Philosopher · Antiquity
Xunzi
c. 310–235 BC · Confucianism; the realist wing
A Confucian master whose works were kept outside the canon after the Song for his doctrine that nature is bad; Nostra Aetate 2 commends what is true and holy in the Chinese traditions, and the Jesuits read him as the Confucian foil to Mencius.
Xunzi, the last great Confucian of the Warring States and teacher of the Legalists Han Fei and Li Si, held against Mencius that human nature is bad: left to itself it pursues profit, envy and the senses, and goodness is “artifice” (wei), the product of ritual, teachers and accumulated study, as a warped board is straightened by steaming. The rites were created by the sage kings to apportion goods and regulate desires, and they are to be observed for the order and dignity they bring, not for any effect on spirits; the “Discourse on Heaven” teaches that Heaven's course is constant, that it does not exist for the sage Yao or cease for the tyrant Jie, that omens mean nothing and that the gentleman should master nature rather than pray to it. His essays on rectifying names, on dispelling obsession and on music are the most systematic Confucian philosophy before the Song.
Why he matters: He is the Confucian who makes the case for ritual, law, education and hierarchy against any appeal to innate goodness, and so the ancestor of every realist reading of Chinese thought; a Catholic reader meets in him both an Augustinian suspicion of unformed desire and an Enlightenment naturalism about religion. Ricci answered his doctrine of nature in The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, and modern Catholic sinologists have treated him as the test of whether Confucianism needs Heaven at all.
Where to be careful
His Heaven is impersonal nature without providence, his rites are human inventions without reference to spirits, and his account of a nature bad by birth and remade by human artifice alone leaves no place for a Creator, for grace or for a goodness of nature that sin wounded but did not destroy (Trent, Session 5; CCC 405). His insistence that moral order is objective, that learning and discipline are the way to virtue, and that government exists for the people remains common ground.
Reading
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Xunzi: The Complete TextXunzi (trans. Eric L. Hutton) · The whole book; read “Human Nature Is Bad,” “Discourse on Heaven” and “Discourse on Ritual” first.
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Xunzi: Basic WritingsXunzi (trans. Burton Watson) · The main essays in a short, readable selection.
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The True Meaning of the Lord of HeavenMatteo Ricci, SJ · Ricci's seventh chapter argues for the goodness of human nature against the view Xunzi represents, and for a Heaven that is a personal Lord.
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each dispute the test covers.