Monday, October 10

The next homework assignment will be due October 17; I'll post it in Wednesday's reading guide.

Reading:    Mencius, Readings 2                                   Reference:  Mencius, Selections

Today's readings will take you through the most famous set of doctrines in the Mencius: those relating to his theory that human nature is good.  Last week, we saw that Mencius pictured actual human beings in terms of the potential for moral excellence within them - trying to illustrate to woefully amoral warlords that their ethical instincts were actually alive, and pointing them towards the type of good conduct that Confucians sought in the True King.  The doctrine of the goodness of human nature articulates that view theoretically.

On Monday, we'll begin by considering passage 2A.2, which is the Mencius's most detailed look at the experience of sagely certainty - something Mencius is pictured as having achieved.  In this passage we will encounter a "psychology":  an analysis of the structure of the morally responsive mind and its development.  The stress lies on the way that the mind gains full leadership over the embodied person.  There is no view of a "mind/body" split (very common in the West), rather, the issue is how we can mobilize ourselves to turn our entire persons into an agent for our morally responsive consciousness - so that when we act, we act out the perfect and powerful instincts that our feelings spontaneously give to us.  The issue is primarily cast in terms of gaining control over a bodily force/substance that was called qi (make sure you consult the readings or the Glossary to be clear what qi denotes!).  (All of Section II of your reading is composed of the lengthy passage 2A.2.)

We'll then turn to 2A.6, a short passage in Section III of your reading, which provides Mencius's "proof" of the goodness of human nature.  Where 2A.2 was a description of experience, 2A.6 is an argument - clearly shaped to refute Mohist claims that those who "love universally" are following Tian's dictates - and as an argument, it employs one of Mohism's key devices: the hypothetical test.  The Mencius is always more interesting, as a text, to those who find some cogency in this hypothetical test case (known as the "child-by-the-well" example).

We will then begin to explore (following the passages in Section IV) a large, contiguous portion of the text, found in Book 6A, and known as the "debate with Gaozi" section.  Here, the Mencius takes us through a number of arguments against Mencius's theory, reportedly offered by a rival thinker named Gaozi, who was probably a Confucian who had reached a compromise position with Mohism.  Mohism argued that a good ethics was one that had adopted the proper "standards" - the proper standard of "right," or yi.  Ethical actors (remember, Mohism was an "Ethics of Action") were those who conformed their action choices to the correct standard of yi, a standard provided by Reason or by political authority (depending on whether you attend to the philosophical approach of the "Universal Love" chapter or that of the "Will of Tian" and "Identifying With Superiors" chapters).  Gaozi adopted this notion of yi (2A.2 reports his maxim as: "If you cannot find sanction for a course of action in the teachings, do not search for it in your heart"), but he rejected the Mohist claim that we could, through an act of will, "love" others.  Linking feelings of love to ren, Gaozi claimed that ren was dictated by our hearts, and could not be manufactured through the manipulation of our effortful energy (qi).  Mencius agreed with this latter position, but strongly disputed Gaozi's Mohistic position that yi - moral standards - were "external" to our spontaneous dispositions.  Basically, Mencius's goal is to utterly refute the Mohists by proving that right action, most especially action according to li, stems from our most primal orientation, a species characteristic endowed in us by that ultimate, shadowy, and very plastic authority: Tian.