Reading Notes about Fung Yu-lan’

Reading Notes about Fung Yu-lan’s A Short History of Chinese Philosophy: Part XII, Xun Tzu and the Legalist school

Xun Tzu the Realist of Confucianism

There is a saying that Xun Tzu represents the right wing of Confucianism or literati, while Mencius represents its left ring. I agree with Mr. Fung that such a word “is too much of a simplified generalization,”[1] and maybe a better saying is that Xun Tzu represents the realistic wing of this school, while Mencius represents its idealistic wing. Therefore, Xun Tzu had two famous disciples Li Si and Han Fei. The former became Prim Minister of Qin dynasty finally, and the latter was a leader of Legalist school.

There is another famous speaking that Mencius believes that human nature is originally good, as contrast, Xun Tzu is known because his theory that human nature is originally evil. Such a saying is not accurate either. In the opinion of Xun Tzu, the value and mortal good is something produced by human, and man can be trained to be a good man because of his originally intelligent but not of the “four beginnings” as Mencius says. “The nature of man is evil; his goodness is acquired training.” As Mr. Fung explains: “Value comes from culture and culture is the achievement of man.”[2] Therefore, according to Xun Tzu, a sage should not “know Heaven”(which in the word of Mencius is a duty to the sage), because when doing it, one neglect what man can do and fails to understand the vocation of human.

Xun Tzu believes, resembling Aristotle, that man must have a social organization, without it, man cannot live. A single man is weaker than most other single animal, so human have to unite to have greater strength. And with co-operation and mutual support, a man can be skillful in one career and have a wealthy life. But human have many desires and their desires are the same in most times. While things are less than satisfying every one. Therefore, there should be li, the moral rule, to regulate the human life. because of li, the human society is much different from the world of birds and beasts. Animals have sperm donors and offspring, but not the affection between father and son. Xun Tzu says: “Hence in the Way of Humanity there must be distinctions. No distinctions are greater than those of society. No social distinctions are greater than the li.”

Li can be translated as ceremonies, rituals, rules of social conduct, or in my opinion, nomos, a Greek word that I think it suits the translation for li perfectly. The most important li, for Confucianists, may be those of mourning and sacrifice. Although mourning and sacrifice maybe originate in religion or superstition, but the Confucianists especially those realists of Confucianism, transformed them into an ethical and poetic form. Mr. Fung gives an evident explanation: “Religion and poetry are both expressions of the fancy of man. They both mingle imagination with reality. The difference between them is that religion takes what it itself says as true, while poetry takes what it itself says as false.”[3] We have a mourning, not because we truly believe that our relatives are still alive, but we hope that they are. We have sacrifice, not because we truly believe in the existence of goods and spirits, but because for expressing man’s affectionate longing and representing the height of piety and faithfulness, of love and respect. We treat the dead and the nature as what we hope and imagine. Such in the word of Mr. Fung is “self-deception.”

The Legalist School

While li is different from xing. As Mr. Fung says: “Li formed the unwritten code of honor governing the conduct of the aristocrats,”[4] in other words, it is a kind of “gentleman’s agreement;” while xing, which means punishments, “on the contrary, applied only to the people of ordinary birth.”[5] The king of every state and those feudal lords, they dealt the staffs between each other by li. While when they ruled the normal people in their own land, they used xing. That, as the Li Chi(Book of Rites) says, is: “The li do not go down to the common people; the xing do not go up to the ministers.”

In the opinion of Mr. Fung, li is a kind of social arrangement which corresponded to feudalism, while when feudalism disintegrated and the numerous states became one united country, the social distinctions between the aristocrats and the ordinary men were no longer so absolutely demarcated. As Mr. Fung says that: “New situations brought with them new problems.”[6] For establishing a huge and powerful country, there comes the xing. We can also find such a progress in the western world. Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics were just fit for the city-state period, but not for the period of Empire which was created by one of his disciples, Alexandria. Utile the time of Roman Empire, the Greek nomos declined, and it was the Roman law which ruled the society. I say, the Legalist school showed the modernity of china. First, they were realists. Second, the other schools all believed that the golden age of man life lies in the past rather than the future, while the Legalist school was different from them. According to this school, new problems can only be solved by new measures, and one cannot “rule the people of today by the methods of government of the early kings.”

The early Legalist school has three major representatives, they were: Shen Dao who emphasized the shi(power, tendency or authority), Shen Bu-hai who emphasized the shu(method or art), and Shang Yang who emphasized fa(xing or law). These three groups came together into the theory of Han Fei Tzu, who was a disciple of Xun Tzu. Han Fei considered all three alike as indispensable, and he said that these three together are “the implements of emperors and kings.” Ruling by law, according to Han Fei Tzu, a ruler can successfully rule his people no matter how numerous they may be. To law, Han Fei Tzu writes on this point: “In his rule of a state, the sage does not depend upon men doing good themselves, but brings it about that they have to do no wrong.” We can see Han Fei realizes the law as a negative request, or in other words, a request of baseline. As Mr. Fung says: “Han Fei Tzu, as a student of Xun Tzu, was convinced that human nature is evil. But he differed from Xun Tzu in that he was not interested in the latter’s stress on cultures as a means of changing human nature so as to make it something good.”[7]

[1] Fung Yu-lan. A Short History of Chinese Philosophy. The Free Press, 1948,p.142.

[2] Ibid.,p.144.

[3] Ibid.,pp.148-149.

[4] Ibid.,p.155.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.,p.156.

[7] Ibid.,p.162.