In chapter 2's discussion of Pattern, we began an account of why there is value in the world, but gave short shrift to a crucial question: How do humans fit into this picture? Much of the Neo-Confucian engagement with Pattern is ultimately in the service of explaining why and how we humans can be good – and, indeed, why we should be good. For Daoxue Neo-Confucians, at least, the basic answer to these questions is “because that is what we truly are.” We are inherently good, even though we do not always act this way. Too often, we are confused or mistaken, misperceiving our world and ourselves. Sometimes our emotions guide us well, but many times we overreact or fail to be moved when we should. The theoretical challenge which the Neo-Confucians shoulder is explaining how it could be that unreliable creatures like ourselves really are good, deep down, and also have the capacity to realize this goodness in a much more consistent and even spontaneous way.
Neo-Confucians build their explanations of our goodness on three main conceptual foundations. Together, the concepts of nature (xing 性), heartmind (xin 心), and emotions (qing 情) enable them to construct theories that bridge the gap between metaphysical accounts of the cosmos and explanations of our individual psychological realities. This chapter focuses on the parameters of “nature.” As we suggested in the introduction to this volume, Neo-Confucians can be roughly divided into three categories, depending on whether their theoretical emphasis is on vital stuff, nature, or the heartmind. A “nature-focus” indicates that a proper understanding of nature is at the center of clearing up the confusions by which people are afflicted. Nature-focused Neo-Confucians hold that our nature is the source of our goodness. Even those thinkers who focus on vital stuff or heartmind still discuss nature, although some of them question whether nature itself can be called good. Altogether, then, this chapter looks at the following questions: (1) How is nature able to guide us? (2) Is nature itself actually good? (3) How should we account for moral failure – that is, why are most of us predisposed to do bad things? To round out the chapter, we conclude by turning to a later Neo-Confucian who was often critical of Daoxue views, Dai Zhen, and consider his alternative understanding of nature.
Already, in chapters 1 and 2, we have indicated that the intellectual landscape inhabited by all Neo-Confucians was shaped by several interrelated forces. Here, we will concentrate on two of them: the philosophical and spiritual agendas of Chinese Buddhism, and a renewed emphasis on certain classical-era Confucian texts. Let us first look at the Confucian sources. As we discussed in chapter 1, a new emphasis on the Mencius is one of the key elements of the intellectual ferment out of which Neo-Confucianism emerges, and the Mencius is indeed a key text in the present context, for Mencius famously argued that human nature is good. For instance: “The goodness of human nature is like water's tendency to flow downhill. Every person is good; all water flows downhill.”1 Mencius is well aware that water can be forced upwards and that people do not always act properly. His point is that we have some spontaneous inclinations toward the good, an idea that he substantiates elsewhere in the text, for example by arguing that anyone, upon suddenly seeing a child about to fall into a well, would feel “alarm and commiseration.”2 Mencius also acknowledges that humans have other sorts of spontaneous inclinations that are more neutral, such as the way our mouths are disposed toward delicious flavors. But it is the good spontaneous inclinations that grow when human beings are brought up under conditions conducive to their natural growth. Human nature is good in this sense.
Two other points are worth making before moving on. First, both in the Mencius and in Centrality and Commonality, human “nature” is connected to the cosmos (tian). Mencius says, “To fully fathom one's heartmind is to understand one's nature. To understand one's nature is to understand the cosmos. To preserve one's heartmind and nourish one's nature is the way to serve the cosmos.”3 As we have already seen, the Neo-Confucians sometimes use “the cosmos” (and especially “cosmic Pattern”) to refer to that which brings order and coherence to everything – to the cosmos as a whole – and so they saw Mencius as here indicating an intimate tie between our own natures and that of all things (whatever exactly Mencius himself may have had in mind).
The second thing to note here is that Mencius's view did not go unchallenged. In the Mencius itself, we read about a rival who believed that “nature” properly referred only to the physical processes of growth and procreation with which we are born.4 Other thinkers argue that our natures are mixed (some good aspects, some bad), variable (some having good natures, others bad), or simply bad (because if untutored they lead us toward boundless desires).5 It is clear that Mencius would reject all these alternatives because he fears they would leave human ethics without an adequate grounding. Even though their understanding of nature is certainly different from that of Mencius, the Neo-Confucians were drawn to him in large part because they agreed on the necessity of an adequate grounding for ethical value. If there is to be a viable way of accounting for ethical value, most thought, it would have to appeal to human nature.
The second crucial influence on Neo-Confucian ideas of nature is Chinese Buddhism, within which the idea of “Buddha nature” had, in the centuries prior to the Song dynasty, taken on enormous significance. We cannot here delve too deeply into the complex details of Buddha nature doctrines, but a few points will be important to our subsequent analyses. To begin with, at least in careful, philosophical treatments, Buddha nature was not seen as a straightforward endowment of valuable emotions or dispositions. To simply say that compassion, for instance, is part of the “nature” that we all share with the Buddha would run headlong against central Buddhist teachings. Buddhists argue for the emptiness of all seemingly existent things and events, as well as for the even more basic idea that attachment to anything, even one's seemingly good nature, is a source of suffering. This view draws on the tenet – widespread in Buddhism – that all phenomenal things are causally “conditioned”: everything that seems to exist is causally dependent on (or “conditioned” by) everything else, so that there are no independent, self-subsisting things. Nothing truly “exists” on its own. This idea is called “conditioned origination.”
But already well before the time that Neo-Confucian philosophy began to get a grip on the Northern Song dynasty, influential strains of Chinese Buddhism had jettisoned the idea of conditioned origination, replacing it with the view that the source of each thing's existence is a special, profound nature that inheres in itself, the aforementioned Buddha nature.6 It was often glossed as our “inherent” (ben 本) nature: “inherent” not in the sense of biologically innate, but rather unconditioned by interactions with anything. Thus these latter Buddhists replaced the doctrine of conditioned origination with what they called “nature origination.” This idea of Buddha nature was explained in indirect and abstract terms, rather than being ascribed any clear content, but some Buddhists still saw it as able to provide a grounding for ethics. The important ninth-century Buddhist thinker Zongmi, for example, was worried about the nihilistic implications of radical strands of Chan Buddhism that were emerging in his day. Zongmi emphasized doctrines related to “Buddha nature” because, in a modern scholar's words, they “provided a firm ontological ground for Buddhist practice.”7 The notion of “inherent nature” had played little role in earlier Chinese debates about nature but would come to be critical to the Neo-Confucians.
As we discussed in chapter 1, the various elements that will, in the Song dynasty, coalesce into Neo-Confucianism are already starting to interact and to catalyze new ideas in the latter part of the Tang. Some of the writings in which these developments occur are explicitly Buddhist and some are more overtly Confucian, though they share much of the vocabulary and some of the arguments that later Neo-Confucians will deploy. One revealing example is an essay called “On the Nature” by Han Yu (768–824), an avid promoter of Confucianism and influential prose stylist.8 The somewhat confused argument of this tract, which both claimed that humans' natures can be distinguished into three different grades and yet that common people and sages share the same nature, suggests that some philosophical work still needed to be done before Buddhist-inspired ideas of inherent nature could be fully integrated into a Confucian worldview.
We turn now to the Neo-Confucians themselves and to the central issues concerning nature on which they spent so much of their intellectual effort. In the early Song Dynasty, “nature” is important for Zhang Zai and is repeatedly discussed by Zhou Dunyi, even though both arguably focus on vital stuff more than they do on nature. Nature lies at the heart of some of the most famous writings by both Cheng brothers, and it continues to be critical for subsequent generations, including for Zhu Xi. Why was it so significant? From a philosophical perspective, the answer is that a robust conception of nature offers a way of accounting for the differences between right and wrong ways to live. If it turns out that it is good to accord with or develop one's nature, then that gives us something other than our own arbitrary inclinations on which to ground distinctions between good and bad ways of being. This is all the more true if it turns out that we have reasons to think our nature is in tune with the needs and interests of the larger world. For the Cheng brothers and their followers, at least, such a conception of nature also gives their view a major advantage over Buddhism, which they believe treats people's arbitrary inclinations as the basis for right and wrong ways of being.
In order to understand the implicit structure of our nature, many Daoxue Neo-Confucians present their readers with a serious conceptual challenge. On the one hand, they say that nature represents a kind of open-ended equilibrium prior to the arousal of emotions. On the other hand, they are clear that there is some pre-existing structure in our nature, and this is what they take to distinguish their account of nature from the Buddhist one: our true, inherent nature is so structured as to make us essentially moral beings. Not only that, but it is structured to make us moral beings of the very sort that the Confucian texts have long praised: filial children, loyal subjects, respectful juniors, loving or benevolent parents and superiors, and so on. So it seems that the Daoxue Confucians want to have it both ways: they want to say our nature is essentially open-ended and not yet predisposed to make us act in one way rather than another, but they also want to say – perhaps in another sense – that it does predispose us to act as virtuous Confucians. The conceptual challenge is to understand and appreciate how nature can be constituted in both of these ways simultaneously.
A good place to begin is with this famous passage from the classical-era Centrality and Commonality:
What the cosmos decrees is called “the nature”; complying with nature is called “the Way”; cultivating the Way is called “teaching.” … When joy and anger, sorrow and happiness are not yet manifest (weifa), call it “the center.” When they are already manifest (yifa), and yet all are hitting the proper measure, call it “harmony.” Being in “the center” is the great foundation of the world; being in “harmony” is the all-pervading Way of the world. By reaching “the center” and “harmony,” heaven and earth occupy their positions and the ten thousand things are brought forth.9
In his commentary to this passage, Zhu Xi explicitly says that “nature” is characterized by the state in which the emotions (joy and anger, sorrow and happiness) are not yet manifest; in other places, he makes the same point by saying that our nature is “inherent.”10 To understand what is going on, we need to further investigate two aspects of the passage: what it means to speak of the nature (or the “not yet manifest”) as “the center,” and what sort of relation to the nature is manifest when emotions attain “harmony.”
Let us begin with nature itself, the “not yet manifest.” From some of the metaphors that Zhu uses to elucidate the nature, we find evidence that he believes a core feature of nature is what might be described as a kind of open-ended potential to act or respond in a wide variety of ways. For example, he repeatedly says that nature is like a fire or like light, which would shine forth except for the degree to which it is blocked.11 But while nature's potential is open-ended, it also has a sense of direction – that is, a sense of what general direction is proper for it. Consider Zhu's suggestion that nature is like the responsibility a minister has to his ruler: insofar as one understands oneself as a minister, one thereby has a sense of direction.12 In both cases, the idea is that to have a “nature” is just to have a combination of two things: first, an ability to respond in a great variety of different ways; second, a sense of the right direction to take.13
The language of being centered takes advantage of these notions. When we are in the center of an open area – say, a room – we have each direction as a possible way to go and so can respond in a great variety of different ways, moving in whatever direction we want. But this does not imply that any direction will be as good as any other. The room will be structured in such a way that some directions will be better than others. There is little to be gained by moving toward a wall when trying to avoid something dangerous. So although one can move in a number of different directions, a wise person has some sense of which ones are preferable. For this reason, one also needs a sense of directionality, an awareness of which directions are the better ones given the situation one is in. Zhu Xi makes these points when explaining what it means to say that emotions in their not-yet-manifest state are “centered”14:
The not-yet-manifest joy and anger, sorrow and happiness can be compared to being in the center of a room, not yet having determined on setting out to the north, south, east, or west; this is what is called “being centered.” With respect to their manifesting, this is like having left through a door – if to the east, then there is no need to also exit west. … When each exiting is in accord with the circumstance without contrariness, that is called “harmony.”15
So part of what makes our natural emotional capacities so powerful is that they, like a person at the center of some open area, are positioned to respond in a great variety of different ways. But Zhu takes pains to add that this does not give them free rein to do whatever they want. The place in which one is centered will make some ways of moving more sensible than others; where the windows and doorways are located make some directions the better ones by which to leave, for example. Zhu explains this in connection with the not-yet-manifest emotions which are seen as starting points for virtue: “When the Four Beginnings [i.e., the moral emotions of alarm and commiseration, disdain, deference, and approval and disapproval] are not yet manifest, although [one's heartmind is] silent and unmoving, yet its center, on its own, has ramifying Pattern (tiaoli 條理)16; on its own, has structure [literally, rooms and house-frame]; it is not homogenous with nothing in it at all.”17 An obvious question to ask, then, is about the kind of structure in which our nature is centered – what is the arrangement of rooms and house-frame that would make some movements better than others, and thus give the centered person a sense of which directions are better than others, so to speak?
When Neo-Confucians ask what value orientation structures our nature – that is, defines the space in which it is centered – they say that it is the “life-giving generativity” (sheng sheng) which is manifest in the productive alternation of yin and yang, as we saw in the last chapter. In that metaphysical context, the point was that cosmic Pattern itself is structured by life-giving generativity. Now, we want to highlight that the same is true of our nature: for Daoxue thinkers like Zhu, this means that “life” specifies the center and directionality that our nature endows in us.18 How do we know this? Zhu suggests that we ask what normatively infused responses we find unavoidable. Strip away ulterior motives and the perceptual blinders caused by selfishness, and look to our spontaneous reactions. This can be hard to do, and the Neo-Confucians have a great deal to say about how to cultivate one's ability to reliably respond in this way. But they are sure that what such thought-experiments and personal investigation reveal is a caring for life. In particular, Zhu builds on Mencius's famous example of encountering a child about to fall into a well. According to Mencius,
anyone in such a situation would have a feeling of alarm and commiseration – not because one sought to get in good with the child's parents, not because one wanted fame among one's neighbors and friends, and not because one would dislike the sounds of the child's cries. From this we can see that if one is without the feeling of alarm and commiseration, one is not human.19
Mencius goes on to say that three other emotions are equally deeply rooted in us, and then adds that each of these four are “beginnings” (duan 端) of four corresponding virtues; for alarm and commiseration, that virtue is humaneness (ren 仁). Zhu argues that these “beginnings” are “clues” (xu 緒, literally the tip of a thread) to the not-yet-manifest nature within us.20 After all, Zhu says, “If we did not have this Pattern within us inherently, how could there be this ‘beginning’ on the outside? Since we have this beginning on the outside of us, we know for sure that we have this Pattern within us, without possibility of deception.”21 Not all Neo-Confucians relied on this kind of inference; others, as we will see below, felt that one could directly experience one's not-yet-manifest nature.
There is one final issue before moving on. We know from chapter 2 that Daoxue Confucians tended to hold that every thing and event has its own Pattern, even though all Patterns are ultimately one; and that all Patterns are in some sense possessed by every thing and event. Our question now is: when we are told that “nature is Pattern,” does this mean that every Pattern is actually, simultaneously, present in our nature, or are they merely implied? Since it is through our heartminds that we possess our natures (as we will see more fully in the next chapter), we could reformulate this question as follows: when Zhu Xi says that our heartminds “possess the myriad Patterns,”22 do we possess each of them individually? Although some scholarly interpretations use examples or metaphors that suggest that Zhu Xi conceptualized the nature as a vast set of pre-existing items of knowledge, we believe that the evidence points toward a different picture.23,24 The same letter we quoted from above (saying that nature has an internal structure) continues as follows:
When there is a stimulus from outside, the inside then responds, as when, upon encountering the stimulus of a child about to fall into a well, the Pattern of humaneness responds, and the emotion of alarm and commiseration takes form; or when, upon encountering the stimulus of passing a temple, the Pattern of propriety responds, and the emotion of respect takes form. From within, where the myriad Patterns are all integrally and indivisibly possessed, individual Patterns become distinctly manifest.25
The Pattern that is our nature is an interdependent whole that cannot be fully captured in words,26 but at the same time it is possessed of a complex structuring that results in reliable responses to any of a wide variety of external stimuli. As we saw in chapter 2, it can be distinguished at different levels, or divided in different ways, depending on the need and context. Zhu says that the reason Mencius focuses on the Four Beginnings is to show students that Pattern reliably ramifies in these ways, and so we can conclude that our nature is good. In short, Zhu wants us to see that nature is not empty but possessed of a complex and interdependent structuring – possessed of the myriad Patterns, which is just to say Pattern – that can guide us to be good.27
We have now seen the most important strand of Neo-Confucian discourse concerning the nature: the inherent nature that we share with all the cosmos, centered on life-giving generativity, serves as a grounding for human ethics. As such, it is fundamentally good. In the section that follows this one, we will turn to the relation between this good nature and our actual, psycho-physical makeup (which clearly can lead us to do bad things, at least some of the time). Here, we examine views denying that our nature is inherently good.
We mentioned above that Mencius's view of nature, which sought to ground morality in our tendencies toward goodness, was only one of a number of competing positions. Most of the possibilities explored in the classical period also found adherents in the late Tang and Song dynasties. Han Yu developed a view with roots in the Analects' brief discussion of “nature,” according to which human nature comes in three different grades – good, intermediate, and bad – only the middle of which can change. However, this position does a better job explaining why many people are not good than at providing a solid ground for ethics.28 For their part, some early Song thinkers argued that nature was a mixture of good and bad, capable of development in either direction.29 Others stressed the human role in establishing morality.30 Such potential relativism worried those in the emerging Daoxue movement; for example, Shao Yong opined that “using things to contemplate things is nature. Using self to contemplate things is emotions. Nature is impartial and clear; emotions are partial and murky.”31 While Shao's view on the “emotions” was not shared by all Daoxue thinkers – see chapter 5 – his view that nature is objective was common ground within Daoxue.
Exactly how to characterize the objective nature, though, generated a key dispute. Was the nature, after all, “good”? Or was it beyond the reaches of human good and bad, resistant to description in human categories? As early as the classical Daoist text Daode Jing, the Way was described as beyond language, and that text seems to suggest that human values are our own invention.32 The Book of Changes can also be taken to suggest that the Way is prior to goodness, though the status and meaning of “nature” in that text is more ambiguous.33 Because of the problem that arises from fixating on any value or direction, no matter how seemingly good, influential Buddhist texts also assert that the Buddha nature is “neither good nor not good.”34 A Song dynasty Buddhist scholar-monk suggests a different route to the same conclusion: “Good and bad are emotions, not the nature. Why is it that emotions have good and bad but the nature does not? Because the nature is tranquil while the emotions are active. The manifest shape of good and bad becomes apparent in activity.”35 Even though it would be artificial to reduce these various sources to each making a single point, we can nonetheless see three different kinds of reason to conclude that nature is not appropriately characterized as good: (1) metaphysical – since there simply is no goodness (or badness) in nature itself; (2) ethical – since it would lead us astray to objectively fix anything as good (or bad); and (3) epistemic – since we have no access to the characteristics of the “tranquil” nature.
Among the several Daoxue approaches to nature's being beyond good or bad, two are particularly interesting and will suffice to give us a flavor of the issues at stake, especially if we pay close attention to the ways their reasons relate to the Daoist and Buddhist reasoning we just saw. First is Hu Hong, an individual who served as a crucial intermediary between the main Northern Song developers of Daoxue and the major thinkers of the Southern Song. According to Hu, nature “is a mystery of heaven, earth, ghosts, and spirits. ‘Good’ is not adequate to speak of it.” Hu adds that he learned from his father that “when Mencius said that the nature was good, he used the word only as an exclamation of praise, not with a meaning opposite to ‘bad.’ ”36 It might be thought from this that Hu believed goodness and the norms of human ethics to be human creations, founded only on the basis of our emotions, and indeed, this is how Zhu Xi did react to Hu's statement.37 Zhu also claims that Hu's father learned this idea from a Chan Buddhist monk.38 Before we conclude that Hu Hong is offering versions of the metaphysical or epistemic reasons mentioned above, though, we need to consider two things. First, Hu Hong's main work, Understanding of Words, is filled with statements critical of Buddhists for being contented in tranquilly “viewing the nature.” Hu says that it is easy to find such quiet reflection enjoyable; the hard thing – which he associates with the cardinal Confucian virtue of humaneness – is to find joy in proper activity.39 Thinking that nature on its own is “good,” it seems, risks a kind of amoral inertness. So Hu's criticism is an ethical one, but not the Buddhist criticism mentioned above. Furthermore, there is evidence that Hu Hong also believes that nature grounds ethics by providing direction, although we have to read between the lines a bit. He says that “Pattern is the great inherent reality of all-under-heaven”; that both nature and Pattern can be equated to the “cosmic decree,” and thus to one another; and that rightness and order are the nature of sentient creatures.40 Zhu Xi would agree with all of this. In short, Hu Hong has a reason for insisting that one has to play an active role in the world to merit “goodness,” but his general view fits comfortably in mainstream Daoxue.
The other Daoxue philosopher most famous for holding that nature is in some sense beyond good and bad is Wang Yangming. The central text to consider is often referred to as the Doctrine in Four Axioms, which Wang pronounced rather late in his life:
In the inherent reality of heartmind, there is no distinction between good and bad;
When intentions are activated, there is distinction between good and bad;
Good knowing is that which knows good and bad;
Getting a handle on things does good and removes bad.41
In what became known as the Colloquy at the Tianquan Bridge, Wang discusses these four lines with two of his senior students. One student – the radical Wang Ji, about whom we will hear more later – embraced the idea that there should be no distinction between good and bad, arguing that if there is no such distinction in the heartmind's inherent reality, then neither should there be a genuine distinction in one's intentions, knowing, or in things. The other student disagreed, maintaining that because our actual heartmind is dominated by habits, the good–bad distinction runs throughout our actual psychology. If this were not the case, he asks, why would the effort of self-cultivation be necessary? In response, Wang Yangming somewhat unhelpfully says that both of the students are right: one student's approach is apt for teaching those of “sharp intelligence,” while the other's is for the more common type of person.42
What does Wang Yangming mean by the distinction in his original four axioms between the heartmind's inherent reality being without good and bad, and the other three all registering good and bad? First of all, it is important to note that Wang makes clear in several places that the inherent reality of the heartmind is “completely good.”43 Saying that the heartmind's inherent reality is “without good and bad,” therefore, does not mean that it is morally neutral or inert. Instead, what Wang means is that external, rigid standards of good and bad have no place in the heartmind's inherent reality. The heartmind's natural responses (which he also calls “good knowing,” liangzhi 良知) spontaneously establish the proper norm for each given situation, without following any guidelines that apply across all cases. “When the seven emotions follow their spontaneous courses of operation, they are all instances of good knowing, and cannot be separated into good and bad.” At the same time, though, “There is but one good knowing, and good and bad are thereby distinguished; what other good and bad is there to think about?” The functioning of our heartminds cannot be pre-separated into good and bad precisely because its responses – at least, when they are natural, spontaneous, and not biased by selfishness – create the explicit norms of good and bad on the spot.44 There are certainly questions we might ask about how one can know when one's emotional reactions are natural and thus norm-instantiating; we will deal with these issues in chapters 5 and 6. For now, the key point is that the reason that Wang Yangming insists that the inherent reality of the heartmind (alone) is beyond good and bad is because he denies that there are rules of right and wrong action that apply across all contexts. Wang is not denying the grounding or objectivity of morality. He thus describes the ancient sage Shun's decision to marry without getting permission from his nasty parents in this way:
Was there someone before him who did the same thing and served as an example for him, which he could find out by looking into certain records and asking certain people, after which he did as he did? Or did he seek the genuine knowing in an instant of his heartmind's thinking, thereby weighing all factors as to what was proper, after which he could not help doing what he did?45
Wang's subsequent discussion makes it clear that the answer is the latter, and that Shun's proper (“good”) reaction establishes no rule (an external, rigid “good”) that can now be followed ever after. Good and bad emerge, that is, from the functioning of the heartmind which itself is prior to our external determinations of good and bad.46
For the many Confucians over the centuries who have held that people's natures are mixed, different, unreliable, or even bad, it has been simple to explain why people do bad things. Most Chinese Buddhists, on the other hand, believe that we all share the same inherent “Buddha nature,” and even if they typically do not say that this nature is “good,” they are still faced with explaining our actual, mixed behavior. At the core of Buddhist explanations lies the idea of delusion. Our most basic beliefs and desires are mistaken; only when we awaken to their “emptiness” can we realize our nature. In chapter 5, we will see this put in terms of whether or not we can generally trust our “emotions” (qing): for Buddhists, the answer tends to be no, and even early Neo-Confucians (including some early Daoxue philosophers) are also suspicious of the emotions. As we have seen, Daoxue Confucians share with Buddhists the idea of an inherent nature, and for the Daoxue thinkers our inherent nature provides the direction that grounds human ethics – whether or not it is correct to call nature “good.” These Confucians therefore reject the Buddhist idea of delusion or emptiness, insisting instead that nature and Pattern are “substantial” (shi) and that at least some of our actual reactions are reliable. In other words, Daoxue Confucians neither claim that our natures are to blame for our bad behavior, nor that delusion is the problem. What, then, explains that our actual characters and behavior are a mix of good and bad?
Faced with this challenge, early Neo-Confucian philosophers like Zhang Zai, Cheng Hao, and Cheng Yi developed related answers on which most subsequent Neo-Confucians would draw. Their core idea is that the vital stuff out of which we are made is often imbalanced or even flawed in some way, and thus imperfectly expresses our inherent nature. This one sentence contains some complex and controversial ideas, and we will devote the balance of this section to exploring its implications.
Zhang and the two Chengs use several different terms to speak about an individual's particular configuration of vital stuff, the most important of which is qizhi 氣質.47 The second of these terms, zhi, means material or substrate. In the context of “qizhi,” zhi can be understood as a kind of material substrate that generates the more immaterial (though still physically present) qi, or vital stuff; together, the interaction of qi and zhi constitute us.48 (In the more basic sense of vital stuff emphasized in chapter 2, all this can be said to be vital stuff, possessing some kind of form.) Qizhi has two aspects, the endowment (or substrate) and the more readily changeable dimension, but it is ultimately one thing, just as a living and changing plant is one dynamic thing. This idea that qi and zhi, representing less and more stable aspects of our physical reality, interact and change over time, is actually quite intuitive. Think of an individual with an irascible disposition. There are various obviously physical aspects to this, from underlying brain structures to the ways that one's heartbeat accelerates under stress; and also aspects that we might be tempted to categorize as mental, like angry thoughts and emotions. On the qizhi model, both the more fixed and the more ephemeral aspects of these phenomena all count as vital stuff in its basic sense, so the ways in which they interact with one another – zhi generating qi (in its narrower sense), and qi influencing zhi – are not mysterious, unlike in more dualist models of mind–body relations. Becoming less irascible will require changing some aspects of the substrate, which in turn will affect the particular emotions we experience moment by moment. One contemporary scholar describes qizhi as being one's “contingent constitution,” which nicely expresses the idea that with work the qizhi can be changed, but for good or ill, it reflects our current dispositions and is thus an important constituent of us.49
This general idea – that our contingent constitution, typically expressed via the term qizhi, explains our badness – becomes common property of Daoxue after the Cheng brothers. Zhu Xi not only uses the term repeatedly, but also echoes the analysis of it that we have just given when he says, “That through which Pattern is realized in practice necessarily follows vital stuff that has been made into substrate (zhi).”50 There are complex metaphysical issues here, concerning the relation of Pattern and vital stuff, which we discussed in chapter 2. Here, we want to note two further aspects of the contingent constitution. First, in addition to explaining badness, it in fact explains all of the ways in which we differ from one another. As we have seen, our natures are identical (and all-encompassing), but the interaction of the vital stuff and its substrate with which one is endowed at birth, encompassing both the physical and emotional dimensions of all the situations that one has so far encountered, shapes the contingent constitution that one finds oneself with at a given point in time. One's height is a matter of one's contingent constitution, as are any quirks or dispositions that might be related to one's history of encountering the world as a person of above-average height (or below-average, or what have you). Second, it is striking that most Daoxue philosophers believe non-human animals to have just the same inherent nature that humans do, but to be dramatically less able than humans at transforming, straightening, or purifying their contingent constitution so as to be more consistently ethical. We can see clues in bees, wolves, and other social animals that suggest the same kind of directionality in their natures as in us.51 However, there are some important differences between human and non-human constitutions. It may be that something about non-human vital stuff simply renders them less amenable to change, though this idea is not made very explicit. What is clear is that the constitution of the human heartmind enables a kind of learning that non-humans cannot undergo, and thus, while non-humans may be able to respond perfectly to narrowly constrained aspects of their experience, they will never have the broad, flexible, flawless capacity of a human sage.
In addition to the terminology introduced in the last section to talk about our contingent constitutions, the Cheng brothers use one other means of making a similar point, but it turns out to be problematic. The Chengs were faced with a twofold challenge to their claim that nature is identical with Pattern and is the same in all of us: on the one hand, there is the intuitive sense that we are different from one another, and not all good; on the other hand, there are classical passages that seem to discuss actual differences between people's constitutions in terms of their “natures” (xing). The former issue could be addressed in the ways we have just seen, by reference to ideas like the contingent constitution. The latter problem, though, seems to require a different approach. The only substantial mention of “nature” in the Analects goes as follows: “The Master said: By nature near together, by practice far apart.”52 While the point Confucius is making seems quite plausible – people's differences mainly come about as a result of their different experiences and efforts – it fits poorly with the understanding of a single nature that the Chengs are advocating. Similarly, the Mencius contains a famous passage that begins by quoting one of Mencius's rivals, Gaozi, saying “Life is what is meant by ‘nature.’ ”53 This is challenging to the Chengs in much the same way as the Analects passage because the Chengs do not take nature to be identical to the actual functioning of our life processes, which is what Gaozi and Mencius here seem to have in mind.
Cheng Yi's solution is explicit and ingenious: argue that the term “nature” can be used in two different senses, either referring to our inherent nature (which he labels with another classic-derived phrase, “the cosmic decree is what is meant by ‘nature’ ”) or to our actual life-nature:
Someone asked: Are “life is what is meant by ‘nature’ ” and “the cosmic decree is what is meant by ‘nature’ ” the same?
Cheng Yi replied: The word “nature” is not to be explained always in the same way. “Life is what is meant by ‘nature’ ” only refers to that with which one is endowed (bing shou), while “the cosmic decree is what is meant by ‘nature’ ” speaks of the Pattern of the nature. When people speak of someone's cosmic nature (tianxing) as soft and lax, or hard and energetic, it is one's endowment that is meant, because in common speech any quality that goes back to birth is ascribed to the cosmos. As for the Pattern of nature, it is entirely good. In this latter context, reference to “the cosmos” refers to spontaneous Pattern.54
The only problem with Cheng Yi's “two natures” solution is that it leaves it unclear how the two different senses of nature relate to one another; as we will soon see, this difficulty is clear to his later critics, who therefore advocate a somewhat different answer.
Cheng Yi's older brother, Cheng Hao, also grapples with these same issues, though in his best-known treatment of the matter he struggles somewhat to articulate his viewpoint, which has resulted in considerable debate about what, exactly, he means. Here is the key passage:
“Life is what is meant by ‘nature’ ”: here, nature is vital stuff and vital stuff is nature; they refer to life. In accord with Pattern, the endowment of vital stuff that one receives at birth has both good and bad, but it is not that within our nature there are originally two contrasting things with which we are then born. Some are good from infancy and some are bad; this is due to the endowment of vital stuff. The good is of course nature, but the bad must also be called nature. Now with respect to what comes before the “life that is what is meant by ‘nature’ ” and “the tranquility of humans at birth,”55 we cannot speak; as soon as we have spoken of nature, that already is not the nature. Whenever people speak about the nature, they are only talking about “following the Way, which is good”; Mencius's statement that nature is good is such a case.56 “Following the Way, which is good” is like water's tendency to flow downward.57 It is all water. Some of it flows all the way to the ocean without ever a touch of pollution; is any human effort needed in such a case? Some of it will inevitably get progressively dirtier before it goes far; and some of it gets dirty only after a long distance. Some has plenty of dirt, and some only a little; cleanliness and dirtiness are different, yet we cannot say that the dirty water is not water. This being so, people must accept the responsibility for cleaning and regulating it. The water will be cleaned quickly if efforts are prompt and bold, more slowly if efforts are careless, but when it is clean, it is still only the original water. It is not that clean water was fetched to replace the dirty, nor that the dirty has been taken away and placed to the side. The cleanliness of the water corresponds to the goodness of nature. Thus it is not that goodness and badness are two contrasting things in the nature which each emerge separately.58
Unlike his brother, Cheng Hao does not clearly distinguish two different senses of “nature” here, but the most plausible reading of this passage in fact relies on just such a distinction. Cheng Hao begins with one sense, our actual life-nature, which is the same as our endowment of vital stuff. It is clear, though, that he also has another sense of nature in mind, even though it is difficult to speak about because we do not directly experience it. This is what he is referring to when he says “as soon as we have spoken about the nature, that already is not the nature.” So even Mencius's famous statements about the nature are really about the actual flow of vital stuff, which is different from the metaphysical fact that our vital stuff has an inherent directionality (as water has a tendency to flow downwards).
There is a lesson in all this: taking the phrase “life is what is meant by ‘nature’ ” seriously as a definition of “nature” gets one into trouble. Both Chengs are sometimes criticized by later Daoxue adherents for their views about nature.59 For his part, Zhu Xi chooses not to emphasize life-nature in the manner of the Chengs, but instead uses the term “contingent constitution” (qizhi) and, more controversially, “the nature of contingent constitution” (qizhi zhi xing). A natural question to ask is: isn't “the nature of the contingent constitution” just as likely to get Zhu into trouble as is the Chengs' “life-nature”?
Zhu Xi credits both Cheng Yi and Zhang Zai with the term “nature of the contingent constitution,” though it does not appear in the major modern collection of the Chengs' works. For that matter, in the very few times that Zhang Zai uses “nature of the contingent constitution,” he simply means the general characteristics (or nature) of one's contingent constitution: for example, that one has desires. For Zhang, it is the contingent constitution itself that is doing the philosophical work, not these general characteristics. Indeed, he emphasizes that superior people do not think of this as a kind of “nature” at all.60 Turning now to Zhu Xi, we make three observations. First, “nature of the contingent constitution” plays an important theoretical role for him and he uses it often. Second, he is quite explicit that there is really only one “nature” – and for him, this is the inherent, completely good nature that we discussed above. Therefore, third, his use of “nature of the contingent constitution” is either inconsistent or subtle. We will argue that it is the latter.
Zhu is very clear that there is only one nature: “The contingent constitution is the result of yin and yang and the five phases; nature is the complete inherent reality of the supreme pivot. When speaking specifically of the nature of the contingent constitution, this is simply the complete inherent reality descended into the midst of contingent constitution, and not another, distinct nature.”61 Zhu Xi has a very similar two-aspect understanding of contingent constitution to that we described earlier: he even distinguishes vital stuff from substrate by associating the former with more ethereal “heaven,” and the latter with more material “earth.”62 The nature of the contingent constitution, though, is not just a generalization about the contingent constitution itself: it is the actual formless nature as instantiated (“descended into”) in a specific entity. Given the way that Zhu Xi uses “qizhi zhi xing,” therefore, a better translation would be “embodied nature” rather than “nature of the contingent constitution.” As he says, “Nature is just Pattern. Without the heavenly vital stuff and earthly substrate, though, this Pattern would have nowhere to reside. … Thus when speaking of nature, it is necessary to simultaneously speak of contingent constitution (qizhi) in order to be complete.”63 Similarly, he elsewhere says “Discussing ‘the nature of heaven and earth’ is only to refer to Pattern, but discussing ‘the embodied nature’ is to speak of Pattern and vital stuff mixed together.”64 So it seems clear that he avoids the “two-nature” problem. Of course, there remains the large question of what, exactly, it means for nature to “descend into” vital stuff; for Zhu's answer to that question, we refer readers back to chapter 2's discussion of the asymmetrical co-dependence between Pattern and vital stuff in Zhu's thought.
The Daoxue Confucians share a common understanding of the inherent nature as being not just good but good in a way that is fully formed, so that all of the dispositions necessary to understand, feel, and behave virtuously are already present in some sense. As we have seen, they do not conclude from this that we are necessarily good from birth, as most of us are endowed with vital stuff that interferes with the natural functioning of the inherent nature. Still, the Neo-Confucian tradition includes outspoken skeptical voices that challenge the idea of a fully formed nature (as they understand it). In this final section, we examine one of the most influential skeptics, the mid-Qing philosopher Dai Zhen. But, first, we will make note of a crucial dispute in the interpretation of the Confucian tradition, a dispute that drives much of Dai's criticisms of Daoxue and helps to launch his own alternative.
In several ways, it is quite appealing to hold the view that our nature is fully formed and good. It helps to explain how sincere and wholehearted virtue is possible for flawed creatures such as ourselves, and it also makes clear how the human heartmind can come to accord so thoroughly with the demands of morality, as we will see in chapters 4 and 8. However, philosophical attractiveness is not the only issue at stake. Neo-Confucians are also concerned that their views align with those expressed in classical texts. Dai Zhen argues that Daoxue interpretations of Mencius's understanding of human nature are seriously mistaken, and like many contemporary scholars, we believe that Dai is largely correct. While Mencius explicitly endorses the view that human nature is good, by this he does not mean that the dispositions to understand, feel, and behave virtuously are already fully formed. Rather, he seems to mean that it is in our nature to become good, and in fact it is part of the natural course of human development to become a sage, but only if brought up in a healthy environment. Mencius famously insists that we have some moral capacities in us from the start, which are evident, for example, in a young child's love of his or her parents and our natural sense of alarm and commiseration for a child on the verge of falling into a well.65 But these moral capacities are nascent, being both weak and also covering a relatively narrow range of moral actions.66 A thing's nature tracks the outcomes of its healthy process of development, not its innate qualities or substance.
Dai Zhen's view comes much closer to Mencius in this regard than do any of the Daoxue interpretations. As Dai understands it, the nature of something describes not the innate material that it has right from the start but rather the salient features of its mature and healthy form. Dai motivates this point by noting how one distinguishes the natures of peaches and apricots – both very similar in seed-form but quite different when allowed to flourish.67 So when one claims that a thing's nature is good, one need not go so far as to say that it has all of the material necessary for virtue innately. It could be that one has enough of the material that, given the proper nurturance and environment, one could become fully good. Dai thinks that the thesis that human nature is good is much easier to defend on this conception, for we can show that people do have certain nascent moral emotions that tend to grow with experience and education. He highlights in particular the natural capacity for empathy or sympathetic understanding (shu 恕), which he takes to be the best way of identifying and taking into account the desires that help to support birth, growth, and life fulfillment more generally.68
A related development in Dai's thought is to argue that human nature is constituted entirely of vital stuff rather than Pattern, which makes him a good example of a vital stuff-focused philosopher. Here again, he appeals to common ways of thinking about a thing's nature. Imagine, he says, that one wants to know how to cultivate a certain kind of plant or tree, or heal someone using medicine. These are the sorts of practices that normally require some understanding of the nature of the thing to be cultivated or healed, but if that is the case then citing a thing's Pattern is of little help because what determines how a thing should be cultivated or healed is the configuration of its vital stuff (e.g., the nature of its skin, the fluids by which it circulates nutrients, the concrete and organic features of its mental faculties). In fact, Dai suggests, it is really what helps us distinguish between methods of cultivation and treatment that give us the most salient information about a thing's nature whereas, by the Daoxue Confucians' own admission, Pattern is the same in all.69
Dai was perhaps the most explicit Neo-Confucian about this error in Daoxue ways of rendering the Mencian thesis that human nature was good, but he was by no means the only Neo-Confucian philosopher to return to the more developmental account of human goodness that Dai articulated. He was preceded in the seventeenth century by several like-minded philosophers, all of whom insisted on reducing human nature to vital stuff, rather than treating Pattern as an independent explanatory principle. These included Wang Fuzhi and Huang Zongxi.70 Contrary to first impressions, the idea of a fully formed good nature was hardly taken for granted in the Neo-Confucian tradition.