Xunzi

Xunzi (“Master Xun”; personal name Xún Kuàng) was the third great philosopher of classical Confucianism (Confucianism), after Confucius and Mencius — and the one who disagreed most sharply with Mencius. Against the doctrine that human nature is good, Xunzi argued that “human nature is bad”: people are born with desires for profit and pleasure, with envy and hatred, and if they follow their nature, strife and disorder result. Goodness is the product of conscious effort (wěi), of learning, and above all of the rituals (lǐ) and music created by the ancient sage-kings, which shape and satisfy human desires as a press straightens warped wood. A naturalist about Heaven, a theorist of language and the mind, and the author of the first great systematic essays in Chinese philosophy, Xunzi was the most influential Confucian of the Han dynasty — and the teacher of Han Fei and Li Si, architects of the Legalist state of Qin.

Life

Xunzi was born around 310 BCE in the state of Zhao, in northern China. At about fifty, according to the historian Sima Qian, he went to the state of Qi, whose Jixia Academy was the most famous gathering of scholars of the age; he was three times appointed its libationer (senior scholar). Slandered in Qi, he went to Chu, where the minister Lord Chunshen made him magistrate of Lanling (in present-day Shandong). He visited Qin, the rising military power in the west, and admired its order while lamenting the absence of Confucian scholars. After his patron’s assassination in 238 BCE he lost his post, and lived out his life in Lanling, teaching and writing. He died around 235, fourteen years before Qin unified China.

Human nature is bad

The chapter “Human Nature is Bad” (Xìng è) is a direct refutation of Mencius:

Human nature is bad; its goodness is the result of conscious activity. Now people are born with a love of profit; if they follow it, strife and contention arise and courtesy and deference disappear. They are born with envy and hatred; if they follow these, violence and crime arise and loyalty and good faith disappear. They are born with the desires of the ears and eyes, a fondness for beautiful sounds and sights; if they follow these, lewdness and disorder arise and ritual and righteousness disappear.

Therefore, “a warped piece of wood must be steamed and pressed against the straightening board before it becomes straight; a piece of blunt metal must be whetted on the grindstone before it becomes sharp”. So human beings need teachers and laws, ritual and righteousness, before they become orderly and good.

Mencius had confused what is inborn — what cannot be learned or worked at, like the eye’s ability to see — with what is acquired by learning and effort. Goodness is like pottery: the potter shapes clay into a vessel, but the vessel is the product of the potter’s activity, not the nature of clay. Yet Xunzi was no pessimist about human beings: “the man in the street can become a Yu” (the sage-king), because everyone has the capacity to understand and practise ritual and righteousness. The sage is not born but made.

Ritual and music

Where does ritual come from? Xunzi’s account (“Discourse on Ritual”) is strikingly naturalistic:

Human beings are born with desires. If their desires are not satisfied, they cannot but seek to satisfy them. If in seeking there is no measure or limit, they cannot but contend. Contention leads to disorder, and disorder to exhaustion. The ancient kings hated such disorder, and so they established ritual and righteousness to apportion things, to nurture people’s desires and supply what they seek.

Ritual thus creates social distinctions — between ruler and subject, old and young, rich and poor — so that each receives an appropriate share, and limited goods are not fought over. But ritual is not only a device of order: it nurtures and refines human feelings, giving them beautiful and proper expression. Funeral rites, for instance, give grief its due form; sacrifices express remembrance and longing. Music harmonises emotions and unites the community. Ritual brings human life into harmony with heaven and earth: “through it heaven and earth join in harmony, the sun and moon shine… the four seasons proceed in order”.

Heaven

In “Discourse on Heaven” (Tiān lùn), Xunzi rejected the idea that Heaven (tiān) responds to human conduct. “Heaven’s course is constant. It does not persist because of a Yao (a sage), nor perish because of a Jie (a tyrant).” Comets, eclipses and strange events are natural occurrences, to be wondered at but not feared. “If people pray for rain and it rains, why is that? Nothing in particular. It is just as if they had not prayed for rain and it rained.” Rituals like the rain dance and divination should be performed, but as ornament (wén), not because they have supernatural effects: “the gentleman regards them as ornament, the common people as supernatural”. Human beings should not “compete with Heaven” by speculating about its workings, but should use its seasons and resources — “form a triad with Heaven and Earth”.

Learning, mind and language

The Xunzi opens with “An Exhortation to Learning”: “Learning must never stop. Blue dye comes from the indigo plant, but it is bluer than the plant; ice is made from water, but it is colder than water.” Learning begins with reciting the classics and ends with studying ritual; its aim is to become a gentleman and ultimately a sage.

In “Undoing Fixation” (Jiě bì) he argued that people go wrong because their minds are fixated on one aspect of things — desire or aversion, the near or the far, the ancient or the modern — and so blind to the whole. Each rival school had seen one corner: Mozi utility but not culture, Zhuangzi Heaven but not humanity. The mind should be “empty, unified and still” — not filled by what it has already stored, not divided, not agitated — so that it can see clearly, like still water reflecting a face.

In “Rectifying Names” (Zhèng míng) he gave the first systematic Chinese theory of language: names are established by convention, through which rulers fix their meanings to distinguish things and keep social order; the paradoxes of the Mohists and the School of Names confuse names and realities.

Legacy

Xunzi dominated Confucianism in the Han dynasty, when his followers transmitted many of the classics. But his association with Legalism — his students Han Fei and Li Si served the Qin, which burned Confucian books and buried scholars — and his denial that human nature is good led the Song Neo-Confucians to exclude him from orthodoxy in favour of Mencius. In the twentieth century he was rediscovered as a rigorous, realist and naturalistic thinker, often compared with Hobbes.

In conversation

• “Human nature is bad” — goodness as acquired, not innate.
• Warped wood — ritual as the straightening board.
• The rain dance — Heaven as nature, ritual as ornament.