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Images of Human Nature
A Sung Portrait
By Donald J. Munro PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1988 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07330-9
CHAPTER 1
BACKGROUND AND METHODOLOGY
Chu Hsi (1130–1200), the subject of this book, is historically important because his ideas became orthodoxy in China after his death and remained so until 1905. Yet the very breadth of his writings and recorded conversations, and the long and fluctuating history of his influence in China, have made it difficult to untangle the intricacies of his philosophical doctrines. Moreover, the organization of his ideas is not easy to grasp. The occasion for this study is the application of a new methodology in the attempt to clarify one core element in Chu's thought: his conception of human nature. This methodology will reveal two sets of polarized ideas at the center of his view of human nature. Because that concept lies embedded in his conversations and writings on ethics, its extraction will inevitably involve an examination of his ethical construct, too.
Previous Western studies of Chu have relied on such useful methods as term definition, historical sociology, and analysis of the nature of Neo-Confucian orthodoxy and have clarified Chu's ideas and their transformation over time. Although each attempt has yielded important new insights, each has also revealed in Chu's works some unsystematic patterns of thought. These discoveries suggest that there is more work to be done to unlock the philosophical perspectives that made his ideas coherent to himself and his followers. If a key is found, it should be possible to differentiate between what was coherent for Chu and yet may still be problematic for modern analysts.
This study will seek the key in Chu's own mode of discourse. That is, I shall articulate his conception of human nature through an analysis of certain dominant structural images that Chu employed to express his ideas. While mindful of historical background, I intend to focus on doctrine. By tailoring my method to the formal structure of philosophical discourse, I can reveal cohesive arrangements of previously elusive ideas, thus making possible an analysis of Chu's views of human nature that is both clear and simple. As the portrait takes form, I will also consider the issue of the distinctiveness of Chu's ideas in comparison with Western philosophical traditions and, at the end of the work, the echoes of Chu's images of human nature in the modern age.
It may seem at times that the pictorial images play too central a role in this study in comparison with the doctrine of human nature that they are meant to elucidate. I have found no way to avoid this, because the doctrine emerges clearly only from the pattern disclosed by the images.
The large philosophical question in which I am interested is: how does the mode of human thinking affect the content of thought (with special attention to the formulators of original theories)? It is in this connection that I was drawn to the use of pictorial images in the explanation of philosophical theories. I was first alerted to the matter by noting the centrality of the images of the human organism to explain nature and society and of light to explain cognition in classical Western thought, and of the machine (especially the clock) to explain nature and humans in Renaissance writings. The methodology is one that I suspect is equally valid for the study of Western and Chinese philosophy.
In sum, this work has three interlocking themes. The first is Chu's views about the nature of human beings, which turn out to involve two sets of polarities. The second is its methodology, identifying and analyzing the structural images that reveal what Chu's conception of man is. And the third is the fitting together of his disparate ethical positions, because they constitute the philosophical source material from which the images of man emerge. Before beginning to discuss these themes, however, I want first to say something briefly about Chu's school. Then I will note the historical background in which the ideas developed. This information helps in understanding some of the reasons for the significance and future course of Chu's thought. Finally, I will lay out in detail precisely what the methodology is that serves as a new key for dealing with Chu's historically monumental doctrines.
The School
If the earliest Confucians were famous as teachers and practitioners of rituals (ali), their Sung descendants were noted for their theories about bli (principle). Among his Sung predecessors, Chu acknowledged the greatest debt to Ch'eng I (1033–1107). He claimed that a metaphysical concept (bli) that Ch'eng had worked into his teachings came to play a central role in his own thought. Originally standing for the grain in wood or jade, of which the carver must be mindful, bli refers to natural patterns in things or events. In Ch'eng's writings, it means the eternal, changeless, and nonempirical (my rendering of Chu's hsing erh shang or "above form") source of both ordered change and the classification of things. Each class of things, such as humans or plants, and each member of a class, has its bli. A knowledge of it reveals the behavior or action that is natural to a class or individual. The bli in the teachings of Ch'eng I and Chu Hsi caused some commentators to refer to their doctrines as the "School of Principle" (li-hsüeh). This designation was made in the second half of the thirteenth century. Their ideas were known as "the learning of the Way" (tao-hsüeh) and, to underscore the importance of the innately moral mind in its teaching, as the "learning of the mind" (hsin-hsüeh). In this study the term "Neo-Confucianism" refers to this school.
Chu did not always agree with Ch'eng I (see Chapter Four). The present work cites Ch'eng's writings and/or those of his brother (Ch'eng Hao, 1032–1085) as additional illustrations of positions shared with Chu for which there is documentation. Chu Hsi's ideas, expressed in his commentaries on Confucian classics of the Chou period (1122 or 1027–256 B.C.), were inculcated by the curriculum studied by candidates for the civil service. To base the examinations on his works was to ensure, among an elite group of scholarly leaders, some degree of shared assumptions about humans and their values and about the societies and natural world in which they lived. This movement toward orthodoxy occurred in three stages. Although factional disputes led to the formal proscription of his doctrines in the 1190s, only a decade after his death the throne began to award him posthumous titles. In 1211 it published his collected commentaries on the Four Books (the Analects, the Mencius, the Great Learning, and the Doctrine of the Mean). The year 1241 marks the second watershed in the progress toward national acclaim of his philosophy, for in that year the earlier proscription was condemned. Just a few years earlier Chu and his philosophical predecessors in the Northern Sung (960–1125) were elevated to the rank of "former sages." The climax occurred shortly after the collapse of the Southern Sung in 1279, when the Mongol emperor decreed that the examinations would require familiarity with Chu's commentaries. The chin-shih ("presented scholar") examination, which was reintroduced in 1314–1315, thenceforth was based to varying degrees on these texts.
Taking note of Chu's place in Confucian orthodoxy should not be limited to mentioning only acts of the throne. Chu himself contributed to the notion that the body of truths he expounded was alone worthy of being transmitted. He suggested that these truths were known to Confucius (551–479 B.C.), his disciple Tseng Tzu, and the Confucian moral intuitionist Mencius (372?–289? B.C.). Chu said that on the death of Mencius they were lost, until several Northern Sung figures — Chou Tun-i (1017–1073), Ch'eng Hao, and especially Ch'eng I — rediscovered them. According to Chu, leading figures from the Han (206 B.C.-A.D. 220) through the T'ang (618–906), when the tao (moral path) was lost, were unworthy of emulation by those who seek it. This idea of a "transmission of the tao" owes something to the Buddhist practice of master-to-disciple transmission of sometimes secret or esoteric teachings.
Chu further claimed that there is a set of core truths, and that up to his own time only a limited number of persons had had access to them. One truth is that the mind is innately capable of discriminating between hierarchical differences and proper relationships, and this capability corresponds to the objective order in nature as a whole. Such a view of mind differs from that of the Buddhists, for whom the ideal state of consciousness is devoid of such categories. Second, although the individual's mind is one, it can be bifurcated in terms of the object on which it focuses. This leads to a separation into a higher and a lower self, between which there will be conflict until the former conquers the latter. All persons possess the higher self, and so there is an assumption of perfectibility. People should regard single-mindedness in the nurturance of the higher self as a cardinal value, along with maintaining the mean. And, finally, these truths are capable of being passed on, as they were from the earliest sages to Confucius.
During Chu's own lifetime, and long before his doctrines became state orthodoxy, he helped nurture society's acceptance of his doctrines by both revitalizing scholarly teaching academies and contributing personally to their curriculum materials. Chu earnestly hoped that more and more people would understand these truths. But the claim by Chu and his like-minded colleagues that there is a "learning of the Way" (tao-hsüeh) to which they had access was perceived by many others as a belief in exclusivity. I will return to this point again.
Scholars traditionally divide the Confucian philosophies that emerged in the Sung and continued to flourish through the Ming (1368–1643) into two schools. That which stands juxtaposed to the Ch'eng-Chu teachings has been called the School of Mind (hsin-hsüeh). But we may accurately ascribe that term to either Chu's school or that of his most famous critic, Wang Yang-ming (1472–1529). Conflicts between the schools dwell on the relation between mind and principle (are they one or two?) and on the relative importance in self-improvement, respectively, of either scholarly textual study or spontaneous intuition and service activity. This second topic, in fact, reveals much about the personality differences between the chief proponents of the two schools. Chu Hsi was a bookish intellectual, most at home in the solitude of his study. Wang Yang-ming, on the other hand, was an idealistic monist who identified mind and principle and was probably happiest when actively engaged in the solution of civil or military problems. He often risked his life in the process. But it is time to turn to the polarities revealed in Chu's images of human nature and to the historical facts of the age in which he lived that helped shape them.
Two Polarities and Their Historical Context
Somewhat before Chu's time, political factors in the Northern Sung had already begun to play a decisive role in a turn toward early (meaning Chou) Confucian fundamentalism. As George Hatch has argued, the gentry from south-central China, a region benefiting from increasing commercial wealth and urbanization, lacked the great landed wealth and hereditary titles of the T'ang (618–906) aristocracy based largely in the north. To compensate, they demanded political and social status by virtue of a claim to the principles of early Confucianism. By the 1060s these principles were dominant, advocating restoration of early doctrines, including the ritual rules (ali), as guides to political and social practice. In addition to these changes, there were the immediate threats from non-Chinese tribes such as the Khitans and Tanguts in the north and northwest. Fan Chung-yen (989–1052) was a restorationist reformer who advocated evaluations of bureaucratic performance. He rose to prominence on the battlefield fighting the Tanguts, and he remained acutely sensitive to the need to reform the society thoroughly in order to save it. The practices of the early sages were there as the appropriate model.
Looking back on the early classical Confucian teachings that carry the wisdom of the sages, it is possible to identify two specific issues that became significant in Chu's own philosophy. The following passage in the Analects contains one of them:
The "Duke" of She addressed Master K'ung saying, "In my country there was a man called Upright Kung. His father appropriated a sheep, and Kung bore witness against him." Master K'ung said, "In my country the upright men are of quite another sort. A father will screen his son, and a son his father — which incidentally does involve a sort of uprightness."
The passage indicates clearly Confucius' priority in a conflict between duty to one's own family and the claims of either the family that lost the sheep or the laws and customs of the state in which the event took place. At the same time, the Analects prizes humaneness (jen), which includes loving people in general. Although rooted in kinship affection, love can and should be extended to persons outside the family. Chu Hsi accepted both the family preference and the obligation for altruism beyond the family. The first issue, therefore, is the potential incompatibility between family duty and duty to those outside the family.
Mo Tzu (ca. 479–ca. 381 B.C.) criticized the Confucian preferential love for family members as both inefficient and often ignored even by its advocates (leaving for a distant mission, they entrust their families to practitioners of universal, not partial, love). It is also contrary to heaven's universal-mindedness. Mo Tzu thus found an impossible conflict between the value of family partiality and that of altruism and advocated abandoning the former in favor of love equally distributed to all. Mohist universal love also differs from Confucian humaneness in the following respects: the former is an obligation, but the latter is a natural disposition; universal love is more like fair treatment of others than an emotional response, like Confucius' humaneness or compassion; and Mo Tzu often justifies universal love on utilitarian grounds, whereas for Confucius humaneness is to be practiced because it is natural and therefore intrinsically right. The Mohist critique of Confucianism constitutes an early identification of an incompatibility seen later by others between Confucianism's family love and the altruistic Confucian ideal of loving those outside the family. Chu Hsi frequently criticizes the Mohist position because it denigrates natural family sentiments and would eliminate natural gradation of worth.
The second issue is the relative weight to assign to self-discovery of morally relevant truths and to obedience to those objective rules of conduct (ritual rules, ali) formulated by others. Mencius emphasized the centrality in man's universally shared innate endowment of the moral sense (ai) and the ability to discriminate between right and wrong (shih-fei chih hsin). Another prominent Warring States Period (403–221 B.C.) Confucian, Hsün Tzu (ca. 298–ca. 238 B.C), also made a place for the moral sense. But, consistent with the practice of many Confucians, he believed that the brutish qualities also present in man's innate endowment require the individual to undergo an exhaustive inculcation of the ritual rules. The early classical Confucian works contain no definitive position on the optimal balance between these two sources of formative standards for the individual.
Chu Hsi himself did not directly focus on these issues. Among other things, he was interested in constructing a metaphysics that could answer those questions which had already received sophisticated treatment in Buddhist philosophy, such as the content of human nature (hsing) and mind (empty of innate moral truths, according to the Buddhists), and the existence of a unifying entity immanent in the many disparate things. And he was interested in the classics as educational materials. Yet as he grappled with these more immediate matters, including constructing a theory of human nature as an alternative to that found in Buddhism, the conflicts in these classical polarities emerged to color his answers. And they are relevant to any attempt to evaluate his doctrines as a system.
The present work is an examination of these two older sets of polarities that keep cropping up in Chu's theory of human nature. The book ends with a consideration of the implications for modern Chinese thought of Chu's treatment of each set. In the first set, the juxtaposition of family love and altruistic love of people beyond the family, the seeds of both poles are innate to human nature. Altruism grows out of the same innate trait as does family feeling. The second set, self-discovery of truth as contrasted with reliance on objective authorities, also emerges from Chu's theory of human nature. The important principles that inform people about all things in nature are innate. Yet the actual cloudiness of the mind, inevitably caused by one's physical constitution, requires momentary reliance on the guidance of external authorities as a supplement to self-effort in grasping these principles.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Images of Human Nature by Donald J. Munro. Copyright © 1988 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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