- Length
- 288 pagesVan Norden, Mengzi, Hackett, 2008 - with selections from Zhu Xi's commentary
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Mencius
The book that made Confucianism a philosophy with a thesis. Mencius answered the two positions crowding it out with a claim about human nature that has been argued over ever since: that everyone already has the beginnings of goodness, and that the moral task is cultivation rather than construction.
- Date
- c. 4th-3rd century BC
- Attributed to
- Mencius and disciples
- Region
- The state of Zou; the courts of Qi and Liang
- Language
- Classical Chinese
- 1861 English, James Legge Public domain Attested
- 1970 English, D. C. Lau Long the standard English; in copyright Attested
- 2008 English, Bryan Van Norden With Zhu Xi's commentary; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Exchange — Both: answers an earlier work and drew a later one
- Form
- Compiled
- Method
- Dialogue — Argument staged between speakers
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
Elevated to one of the Four Books in the Song and thereafter memorised by every candidate for office in China, Korea and Vietnam.
What the book says
Seven books of conversations, most of them between Mencius and a ruler he is trying to shame into governing better. The philosophical core is an argument about what people are like. Anyone who suddenly saw a child about to fall into a well, Mencius says, would feel alarm and pity - not because they knew the parents, not to gain a reputation, not from dislike of the noise, but immediately and before any calculation. That reaction is evidence that the material of morality is already present. He identifies four such sprouts - compassion, shame, deference, and the sense of right and wrong - and argues that they grow into the four virtues if cultivated and wither if not, so that a bad person is not one who lacked the capacity but one whose capacity was starved. From this follows a politics. A ruler who feels for his people has everything he needs to govern well and simply fails to extend it; a state that taxes people into desperation manufactures the crimes it then punishes; and a king who is a tyrant has stopped being a king, so removing him is not regicide. The tone is confident, sometimes rude to the powerful, and unusually good-humoured.
What it argues
That human nature tends toward goodness the way water tends downhill, and that the tendency shows in reactions nobody chooses - the lurch of feeling at the child by the well. The sprouts are not virtues but their beginnings, and the difference matters: they need care, and they can be destroyed by circumstances, which is why Mencius spends so much time on economics. A people with no secure livelihood will have no secure heart, so an unjust distribution of land is not merely unfair but corrupting. The political conclusion is the boldest in classical Chinese thought: legitimacy depends on the ruler's conduct, and a tyrant has forfeited the title along with the protection it carries.
What it answered
Mozi c. 5th-3rd century BCMozi and the Mohist school
Mozi's impartial care and Yang Zhu's egoism, which Mencius treats as the two errors between which the Confucian way runs. Against Yang Zhu, who would not give a hair from his body to benefit the world, the objection is that this is to be without a ruler. Against Mozi, that impartial care is to be without a father. Both charges are polemical rather than fair - the Mohists did not say one should feel nothing for one's family - but the underlying question is real and is still open: whether morality is an extension of particular attachments or something that has to override them.
What answered it
Xunzi 3rd century BCXun Kuang
Xunzi, directly and by title, arguing that human nature is bad and that goodness is deliberate work; the disagreement between the two became the permanent internal argument of Confucianism. In the Song, Zhu Xi settled it institutionally by making Mencius orthodox and demoting Xunzi, which is why the optimistic account of human nature is the one most people mean by Confucianism today. Modern philosophy has reopened it: the sprouts have been discussed alongside work on moral intuition and moral development.
How it argues
By analogy and by cornering the interlocutor. Mencius' characteristic move is to get a ruler to agree to something in a small case - sparing an ox being led to sacrifice because he cannot bear its trembling - and then to show that the same feeling, extended, is all that governing well requires. The famous arguments about human nature are conducted against a named opponent, Gaozi, in a series of exchanges over metaphors: is nature like willow that must be carved into a cup, or like water that will flow downhill if unobstructed? The reasoning is quick, and its reliance on analogy is the standing complaint against it.
The moment
A century after Confucius, with the Warring States at their most destructive and philosophers moving between courts as advisers. Mencius spent decades doing this and, like Confucius, never got the appointment he wanted. The conversations with rulers preserved in the book are remarkable for their tone: he tells King Xuan of Qi to his face that if a minister cannot look after his post he should be dismissed, and then asks what should be done about a ruler who cannot govern his state, and waits.
How it travelled
Slowly, then everywhere. Mencius was not especially prominent for a thousand years; his elevation dates from the Song, when Wang Anshi added the book to the examination curriculum and Zhu Xi made it one of the Four Books, after which every educated person in the Chinese cultural sphere knew it by heart. Legge's English translation of 1861 carried it to Western readers, and it has been continuously in print since.
The strongest objection
Xunzi's, and it is well aimed. The child at the well shows at most that people have a momentary feeling; it does not show that the feeling reliably survives inconvenience, or that it extends beyond what is in front of us, and the history Mencius himself describes is one of rulers who felt for an ox and starved a province. If goodness were the natural direction, the amount of cultivation Mencius says is needed would be inexplicable. Mencius' reply - that a tendency is not an outcome, and that water flows downhill unless something blocks it - concedes that almost everything depends on the blockage, which is where Xunzi wanted the argument.
Why read it
Because it is the most enjoyable philosophical book of the classical Chinese period: fast, argumentative, frequently funny, and full of a nerve that is rare in advice literature. The exchanges with rulers can be read on their own, and the argument about human nature in the sixth book is one of the great set pieces of moral philosophy in any tradition.
- First printed
- 1315
- First in English
- 1861
- Digitised
- Yes
The received text of seven books, each divided in two, was fixed early and is unusually stable. Zhu Xi's commentary of the twelfth century became the authorised reading for the examinations and shaped how the text was understood for six centuries.
Legge's 1861 English is public domain. Lau's, Van Norden's and Bloom's are in copyright.
Where it stands
Live in two conversations: as the orthodox statement of Confucian moral psychology within East Asian philosophy, and in comparative ethics, where the sprouts and the well argument are discussed alongside sentimentalist and virtue-based accounts in the Western tradition.
On quoting this book
The Chinese is public domain and Legge is out of copyright, but his rendering of the key psychological terms is now considered misleading and the readable versions are in copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
The reliability of the conversations as records is unknown. Whether Mencius' claim is that human nature is good or that it tends toward goodness is disputed and the two are not the same thesis. Gaozi's position, known only from Mencius' refutation of it, cannot be reconstructed fairly. And the standing question of how much of the received reading is Mencius and how much is Zhu Xi's twelfth-century interpretation - which shaped six hundred years of examinations - is a live issue in current scholarship.