Xunzi and Early Chinese Naturalism (review)

For many centuries Xunzi was one of the most misprized of the classic philosophers. Today he might be the most popular. Janghee Lee's new book, Xunzi and Early Chinese Naturalism, is the fifth on Xunzi in English since 1999.¹ To my knowledge, no other Chinese philosopher has been the subject of as many scholarly books in English over the same period. In a field where monographs have come to appear at a rate of about one per year, new contributions face an increasingly difficult task: to take into account the swelling secondary literature and at the same time to offer an original interpretation. Lee does not completely satisfy these two demands.

The heart of Lee's book lies in his discussion of xin—the term frequently rendered as "mind" or "heart-and-mind" in sinological writing—which Lee, however, sensitive to the dualistic connotations of such phrases, prefers to leave untranslated:

I argue that Xunzi's notion of xin, particularly as the faculty of "autonomy," is a response to the "naturalistic trend" of his time. The notion of xin as the faculty of self-governance is Xunzi's deliberate attempt to respond to the challenge of "naturalistic" philosophy by clearly identifying a human realm that cannot be confounded with the natural realm.

(p. 3)

Lee's chapter on xin (pp. 33-56) surveys Xunzi's basic tenets competently—xin is the "faculty of self-governance"; xin relies on the sense organs for information and confirms the empirical information they present; xin issues commands to all other parts of the body but does not receive commands; xin is "empty," "unified," and "placid"—but his discussion is based almost exclusively on the work of Lee Yearley, A. S. Cua, and Roger T. Ames. Some of the most important studies of Xunzi's concept of xin are in East Asian languages, and Lee does not cite any of them. Neither in the notes nor in the bibliography does one find the names of Du Guoxiang , Tang Junyi , or Uchiyama Toshihiko .² This neglect is, regrettably, typical: in the entire book, Lee cites only five secondary Chinese works (all of which are general books on Chinese philosophy, not specialized studies of Xunzi) and not a single Japanese title whatsoever. Consequently, Lee's chapter on Heaven (pp. 19-31) is blighted by his failure to discuss the three great Japanese scholars who have written the most on this subject: Itano Chöhachi , Kanaya Osamu , and Kodama Rokurö .³ Such gaps are not acceptable in an academic book. Even if Lee does not agree with the views of any of these scholars (although many of them would seem to be in line with his own), he is required to respond to them and explain why he rejects them.

Lee's unqualified use of the term "naturalism" also raises several issues that he does not adequately address. Although he argues that Xunzi crafted his philosophy of xin as a sophisticated way of avoiding naturalism, Lee's exposition of Xunzi's philosophy makes him sound very much like a naturalist in other respects. For example, Lee concludes his discussion of the "Zhengming" chapter as follows:

For Xunzi, although names are conventional artifacts created to refer to objects, as we do not perceive the world in an idiosyncratic, human way, but recognize things according to "natural categories (lei)" to which they belong, or "natural characteristics (qing)" that they possess, names must also reflect the world appropriately.

(p. 63)

By Lee's own definition of "naturalists"—people who "take the natural realm as the source of values and resort to the way of nature for directing our ethical life and building culture and society" (p. 3)—does this understanding of Xunzi's theory of names not make him a naturalist as well?

A clearer example: Lee contends that the li (rites, rituals) are created by human beings but are not arbitrary...