Professor Andrew Meyer

And really, that's what drew me to the Warring States.

I think of myself first and foremost as an intellectual historian, and I first fell in love with these sources.

I took a course on, it was called The Foundations of Chinese Religion, but it was in effect a course about the philosophical and religious texts that were being produced primarily in the Warring States and in the eras just preceding it.

And I have found the literature that this period produced so fascinating that it's absorbed me my entire life.

And I think that one of the things that's so intriguing when one looks at this period, and one of the reasons it's mesmerized me so much, I've always felt that consciousness matters.

It's that quality of people's thought has a kind of historical impact.

I mean, I know thinkers like Marx would say, well, you know...

Consciousness is really epiphenomenal.

It arises from whatever your material situation is.

I've never quite bought that.

I've always felt that people's capacity to imagine a new way of doing things can begin to reshape the material conditions of their world.

And I think that The Warring States provides good examples of that.

That a lot of the kind of changes that we're talking about would not have been possible

unless and until people could imagine new ways of doing things and new ways of seeing things.

That's absolutely true.

And I think one of the misconceptions that people in Europe and America sometimes have about China is that it's this hidebound, just sort of irredeemably conservative, backward-looking society.

And I think The Warring States shows that that's simply not true, that all of the figures that we're looking at in The Warring States are

They're looking to the past.

I think the deep insights of the discourse of the war in states more generally is that in human terms, for human beings, there is no thinking about the future in the absence of thinking about the past.

You're not really seriously imagining the future if you're not taking into consideration the past.