The COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY and the WEATHERHEAD EAST ASIAN INSTITUTE
welcome you to an IN-PERSON meeting:
Hagop Sarkissian (CUNY): «Engineering the Dao: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Trust the Mengzi»
With responses from Tao Jiang (Rutgers)
ABSTRACT: Why does Mengzi tell rulers that their love of wealth and women poses no obstacle to ideal rulership, even as he venerates sage kings who seemingly lack such desires? How can he advocate for universal moral response in the child-in-the-well scenario while explicitly rejecting impartial concern? Why does he advise King Xuan to avoid looking at sacrificial oxen—effectively telling him to ignore his compassionate impulses—if moral sprouts are meant to guide ethical action? And why does he reject merit-based appointments, favoring hereditary offices, while advocating ethical transformation of government? These persistent interpretive puzzles have led some scholars to conclude that Mengzi’s philosophy is fundamentally conflicted. In this talk, I propose that these puzzles dissolve when we shift our focus from theoretical systematization to dao construction. Rather than seeing Mengzi primarily as a theorist of human nature, a virtue ethicist, or a political philosopher, I argue he is best understood as a constructor of dao: an engineer of workable frameworks for guiding conduct and organizing social life. Like an engineer, Mengzi builds with available resources—human psychology, institutions, cultural forms—within real-world constraints, prioritizing sustainability over theoretical purity. This “pragmatic constructivist” reading explains Mengzi’s characteristic patterns: motivational permissiveness (redirecting self-interested desires rather than suppressing them), institutional conservatism (preserving Zhou structures while fostering ethical renewal), and accommodation of natural family attachments (without making them the normative foundation). Instead of demanding universal emotional expansion, Mengzi engineers coordination mechanisms that work with human nature, social realities, and political structures as they actually exist. I aim to show how this engineering approach resolves longstanding interpretive difficulties and reveals Mengzi as a systematic social engineer whose methodology remains relevant for contemporary debates on moral and political progress.
DATE: September 19th
TIME: 5:30-7:30pm EST
LOCATION: Philosophy Hall, Room 716, Columbia University, 1150 Amsterdam Ave, New York, NY 10027
IMPORTANT NOTE FOR NON-COLUMBIA GUESTS: All non-affiliated members of our community must RSVP to Helen Han Wei Luo (hl3631@columbia.edu) preferably no later than Tuesday, September 16th, including in the request your name on government-issued ID in order to be granted access to campus. Non-affiliated members who do not RSVP will not be given entry to campus. Please also plan to arrive early.
