⁂ Concepts · Being · No. 9
Li (principle)

Jade carving: the design read out of the veining rather than imposed on it.

Li (principle)

The intelligible pattern in things - what makes each thing the kind of thing it is, and the reason it can be understood at all.

Theme
Being and reality
Tradition
Chinese
Term
理 · lǐ
Term fixed
c. 1175

In plain terms

Li is usually translated as principle, which makes it sound like a law imposed on things from outside. The image behind the word is better: the character originally means the veining in a piece of jade, the pattern a carver has to find and follow because cutting against it ruins the stone.

On that picture the order in things is not a rule laid over them. It is how they are grained. Every kind of thing has its li, and so does every situation - the right way for a family to be arranged, the way water runs downhill, the grain of a problem.

And because the pattern is really there, it can be found. That is why the Neo-Confucian programme is the investigation of things: you do not deduce the order, you look until you see it.

As a philosopher would put it

Zhu Xi's synthesis makes li and qi jointly necessary and neither prior in time. Li is the principle by which each thing is what it is and ought to be what it ought; qi is the concrete energy in which principle is realised, and its relative turbidity explains why things fall short. There is one li, present entire in each thing - the moon reflected in ten thousand streams is the standard image - and yet each thing's li is complete rather than a fragment.

The programme that follows is gewu, the investigation of things, and it is genuinely investigative: principle is reached by examining cases, one after another, until understanding opens through.

Wang Yangming's objection is famous and personal. He sat before bamboo for seven days investigating its principle, fell ill, and concluded that principle is not in the bamboo but in the mind - that mind is principle, and the extension of innate moral knowing replaces the study of external things. The dispute between the Cheng-Zhu and Lu-Wang schools runs on that point for four centuries.

Where you meet it

Chinese jade carving works with the stone rather than on it. Nephrite is extraordinarily tough and cannot be chiselled; it is abraded slowly with harder sand, which means a carver cannot force a shape and must plan the piece around what the material already contains.

The skill that is prized is yin cai shi yi, using the material to determine the design: reading the internal veining, the russet skin, the flaws and the colour changes, and finding the object that is already implied by them. A brown inclusion becomes a bird's wing. A crack decides where a limb ends. Two carvers given the same boulder produce different pieces and both may be right, but neither is free.

That is the picture the word carries before it becomes technical. The order is in the stone, discoverable rather than invented, and the mark of skill is finding it rather than overriding it.

What is actually disputed

Where principle is.

The Cheng-Zhu position is that li is in things and reached by investigating them, which makes learning outward-facing and cumulative. Wang Yangming's Lu-Wang position is that mind is principle, that seeking it in external objects is a mistake with a moral cost, and that knowledge and action are one rather than sequential.

Both positions were attacked from a third direction by the kaozheng philologists of the Qing, who argued that li in this sense is not in the classics at all but was read into them under Buddhist influence, and that the whole apparatus should be dropped in favour of evidential scholarship. The argument is not settled so much as still running: New Confucian writers in the twentieth century revived li deliberately as an alternative to a purely mechanical account of nature.

Commonly confused with

  • li as ritual propriety A different character entirely, and a different concept. 禰 is the rites and appropriate conduct; 理 is the pattern in things. They share a romanisation and nothing else.
  • law of nature A law is imposed and could have been otherwise. Li is how things are grained, and the metaphor is textural rather than legislative.
  • Platonic Form A Form is separate from its instances. Li is present entire in each thing and has no existence apart from qi.

Defined against

  • Qi The two are inseparable and neither explains anything alone, which is exactly why the pair is the unit

Philosophers

  • Zhu Xi Makes li a technical term and pairs it with qi
  • Confucius The classical source the whole programme claims to be reading
  • Zhuangzi The older sense of pattern in things, before it is systematised

Works

Schools

Related concepts

Qi c. 320 BC · Form c. 380 BC · Nature c. 330 BC · Essence c. 330 BC · Knowledge c. 369 BC

The character originally names the veining in jade, which a carver follows rather than imposes; Zhu Xi makes it a technical term in the twelfth century, paired with qi.