has simplicity but lacks vitality. The south has vitality but lacks direction.

In the northerners' "silence" there is a certain honesty—at least they don't pretend, they don't show off. In the southerners' "gathering" there is a certain vitality—at least they are present, they are communicating. Gu Yanwu didn't say this explicitly, but the structure said it for him.

Moreover, if you place this back into his affirmation of the Six Dynasties, the logic becomes even clearer. What were the Six Dynasties? Precisely the peak of southern culture. Gu Yanwu affirmed the Six Dynasties' "pure criticism" (qīngyì), "reputation and integrity" (míngjié), and "pedigree" (méndì)—all of which are elements of the southern scholar-official tradition: gathering, discussing, evaluating, socializing. What he affirmed was precisely the function this southern force had historically served in maintaining the moral order. What he criticized was that in his own time, this force was idling—still gathering, still talking, but the content had been hollowed out.

So Gu Yanwu's true diagnosis is not "southerners are bad, northerners are also bad," but rather closer to: The north has lost the habit of "using the mind," and the south has lost the direction of "touching upon righteousness." If the simplicity of the north could be combined with the vitality of the south, it would be exactly what a complete scholar should be.

This also echoes the poem by Lu You that he quoted: "In the days of our ancestors, customs were most pure and beautiful. Talents combined north and south, discussions forgot you and me. " The ideal state is not the south prevailing over the north or vice versa, but the strengths of north and south being united, and the division between north and south disappearing. The background of Gu Yanwu's criticism is actually a longing for this ideal.

The essay by Lu Xun you're referring to should be "Northerners and Southerners" (Běi Rén Yǔ Nán Rén). Let me find the original text.

Found it. Lu Xun's essay precisely made explicit the intertextuality you mentioned. Gu Yanwu merely juxtaposed two sayings, leaving the affirmation implicit in the structure; Lu Xun directly stated both the positive and negative sides.

Lu Xun said: "The virtue of northerners is honesty and solidity; the virtue of southerners is cleverness and agility. But the flaw of honesty and solidity is foolishness, and the flaw of cleverness and agility is cunning." Then he quoted Gu Yanwu's two sentences, saying that "as far as the idle class is concerned, I think it is largely true."

Note this qualification—"as far as the idle class is concerned." Lu Xun was more precise than Gu Yanwu in delimiting the target of criticism: this is not a judgment of all northerners or southerners, but of those who have the conditions to do things but don't.

Then Lu Xun made a deduction that Gu Yanwu did not: "Flaws can be corrected, and virtues can be learned from each other. There is a saying in physiognomy books that those who have a southern appearance with a northern temperament, or a northern appearance with a southern temperament, are noble." He explained that a northern appearance with a southern temperament means being honest and solid yet clever and agile, and a southern appearance with a northern temperament means being clever and agile yet capable of honesty and solidity. This so-called "nobility" nowadays means "accomplishing beneficial undertakings." He called it "a small path of self-renewal for the Chinese people."

But Lu Xun's sharpness lies in the final blow. He said that most of those who write essays are southerners, and the north has been influenced by them. Aren't the glib, self-pitying writings in Beijing newspapers more numerous than before? If this were to marry the northern inherent "glibness," the offspring would surely be an "ominous new degenerate breed."

This is Lu Xun's venom—his fear is not the respective illnesses of north and south, but the hybridization of the two illnesses. The south's "words not touching upon righteousness" spread to the north, combining with the north's inherent dullness, producing not the ideal type of "northern appearance with southern temperament," but a new thing that is neither honest and solid nor clever and agile, leaving only slickness and numbness.

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You say it's still like this today. I think your intuition is correct, but the form has changed.

In Gu Yanwu's time, there was a natural geographical barrier between north and south, and the two illnesses each had their place. In Lu Xun's time, due to transportation and newspaper dissemination between Beijing and Shanghai, the two illnesses began to come into contact and hybridize; he already sensed the danger.

And today, the internet has completely erased geographical distance. What you see when you open social media is precisely the "ominous new degenerate breed" that Lu Xun predicted—"gather all day without their words touching upon righteousness" is no longer the exclusive preserve of southern scholars; it has become the daily state of everyone, with short videos, group chats, and comment sections, the whole nation is "gathering all day." And "eat all day without using their minds" is no longer a specialty of the north; it has become a universal spiritual lethargy, the so-called "lying flat" and "going to seed."

In other words, the illnesses of north and south have merged. This is precisely not the "northern appearance with southern temperament" or "southern appearance with northern temperament" that Lu Xun hoped for—not the combination of honesty and cleverness—but the combination he most feared: a clever surface with a mindless core, a lot of noise on the lips, but no brain turning.

But conversely, Gu Yanwu's implicit ideal has not disappeared. You can still see people today who possess both "honesty and solidity" and "cleverness and agility," who can sink down to do things and also adapt flexibly. It's just that such people are no longer divided by north and south, but by individual choice. The geographical meaning of "north and south" has blurred, but the spiritual and temperamental meaning of "honesty and solidity" and "cleverness and agility" as two basic personality energies are still there, and still need to be united.

From Gu Yanwu to Lu Xun to your observation, this thread spans three or four hundred years, diagnosing the same thing: How can Chinese intellectuals find a balance between vitality and direction, between action and thought? This problem has indeed not been solved to this day.

Your observation is very sharp, and it points not just to a problem with Gu Yanwu alone, but to a misalignment between the entire mode of knowledge production in ancient China and the reading habits of modern people.

First of all, the genre of Rizhi Lu itself is not a treatise; it is a collection of notes (zhájì)—"daily record what one has not yet learned," jotting down insights every day, accumulated over thirty years. So the entries in Volume 13, like "Zhengshi" (The Proper Beginning), "The Loss of Northern and Southern Customs" (Nánběi Fēnghuà Zhī Shī), and "The Illness of Northern and Southern Scholars" (Nánběi Xuézhě Zhī Bìng), are not different chapters of one article, but different notes written on different days, compiled together by later generations. They echo and relate to each other, but there is no strict chain of argument. You feel "the subject is shifting," partly because you are reading a notebook with the expectation of reading a paper.

But this is only the surface reason. The deeper reason indeed involves a different mode of thinking.

The ideal pursued by ancient Chinese scholars was not to "prove a proposition," but to achieve tōng (comprehensive mastery). The so-called "tōng gǔjīn zhī biàn" (master the changes across ancient and modern times) and "rónghuì guàntōng" (achieve a thorough and integrated understanding)—this character "tōng" is the core. It means: you can see the underlying pattern between different phenomena. The pure conversation (qīngtán) of the Six Dynasties, the fall of the Wei and Jin dynasties, the decay of academic atmosphere in the late Ming, the respective faults of northern and southern scholars—in Gu Yanwu's view, these are not different topics, but different symptoms of the same disease. That disease is: the scholar-official class lost their sincere pursuit of "righteousness" (yì), and the moral order collapsed from within. He didn't need to deduce it step by step; he only needed to place these symptoms together for you to see the pattern yourself.

This is like an old Chinese doctor. He won't give you a lab report to prove you have liver fire. He will say, your eyes are red lately, you're irritable, your mouth is bitter, you wake up at three in the morning—you feel he is "shifting" from eyes to temper to mouth to sleep, the subject constantly changing. But in his cognitive framework, these are all different manifestations of the same thing. What he is doing is not linear reasoning, but biànzhèng (pattern differentiation)—discerning an overall configuration.

Specifically, the difference between the writing style of ancient literature and modern argumentative thinking can be roughly understood as follows:

The logic of modern argumentation is vertical—set a proposition, advance layer by layer around it, each step must be strictly derived from the previous one, the subject cannot change, the scope cannot drift. This is the Aristotelian tradition of syllogism, strengthened by modern scientific methods, and has become the basic paradigm for writing papers and reports today.

The logic of ancient Chinese scholars is horizontal—you have a core concern (e.g., "why did the world fall"), and then you identify the repeated appearance of the same pattern across different eras, different figures, and different phenomena. Each example changes the subject, but illuminates the same thing. This is not argumentation; it is jǔzhèng (adducing evidence), or more accurately, jǔyú (raising one corner)—"raise one corner and expect the student to infer the other three."

The advantage of this way of thinking is that it can capture what linear argumentation cannot. Gu Yanwu placed the pure criticism of the Six Dynasties, the fall of the Wei and Jin, and the academic illness of north and south together. If you read along with his method, you suddenly see a structural predicament spanning a thousand years—the collective spiritual idling of the intellectual class. This insight is very difficult to express in a strict paper format, because it crosses too many disciplinary boundaries and time scales.

But the disadvantage is also obvious. When Professor Zhang Fan, mentioned earlier, evaluated Wang Fuzhi's Dú Tōngjiàn Lùn (Reading the Comprehensive Mirror), he directly pointed out this problem: originally discussing whether Emperor Wu of Han should fight the Xiongnu, it suddenly jumps to the Warring States period, then to the founding of the Ming dynasty's capital—too many detours, a bit too casual. This is not a compliment; it's a criticism. The cost of horizontal thinking is that when to stop and where to draw the boundary depend entirely on the author's judgment. An author with good judgment (like Gu Yanwu), you feel that although he is shifting, he ultimately points to the same target; an author with poor judgment is truly rambling.

There is one more point worth mentioning. The reason you feel ancient literature is "always like this" is partly because the main texts used to train reading ability in our education system today are modern genres. We read papers, news, and reports, all of which are linear structures. So when we encounter an ancient "constellation-style" text—where points have gravitational relationships but no clear arrows—it feels loose and drifting. But this may not be a problem of the ancients; it may be that our reading muscles have only been trained in one way.

In fact, what you have done in this conversation precisely has the quality of "tōng." Starting from a vaguely remembered quote, you found Gu Yanwu, then read out the intertextuality, then associated it with Lu Xun, then with the present—this trajectory of thought is itself not linear, but horizontal, associative, and dialectical. You feel the ancients' subjects are shifting, but you yourself are also shifting, only you shift with a sense of direction, so it doesn't feel scattered. The ancients were the same.

This is a very big question, but also a very good one. Let me try to explain it clearly from the origins.

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I. The Conscious Starting Point of This Tradition

The most explicit conscious articulation is Confucius's saying: "If I raise one corner and the student does not come back with the other three, I will not teach him again" (jǔ yī yú bù yǐ sān yú fǎn, zé bù fù yě) (Analects, Shu Er). I show you one corner; if you cannot infer the other three corners yourself, I won't teach you anymore. This is often read as a pedagogical method, but it is actually an epistemological statement: true understanding is not being dragged along a logical chain to the end, but seeing the whole pattern from a single part.

But Confucius did not invent this mode of thinking out of thin air. Its deeper roots lie in the Yijing (Book of Changes). The entire operation of the Yijing is jǔyú—the sixty-four hexagrams, each hexagram is a "corner," a condensation of a situation. You don't need to arrange the sixty-four hexagrams linearly into a chain of reasoning; you need to recognize, in your current situation, which hexagram's pattern is isomorphic with your situation at this moment. This is a kind of pattern recognition, not causal deduction.

The tradition of interpreting the Shijing (Book of Songs) is also like this. Confucius said the Shijing can be used for "xīng, guān, qún, yuàn" (stimulation, observation, social cohesion, expression of grievances), among which the character "xīng" (stimulation) is the most crucial. What is "xīng"? It is seeing a concrete scene—"Guan-guan go the ospreys, on the islet in the river"—and from this concrete scene being stimulated to feel a greater meaning. It is not metaphor (that is "bǐ"); it is a vibration from a part to the whole. This leap from the concrete to the universal, without the mediation of abstract concepts, directly from this thing to that principle, is the poetic form of jǔyú thinking.

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II. How It Developed in the Chinese Tradition

After being established in the pre-Qin period, this paradigm grew into different forms in different fields.

In historiography, it became the "Spring and Autumn brush style" (Chūnqiū bǐfǎ). The Spring and Autumn Annals does not comment, only records events, but by choosing what to record, what not to record, and what words to use, it makes you feel the praise and blame yourself. Later, Sima Qian's "The Grand Historian Says" (Tàishǐgōng yuē) is also in this tradition—he does not do systematic argumentation, but gives a concise comment at the end of the narrative, making you look back at the whole story anew. "Seeing righteousness through events" (yǐ shì jiàn yì), not "proving righteousness through argument."

In philosophy, it became the genre of recorded sayings (yǔlù tǐ). From the Analects to Chan (Zen) Buddhist yǔlù, the core texts of Chinese philosophy are mostly not treatises, but fragments of dialogue, situational descriptions, and gōng'àn (kōan). Chan Buddhism pushed this to the extreme—a monk asks the master what the Dharma is, and the master says, "The cypress tree in the courtyard." This is not avoiding the question, but using an extremely concrete "corner" to pry open your entire cognitive framework.

In the genre of notebook literature (bǐjì tǐ) , it became an independent mode of knowledge production. From Liu Yiqing's Shishuo Xinyu (A New Account of the Tales of the World) to Shen Kuo's Mengxi Bitan (Dream Pool Essays), to Gu Yanwu's Rizhi Lu, this tradition is continuous. Each note is an independent "corner"; there is no explicit logical connection between entries, but together they weave a cognitive net. The reader's task is not to follow a line to the end, but to find their own path within this net.

In literary criticism, it became the tradition of diǎnpíng (punctuated commentary). Jin Shengtan's commentary on Water Margin and Zhiyanzhai's commentary on Dream of the Red Chamber are not systematic literary theories, but dropping a sentence or two of commentary at key points in the text, like acupuncture, hitting the acupoint, letting you feel the smooth flow of the entire meridian yourself.

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III. Counterparts in the World

You ask if there are counterparts. Yes, and they are widely distributed.

The most direct counterpart is Montaigne's "Essays" (Essais). The word "Essai" in French originally means "attempt"—not to prove something, but to try out a topic. Montaigne's writing is strikingly similar to Gu Yanwu's: starting from a specific event or observation, freely associating, jumping from ancient Rome to his own daily life, from one virtue to a certain illness, the subject constantly shifting, but after reading, you indeed gain a deeper understanding of human nature. Montaigne was about a hundred years earlier than Gu Yanwu, and the two had absolutely no contact, yet they independently developed almost isomorphic writing methods. This shows that jǔyú thinking is not a Chinese patent, but a natural human response to complex experience.

Pascal's Pensées (Thoughts) is also a similar thing. It is fragmentary, aphoristic, each piece like a shard, but all the shards together outline a complete picture of the human condition. Pascal originally planned to write a systematic apologetic work, but he died, leaving only these fragments—and the power of these fragments far exceeds any systematic argument.

Nietzsche is the most thorough jǔyú thinker in modern Western philosophy. He deliberately refused to write systems, choosing to write in aphorisms (Aphorismus). Beyond Good and Evil and The Gay Science are all short pieces, the subject constantly jumping, from morality to music to physiology to Greek mythology. He believed that systematic thinking itself is a betrayal of the complexity of life—once you stuff everything into a system, you have already killed it.

Walter Benjamin developed this method into an explicit methodology. He had a concept called "Konstellation" (constellation)—truth is not a proposition, but a pattern of relationships between phenomena, like a constellation in the sky. Each star is independent, but when you see them as a group, a shape appears. His unfinished magnum opus, the Arcades Project, is the ultimate expression of this method: composed entirely of quotations, fragments, and commentaries, with no overarching argumentative thread, but each fragment is a "corner" of nineteenth-century Paris, together forming a panoramic picture of capitalist modernity. This structure is almost isomorphic with Rizhi Lu.

The Jewish Talmudic tradition is also very close. The Talmud is not a code of law, but a record of debates around specific cases. The rabbis discuss a specific situation—for example, what to do if an ox tramples a neighbor's crops—and then from this case, they extend layer by layer, introducing opinions from other rabbis in other times on other cases, the subject constantly shifting, but all the shifting revolves around a core: what is a righteous life. This mode of thinking, "case-centered, expanding through analogy," is very close to the Chinese jǔyú tradition.

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IV. Modern Counterparts

Entering the modern era, jǔyú thinking has not disappeared, but it no longer occupies the central position in mainstream academia. It has retreated into several specific fields:

The "essay" tradition in the humanities continues. Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, John Berger—these best cultural critics of the twentieth century did not write papers, but a kind of modern notebook—starting from a photograph, a film, a way of seeing, freely associating, ultimately illuminating a larger cultural pattern.

Clinical medicine is essentially also jǔyú. The core ability of a doctor is not to deduce a treatment plan from axioms, but to recognize patterns in a large number of cases. So-called "clinical experience" is: you have seen enough "corners," so you can quickly identify the pattern in a new patient. This is why medical education to this day is centered on case-based learning, not pure deductive reasoning.

The operation of Common Law is also jǔyú. A judge does not deduce a verdict from a code of law, but by citing previous precedents, establishing analogical relationships between specific cases. Each precedent is a "corner"; the entire legal system is supported by the network of relationships between these "corners," not derived from a top-level axiomatic system.

Deep learning in artificial intelligence is also, in a sense, jǔyú—it is not told the rules, but fed a large number of cases, and then it "recognizes" patterns in the cases. This is structurally similar to an ancient scholar who has read a vast amount of history and recognizes the same pattern of order and chaos in different historical events.

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V. Why Did Linear Argumentation Eventually Become Mainstream?

This is the real tension implicit in your question. Jǔyú thinking is so ancient and so universal, why has it been pushed to the margins in modern times, while linear argumentation has become synonymous with "proper" thinking?

The core reason is verifiability and transferability. Jǔyú thinking relies on a "tacit understanding" between the reader and the author—I give you one corner; whether you can infer the other three depends on your skill. This means it places extremely high demands on the receiver, and the same text can be read very differently by different people. This is fine in a small-circle elite culture, but once knowledge needs to be mass-produced, disseminated, and tested—which is what modern science and academia do—you need a more "clumsy" but more reliable method: write out every step explicitly, so that anyone with basic training can follow the entire path and raise objections at any step.

So it's not that jǔyú thinking is "wrong," but that it is not suitable as the backbone of a modern knowledge system. However, as a method of generating insight and a starting point for creative thinking, it has never been replaced. You could say the best situation is: use jǔyú to discover, and use argumentation to confirm. First see the pattern, then verify if it is real. Gu Yanwu used jǔyú to see the pattern of the collapse of scholar-official ethos. If he lived today, he would probably need to do some quantitative sociological research to confirm this judgment—but that initial insight, argumentation cannot produce.

You mentioned A Thousand Plateaus, which connects perfectly.

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A Thousand Plateaus and Rhizomatic Thinking

Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus is indeed the most conscious contemporary philosophical response to this issue. At the beginning of the book, they propose the opposition between the "rhizome" and the "tree." "Tree" thinking is hierarchical, from root to trunk to branches to leaves, branching out but always having a main trunk—this is what you call linear argumentation and systematic thinking. "Rhizome" thinking is like ginger or lotus root—underground stems with no main root, any point can connect to any other point, no starting point or ending point, you can enter from anywhere.

A Thousand Plateaus itself is written according to this principle. The book is composed of several "plateaus," each plateau is an independent plane of discourse, with no progressive relationship between them; theoretically, you can start reading from any chapter. This is indeed isomorphic with the structure of Rizhi Lu—each note is a "plateau," each plateau has its own intensity and internal movement, but they do not form a line; they form a field.

However, there is an important difference. Gu Yanwu's jǔyú still has an implicit center—"righteousness" (yì), or "the order and chaos of the world" (tiānxià zhī zhìluàn). Although the subjects of the entries vary, they all ultimately point to this concern. Deleuze explicitly rejects this kind of implicit centering. He wants thoroughly decentered thinking, where no node is more important than any other. So A Thousand Plateaus is more radical than Rizhi Lu, and therefore harder to read—you can't even find the anchor of "what is he really talking about."

This leads to an interesting spectrum: at one end is completely linear Aristotelian argumentation, at the other end is completely decentered Deleuzian rhizome, and Gu Yanwu, Montaigne, and Benjamin are probably in the middle—they have the freedom of association, but there is an implicit gravitational field pulling all the fragments towards the same direction.

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Is There a Better Name?

"Jǔyú" (举隅) is a very good Chinese term, but it leans towards pedagogy. To find a more precise name that covers the full scope of this way of thinking, there are several candidates among existing terms, each with its own emphasis:

Analogical reasoning is the closest term in cognitive science. The core operation of jǔyú is analogy—I show you this one case, and you recognize a structural similarity between it and another case. But the term "analogical reasoning" is too cold; it implies it is just a reasoning technique, whereas jǔyú is actually a complete cognitive style.

Abduction is a concept proposed by C.S. Peirce, the third form of reasoning alongside deduction and induction. Deduction infers results from rules; induction summarizes rules from a large number of cases; abduction starts from a surprising phenomenon and guesses a rule that could explain it. For example, you see the ground is wet and guess it rained. Gu Yanwu saw the respective faults of northern and southern scholars and guessed there was a common structure of the collapse of scholar-official ethos behind them. Abduction does not guarantee correctness, but it is the only source of new hypotheses. Peirce himself said that abduction is "the only form of logical reasoning that can introduce new ideas." This may be the best formalized description of "jǔyú" in Western philosophy.

Exemplary thinking is a concept Hannah Arendt developed from Kant. Kant distinguished two types of judgment: determinative judgment is when you already have the rule and only need to subsume the individual case under the rule—this is deduction; reflective judgment is when you only have the individual case before you, with no ready-made rule, and you must start from the individual case itself to seek the rule that does not yet exist. Arendt believed that political thinking and moral thinking are essentially reflective judgment—you cannot use a set of presupposed axioms to deduce "what is just in this situation"; you can only examine specific examples and feel the outline of justice between them. This is almost exactly what Gu Yanwu did.

Constellational thinking is Benjamin's term, mentioned earlier. Its advantage is that it conveys two things simultaneously: the elements are independent (stars each emit their own light), but the relationships between them form a recognizable shape (a constellation). This shape is not deduced, but seen.

If I were to name it myself, I might call this kind of thinking pattern recognition (gézé rènzhī)—not deducing a conclusion, but recognizing a pattern in scattered phenomena. The Chinese word "gézé" (格局) is better than any Western term, because it contains both "gé" (the texture of each part) and "jú" (the overall situation).

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Related Studies in Cognitive Science and Psychology

This area is actually very rich.

Douglas Hofstadter is probably the cognitive scientist who has thought most deeply about this issue. The core thesis of his life is just one sentence: Analogy is the core of cognition. Not logic, not computation, but analogy. He co-wrote a book with Emmanuel Sander, Surfaces and Essences, which uses hundreds of pages to argue one thing: what we are doing every moment—recognizing a chair as a chair, understanding a metaphor, seeing the similarity between two historical events—are all analogical operations. Logical reasoning, on the other hand, is a very recent, very laborious, very unnatural cognitive behavior. From this perspective, jǔyú thinking is not an ancient, backward method, but the default mode of human cognition. Linear argumentation is a special skill trained later.

Daniel Kahneman's dual-system theory is also relevant. His "System 1"—fast, intuitive, automatic cognition—is essentially pattern recognition, recognizing a previously seen pattern in the current situation. "System 2"—slow, effortful, deliberate cognition—is linear reasoning. Jǔyú thinking is largely a product of System 1, while argumentative thinking is a product of System 2. Kahneman's contribution is to point out that these two systems are not a matter of high and low, but each has its own appropriate scenarios.

Wittgenstein's concept of "family resemblance" (Familienähnlichkeit) is perhaps the most precise philosophical counterpart. He asks: what is a "game"? Chess, ball games, card games, children's chasing... There is no single essential feature common to all of them, but there is a crisscrossing network of similarities between them, like the members of a family, some resemble the father, some the mother, some the grandmother, no single feature is shared by all, but you can still recognize them as a family. This is the epistemological basis of jǔyú—you don't need to extract an abstract common definition; you only need to show enough examples for the "family resemblance" to emerge by itself.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argued in Metaphors We Live By that the entire human conceptual system is built on metaphor, and the essence of metaphor is using experience from one domain to understand another domain. "Time is money," "argument is war," "life is a journey"—these are not rhetorical decorations, but the basic ways we think about time, argument, and life. Each metaphor is a jǔyú operation: projecting the "corner" of one domain onto another domain.

Clifford Geertz's "thick description" in anthropology is also an extension of this tradition. He opposed using abstract sociological theories to "explain" cultural phenomena, advocating instead for an extremely detailed description of a specific cultural event—like a Balinese cockfight—and then letting the reader see the larger cultural structure from this description. A cockfight is a "corner," but if you describe it deeply enough, the entire Balinese social hierarchy, concepts of honor, masculinity, and the entanglement of gambling and fate will emerge from this one cockfight.

Gerd Gigerenzer's research on "fast and frugal heuristics" supports the effectiveness of jǔyú thinking from another angle. He found that in many real-world decision-making scenarios, simple heuristics based on pattern matching with a few cues are more effective than complex models that collect large amounts of information for comprehensive analysis. The reason is that the real world is full of noise; the more information, the greater the risk of overfitting. An experienced doctor can "intuitively" judge something with a glance, but running the full set of tests might actually be led astray by interfering factors. This empirically verifies one thing: jǔyú-style "knowing at a glance" is, in many cases, not laziness, but an optimal cognitive strategy.

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So, back to your original question: what is Gu Yanwu's "subject shifting"? It is a very ancient, very universal, very well-founded cognitive mode. In China, it is called jǔyú; in Deleuze, it is the rhizome; in Benjamin, it is the constellation; in Peirce, it is abduction; in Arendt, it is exemplary thinking; in Hofstadter, it is analogy; in Wittgenstein, it is family resemblance; in cognitive science, it is pattern recognition. It is not a flaw in thinking, but the natural posture of thought when facing something truly complex. Linear argumentation can tell you whether something is right, but jǔyú allows you to see something you didn't even know existed.