Introduction

We began with an introduction to the basics of Classic Confucianism, as we suppose it to have been understood in the time of Confucius himself. We shall continue now with certain developments of that doctrine due to those who came after him. The first of these successors that we’ll look at is Mencius (孟子, Mèngzĭ) (372–289,) who is best known for his theories concerning human nature, and for his claim that people are basically good. In this he was opposed by Xunzi, whom we shall look at next, who claimed that people are basically bad. The orthodox Confucian position since Sung dynasty times (960 AD-1279 AD) has been in agreement with Mencius, and as a consequence of this belated victory he has been taken as the true successor of Confucius, and the one who set the form of Classic Confucianism for the ages. In this respect, his position is now imagined to have been somewhat analogous to that of St. Paul in the Christian tradition. A mark of the esteem in which Mencius is held is that his book (the ‘Mencius’) is one of the ‘Four Books’ taken to be fundamental expressions of the Master’s way, and it is the only one of them not traditionally authored by Confucius himself.[1]  As to its actual authorship, the evidence suggests that it is mostly Mencius’s work, though perhaps collected, edited, and augmented by others. It must have assumed something like its present form not too long after Mencius’s death.

Despite his esteem, however, we know little of Mencius, as is often the case with ancient philosophers. What we do know of him (and his mother) comes largely from an analysis of his (eponymous) book, or from a few passages in the ‘Records of the Historian’[2]. From these sources a story emerges that Mencius was born in the small state of Zou, studied under Confucius’s grandson Zǐsī (子思, ca. 481–402,) wandered about the central kingdoms for 40 years trying to spread the good word of Confucius, was appointed as a minister in the state of Qi from 319 to 312, and eventually retired from public life having been disappointed by the reluctance of the rulers to follow his guidance. It all sounds pretty familiar doesn’t it?

Mencius set himself the task of defending the Confucian position against the criticism of competing schools of philosophy. You will recall that this was a particularly fertile period of philosophical speculation – in fact, it was one of the great periods in world history for the formation of lasting and valuable ideas. There were, in the traditional idiom, one hundred schools to contend with; but he particularly saw himself as doing battle with the teachings of Mozi and Yang Chu.

The words of Yang Zhu and Mo Di fill the country. If you listen to people's discourses throughout it, you will find that they have adopted the views either of Yang or of Mo. Now, Yang's principle is "each one for himself," which does not acknowledge the claims of the sovereign. Mo's principle is "to love all equally," which does not acknowledge the peculiar affection due to a father. But to acknowledge neither king nor father is to be in the state of a beast.[3]

We have already looked at the system of Mo Di, or Mozi as he is also known, who propounded a type of utilitarian ethic which was most notable for its claim that every one had a claim to equal concern on our part. This was represented as a doctrine of ‘universal love.’ Yang Chu, on the other hand, was successfully discredited by his enemies as an extreme egoist. Mencius here claims that according to him one has no obligations other than to oneself. In fact, as we’ll see later, it’s likely that his ideas were a bit more subtle than this, and that he represents one early strand of the philosophy that we have come to call Taoism.

The Error of Interests

Mencius’s criticism of Mo Di and Yang Chu in that passage is simply that if we adopt the theories of those two philosophers we will fail to observe the proper moral relations that exist between people in a well-organized society. The reason for this, Mencius believes, is that those philosophers were ultimately concerned with pursuing interests (利, lì), rather than ‘doing the right thing.’ For the Mohists, the interests of all were equally important, while for the followers of  Yang Chu one’s own interests were all-important.

It’s sometimes thought to be odd that Mencius should have mentioned Yang Chu so prominently in that passage, because Yang does not really seem to have been of much importance at this time – or, indeed, at any later time. Most would say that his other obvious opponents were the Legalists, whom we have also seen before. However, if we look again at the teachings of the Legalists we observe that they thought that people were naturally self-interested, and could only be made to behave well by means of the ‘Two Handles’ of reward and punishment.[1] So the Legalists based their system too on the pursuit of interests (the interests of seeking reward and fleeing punishment) and so were actually identical to the Yangists in that respect, and Mencius would have included them in the error that he thought that Yang Chu had made. But the philosophy of Yang Chu makes the error clearer and, stylistically, makes a nice symmetrical complement for the philosophy of Mo Di with respect to the pusuit of interests.

We get an idea of why Mencius thought that the pursuit of interest is an error in a passage in which reports an interview with King Hui of Liang.

Sir,’ said the king, ‘You have come all this distance, thinking nothing of a thousand li. You must surely have some way of profiting my state ?’

‘Your Majesty,’ answered Mencius. ‘What is the point of mentioning the word “profit (利, lì)”? All that matters is that there should be benevolence and rightness. If Your Majesty says, “How can I profit my state?” and the Counsellors say, “How can I profit my family?” and the Gentlemen and Commoners say, “How can I profit my person?” then those above and those below will be trying to profit at the expense of one another and the state will be imperilled. When regicide is committed in a state of ten thousand chariots, it is certain to be by a vassal with a thousand chariots, and when it is committed in a state of a thousand chariots it is certain to be by a vassal with a hundred chariots. A share of a thousand in ten thousand or a hundred in a thousand is by no means insignificant, yet if profit is put before rightness, there is no satisfaction short of total usurpation. No benevolent man ever abandons his parents, and no dutiful man ever puts his prince last. Perhaps you wiull now endorse what I have said, “All that matters is that there should be benevolence and rightness. What is the point of mentioning the word ‘profit’?”’[2]

The message is clear: if people take ‘interests’ to be the measure of right action then the results will not be what anyone thinks of as a moral society. We shall see that Mencius’s claim is that we must not approach the question of how to behave in this way: basing our behaviour on some other criterion than morality and merely hoping that the consequence will be moral behaviour. Instead, Mencius says, moral behaviour is natural to humans and needs only to be nurtured for goodness to flourish.

Human Nature

Mencius’s view was one early position in the controversy about human nature (性, xìng) to which Chinese philosophy – or at least Confucianism – constantly returned. It was not originally a topic of much interest: Confucius only mentions it once when he comments that “Men are close to one another by nature. They diverge by repeated practice.”[1] The motivation for this dispute comes from the common belief (which Mencius shared) that one could be trained in the virtues.[2] The question then naturally arises as to whether human nature is basically good or basically bad, or not essentially either, or both; for the possibility of training and the kind of training proposed will depend upon the answers to that question. All of these positions and others were current in Mencius’s time. He mentions, for example, that:

 ‘Gaozi said, “There is neither good nor bad in human nature.”

 ‘But others say, “Human nature can become good or it can become bad, and that is why with the rise of King Wen and King Wu, the people were given to goodness, while with the rise of King Yu and King Li, they were given to cruelty.” 

‘Then there are others who say, “There are those who are good by nature, and there are those who are bad by nature. For this reason, Xiang could have Yao as prince, and Shun could have Gu Sou as father, and Qi, Viscount of Wei and Prince Bi Gan could have Zhou as nephew as well as sovereign.”’[3]

 Against Gaozi

 From the many views current at the time, Mencius singles out in Book 6 the view of  Gàozĭ (告子, ca. 420–350) as being most important to counter. Gàozĭ explicitly claims that “Appetite for food and sex is nature”[4] (by implication claiming that that is all that is in our nature) and by doing so gave support to those who thought that if people were to be made good then we would have to appeal to those base elements of their nature – which is to say to the non-moral interests of the natural man.

 Gaozi thinks that it’s just obvious that there is no preference for good in human nature. Consider, he says, the nature of water. We see that water will drain East if there is an outlet  on the East, or West if there is an outlet on the West; therefore we say that water has no natural tendency to go either East or West but it depends on the circumstances. Just so, if we see that human nature does not prefer good behaviour over bad then it cannot be said to be either good or bad in itself. Gaozi is not recorded as completing this argument by showing that people in fact do not prefer good behaviour over bad, but one could imagine him pointing at the disordered world about him to make this point easily enough.

 Mencius’s reply to this is to take the analogy further.

 ‘It is certainly the case,’ said Mencius, ‘that water does not show any preference for either east or west, but does it show the same indifference to high and low? Human nature is good just as water seeks low ground. There is no man who is not good; there is no water that does not flow downwards.

 ‘Now, in the case of water, by splashing it one can make it shoot up higher than one’s forehead, and by forcing it one can make it stay on a hill. How can that be the nature of water? It is the circumstances being what they are. That man can be made bad shows that his nature is no different from that of water in this respect.’[5]

 So we do think that water has a certain preference for movement in one direction rather than another, down rather than up, and we believe this even when it is not always the case that water moves down rather than up. It is not necessary for something to be uniformly true of X for it to be the nature of X, and so it may be the nature of Man to be good even if it happens that some men are sometimes bad (or, to be extreme, even if it just so happens that all men are always bad.)

 The View of Mencius

 The difference between these two philosophers on the question of the nature of Man reduces to a difference in understanding what is meant by talking of the ‘nature’ of anything. For Gaozi, the nature of a thing is that which is common to all members of the class to which the thing belongs. Thus, because it is never seen that there are people without an appetite for food or sex, it is clear that those are the essential characteristics of Man. It is a reasonable point of view, but Mencius can point out that this does not distinguish Man from the animals, and surely the nature of Man is only the nature of Man if it is not the same as the nature of the hound or the ox.[6] On the contrary, for Mencius  the nature of a thing is that which is unique to the members of the class to which the thing belongs, and therefore the nature of Man is that faculty or capacity which is uniquely possible for men.

 This unique faculty, he says,  is the ‘heart’ [xīn, 心]. In ancient China the heart was supposed to be the seat of the cognitive faculties. (These days the term, in these contexts, is often translated as the ‘heart/mind,’ but we needn’t bother with that here.) For Mencius, in particular, the function of rationality was shown in the ability of the heart to judge amongst the things that might be attractive to it in a way that no other faculty was able to do.

 The organs of hearing and sight are unable to think and and can be misled by external things. When one thing acts on another, all it does is attract it. The organ of the heart can think. But it will only find the answer if it does think; otherwise it will not find the answer.[7]

 Whereas the other faculties are capable of responding to interests, the heart, if Mencius is correct, will allow us to transcend these and to act according to moral principles. The point to note is that our rational faculty is identified with our moral capacity, and our moral capacity is identified as that which makes us men rather than beasts..

 Let us take it for granted that animals do not have this faculty; how does Mencius know that humans all have this capacity? He has several arguments, the most famous of which depends on the following simple thought experiment:

 ‘My reason for saying that no man is devoid of a heart sensitive to the suffering of others is this. Suppose a man were, all of a sudden, to see a young child on the verge of falling into a well. He would certainly be moved to compassion, … From this it can be seen that whoever is devoid of the heart of compassion is not human.[8]

 We need to be careful not to read too much into this claim: he does not say that we will therefore act morally in response to the feeling of compassion that the plight of the child evokes. His point is only that the necessary first step towards moral action – recognition of others – is necessarily possible for all of us. We all must have the possibility of morality, but not necessarily the actuality.

 Another argument for the possibility of morality as a spontaneous product of human nature is an historical one. We know that there were sages in the past who were moral, and we know that

 Things of the same kind are all alike. Why should we have doubts when it comes to man? The sage and I are of the same kind.[9]

 He then gives a long passage noting that the things that appeal to the faculties of sight, taste, and hearing are identical amongst all men, and asks:

 Should hearts prove to be an exception by possessing nothing in common?What is common to all hearts? Reason(lǐ, 理) and rightness (yì, 義/义). The sage is simply the first man to discover this common element in my heart.

 So, because the sage existed before there was anything that could teach him morality, and because the sage did nevertheless become moral, it follows that the sage was capable of becoming moral by his own efforts. Furthermore, because the sage could become moral, and because the heart of the sage (his capability) is of the same kind as the heart of all men, it is possible for all men, even today, to become moral.

The Virtues

Origins: the Seeds of the Virtues

 Obviously, the example of the child in danger by the well supports only the claim that we all have a heart of compassion. Mencius also believes that we can easily see that all men also possess a heart of shame, a heart of courtesy and modesty and a heart of distinguishing right and wrong. It would be nice to have been provided with examples to support the other hearts similar to the example of the child and the well that supports the heart of compassion, but he clearly thinks that this is unnecessary. The closest we come is a discussion of the fact that no man, be he ever so untutored and far from sageness, will accept even the necessities of life if that would mean accepting shame as well.

 A basket of food and a bowl of soup – if one gets them then one will live; if one doesn’t get them one will die. But if they’re given with contempt, then even a homeless person will not accept them. If they’re trampled upon, then even a beggar won’t take them.[1]

 So, Mencius takes it as being essential to our human nature that we have a heart capable of compassion, capable of shame, modesty, and judgement; but this is not enough: we need more than those feelings. Feelings can not be trusted as direct guides to action: this is a belief that is common to ethicists everywhere. Luckily, in Mencius’s view, the existence of those feelings gives us the capacity to develop the four virtues that the Confucians considered to be essential to the (more than merely human) noble man. Mencius says that:

 The heart of compassion is the germ [duan, 端]  of benevolence [rén]; the heart of shame, of dutifulness [yì]; the heart of courtesy and modesty, of observance of the rites [lǐ]; the heart of right and wrong, of wisdom[2] [zhì, 智]. Man has these four germs just as he has four limbs. For a man possessing these four germs to deny his own potentialities is for him to cripple himself.[3]

 Development: Reflection and Extension

 So we have the potential for virtue in those seeds, but how do we go about realising that potential? Recall that those seeds are natural faculties of the heart, which is our organ of thinking. It is in the power of the heart to reflect upon things, especially the operations of those faculties, and Mencius thinks that by doing so it is also in its power to nourish the seeds of virtue so that they grow into the virtues. We have already quoted above his observation that: “The organ of the heart can think. But it will only find the answer if it does think; otherwise it will not find the answer.”[4] And the ‘answer’ here is knowledge of what is of greater importance and what is of lesser, and what a great man should do and what is only fit for a small man to do. Reflection, therefore, (sī, 思) is what is required for the virtues to flourish, but it is not yet clear what sort of reflection is required.

 Consider the story of the suffering ox.[5] King Xuan of Qi asked Mencius whether he (the king) could be a good king. Mencius replied that he thought that he could, because he had heard that the king had once prevented the slaughter of a sacrificial ox on the grounds that he “could not bear to see it shrinking with fear, like an innocent man going to the place of execution.” The king replies that this is true, but also laughingly admits that he did have the sacrifice performed, only with a lamb rather than the ox. Mencius remarks on this last fact that “If you were pained by the animal going innocently to its death, what was there to choose between an ox and a lamb?” and the King is perplexed. “What was really in my mind, I wonder?” To this Mencius replies: “There is no harm in this. It is the way of a benevolent man. You saw the ox but not the lamb.”

 Mencius’ point here is that seeing the ox, the king was able to recognise something in its situation similar to a situation that would certainly have evoked compassion. Recognising that similarity, his heart extended its concerns to include the ox and he behaved accordingly. In doing so the king showed to the ox a part of the kindness or benevolence that would be due to a man in the same position. On the other hand, the king did not see the lamb and so was unmoved. This is the way that benevolence grows. When a man considers a situation, or is made to consider it, he is able to see how it is like other situations which affect his heart. The task of a man is to always reflect upon things at hand in this way, always extending the range of the concerns of his heart. The king has shown that he can do this at least to a small degree, so there is no reason to doubt that by continued reflection he may come to do this to a great degree – and thereby become a good king. “In other words, all you have to do is take this very heart here and apply it to what is over there.” Elsewhere Mencius says:

 For every man there are things he cannot bear. To extend this to what he can bear is benevolence. For every man there are things he is not willing to do. To extend this to what he is willing to do is rightness[6]

 One thing that Mencius wants to make very clear, is that there is no question of reflection delivering a set of moral principles that need to be rigidly adhered to. The tender-heartedness of the king was not motivated by recognition of a rule that one should not harm animals (as the substitution of the lamb demonstrates) and neither is the king to be faulted because it was not. Benevolence, and by extension the other virtues, is to be exercised according to the facts of a particular situation, and how they appear to a properly reflective man. He makes the same point elsewhere when he says:

 Not to help a sister-in-law who is drowning is to be a brute. It is prescribed by the rites that, in giving and receiving, man and woman should not touch each other, but in stretching out a helping hand to the drowning sister-in-law one uses one’s discretion.[7]

 Nourishment: Qi

 This idea of reflection and extension is fairly straightforward: we often see similar claims in Western ethics and the mechanism by which it is supposed to work seems plausible to us (though we would now locate our cognitive faculties in the brain rather than the heart.) A second element in the encouragement of virtue is, however, more mysterious to us. Mencius appears to believe that the seeds have to be nourished by the flow of qì (氣/气), a part-physical, part-spiritual universal flux that is a common feature of Chinese metaphysics.

 In Mencius’s system (the one he accepts, though he did not devise it) qi is an ever-mobile element that permeates the universe and man. This qi is not all of the same nature: it varies from ‘grosser’ to more ‘refined’. The gross qi tends to descend and gather on Earth, while the refined qi rises to Heaven. In man, the body in general is dominated by gross qi while the heart depends upon the dominance of refined qi to make possible its characteristic function. In order for the heart to function to its maximum capacity – a necessity for the reflective man striving for sage-hood – we must maximise the dominance of refined qi in it. In Mencius’s view our qi is depleted during the day by the action of our heart but we are able to replenish this supply by properly resting our heart’s activities in sleep – and ensuring that our heart is in the right (pure) condition to take in this revivifying night supply.

 Mencius’s only notable contribution to this metaphysics of morality is his introduction of the ‘flood-like qi’ (hào rán zhī qì, 浩然之气) that is ‘difficult to describe.’

 This is a qi which is in the highest degree, vast and unyielding. Nourish it with integrity and place no obstacle in its path and it will fill the space between Heaven and Earth. It is a qi which unites rightness and the Way. Deprive it of these and it will collapse. It is born of accumulated rightness and cannot be appropriated by anyone through a sporadic show of rightness. Whenever one acts in a way that falls below the standard set in one’s heart, it will collapse.

 This appears to be something of great importance to Mencius; unfortunately, nobody seems to have a good idea of what the passage means or what the actual function of this new form of qi is in Mencius’s system. Luckily it doesn’t seem to affect the rest of the system which is quite comprehensible without it. We shall not mention it again.

 The Problem of Non-Goodness

 Now that we have seen how it is that human nature is fitted for the development of the virtues, and how we should go about encouraging their development, we are in a good position to respond to the questions that would doubtless be asked by philosophers such as Gaozi: how is it if human nature is good that there are so many (or any) people who are not good? And isn’t the existence of bad people empirical evidence that the nature of man is more likely to be bad than good?

 In response to this Mencius asks us to consider the state of Ox Mountain.

Mencius said. ‘There was a time when the trees were luxuruiant on Ox Mountain. As it is on the outskirts of a great metropolis, the trees are continually lopped by axes. Is it any wonder that they are no longer fine? With the respite they get in the day and in the night, and the moistening by the rain and dew, there is certainly no lack of new shoots coming out, but then the cattle and sheep come to graze upon the mountain. That is why it is as bald as it is. People, seeing only its baldness, tend to think that it never had any trees. But can this possibly be the nature of a mountain?

‘Can what is in man be completely lacking in moral inclinations? A man’s letting go of his true heart is like the case of the trees and the axes. When the trees are lopped dya after day, is it any wonder that they are no longer fine? If, in spite of the respite a man gets in the day and in the night and of the effect of the morning air on him, scarcely any of his likes and dislikes resemble those of other men, it is because what he does in the course of the day once again dissipates what he has gained. If this dissipation happens repeatedly, then the influence of the air in the night will no longer be able to preserve what was originally in him, and when that happens, the man is not far from an animal. Others, seeing his resemblance to an animal, will be led to think that that he never had any native endowment. But can that be what a man is genuinely like?’[8]

Here Mencius is also alluding to the restorative role of night-time qi that was described above. That qi has the power to nourish the seeds, and we should encourage that; but it is difficult to retain the developments of one’s original heart if they are constantly worn down during the day. If we do not act to preserve the growth that occurs in the evening, then we will lose them to the day, and we will appear to have no such nature. But this is only the appearance. We would not say that the nature of the mountain was barrenness because we know that its barrenness is a result of its being poorly managed, and we would not be justified in saying that the nature of any man was bad because we know that his badness may be a result of nothing more than bad management of his heart.

 This bad management is described by Mencius as ‘letting go’ of one’s true heart. He strongly urges us to make the most of the endowments that we have originally and not to let them be squandered.

 Confucius said, “Hold on to it and it will remain; let go of it and it will disappear. One never knows that time it comes or goes, neither does one know the direction.” It is perhaps to the heart that this referes.

 Moral Motivation

All that remains now is to understand why we should prefer the effort of developing our moral faculties above the pursuit of our obvious self-interest. This is not the same as the objection to interest that we noted in the argument against Gaozi, since that was merely pointing out that we wouldn’t be likely to get moral behaviour from behaviour motivated by interests. Now we want to know why so-called ‘moral’ behaviour should be preferred. This is one of the classic problems for moral theories, and Mencius approaches it from two directions.

In the first place, if you are going to reject classical morality and adopt the pursuit of your interests as the guide to your behaviour, then you make the success or failure of your actions hostage to things beyond your control – in particular, to the workings of Heaven as expressed in Fate (mìng, 命). Therefore make the guide of your actions something internal. (This reasoning we are familiar with from Confucius.) Frome what we have seen above we know that what is internal to Man, and what can guide our actions, are the native tendencies to action that we have identified as compassion, shame, respect and judgement. To take these as our guides and to apply the unique faculty of Man to these, is to develop the corresponding virtues: benevolence, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom.

In the second place, and developing those ideas further, to do what is uniquely possible for Man is to separate ourselves from the beasts:

 That whereby Man differs from the birds and beasts is but slight. The mass of people cast it away, whereas the superior man preserves it.[9]

 And by excelling in this same effort we distinguish ourselves from inferior men:

 Those who follow that part of themselves which is great are great men, and those who follow that part of themselves which is small are small men.[10]

As to be a man is better than to be a beast, and to be superior is better than to be inferior, it follows that when we are made aware of the choices, we will prefer to develop our moral natures rather than to merely pursue our interests.