- More "Mencius-on-Human-Nature" Discussions:What Are They About?
Mencius: Contexts and Interpretations, edited by Alan K. L. Chan, consists of thirteen essays by different authors on various aspects of the Mencius. Nine of the thirteen focus in one way or another on Mencius' views on human nature, and these nine will be the main focus of this review.
I initially set out to try to understand these discussions of Mencius-on-human-nature in a way that would enable me to say how the views expressed compare to each other, and this attempt eventually led me to focus on the many problems and confusions connected with this subject. These essays in fact present a rather bewildering variety of views, not only about Mencius' own views, but even more about how to approach the subject of human nature, what criteria should be decisive in forming our views of human nature, what practical conclusions follow from a given view of human nature, and so on.
This review will therefore begin with a discussion of certain key problems, followed by a detailed discussion of those essays in which these problems are most apparent. Afterwards I will move on to several essays that seem to me less problematic, and finally to a brief treatment of the four essays in the volume that deal with other aspects of the Mencius.
The main problems I want to focus on first can be described in terms of two contrasting approaches one can take when dealing with Mencius-on-human-nature. One approach assimilates Mencius' thought into modern Western thought about human nature. According to this view, "human nature" is contrasted with "socialization." Some traits we observe in people are traits that all humans are born with, and some are due to socialization. The former constitute "human nature," and for most of the contributors this means that they should be taken as a basis for ethics. The purpose of discussing human nature is to provide an objective foundation for ethical theory or political philosophy.
A second approach places Mencius' thought about human nature in the very particular context of self-cultivation. According to this view, Mencius is addressing [End Page 1] already socialized adults. He advises them to think of self-cultivation as a process of developing impulses that they perceive to be already "inside" them. In Mencius' mind, this stands in contrast to the view that self-cultivation consists of imposing on oneself norms perceived as "external." From a modern standpoint, some of what adults feel to be inside them will of course be the result of prior socialization. This does not matter, because Mencius is trying to give adults practical guidance in a mode of self-cultivation informed by a particular ethical vision, not trying to guess about the what human beings would be without socialization in order to provide an objective foundation for ethical theory or political philosophy.
The first approach is dominant in most of the nine essays considered here. I found the main problem with this approach to be the assumption that "human nature" is a single topic, and that everyone who makes statements about human nature, including Mencius, can be assumed to be contributing to a single discussion. This seems to be why interpreters taking this approach generally do not speculate as to what brought Mencius to his views, and why they pay little attention to the conclusions that Mencius himself associated with these views. These interpreters seem to assume that it is obvious what conclusions logically follow and do not follow from a given view of human nature, so we do not have to concern ourselves with questions about what conclusions Mencius drew.
The fact is, however, that the various modern contributors to this volume do not agree with each other on the nature of the discussion itself. They show no agreement concerning what the discussion is really about, how an intelligent person might go about deciding between competing views on this subject, or what conclusions follow and do...