Mencius

Mengzi (Mencius)

Imagine you suddenly catch sight of a small child crawling toward the lip of a well, about to fall in. What happens inside you in that first instant, before you have any time to think? You feel a jolt of alarm and distress, and an impulse to lunge and catch it, and Mencius's entire philosophy turns on a claim about that instant. You did not feel it, he points out, in order to win the gratitude of the child's parents, or to earn a good name among the neighbors, or because you would be ashamed to be seen doing nothing. The feeling came before all of that, unbidden, from somewhere underneath your interests. And that, Mencius argues, is proof of a thing the world is forever wanting to deny: that human beings are good by nature; that the seeds of morality are already planted in us; and that the work of ethics is not to force virtue onto a selfish animal from the outside but to grow what is quietly already there.

Four sprouts. The flash of feeling at the well is one of four that Mencius calls the sprouts, the duan, the tender shoots of full virtue that every human being is born with. The instinctive distress at another's suffering is the sprout of ren, humaneness. The reflex of shame and disgust at what is base is the sprout of yi, righteousness. The natural impulse to defer and to yield is the sprout of li, propriety. And the spontaneous sense of right against wrong is the sprout of zhi, wisdom. We come equipped with all four, Mencius insists, the way we come equipped with four limbs; a person in whom not one of them ever stirred would not be a wicked human being but barely a human being at all. The crucial word, though, is sprout. The four are not finished virtues but seeds, fragile and easily stunted, and they grow into the real thing only with care, the way a shoot becomes a tree only if it is watered and not trampled. Mencius's optimism is not the naive kind: we are good in our beginnings, not in our conclusions, and that goodness is a potential which a whole life of cultivation either brings to flower or lets go to waste.

Water flows downward. Not everyone agreed, and the Mencius preserves the debate, conducted with real philosophical bite. A thinker named Gaozi argued that human nature is morally neutral, neither good nor bad: it is like water, he said, which runs east if you cut a channel to the east and west if you cut one to the west; people likewise turn good or bad depending entirely on how circumstance channels them. It is a strong argument, and Mencius's reply is among the most elegant in the history of philosophy. Granted, he says, water has no preference between east and west. But water has a very decided preference about up and down: dam it, splash it, force it uphill, and the instant you let go it runs downward again, because downward is simply its nature. So with us. You can drive a person toward cruelty with enough pressure and enough deprivation, but the native tendency, the direction we run the moment the pressure is off, is toward the good. The badness in the world is real, but it is the work of force pushing against the grain of human nature, not the grain itself.

The people are the most important. From a good human nature Mencius drew political conclusions that were astonishing for the fourth century BC and stay bracing today. If ordinary people share the same moral nature as kings, then a kingdom exists for the people, not the people for the kingdom. "The people are the most important element in a state," he told the rulers he advised; "the spirits of the land come next; the sovereign is the lightest." Good government, he argued, is not a matter of clever statecraft or military muscle but of a ruler extending to his subjects the same plain compassion he would feel for a frightened animal, and a ruler who instead grinds his people down through force and greed forfeits something larger than their loyalty. He forfeits, in the old phrase, the Mandate of Heaven, the moral right to rule, and at that point he has stopped being a king at all. Asked outright whether it could ever be right for a subject to overthrow his sovereign, Mencius did not flinch: a tyrant who has trampled humaneness and righteousness, he said, is no sovereign but a mere thug, and removing him is no more regicide than collaring a criminal. Two thousand years before Locke, a Chinese philosopher had grounded the right of revolution in the moral equality of human beings.

The flood-like energy. What does it feel like, then, to grow the sprouts to their full height? Mencius gives a strange and memorable answer. The person who has spent a lifetime acting in accord with what is right, never against it, accumulates something he calls the flood-like qi, a vast, surging vital energy that, he says, fills the whole space between earth and sky. It cannot be faked or summoned up for an occasion; it builds only through long, unbroken integrity, and it drains away the moment you betray your own sense of right, even once. A person who has it is recognizable not just by what they do but by a kind of presence, an unforced steadiness, a fullness that comes of never being at war with oneself. This is Mencius's picture of the cultivated life at its summit: not the white-knuckled suppression of a bad nature but the flowering of a good one, until doing right is no longer a struggle against yourself but the free expression of what you most deeply are. It became the seed of a whole later tradition of Confucian inner practice, the quiet sitting and the patient cultivation of the centuries that followed.

The deepest disagreement. The room reads Mencius in James Legge's old translation, cited by book and chapter; the argued, dialogue form makes him, of all the early Chinese thinkers, the one whose reasoning a Western reader can follow most directly. And it is worth standing him beside the Western tradition, because on the single deepest question about human beings he takes the opposite side. Where Augustine, and later Hobbes, begin from a dark premise, that we are born selfish or fallen and must be saved or restrained by some power outside us, Mencius begins from the child at the well and builds an entire ethics and politics on the conviction that the raw material of goodness is already in us and needs only to be cultivated. The nearest Western echo came two thousand years later in Rousseau, who likewise held that human beings are good by nature and made bad by their institutions. Which of these starting points is true may be the most consequential disagreement in all of philosophy, because nearly everything, how you raise a child, how you build a society, how you regard a stranger on the street, follows from where you begin.

Mencius lost most of his arguments in his own lifetime; the kings he lectured wanted power, not virtue, and sent him politely on his way. He won the longer argument by a mile. For seven hundred years his book was required reading for everyone who hoped to serve the Chinese state, and his conviction that human nature is good became the settled wisdom of the largest civilization on earth. The question he raised has never been closed, and it presses on us as hard as ever. When you look at humanity, do you see, beneath the cruelty and the greed, a frightened and basically decent animal that the world has bent out of shape, or a selfish one barely held in check? Mencius stakes everything on the first answer, and he hands you the test that convinced him: the next time you see someone in sudden danger, notice what moves in you before you have had any chance to think. He was wagering that what you find there is better than you have been led to believe.