Human Nature, Ritual, and History: Studies in Xunzi and Chinese Philosophy (review)

This volume is a collection of several essays by Antonio S. Cua and includes material from the years 1976-2002. It is divided into two parts: the first section, "Xunzi's Moral Philosophy," features eight essays on various aspects of Xunzi's thought, complementing Cua's earlier work on Xunzi in his Ethical Argumentation: A Study in Hsün Tzu's Moral Epistemology (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1985). The second section, titled simply "Other Studies in Chinese Philosophy," is a more diverse assembly of topics. Problems dealt with in this part include: the conceptual relation between ganying (stimulus-response) and causation; the relation between the Confucian ideal of tianrenheyi (the unity of humanity and nature) and environmental ethics; the social dimension of Confucian ren (humanity); the role of li (pattern or principle) in Chinese philosophy; the emergence of a selfconscious history of Chinese philosophy; and a study of the work of Thomé H. Fang.

The volume contains some fifteen scholarly essays but only a few can be outlined here; I would urge readers to tackle this substantial work for themselves.

Cua's studies on Xunzi begin with a careful explication of what lies behind the Xunzi's familiar claim that "Human nature is bad." Cua calls such reductive slogans that stand for conceptually complex accounts of human nature "conceptual reminders" (p. 35), and sets out to examine the understanding of morality and human nature, which lie behind both this "reminder" and Mencius' "Human nature is good." Focusing on Mencius' understanding of morality as the personal growth of the individual toward an ideal state, and noting Xunzi's construal of morality as externally imposed "conditions of restraint," Cua suggests that "Xunzi's thesis is rooted in a picture of man as beset by a conflict of desires, whereas Mencius' is a picture of a moral agent with inherent tendencies toward the fulfillment of moral excellence" (p. 37). Cua suggests that the two perspectives are complementary, since they can be seen as two accounts of the phenomenon that is moral experience.

The collection also contains two essays (2 and 7) dealing with Xunzi's approach to li (ritual / ritual propriety). The discussion in Cua's earlier essay (essay 2, from 1978) focuses on whether li as a term exhibits conceptual unity (i.e., is used with a reasonably fixed meaning) and also on the nature of the relationship between li and morality (one interpretation of li holds that it is a system of fixed codes whose moral worth is open to question). Cua brings out the moral, aesthetic, and religious dimensions of li and the unity that obtains between them "in a vision of the good human life." In summary, a study of the concept li invites us to give greater consideration to the presence of aesthetic experience in the moral life, with Confucian thought being a rich source of insights for understanding "the beauty of virtue" (p. 61). Cua's later essay (1999) on li focuses on the religious dimensions of it, outlining the distinction between an engagement in ritual that demands a specific account of an act's purpose or function and a heuristic understanding of li in terms of the broader religious ideal of being able to "permeate or penetrate through all existent things" (p. 188), guided by a vision of the unity of tian (heaven) and humanity.

The third essay deals with what Bentham called the "Chinese argument": the use of the past in argumentation to support ethical or political claims. In Chinese literature it is commonplace to note the innumerable times that former kings, paradigmatic officials, virtuous sages, and even the Book of Songs are the subject of an appeal by an interlocutor in order to make an argument persuasive.

As most readers will already be aware, the dispute centers on whether...