Category Archives: Human nature

Episode 38 of “This Is the Way”: Xunzi on Human Nature and Human Artifice

Xunzi is famous for the claim that “human nature is bad.” But what does he mean by this, and if goodness does not come naturally to us, where does it come from?

In this episode, we discuss Xunzi’s distinction between nature (xing 性) and deliberate effort (wei 偽), his disagreement with Mencius, and his view that moral goodness must be “learned” and “worked at.” We also ask how sharp the distinction between the natural and the artificial really is, and consider Xunzi’s comparison of moral cultivation to crafts like pottery and woodworking. If we are shaped through deliberate effort, are we both the material being shaped and the ones doing the shaping? Continue reading →

Body and Cosmos in China: An Interdisciplinary Symposium in Honor of Nathan Sivin

The Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania is delighted to announce an interdisciplinary symposium in honor of Nathan Sivin at Perry World House, 3803 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19104, on Oct. 14-15, 2017.

The symposium is free and open to the public, but pre-registration is required.  Just click here if you’d like to attend:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/body-and-cosmos-in-china-an-interdisciplinary-symposium-in-honor-of-nathan-sivin-tickets-37455848451.

Continue reading →

The Heart of Deference

Section 2A/6 of the Mencius tells us that the heart of deference (辭讓) is the starting point of ritual. I’ll try to convince you that this is a puzzling claim, and then suggest a solution to the puzzle.

The puzzle is that ritual obviously mobilises motives other than deference, and calls for behaviour that is not simply deferential. Think of the way that grief takes on ritualised shape in funerals: this is not just an extension of deference. So, why did it make sense to the author or authors of Mencius 2A/6 to say that deference is the starting-point of ritual?

Continue reading →

Your Xing and What You Do

This post sketches part of the argument in my paper “The Warring States Concept of Xing,” which is just out in Dao 10.1 (Spring 2011). “Xing” is commonly translated as “nature,” though “spontaneous character” would be better.

There’s this idea that (in Warring States terms) it can be your xing 性 to do something even though you have no tendency to actually do it. This idea is badly wrong. And no one would take it seriously if they weren’t misreading the Mencius.

The big problem is that the Mencius seems to say that it is our xing to be good, and that people who study the Mencius are mostly trained to think that that claim somehow stands for or summarises everything else the collection has to say about human nature. And trying to interpret the claim so that it does stand for all that leads to some major interpretive troubles. Continue reading →