Xunzi’s Theory of Human Nature

Last week we read one of the most famous and important selections from Hobbes, an English philosopher writing in the 17th century in Europe, and motivated by distinctive problems of his own time and place, including the English Civil War, which he saw as creating unnecessary instability. This week, for our second state of nature theorist, we turn to Xunzi, one of the great classical thinkers in Chinese Confucian thought, who is often compared to Hobbes, though he was thinking and writing two thousand years earlier.

Xunzi - literally, ‘master Xun’ - lived and taught in the 3rd century BCE, after the time of Confucius and Mencius, who established the most important and central doctrines of Confucian thought. Like Confucius and Mencius, he lived and wrote during the Warring States Period, just before the rise of the Qin dynasty.

If you are interested in finding some context to Xunzi’s ideas, I found the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for him to be particularly helpful. The SEP is a valuable free online resource that is regularly updated to include the very latest scholarship.

We are going to read two “chapters” from the collection of Xunzi’s work that has come down to us from his time. But it is important to be clear that this edition of his work was collected by later scholars around two hundred years after his death, from manuscripts that were likely circulating in China at the time. The order of the chapters was determined by the scholars who assembled them - not by Xunzi himself - and contemporary scholars agree that some of the chapters included were probably not written by Xunzi himself. But my understanding is that the two chapters that we are going to read are believed to be actually written by Xunzi, though we do not know which order he actually wrote them in or intended them to be read in - and the titles of the chapters were probably not chosen by Xunzi himself, either.

Human Nature

Chapter 23, “Human Nature is Bad”, lays out Xunzi’s views about human nature, and is intended to push back against Mencius, who emphasized the perfectability of human nature, or at least against a common interpretation of what Mencius believed. My understanding is that this is one of the most-read selections from Xunzi.

Ritual

Chapter 19, “Discourse on Ritual”, lays out Xunzi’s views about the important of what he calls ‘ritual’, or li. Pay close attention to the relationship between Xunzi’s views of human nature and his claims about the need for ritual.

Our Questions

As always, we are going to want to struggle to try to understand these texts in their own right, but in keeping with our class design, I also want you to think about the contrasts between Xunzi’s and Hobbes’s views about human nature, and also about the contrasts between their solutions. And since we are living through the Zombie Apocalypse, finally what we really want to know is whether Hobbes and Xunzi would agree or disagree about the significance of the predicament of suddenly losing a central government that can enforce the law.