Mencius on Becoming Human (review)

In Mencius on Becoming Human James Behuniak, Jr., offers a comprehensive portrait of a Mencian theory of the person, mounted on the framework of a process ontology. His initial cue is the pervasiveness of the botanical metaphor underlying the Mencius' discussions of human development, and the argument opens with a provocative analogy comparing individuals in the Mencian view to the beautifully varied trees that grow today in the temple of Mencius in Shandong.

Behuniak offers his model in contrast to those that picture the Mencian doctrine of the goodness of human nature as a model of genetically universal innate traits in members of the human species. For Behuniak, Mencius' doctrine is about our experienced dispositions (xing) and their potential productivity (shan), which Mencius views as the products of culture, not biological heredity. In this general position, he follows closely, with acknowledgment, the ideas of Roger Ames.

Behuniaks model is based on an outline of Mencius' philosophical milieu. Behuniak maintains that Warring States period thinkers worked within the scope of a cosmology of qi, a term that he renders most often as "configurative energy." In his first chapter he describes this qi cosmology as envisioning a thoroughly dynamic, Whiteheadian universe. He draws on the work of A. C. Graham to highlight the way in which spontaneity becomes a critical concept in such a cosmology, joining the dispositions and actions of beings to the intrinsic directionality of the cosmos, and he endorses Tang Junyi's process-oriented description of Chinese metaphysical assumptions.

The remaining chapters construct Behuniak's central model in four major stages, focusing in turn on Mencian descriptions of the feelings (xin), the root origins of the person in the family, the formation of human dispositions (xing), and how moral leadership and ritual propriety can overcome the resistance of determinate conditions (ming) in the creation of social harmony. Throughout this discussion, many of his interpretations are primarily conveyed through innovative translations of key Mencian terms, making them fit tools for his process-oriented reconstruction.

Behuniak's rendering of xin as "feelings" facilitates his effort to portray the Mencian person as a cluster of responsive moral tendencies that enables the person to become fully engaged (de) in the world, and integrated (cheng) in a "transactional" manner, adapting here the ideas of John Dewey. Mencius is pictured as avoiding the analysis of experience in terms of inner/outer distinctions in favor of this dynamic interplay of human being and environment, expressed through the botanical analogies that pervade the text.

Chapter 3 begins with a useful sorting of early Chinese ethics into those traditions that value the cultivation of various forms of spontaneity and those that are more "technically" oriented toward theoretical system building. Behuniak casts the debate between Mohist and Confucian ethics in this mold, and, contrasting the Mohist maxim of universality with the Mencian focus on family, he claims that for Mencius the family serves as the root of the moral tendencies that become experienced as spontaneous. The discussion here lays the groundwork for the more central claim that the human ethical dispositions are, for Mencius, not innate, but socially derived, with the family as an ultimate source.

In his discussion of the dispositions (xing), Behuniak directly attacks notions of any genetic basis for the moral dispositions Mencius labels as uniquely human, the "four sprouts." While acknowledging that some statements in the Mencius suggest a genetic basis, he objects that this would be inconsistent with the qi cosmology on which he claims Mencian ideas are grounded. Instead, Behuniak treats as more critical Mencius' portrait of cultural history, which he claims shows that, for Mencius, primitive human society did not entail ethical dispositions, these emerging only with the tutelage of sages. Invoking texts believed to be of the Zisi-Mencius tradition excavated from the tombs at Guodian, Behuniak argues that these, too, support a view of xing as dispositions emerging only through dynamic engagement in the world, not as a set of a priori...