“presenting Chinese philosophy to students — to talk about the difficulties of doing this, the benefits of it, what specific strategies seem to work, not work, and so on.” Full speed ahead! I would love to see some material like this. Your experience now puts you in a particularly interesting position to comment on such things. I was talking recently with someone who teaches in Hong Kong, and the differences between HK students and US students on the matter of, say, assessing Xunzi’s importance was fascinating! (Namely, HK students have a New-Confucian-saturated upbringing, so they will see different things as “challenges” to what they assume about Chinese thought.)

Speaking of which, I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about Xunzi recently, surveying how he is studied etc. It’s struck me that the “baseline concern” most scholars have, whether individually or collectively, is to explore Xunzi’s conception of how the moral personality changes as the agent attains virtue. This is the primary concern because the strong Mencian tradition embodied in Neo-Confucianism and its intellectual descendants is skeptical that you can “get” (得, cf. 2a2) anything that isn’t already in you. That intuition works on multiple levels, but where the psychology of motivation is concerned it translates to the conviction that any ability or inclination agents have to pursue the right course of action proves that 性善. (However the writers may take that.) Xunzi is found interesting (cf. the Kline/Ivanhoe anthology) because he explores alternative conceptions of character change.

One question is how the scholarly reception and current activities surrounding Xunzi would look different if there were not that Mencian moral psychology to react against. It has tended to strike me that, if we do not approach Xunzi with knowledge of those strong Mencian contentions, most of what Xunzi has to say on moral psychology seems perfectly reasonable–if not decisive, then at least a good starting-point and no less promising than posited Mencian alternatives. For me, in any event, a thinker’s moral psychology is most interesting if he weaves it into the questions of how we attain moral knowledge and why the proper course is justified. On my reading (admittedly controversial), neither Mengzi nor Xunzi does this in a sustained or satisfying way. So if we are interested in normative and metaethical questions, we have to look elsewhere in these texts than at their theories of motivation.

Stephen -

On your first comment: I need to make a whole post on this issue. I’ve been intrigued by the reception (in many senses of that term) I’ve received in terms of talking about Chinese Philosophy here (teaching it formally, giving a public lecture on it, speaking informally about it). There are two main camps: those who seem either perplexed or offended by Westerners talking about the subject, and those who seem genuinely excited about the idea of Westerners talking about it. My data set is small, so my observations on this issue are to be taken with a grain of salt. In brief, though, the former camp seems to be more rigid in their understanding of what these thinkers’ works mean — they tend to line up with received views and tend to be fairly conservative in orientation. The latter seem excited by the possibility of challenging the received view (most especially of Confucius). Granted, my own take on Kongzi has a liberal and non-authoritarian feel to it. Still, this is very intriguing to some Chinese in the latter camp, many of whom think that Kongzi has been, historically, misappropriated for non-Confucian purposes.

The subject deserves a separate post, though. It’s in the queue!

I’ll be back on the second comment. I had a reply half finished, but I have to run off to class.

Happy belated blog birthday!