before we get to the book, he has been teaching a course on chinese philosophy at harvard. I wonder if you could talk a bit about that.
The goal of the course is to allow students to read the texts for themselves. they are in translation, of course, but I only assign primary texts. I even tell students not to read secondary literature. I warn you that these are difficult texts, but I also tell you that they are extremely powerful, and if you actually spend the time reading and rereading them over the course of the semester, you will find that they are truly amazing pieces of work.
You are reading: Books on chinese philosophy
I think it’s been an incredibly popular course.
Students find these texts incredibly exciting and, yes, I’m pleased to say the numbers have been very high.
Do you think Chinese philosophy books are accessible to a western audience, an audience that is not familiar with the traditions of Chinese philosophy and how it is implemented in daily life?
I think it is. it’s a bit off-putting, at first, because the assumptions, the arguments, and the terminology are so different. And yet, one of the intriguing things about Chinese philosophy is the focus on the mundane ways we live our daily lives and how that can have big effects over time. the examples tend to be very simple: how human beings interact on a daily basis and what the implications are. so once you get the students to know the material and the terminology, it makes a lot of sense. they may not agree with all the arguments, but they have no problem understanding what is going on.
There is a caricature of the Chinese philosopher as a sage, an all-knowing old man sitting there, pronouncing wisely on things. that is quite different from the Socratic model of truth, which emerges through discussion and conversation. it is as if the ideas were being given with authority by someone who knows, almost like a religious and dogmatic teacher could tell you how things are.
It certainly seems that way at first, but one of the things that is very intriguing is that these texts tend to invite the reader to interact with them.
In some of the great wise sayings, the so-called sages are presented as very human and fallible. a very significant example is mencius, also known as mengzi [in Chinese pinyin; see notes on Chinese names at the end of this interview]. He was seen as one of the great sages, the second greatest after Confucius. when he reads the work, he often comes across as arrogant. he is sometimes selfish and often falls short of his own views on what one should do to cultivate oneself.
“the text is written so that the reader sees it in its best and worst moments”
I think the text is written so that the reader sees it in its best and worst moments. part of the power is that we see a great sage as a human being, who often fails and hopefully learns from his mistakes.
his own book, el camino, has quickly become a bestseller. there is obviously a wider audience for Chinese philosophy books. Could you say something about your book and its reception?
I think you’re right, there really is an interest, now, in understanding Chinese philosophy and its complexities. the goal of the book was to take what seemed to work well in the classroom and bring it to a larger audience. I was very moved by the response.
let’s move on to your first book. You have chosen the Analects of Confucius, one of the most famous works of Chinese philosophy. when was this written? who wrote it?
The text pretends to be written by the disciples of Confucius, after he passed away. the disciples are supposedly writing down the words he spoke to them, the things he did daily, the actions he would take.
but we don’t know when the specific statements were written. were they really written just after the death of confucius? Or were they written two centuries later? the truth is that we have no idea.
but that, of course, is part of the power of the work. You read it without necessarily saying, “These are the words that Confucius spoke in a given year.” teacher and putting his philosophy into practice.
when did confucius live and what kind of society did he live in?
lived in the last part of the 6th century and until the 5th century BC. It was a period of dramatic change in China and throughout Eurasia. For some two millennia, Eurasia had been dominated by an aristocratic Bronze Age culture, at least in the agricultural areas. it was a highly stratified society, where all ranks were based solely on birth. all of this was falling apart as the ancient bronze age kingdoms across eurasia crumbled.
“One of the intriguing things about Chinese philosophy is the focus on the mundane ways we live our daily lives and how that can have big effects over time.”
then, in the middle of the first millennium a. c., eurasia underwent a massive transformation. As the social hierarchies and forms of statecraft of the Bronze Age crumble, one sees the rise, for the first significant time in some two millennia, of social mobility (relatively speaking) and of new forms of social mobility. political experimentation. And, with the collapse of the religious systems of the Bronze Age, we also see the rise of new religious and philosophical movements throughout Eurasia. This is when you have the Orphics, the Pythagoreans, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in Greece; Jainism and the Buddha in India. and, in china, one of our first philosophers was confucius. he was witnessing the same phenomenon and tried to make arguments about what one should do as a consequence.
I know that it is difficult to summarize the central ideas of a thinker in a short answer, but, in broad strokes, what was Confucius’ position on the world he found?
One of his basic views was that humans need to cultivate themselves. the reason he started there was because he believed that one of our dangers as human beings is that we fall into patterns or routines in our behavior that can be largely defined by the world around us. therefore, we tend to be very passive in the world, even though we think we are not.
“We tend to be very passive in the world, even though we think we are not”
So one of the questions for him is how, in our daily activities, the way we build our lives and have relationships, we can train ourselves to become better beings. then the question arises what would we do with that ability. curiously, he says very little about that question. the focus is on starting the cultivation work.
which, in a sense, parallels the “know thyself” of ancient Greek philosophy.
a lot. We often think that Chinese philosophy focuses on how one lives daily life and we have the stereotype that Greek philosophy is about the radical separation of the world of ideas from mundane reality. the truth is that this is a rereading of Greek philosophy. There are some places where those claims are made, in some famous places in Plato’s work, for example. but most of greek philosophy, including plato’s, is about how one cultivates oneself through daily activities and what practices one should do to become a better human being. so indeed the parallels between greece and china in this period are very striking, although the two traditions went in very different directions later on.
Confucianism, again in cartoon form, is about respect for elders and tradition. is that a fair summary of the confucius angle?
It’s certainly about working with the traditions you were born into. we are born into a set of traditions and that is always the beginning of what you are working on. that therefore includes taking seriously what those who came before you did, and how we can learn from them and build on that.
That said, Confucius was highly critical of much of his tradition and this is part of the point. yes, you start with the rituals and traditions you were born into, but you use these rituals to become a better human being. at that point, you not only can, but you really must alter the rituals and work against the traditions, and change them. he wanted an active engagement with one’s tradition.
If you were advising someone coming to the Analects for the first time, would you suggest they read the book cover to cover?
what I tell my students is, ‘start at line one and read.’ I also give many warnings, such as the following: ‘this is a text that seems very unphilosophical at first glance. you’ll literally get a statement from confucius and then another statement that seems to contradict the previous statement, then another statement that seems to contradict the other two, then a statement about how confucius sits on a mat in a certain way, and then yet another statement that seems to not have anything to do with anything you’ve seen so far. At first glance, this will not only seem mundane but contradictory and really doesn’t seem to have anything to do with anything.”
I always tell students to keep reading, because what will happen, as you keep reading, is that you will see that there is a reason for all this.
“That goes for someone from the 21st century as well as for someone from the 5th century BC. c. in china”
Let’s take the example of contradictory statements. yes, he will say different things to different disciples. this is because part of the argument of the text is that you are learning to feel situations, what certain people need to hear, what they don’t need to hear. Confucius is presented as a figure who is trying to do this in practice.
so, to one disciple he will say, ‘you really need to do a lot more rituals,’ and to another disciple he will say, ‘you do too many rituals, you’re beyond that, you need to start changing and altering things.’ this is because they are different situations, and he is a different disciple. what he’s trying to do, as he reads the text, is add them together to get an idea of what the motivating philosophy is that would lead him to do these seemingly very different things.
Is this a philosophy that you think can be transferred to Western society in the 21st century? for readers in the west, is there anything to catch there?
certainly the traditions and specific ritual content are quite different.
But, in terms of philosophy, and I’m very happy to use that term for what Confucius is doing, if part of the argument is that we are figures who tend to fall into particular habits, patterns, and routines in our behavior, I’m totally agree with confucius on this and that it is the same for us today. and if the goal is to break these habits and feel better, not only respond better to other human beings but, in the long run, help create better worlds, where both we and those around us can prosper. If all this is so, how would we train ourselves very concretely, on a daily basis, to be able to do this? that’s what confucius means.
and I think that goes for someone from the 21st century just as much as it does for someone from the 5th century BC. c. in china.
Let’s move on to your second option. this is the daodejing of laozi. Where does Daoism come from?
yes. Taoism is a body of thought that comes from the laozi text. the ‘dao’ in Taoism refers to the daodejing which we usually translate as ‘the way’.
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presumably this also gave him the title of his book?
exactly. the idea of calling it the path is a play on the Chinese notion of the dao, which is the path that you are building by the way you live your daily life, be it in a dangerous or powerful way. either you are failing to live your life well or you are succeeding. it’s the notion of a path, not in the sense of a predetermined path, but rather a path that you make.
How would you characterize this book? We have discussed the analects of Confucius as a summary of stories about a great teacher. how is this book?
This book is radically different. If the analects consist of lots of stories about what Confucius does, how he talks to his disciples, etc., the laozi, by contrast, contains no stories. there are no examples, there are no anecdotes, there are no references to historical figures at all. it’s just a series of statements that sound extremely paradoxical, very gnomish, very difficult to crack, and yet extraordinarily powerful once you work at it and get a sense of what the underlying philosophy is.
could you give an example of the type of gnomish declaration that can be unpacked?
The opening line of the laozi is often translated, and it’s not a bad translation, but it misses some of the puns, like “the form [dao] that can be spoken of is not the enduring form.” now, what is lost in the english translation is that the word we are translating, ‘spoken of’, is the same word: ‘dao’. words, turned into a self-conscious path: “…it is not the lasting path”. what it means is that if you consciously try to decide, ‘I’ll plan everything perfectly in advance and it will be,’ you’ve missed the point. that is not the lasting way. you’ve created a preset shape, but it’s not the way you should be trying to make sense of it.
Is that the defining principle of Daoism, that you have to make it up on the fly, so to speak?
it is. And part of the argument is that you’re learning to get a sense of how things come about in the world: how situations play out, how trajectories play out. the goal is to train yourself to be able to feel that and alter those trajectories for the better. the key here is that you don’t know exactly where everything will go beforehand.
the path, this sensitivity to changing circumstances and dynamics, sounds like a wise approach to life. We probably all know people who have planned too much and have fallen flat on their faces as a result of not seeing what was really going on around them. But it is more than that? is it quasi-religious or possibly really religious?
is all that. a good way to think of the path is that it could be absolutely everything in its completely undifferentiated sense. if you could imagine the world as completely interrelated, that’s the way. then imagine things emerging from the path. cosmologically, you could say that everything arose from the big bang.
“what you’re training yourself to do is feel how you can alter and work with these larger patterns without the dangerous feeling that I, personally, can control everything.”
but think of everyday life the same way. situations arise from the path and the way they arise is part of the path. the reason it is presented in this seemingly paradoxical way is that we as humans tend to focus on momentary differences in the world. we think that I am there, that person is there and we are in this situation. if you are thinking about the path, what you are thinking is that what that person is doing is related to the things that I have done, because implicitly I am affecting things. we are being affected by the world around us and certain trajectories are set in motion all the time.
The more I can get a sense of those larger trajectories, the more I’m getting a sense of the path, in other words, how everything is actually interconnected, and therefore how these little things that I’m doing can change. the way or not.
there are two things that occur to me there. First of all, is this like the Buddhist idea that human individuality is some kind of illusion? second, what about time? Is the path, as you have described it, outside of time, so that everything that has happened and will happen is part of it? Or are you, as a thinker, somehow located in time and do you have to take your future as uncertain?
is more of the latest. An intriguing difference between laozi and, say, Buddhism is that in laozi the world around us is not illusory. we are creating the world around us which, in that sense, really exists. the danger is that we usually create it passively and very badly and follow it along very dangerous paths. what you are training yourself to do is feel how you can alter and work with these larger patterns without the dangerous feeling that I, personally, can control everything.
But unlike Buddhism, the ultimate goal is not to retreat and see the world as an illusion. on the contrary, we are creating the world that really exists, and usually we are creating it in a very dangerous and poor way.
So what are the guidelines that make us better world builders?
It’s about training and self-cultivation. part of what we’re training ourselves to do is stop seeing the world in terms of simple dichotomies, simple rules, simple laws, simple ways that allow us to quickly understand what’s going on. all of these, in fact, are generally based on a very limited understanding of what is going on around us. you are training yourself, to use this terminology, to feel the way, to feel how everything is interconnected, how the things we are doing lead to certain consequences, often very dangerous, and how you can change and work with the world around you. surrounds. you.
It’s interesting, as a philosophical position, because rules of thumb are incredibly useful for surviving and not having to think too hard about what to do next. Generally, people you meet on the street don’t lie to you, so you don’t have to be too suspicious of everyone you meet. that seems like a reasonable rule of thumb in life. but in reality, the world is complex and there are people who cheat, so it doesn’t always work. if I go the way, should I be hypersensitive to each individual situation in particular, or can I fall back on the rules of thumb sometimes?
you are training yourself to feel situations spontaneously. From the beginning, this means training yourself to feel the complexity of situations. you are pushing against our tendency to follow easy-to-think rules and patterns. but in general, over time, you’re training yourself to become so intuitively good at it that you’re able to sense situations, sense the patterns that develop in situations, and sense the little things you can do to alter them.
“one of the arguments is to try to be like water: water is very powerful, of course, but it flows. wield power by working with the current, not fighting it.”
One of the intriguing ways you’ll talk about is influencing the world not in terms of power, control and domination. instead, think of it in terms of softness, weakness, flexibility. you are training yourself to feel the complexities of situations and the ways in which, through little things you can do, you can alter those trajectories. you are not mastering situations, you are not even rationally controlling situations in a mental sense, you are feeling them and working with them.
that reminds me of the saying often attributed to bruce lee: “be like water”. is it a daoist principle?
which comes directly from the daodejing, from this text. one of the arguments is to try to be like water: water is very powerful, of course, but it flows. wields power by working with the current, not fighting against it.
the third book you have chosen is the essential writings of zhuangzi. Zhuangzi is not a philosopher he is familiar with. who was he?
zhuangzi, we are told, lived in the fourth century bce. we don’t really know much about him. indeed, all we have of him, apart from the later stories told of him, is this single text, which is remarkable.
what makes it so extraordinary?
is a text that will later be categorized as a Daoist text, as part of the same way of thinking as the Laozi. I tell my students to think of it as a very different version of a somewhat similar set of ideas. but it really is a different take. As far as we know, Zhuangzi did not know the Laozi. the term ‘Taoism’ did not exist at the time. is a later term that aims to bring these texts together.
In a nutshell, what the zhuangzi is trying to do is break us out of our thought patterns. but the way he will do it is not simply through very short and gnomic paradoxical statements. the way the zhuangzi will do it is through this extraordinary and imaginative prose that will try, as written, to take us out of our limited perspectives.
so, as you read it, you will take the point of view of a butcher, you will take the point of view of a bird, of a piece of bark, of a fish. zhuangzi is trying to get us out of our limited understanding so that we begin to have an idea of the world as an endless flow, an endless transformation, in which, if we can train ourselves to do so, we can begin to understand its tremendous multiplicity.
Is this a recommendation to engage in some sort of decentering meditative practice, or is it a literary device?
is between the two, and there is also a third party element. Unlike a process of meditation and decentering, it is about training yourself to feel this multiplicity. many of the stories, for example, will revolve around skill-based activities. a butcher is one of the examples: a butcher, by the very way he carries out his butchery activities, is learning to break his tendencies to think very narrowly and to feel the complexity of situations.
this sounds like jean-paul sartre’s coffee waiter idea of being and nothingness. the bartender is performing a “dance” that has been choreographed by his role. and somehow, in the way he does it, he reveals to sartre that she is not genuinely, authentically free in her actions. he is in bad faith, he deceives himself. so zhuangzi’s butcher doesn’t just play the role of a butcher, presumably. what does he or she do, then, that is different?
It is a very revealing story. it is understood in an analogical way, of course. the butcher will start by simply cutting pieces of meat according to a very rational calculation. each slab is cut in exactly the same way. And, because that means you’re digging through all these bones, muscles, and tendons, you have to constantly stop to sharpen your knife.
“Imagine, in our daily lives, training ourselves with the same type of work that we would do to train for a sport or when we learn to play a musical instrument”
then the argument is that he slowly begins to realize, as the years go by, that meat does, in fact, have its own patterns. there are places where, say, the muscles wrap around the tendons, which wrap around the bone, and each piece of meat is slightly different.
There is no single way to understand that. what you must do is learn to feel where these patterns flow. and he gets so good at it, at a certain point, that he’s able, not with his mind but with his spirit, to just feel these patterns and take his knife and slide it through the patterns of flesh so perfectly that he’s able to cut perfectly without having to re-sharpen the knife.
This is a bit like a highly skilled athlete who can react to where the ball is flying and just do the right thing, instead of having to rely on a rational process of thinking through a set of actions.
That’s a perfect analogy. one is training in a sport to become so good that he no longer thinks about what he is doing physically, he is just sensing situations perfectly. learning to play a musical instrument would be another good analogy: you are training yourself, over the years, to play the musical instrument, to influence the room, being sensitive to the situation.
“what you have to do is learn to feel where these patterns flow”
The zhuangzi’s argument is that we should do this in our daily lives. imagine, in our daily lives, training ourselves with the same type of work that we would do to train for a sport or when we learn to play a musical instrument. we would be training ourselves in our lives, not to fight for the world, not to strike against the world, but to feel situations, work with situations, alter situations as we work with them.
In other words, in your daily life, you would be doing the same kind of work that we think we are doing in these restricted skill-based activities.
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This is much closer, as an approach to ethics, to Aristotle than to Kant. As an Aristotelian, you cultivate the virtues and the ideal is to become the type of person who reacts appropriately when faced with a situation. while for Kant, there is an application of a principle that ultimately boils down to a moral law: the “categorical imperative.” any particular moral act is just one instance of that. this approach requires a degree of thought to decide whether this particular action is consistent with the general principle.
a lot. now there were some thinkers in early china who began to develop arguments a bit like kant’s, but much more consequentialist: they tried to develop a utilitarian calculus that we should follow to determine what to do and what not to do, how to become a good person, how not to become a good person.
but, in fact, the texts we’ve been discussing so far are very Aristotelian. they oppose such attempts and say: ‘no, no, no, it is about personal practice, about acquiring the ability to feel situations well, to become virtuous over time by the way one feels situations’. therefore, they are very suspicious of attempts to say that we can solve by some kind of calculation, be it deontological or utilitarian or whatever, what to do.
That seems like a profound way to think about how to live. has that filtered through Chinese society? Have these philosophers significantly influenced current Chinese thought?
extraordinarily. These are ideas that have been incredibly important throughout China and, indeed, all of East Asian history. in the 20th century, many of these texts were burned. there was a strong push against it, as a result of the self-conscious attempt to build a communist society that strongly opposed these old traditions. now, curiously, they are making a comeback. the texts are read again, debated again. Of course, this isn’t just happening in China: it’s truly a global phenomenon. these texts are coming back to life.
A rediscovery of Chinese philosophy in the 21st century?
a lot. we are also physically discovering many ancient texts. there are many ancient texts that are being found and studied for the first time. China is rediscovering its old traditions. It is a truly extraordinary moment.
the fourth book you have chosen is mengzi: with selections from traditional commentaries. As someone with an idea about how we should live, he seems like someone that students of Western philosophy should certainly study.
mencius lived in the 4th century BC. c., so he is a crude contemporary of texts like the Zhuangzi. I say ‘approximate’ because we don’t know the exact dates. Unlike Zhuangzi, Mencius saw himself as a great developer of the teachings of Confucius. in fact, in the fourth century a. c. he is considered the great Confucian teacher of his time.
“it is part of the power of the text that it shows someone trying, on a daily basis, to live up to their own philosophy and sometimes failing to do so, and then learning from that.”
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This is a fascinating and profound text. like the analects, it consists mainly of dialogues, in this case dialogues Mencius has with disciples, with rulers, and with fellow philosophers with whom he disagrees. they tend to be much longer than in the analects. you get the whole debate going, so you can really see the intricacies of the arguments.
It is also an intriguing text because Mencius presents himself in a very ambivalent way. he is clearly seen as someone brilliant, someone whose philosophy is extraordinarily powerful, and yet the text, despite being written by his own disciples, will present him as a failure at times. it is part of the power of the text that it shows someone daily trying to live up to his own philosophy and sometimes failing to do so, and then learning from that. it is a very complex portrait of a human being.
Is there an example you can give of that?
yes, there is a very moving example. Towards the end of his life, Mencius decides that the time is right for these ideas to finally be implemented on a broader political level. Thinking himself to be the great Confucian of his day, and certainly seen by others as such, he goes from court to court trying to win an audience with the rulers, to explain these ideas. he manages to obtain an important ministerial position within a kingdom, the kingdom of qi, and the king seems to be listening to him.
mencius clearly thinks that he is about to become the great sage minister, which will lead to the rise of a great new dynasty based on the teachings of confucius as he interpreted them himself. he begins to be a little arrogant and too convinced of his own greatness. then it becomes clear to him that the ruler is simply using him, twisting his ideas to rationalize his own self-aggrandizing policies. Mencius is forced to leave the state in utter disgrace.
“The design of the book is a way of trying to give you a sense of a human being, in all this complexity, trying to be great, failing, and then learning from that experience.”
There is a very moving moment when he leaves the state and one of his disciples says, ‘but did I mention, didn’t you once quote your great teacher Confucius, who said that you should never resent what the sky does? in other words, you should never resent things that happen to you in life, you should just try to respond well to them, and mencius, don’t you seem a bit resentful?’, the answer is extraordinary. he’s like, ‘well look, it’s obviously the right time for great things to happen. we need a great sage. I’m obviously the great sage, and yet for some reason heaven has prevented me from starting a new great sage.’ Clearly, he’s reeking of resentment. it’s a powerful moment in which he visibly falls short of his own philosophy, overcome by his arrogance. this is, in fact, how the book opens. the first two chapters of the book consist of these dialogues without commentary.
the rest of the book consists of mencius just trying to be a good teacher, discussing these ideas with his disciples, training the next generation to be good. i think the design of the book says that mencius, at this key moment, failed and then learned from it. he realized that the way to change the world, in this case, would be, having failed politically, to be an extraordinary teacher and try to help the next generation to be extraordinary beings. the design of the book is a way of trying to give you a sense of a human being, in all this complexity, trying to be great, failing, and then learning from that experience.
so there is a sense of imperfection here, the crooked wood of humanity, etc., which is fascinating because the caricature of the wise person is that they have already reached this enlightenment or depth. Mencius is still on his journey.
is extraordinarily powerful for this reason. it would be much less powerful if it were just mencius spouting these brilliant ideas. it’s more powerful to have mencius say brilliant things, but then, in practice, for the reader to see the complexities of him as a human being.
this fits with your theme of dealing with the world as we find it, not in some simpler way that makes everything easy.
Part of what I find so powerful about these texts is that underlying all of them, despite all their many differences, is a sense that the world is messy, that it’s complicated. we as human beings are very, very messy and complicated, and the world around us is extremely difficult to understand; in fact, impossible to understand in the simplistic terms in which we try to do it. one must deal with this mess. one must deal with this complexity, and by definition, when one tries to do so, one usually fails. and then hopefully you try to learn from it and create slightly better worlds next time.
let’s talk about the final text. this is xunzi again, it’s a full text, but it bears the author’s name.
xunzi is a self-proclaimed Confucian. It comes from the teachings of Confucius, but the text purports to be written by Xunzi himself. Instead of giving us the anecdotes of xunzi talking to different people, this one consists of philosophical essays on specific topics.
what kind of topics does it deal with?
He is very interested in self-cultivation and writes essays about it. he is very interested in how we cultivate ourselves through ritual, and will write essays on rituals. he is interested in the political sphere, so he will write essays on the political sphere. he tries to take all the issues that Confucius’ teachings touched on and then try to work out, philosophically, how we should understand them.
Is this self-cultivation image an agricultural metaphor?
with mencius, it absolutely is. he says that we should think of our potential to be good as the equivalent of sprouts: if we grow them properly, in other words, if we put them in suitable soil in a sunny spot, water the soil and nurture them, they will become something extraordinary. . humans are the same. if we cultivate ourselves, we feed ourselves, we develop great worlds around us in which we and those around us can grow, we can develop and become extraordinary sages. if we fail in this, we can end up destroying the buds. we can become, in a strong sense for Mencius, inhuman. we will still be alive, but we will become inhuman. so it’s very much the world of domesticated agriculture, where we humans are trying to create conditions within which things can actually grow.
xunzi, curiously, argues the opposite. he says ‘let’s get rid of these agricultural metaphors and use construction metaphors instead. think of human nature as a crooked piece of wood that has to be shaped and twisted to be good. part of his argument here is that he thinks the Mentian metaphor makes living sound too organic. xunzi is saying, ‘let’s really emphasize the kind of work it takes to do this’.
In truth, Mencius is talking a lot about the job: the very fact that he is seen failing shows how difficult it is for him. but i think xunzi’s criticism is that that metaphor could allow, perhaps, to think that this is an organic process that will naturally occur on its own with a minimum of work. although that’s not mencius’s actual point of view, i think that’s the danger of the analogy from xunzi’s point of view. xunzi wants to use these strong construction metaphors. we are building the world around us, we are building ourselves, making ourselves good human beings. if we fail to do that, we’re building the world anyway, and building humans anyway, but we’re doing it very poorly.
However, if you take that architectural analogy, doesn’t that imply a certain amount of planning, blueprints, and the sort of things that we’ve been talking about in opposition to Chinese philosophy? it’s a very rational approach.
it is, but xunzi will use architectural or constructionist metaphors for the first stage. what he will say, for example, is, ‘Think about ritual training.’ we’re building them, but then once you start that process, you can’t predict what you’ll become in the long run.”
The idea is that by breaking these patterns and forcing ourselves to become better people, we potentially become better human beings than we could imagine right now. the key is that you must build an artificial world to allow this to be possible. as he will say, very famously and powerfully, the artificial pigments of, say, indigo are much more powerful than the natural indigo that you find in nature. the built world is going to be bigger than anything we’ve ever encountered naturally.
“the built world is going to be bigger than anything we’ve come across naturally”
will argue against thinking of humans in terms of our natural gifts or endowments. the argument is that we will build ourselves to be better than we think we are naturally capable of being or even than we can imagine ourselves to be. when you build yourself and it opens up possibilities you couldn’t imagine.
With all of these five thinkers, there is an emphasis on self-development and reflection. is this isolated from society in general? Is it about locking yourself up to become a better person, sitting in a cave on the side of a hill somewhere?
It might even be impossible for them to do that. For many of these philosophers, if you left them alone on a desert island, they would surely do all kinds of training exercises to become better human beings. but I think the sense would be that it would be limited. the only way you can really train yourself to be a better human being is to be actively out in the world and working with the human beings around you.
If you’re not doing that, it would be hard to say you’re becoming a better person because, in many ways, that’s where you’re judged: in your interactions with others. are you actively building a better world, are you building better relationships, are you sensing the humans around you in better ways? without humans around you, you couldn’t really do the training exercise, nor could you be judged if you’re being effective in the training exercise because that’s what’s considered most important.
It’s intriguing because there is a dominant practice in Eastern philosophies, transferred to the West, of withdrawing from society, away from all the complexities of technology, to return to a much simpler, quieter, more encapsulated world, without immersing yourself same in the complexity of the world as it is today.
precisely. One of the things that is so intriguing about these texts is that throughout all of them the great sages that are discussed are all the people who are actively living in society, working with the world around them, trying to create better worlds. and often unable to do so. well, but then learning from their mistakes. you rarely find people who are physically removed from the world in these texts. it’s about how you build better worlds in this messy life we find ourselves living. to give you a very good, and very revealing example, the laozi is often surprising in this way because, when you start reading it, and it is written in a very mystical terminology, you assume that it is about withdrawing from society and doing meditations that give you greater mystical awareness. and then not! you get to their actual examples, and the examples are things like people who are effective rulers: generals who are effective military strategists, for example. it’s about human beings in the world, working very effectively in the world. the sense is that there is no distinction between being a great mystical sage and being someone actively engaged in the world. in fact, they are truly one and the same. if you achieve this sense of path, by definition, you are doing well in this messy world.
note on Chinese names
Chinese names can cause confusion due to the different ways Chinese characters have been romanized over the centuries. today, when you study Chinese, you learn the ‘pinyin’ system. in pinyin, confucius is ‘kongzi’ and mencius is ‘mengzi’. ‘taoism’ is ‘taoism’ and ‘tao te ching’ is ‘daodejing’. xunzi, zhuangzi, and laozi are written in pinyin.
the character ‘zi’ is an honorific suffix. So we’re talking about Master Kong, Master Meng, Master Xun, Master Zhuang, and Master Lao.
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