Jottings from the Granite Studio

One of my favorite blogs is The Useless Tree written by Sam Crane. I enjoy reading his posts so much it almost makes me forget he’s a Yankees fan. I had a question relating to Confucianism and how to characterize human nature and Sam seemed like the absolutely perfect guy to ask.

Some background: Twice a year in our department we teach a 5000-years-in-9-weeks-from-Yao-to-the Ming-to the-Yao-Ming Chinese history survey. We’ve had a small debate that’s been going on for a few years now over how to teach Xunzi, the 3rd century Confucian scholar, some of whose students, such as Han Fei, would go on to found the Legalist school and work as officials in the employ of Qin Shi Huangdi. When teaching the “Big 3″ of the early Confucians, Xunzi, Mencius and the C-Man himself, Xunzi gets a kind of bad rap.

Whereas Mencius has great stories of the goodness of human nature and the responsibilities of leaders to listen to the people and act according to Heaven’s will, Xunzi seems like a sourpuss. To be fair, Xunzi, unlike Mencius or Confucius, actually had a real career in public service. No matter where or in what era, this has to temper your joy in humanity somewhat. So whereas Mencius comes out and declares that “human nature is good”: 人之性善 ren zhi xing shan. Xunzi, in his writings, seems to say the exact opposite: 人之性恶 ren zhi xing e, usually translated as “human nature is evil.” But is this really as dualistic as it appears or are Westerners, caught up as some of us are in notions of Original Sin and the tension between Good vs. Evil, perhaps missing the subtleties of these two arguments?

Anyway, I asked Sam for his thoughts, and he was gracious enough to respond with a very thoughtful post. Sam agreed that it was best to not draw too stark a dichotomy between Mencius and Xunzi:

Even though they offer different summarizing statements on human nature, they are both deeply committed to a project of Confucian perfectionism. This is what distinguishes Xun Zi from the Legalists, who could care less about moral transformation, it seems to me, and are much more concerned with power and its maintenance. Take this quote from the last chapter of [Burton's] Basic Writings, which has that infamous title, “Man’s Nature is Evil:”

You have said, someone may object, that a sage has arrived where he has through the accumulation of good acts. Why is it, then, that everyone is not able to accumulate good acts in the same way? I would reply: everyone is capable of doing so, but not everyone can be made to do so. The petty man is capable of becoming a gentleman, yet he is not willing to do so; the gentleman is capable of becoming a petty man but he is not willing to do so. The petty man and the gentleman are perfectly capable of changing places; the fact that they do not actually do so is what I mean when I say that they are capable of doing so but cannot be made to do so. Hence it is correct to say that the man in the street is capable of becoming a Yu but it is not necessarily correct to say that he will in fact find it possible to do so. But although he does not find it possible to do so does not prove that he is incapable of doing so. (167)

The element of agency in this passage, the sense of personal responsibility and capability for moral improvement, is certainly closer to Mencius than to Han Fei Tzu. It suggests that what is meant by “human nature” - xing - does not carry the deterministic connotation that we associate with it in our modern (Western, rationalist) context. The difference between Mencius and Xun Zi, then, is not really a matter of irreconcilable categories of “human nature” as much as it is a tension between optimistic and pessimistic assessments of moral perfectability.

This idea of optimism and pessimism is an interesting one. For example, I do think that what separates Xunzi from his Legalist students is Xunzi’s (admittedly crotchety) sense of optimism. Certainly the Legalists later would take a more extreme position on human nature and argue that human beings, left to their own natures, are unable to do “good” and thus must be tightly controlled. Xunzi is not so pessimistic. He does believe that people can change (can be changed?) through education and ritual as opposed to the Legalist emphasis on, well, laws. Perhaps Xunzi’s most famous metaphor is that of the piece of warped wood that can be straightened, steamed and bent until it becomes straight and useful. (A metaphor that would be an interesting juxtaposition with the Zhuangzi story from which Sam derived the name for his blog: the story of the useless tree.)

I want to thank Sam for such a thoughtful answer and to encourage readers to read my original question and Sam’s full explanation over at The Useless Tree. While you’re there, be sure to also read Sam’s Sun Tzu-inspired breakdown of Sunday’s Super Bowl.