I am not asking you to agree that there is one way of ‘parsing’ reality that is universally generalizable. This is for at least two reasons. First, there is no ‘reality’ independent of the parsing of it, so far as politics (and much else in human life) goes. And second, the generalizability I am interested is at the level of form, not content; and I mean logical form, not the form of an empirical practice. My way of ‘parsing’ is a taxonomy, not a grammar, and it imposes itself only at the highest level of possible abstraction; no values or prescriptions flow from it, as I hope I made clear.

At the risk of some repetition, you clearly believe it possible (because you actually do it) to identify both Western and Chinese forms of activity that you regard as ‘politics’. I do not understand how to make sense of this statement unless these activities are instances of a class of some kind; a class that finds its unity not in a Platonic essence but in an historic response to a universally shared condition.

My view could thus be refuted on at least three grounds. If evolution were false, or if there are really no anthropological universals, then I can’t make the argument I want to. I assume you don’t want to say evolution is false, though I’m not sure about your position on anthropologically bounded cultural universals. Finally, if one disagrees that it is possible to conditionally abstract ‘thought’ from ‘language’ (not separate them absolutely), I can also be refuted. In other words, there are at least three possible refutations of my position – which as I said rested on a combination of biology, anthropology, and phenomenology – and so far as I am concerned, they all fail.

I would also like to insist on the distinction between government and politics. If you admit that the Chinese had government, tout court (however different in historic form from government elsewere), you have already accepted the bulk of my argument. But as for politics (which is not government – government need not be a political matter, for in principle it can be uncontested, whereas politics presupposes disagreement), of course it can be largely consumed by ethical questions. It can, in other words, take place in the guise of what might be called ‘ritual’, never the static category it is fond of representing itself to be.

One can never, I take it, entirely divorce the question of what is right from what one/we/they/you ought to do. This distinction is often fuzzy in practice in the West, never mind China. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that for much of the medieval period in the West, and for much of the history of the Islamic world, ‘politics’ is in practice mixed up an indissoluble way with religious and ethical concerns, just as you say it was in China, and that if we take our own Western understanding of ‘politics’ here and now to inform what was going on then, we go badly wrong.

But that is not what I want to do, and I am well aware that whatever kind of class of phenomena I am concerned with under the heading of ‘politics’, its borders had better be pretty elastic, or it won’t do what I want it to do. But you yourself are similarly unable to escape the logical dilemma of wanting to say that Chinese politics is utterly different, and yet at the same time wanting to call it ‘politics’. Because if you don’t call it politics, you are then forced to say that there was no politics in China before the modern era, a conclusion that it seems to me you would very much like to avoid. My position is intended to offer a way out of precisely this dilemma, by showing how it can be the case that there are phenomena in Chinese culture which are recognizably ‘political’ but which have no analogue elsewhere.

My view, in other words, is most emphatically not one that insists the West, Athens, California, or anywhere else in Europe or North America supplies the yardstick for what goes on elsewhere. So far as I can see, what is interesting is that the Chinese and the Greeks appear to have stumbled on ‘politics’ independently in answer to a common problem, when other societies did not; whereas ‘government’ in some sense is an inevitability in response to the problems of order, power, and persuasion, I do not see ‘politics’ as a necessary existence. But government and politics (as well as much else, including economics) do both belong to what I am calling the sphere of value, which is where cosmology becomes relevant.

I am all for learning languages, and admire what you have achieved in Chinese. To be able to think in it as well as one can do in the language one was brought up with certainly enhances one’s understanding enormously. But what one is doing is still ‘thinking’, whether one does it in Chinese, English, or some other language. Moreover, even if one knows two languages equally well, one also has to come and go between them, and one cannot know every language. So I don’t see how this offers more than a partial solution to the problem of translation. I take seriously here the idea of mathematics as a language as a proof of the possibility that thought can assume a universal form which is only implicit in natural languages. I would never claim that ‘thinking’ is something only Westerners can do, as in the absurd ‘can Asians think’ debate,