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This chapter outlines the disagreement between Mencius and Xunzi and the deeper ethical issues these thinkers confront under this organizing principle, as they help articulate some of the most powerful and influential visions of personal formation ever produced. The essay closes with a discussion of how Mencian and Xunzian material lends itself especially well to teaching courses on Chinese or Confucian thought, East Asian culture and society, religious ethics, philosophical ethics, and virtue ethics.

This chapter begins by contrasting the binary logic of the Guodian text “The Five Aspects of Conduct” with the Analects of Confucius and the Mencius. This properly situates the Guodian texts as a new set of ideas that relate to but are separate from our former understanding of the tradition. The chapter continues with a critical overview of scholarship that is interested in connecting “The Five Aspects of Conduct” to transmitted texts. These scholars argue that “The Five Aspects of Conduct” was written by Confucius’s grandson Zisi. The theory of Zisi authorship is rooted in a single line of a single polemical passage of the Xunzi, which is vague and unsubstantial.

This chapter provides a nuanced study of the relationship between “The Five Aspects of Conduct” and Mencius. In “The Five Aspects of Conduct,” This chapter is an important part of self-cultivation, but this is not true of the Mencius. Mencius’s ethical system is primarily concerned with developing the moral framework of the people. This framework is human nature (ren xing), an innate source of goodness that enables us to act as moral agents. Human nature is entirely absent from “The Five Aspects of Conduct,” which instead employs rhetoric as a means of interlinking people. However, an analysis of the religious function of rhetoric and human nature will uncover a degree of similarity from the perspective of the social application of both concepts: they bridge ruptures that otherwise separate individual processes of self-cultivation.

This chapter looks at how Mencius envisions a multilevel social system of provision in which the family, the village or commune, as well as the government all have specific roles to play. Social justice is the foundation of this social system; the family and commune (or social relationships and networks) provide familial care and mutual aid; and when they are not sufficient, the government steps in to provide direct welfare assistance. This Confucian social ideal integrates justice and care, recognizing both individual merit and personal responsibility. Mencius's vision is not of a nanny state that takes care of every aspect of people's lives from the cradle to the grave, but of a social system regulated by several principles, such as sufficiency, personal responsibility, merit, and contribution.

This concluding chapter reviews how the book reconstructed the political vision offered in the three Classical Confucian texts: the Analects, Mencius, and Xinzu. For a long time, the Chinese intellectual tradition did not receive academic interest in its own right similar to that received by the Western tradition. While the urgency of the renewed interest in it is both timely and welcome, it has meant that the Confucian texts are now mined with a view to contemporary concerns. Many of the political discussions in the early texts have thus been ignored for being irrelevant today. As a result, the book's interpretation of early Confucianism meshes with the recent trend in the discipline of political theory, which critiques the post-Kantian approach that takes ethics as a basis.

This chapter argues in defense of Confucian politics, but rejects Jiang Qing's interpretation of Confucian constitutionalism. Jiang argues for a kind of Confucian constitutionalism that is grounded in “transcendent values” of the Han dynasty Gongyang school, but the chapter contends that the true spirit of Confucianism should be located in the earlier pre-Qin Confucians such as Mencius and Xunzi, who attempted to find a middle way between the sacred and the secular. It states that a Confucianism backed by a transcendent foundation could not be widely accepted in a modern-day society characterized by the “fact of pluralism.” The chapter rejects Jiang's idea that political institutions such as the House of Ru and the Academy should represent heaven as separate from the people.

This chapter is organized around challenges from Martha Nussbaum, Karen Stohr, and Diana Myers. Does a commitment to harmony entail an unhealthy desire for consistency and unity in one's life and relationships? Along similar lines, can a commitment to harmony be squared with the existence of moral conflicts? Finally, does such a commitment push one toward a state of “emotional vanilla” in which one cannot mount dramatic challenges to the status quo? The chapter argues that a contemporary Neo-Confucian understanding of harmony has the resources to rebut all these concerns. In particular, the role of imagination in overcoming moral conflicts is stressed; this is illustrated through consideration of famous passages concerning potential conflicts from the Mencius. Particular attention is paid to the role of anger. The chapter argues, though, that both classical and Neo-Confucians too often leave grief out of account, even though it can fit well into their picture.

Looking mainly at the Analects, the Lǐjì, and the Mencius, this chapter argues that early Confucianism has much to show about such mechanisms. The early Confucians developed, engaged in, and promoted a set of practices meant to improve their sensibility about the world around, centering on matters of moral importance and on what to do. Central among these practices was what the Confucians called “ritual” or lǐ. The early Confucians were not, however, theorists. Their focus was instead the practical work of developing and using ritual, a body of largely nonlinguistic signs. Most of the Confucians' speech and writing aimed not at theory but at other supports and extensions of ritual, such as poetry, rules and records, terse but persuasive conversation, and pithy sayings designed to focus various people's practical attention.

This chapter lays out the reasons for trying to understand Mencius by attributing a consequentialist moral theory to him. This is meant in part as an oblique criticism of readings on which he is construed as a “virtue ethicist.” It is also meant to be something of a reply to Chad Hansen's (1992) consistently severe dismissals of Mencius as a competent thinker about ethics. However, the scope of the argument here is limited to the positive argument in favor of reading Mencius as a consequentialist. This chapter argues that, on the best systematic sense that can be made of the text, Mencius judges the responses and actions of the gentleman, or jūnzǐ, to be better or worse according to whether such responses and actions bring about better or worse consequences than other responses, lack of responses, actions, or inactions that might have been brought about.

This chapter examines the problematic intersection between reliance on tradition and demands for justification, particularly the implications of this tension for the meaning of philosophy. It concentrates on the Mencius as an attempt to maintain the primacy of tradition while answering the demand for justification, a demand prompted by the Mohists. These issues are approached following the work of Chad Hansen, in particular by working through a dilemma Hansen sets up between two interpretations of Mencius's view of human nature: a strong position that claims that human nature determines the details of Confucian morality and ritual, and a weak position that claims only that human nature drives us to develop morality, ritual, and so on, without determining their precise forms.

This chapter examines how Confucians prefer a society that produces a more exalted level of order. This higher level is achieved by means of rituals, which operate as an institutional mechanism for the regulation of society. The chapter also analyzes the differences between Mencius and Xunzi on the question of human nature and its relationship to the use of rituals. Mencius is more optimistic about the ability of people to develop morally in a spontaneous way, and allows for a bigger role for the emulative example of the ruler, while Xunzi emphasizes more strongly on the importance of rituals. In this dimension of their thought, the conventional view of Confucianism more closely reflects Mencius' politics than Xunzi's.

This chapter argues that involvement in politics is necessary for the full development of virtue. According to the Confucian view, a person cannot become fully virtuous in isolation from politics. The chapter argues against the contention that the Confucians adopted a purist approach, rejecting any involvement in political regimes that they deemed corrupt. Instead, they advocated involvement in politics based on a consequentialist logic: involvement is permitted, even advisable, insofar as it can bring about political order. The chapter challenges Robert Eno's reading of the early Confucian texts—particularly the Analects and Mencius—in which the Confucians reveal themselves to be in favor of political engagement, even in troubled times.

This chapter discusses Mencius. The philosopher Mencius is probably the one to have furthered the Confucian mission the most out of any other Chinese philosopher of the fourth century BC and thereby inherited the mantle of Confucius himself. In later centuries, Neo-Confucians regarded him as the last sage. Mencius, however, poses many of the same interpretive problems as Confucius. Mencius did not write the surviving repository of his teachings, the eponymous Mencius, which was compiled after his death and edited in its present form by Zhao Qi. Zhao reported that he took a text in eleven sections and eliminated four that he considered inferior, leaving the Mencius in seven books that we know today.

This chapter turns to Xunzi, one of the most popular philosophers throughout East Asia. He has been the subject of more books published in English over the past two decades than any other Chinese philosopher, vastly outstripping Mencius. His body of work has always been one of the best preserved, and with the commonplace scholastic objection to his philosophy—namely, that he was wrong to say human nature is evil (xing e)—having lost most of its cogency, it is only to be expected that philosophical readers should be attracted to his creative but rigorous arguments. In practice, Xunzi's claim that xing is evil means that following the impulses of one's xing, without reflecting on them and moderating them, will lead one to evil acts. It should be emphasized that e, the Chinese word translated here as “evil,” is not to be understood in the Christian sense of “diabolical” or “antithetical to God.”

This chapter shows that there are some fundamental problems with contemporary democracy, especially the ideology beneath the one person, one vote system and the inevitable consequences of it. It identifies four problems of democracy: the suspicion of the elite, the neglect of the interests of nonvoters, the neglect of the interests of the minority, and the irrationality of voters. Then the chapter shows how the “internal” solutions are inadequate. Next, this chapter constructs a Confucian hybrid regime that is based on Mencius’s ideas discussed in Chapter 2, and shows how it can address the problems with democracy more adequately than present liberal democratic regimes. That is, the chapter reveals that the Mencian reservation of one person, one vote is actually a good thing about Confucianism.

This chapter discusses the key concept that early Confucians developed to address the issue of finding a new bond for an emerging “modern” society, the large and populous society of strangers, as well as the issue of state–state (international) relations. The main texts that used in this discussion are the Analects and the Mencius. The chapter argues that a bond that presupposes a small, stable, and closely knit community of acquaintances does not work in a large and mobile society of strangers. A new way of bonding the people of a state together was desperately needed. Apparently, the solution Confucius offered was to restore the old world order by sticking to li.

The traditions of Confucianism, Daoism, and their later adoption of and adaptation by Buddhism envisioned a world that, re-described in modern parlance, is composed of shifting, fractal dimensions in which emergence can happen along turbulent boundaries of attractors where tensions arise between opposites. For the ancients, these ways of thinking invoked nascent principles of our current understanding of deterministic chaos; they glimpsed self-organization proceeding toward complexity, and human beings moving through the world with wuwei, an adept sense of participation. This participatory ethos can be situated on a cultural spectrum of behavior that extends between integrity (individuality) and intimacy (sociality, cooperation). An approach to life that empathizes the intimacy portion of the spectrum leads to the highest expression of the self in Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist environments where an effortless expertise, ziran, may be achieved, arising from unforced participation within a particular sector or system of the world. The individual who attains such a state is recognized as a sage. Such a person is a cooperator in the broadest sense, very often an innovator and a catalyst, and, in social systems, a constructive leader. Sagely behavior is proposed as the supreme achievement of biotic and cultural evolution.

In this chapter, I reflect on the implications of Mencius’ conception of compassion for one of the most important problems that defines the Western philosophical tradition: the relationship between reason on the one hand and desire and emotion on the other, especially in the development of moral character. I articulate what philosophers working within the Western tradition could learn from the Mencius text, drawing from some contemporary scientific studies to support my suggestions that this text provides fruitful directions of thought. Western philosophers and many psychologists continue a tendency to construe reason, desire, and emotion in dichotomous and overgeneralized terms. I argue that we need to take a more particularized and discriminating approach to the phenomena covered by these terms. Finally, I discuss what I believe are some limitations in Mencius’ approach and then show how the Analects and the Xunzi indicate ways the early Confucian tradition pointed beyond Mencius’ limitations.