Xunzi on the Perfected Sage and the Uncodifiable Way

It is sometimes assumed that the best people—those whom it would be appropriate to admire and emulate—ought to be free of all moral defects. Numerous contemporary scholars have attributed this assumption to the early Confucian philosophers with moral perfection said to be a necessary condition for sagehood. Drawing upon the early Confucian literature I will argue in support of two claims. The first is that the early Confucians did not insist on the moral perfection of the sage; on the contrary, the sage was explicitly understood to be morally fallible. The second claim is that the early Confucians were right to reject moral perfection as a suitable ideal. I conclude with a discussion of the relative merits of taking “love of learning” (haoxue 好學)—rather than moral perfection—as one’s ideal.

This chapter examines the current debate between interpretations of early Confucian ethics as a form of “role ethics”, or alternatively, a form of virtue ethics. It argues that the virtue ethical readings are more accurate, but still only partially recognise the significance of roles and role-specific obligations in early Confucian social ethics. This chapter explores the fundamental normative justification for early Confucian social ethics and political theory, to show the interrelated place of reflection on roles and virtues to both. Against the widely discussed recent statements of early Confucian role ethics by Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont, the chapter argues that the early Confucians were not radical particularists, eschewing all generalised normative theorising; nor were they committed to the extreme and misguided view that the self is nothing but the roles it inhabits, without an “internal” centre of judgment and consciousness capable of adjudicating conflicts between role requirements or other values. Roles, and the corresponding relationships that define them, are what the early Confucians call “positions”, which can only be properly fulfilled by those who are virtuous. Role fulfilment helps train people into virtue, but it also addresses early Confucian concerns to uphold just social order and support flourishing communities that makes possible a humane life for every member of each community. Early Confucian theorising is worthy of contemporary interest in part because of the way it integrates reflection on family roles with analysis of political and professional offices, providing a noteworthy example of how role ethics may be combined with virtue ethics and obligation centred accounts of morality and law.

Several prominent interpreters have suggested that early Confucians would support what we now call “humanitarian intervention,” albeit with some particularly Confucian nuances. It is argued here that this is at least misleading. It is maintained that the key criterion for the appropriate use of offensive military force implied in the early Confucian texts is such overwhelming support, on account of one’s moral virtue, that little resistance is encountered, and thus the carnage associated with genuine war is not required. Since this condition is not actually encountered in real circumstances, early Confucianism can provide support for resisting calls to use offensive warfare for humanitarian purposes. First the focus is on Mencius, and interpretations of Mencius’s view of humanitarian intervention, especially that of Daniel A. Bell. It is then argued that Xunzi holds a view similar to that of Mencius. This suggests that there is a relatively consistent early Confucian perspective on warfare that is, in its practical implications, more pacifistic than recent commentaries suggest.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Democracy in Confucianism

Those working in Confucian ethics will notice that Ing tends to view Confucian ethics solely in terms of rituals and to interpret Confucian texts as being primarily focused on ritual behavior. At times he seems to present all ethical actions as ritual actions, and while there are relationships between the two in early Confucian texts and they sometimes overlap, an important distinction remains. Indeed, early Confucian texts raise many issues in ethics that are not primarily focused on ritual behavior. Scholars in Confucian ethics also may wonder how the view of vulnerability that Ing describes compares with prominent accounts that have been given by philosophers like Martha Nussbaum and Alasdair MacIntyre, and whether those working in Confucian ethics (even those using virtue-ethical approaches) have as much in common as Ing argues they do. It also seems to me that some contemporary interpreters describe the doubts and vulnerabilities of early Confucians to a greater extent than Ing suggests (and in works he does not discuss).1 Ing’s effort to highlight the importance of the Liji and his claim that Confucian views of ritual can make significant contributions to ritual theory are most laudable, although he departs from the Liji partly in order to argue against the interpretations of scholars working on other early Confucian texts. At one point he says these interpretations ‘‘are not necessarily misreadings of the texts—I am, of course, speaking about the Liji, whereas most other contemporary scholars are writing about the Analects, Mencius, or Xunzi, and as such I remain open to the possibility that there are significant differences between these texts’’ (p. 77). But Ing’s critique suggests that he thinks these early texts all present the same view of ritual failure— something that I doubt the scholars he criticizes, or others working in Confucian ethics, would easily accept. Given that one of Ing’s central aims is to show how the Liji presents a distinctive view of ritual and is therefore worth studying, one cannot help but wonder: if the Liji offers a novel theory of ritual and if a concern with unpreventable failures of ritual is one of the central features of that theory, is it possible that contemporary scholars of early Confucianism have not addressed this matter because other early Confucian texts are not as concerned with it? ERIN M. CLINE Georgetown University MARIA JASCHOK and SHUI JINGJUN, Women, Religion, and Space in China: Islamic Mosques & Daoist Temples, Catholic Convents & Chinese Virgins. New York and London: Routledge, 2011. xx, 276 pp. US$125/£80 (hb). ISBN 978-0-41587485 -4 Following their pioneering study of women and Islam, Maria Jaschok and Shui Jingjun’s new book makes another major contribution to the study of women and 1 For example, Ing criticizes the interpretations of Edward Slingerland and Philip J. Ivanhoe, but does not discuss or cite Slingerland’s major work, Effortless Action: Wu-wei as Conceptual Metaphor and Spiritual Ideal in Early China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), or works by Ivanhoe such as Confucian Moral Self Cultivation (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000) and ‘‘Heaven as a Source for Ethical Warrant in Early Confucianism,’’ Dao 6 (2007): 211–220. All of these works seem to problematize Ing’s view. BOOK REVIEWS 163 gender in the history of Chinese religions. So far this is the only book-length study on women and religion through the twentieth-century and contemporary China. As the title makes clear, it offers wide coverage of women’s experiences within three different religious institutions—Daoist, Catholic, and Islamic—and its local focus is in Kaifeng 開封, Zhengzhou 鄭州, and Jin’gang 靳崗, in both urban and rural Henan 河南 province, a part of north-central China that still remains understudied by scholars of Chinese religions. The effective collaboration of the two authors also brings out the best in combining theoretical sophistication with an in-depth exploration of historical texts, archival materials, and ethnographic data. Jaschok and Shui claim to follow in the footsteps of feminist historians like Dorothy Ko and Susan Mann in dispelling the ‘‘victim narratives’’ that defined the ‘‘traditional Chinese woman’’ as ‘‘victimized, passive, and vulnerable to abuse outside her allocated sphere of respectable female place and conduct’’ (p. 13...

This paper examines how early Confucianism reinterpreted sacrificial rites and reconstructed the relationship between humans and spirits through the lens of qing (情, sentiment). Traditional scholarship often views the Confucian reinterpretation of sacrifice as a shift from religious belief to a human-centered framework of rationality, morality, and humanism—emphasizing its role in moral education and social governance and thereby marginalizing or even denying the existence of guishen (鬼神, spirits and deities) and the transcendent realm they represent. Although some scholars have emphasized the religious dimensions of Confucianism, few have addressed how Confucians managed to affirm the existence of spirits while simultaneously endowing sacrificial rites with moral and humanistic meaning—that is, how they navigated the inherent tension between the human and the divine realms. Against this background, this study argues that early Confucians neither denied the existence of spirits nor reduced sacrifice to a purely ethical or political instrument. By contrast, they regarded human sentiment as the universal foundation of sacrificial practice and, through a profound and creative transformation, redirected the meaning of sacrifice toward the human world (rendao 人道), thereby establishing a new model of human–divine relations—one that affirms human agency and dignity while preserving the sanctity of the spiritual. Drawing on close readings of classical Confucian texts such as The Analects, The Book of Rites, and Xunzi, this paper identifies three core dimensions of sacrificial sentiment: remembrance, gratitude, and reverence and awe. Together, these sentiments form a relational structure between humans and guishen that enables communication and interaction while maintaining clear boundaries. In this way, Confucian sacrificial rites become a space for emotional expression without degenerating into a “carnival of emotions” or transgressing the proper separation between the human and the divine. Confucian sacrificial thought thus affirms human dignity and moral agency while upholding the transcendence of the sacred.

This chapter argues that early Confucians were revolutionaries with a conservative facade. According to this “progressive” reading, they tried to solve issues of modernity not by rejecting modernity but by embracing it, although some of their locutions seem to resonate with those widely used in the “good old days,” and they were not as resolute as thinkers from some other schools. Moreover, not accepting early Confucianism as a moral metaphysics, the chapter also rejects the reading that early Confucians tried to solve political issues by improving on people’s morals alone. Rather, the premise of its reading is that they apprehended the political concerns as primary and the ethical ones as secondary, a byproduct of their political concerns. They were concerned with reconstructing a political order and were thus open to the idea of institutional design, even though they themselves did not discuss it in detail. To take a continuous reading of early Confucianism by asking about which political institutions they would have in mind, especially in today’s political reality, would not be alien to Confucianism.

This chapter reveals that early Confucians saw irresolvable value conflicts as real possibilities. It starts with an overview of the ways in which contemporary scholars have described Confucianism in terms of harmony and the lack of tragedy. It then challenges these narratives by looking at several vignettes that depict moral agents confronting irresolvable value conflicts. This chapter also analyzes the notion of tragedy in an early Confucian worldview to show that early Confucians did not see values as necessarily conflicting with each other, although they accepted the possibility of tragic conflict. This means that early Confucians recognized the complexities of life such that even the highly skilled moral agent (i.e., a sage) could encounter a situation where the values at stake were incapable of being harmonized, but, at the same time, the Confucian moral agent did not see the world as necessitating conflict. The Confucian conflictual world is one of possible incongruity, where minor value conflicts may even be inevitable given the complexities of life, but values in the abstract sense are not thought to be in conflict in and of themselves. In this light, deep value conflicts such as those discussed in this chapter may rarely occur, but the fact that they can occur, and that they can occur for even the most profound people, is significant in forecasting the sentiments people have about the world they live in.

Manners, Vulnerability, and Rude Women:Comments on Amy Olberding's The Wrong of Rudeness Emily McRae (bio) In response to Amy Olberding's fascinating and thoughtful book—a book that I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone—I will explore a specific kind of problem regarding manners and morality. It is a question that arises at the intersection of good manners, moral self-cultivation, and oppressive social systems: how do we practice good manners in non-ideal, unjust contexts as members of socially disadvantaged groups? Before I begin to address this question, I want to note that I am convinced by Amy's arguments for the significance of civility and mannerliness in moral and social life (her main argument being, roughly, that civility shows our commitment to the big values of shared life together, the regular expression of which is necessary for living together well). My reflections in this comment are not intended to devalue or undercut civility in social life. I take myself to be doing the opposite by thinking seriously about how we show our reverence for, as Amy says, that which is "finest and most exquisite" in our shared life, in contexts shaped by unjust norms (p. 58). Of course, the Confucian philosophers that Amy engages so compellingly in this book are not strangers to this question: they were arguing for the value of li 禮 in times that were far from ideal, as political corruption, war, crime, and famine were widespread during the time period in which these thinkers were teaching and writing (475–221 b.c.e.). Not only that, but these early Confucians, including Confucius himself, were making their arguments as members of an at least somewhat socially disadvantaged group: Confucius and his followers were infamously exiled, often (but not always) denied political influence, and were not uncommonly the object of ridicule. These early Confucians were arguing for the importance of li—including civility and good manners—not from a place of assumed social, political, or economic dominance, but from the position of a complicated and considerably more vulnerable relationship to power. As far as I know, all of these early Confucians, recorded in the Analects and other texts, were men—at least that is the conclusion of the early Hanperiod Chinese historian Sima Qian (145–86 b.c.e.), who lists seventy-seven disciples of Confucius, all male. We don't really know, then, how Confucius would counsel women students on li, or whether and how this counsel would be different from his advice to his male disciples. Regardless, it does seem to be the case that the general expectation to be mannerly applied to [End Page 1084] men and women, in the sense that neither group is given a pass on the demands of civility. Even if the specific norms of etiquette were highly gendered—for instance the different norms of etiquette that govern appropriate behavior for a husband and a wife—the general expectation to abide by li could be (and I suspect was) universal. This, I think, is a point of significant difference between the Confucian context and our own. As far as I can tell, there is no evidence that manners were feminized in Warring States period China. But a quick tour through the history of etiquette in the United States reveals it to be a highly gendered concept: etiquette, at least from the nineteenth century onward, is feminized in at least two main ways. Etiquette in the American context is feminized in the sense that it is largely understood as for women (and, significantly, other social climbers), as rules directed to, and often written by, women (pp. 7–8). But good manners and etiquette are also feminized in the sense that they are ridiculed and trivialized in strikingly feminine terms. As Amy notes, even the word "etiquette" can be "rejected as useful for discussing serious subjects," being dismissed as "ladylike" and "prissy" (p. 8). In thinking about manners as a cornerstone of moral self-cultivation, we have to take this history into account, since, unlike in the early Confucian context, it seems to me that for us the general expectation to be well-mannered is gendered, with the bulk of the...

To say Early Confucians advocated the possession of a sense of shame as a means to moral virtue underestimates the tact and forethought they used successfully to mold natural dispositions to experience shame into a system of self, familial, and social governance. Shame represents an adaptive system of emotion, cognition, perception, and behavior in social primates for measurement of social rank. Early Confucians understood the utility of the shame system for promotion of cooperation, and they build and deploy cultural modules – e.g., rituals, titles, punishments – with this in mind. These policies result in subtle alterations to components of the evolved shame system that are detectable in data form contemporary cross-cultural psychology that show that populations in the Confucian diaspora have a unique shame profile compared to Western and non-Western populations. The status of Confucian diaspora populations as outliers in the context of shame is partially explained by appeal to the cultural transmission and historical endurance of relevant Early Confucian cultural modules.

This chapter explores Confucian practices, including archery, ritual, music, and poetry. It argues that the early Confucian Dào should be understood as a practice-centered tradition that shapes human relationships, character, and skills. Becoming good at these practices requires authoritative teachers, but their authority should not give contemporary people pause—the early Confucians took no vows of obedience, nor did they advocate ascetic renunciation. This chapter explores the three aspects of “the master”: a master practitioner of Confucian arts, an attractive exemplar of good living, and an effective guide for others. The Confucian Way forms a lifelong path, with distinct stages, that reflects a gradualist developmental paradigm, and makes family life central to good living. In sum, this chapter explores the reliance of students on their teachers, in order to suggest that it is salutary rather than deforming for both students and teachers.

Contrary to what several prominent scholars contend, a number of important early Confucians ground their ethical claims by appealing to the authority of tian, Heaven, insisting that Heaven endows human beings with a distinctive ethical nature and at times acts in the world. This essay describes the nature of such appeals in two early Confucian texts: the Lunyu (Analects) and Mengzi (Mencius). It locates this account within a larger narrative that begins with some of the earliest conceptions of a supreme deity in China. The essay concludes by noting some similarities and differences between these early Confucian accounts and more familiar views commonly shared by monotheists.

‘Variety within early Confucianism’ considers two very different, early interpretations of the Confucian tradition that have influenced education, social practices, and intellectual tradition throughout imperial Chinese history: that of Mencius (fourth c.bce) and of Xunzi (third c.bce). Both followers of Confucius agree that: (1) man is morally perfectible; and (2) to achieve moral perfection man must undertake a self-cultivation process. But for Mencius, the source of man's moral potential is internal, found in man's nature itself; for Xunzi, man's nature is evil and he must look externally to his environment and culture to find moral resources to redirect his recalcitrant human nature.

Comments on Aaron Stalnaker’s Mastery, Dependence, and the Ethics of Authority Nancy E. Snow (bio) Mastery, Dependence, and the Ethics of Authority. By Aaron Stalnaker. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Introduction Aaron Stalnaker's Mastery, Dependence, and the Ethics of Authority is a significant achievement. The aim of this book is to mine the insights of the early Confucians, or Ru, for enriching Western ethical and political thought on the ethics of authority and dependence. Stalnaker does this through a meticulous and in-depth study that highlights, but is not limited to, the early Confucian thinkers Kongzi, Mengzi, and Xunzu. His focus is on the ways in which their approach to ritual and certain forms of authority/dependence relationships, such as master/student and father/son, have the potential to inform contemporary Western political structures and governance. The Ru thought that by learning certain virtues and skills, such as benevolence, righteousness, filial piety, and propriety—primarily through ritual—junzi (gentlemen), could be educated to become wise and virtuous. Having been educated in virtue, junzi could then become shengren (sages)—a higher stage on the path to wisdom and virtue. Degrees of expertise are envisioned in this process, but the point is that acquiring significant learning and virtue qualifies one either to rule or to advise rulers. The Ru approach to ethics and politics is significantly different from the Western perspectives that Stalnaker discusses, which are in the liberal political tradition. In that tradition, individualism and autonomy are the key points of departure for theorizing structures of governance. By contrast, the Confucian tradition highlights wisdom and virtue acquired through training in the performance of ritual, undertaken under the guidance of an accomplished master. Individuals are ineluctably enmeshed in relationships of authority and dependence, and this network of relationships forms the basis for Confucian thought about governance. Individual liberty and, in [End Page 497] some versions of liberalism, equality are the guiding values that government should embody and seek to promote. Confucian government, by contrast, should embody and promote the Dao, or way, which is the path we should follow to achieve virtue and righteousness. I am only peripherally familiar with the early Confucian tradition, and have learned much from reading this book. My familiarity is with the liberalism of the West, and perhaps that explains why I have more questions about Confucianism than about Stalnaker's treatment of liberalism. Since I am no expert in Confucian philosophy, I present my comments as questions for clarification or edification. They fall into three areas: persons and rituals, deference and remonstration, and gender subordination and the perils of meritocracy. Persons and Rituals The performance of ritual, for Confucians, is the path by means of which virtue is cultivated. All three of the early Confucians—Kongzi, Mengzi, and Xunzi—thought this. To the best of my knowledge, Kongzi does not clearly articulate a set of assumptions about human nature (xing), but seems to assume that persons have capacities for goodness as well as for evil. Mengzi, by contrast, apparently assumes that we are basically good, contending that we have four 'sprouts', or, as I read them, basic tendencies or orientations, toward various types of goodness: benevolence, righteousness, ritual propriety, and wisdom (Stalnaker 2020, p. 94). Xunzi, according to my (imperfect) understanding, has a darker view of human nature, believing, in terms reminiscent of Hobbes, that we are basically prone to evil, and that our natural tendencies need to be curbed and reshaped in ways more consistent with goodness, so that we may truly follow the Dao. Stalnaker acknowledges that there are differences between Mengzi and Xunzi, but sets these aside, stating: "In brief, I think analysts have been overly credulous regarding Xunzi's critique of Mengzi's ideas about "human nature" (xing…) and self-cultivation, and thus missed some aspects of what these two texts nevertheless share regarding teaching, learning, and the economic and social order necessary for personal formation to succeed more than occasionally" (p. 57). I want to push back a bit on this. Surely, assumptions about human nature would shape the kinds of rituals that each Confucian theorist would prescribe for self-cultivation, as well as for the governance of...

This paper is intended to examine the ethical paradigm of the good life constructed in the early Confucian texts, in contrast with the clear tendency to the rational paradigm as ascribed in the ancient Greek philosophy. To fully appreciate the Confucian paradigm, we will investigate how joy becomes the central concern for early Confucians and what categories it is classified through discourses on wisdom and virtue. We will argue that joy, wisdom and virtue underlie the theme of learning to be human and is both the necessary ingredient and the consequence of the good life in early Confucianism.