Relational Self-Cultivation in Southeast Asian Contexts — Epoche C2
What Zhu Xi supplied where the text was silent The Great Learning makes 格物 ( ge wu , investigating things) and 致知 ( zhi zhi , extending knowledge) the first two steps of its programme of self-cultivation and never says what either phrase means; the reading that has dominated Neo-Confucian philosophy since the twelfth century rests on a paragraph that Zhu Xi (1130-1200) wrote himself, in 1189, to fill what he judged to be a hole in the transmitted text. That fact is the proper starting point, because it shows that the "traditional" interpretation is not a reading of the classic but a supplement to it, and therefore something a later reader may argue with on the same footing. The text in question began as a chapter of the Liji , the ritual compendium. Cheng Yi (1033-1107) and then Zhu Xi extracted it, and Zhu Xi's Daxue zhangju of 1189 installed it as the first of the Four Books and the gateway to the whole curriculum. Its architecture is a chain of eight items, running outward from an act of knowing to the ordering of the world: investigating things, extending knowledge, making the intention sincere, rectifying the mind, cultivating the person, regulating the family, ordering the state, bringing peace to all under heaven. Because the chain is stated as a strict dependency in both directions — each later item is reached only through the earlier — whatever 格物 turns out to mean fixes the character of everything downstream. A cognitive reading of the first item makes the political end a consequence of knowledge; a practical reading makes it a consequence of conduct. Zhu Xi divided the received text into a short "classic" chapter and ten chapters of commentary, judged that the commentary on 格物致知 had been lost, and wrote a replacement: by the traditional count one hundred and thirty-four characters. It instructs the learner to approach the things of the world and, proceeding from the principle in them that he already grasps, to press further until, after long exertion, "one morning there will be a sudden breakthrough to integral comprehension" (豁然貫通), at which point the outer and inner, coarse and fine aspects of all things are reached and the whole substance and functioning of one's own mind is illuminated. Cheng Yi's gloss underwrites the vocabulary: 格 means 至, to arrive at, and 物 means 事, affairs; and one investigates, he said, one item today and another tomorrow. The metaphysics behind this needs stating precisely, because the essay's argument turns on a tension inside it. 理 ( li ) in Cheng-Zhu usage is the constitutive and normative pattern of a thing at once — what it is and what it ought to be — and it is never encountered bare, but always as instantiated in 氣 ( qi ), the psychophysical stuff. Cheng Yi's formula 理一分殊, "principle is one, its differentiations are many", which he coined in commenting on Zhang Zai's Western Inscription and which Zhu Xi took over with the image of one moon reflected in ten thousand rivers, states that the unity of principle is available only through the particulars in which it is refracted. This matters because it means the detached-universal reading of 格物 is already strained by Zhu Xi's own doctrine. There is no vantage point from which principle can be inspected apart from a particular affair with a particular history. The objectivist reading is not a straw figure — Zhu Xi's programme really is one of patient, item-by-item inquiry aimed at eventual comprehension — but its detachment is an emphasis, not an entailment. The practical reading is not new: Wang Yangming reached it in 1508 The earlier version of this essay proposed the shift from objectivist inquiry to relational practice as a re-evaluation to be argued for. That framing must be withdrawn, because the shift was made, in almost these terms, five centuries ago, and an argument that does not say so is reinventing a position rather than advancing one. Wang Yangming (1472-1529) recounted in later life that at about twenty-one, taking Zhu Xi's instruction literally, he set himself to investigate the bamboo in a courtyard, kept at it for seven days, fell ill, and concluded that principle was not to be found by staring at external objects. The positive doctrine came in 1508 during his exile at Longchang in Guizhou: 心即理, the mind is principle. On that basis he re-read the two phrases. 格, he argued, means 正, to rectify — to correct what is not correct so that it returns to correctness — and 物 means the affairs in which intention is engaged, since wherever an intention is directed there is an affair, and that affair is the "thing". So 格物 is not the survey of an external inventory but the rectification of the conduct one is actually engaged in. 致知 he read as 致良知, extending the innate moral knowing that Mencius had named — the knowing one has without deliberating — and in 1509 he added 知行合一, the unity of knowing and acting: a knowledge that does not issue in action was never knowledge in the first place. His Daxue wen of 1527 opens by defining the great person as one who takes heaven, earth and the myriad things as a single body. That is the relational, practical, anti-detached reading, complete. The consequence for this essay is that its thesis has to be narrowed to something Wang did not already hold, and the remainder sets out what that is. What a plural society adds that Wang Yangming's account does not supply Wang's criterion is internal. The test of whether an affair has been rectified is 良知, an innate knowing that each person carries and that requires no external ratification; and the interlocutors he wrote for shared his metaphysics, so that a disagreement between them was a disagreement about application, not about whether things have principle at all. Both features fail in the setting the essay is concerned with. Consider what the "thing" is when a Chinese family in Penang or Singapore lives beside a Malay Muslim family and an Indian Hindu one. The affairs in which intention is engaged now include a