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Commentary on Xunzi's "Discourse on Heaven"
- userbinator 3y agoDiscourse on Heaven, the successor to Discuz on Earth? (Sorry, could not resist...) More seriously, it's interesting to see the distinctively authoritarian line of thought even in ancient China; certainly explains a few things about their culture and society today.
- seewhydee 3y agoI mean, Plato argued for governance by philosopher-kings, not too different from the Confucian conception of governance. What's more interesting to me is the skeptical attitude toward omens and the notion of heavenly will. That sounds really remarkably modern, and not at all what I'd expect from someone writing during the third century BCE.
- mbivert 3y agoI don't think it's peculiar to China: parents towards young children naturally act authoritatively, in part because of the nature of young children. This nature somehow perseveres in adulthood, albeit altered: consider for example Asch's experiments[0], or this antique idea of assimilating rulers to shepherds. (I'm using "authoritative" in a neutral sense here, free from its usual negative undertone) Edit: Hm, I was incidentally opening the San Zi Jing[1] a few moments ago. It's a historically important educational Chinese book, and it opens with: "Men at their birth are naturally good." The character used for "good" is "善" (shàn), which contains in part "羊" (yáng), meaning "goat/sheep". [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Character_Classic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Character_Classic
- Joker_vD 3y agoOh, wait until you read about the so-called Legalists.
- hnfong 3y agoFWIW, two of the most famous Legalists, Han Fei and Li Si were Xunzi's students. In a sense, the Legalists and Confucians had a strange marriage, and they kept the name Confucianism because the credibility of the Legalists proper took a big hit when the Qin dynasty (founded on legalist principles) crumbled within a short period of time.
- canjobear 3y agoI wouldn't say Xunzi is authoritarian. His school, the Confucians, were explicitly opposed to ruling by force and raw power, and instead thought that a state should rule by creating and following proper rituals for everyone to follow. The rituals would act psychologically to instill a sense of virtue in everyone, and then you would have a harmonious state where the ruler doesn't need to do anything except wear the ritual robes and face south. They thought a state based on naked force (or one based on explicit laws) would be too unstable.
- indigo945 3y agoIndeed Confucian thought is not inherently "authoritarian" in the sense that you allude to here, although "authoritarian" is a vague word to begin with, and some of its meanings mesh quite well with Confucian thought. However, Xunzi is uncommonly anti-individualistic even by Confucian standards, and influenced the tyrannic "legalist" tradition of Chinese state theory. Besides, Xun Zi is not at all convinced that a good society can be built through Confucian "ritual" alone - which, by the way, you unwittingly caricature by painting it as some superficial thing (wear robes, face south).
- vinnyvichy 3y agoThis guy Xunzi is mildly modern, even heretic, with respect to the prevailing confucians and taoists, no surprise that he is not better known. See the chapter: "Proper Use of Terms" (正名 zhēngmíng): A name becomes proper for a situation through conventional usage, but once this is fixed it is improper to deviate from this norm. " Totally an ancient tech blogger
- asimpletune 3y agoYeah one of the things I love about him is that he takes an idea so far that you can’t tell if it’s actually meant as satire. Humor alone is enough to make him revolutionary.
- HuShifang 3y agoFor context, he is reasonably well known -- probably the third most-prominent of the early Confucians (albeit a distant third, after Confucius and Mencius), with partial and complete English translations. But, he was often regarded by Confucians throughout Chinese history warily, because of certain "Legalist" tendencies (which, to put it crudely, were more authoritarian and Machiavellian as well as more legalistic), which were frequently disparaged (but quietly drawn on by pragmatic "statecraft" thinkers). Especially because two of his students, Han Fei and Li Si, were arguably the most (in)famous legalists. That said, I had a teacher years ago from Taiwan who argued that 1) Xunzi was the first full-blown "philosopher" (in the Western sense of offering an epistemology etc and arguing in a logically reasoned way) in Chinese history, and that 2) Xunzi and Zhuangzi were the smartest Chinese thinkers of all time. Years later, I'm not sure she was wrong.
- markhahn 3y agotoo circumlocutory, didn't read.