Jing and the Active Self: Re-evaluating Moral Agency in Neo-Confucian Virtue Ethics — Epoche C2
The disagreement, stated exactly Zhu Xi (朱熹, 1130–1200) makes a single mental posture — jing (敬), the composed and undivided attentiveness that older translations render "reverence" or "seriousness" — into the standing precondition of every other item of moral cultivation, and in doing so alters what the Mencian doctrine of innate goodness is being asked to explain. The disagreement is not, as it is often presented, between a Mencian view on which virtue simply grows and a Neo-Confucian view on which it must be worked for. Mencius demands work, and says so at length. The disagreement is about where the work is located and what it operates on: for Mencius, on particular occasions of feeling, which are to be preserved, not forced, and extended; for Zhu Xi, on a continuous condition of the mind that must already be in place before any occasion arises, because the medium in which the good nature is instantiated is itself variable and can obstruct it. Setting the disagreement out this way requires first correcting the picture of Mencius that makes the contrast look easy. What Mencius actually asks of an agent The Mengzi 2A6 passage is the source of the organic imagery. Every human being, it says, has a mind that cannot bear the suffering of others; anyone who saw a child about to fall into a well would feel alarm and compassion, and would feel it without calculating any advantage from the rescue. From this reaction and three others — the sense of shame and aversion, the sense of deference, the sense of right and wrong — Mencius derives the "four sprouts" (四端, siduan ), which are related to benevolence, righteousness, propriety and wisdom as a sprout is to a mature plant. Having them, he says, is like having four limbs. But the same text is emphatic that sprouts do not mature unattended, and it is emphatic in both directions at once. In 2A2, the passage on the "flood-like qi " (浩然之氣, haoran zhi qi ) that is nourished by the accumulation of right conduct, Mencius sets out the discipline in four clauses: one must work at it (必有事焉), must not fix a target for it, must not forget it, and must not help it to grow. He then tells the story of the man of Song who was distressed that his seedlings were not growing and pulled each of them up a little, and came home exhausted to announce that he had helped them; his son ran out and found the plants withered. The parable is a warning against forcing, but it is offered as a gloss on a positive instruction — do not forget it — and forgetting is precisely a failure of continuous attention. Nor does Mencius lack an account of moral loss. In 6A8 he describes Ox Mountain, once wooded, now bare: axes came daily, and what regrew was eaten by cattle and sheep, until people seeing the bald hill concluded it had never had timber on it. The conclusion drawn is about human beings, not landscape — what is lost daily is not the capacity but its expression, and one should not infer from the bare state that the capacity was absent. And in 6A11 he defines the whole enterprise of learning in a single sentence: it is nothing other than to seek the lost heart-mind (求放心, qiu fang xin ). A doctrine on which virtue merely unfolds has no use for that sentence. So the sharp form of the question is not whether effort is required. It is: what does effort consist in when there is no occasion of feeling to work on? On the Mencian material as it stands, cultivation is occasion-shaped. One notices the reaction of compassion when it arises, protects it from being extinguished, and extends it (推, tui ) from the case where it arose to a case where it did not — from the ox one has seen trembling to the people one has not seen. That is a real method, and it is the method Bryan Van Norden's translation and its selected traditional commentaries display throughout. But it gives no instruction for the mind at rest. Why Zhu Xi needs something the Mencian method cannot supply Zhu Xi's metaphysics forces the question. He holds that nature (性, xing ) is principle (理, li ) — the pattern that makes a thing the kind of thing it is and prescribes what it ought to be — and principle is wholly good and cannot be corrupted. But nothing exists as principle alone: every concrete thing is principle instantiated in qi (氣), the psychophysical stuff whose configurations vary in clarity and turbidity, density and openness. Hence the distinction Zhu Xi inherits from the Cheng brothers and Zhang Zai between the nature-in-itself (本然之性) and the nature as conditioned by endowment (氣質之性). The good nature is universal and identical in everyone; what differs between persons, and within one person from hour to hour, is the transparency of the medium. This is what the earlier formulation of the problem gets wrong when it says that the innate goodness may "become corrupted". On Zhu Xi's account it cannot. Principle is not the sort of thing that degrades. What happens is obstruction: selfish desire (人欲, renyu ) is not a rival substance but turbid qi in operation, and it occludes the heavenly principle (天理, tianli ) that is already there. The remedy therefore cannot be to repair the nature, and it cannot be merely to remove external impediments. It has to be a continuous management of the medium — which is exactly the office Zhu Xi assigns to jing . The mind is the site of that management because of a formula Zhu Xi takes from Zhang Zai and makes structural: the mind commands nature and the emotions (心統性情, xin tong xing qing ). Nature is the mind's unaroused principle; the emotions are that principle in operation; the mind is what holds both and can be either their master or their casualty. Wing-tsit Chan's collection sets out these formulas with their sources, and they are not decorative — they determine that the target of cultivation is a state of the mind rather than a class of actions. What jing is, in the glosses Zhu Xi actually endorses Zhu Xi rarely defines jing outright; he transmits and ranks a set of earlier formulas