- Length
- 400 pagesHutton, Xunzi: The Complete Text, Princeton, 2014
- Reading
- DemandingReadable with attention; assumes no other book
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
Xunzi
The most rigorous philosopher of the classical Chinese period and the one his own tradition sidelined. Xunzi agreed with Confucius about everything that mattered and disagreed with Mencius about where goodness comes from, and for that he spent eight hundred years out of favour.
- Date
- 3rd century BC
- Author
- Xun Kuang
- Region
- The states of Qi and Chu
- Language
- Classical Chinese
- 1928 English, Homer Dubs Partial; public domain in most jurisdictions Attested
- 1988 English, John Knoblock Complete, in three volumes; in copyright Attested
- 2014 English, Eric Hutton The first complete English by a single translator; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Exchange — Both: answers an earlier work and drew a later one
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Demonstration — Proof from premises the opponent already grants
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Revived — Out of circulation and read again
Orthodox in the Han, demoted in the Song when Mencius was made the true heir of Confucius, and restored to the centre of the field by twentieth-century scholarship.
What the book says
Thirty-two essays, argued at length and in order, by the first Chinese philosopher to write a book rather than leave one. The famous chapter states the thesis: human nature is bad, and whatever is good in a person is the product of deliberate work. People are born wanting things, and wanting things leads to competition, and competition to disorder; the sage kings saw this and invented ritual and standards of right the way a craftsman invents a tool, precisely because nature would not supply them. Goodness is therefore an achievement, and the analogy is not the growing plant but the warped timber straightened in a press and the blunt blade taken to the whetstone. Other chapters develop the consequences. Ritual is not sacred in origin but is the accumulated technology of living together, and works whether or not one believes anything about it: mourning rites shape grief, and rain sacrifices are proper as ceremony and foolish as meteorology. Heaven has constant ways and takes no interest in human affairs. Language is conventional, and disputes about names are settled by the ruler fixing usage. Learning is endless, and its point is to become a certain kind of person rather than to know things.
What it argues
That morality is invented rather than found, and that this makes it more important rather than less. Nature supplies appetites and no restraint on them; ritual and standards of right are human constructions, made by sages who understood the problem, and they work by shaping desire rather than suppressing it. This gives Xunzi a naturalism unusual anywhere before the modern period: Heaven is regular and indifferent, prayers do not change outcomes, and ceremonies are valuable as human institutions rather than as transactions with anything. It also gives him an account of why education is the whole of ethics, since a person is the product of what has been done to them and what they have practised.
What it answered
Mencius c. 4th-3rd century BCMencius
Mencius, on the single question of what human beings start with. But he answers almost everyone else too - there is a chapter surveying and criticising twelve contemporary thinkers, including the Mohists for austerity, Zhuangzi for being so taken with Heaven that he forgot people, and various logicians for playing with words. It is the first systematic critical survey of a philosophical field written in Chinese.
What answered it
Han Feizi c. 240-233 BCHan Fei
Han Fei, by taking the premise somewhere Xunzi did not want it to go, and then the Confucian tradition itself, which found the association with the Qin unforgivable and the doctrine of a bad nature incompatible with what Mencius had established. Zhu Xi's judgement in the twelfth century, that Xunzi's teaching had produced Li Si and the burning of the books, was effectively final until the twentieth century, when the essays were read again on their merits and Xunzi became the classical Chinese philosopher most often discussed by philosophers rather than by sinologists.
How it argues
In continuous essays, with a thesis stated, developed, defended against objections and illustrated. This is a genuine formal innovation: the Analects and the Mengzi are collections, and the Xunzi is a book. The prose is orderly and heavily patterned, fond of paired images and accumulating examples, and the argument is generally the strongest in the classical corpus. His debt to the Mohists for the habit of sustained argument is visible even where he is refuting them.
The moment
The end of the Warring States, with unification imminent and the intellectual competition at its most crowded. Xunzi held office in Qi at the Jixia academy and later a minor post in Chu, and two of his students - Han Fei and Li Si - became the theorist and the chief minister of the Qin regime that unified China by force and burned the books. The tradition never forgot that.
How it travelled
Continuously present and long unread. The text survived intact, was printed early and was never lost, but from the Song onward it was studied as a cautionary case rather than as a source. Its rehabilitation began in the Qing and completed in the twentieth century, and it now has a scholarly literature in English out of all proportion to its position in the tradition a hundred years ago - Hutton's complete translation of 2014 was the first into English by a single hand.
The strongest objection
That the sages cannot be explained. If human nature is bad and everything good is invented, then the people who did the inventing were themselves products of the nature Xunzi describes, and it is not clear where they got either the motive or the standard. Xunzi's answer is that they were exceptionally intelligent and saw that disorder was against everyone's interest, which makes morality a prudential discovery rather than a moral one - and if prudence is enough to generate it, the claim that nature contains nothing pointing that way begins to weaken. The objection was made in his own tradition and has not been disposed of.
Why read it
Because the arguments are better than anyone else's in the period and the essays can be read singly. The chapters on human nature, on Heaven, on ritual and on learning are each self-contained, and the chapter on Heaven is one of the most thoroughly naturalistic pieces of writing to survive from the ancient world anywhere.
- First printed
- 1181
- First in English
- 1928
- Digitised
- Yes
The text was edited into its present form by Liu Xiang in the first century BC from a much larger collection of duplicated material. Yang Liang's ninth-century commentary is the earliest surviving.
Dubs' 1928 partial English is out of copyright in most jurisdictions. Watson's selections, Knoblock's three volumes and Hutton's complete translation are in copyright.
Where it stands
Revived, and arguably the classical Chinese philosopher of most interest to contemporary philosophy: the account of ritual as social technology, the constructivist theory of morality and the naturalism about Heaven all speak directly to current debates.
On quoting this book
The Chinese is public domain; the complete and accurate English versions are recent and in copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Which chapters are genuinely Xunzi's is disputed, and several are generally regarded as later. Whether his thesis is that human nature is bad or that it is merely unimproved - the Chinese term is stronger than the English suggests - bears directly on how far he really differs from Mencius, and some recent readings narrow the gap considerably. And whether he bears any responsibility for Legalism, the charge that sank his reputation, is a question about intellectual influence that the tradition answered emphatically and modern scholarship mostly rejects.