Confucianism and The Interpersonal Universe: Humanity Beyond Personhood

 

The real homeland of the concept of wuwei, non-deliberate activity with no explicit goal as the ultimate source of cosmic activity and as both the most valuable and the most efficacious state of human activity, would seem to be the ancient “Daoist” thinkers, Laozi and Zhuangzi.   We’ve called it the ground zero of Emulative Atheism.  Dao does nothing and yet all things are done (Daodejing 37).   The sage does nothing and thus leaves nothing undone. Heaven and Earth are not humane: to them all creatures are disposable sacrificial effigies made of straw.  The sage is not humane: to him all creatures are disposable sacrificial effigies made of straw.  (Daodejing 5)  Dao has no intention, does not play the lord or master, knows nothing and is never known, and thereby does its bounty flow to all creatures.

However, this centrality and ultimacy of wuwei, this hallmark of ultimate godlessness, is the one point shared by theoretical Daoism and Confucianism and Chinese Buddhism.  All see the world as something that comes into being without the intervention of anyone’s intention, without any plan or purpose, and each in its own way sees what is best in human experience as some manifestation of that same effortless unintentional purposelessness in us.   Indeed, strictly speaking, we must trace the concept of wuwei first to Confucian sources.   The locus classicus is a single ritual-political reference in the Analects, “Is not Shun someone who ruled without any effortful action?  (wuwei er zhi 無為而治)   He simply made himself respectful and faced south, that is all.”  (Analects 15:5)   The sage-king Shun is here depicted as placing himself in his ritually proper position as emperor, and doing so with the proper ritual attitude of respect.   This is probably to be understood as referring to the non-coercive organizing power of ritual, referenced elsewhere in the text.  In Analects 2:1, we are told that “one who rules with virtue (de, 德 virtuosity) is like the North Star: it simply occupies its place and all the other stars turn toward it.”   Virtue here is ritual virtuosity, attained mastery of the received ritual system, internalized to the point of grace and effortlessness, believed to come with certain attitudes in the person and effects in the world.   Truly internalized ritual mastery is depicted as having an automatic effect on others who are also operating within that shared traditional ritual system.   We see effortlessness manifest on both sides of the relation here: the ruler does no more than take his position, with the respect for that position and for the other positions in the system that is considered by Confucians to be the essence of internalized and thus effortless mastery of the system, and the others, without thinking about it or having to make efforts to overcome contrary inclinations, respond, organizing themselves spontaneously around him.   The implications are spelled out a few lines later in the same text, which pairs “ritual” and “virtuosity” (virtue), contrasting this pair favorably with the alternative pair of “governance” (zheng政) and “punishment,” (xing 刑)  i.e., penal law, as two alternate possible approaches by which a ruler might bring order to the people.  The coercive method of punishment and threat, combined with explicitly formulated statutes and controls, incentivizes the people to avoid the punishments, but without any internalized feeling of shame in failing to comply, as long as they are not caught.   “Shame” here means a feeling that one has failed to live up to a standard that one recognizes and has made one’s own, that one has internalized as a standard of worth, as one would feel shame in failing to accomplish a task for which one had trained and to which one had aspired.  It also presupposes that this failure will mean loss of status and recognition in the system of other social agents sharing membership in this system.  This internalized sociality and its power to incentivize action, the threat of loss of recognition and belonging, are key to the ritual form of social organization, the form of orderly social grouping offered as an alternative to law and control and punishment.   Leading the people with virtuosity and organizing them with ritual brings to the people their own internalized sense of shame, allowing them to correct themselves, literally “come into the grid” (ge 格), assume their own positions in the same system of ritual that the ruler inhabits and internalizes with wuwei mastery.  (Analects 2:3)  The next item in the Analects describes a process by which this wuwei mastery of traditional ritual, which allows one both to follow one’s own desires with no sense of effort and to elicit order-producing responses from others equally effortlessly, is attained, through long and sustained practice and effort.  (Analects 2:4)   The model nearest to hand for understanding this conception is perhaps that of learning a skill: one practices for a long time, having to consciously pay attention to every movement, correcting and coercing oneself, subjecting oneself to executive conscious control—with the goal of finally reaching a state where one can forget what one is doing, because one has internalized it and is doing it so well.  Such skill entitles one to membership in good standing in a mutually recognizing society of practitioners who share this skill and the values it exemplifies.   The added dimension of spontaneous response to this attained spontaneity has been illuminatingly compared to the sort of response we see, for example, in a handshake.[1]   If (and only if) the person in front of me has been trained in the same cultural ritual system as myself, he will understand my action of lifting my hand in front of him, and without thinking, without naming it, without controlling it even himself, his own hand will rise to grasp mine.   I will not have to tell him what to do, or order him to do it, or threaten him with punishments if he fails to do it.   This is the magical responsiveness of ritual—and it presupposes a shared tradition.  The content of that tradition need not be entirely rational or explicable or even consciously known: what matters is that it is shared, it is presupposed, it is internalized, and thus that it works, and works unreflectively.

The seeming curmudgeonly insistence on an irrational inherited system of ritual as the sole source of order, with its profound traditionalism and conservatism, is thus framed as actually being a protest against the ideas of explicit command and threats of coercion and deliberate control as the only possible sources of order—the very ideas applied on a cosmic level in the monotheistic idea of God.  Obviously neither of these alternatives is about freeing the individual from social control: it is assumed that we need some sort of social organization, that this requires some sort of power of normativity and sanction, and that punishment and ritual are the only alternatives to anarchy.  But even if we were to assume that social control is a kind of necessary evil (a view not shared by the Confucians), we can say that from the point of view of non-coercion, Confucianism is one long argument that ritual is the lesser of the two evils.  Ritual is like grammar; normative but unformulated, and not imposed ex nihilo at any point in time.   It has no single source: no one is credited with creating it wholesale.  Rather, the picture we are generally given is of virtuosic sages and sage-kings who add and subtract to it in minimal ways, forming a communal cumulative system of always-already functioning rules, as much descriptive as prescriptive.  Those sages and kings are to ritual what genius writers are to the grammar of the language they work in: through this effortless internalization of the grammar, which was objectively never created or formulated on purpose and which has now lifted free of any conscious sense both of effort and of definitely fixed purpose, they can make new sentences to serve any purpose: the purposelessness of grammar enables infinite meanings and intentions to be expressed.   Purposelessness again enables infinite purposes.  In exceptional cases, these virtuosos can even create new forms that may resonate enough into the future to slightly tweak the grammar itself, as a particularly striking Shakespeare or Goethe phrase might do in English or German, respectively. A virtuoso might deliberately use improper grammar, against a massive background of effortless correctness, for a particular effect in a particular time and context, and this would ipso facto make that irregular usage legitimate and effective, perhaps even becoming a precedent, becoming part of correct usage in the future; we may think of phrases like, “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” here: grammatically incorrect, but now a part of standard usage and recognized as such.  The phrase has no single inventor, and no one passed a law that suddenly made it grammatically lawful; but it has become normatively acceptable, changing in this case the nature of the norms through actual effectivity of use.  But no one can make up a grammar or a language ex nihilo and make people speak it and follow its rules.  That would by definition involve coercion and enforcement, for it would require dropping their unreflectively prior ways of speaking and replacing them with new, more “rational,” ones.  Someone would have to go around enforcing that, punishing violations of the new rule, of which there would be many, since the whole point of it is to contravene the acquired habitual actions that preceded it, without any specific creator or rational warrant but incorporated into behavior as second-nature by now.  The point of this weird preference for ritual over law is precisely that ritual is mainly unintentional; the small tweaking that constitutes the sole possibility of reform in this context is always concerned only with that surface that is going astray, resting on a massive pre-reflective understanding of the shared social fabric.  As with a grammar, corrections are only possible on the basis of an assumed prior massive agreed-upon correctness of operation: one has to be able to understand the correction in some language before one can correct one’s language accordingly.

We can perhaps begin to see how the idea of a controlling consciously purposeful deity begins to get de-incentivized in the context of this general ritual view of the continuity between deliberate and non-deliberate activity, with the deeper and more primordial role always granted to the non-deliberate.   The Confucian tradition was certainly deeply interested in rooting a sense of human ethical normativity into the very fabric of the universe somehow, making human values and purposes feel firmly rooted, non-quixotic, and at home, as it were, in the cosmos.  This makes it all the more remarkable that, even when presented with the opportunity for a broadly theistic solution to this challenge in the form of Mohism—which energetically propounded the idea of a single universal ruling deity, very consciously surveilling human behavior, equally concerned with all humans, constantly watching, relentlessly interested in legislating and enforcing human ethical behavior with clear-cut norms and punishments and rewards–the Confucian tradition literally defines itself in terms of its staunch opposition to it, beginning with Mencius (4^th century BCE), setting the terms for the next two millennia thereafter.  Initially at least, to be a Confucian is, quite literally, to reject the idea of Heaven as a fully anthropormophic moral deity who enforces justice in the universe through commandment, law and punishment.

And yet the majority of Confucian systems do want a universe that supports human values, a cosmos that is even often characterized ontologically above all by its relation to ren 仁, humaneness (the word is as closely cognate with the word for “human” ren人as the English “humane” is to “human”), and indeed, the term “Heaven” remains a privileged marker for some dimension of normative authority throughout the tradition, in one way or another.   But because the essence of human experience is here assumed to be centered not in the deliberative, separable consciousness but in the spontaneous reciprocal interpersonal responsivities, the idea of Heaven as a separate mind in unilateral control was felt again and again to be actually at odds with a humane/human cosmos: an anthropomorphic God, an intentional mind with absolute unilateral power, would make the universe inhospitably inhuman, and inhumane.  Instead, Confucianism gravitated from almost its first steps toward a truly narrativeless Heaven which, even when still overseeing the world in some way and lending its weight to some particular tendencies in human affairs over others (enough to still be claimed as a partisan in political struggles), was quickly divested of both speech and deliberate world-creation, and usually of unilateral and identifiable interventions, and was not at all interested in deliberately micromanaging rewards and punishments for individual human behavior either before or after death.   This is not to say that these thinkers did not embrace many beliefs that would, by modern standards, be judged superstitious; most glaringly almost all of them believe in divination.  But this is a very different thing from belief in a purposeful and morally interested God in control of events; indeed, whenever schemas of predictability are developed within divination systems (and explaining their efficacy in terms unrelated to the intentions of unseen intentional spirits is the overwhelming trend among these thinkers), there comes to be a powerful contradiction between these two directions of superstition, two opposite though perhaps equally empirically groundless ways of approaching what is beyond human control.   There were, to be sure, some Confucian thinkers, particularly in the Han dynasty, who did try to make a case for at least the moral “responsiveness” of Heaven to human moral turpitude, in the form of natural disasters—though even that was generally seen as occurring only exceptional cases, in response to truly egregious acts with large political consequences, and usually only on the part of rulers.   But even these thinkers were consistently marginalized by later Confucian thinkers, and whatever role remained for Heaven’s punitive responsiveness was overwhelmingly explained away in terms of inherent non-intentional factors rather than deliberate acts of intervention on the part of a controlling deity.  Even that moral responsiveness served merely as an incidental supplement to the Confucian moral anthropology, rather than as its main engine and support: the grounds and motivations of morality were located in factors that were unrelated to any rewards or punishments imposed externally by Heaven, either before or after death (keeping in mind the stark difference between the conception of “rewards and punishments,” which implies the intention and activity of a punisher, and the conception of mere “consequences,” which does not).  Already for Confucius, Heaven did not speak, and operated by some means other than the issuing of explicit orders or laws either to humans or to the rest of the cosmos, though this does not prevent him from making occasional references to Heaven as a support and sponsor for his particular cultural mission in some vague way.    The Neo-Confucians of the 10th century CE and later went ahead and fully divested the Heavenly deity of any non-metaphorical existence, turning it into a word either for a type of coherence that was intrinsically always both one and many, always both some one specific principle and also alternate principles, never reducible to a single univocal system of consistent and stable formulae, or else for an active and affective version of a immanent universal mind that is again a strong antithesis to God, as we’ll see.   What is most surprising about these developments, though, is how little anyone in the tradition seemed to think they was particularly shocking or troubling.

For this resistance to a unilaterally and exclusively controlling deity is not something merely incidental to this tradition, but a key structural concomitant of the very ethical ideals it hopes to encourage and the cosmological vision it requires to sustain them.   Spontaneous continuity and responsive reciprocity become ultimate; the disjunctive aspects of personality as controller and choice-maker become, both for the natural world and for humans, an always-present-but-always-surpassed mode in the broader fabric of a larger spontaneity.   The status of Heaven in the Analects and Mencius is admittedly a highly contentious and problematic topic.  I have elsewhere stated and argued for my view that Heaven in those two texts is a metonym for the locus housing a collective group of forces, both personal and impersonal, like “Hollywood” or “Washington,” a locus that includes both purposeless aspects and diverse purposes which can be temporarily summed as a specific overall collective purpose when linked to some specific human alliance or interest, but which is neither completely purposive nor completely purposeless, and where the purposeful is certainly not the ultimate source of either being or value.[2]   This gives us a way to account for Confucius’ remarks about Heaven “knowing” him (14:35), and wanting certain things like the preservation of “this culture” (9:5), and being something whose dispositive power is unsurpassable (3:13), but also for the striking quantitative lack of references to it, explicit or implicit, in making normative claims and describing the world, and also for the opposite tendency seen in the sole expansive discussion of Heaven in the text (17:19, discussed below), which attributes to it the natural phenomena of seasonal change and animal and plant birth and growth, all accomplished without Heaven ever “speaking,” i.e., without communicating with humans or giving the natural world any instructions or orders.  The seemingly incompatible aspects of purpose and purposelessness are resolved if we view Heaven as a metonym for all the powers that be, both spiritual and otherwise, both personal and otherwise, both purposive and otherwise.  This view is controversial, however, and our argument here is served just as well by the still plausible view that Heaven in these earliest Confucian texts is indeed a supreme and purposeful personal deity, but not the creator of the world, and one who operates through some means other than those suggested by the Mohists, i.e., not through close control, intervention, supervision, command, explicit standards and injunctions, and punishment of individual behavior.  The Confucian Heaven is envisioned as ruling in the same way the Confucian sages rule: through wuwei.   I have already mentioned in passing Confucius’ most extensive comment on the nature of Heaven in the Analects, which give us the earliest locus classicus of Emulative Theism turning into Emulative Atheism.   Here is the passage in full:

 

Confucius said, “I want to speak no words at all.”  Zigong said, “If you, master, spoke no words, how would we disciples be able to tell others about you in the future?”   Confucius said, “What words does Heaven speak?   And yet the four seasons move along through it, all things are generated through it.   What words does Heaven speak?”   (Analects 17:19)

 

Confucius wants to be like Heaven, but what Heaven is like is that it says nothing, gives no orders or instructions, issues no commands and makes no rules–and yet moves the world along and generates all things.   Its efficacy, apparently, does not derive from what it says, from telling anyone to do anything, from issuing commands or instructions, much less from directly intervening; it brings order but does not do so by means of exerting any control.  In other words, it is wuwei, just like Shun sitting on his throne in the center of the ritual system: acting purposelessly, and thereby bringing about order in the way all things respond by arraying themselves around that effortless nonaction, that still center that is not trying to do anything, making no intentional moves.  Rather than seeking to compensate for this dearth of control by taking control (Compensatory Atheism), Confucius wants to be like heaven and get things done by non-doing: as Heaven accomplishes the circular motion of the seasons, the production of life, without direct interference, Confucius would like to accomplish the ritual ordering of society in the same way.   This is the format of Emulative Theism—man should be like the divine—but on the cusp of transforming to Emulative Atheism.  For in this case, unlike the monotheist case, the deity to be emulated is not more purposive and controlling than us, but less so.   We relinquish direct control not to allow Heaven to take control, but to be more effortless and uncontrolling, as Heaven is.   Heaven is not quite fully purposeless yet here, it is true: it seems to still have a crucial role in making the seasons flow and making all things grow, and in the political destinies of ruling dynasties that foster or obstruct this process for their populaces.  Heaven has no specific command structure or controlling purpose, perhaps no deliberate activity, but it has a preference, it would seem, for life over death, for sustainable growth over decline and extinction, and in this very early version of the idea may well be thought of as conscious of this preference, which it accomplishes through its own silent charisma.   The Daoists will subsequently accuse Confucianist wuwei of being a sham: it claims to get things happening through ritual alone, but if the expected response fails to come, it “rolls up its sleeves” and forces the intended result (Daodejing 38).  Its alleged wuwei thus ends up being a thin sugar-coating for the punishment-based type of control it ostensibly rejects, which is always there at the ready to do the dirty work if and when the non-coercive ritual attempt fails.  The burden of this critique, however, is that Confucianism does not follow through in its own idea of non-deliberateness: the Daoist thus try to radicalize it.  The issue is whether or not there is in fact an unstated specific goal informing the apparent non-striving, whether there is an unspoken teleology hidden beneath this veneer of goal-lessness.  To the extent that there is, apparent non-coercion and effortlessness is still not thoroughgoing, and is vulnerable to the Daoist critique.   The extent to which the effortless Confucian cosmos counts as a real teleology will continue to be a vexed issue in Confucianism; we will see it explicitly addressed in a moment in the thought of Zhu Xi (1130-1200), the formulater of Neo-Confucian orthodoxy 17 centuries later, who offers an ingenious solution that remains true to the spirit of wuwei while putting a distinctive Confucian normativity into play at the same time.    But it is clear already in the Analects, the first properly Confucian text, that we are already moving in the direction of, and getting dangerously close to, the full-blown purposelessness of wuwei as it comes to be understood in the Daoist texts, which are soon to follow.

However we may wish to understand the case of Heaven in the earliest Confucian texts, we certainly see a clear and forceful example of God-less religiousness developed in the Confucian metaphysic found at the end of the classical period in the “Xicizhuan” 繫辭傳 commentary to the Zhouyi 周易. (also known as The Book of Changes), which becomes the wellspring of well-nigh all later Confucian speculation.  This text accepts and adapts the Daoist idea of a universe and universal creative process that acts with no ethical intentions—the “Heaven and Earth are not humane” idea of Daodejing 5 (tiandi bu ren天地不仁)–but changes the human consequence of Daoism (i.e., the Daodejing’s further claim that the sage is also not humane, shengren bu ren聖人不仁) by adding that the sage, on the contrary, does have ethical intentions and concerns.  The question is how to relate these two.   We see this adaptation clearly expounded, along with the key response to Daoism, in the following central passage of the mature Confucian God-less metaphysic:

 

One Yin and one Yang alternating in balance—this is called Dao. Whatever continues this is called “the Good.” What completes it is called “inborn human nature.” The humane see this Dao and call it “humaneness”; the wise see this Dao and call it “wisdom”; the ordinary folk make use of it every day and yet are not aware of it. Thus the way of the exemplary man is rare indeed. It manifests as humaneness, [but] is concealed in [all] those uses [of the ordinary folk]. It drums the ten thousand things forward and yet does not worry itself as the sage must….^[3]

 

This is the key Confucian contribution to the problem: the universe is indeed thoroughly wuwei, and is neither created by nor for any particular intention or value: Dao is just the alternation of Yang and Yin, of light and dark, of hot and cold, of foreground and background, of this and that, of value and disvalue.   Following the contrasts of the Daodejing, Yang and Yin in this newly universalized sense are simply what is picked out because desirable—brought to light, honored with a name, vigorously moving against a static background—as against that background being darkened, inchoate, nameless, disvalued, ignored.   When there is something, there must be some other with it.  Where there is any one, there must be a two.  Where there is a thing, there is simultaneously a context.   This requires no design or intelligence, it is not the result of being put into order—any other thing that could possibly be there, simply by virtue of being a thing, would also have this quality.  It is another way to say “determination is negation.”  Anything determinate, even eternal blankness, thus presents a Yin-Yang pair: Yang is whatever is determined, Yin is whatever surrounding otherness it negates but also draws upon to establish itself, minimally merely by contrast, maximally rather by material dependence as the resources for its nourishment and the place of its growth and fostering.   This passage warns us against conceiving this as a wisely or benevolently designed order in its own right.  It is not a manifestation of any cosmic preference for value over disvalue, wisdom over folly, benevolence over indifference.  On the contrary, it is precisely the cohesion of the two sides–wisdom and folly, benevolence and indifference, the valued and the disvalued–that constitute the cosmic process.   Those who are oriented toward love may call that whole process a kind of love, since it is indeed the source of all love; those who are oriented toward wisdom may likewise call it wise.   This is just as we would expect on the basis of Zhuangzian perspectivism, to which this passage is undoubtedly a response.  This is of course also the critique that would be applied to monotheists: they look at this inadvertent structure and see Noûs or Agapé or Design there, not because they are really any such things there, but rather because they are projecting these qualities based on their own preoccupations.  But the Confucians here find a way to accept the Zhuangzian perspectivist point while also rooting these human moral qualities in that indifferent universal process, and even assigning a crucial cosmic role to those qualities.  For the highest human values, defining the role of human effort, human youwei, are those that stand in a very specific relation to that wuwei, that unplanned and unfabricated cohesion of any possible state and whatever is other to it: they “continue it” 繼之.   Value is here still rooted in valuelessness, purpose in purposelessness; the two now form the inseparable halves of a single whole which alone accounts for human values and purposes.  The Dao is not good, and doesn’t try to be good or want the good; but it is the basis of good.  Good is the continued existence of the yin-yang relationship, which is neutral, neither humane nor wise, but “can be seen as” either humane or wise, in some sense contains aspects of what, if selectively viewed, can be seen as a source or instantiation of both humaneness and wisdom.   The crucial move is a slight tipping of emphasis in the direction of the ethical, for the function of Dao here is said to be “revealed” 顯 in humaneness, but “concealed” 藏in all other functions.  That is, all things in some way are the operations of Dao, the neutral process of balanced alternating Yin and Yang, but benevolent human activity reveals it in the most direct or explicit way.  There is an undeniable privileging of human values here, but carefully and ingeniously positioned as both rooted in something real in the operation of the cosmos and as describable in that way only in relation to posterior human activities and ethical feelings, which themselves emerge unintentionally from that pre-ethical process, though rooted in it, like everything else.^[4]

This idea may at first blush seem similar to the structure I criticized at length in online appendix A, supplement 8, “Negative Theology, and Why it Doesn’t Really Help Much.”   The argument put forth there, it may be recalled, was that the claim of prominent apophatic mystics (e.g., Pseudo-Dionysius) that God was beyond all predication was fatally belied by their assertion that, although God was properly speaking neither wise nor foolish, neither alive nor dead, neither good nor bad, neither orderly nor chaotic, nevertheless it was wisdom and life and goodness and orderliness that came “closest” to Him, that were somehow better approximations of this neither-nor than foolishness, death, badness or chaos.   We suggested that this undermined the claim that this God was beyond all determinations; God’s greater similarity to some particular things than others—to all the usual godly suspects, in fact—even if, as claimed, only in a “superessential” or “eminent” sense, unavoidably meant that God does have some determinations, is in fact some one particular entity rather than another, i.e., is a determinate being after all, and very much is something conceivable in at least some minimal sense, about which some definite things could be truly predicated: namely, that God resembles goodness and life and intelligence more than God resembles badness and death and stupidity.  Here in the Confucian case, we have the seemingly similar claim that Dao is neither humane nor inhumane, but that humaneness “reveals” it better than the other functions, in which Dao is nevertheless present but concealed.   A certain parallel may thus legitimately be suggested here.  But it is more important to note the crucial differences, and their consequences.     First of all, the point at issue here is not the claim of indeterminacy or ineffability; it is only a claim about value and valuelessness, about purpose and purposelessness.   Dao is disarmingly presented here as perfectly described in four characters: one yin one yang.   No claim is made for its ineffability, no claim therefore that Dao should not resemble anything more than anything else.   Where claims about ineffability are made, e.g., in Daoist and Buddhist works, we have quite a different dynamic, which we explore elsewhere.  But perhaps even more strikingly, the claim here is not that human goodnesses like humaneness and wisdom resemble or even approach Dao more than other functions do, like the claims of the apophatic mystics within monotheisms, e.g., that goodness and intelligence resemble or approach the ineffable God, which is beyond any such things, more than badness or stupidity do.   Rather, what human goodnesses do in this Confucian vision is not “resemble or approach” Dao more than other things.  What they do is continue it, and thereby reveal it.   Indeed, in so doing, the human role is to complete it 成之, to perfect that very wuwei process of Yin and Yang.  So when we are told here that Dao is “revealed” in humaneness, it does not mean that humaneness is more like the one-yin-one-yang wuwei process of Dao itself than any other function.  Indeed, in the last sentence we quoted above, what is stressed is precisely the dissimilarity between them: the sage worries, acts deliberately, makes choices, while Dao does not.  It is precisely in this (“Compensatory Atheist”) way that the human youwei goodness of the sage continues and completes the cosmic wuwei indifference of the Dao.  It complements it, fills in what is missing, nudges it through impasses, providing deliberative youwei interventions which serve only to return to and further advance the non-deliberative wuwei process itself, precisely by resembling it least of all.  This is how human goodness “reveals” Dao: by being so unlike it and yet serving to make the visibility of its omnipresent operation more prevalent, more widely and clearly seen—as the labor of carving a canal through land is what “makes manifest, reveals” the radically dissimilar  effortlessness of the water that is then allowed to gush through it, or as the labor of a gardener thoughtfully and deliberately digging the soil and hauling fertilizer “makes manifest, reveals” the undeliberating growth of the plants that then spring up.  Indeed, in terms of the resemblance, the “daily use without knowing it” of the ordinary people, in which it is “concealed,” resembles Dao most of all.

In one way or another, this special status of man, as one who can uniquely “form a triad with Heaven and Earth” (yu tiandi can與天地參)^[5] or as receiver of the most excellent (xiu秀), correctly aligned (zheng正) and/or numinously efficacious (ling靈) “qi” (breath-energy) of Heaven and Earth, would become a staple of most later Confucian metaphysical systems.  The classical version just discussed may be described as a unique version of Compensatory Atheism.  But it differs sharply from to those forms of Compensatory Atheism found in aftermath of the Noûs as Arché milieu, as noted in the body of this book, where Noûs was the highest value, such that when it was judged to be lacking in the cosmos, mankind took it upon themselves to provide it: in these forms, purposeful youwei remains the only real value, so man must provide himself with purpose in a purposeless cosmos. The Confucian case is different in that purposeless valueless wuwei is assumed to be the highest value, and remains so throughout.  Man’s youwei is brought in to promote and extend this wuwei dimension of existence, not to glorify youwei itself.   Our ideal cooperation and participation with Heaven is thus accomplished by our dissimilarity, our youwei.  In the mature Confucian speculation of later eras, to be sure, there are lively debates about exactly how to construe this.  Dao always remains wuwei and is never a deliberative agent with a will, an intention, a plan, and this is embracing-of-no-explicit-values is always the highest conceivable value.  But that fact itself may be described either as morally neutral or as morally good.  Many, from Hu Hong (胡宏1105年—1161年) to Wang Yangming (1472-1529), will continue to state outright that Dao is itself best described as beyond good and evil (forming the original nature of the human mind, which is itself therefore also without good and evil), but as grounding human goodness, and that only in this specific sense, and for this very reason, can it be called the highest good–which in my judgment is the more classical view.  Others, for example Zhu Xi, the consolidator of Neo-Confucian orthodoxy in the Song dynasty, will insist that this purposeless and valuelessness of Dao can after all be described as Good in itself, and indeed should be so described (albeit in a highly attenuated and qualified sense), since what issues directly from it can unambiguously be so identified.  But this is arguably more a rhetorical than a substantive shift; it is still the case that Dao is wuwei, and indeed even that this Good human nature is wuwei, while the role of human moral striving and evaluation is to deploy strenuous youwei to reconverge with the perfect wuwei of Dao and man’s original nature; it’s just that now this wuwei Dao is claimed to be best described as “Good.” This “best described” belongs to the realm of a performative ethical act: the human use of language itself, naming wuwei in one way rather than another, is part of the youwei process of continuing and completing it—a profoundly important Confucian point that can be traced all the way back to Mencius 7B24.  Indeed, we may view Zhu Xi’s insistence on the synonymity of the Wuji 無極 (the pivotless, the unbounded, the standardless) and the Taij 太極 (the Great Pivot, the Great Ultimate, the Great Standard), as an emphatic acknowledgement of the unchanged ultimacy of the indeterminate and non-normative in the very midst of ultimate normativity.  The justification for the rhetorical shift is not without important consequences, but it involves no alterations of the basic metaphysical situation.  The argument that informs it is that, given the fact that Goodness is what is uniquely able to reveal it, and it is the standard of Goodness, it is legitimate and indeed needful to describe this wuwei Dao as Good.    With this shift, we frame this metaphysical situation not as a Compensatory relationship between Heaven and Man, as in the classical Confucian case, but as an Emulative one.   Actually, however, what is distinctive about the Confucian case is the continuity between these two dimensions, youwei and wuwei, which allows a broad range of rhetorical redescriptions ranging from the Compensatory to the Emulative.  We will unpack this further below.

But what is to be noted even in the Confucian instances of Emulative framing, which makes human beings the uniquely privileged representative among existing beings of the nature of ultimate reality by virtue of resemblance rather than dissimilarity, is that it is to be carefully distinguished from the imago dei idea in God-centered traditions.  The latter asserts not only a specially exalted role for man, but an isomorphism between the mind of the creator and something about the human being (usually the human mind or spirit) alone among all creatures, which gives a special ontological status to human ideas and ideals as tapping into and accurately instantiating the ultimate source of the being of things via a close imaging or imitation of some kind.   The Confucian systems that do move in this Emulative direction, in contrast, satisfy the religious intent and psychological role of this idea, finding a unique kind of similarity between the human being and the ground of all being, but in entirely different ways.   What makes human beings special in the universe according to the orthodox Neo-Confucianism of Zhu Xi, for example, is not that they alone possess the image of the creator, or that they alone embody the numinous source of creation.  Every being embodies this indivisible coherence of Yin and Yang, the condition of possibility of the process of generation of beings as such.  Zhu Xi calls it Li 理, which is at once the Great Pivot (taiji 太極) between yin and yang, enabling the coherence of the cosmos as a whole, and the individual nature of each being, the specific coherence that makes each being what it is.  As such, it simultaneously serves as the ground of connection and of individuation of all distinct identities, enabling their coexistence and transformation, the balance of yin-yang which on the one hand centers and thereby sustains the cosmos as a whole, and on the other hand does so for each individual being, giving it its distinctive nature and character.  He insists that this Great Pivot qua Li is present in its entirety, not in part, in every particular being.  Each is able to come into being only through a unification of the contrasting forces of heaven and earth, to grow and transform by continually fostering and adjusting the generative balance between these forces according to that standard, and thereby to produce and reproduce beyond themselves.  All entities are thus endowed with the entirety of the Great Pivot–not a part of it, and not merely an image of it–as their own nature, Li qua human xing 性, which makes them what they are in particular.  Humans are unique only in that they have bodies in which this entire Great Pivot, the inmost nature of every being, can function with fewer obstructions and distortions than is the case for other creatures, in a more balanced, extensive and unimpeded way, a body that also allows them to increase the degree to which they do so, through their own moral effort.   Zhu Xi borrows the Buddhist image of the reflection of the moon in various bodies of water: the entire moon is visible in each of them, but in muddy water it is dulled, in choppy water it is scrambled, in wavy water it is undulating unstably—but in all cases it is there, and in all cases all of it, the entire round disc of the moon, is there. It is not a question of being endowed with it or not; it is not even a question of embodying all of it or merely part of it, a crescent or slice of it, for it is indivisible, it is coherence itself, and every being is thus the embodiment of the whole of it, not a part of it; it is a question of embodying all of it in a more or less biased, one-sided, indistinct or obstructed way.  All things high and low and good and bad necessarily exemplify it in its entirety, exist only as embodiments of this very coherence of Yin and Yang itself; the question is not whether they do so, but how they do so.  We will discuss Zhu Xi’s unpacking of this idea in greater detail below.   But I think it can be easily shown that a similar relation of the human to the rest of existence, mutatis mutandis, can be found also in other Confucian systems, whether of the more “idealist”-leaning stripe as with Wang Yangming (where the substance of mind is explicitly described as “neither good nor evil”—which is itself described as “the highest good”!), or the more “qi”-oriented, as with Zhang Zai and Wang Fuzhi.

Indeed, this continuity between the similarity and the dissimilarity between Heaven and Man, and the continuity between heaven, earth and man more generally, and from there to all creatures, is embedded already in the earliest Confucian ideas.  One route was what we saw above in the case of Confucius himself: the ideal man on the one hand must be at times dissimilar to Heaven in having biases and moral principles, but even in so doing, he does remain in continuity with the Heavenly in himself, and at the pinnacle of his cultivation will also resemble Heaven specifically in his eschewal of any explicit articulation of rules, commands, laws, or indeed any specific invocation of Heaven.   Normativity and non-normativity, value and valuelessness, will and will-lessness, must remain forever entwined.   Confucius wants to be like Heaven in not speaking at all—and he instantiates this Heavenly unbiasedness, this utter lack of definite norms or intentions, in his creative timeliness 時; he is most like Heaven when he says, “There is for me nothing definitely permissible or impermissible” (無可無不可  Analects 18:8); Heaven is at once the source of definiteness and rule and also the transcending of them, unified not in a cumulative whole but in the inseparability of alternate times, roles, situational responses, as Heaven (in the sense of the sky) has its four seasons but is not a cumulative higher unity of the four seasons; Heaven is the timely application of each season in turn, and the unobstructed transition from one to the other when appropriate, rather than a static totality of the four seasons resolved into a higher unity.  Heaven, the sky, is entirely vernal in the spring, entirely autumnal in the autumn; it doesn’t hold the other seasons in reserve somewhere outside the spring, but transforms entirely into the spring sky, which precisely as such has the power to then transform entirely into the summer sky when the time comes to do so.   Neither spring, nor summer, nor autumn, nor winter, nor a separate summative totality of all four, is “definitely permissible or impermissible.”   Even the “ability of each to transform in a timely manner entirely into the appropriate other,” this principle of the totality, does not stand apart from the instantiations as their separate controller, but is rather another name for the coherence of each season being precisely the season that it is, its internal coherence as its coherence with the others that precede and follow it (even as developed in the allegedly transcendent notion of Li in Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucianism, as we shall see shortly).   This is the ethical ideal embodied in Confucius, his participation in the creative process of Heaven.   This is still seen as entailing the generation of desired ethical results, but as we’ve seen in the “Xicizhuan” passage just quoted, the anti-control atheism at the heart of the tradition incentivizes the creation of explanations of this value as a continuation of a Wertfrei natural process, rather than an emulation of an eternal value.   By always keeping one foot beyond bias, as Heaven is, with nothing permissible or impermissible, one continues the work of Heaven even in one’s dissimilarity with Heaven–i.e., in one’s morality, in the specific bias for this continuation which is called the Good, the human bias for the good over the evil.   This ingenious asymmetry appears as a distinctive stance of the tradition again and again throughout its history.  We can thus begin to see the significance of the Confucian tradition’s consistent resistance to the idea of an ultimacy of a divine personality exerting intentional control: it is symptomatic of an ethical structure that resists the ultimacy of intentional control and exclusion in general, and with it the ultimacy of the disjunction and discontinuity of being and of values that intentional control entails.  Precisely because the intentional is not ultimate, the continuity between the intentional and the nonintentional, between the biased and the unbiased, is ensured.  Unlike ultimate purposivity, which strives to exclude purposelessness, ultimate purposelessness enables both purpose and purposelessness–another example of the Great Asymmetry discussed in Part One of this book.

The same problem is approached in another way in what is generally described as the central issue in the first generations of Confucian theory after Confucius himself, the conflict between Mencius and Xunzi over human nature.   This is not well-described simply as a crude contrast between the alleged views that human nature “is good” and that it “is bad.”   Rather, the issue is how best to characterize the relation between human moral sentiments and social values on the one hand and the non-moral spontaneities of affect and desire from which they can sometimes emerge on the other.  The question is how best to describe both the continuities and discontinuities between these.  Both assume that the youwei of deliberate moral effort is both preceded by and in some manner succeeded by the wuwei of spontaneity.  On the basis of a prior spontaneity acquired and operating without effort, one starts out making an effort, and ends up internalizing the moral practice to the point of making it effortless.  The model is of learning a skill: on the basis of some measure of innate ability found in one’s possession but not acquired by plan or effort, one effortfully practices until one gets good at it and it becomes effortless.  Both Mencius and Xunzi see some form of effortlessness and non-deliberation as the cosmic condition that precedes the taking up of moral effort, both within and outside of the human self.  The question is how precisely to conceive the relation between 1) the prior effortlessness, 2) the effort, and 3) the achieved effortlessness at the end.   In Xunzi’s case, we begin with an unruly set of spontaneous emotions and desires which must be deliberately organized, trained, pruned and even opposed—not for the sake of some abstract good posited independently by this organizing and opposing deliberative effort, however, but only to satisfy those very spontaneous desires more efficiently:

 

Whence does ritual emerge?  I say: humans are born having desires, and if their desires are not satisfied, they cannot but seek to satisfy them.  If they seek without any measures or limits, they cannot but get into conflict with one another.   Because of conflict there is chaos, and because of chaos there is impoverishment and lack [of things to satisfy the desires].   The former kings hated his chaos, and thus created ritual norms to divide things among them, so as to nurture their desires and provide what they sought, causing their desires to never run out of the things they want, and things to never be depleted by desires, so that the two support each other and can long be sustained.   This is where ritual comes from.[6]

 

 

The desires that stand as the final arbiter of good are themselves spontaneous and subject to no further inquiry: they are simply given facts.    The chaos among these desires and emotions in their original state puts them at odds with one another, making their satisfaction minimal unless they are organized by some intervention—tried and tested forms of social organization that must be deliberately applied, that allow for a division of social labor, which in turns allows for social cohesion, which in turn allows for the strength that allows human beings to have greater power over their surroundings and thus to satisfy their desires more effectively—given them dominance over other creatures even though naturally they are slower than horses and weaker than oxen.[7]  Though Xunzi must be classified as a Compensatory Atheist, he differs from those in the post Noûs as Arché world in a decisive and very revealing way: for them, we are to go from a purposeless cosmos to a fully purposive humanity, from wuwei to youwei, whereas Xunzi still envisions an internalization of these trained behaviors that amount to effortless virtuosity at the end of the process, where no intentional striving is any longer needed.     We go from wuwei through youwei to a newly accomplished wuwei, which is even more effortless and intentionless than the initial state, because it has been freed of the initial conflicts that had led to the need for intentional intervention in the first place.  Xunzi tells us, “The sage indulges his desires and embraces all his dispositions, and yet whatever he thereby produces simply ends up well-ordered.  What forcing of himself could there then be for him?  What will-power to endure?  What precariousness?  Thus the humane person’s practice of Dao is without any doing (wuwei), and the sage’s practice of Dao is without any forcing himself.”[8] The initial wuwei of spontaneous human nature is described as odious because its desires are chaotic, self-conflicted, and must be strenuously modified in order to reach the final wuwei, which however accomplishes precisely the satisfaction of the desires of the initial wuwei phase, and is again freed of any need for effort, forcing oneself, will-power, intention.   And yet, we notice, Xunzi here specifies that the sage embraces all his dispositions 兼其情.  Because the principle of value is completely immanent to the desires themselves, the only standard is a quantitative or mereological one: more desires fulfilled is better, less is worse, because “better” just means “fulfilling more desires.”    As he puts it,

Know that ritual principles and decorous order are the way to nurture one’s desirous dispositions. Thus if a person has his eyes only on living, he is sure to die. If a person has his eyes only on benefiting himself, he is sure to be harmed. If a person is only lazy and sluggish, taking these as means to attain safety, he is sure to be endangered. If finds joy only in the pleasures of his dispositions, he is sure to be destroyed. Thus if a person concentrates and unifies himself with ritual principles, he will attain both [i.e., both ritual principles and the pleasure of the dispositions]. If he concentrates and unifies himself with the inborn dispositions, he will lose both. Thus the Confucians are those who cause people to gain both, and the Mohists are those who cause people to lose both.”[9]

What makes restraint of certain desires and the development of others good, the only standard, is that the former prevent the satisfaction of both, while the latter enable it.  Here we have a second-order application of the Great Asymmetry, to great effect: just as ultimate purposelessness is to be preferred to ultimate purpose because it enables both purposivity and purposelessness, here the same criterion is applied to the selection of which purposes (i.e., desires) are to be prioritized: those the preference for which is a merely temporary means to overcoming the preference, those that enable the satisfaction of both themselves and what they initially have to temporarily exclude, are the ones to be preferred.   A preference for desires whose satisfaction prevents the satisfaction of the unpreferred desires—i.e., the sensory satisfactions—is what must be (temporarily) discouraged.  Note the contrast to the ultimacy of moral dualism, mutual exclusivity and dichotomization of the desired and the undesired (i.e., so-called good and evil) that results from making purpose ultimate, i.e., monotheism on the basis of Noûs as Arché.

Although Mencius, in contrast, insists on calling human nature good, we find that for him this same quantitative or mereological standard is the only criterion of value by which to make this claim: “good” means what satisfies some desire, and the more desires are satisfied by something, the more “good” that thing is judged to be.  This is the hallmark of atheist thinking that we have seen again and again, as stated most explicitly by Spinoza: we do not desire something because it is good, but rather call if good because we desire it–and that desire neither has nor requires further justification.  Mencius too says this explicitly, when asked what he means by “good”: “Whatever can be desired is called good.”  可欲之謂善   But as with all the great atheist mystics, this is not the end of the matter; given this immanent standard, the next question will again be how to adjust and combine all these diverse desires in such a way as to maximize the satisfaction of as many of them as possible.   Mencius continues: “Whatever can be desired is called good.  To possess it [i.e., something desired, a “good”] truly in oneself is called being genuine.   To be suffused and filled with this it [i.e., that good as genuinely possessed in oneself] is called beauty.  To be filled with it to the point where it radiates outward is called greatness.   When this greatness is such that it transforms others, it is called sageliness.  When this sageliness is beyond comprehension it is called divine.” (7B25)[10]  The question is always the extent of influence of the desirable thing, the way it affects the things around it, both other persons and the other dispositions in the person.   Among the many desires and their concomitant objects of those desires (desired states or attributes) found given in the human being, some of them are able to be appropriated in the self and expanded in such a way as to fill the person, to radiate their influence outwardly, to transform other desires and desired goods of that human being as well as other human beings in their surroundings.   Thus when Mencius says human nature is good, he means by this only that a certain subset of the spontaneous unplanned unmotivated tendencies and responses human beings are born with, which arise without deliberation or choice or will, can, under certain conditions, be deliberately selected out, cared for, cultivated, nourished and grown to become what are later identified as full moral virtues—virtues that are considered “good” only because they are what can, when so developed, transform otherwise conflictual desires and desirers into harmony with one another, to maximally satisfy all of them.  These innate starting points are not things one tries to do; they are rather things one cannot stop oneself from doing even if one tries, e.g., feeling a twinge of discomfort when seeing an infant about to fall into a well, even when there is no good reason to do so, even if one may have great reasons not to feel it, even when one doesn’t want or will to feel it, even if one is at the same time also feeling many other, contrary things about it.  Looking back from the accomplished moral virtues, a continuity with that subset of spontaneous human responses can be traced, which provides a guideline for which among the mass of spontaneous responses to the world are thus to be singled out for cultivation.   The deliberate activity is thus again given a mediating role: its function is to select and care for certain spontaneous aspects of the self and the world, thus deprioritizing other spontaneous impulses equally inborn and spontaneous in human beings.   All of these spontaneous impulses, those chosen to be nourished as seeds of morality and those demoted and starved out or at least subordinated in this process, are from Heaven, are extensions of the spontaneity of Heaven.  The youwei human role of the sage is to select out some of these spontaneous processes and get into the habit of describing and regarding only these as xing, i.e., “inborn human nature” insofar as it is considered as the basis of further moral development, without losing sight of the fact that strictly speaking all of the spontaneous non-deliberative processes, including sensory desires of the mouth liking flavors and the body liking comfort, are equally human nature, equally xing:

 

Mencius said: “The mouth’s relation to flavors, the eye’s to forms, the ear’s to sounds, the nose’s to scents, the four limbs to ease and comfort—these are all human nature, [xing 性, the inborn human nature that can serve as the basis of moral cultivation],  but since in these there is also something of the fated [ming 命, mere neutral givenness of what human effort cannot change], the noble man does not call them human nature.   The relation of humankindness to the relationship of father and son, of righteousness to the relationship of ruler and servant, of ritual to the relationship of host and guest, of wisdom to the worthy, of the sage to the way of Heaven—these are all fated (ming), but since in these there is also  something of the nature (xing), the noble man does not call them fate. (7B24).[11]

 

Both physical hedonic pleasures and interpersonally interactive impulses (“ethical” desires) are spontaneous, and Mencius tells us explicitly that, strictly speaking, both are mere neutral givens (what he calls ming 命—just the way things are, conditions we are stuck with and cannot change, with no particular moral meaning) and both are also the distinctively human nature that can be developed into sagehood (which he calls xing).  But he also tells us explicitly that the noble person calls the former ming and the latter xing, in spite of the fact that each is both: this is a morally significant act of naming and a concomitant way of regarding them that begins the process of cultivation, which will lie in prioritizing, nourishing and clearing the way for the full growth of these tendencies—and also, again, as we’ll see in the moment, even the full flourishing of those spontaneous tendencies that are initially not prioritized.  At the other end of the process, the Heaven-like spontaneity is to be recovered in the accomplished moral virtues themselves, in their non-deliberate operation, in the effortless virtuous behavior of sages and the unpremeditated responses that people will have to that behavior, like the stars rotating around the North Star in the Analects.  As Mencius says of the sage-king Shun, again in line with Xunzi’s later characterization of sagehood quoted above, “His activity proceeded from humaneness and righteousness—he did not put humaneness and righteousness into practice.”   由仁義行，非行仁義也  That is, he did not deliberately try to be humane and righteous; his activity followed from them without even having to know what they were as objects or goals.  Here too we go from wuwei through youwei to accomplished wuwei.

The presence of these spontaneous inclinations in the human being is in some sense due to Heaven.  If Heaven were thought of here as deliberate, and had deliberately implanted these spontaneous inclinations in man as part of Its own deliberate plan, then we would have (divine) deliberate activity leading to (human) spontaneous activity, supplemented by further (human) deliberate activity—which then, oddly, is consummated not in what would be maximally godlike (i.e., deliberate) activity, but instead in (ungodly) spontaneous virtue.   The result would be a mix of Compensatory and Emulative Theism, with the former put in the ultimate position (Heaven alone has the prerogative of deliberate activity, which is the true value, while man must know his place and strive to be as unlike Heaven as possible, to be merely wuwei, deploying the presumptuous prerogative of divine youwei only as a temporary means to that end!).   It seems quite clear, however, that Mencius places ultimate value on wuwei, as Confucius did.   It lies at both the beginning and end of the process: Heaven does not speak, does not act deliberately, and its efficacy in ensuring that mankind has these particular spontaneous inclinations is an outgrowth of its own spontaneous growths and actions, not a deliberate choice or bestowal with a moral intent: man’s spontaneous goodness is in continuity with some aspect of Heaven’s own spontaneity.   When final sagely spontaneity is again attained, one has come to resemble Heaven all the more.

Hence Mencius says, “To fully plumb one’s own mind is to know one’s Nature, and to fully plumb one’s Nature is to know Heaven.  Thus by preserving our own minds and nourishing our own natures, we serve Heaven.   Then it makes no difference whether we live long or die young.  We cultivate ourselves and await either outcome, thus establishing ourselves in our destinies.”  (7A1)[12]   To know the spontaneity in oneself is to know heaven, which is a way to preserve and nourish specifically those spontaneous sprouts of that nature that are capable of becoming the basis of the deliberate moral mind—meaning specifically the four spontaneous sprouts of humaneness, ritual respect, righteousness and wisdom selected out from all that spontaneity as what we find upon reflection we truly want, because they can nourish the spontaneity as a whole, including the demoted and deprioritized parts.  Here again we find the mereological or quantitative immanent standard, and no other standard: the only goal is to nourish all the spontaneous parts:

 

The relation we human beings have to our own bodies is to love and cherish every part of it.   Because we love and cherish every part of it, we nourish every part of it.  Since there is not so much as an inch of our own skin that we do not love, there is not so much as an inch of our skin that we do not endeavor to nourish.  In examining what is good or not good, how could there be anything other than this?   It is just a matter of how we choose to apply it to ourselves.   Some parts of our body are nobler than others, some are of greater scope and some of smaller.   We must not harm the greater for the sake of the lesser, the nobler for the sake of the ignoble.  Those who nourish the lesser parts of themselves are lesser men, those who nourish the greater part of themselves are greater men.    Imagine a gardener who neglects his lumber trees and evergreens to nourish his bramble bushes—he would be an ignoble gardener indeed.  A man who nourishes his finger and thereby loses his shoulder and back, without realizing it, has made of himself a wretched invalid.   The reason we look down on those who prioritize only eating and drinking is that they lose the greater for the sake of the lesser.  But if we can eat and drink without losing the other, how could the mouth and stomach be considered equal to merely an inch of skin [which we also love and nourish]? (6A14) [13]

 

That last line means that, since we also love nourish even the inch of skin, how much more so should we love and nourish the mouth and stomach, which are nobler and of larger scope—as long as we can do so without causing harm to parts of the body that are still greater, like the heart, which is an organ that just wants to feel interpersonal ethical desires and satisfy itself with the interpersonal ethical satisfactions, and further to prioritize its choices accordingly, through thinking and choosing—which is also just something one of the organs of the human body, the heart, desires to do. The goal of our deliberate choice and effort is to nourish the spontaneous body, the whole self, in all its parts with all their spontaneous desires, physical, mental and moral.  The reason we prioritize some over others is that some promote this very goal of nourishing all, while others obstruct it: the criterion by which we should decide which plants are more valuable seems to have to do with the tendency of some of them, the bramble bushes, to overgrow and obstruct the nourishment of the others.  Ideally, we want all the plants to thrive, but to do this we must deprioritize those that are prone to weedlike overgrowth.  The favoring of one group of spontaneous wuwei behaviors over the other is done only because the non-favoring that is the real goal can only be accomplished by a temporary favoring, can only be done by favoring those among these spontaneous wuwei interactions with the world that are themselves non-obstructive of the development of the others spontaneous parts of the self.  The spontaneous Four Sprouts of commiseration, embarrassment, yielding, and preferential distinction-making are selected out from among all the spontaneous wuwei activities of the human being because they can be developed into Humaneness, Righteousness, Ritual and Wisdom, respectively; they are thus prioritized and called xing 性, while the mouth’s preference for flavors, the body’s preference for comfort and so on are deprioritized and called ming 命 (although we must also remember that strictly speaking all of them are really both xing and ming).  The role of youwei here is to select out from among the wuwei aspects of the human being those that will ultimately maximize all the wuwei aspects. The point is made more explicitly in the second example: the reason we should nourish the shoulder rather than the finger is that if we lose the shoulder we lose the finger too.    The criterion of goodness is simply inclusiveness.  “In examining what is good or not good, how could there be anything other than this?”  We must temporarily prioritize deliberate thought and moral choice to facilitate this, by following the mind, the “greater” part, rather than the eyes and ears, which are led along by things because they are obstructed by those things, giving them limited scope: they are incapable of the inclusiveness of concern of the thinking mind.  As long as we first establish the priority of the greater, the lesser cannot undermine it.   (6A15)  All of those spontaneous process can be transformed by the cultivation of the narrow range of them that are to be thus singled out as the basis of development.  Though some are initially favored over others, this is not the final goal, quite the contrary: the goal is not to favor some over others, but to “equally love all parts” of the spontaneous self.  Here we have another application of the Great Asymmetry: one side (the virtues) is inclusive, and the other (the hedonist desires) is exclusive—and thus a temporary exclusive preference must be made for the inclusive, but only to reach the inclusion also of the elements that, if prioritized and made ultimate, would have led to the ultimate exclusion of the other.  The goal is to have both virtues and hedonist enjoyments; prioritizing the virtues allows this, for it will eventually include also the hedonist enjoyments; the prioritization of the hedonist enjoyments, on the other hand, will end up foreclosing the virtues completely.   As in Xunzi, the goal is to “attain both,” and the claim is that what makes the so-called moral virtues moral at all, the reason they are singled out from among all the dispositions for special development, is precisely and only their ability to do this. As in Xunzi, the direct indulgence in the “smaller” desires, the hedonistic ones, is claimed to lead to loss of both hedonistic and moral satisfactions, while the nourishment of the “greater” ones, the moral ones, leads to the satisfaction of both.  The “greater/smaller” language here is again a way of talking about relative inclusiveness and exclusiveness, with the goal of maximal inclusiveness, achieved through the temporary narrowing by means of choice, selection, prioritization.   The “noble and base” language has no other content, no standard independent of this “greatness”; nobler is more inclusive, baser is less so.   Higher rank means wider scope of engagement and influence, lower means narrower, just as in the ideal Confucian social hierarchy of the day.   The highest is what has the widest jurisdiction.  Here Mencius makes clear that the attribution of nobility is to be consequent to the greater breadth of influence, not the other way around.   One is exalted because one’s influence is broad; one is not given broad influence because of one’s prior exalted rank.  Mencius applies the same standard when discussing the succession of the sage kings Yao and Shun  (5A5), and also, most trenchantly, when defining what it is to be a sage, as we saw above: 充實而有光輝之謂大，大而化之之謂聖  “To be filled with it [i.e., the desired, the good] to the point where it radiates outward is called greatness.   When this greatness is such that it transforms others, it is called sageliness.” (7B25)

To nourish that total spontaneity of our body and mind, which is wuwei as Heaven is wuwei, is “to serve Heaven,” without any interest in meeting any externally imposed standard meant to maximize anything other than this total spontaneity itself, and without interest in the control of external events or in punishment and reward.   That spontaneity is our contact with Heaven, and that part of it that can grow into goodness—i.e., into what can maximize the spontaneous flourishing of all parts of the Heavenly, including those not initially to be labeled “the greater and nobler parts,” i.e., including every inch of skin and the appetites of mouth and belly and so on–is the only revelation of any basis of goodness in Heaven, with which it is in constant continuity.  Least of all is Heaven anything like Noûs, as Socrates describes it in the Phaedo: intelligently arranging things in order to attain its good purpose, choosing the good over the bad through its ability to think or be thought-like.   In fact, Mencius tells us explicitly that “thinking,” si 思 –a term which implies also seeking and choosing—is exactly what distinguishes Man from Heaven.  Heaven does not think, it is rather Man who has to think.  We cannot direct indulge in the spontaneous wuwei desires of every part of the body, including both the moral sprouts and the sensory pleasures, though the satisfaction of all of them is our ultimate goal: there must be a temporary intervention of youwei which chooses among these wuwei elements, temporarily prioritizing some of them so as to fulfil all of them.   None must be allowed to starve out or obstruct the others. Prioritizing among these desires, making choices among them so as to maximize the satisfaction of as many of them as possible, is the role of thinking.   Asked why some people follow the greater parts and some follow the lesser parts, Mencius said, “The organs of eye and ear do not think, and thus are obstructed by their involvement with things.  One unthinking thing interacts with another, which simply draws it along.  The role of the heart-mind is thinking; by thinking it gets it, by failing to think it loses it.  This is what Heaven has endowed us with, so as to give priority to the greater, so that the lesser cannot snatch it away.”[14]  The initial hedonic interactions of the senses with things, though these desirous interactions are fully wuwei like Heaven just as the ethical desires of the heart are, cannot be followed because the lesser among them will get in the way of the greater; the problem is with obstruction by things, narrowness of engagement, neglect of the whole array of Heavenly spontaneity.  Thinking, youwei, must intervene by selecting the spontaneous growths of greater scope and not allowing the lesser spontaneous growths (overgrowing shrubs) to starve them out.   Man’s role is thus initially to be youwei, to think, to choose, to seek, to prioritize.  But what he thinks about and seeks and chooses is how to be more like Heaven precisely in its non-seeking, non-choosing, non-thinking:

 

If those in lower ranks have no way of getting through to those with power in higher ranks, the people can never be put in good order.   There is a way to get through to those in positions of higher ranks: one who is not trustworthy with his own friends of equal rank will not be able to get through to those of higher rank.  There is a way to gain the trust of one’s friends: if one fails to please one’s parents in serving them, one will not be trusted by one’s friends.  There is a way to please one’s parents: if in looking into oneself one finds oneself duplicitous, not integrated into a complete whole, that is, if one is unintegrated and insincere (bucheng 不誠), one will be unable to please one’s parents.  There is a way to become sincerely free of duplicity: if one does not understand what is good [i.e., what one truly wants, integrating all one’s desires], one cannot become integrated and sincere.  Thus being integrated and sincere (chengzhe 誠者), free of all duplicity, is the way of heaven; thinking how to become free of duplicity, to be integrated and sincere (sichengzhe 思誠者) is the way of man.   There has never been someone who is perfectly free of duplicity, completely integrated and sincere who fails to move others, and someone who is completely duplicitous, unintegrated and insincere can never move others at all.  (4B12)

 

What is meant by being free of duplicity, being “integrated and sincere”?  We are talking here about ways in which various levels of a structure interact and influence one another.   The assumption is that some of these have more power and some have less, some have more influence on their surrounding members and some have less: these are the “higher” and the “lower” respectively.   The primary example is a human society or organization.   Mencius is here describing his ideal of spontaneous organization: how to get the parts of this nested hierarchical structure to interact harmoniously but without coercion: how to get the various levels to interact, to maximize the satisfaction of the desires of all of them.   He thinks it has something to do with there being no conflicts among them, no being of two minds, no duplicity—the achievement of a kind of “integration and sincerity”: the term means the consistency of all the parts to form a complete whole (punning on cheng 成) so there is no conflict or mutual obstruction between its various parts, which is expressed in the behavior of “sincerity,” i.e., the consistency of one’s inner intentions and external words and actions.  Because of this lack of inner conflict and ulterior motive, the perfectly sincere is effortless, wuwei.    Just as we saw in the ritual effortlessness of Confucius and his Heaven, this effortless sincerity in particular agents is what makes other agents respond to them in a way that is equivalent to a non-controlling, non-coercive form of order, allegedly to the benefit and satisfaction of both parties.   This is extended to a model for how the observed order of the cosmos comes about—things like the movements of the heavenly bodies and the turning of the seasons.   Parallel to the structure we saw in the key “Xicizhuan” passage discussed above, Mencius can be read as combining a notion of a non-moral Heaven with a Heaven-derived internal imperative for humans to be moral, as Franklin Perkins has convincingly shown: it may be that the only will of Heaven is for each thing to follow its own nature, which in the case of humans alone is to strive to be moral and social, without implying that Heaven’s own global intentions are for a moral or harmonious cosmos that in any way accords with those values; moral values are provided by Heaven for human behavior alone, though Heaven’s cosmos as a whole may well be amoral.  Human values can still be rooted in a Heavenly imperative without that implying that Heaven has any moral intentions for the cosmos considered globally, and without implying that It makes any promise that events in the universe will turn out in a way that is morally satisfying to those Heaven-instilled moral values rightfully embraced and developed by humans.[15]

A cruder reading, regrettably still much in evidence in both Chinese and English secondary works on this thinker, though in my view transparently twisting the text toward conceptions derived from modern models rooted in Noûs as Arché assumptions, alleges that Mencius views the working of the cosmos as exemplifying some sort of value that bears a closer relation to human values.  But even if we adopt this cruder reading, it will have to be one that does not entail precise moral justice: as we saw in Mencius 7A1 above, a morally exemplar person cannot expect Heaven to reward him, even when he has realized his own Heavenly nature to the utmost.   The external operation of Heaven is not humanly moral in that sense.   At most, as in the “Xicizhuan” passage already cited, the human values can be understood as a continuation and extension of the value-free natural operations of the seasons and the sky as the preconditions of life, which can be read retrospectively as exemplars of a sort of efficacy that has values to human beings, once human beings embrace values, which is something they must do in accordance with their particular Heaven-endowed nature, though these values are not shared by Heaven itself.  The Heaven-endowed nature of humans involves moral values; the Heaven-endowed nature of fish involves swimming.  But this does not imply that Heaven itself either swims or has moral values.

The operations of Heaven and the rough-and-ready approximate cosmic ordering it accomplishes are enough to produce life and humans, and these are the preconditions of value.   These operations too go smoothly and well because of a kind of “sincerity” in the sense of reliability, a perdurance through time made possible because it requires no special effort.  This is what makes it an order that emerges not as the result of anyone controlling or commanding anyone else, but through spontaneous response of one member to another.   But sincerity is precisely effortlessness.  It is the lack of any interior division or any external ulterior motive, equally describable as willing with all one’s being and not willing.   But willing with all one’s being, as we saw in Spinoza, Nietzsche, Emerson above, is just being exactly what one is without the intervention of a separate controlling executive function of Noûs.   The word for this, which Heaven has and Man has to think about obtaining, is cheng, 誠which means “trueness” or “sincerity” or “sustainability,” or “reliability,” with an implication, writ large in the composition of the character, of integration, coherence, consistency.   The idea is that when one’s innermost spontaneous desires and commitments, including both the physical and the ethical, are all of a piece with each other and with one’s outer words and behaviors, one’s words and actions are considered “sincere” and “true to oneself,” and thus likely to be sustainable without effort.   It takes effort to pretend, or to maintain a division within oneself, or to recall which of the various spontaneous aspects of the self are to be allowed to show.  If one is integrated and consistent, coherent within and without, one need not worry about what to do or say, all of it will express the needed content, effortlessly.   This inner coherence or consistency in turn is what has efficacy in producing spontaneous effects in the world.  In the human sphere, sincere behavior is believed by Confucians to “move” others without having to coerce them, and Mencius is clearly claiming that this is in fact the model we should apply when we try to think about how Heaven gets things done.   It doesn’t think, and it moves others just by means of the inner consistency and integration, which are precisely what makes thinking and seeking and choosing unnecessary for it.  The expanded parallel passage in the “Zhongyong” is even clearer on the kind of pre-human value we are entitled to envision here:

 

…There is a way to make oneself integrated and sincere: if one does not understand what is good, one cannot become integrated and sincere.   Being integrated and sincere (chengzhe 誠者) is the way of Heaven; making oneself integrated and sincere (chengzhizhe 誠之者) is the way of man.   To be integrated and sincere means to make no effort and yet hit the mark, to take no thought and yet get it done, ambling at ease on the Way of the Mean (chengzhe bumian er zhong, bu si er de, congrong zhongdao 誠者不勉而中，不思而得，從容中道 ).   Thus is the sage.   To make oneself integrated and sincere, in contrast, is to choose the good and firmly hold to it  (zeshan er guzhi zhizhe ye 擇善而固執之者也), to broadly study it, acutely investigate it, carefully contemplate it, clearly discern it, deeply practice it.

 

Effortlessness is the way of Heaven.   Effort, choice, resolution, decision of the best course of action, preference for the good as an object to be pursued, willing one thing rather than another—that is man’s job.   Noûs is not Arché, is not of Heaven, is precisely what Heaven lacks and has no need of.   Noûs is secondary, derivative, precisely what is peculiar to man’s role.   The Mencian form of Confucianism seeks to find that spontaneity in oneself, that subset of spontaneous impulses that are capable of “making oneself sincere,” those that, if chosen and held to and cultivated above all the others, can in turn be used to spontaneously integrate both all those other spontaneous desires and inclinations of the self into consistency with themselves (again see Mencius 5A14-15, where Mencius describes this as precisely si,思， deliberative thought, the particular role given to man’s mind in contrast to the thoughtlessness of Heaven) and beyond that moving into alignment, i.e., integrating, the community spontaneously around oneself.    This is the hump that Aristotle approaches but cannot get over with his observation that “Craft does not deliberate.”   In Greece, there was no way to go forward from here except to read this as some sort of crypto-Noûs, for no other metaphor of coordination and consistency and optimizations was available; Aristotle has to imagine this non-deliberative coordination, theoria, as ultra-Noûs, as uberpurposive.   In Confucianism, in contrast, the metaphor is not purposive planning, but “sincerity,” immediate uninterrupted impulse and integration, “non-doubleness” 不貳 (to use another striking formulation from the “Zhongyong”), unimpeded and uninterrupted process going directly to its consequence, undisturbed by ulterior intent.   Intelligence and choice and moral intent are not the ultimate source of coordination.  Rather, intelligence and choice and moral intent are secondary remedies to a disturbance in sincerity caused by selectivity and narrowness–in this case, the narrowing of spontaneity into the obscuration of the sense desires, just what we saw described by Mencius as “thing (sense organ) interacting with thing (external object) and merely being led along by it” (物交物，則引之而已矣5A15), of prioritized “food and drink,” the “smaller” aspects of the human bodymind spontaneity.  Though all are beloved, these smaller aspects of spontaneity narrow the breadth of the total spontaneity of body and mind by drowning out other aspects of that all-equally-beloved spontaneity.   Heaven is thus the opposite of Noûs, and it is the non- Noûs like aspects of ourselves that we are to locate and prioritize, using our own Noûs, and which we should then treat in such a way that they result in a total spontaneous integrated system that is again effortless like Heaven, effective in moving all things spontaneously and without coercion as Heaven does.   Non- Noûs to Noûs to non- Noûs: Noûs is not Arché, is not ultimate, is rather merely a means to get back to the real ultimate, the lack of any deliberate values or purposes from which all value and being flow: Heaven as effortless, as unthinking, as unchoosing, as non-Noûs.

This does not require us to deny that Mencius is sometimes still willing to at least rhetorically grant Heaven a kind of intentionality, in setting the general trend of macrolevel human events (e.g., when a true king will appear and order will come to the world, Mencius 7B36) and in selecting out human beings (like Mencius himself!) for special tasks in promoting its ends and training them with special hardships (Mencius 6B14), though he does deny its just management of the outcome such a chosen or virtuous individual encounters, his success or failure, his survival or demise (7A1).   Assuming for the sake of argument that these few passing remarks are meant literally and in earnest, which their marginal position in his total discourse suggests they likely are not, they must be understood in the context of the ultimacy of spontaneity that characterizes Heaven’s more direct manifestation within the nature of Man, this Inner Coherence or Sincerity that achieves effortlessly and without intent the very things that man must strive to achieve.   As we have stressed repeatedly in this book, ultimate purposelessness does not exclude the emergence of purpose and intent, but rather serves as its basis.   When the above passage states that Heaven “hits the mark” or “gets it done,” there is certainly an implication that what Heaven, or the spontaneous Heavenly in man, accomplishes without intention is something we can legitimately regard as having humanly-recognizable value, rather than a chaos that leads to nothing of value.   What is this value?   Again, the tradition settles on the answer cited above from the “Xicizhuan”: it is the continued process of generation through the effortlessly balanced interaction of yin and yang, cosmic process that begins the production of things through sexual reproduction of male and female and agricultural rhythms of hot and cold and light and dark, not characterized as good in itself, and not guided by any intention, but a thread to be picked up which gets the ball of existence rolling and is ex post facto taken as a standard of the good in that human intentions seek to enhance, prolong and continue it through their efforts.   It is that process of forming coherent, sustainable (often but not exclusively “living”—see below!) wholes, through quasi-sexual attraction and quasi-atmospheric teeter-tottering balance around a pivot like the light and dark of day and night and the warmth and coolness of spring and autumn, the undirected mutual grouping of opposites around a center through which they related to and reproductively link to each other, rather than through intentional command or coercion or obedience.   Like the “law of averages” discussed in Part 1 of this book, this balance is regarded not as a result of a deliberate preference for any one outcome but rather precisely by an unbiased allowing of all outcomes, as a circle is the statistically likely outcome of a spreading outward on a flat surface as long as no other tilt or torque or friction intervenes.   It is bias, choice, preference which on the contrary would disturb this spontaneous general tendency to balance.  The intentional aspect of Mencius’s Heaven is itself one extension of this pre-intentional process, one to which he grants an authoritative role to be sure, but which is itself rooted in a deeper level of spontaneity from which it gets its real value, the unintentional purposeless “Sincerity” or “Integrity” or “Realness” which is in Heaven more than Heaven itself, which is more profoundly Heavenlike than the intentional, knowing part of Heaven, to the extent that there is one for Mencius at all.

It is certainly true that in this case the emergent personality deriving from the substratum of the unintentional is emphatically singular.   But here too, as I have argued at length elsewhere, the sort of singularity at play in this conception is not a dismissal of diversity but a coherence of one-and-many: the model in play is of summative organization and continuity, in this case of ghosts and spirits and rulers and populi which are brought into the orbit of Heaven’s activity, forming a continuity with it, expressing it.   Heaven’s Sincerity is at the center of this system of reciprocities, but is also present as all its expressions.   Heaven is both personal and impersonal, both intentional and unintentional—like “Hollywood,” like “Washington.”   The sage too is both personal and impersonal, both intentional and unintentional, both youwei and wuwei.

We can imagine a theological rejoinder on this basis: since we would not therefore say that the sage is not a person, why should we say that Heaven is not a person?  And indeed, we do not say so.  We say rather that, for early Confucianism, Heaven is both personal and impersonal, and the same is true for the sage.  The fact that this is even possible is indeed our point.   Personality as ultimate (absolutized personality, not personality per se) excludes impersonality, just as purpose as ultimate excludes purposelessness, which is why the sometimes-attempted theological concept of God as both personal and impersonal shipwrecks on the ultimacy of personality.  Where thinkers in the monotheist traditions have attempted to situate the personhood of God on the basis of a deeper nonpersonal essence (Pseudo-Dionysius, Eckhart, Boehme, the Schelling of the Essay on Human Freedom of 1809 onward, where the personal God must make himself exist by arising from an eternally prior impersonal ground that remains forever within himself), they have risked Plotinian heresy, because here “personal” equates to “purposive,” “good-seeking,” “intelligent,” Noûs, which defines whatever is not its purpose as ipso facto evil.   Schelling is perhaps the bravest of those who attempt to connect all the dots here, requiring a daring redefinition of evil which, however, does not really escape the basic contours of his tradition: evil ends up still meaning free-will disobeying God’s will in favor of its own will.   That is not the case in Mencius no matter how singular and how personal his Heaven may be.  For here, both Heaven and sage are structured in the typically atheist way: combinations of purposive and purposelessness, of personhood and impersonality, of conscious willing and will-lessness, where the latter of each pair is always the more ultimate in both generative power and value.

Much more straightforward but not radically different is the full Compensatory Atheism of Xunzi’s “Tianlun” 天論, rejecting any intentional aspect of Heaven altogether.  Here too man fulfills his role in the triad through his specifically human and non-Heavenlike character, i.e., precisely through his purposive intentionality and effort:

 

To accomplish without action, to attain without seeking: this is what is called the work of Heaven.  Although it is something deep, man need apply no thought to it; although it is vast, man need apply no skill to it; although it is something precise, it does not bear the application of any investigation.  This is called not competing with Heaven’s work.  Heaven has its times, earth has its resources, man has his governing.  This is what allows him to form a triad with them.  To try to form a triad with them while giving up that by which one forms a triad is just a confusion.^[16]

 

The difference is that here it is not spontaneity alone that has value; as in Xunzi’s famous “Human Nature is Odious” chapter, value comes from deliberate activity, from control, from purposive control in shaping things towards an end.   This is the shared view of the Emulative Theist, the Compensatory Theist and the Compensatory Atheist generally.   But even here, as already noted, this deliberate activity is understood as having a necessary relation to the spontaneous, i.e., to the other members of the triad, Heaven and Earth.  Unlike the case of the straight Compensatory Atheist of post-monotheist traditions, where the uncontrolled is simply anti-value to be eschewed as much as possible, here the continuity is forefronted: it is really the totality of the non-deliberate plus deliberate, i.e., Heaven-and-Earth plus Man, that is the creator of value.   Man is the finisher, the decisive determinant; but the impossibility of this role in the absence of the non-deliberate is still an essential aspect of this Confucian view of the world.    Ultimate value is not in purposive control as such, but in the controlled combination of control and irreducible non-control.   Even here, as we’ve noted, space is made for the non-intentional as integral to the highest accomplishment even of the human, in the effortless virtuosity strenuously attained by the deliberate efforts of the sage.

Finally, we have perhaps the most influential classical options for this uniquely human participation in the creative work of the universe, those derived from the “Zhongyong” 中庸 and Zhouyi 周易, the metaphysical climax of classical Confucian metaphysical speculation, adopted in various forms in the Neo-Confucian systems.  We have already taken up the Zhouyi “Xicizhuan” position, finding it to be an artful crystallization of many trends within the prior tradition.  The “Zhongyong” presents an equally penetrating attempt to characterize the precise nature of the human relation to the creative process of the cosmos that it continues and completes.   Extending the motif presented in Mencius 7A1, man’s distinctive role here is described as plumbing to the utmost his own nature, which in this case reveals to him not just the Heavenly spontaneity as such, but also the spontaneous inborn natures of other people, and indeed the spontaneous inborn natures of all things.  Here too this is presented as enabling one to “assist in the creative and nourishing work of Heaven and Earth, and form a triad with Heaven and Earth.”^[17]   This adaptation of the Xunzian motif of the triad in combination with the initially quite distinct Mencian motif of “plumbing one’s own nature” produces crucial new results.    “To plumb the nature” of all things in this way certainly does point to some kind of privileged access to the metaphysical reality of things.  This is what sometimes misleads unwary readers into thinking we have here something analogous to the God-centric metaphysical systems where a special capacity of man’s (e.g., imago dei, Reason) allows him to grasp the real nature of things.  The question, though, is what this “real nature” is in the two cases, and this differs radically in the God-centric and the God-less worldviews.  For the Nature of all things, rooted in Heaven, is stipulated in the “Zhongyong” to be inextricably related to unknowability, not just to us, but in principle, in itself, to itself, just as we see in the Daoist texts.     The text begins with the unmanifest “Center”  that is neither happiness nor sorrow, neither joy nor anger (the “inner center which is unexpressed” (xinuailezhiweifa wei zhi zhong喜怒哀樂之未發，謂之中), which is the more evident and manifest precisely by being the more hidden and unknown (moxianhuyin, moxianhuwei 莫見乎隱，莫顯乎微).  Because it is expressed in no one determinate form (least expressed), it is what is operative in and dispositive of all forms (most expressed).  Such is the innermost inborn nature that is at once the most unmanifest and the most universally expressed, beyond the reach of intention.  Here again the conscious effort of human ethical endeavor is a kind of carefulness and attention directed toward this pre-intentional indeterminate nature, the unknown from which the known emerges (junzi jieshen hu qi suobudu君子戒慎乎其所不睹).   The text ends by describing Heaven’s operations as equally unmanifest in any particular form, without even sound or smell (shangtian zhi zai wushengwuxiu上天之載，無聲無臭), achieving its universality in the same way.   The sage is himself effortless, beginning and ending in the maximally unmanifest, the ultimately unknowable.   Harmony and Heaven’s mandate are reconceived as surface manifestations of this deeper indetermination, which is the ultimate source of both being and value.   The Center is in itself indeterminate, “having neither sound nor smell,” the indeterminate Inner Middle before the emergence of determinate pairs of contrasting mental conditions (joy, anger, sadness, happiness), affects which precede thinking, and with which alone determinate knowable characteristics become available, for it is the contrast between these opposites that provide determinate content.

Here, however, in contrast to what we find in the Daoist accounts, unknowability is presented as only half the story, the less important half for humans; unknowability serves as the everpresent ground and enabler of reliable human knowledge.  This unknowability is what grounds the possibility for a continuity between knowledge of entities which are, as known, distinct and separate: the self, other people, and all other things.  For because our own nature and the nature of all other things are in no case fully determinate, they are not mutually exclusive; growing from the same pre-determinate root, they are inextricable linked to one another, and converge at their deepest point.  The human nature we plumb is thus more than just Reason, more than just intelligibility; it is the whole being of man, a being that not only includes but is indeed rooted in and most pervasively disposed by what is beyond any determination or intelligibility.  Most crucially, this means that the whole being of man is even more than just “human”; it partakes in the nature of all things.  It is not because we have Reason that knows those things as objects that we plumb them, but because they, like us, are joined to the totality of other things by the unknowability at the root of them, the non-mutual-exclusivity which is the unknowable aspect of their nature.  Daoist sensitivity to unknowability is repurposed, put in the service of knowledge in the Confucian systems, as valuelessness is put in the service of value in the “Xicizhuan” passage repeatedly cited above.  And yet in these Confucian metaphysical systems, distinctively, the achieved goal is not the full suppression of the unknowability, effortlessness and valuelessness, not even (quite) in the Compensatory Atheism of Xunzi, but rather their full expression.

We later come to see reaffirmations and developments of these two points of indetermination—identified on the one hand as the ultimate source of beings and posited as a locus of transcendence of limitations to specifiable identities which marks the consummation of human excellence on the other–in nearly all the full-blown Neo-Confucian systems of subsequent eras, elaborated into 1) the dimension of non-specifiability in the ultimate nature, (e.g., as wuji 無極 for Zhu Xi, already discussed, or as the denial of pre-existing “fixed coherences/principles” dingli 定理 in the universal “innate knowing” which constitutes the world for Wang Yangming), and 2) a view of the nature of things whereby in one sense all things have the same nature but in another sense each thing has its own distinct nature, and the realization of the convergence of these two is the goal of ethical cultivation.  These two points go together: the absence of ultimate determination at the most fundamental level of reality is precisely what remains operative at the concrete level in the ambidexterity of the determinations of both being and normativity that pertain to each entity, the many that continues to open out from any “one,” the one-many of a coherence that prevents both atomized onenesses and disconnected multiplicity, without resort to a species-genus type of external unification of the many from above.   In the later systems these persistent intuitions are elaborated through an affiliation with the Yin-Yang cosmology of the Zhouyi system, and we can easily see why.  For the primary meaning of Yang and Yin illustrates this deep unknowability in the known: they mean respectively, essentially, the seen (Yang) and the unseen (Yin), the obvious and the obscure, the foreground and the background, linked to “valued” and “neglected” (as in the Daodejing), the obviously desirable (Yang) and the usually shunned (Yin).  “Definite” and “vague” are given a formal structure here.   This is just a formal statement of the previous point about knowledge: whatever appears to knowledge is always half-in-darkness, all Yang rooted in its inalienable relation to Yin and vice versa.  To be knowing something is to not-know half of it.   To be known is to be half-unknown.  To be knowable is to be half-unknowable.  Only thus is there any knowing, or anything to know.  It is just that now this is in the service of asserting a kind of authoritative, reliable knowledge on the Yang side, but one which necessarily expands the sense of the knowing self and the self to be known beyond the range of any notion of unity as consistency of purpose and conscious control.

Confucianism may seem to resemble monotheism in terms of some of the themes we’ve developed here, at least in terms of the main thing: like Durkheim, like Sociology, like monotheism, Confucianism (unlike Bataille or Daoism or Buddhism or Spinoza or Nietzsche) sees the realm of non-utility, its chosen form of liberation from the PSR, its access to the unconditioned, in terms that are wholly social, interpersonal—personhood and its purposes are what are transcended but are also what are found in the transcendental realm.  It wants to reassign the purposeless effortless joy of the spontaneous into the realm of utility to social purposes.   In some readings, especially of Neo-Confucianism, this is even in the form we found in Durkheim, a form we see as unmistakably rooted in monotheism: non-negotiability as the inviolability of absolute moral demand.   But this is what makes Confucianism especially valuable for illustrating our thesis in this book.  For what is it that, in spite of this shared commitment to ultimacy of the personal and interpersonal, makes Confucianism (for us atheist mystics) so much more palatable than monotheism or Kantianism or Durkheimian sociology?   The answer is simple: Confucianism has a different idea of what a person is.  The Confucian person is both body and mind, reason and emotion, purpose and purposeless, controlled and uncontrolled, youwei and wuwei.   Confucian virtue is intercorporeal as much as it is intersubjective: it is mediated always by li 禮, ritual, saturated with the givenness of both existing traditional social forms and of bodies which no single mind has created ex nihilo.  This personhood will be different from the personhood of the disembodied souls of Platonic shades, and even forever different from the selves of Abrahamic believers in the literal resurrection of the flesh, for whom body and mind are, let us remember, also inseparable.  For in the latter case, that body is still under control of and indeed still designed by a mind, still purposefully made—not by my mind, but by God’s mind.   So mind, personhood, thinking, Noûs, purpose, control are ultimate in all directions, body or mind.   Confucian persons are not deliberately-created selves in this sense, and control is not the final category accounting for either their existence or their virtue.  They are cultivations of a pre-existing unintentional facticity, pruned and guided and nourished and grown in a certain purposive way, so that the purposeless is brought partially into the service of a purpose, and only to this extent somewhat resembling the body-as-tool conception of some monotheisms.  But the purpose into whose service the purposeless is here pressed is not the purpose at the root of the world, for that is not the kind of world it is: it is not a world created by a mind or by anything mental.   Furthermore, the pinnacle of this virtue restores a condition of wuwei, of effortlessness and purposelessness, where mind is not controlling, where ends-means deliberations have ceased.   The origin of the Confucian self is in the wuwei transformations of the universal process of generation, has a period of deliberate youwei activity and deliberate cultivation in which he tries to attain a balance of the two sides of his nature, the spontaneous and the deliberate.

Mencius 2A2 gives a strong version of this Confucian self-conception, one that would later become canonical.   We start with something spontaneous, purposeless, non-human in the very depths of the human: those aspects of man’s spontaneous (non-deliberate, wuwei) being that, with proper nourishment and environment, if they are not unduly obstructed, if they are cultivated and pruned and trimmed properly, will grow into fully fledged social virtues.  These are compared to growing a plant, cultivating a garden: the key metaphor is that we are trying to grow the “sprouts” of virtue. The youwei, purposeful aspect of life is this pruning and cultivating and feeding of a wuwei purposeless spontaneity.   Mencius positions the Confucian way between two extremes: total purposelessness, laissez-faire of anything goes, which just lets the plants grow however they want, all together with whatever weeds might be there—let’s call that the Daoist extreme.  On the other extreme, are those people who, like the foolish man of Song, tried to “help their sprouts grow” 助長: the growth was felt to be too slow and indirect, so he tried to pull up on the sprouts—thereby killing them.   That is, he tried to exert total control over the spontaneous side of his nature, to force it to follow his conception of how it should be, to make the body genuinely and exceptionlessly a tool of the mind.  This latter attitude accords with the Emulative Theist and Compensatory Atheist options, in both of which deliberate activity and willed goals are what is of most value in human existence.   Confucianism, for Mencius, is rather a gentle, patient guiding of the spontaneous by the deliberate, which, when successful, then drops the deliberate altogether, leading back to spontaneity, an expanded state of spontaneity, as the spontaneous sprout has now become an equally spontaneous and wuwei tree, through the temporary intervention of the youwei gardener.   The source and the goal are still both wuwei; the instrumental role of the purposive is self-canceling.   In the pithy phrase Zhuangzi (Chapter 6) uses to satirize the Confucian position, it is simply a case of “using what knowledge knows to nourish what knowledge does not know.”   The proper role of my consciousness is to be the leader, the controller, the ruler, the king only in the way the sage-kings are leaders and rulers: by non-deliberate wuwei, by assuming its ritually proper position and issuing no commands, so that the qi of the body circulates around it without effort or coercion, like the stars rotating around the North Star (Analects 2:1).  When it does have to deliberately intervene, it is as a gardener, a leader who leads by where he goes and what he does rather than by what he commands: it is to be the nourisher of the non-conscious.  The proper role of purpose is to nourish the spontaneous, the incomprehensible, that which acts without knowing why it acts.   The proper role of the personal is to nourish the impersonal that is its basis, its root, its living font.  This living font is what knowledge does not know, and can never know.   Not just my knowledge, not just human knowledge: what no knowledge in the universe knows, what even Heaven doesn’t know and doesn’t need to know: the genuinely spontaneous process of nature.

So when Confucians assert that the universe is ren 仁, humane–that the intersubjective affection (ren 仁), and respectful yielding to tradition and to others (li 禮), and harmonious-clustering-each-in-the-right-place (yi義) and mutual-recognition-and-acquired-knowhow (zhi智) (for these are the four Mencian virtues: ren, li, yi, zhi 仁禮義智—which mainstream Neo-Confucians correlate in this sequence to the four seasons, spring, summer, autumn, winter) are the ultimate, the real source of all being and value, it means something very different from a monotheist who makes the interpersonal relation the ultimate ontological fact.   The monotheist interpersonal relation is the relation between two responsible controllers who exist in a universe in which responsible control is the ultimate ontological fact.  The ontological interpersonality of the Confucian cosmos is the relation of persons who are, from beginning to end, both purposeful and purposeless, with the purposeless dimension as both the deepest root and as the ultimate development, the source and the end.[18]   Confucian persons are from the beginning to the end purposeless-purposeful-purposeless sandwiches, so the interpersonality of the Confucian cosmos does not imply the ultimacy of the purposeful, but just the opposite.

We can now come to understand how this complex commitment to ultimate atheism plays out even when a sort of “humaneness-mindedness” to the Cosmos is allowed or even insisted upon, as happens in a passage from the “Sorted Dialogues” of “the Aquinas of Neo-Confucianism,” the gold standard of Neo-Confucian orthodoxy, Zhu Xi (1130-1200):

 

 

Q: Is the Mind of Heaven and Earth conscious?  Or is it just silent non-doing?

A: The Mind of Heaven and Earth cannot be said to be unconscious, but it doesn’t think and deliberate like the human mind.   Cheng Yi said, “Heaven and Earth have no mind and yet accomplish all transformations; the sage has a mind and yet is without any deliberate action.”

Q:  The Mind of the Heaven and Earth is just their Productive Compossibility/ies.^[19]  Productive Compossibility means principle, while mind denotes the aspect of being master.  Is that correct?

A:  Mind definitely means being master, but it is precisely the Productive Compossibilities that are the master here.   It is not that outside this mind there is some other Productive Compossibility of Productivity, or outside this Productive Compossibility there is some other mind.

Daofu said, “Previously you told us to think about whether Heaven and Earth have a mind or not.   Recently I have been thinking about this, and my personal conclusion is that the Heaven and Earth have no mind, for only Humaneness (ren 仁) is the Mind of the Heaven and Earth.   For if it had a real mind, that would necessarily mean it engaged in thinking and deliberation, in management and purposeful action—but when have Heaven and Earth ever had any thoughts or deliberations!?   Thus when [Confucius says] ‘the four seasons proceed, the hundred creatures are generated,’ it just means that it is like this because it is meet that it be like this, without requiring any thought—this is why it is the Way of the Heaven and Earth.”

Zhu Xi answered, “If that is the case, then what does the Book of Changes mean when it says ‘The Fu [“Return”] hexagram shows the Mind of Heaven and Earth,’ and ‘Aligned and Vast, thus showing the dispositions of Heaven and Earth’?   What you have said only touches on its non-mind aspect.   But if there were ultimately no mind at all, then cows would give birth to horses and plum blossoms would bloom on peach trees.   In reality all these things are naturally fixed.   It is as Cheng Yi said: ‘In terms of its role as master, it is called Lord.  In terms of its nature and disposition, it is called Qian [the hexagram representing the tireless vigor of heaven’s movement].’  These various names and their meanings are naturally so determined.    ‘Mind’ refers to its aspect of mastery or control, which is what is meant by saying that ‘the mind of Heaven and Earth is to generate things.’  On this point, Qinfu once objected that I shouldn’t put it in these terms, but I told him that it just means that Heaven and Earth have no other business, that their sole intent, their sole mind, is to generate things.   The one original vital force operates and circulates, flowing unobstructedly, never stopping for an instant, doing nothing besides generating all the myriads of existing things.”

Q:  Is this what Cheng Yi meant when he said, “Heaven and Earth have no mind and yet accomplish all transformations; the sage has a mind and yet is without any deliberate action”?

A:  This is referring to the non-mind aspect of Heaven and Earth.   When ‘the four seasons proceed, the myriad creatures are generated,’ do Heaven and Earth ever harbor any deliberate mind?   As for the sage, all he does is follow Productive Compossibilities.   What deliberate activity could he have, above and beyond this?  Thus Cheng Hao said, ‘The constancy of Heaven and Earth is to pervade all things with their Mind and yet to have no mind at all; the constancy of the sage is to follow all affairs with his emotions and yet to possess no emotions at all.’  That’s the best way to put it.

Q:  “Pervading all things”—does that mean comprehensively pervading all things with the mind but without any one-sided selfishness?

A:  Heaven and Earth reach all things with this mind.  As obtained in human beings it becomes the human mind, and as obtained in things it becomes the minds of things.  When received by plants and animals it then becomes the minds of plants and animals.  But all of them are nothing but this one Mind of Heaven and Earth.   What we need to do is to recognize both the sense in which it has a mind and the sense in which it has no mind.   To fix it [on one side or the other] as you have is not sufficient.”

[At another time Zhu Xi said:] When all things are born and growing, that is the time when Heaven and Earth have no mind.  When things are dried and withered and about to spring back to life, that is the time when Heaven and Earth have a mind.^[20]

 

 

Let us summarize Zhu Xi’s position as delineated here:

 

First, Heaven and Earth, meaning the cosmos, can in one sense be said to have a mind, and in another sense to have no mind.

They have a mind in two related senses: 1) that there is regularity and predictability of cause and effect in the process of generation (plums produce plum blossoms, horses give birth to horses); and 2) there is a definite proclivity in the cosmos toward production and reproduction, transformation, generation.

They have no mind in the sense that they do not consciously deliberate, think, manage or control in any way analogous to human minds.

We may find it surprising that, like Aquinas and many other medieval European thinkers, Zhu Xi seems to find no way to conceive causal regularity without referring it to mind and purpose.^[21]   However, before taking this to suggest a deep convergence of intuitions, we should note that the exact meaning of this claim will differ to exactly the extent that the relevant conception of “mind” and “purpose” differs in the conceptions of Chinese and European thinkers.   That is, although both Zhu Xi and theistic theologians assume that causal regularity has some necessary connection to mind and purpose, their conceptions of mind and purpose themselves differ radically, and thus the implications of this claim are wildly different.   How do these conceptions differ?

The first clue comes already in the second aspect of “having a mind” mentioned above: to have a mind and a purpose is here constrained to one specific purpose, “production and reproduction.”   That is the specific telos that Zhu Xi detects in all things, though in different determinate ways for each specific thing so produced and reproduced, and it is this aim that he sees as constituting “the mind of Heaven and Earth” in its “minded” aspect.  The productive compossibility (as I translate Li 理in the context of Zhu Xi’s brand of Neo-Confucianism—more on this below), the enabling possibility or non-obstruction of coexistence and mutuality and coherence, of various forms of production, as we shall discuss below.   Here we need only note that the ultimate telos of all things is both one and many in the way that Li is both one and many, a complex system of coherence of diverse forms of productivity.   The mind in all things wants only one thing: to produce and be produced along with (hence “compossibility“) all the other things that are produced and producing.   As such, this one desired direction in all things is also the various specific directions of all things.   But the content in all cases is the maximal collective productivity, literally “life” or “birthing,” that is also experienced as Humaneness and also described as Li, which I thus translate here as Productive Compossibility.

But here too we must be cautious: what is this production and reproduction Zhu Xi speaks of?   Does it mean that there is some preference for living beings over non-living beings, and that this really defines the reason things are as they are?  Does the universe intend to produce living beings?  Are we talking about some sort of folk-Schopenhauerian “will to life”^[22] or a Bergsonian élan vital, a will to life that is the secret purpose behind the production of non-living things?   The answer to this is a qualified no.  The reason for this negative answer lies in the meaning of the Chinese word sheng 生.   Consider the following explanations from Zhu Xi:

 

 

Q: I have seen that in your letter responding to Yu Fangshu that you consider even dry and withered things to have Productive Compossibility (Li).   But I don’t see what Productive Compossibilities there are in dried and withered things, or tiles and shards.

A:  Consider the medicines made from rhubarb and from aconitum.  These are dried and withered, but the rhubarb medicine cannot be used in place of aconitum, and aconitum cannot be used in place of rhubarb.

 

Q:  “Dried and withered things also have the Nature”—what does this mean?

A: It means they should also be said to have this Productive Compossibility (Li).  Thus [Cheng Hao] said “In the whole world there are no things outside the Nature.”  Then walking on the street he said, “The bricks of the steps have the Productive Compossibility of the bricks of the steps.” Sitting down he said, “The bamboo chair has the Productive Compossibility of a bamboo chair.  Dried and withered things can be said to lack the intention to produce (shengyi 生意), but not the Compossibility of Production (shengli 生理^[23]).  For example, rotten wood cannot be used, and can only be put to the flame.  This is what it means to say it has no impulse of production.   But even so, burning a given kind of wood produces a given kind of scent, each one different from the others.  This is because the Productive Compossibility of each is thus.”[24]

 

“Production,” sheng 生, does not refer only to what we mean by the English word “life”: it means any transformation, any emergence of a qualitiatively distinct entity.   Burning rotten wood produces scented smoke.  Neither the wood nor the smoke is “alive,” but this is an instance of sheng, and thus the relation of production is the expression of the Li, the Productive Compossibility, of the wood.   Basically, any event that occurs is an example of “ceaseless production and reproduction” 生生不息.   The rotten wood does not “intend” to produce, it has no living “intention” or “impulse” to produce (sheng yi 生意), but it has the potentiality to produce; to exist is to have this potential to produce a certain effect, and requires that this entity was something that could come into existence, could be produced, in tandem with whatever else is already existing.   To have a Li is to be something that can be generated by whatever is already existing, and to participate in this process of ceaseless production and reproduction by in turn having the capacity to produce something else beyond itself.   This is why I translate Li in this way for Zhu Xi.   The Song Neo-Confucians often use the term in its everyday sense to mean “possibility,” as when they say something could possibly exist with the phrase youcili 有此理, or when something is impossible, qiyoucili 豈有此理.   This can apply to things like the existence of spirits, or telepathy, or seemingly miraculous events: judging whether such things can exist depends on whether they fit in with what else exists in a way that is consistent both with their being produced by them and by them continuing the process of production within the context of the total matrix of relations that exist, and this interrelation of all beings is considered to be intrinsically productive, even where the “impulse” of production is lacking.    Li is a kind of coherence which is productive, a way in which things join together so as to continue the process of production and reproduction, the continuation of the process of creativity which is the cosmos.   The “co-“ in “compossibility” denotes this possibility of coexistence, and this already implies a kind of value.  Coexistence is itself a value, a kind of unity among produced entities that allows them to all exist without obstructing each other, without excluding each others’ production.   We see this in the Neo-Confucian tropes of ren 仁 (humaneness), the most direct manifestation of Li, as primarily manifested as (though not identical to) unbiasedness (gong 公) and as sensitivity (jue 覺), the extension beyond any given boundary to include and connect and respond to whatever else exists, which is also the key characteristic of production and reproduction: non-limitation within a given determinate sphere, the continuation of one thing into something else, the expansion into and the generation of otherness: growth, but in the sense that also includes any non-living event as well, even that of firewood turning to smoke.

Indeed, even human creations of inanimate implements thus count as instances of sheng.  Consider the following:

 

Q:  Do dry and withered things have Productive Compossibility or not?

A:  As soon as there is anything at all, right away it has its Productive Compossibility 才有物，便有理.   Heaven produced no writing brushes; it was human beings who take rabbit hair and make a writing brush out of it.   But as there is a brush, there must be the Productive Compossibilities of the brush.

Q:  How do you discern Humaneness from Righteousness [which are the innate characteristic of Li]  in the brush?

A:  Such a small thing does not bear a division into its Humaneness and its Righteousness [i.e., they are present there only as its Li].^[25]

 

Several things are to be noted here.   Taken literally, the language here suggests the brush exists before the specific Li of “brushness,” and that Li follows from the emergence of the brush in reality.   But the production of the brush also instantiates the prior Li of Productive Compossibility with all else that exists, which until the time of the brush’s emergence simply is the Li of all these other things, not yet the Li of the brush.  The general compossibility of all things, which is also the specific compossibilities of each thing already existing, including rabbit hair, ink and the human desire to write, is compossible with the creation of a brush from rabbit hair, which make that creation possible, at which time there will necessarily be a Li of that brush.  The Li of the brush may be said to be newly emergent, but it may also be said to have always existed: for the relation between the Li of the brush and the Li of anything else that priorly existed is not of two distinct individual entities, this Li and that Li.  Rather, each individual Li is also a version of the Li of all things, the Taiji, that has always existed priorly as the Li of each prior thing.   The creation of the brush is an instance of sheng.  When that creation occurs, all those prior compossibilities are present as the specific productive compossibility of the brush to participate in further sheng.   Perhaps it will be used to write a poem.  That will be a further instance of sheng, which demonstrates the specific Li of the brush.  And that poem, once it is written, will then be present in the compossibility of all other things with that poem: the general Li of Productive Compossibility is the specific compossibility of the brush, of the poem.    Indeed, Cheng Yi does not hesitate to see a poem written by the Tang poet Du Fu as being inherent in all Li—once it has occurred:

 

It is like the case of the man who had been illiterate all his life, and then one day fell ill and was suddenly able to recite a Du Fu poem.   There is such a Li (possibility).   Between Heaven and Earth there is just what exists and what doesn’t exist.  What has come to exist exists, what doesn’t exist doesn’t.  As for Du Fu’s poem, this poem really exists in the world.   So when the man was so sick that his mind reached a state of perfectly concentrated unity, there was this principle (daoli) that resonated naturally all the way to this man’s mind.[26]

 

Whatever can be created ipso facto instantiates the prior generative compossibility of all prior existence and that thing, which also set limits (norms) on its continued operation in the future.  All future emergences must be compossible with this specific Li in same way.   It now becomes the Li of all things to have to be compossible with this brush and this poem, which can thus be apprehended, under the right conditions, in the Li of any currently existing thing.  The brush and the poem were produced by a human mind bringing together elements already existing in the world.  Once existent, we might think this either demonstrates or produces the corresponding specific Li, not both.  But Zhu Xi’s metaphysics presents a third option.  The Li of Z is pre-existent to the emergence of Z only in the sense that compossibility must be compossibility with everything, including whatever already exists or has existed, and that the compossibility of “everything else” with X is the same as the compossibility of Z with “everything else.”   Prior to the emergence of Z, the possibility of X is present not as a self-standing formal cause of Z, but only as the compossibilities of every priorly existing thing.  The specific Li of Z, prior to the emergence of Z, is present only as all other Li, and their necessary opening out toward “more.”   The role of the human mind in creating the brush and the poem: teleological consciousness as “winter” aspect of Li, Ren, Generative Compossibility, making a special effort, at a time of obstruction, to further generativity (sheng) through conscious purposive effort.   The horse hair was priorly intended neither for human brushes, nor only for horses in nature.   It was neither intended nor created ex nihilo: it is rather the coherence of all prior compossibility that enables its emergence, to which it then contributes.  We could call this contribution either a change to the prior Li of the world, or simply a further extension of it: it reveals more of what is compossible with the prior compossibilities, which in that sense remain unaltered, though the specific compossibility of the brush is not among the conditions for new emergences, i.e., does not function as part of the Li for the world, until that brush emerges, through human fiddling, in actuality.   Hence, though each thing’s Li is the specific telos endowed by Heaven and Earth to it in particular, with the strongly conservative requirement to cohere also with human cultural tradition, because Li is both one and many, because compossibility is both of each and of all, there is no one way in which this telos is fulfilled: the ”end” of sheng reaches no single end anywhere.   The norm that governs the emergence of any thing is its compossibility with whatever already exists; as soon as it emerges, its structure and function establish a new norm for itself, a specific particular form of that prior compossibility of all prior things.  Henceforth, its presence is an additional item with which all subsequent things must be compossible, altering the universal norms for new emergences to exactly that extent.

We see here how defining Li as “Productive Compossibility” helps us understand one of the most distinctive and puzzling features of Zhu Xi’s metaphysics: the simultaneous oneness and manyness of Li.   For Zhu Xi is very clear that Li is at the same time one Li (the Taiji 太極) of all things, and at the same time is, in its entirety, all the many individual mutually differentiating “principles” and “patterns” and natures of things (liyi fenshu 理一分殊──note well that the “fen” here does not mean that only a portion or division of Li is present as the specific principle which is the nature of any individual thing: the entire Li is present as the specific principle of production and growth of each thing).   For the “compossibility”—i.e., the possibility of coexistence, of two items, A and B–would be described in just this way.   This reconfiguration of singular and plural is precisely the biggest difference between “possibility” and “compossibility.”   The “possibility” of A is something entirely different from the “possibility” of B, and the “possibility of the coexistence of A and B” is yet a third thing.   But the “compossibility of A with B” is exactly “the compossibility of B with A,” which is none other than “the compossibility of A and B.”   Analogously, for Zhu Xi, the Li of a chair is the Li of a table, and this is the same as the Li of the world that has table and chair.   And yet the compossibility of A and B can never be reducible to a featureless unarticulated “Oneness”: it specifically delineates the possibility of A and the possibility of B as two separate and definite aspects.   The possibility of A is the compossibility of A with all other things (abstract and concrete, human and natural); this is different from the possibility of B, which is the compossibility of B with all other things.   But the compossibility of A is the compossibility of B, while maintaining this specific difference.  We can see here how this conception requires us to rethink reform and conservativism with respect to norms.   Normativity, order, teleology, consciousness, nature, mind, purpose, human and cosmic creativity all scan differently depending on the presumed conception of the one-many relation.  And the one-many relation has everything to do with how we are conceiving the nature of purposivity.

Li for Zhu Xi is thus coherence qua compossibility, or to put it more strongly, the copotentiality of production of all things.   We can see this quite clearly in Zhu Xi descriptions of specific Li.  For example, speaking of the Li of a chair or a fan, he says:

 

Clothing, food, activities are just things, while their Li is Dao.  It is impermissible to call the thing the Dao.   For example, this chair has four legs, and can be sat on: this is the Li of the chair.   If we take away one of the legs, it will be impossible to sit on it, and thus it will have lost the Li of a chair….Or take this fan, which is a thing, but has the Dao, the Li, of a fan.   How the fan is made, and how it should be used, is the Li of the fan that is above its form.[27]

 

 

Li is how the chair is constructed (it has four legs cohering in a certain way to form a whole) and what can thus be done with it (people can sit on it).   These are both obviously instances of coherence: how the pieces fit together, and how it fits in with other entities, i.e., human desires to sit down.   It is coherence as compossibility, i.e., it is possible for these pieces of wood to coexist with each other and with the world in such a way that the pieces of wood can be put together in this way so as to make possible another thing, the sitting down of a person.   Of course this facilitates human flourishing, production and reproduction, and so on—a little piece of Ren, which is Impartial, which is the Copotentiality of all things.   The greater coherence of the chair with the rest of the world—its use, the way it fits together with things which are not chairs—is the direct content of the Li.   Li as double coherence, as second-order coherence necessarily also involving those among human desires that are themselves coherent with each other, i.e., “harmonious,” i.e., remaining expressive of the Center (humans are, after all, the finest and most sensitive qi, the most balanced and complete representation of Li or Taiji in any concrete entity), an enabling of further coherences, a compossibility of planks of wood and the human desire to sit.   These precede the chair, and the chair depends on it, in the sense that no chair would occur without this compossibility.  Simply to describe it as unmodified “coherence” obscures the sense in which it might precede its concrete existence.   But by redescribing this sort of coherence as compossibility and even copotentiality, we see immediately in what sense it is still the standard idea of coherence (internally and externally), but with the extra sense of its place in the total context of all existing and all future things, the role it is able to place among whatever already exists to help maximize the unity of things, the interconnection of things, the production and reproduction of things, the balance of things, the coexistence of maximal things, the maximization of functions, of life, of impartiality, of mutual non-numb sensitivity of one thing to another—in short the impartiality and oneness-in-manyness which is Ren, which is Li.

More specifically, the Neo-Confucians define value in terms of the “continuance of the process of alternating Yin and Yang,” (jizhizhe weizhishan繼之者謂之善) or “production and reproduction without cease,”（shengsheng buxi 生生不息） derived from the “Great Commentary” to the Book of Changes, already quoted above.   To have the potentiality to produce and be produced in coherence with all that exists, including both historical particular facts and general conditions of Heaven and Earth, is to have a Li.   This “togetherness” also implies a kind of unity that is productive, including a unity with human nature and human inclinations.  As Cheng Hao had indicated in his “Discourse on Recognizing Humaneness,” “this Li” is the Li of Humaneness which is a coherence both of the human being with all things and a coherence between Humaneness and the other three Mencian virtues (Ritual Propriety, Righteousness and Wisdom), all of which are in one sense contrasted to Humaneness and in another sense are included in its unity, are further extensions of it, even when they seem to oppose it: the continuation and growth of one thing into its apparent other.   So to have a Li is to have a capacity, a potentiality, to be produced and produce, to exist and support other existences, in tandem with the rest of all things, as expressed most directly as the coherence with the human inclination manifest as Humaneness as the most comprehensive manifestation of the unity of this Co-productivity, as impulse to unify, to feel, to be unbiased, to produce and reproduce.   It is noteworthy that, read in this way, Li in Neo-Confucianism means almost the same thing as the Buddhist “dependent co-arising” (pratītyasamutpāda, yuanqi 緣起)   , which, as Emptiness, is precisely the primary meaning of the term Li in Chinese Buddhism.   The huge difference of course is that in the Confucian usages the continuation of this collective productivity is the Good itself, while in the Buddhist usage it is (initially) what must be understood and in some sense seen through or transcended to achieve the stated goal of the end of suffering.   In Confucianism, we may say, it is directly and unqualifiedly what is to be continued, which is the Good itself, while in Buddhism it is initially precisely Samsara, the Bad itself.  But when in later developments of Buddhist thought, this Samsara is seen to be precisely Nirvana, when all generation is seen to be already intrinsically quiescent because, precisely as dependent co-arising, they are already Empty, and thus they are the Good itself.

These considerations allow us to understand the specific sense in which both teleology and regularity are understood in the context of Zhu Xi’s thought.   The telos amounts to nothing more and nothing less than the impetus or at least the Compossibility without intent, of production and reproduction as coherent with all other existents both natural and cultural, which as we have seen really is underdetermined to an extraordinary degree: it simply means that, to the extent that the universe wants anything specific, what it basically wants is not to stop.  “The Mind of Heaven and Earth is simply Li”: Generative Compossibility, it “wants” to generate whatever is compossible with the prior existence of whatever has already existed.  Derivatively, this requires the orderliness embodied in the specificity and constraint of each generative event, which requires something that can rightfully be described as a sort of mindedness.  This ceaselessness generativity requires a certain structure: the fourfold dialectical order modeled on the Yin-Yang process of growth and decay.

To the extent that it is “wanting,” what it wants is no more and no less than not to stop anywhere or in any one form or as any final state.  It resists reaching final equilibrium or steady state, which would amount, on this conception, to ceasing to exist.^[28]  The Neo-Confucian universe goes on forever, beginningless and endless.  This infinity is more than an incidental piece of scene-setting; it modifies how we must understand the idea of telos here.   The universe “wants” only to continue, and it continues via its coherence, its collective coexistences of contrasted qualities, states, and beings, productive in general Yin-Yang contrasts like male and female or like the generosity of Humaneness and the strictness of Righteousness, or the life-giving warmth of Spring and the death-dealing cold of Autumn.  These things hang together in a way that produces and reproduces.   Here we have something more like Spinoza’s the infinitely changing but always self-maintaining conatus of the infinite mediate mode than like a conscious telos that singles some aims out over others; for any continuation is a partial fulfillment of the telos for production and reproduction.  The determination of what is produced is regulated by, and its relative value adjudicated with reference to, the degree to which coherence is fostered and exemplified by any given production.  That is, the more the totality of opposed virtues are present, or the productive combination of all things, is made operative in any deed or thing, the higher its value.   So the reason horses give birth to horses and not cows is not due to the “impulse of production” or the universe’s “intent to produce” as such, as a conscious and deliberate concept or aim, but rather the compossibility of production and reproduction, the Productive Compossibility of being a horse.    These things hang together in a way that endlessly produces and reproduces.   This is the opposite of a telos in the sense of a final state of perfection to which it is striving, and at which it will stop.  It is the antithesis of the idea of an eschaton, or a final judgment,  or any single final sustained ideal condition. This is why Zhu Xi calls it “a nonmind mind,” 無心之心 (not just “nonmind”)–a telos that is no telos, an intention that is no (specific) intention.:

 

All things under heaven, even the tiniest things, have mind.   It’s just that they also have [a preponderance of] places of insentience.   For example, when a plant is turned toward the sunlight it grows, when turned toward the shade it shrivels—there is an element of liking and disliking in this. …. At the opposite extreme of the most vast, Heaven and Earth themselves have a nonmind mind.”[29]

 

That last phrase, “the nonmind mind,” gives us the key to understanding the Mind of Heaven and Earth.  For it is just this that Zhu Xi calls the Mind of Heaven and Earth, which is identified precisely with the mind/intention to generate things.[30]  What this amounts to is nicely clarified and summed up in Zhu Xi’s general “Theory of Humaneness” Renshuo 仁說： “

 

It is the generating of things that serves as the mind/intention of Heaven and Earth.  But in the generation of humans and things, each obtains the Mind of Heaven and Earth as its own mind….This mind of Heaven and Earth has four virtues: origination, flourishing, benefit and consolidation, but origination unifies all four. They function processionally as the four seasons, but the energy of springtime growth pervades all four.  Thus in what serves as the mind of human beings, there are also four virtues—humankindness, righteousness, ritual and wisdom–but humankindness includes all four.   They emerge into function as the emotions of love, respect, appropriateness and differentiation, but the sensation of fellowfeeling runs through all four….There are those who say love is not Humankindness, instead explaining the word Ren as referring to the mind’s awareness….When they speak of the mind having awareness, this can be used to show that Humankindness [item 1] also includes Wisdom [item 4].  But this is not what Humankindness itself refers to…It is not only human beings who are embody the perfect consciousness and intelligence between heaven and earth.   One’s own mind is the mind of birds, beasts, grasses and trees.  It’s just that human beings are born through receiving the Balance (center) of Heaven and Earth.”[31]

 

 

The Mind of Heaven and Earth is present only as all the finite minds in the universe, considered en masse, with no actual unified consciousness or unity of apperception apart from the minds of those beings—including even the “mind” of a brush, a stone, a plank of wood.  In one sense, we might say that the entire Mind of Heaven and Earth becomes each finite mind, or rather, more accurately, becomes not each finite mind, which Zhu considers a quasi-physical Qi-activity, but the Nature of each finite mind: the Mind of Heaven and Earth as filtered through a particular Qi-configuration.  The fourfold structure of continuing process of yin-yang coherence (origin-flourishing-benefit-storage, humaneness-ritual-righteousness-wisdom, spring-summer-autumn-winter, etc.) is the mark of this Nature, present in each.  In separation from the minds of all beings, living and unliving, it is no mind.   But it is these minds, and their own generative compossibilities, which is at once each specific generative compossibility (to generate the specific thing this being can generate in coexistence with all other things and in continuation of the yin-yang process, but which can be anything at all, including brushes, poems, smoke) and the generative compossibility of all things, the simple impulsion to keep generating, to continue, to produce (shengsheng).   It is every specific telos, and no particular telos: nonmind mind.

 

This can perhaps help us understand the surprising final specification in Zhu Xi’s discussion of the Mind of Heaven and Earth collected in the Zhuzi yulei, cited above, where it is claimed that Heaven and Earth sometimes have a mind and sometimes do not.  The specification of when it does and does not have a mind is highly revealing of what Zhu Xi thinks consciousness is and what it’s for, which provides us with a stark contrast to anything that emerges under the aegis of the Noûs as Arché traditions.   As quoted above, Zhu Xi tells us that when things are flourishing (in the growth process proceeding directly in thriving lifeforms budding and blooming during the spring and summer, for example), there is no mind; when things get dry and withered (for example, in the autumn and winter), and striving to regenerate, the universe has a mind.  萬物生長，是天地無心時；枯槁欲生，是天地有心時。 What is assumed here?   Consciousness, it seems, goes with being thwarted and having to delay gratification, having a prospective accomplishment of the impulse toward generation of life, rather than in its immediate satisfaction, which, it is implied, requires no mindedness.  Mind in the sense of consciousness seems to be a kind of Plan B for when the immediate gratification is thwarted.   This arranges the consciousness and unconsciousness diachronically, along the lines of the four seasons or the four virtues or the four phases of productivity in the Book of Changes.  It is noteworthy that in this scheme “winter” correlates with Wisdom: the storing up of resources during a time when the direct satisfaction of the impulse of growth is temporarily obstructed.

This idea is particularly intriguing, although it seems added to the discussion almost as a throwaway, an afterthought.   For it exposes certain presuppositions about the nature of consciousness that inform the previous discussion, and perhaps give us a sense of in what sense the Cosmos may be called both conscious and unconscious.   Zhu Xi seems to take it for granted that there is something less than ideal about consciousness; far from being the sign of the highest or most perfect being, it is rather a sign of a problem, an imperfection.   This assessment of the status of consciousness is, in a deep structural sense, the real hallmark of ontological atheism.   For as we have seen, the story of Western theism begins with Anaxagoras’ claim that thinking mind (Noûs) is the real first cause, Arché, of all things^[32]—the doctrine that Plato has Socrates so excited about in the Phaedo, and arguably the program for intelligent design fulfilled speculatively in the doctrine of the demiurge in Plato’s Timeaus, and, also arguably, the deep source of the ascendancy of Christian monotheism in later Hellenist culture within the Roman Empire.   Schopenhauer regarded consciousness as the “foreign relations office” of the organism; something relatively superficial and employed for handling relatively difficult negotiations between various persons.  Nietzsche had a similar view, noting that consciousness only arises and gets involved in times when instinct fails, when new and not immediately solvable problems arise that require deliberation^[33]—as in Zhu Xi, it is a sign of a problem.  So on this crucial question of the status and function of consciousness as such, Zhu Xi arguably has much less in common with ontological theism than with arch-atheists Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.  But the difference between Zhu Xi and the arch-atheists is that for Zhu Xi this aspect of difficulty, of the thwarted and obstructed life which requires and produces consciousness, is not a kind of going awry or degeneration as it seems to be in Nietzsche at times, nor something with an ontologically second-rate status as it is in Schopenhauer; on the contrary, it is integrated into Zhu Xi’s general picture of coherence between direct and indirect expressions of life.  The relation between unconsciousness and consciousness is exactly correlative to the relation between Humaneness and Righteousness, or between Spring and Autumn.   Humaneness and Spring and Unconsciousness are directly the Good, the direct and full expression of the smooth harmonious coherent totality of the impulse and compossibility of productivity.   But Righteousness and Autumn are the reverse but necessary alternate forms of expressing and completing what begins as Humaneness and Spring (harsh punishment and harvest as opposed to love and warmth and sprouting growth).  Righteousness is 1) the opposite of Humaneness, 2) an alternate form of Humaneness, and 3) a component included within Humaneness, and 4) the completion of Humaneness.   The cold harvest of Autumn is 1) the opposite, 2) an alternate form, 3) an included component, and 4) the completion, of the warm sproutings of Spring.  And in an analogous way, Consciousness is 1) the opposite, 2) an alternate form, 3) an included component, and 4) the completion, of the perfect harmony and smooth functioning of unconsciousness.   Unconsciousness is root, and the whole; consciousness is the branch, and the part.

And I think this is our key clue for understanding why Zhu Xi insists that Heaven and Earth must be considered both conscious and unconscious.   Consciousnesses arise within the total process of Heaven and Earth in the same way that Autumn must arise from Spring, as an expression of Spring itself as the impulse of generation, for generation must reach completion to be real generation.  Unconsciousness can only do what it does if it goes through a phase of consciousnesses.  This consciousness appears at first glance regrettable, a necessary evil; but Neo-Confucian wisdom teaches that it is as good and as necessary as Autumn and harsh Justice, for these apparent opposites too are really parts and expressions and completions of the sproutings of Spring and the warm love of Humaneness.   Thus Zhu Xi still wants to claim that Heaven and Earth have consciousness in some sense, and must have them.  In what sense?   Minimally, as in the passage translated above, in that it is what is manifested in and as the conscious minds of each animal and thing as its own mind, nonetheless never ceasing to be a portion or manifestation of the one mind of the Cosmos.   Granting that Zhu Xi seems to allow “minds” here even for inanimate things (since he lists this as a third category, above and beyond humans, plants and animals), the totality of minds present at all points of space, in the Qi of Heaven and Earth, is this collectively conscious mind of the Cosmos.

Pushing this further, we may speculate that the totality of all conscious minds is all there is to the conscious aspect of the Mind of Heaven and Earth, and that as totality, considered as one, this mind is not conscious.   In other words, an unconscious whole is made up of conscious parts, such that this totality can be described as either conscious or unconscious.  This perfectly matches the relation between Humaneness and the other three virtues: the totality is Humaneness, but the individual components are only one-fourth Humaneness.  The universe is unconscious, but the individual components of the universe all have their individual minds.  The lack of distinction between singular and plural makes this a rather natural way for Zhu Xi to express such an idea: the one mind of Heaven and Earth is really just a way of saying the (many-)mindedness of individual beings, which however do not add up to a single mind with a single purpose; the universe has no consciousness of the kind any animal being has, which is predicated on a particular distinct Qi-endowment.   However, there is an important sense in which this is totality is also a oneness, justifying the phrase “one mind of Heaven and Earth”: it is a harmony of precisely the kind described by the term Li: coherence, copotentiality, Productive Compossibility.   That is wherein the “oneness’ of the “One Mind” of Heaven and Earth resides, not in anything like the oneness of consciousness or unity of apperception.  This is why Zhu Xi says above simply that “there is no mind other than Productive Compossibility (Li) itself.”   The mind of Heaven and Earth is the Productive Compossibility of Heaven and Earth, which is unconscious wuwei expressing and completing itself in its opposite, the conscious, youwei minds of individual living beings.   The many are the one and the one are the many, just as in the case between individual Li and the totalistic Li which is the Taiji.   But just as the individual Li cannot be viewed as mere dispensable “epiphenomena” of the one Taiji, any more than Righteousness is a mere dispensable epiphenomenon of Humaneness, consciousness is not a mere dispensable epiphenomenon of the more primary unconsciousness, as it seems to be in Nietzsche or Schopenhauer.  Unconsciousness requires consciousness to complete itself; they are parts of a single inseparable whole, although it is unconsciousness, not consciousness, which has the privileged place as the most direct expression of the character of the whole as both being and as value.

The peculiar intimacy between Heaven and Humans, and the difference between humans and all the rest of creation, reflects this structure in a particularly telling way.   It is not the personhood of man that gives him a special relationship to Heaven, or even a resemblance to Heaven, as would be the case when Heaven is itself construed as a maximal exemplar of personhood.  It is not man’s responsiveness to reasons, his purposive activity, this rational soul, often identified as the imago dei in theistic traditions, uniquely possessed by human beings, though potentially obscured or corrupted, and entirely lacking in all other animals and created entities.   Rather, in line with the classical Confucian reflections on the purposeless effortless sincerity-integration-completeness (誠) of Heaven as what man strives through his purposes to attain, Zhu Xi construes this relation as one of partiality and completeness.    Heaven is simply Productive Compossibility itself, and its complete form is evident in the Nature of human beings as the four Mencian virtues of Humaneness, Ritual Propriety, Righteousness and Wisdom; these are construed as a process of productive sprouting, flourishing, maturation and preservation, exactly what is seen in the processes of animal activity and vegetable growth through spring, summer, autumn and winter.   This entire Nature is not uniquely present in human beings; the entire nature, the entire Productive Compossibility, is present as the Nature of every entity in the world, mineral, vegetable or animal.   But due to their differing bodies, their different “qi-endowments,” this totality may manifest more or less completely in various beings.   It is convenient to think of this as something like the relation between the Internet, present everywhere in its entirety, and the receptive capacities of various digital devices, in an environment where a strong signal is present everywhere: some get better reception than others, faster or slower load times, or have software allowing the opening of more windows at once and so on, but there is no difference in the signal itself.   Whatever narrow content may be displayed on a particular screen does not represent all that is available, and the signal itself is not divided into parts: it is present entirely everywhere, even in a rock which can manifest none of it.   On Zhu Xi’s conception, “Sages” are people whose qi—whose body, whose digital device–is “balanced and clear” (正\中\清), allowing the entire fourfold process of Productive Compossibility to manifest fully and evenly.     Other humans may be born with a body/device that is to some extent “muddied and one-sided,”  (濁/偏), to some extent obscuring or narrowing how the signal comes through, even though it is completely present there too.  But the human body is unique in that even these can strive, through their cultivation, to attain balance and clarity; this is what all human purposive activity, all moral striving, the whole endeavor of human life consists in.   But other creatures too, though they cannot change their qi-endowment, are without exception also possessors of the entire signal, the entire Productive Compossibility, the entirety of Heaven, as their own nature, by which they are born and live.   Zhu Xi can be amusing in explaining this idea: the “one-sided” moral nature of animals can be seen in carnivorous mammals like tigers and wolves, whose bodies allow the Benevolence to shine through (as evidenced in their care for their kin) but not its extension into Ritual Propriety, Righteousness or Wisdom (as seen in their inability to form societies or consideration for creatures beyond their own kind); ants and bees, on the other hand, are one-sided in the other direction: they have plenty of Righteousness (as seen in the role-directed duties that suffused their complex social organizations), but no Benevolence, no emotional empathy.   All animals and all things have the entire Nature, and yet man is “special” in having the kind of body-device that can allow the full range of this nature of all things to shine through.   For man to be truly man and truly Heavenly is for him to fully exemplify what all other things exemplify in a piecemeal way, to be a microcosm of Heaven and Earth and of the entire four-season cycle of productivity of new entities, including both the conscious and the unconscious, the animal and the human, the unthinking purposeless eros of Spring in Benevolence and the ponderous struggling purposivity of winter in Wisdom, the benevolence of the mammals and the dutifulness of the ants, which are merely subhuman or animal only because separated from one another, failing to represent the total Productive Compossibility between them that is their true Nature and source.   They become distinctively human, fully reflecting the Heaven that is the Nature of all things, precisely through their preservation in the restoration of their unity.

So we have nothing like the teleology of ontological monotheism or its aftermaths here; the only telos is that of the single unconscious (but also secondarily but indispensably multi-conscious) process of production and reproduction, of Productive Compossibility to produce, among other things, conscious beings as a completion of the expression of its value, its unconscious self-satisfaction.   As the “Great Commentary” says, “it is completed in human nature.”  Full consciousness is the completion, not the source, of the purpose that informs the cosmic process.  Oddly enough, we may say that unconscious non-teleology requires conscious teleology to complete itself, rather than the other way around, as is the case in many monotheistic theodicies.  It is wuwei that is ultimate and foundational, and that is expressed derivatively (though indispensibly) as youwei.

We may now recall Kant’s speculations about teleology in the Critique of Judgment, discussed in online appendix A, supplement 11, “Europe’s Missed Exit to Atheist Mysticism.”   Zhu Xi’s form of teleology cannot be that of “teleological realism” in Kant’s sense, either of the Stoic “world-soul” type or the Christian “transcendent creator” type: the origin of this purpose is not a mind of any sort.   Rather, we can revert to Kant’s second alternative, the “ideality of purpose” found in Spinoza’s idea of causally efficacious self-instantiating unity.   It may not be immediately apparent why Kant would think that a prior non-mental unity with causal effectivity would count as a possible explanation of even apparent teleology, in any way that differs from the first alternative, that of mere chance.   How does this even appear to approximate the “causality by concepts” which Kant stipulates as the basic meaning of teleology?    The answer lies in Kant’s breakdown of what a “concept” actually is.   For one of the results of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason that continues to inform his explorations in the Critique of Judgment is the breakdown of a “concept” into itself a form of unity.  A concept is not a particular perception ever found in experience, but a condition for understanding particulars as particulars, which must be related to each other in specific ways to count as real particulars in our experience.   In short, a concept is a way of unifying particulars.   So if “teleology” really means “concept acting as the cause of the particulars that instantiate it,” and “concept” really means “way of unifying particulars,” the possibility of as it were skipping the middle man of mental concepts becomes available: the appearance of teleology might be due to a causally efficacious sort of unity that precedes and makes possible the appearance of the particulars available to perception and understanding, and this, in Kant’s reading, is what Spinoza is suggesting, but which Kant rejects as “incomprehensible.”   Spinoza would disagree, of course.  Zhu Xi, though sharing with Spinoza a commitment to the idea of being as maximally inclusive unity and as productivity, comes to these problems with a completely different set of presuppositions and premises.  But it seems that he, and Confucianism in general, would disagree as well.

 

 

[1] The example is originally Fingarette’s:  “I see you on the street; I smile, walk toward you, put out my hand to shake yours.  And behold – without any command, stratagem, force, special tricks or tools, without any effort on my part to make you do so, you spontaneously turn toward me, return my smile, raise your hand toward mine.  We shake hands – not by my pulling your hand up and down or your pulling mine but by spontaneous and perfect cooperative action.  Normally we do not notice the subtlety and amazing complexity of this coordinated ‘ritual’ act.  This subtlety and complexity become very evident, however, if one has had to learn the ceremony only from a book of instructions, or if one is a foreigner from a nonhandshaking culture.  Nor normally do we notice the the ‘ritual’ has ‘life’ in it, that we are ‘present’ to each other, at least to some minimal extent.  As Confucius said, there are always the general and fundamental requirements of reciprocal good faith and respect.  This mutual respect is not the same as a conscious feeling of mutual respect; when I am aware of a respect for you, I am much more likely to be piously fatuous or perhaps self-consciously embarrassed;” Herbert Fingarette, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred (Sanfrancisco: Harper Collins,1974), p. 9.

[2] See my Ironies of Oneness and Difference.

[3]一陰一陽之謂道，繼之者善也，成之者性也。仁者見之謂之仁，知者見之謂之知。百姓日用而不知，故君子之道鮮矣。顯諸仁，藏諸用，鼓萬物而不與聖人同懮。

[4]Indeed, the entire Yin-Yang conception on which this text is based is constructed from the interplay of two key metaphors, drawn from observations about the origin of life, in its vegetable and animal forms.  Both are emphatically anti-intentional.   Vegetable life emerges due to atmospheric cycles (diurnal, seasonal).  Animal life emerges due to sexual reproduction.  Both of these are root metaphors for the life-giving structure of the yin-yang relationship.  Atmospheric cycles means day/night, hot/cold, etc.  Crops grow only because of the cycle of day and night, of light and dark, and of hot and cold over the course of the year.   It is the proper balance or relation between these two that make the harvest possible.  The same is true of the creative power of the sexual relation of male and female; again we have a balanced relation between two opposed poles which accounts for the origin of things.   Note that in both cases, the source of being is 1) non-monolithic, involving more than a single agent, and thus not a matter of unilateral command or control, and 2) an unintentional by-product of a spontaneous relation rather than an intended creation (most obvious in sexual reproduction).  In sum, Yin and Yang are just a minimal assertion of “there is something intelligible there, against a background of what it is not.”  We must emphasize that they are not to be thought of as “first principles” that require anything to be made-so, but rather the lack of any such principles, again as the “Law of Averages” is the lack of any law.  Note also the resistance to an overriding order set of mutually consistent laws implied by the fact that the Yi system is rationalized divination, an intrinsically case-by-case endeavor geared to changing circumstances and addressed to the specific projects and desires of specific participants in those situations, as opposed to rationalized mythology, which typically attempts a global explanation for why the world is as it is, for its constant characteristics. It is no accident that this metaphysics and its “principles” are attached not to a univocal myth, but to a fortune telling book: thoroughgoing situationalism and particularism, not a universal order but an order vis-à-vis each particular time, place, observer and desire/purpose (rather than one overridding purpose). Mythology, rationalized, produces God-steered religion and metaphysics.   Divination, rationalized, produces God-less religiousness.  What we end up with are not global laws laid down once and for all by an intentional lawgiver, but rather rough and ready tendencies which are traceable but not strictly reducible to any formula.   The text thus insists, “The transformations simply go where they go; no essential norms or rules can be made of them.” (wei bian suo shi, buke wei dianyao 唯變所適,不可為典要).

[5] The phrase is found in the 經解, collected in the 禮記, where it is applied to the emperor, but in the中庸 in the same collection, it is applied to human beings generally.  The same idea appears in a slightly different form in the Xunzi.

[6] Xunzi, “Lilun” (Treatise on Ritual).  禮起於何也？曰：人生而有欲，欲而不得，則不能無求。求而無度量分界，則不能不爭；爭則亂，亂則窮。先王惡其亂也，故制禮義以分之，以養人之欲，給人之求。使欲必不窮乎物，物必不屈於欲。兩者相持而長，是禮之所起也。

 

[7] Xunzi, “Wangzhi” (Regulations of the King).  水火有氣而無生，草木有生而無知，禽獸有知而無義，人有氣、有生、有知，亦且有義，故最為天下貴也。力不若牛，走不若馬，而牛馬為用，何也？曰：人能群，彼不能群也。人何以能群？曰：分。分何以能行？曰：義。故義以分則和，和則一，一則多力，多力則彊，彊則勝物；

[8]聖人縱其欲，兼其情，而制焉者理矣。夫何彊？何忍？何危？故仁者之行道也，無為也；聖人之行道也，無彊也。

[9] 孰知夫禮義文理之所以養情也.  故人苟生之為見，若者必死；苟利之為見，若者必害；苟怠惰偷懦之為安，若者必危；苟情說之為樂，若者必滅。故人一之於禮義，則兩得之矣；一之於情性，則兩喪之矣。故儒者將使人兩得之者也，墨者將使人兩喪之者也。

[10] 可欲之謂善.  有諸己之謂信。充實之謂美，充實而有光輝之謂大，大而化之之謂聖，聖而不可知之之謂神

[11] 孟子曰：「口之於味也，目之於色也，耳之於聲也，鼻之於臭也，四肢之於安佚也，性也，有命焉，君子不謂性也。仁之於父子也，義之於君臣也，禮之於賓主也，智之於賢者也，聖人之於天道也，命也，有性焉，君子不謂命也。」

 

[12] 孟子曰：「盡其心者，知其性也。知其性，則知天矣。存其心，養其性，所以事天也。殀壽不貳，修身以俟之，所以立命也。」

 

[13] 孟子曰：「人之於身也，兼所愛。兼所愛，則兼所養也。無尺寸之膚不愛焉，則無尺寸之膚不養也。所以考其善不善者，豈有他哉？於己取之而已矣。體有貴賤，有小大。無以小害大，無以賤害貴。養其小者為小人，養其大者為大人。今有場師，舍其梧檟，養其樲棘，則為賤場師焉。養其一指而失其肩背，而不知也，則為狼疾人也。飲食之人，則人賤之矣，為其養小以失大也。飲食之人無有失也，則口腹豈適為尺寸之膚哉？」

 

[14] 曰：「鈞是人也，或從其大體，或從其小體，何也？」曰：「耳目之官不思，而蔽於物，物交物，則引之而已矣。心之官則思，思則得之，不思則不得也。此天之所與我者，先立乎其大者，則其小者弗能奪也。此為大人而已矣。」

 

[15]See Franklin Perkins, Heaven and Earth are Not Humane: The Problem of Evil in Classical Chinese Philosophy, (Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 2015), and Doing What You Really Want: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mengzi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).

[16]不為而成，不求而得，夫是之謂天職。如是者，雖深、其人不加慮焉；雖大、不加能焉；雖精、不加察焉，夫是之謂不與天爭職。天有其時，地有其財，人有其治，夫是之謂能參。舍其所以參，而願其所參，則惑矣。

[17] 可以贊天地之化育，則可以與天地參矣

[18]I am here not speaking of the Xunzian line of Confucianism, touched on above, which I consider a simple case of Compensatory Atheism.  Nor am I speaking, at the other extreme, of the imperial Confucianism derived from Dong Zhongshu and other Han thinkers, which, stands in the relation to Confucianism where negative theology stands in relation to monotheism: the outlying and ultimately marginalized attempt within these respective systems to massage the outcome in the other direction, in this case toward a quasi-monotheism.   But just as I’ve argued in the case of the negative theologians, the attempt ultimately fails: the negative theologians end up shipwrecked in the last instance in a hyper-purposive cosmos, while Dong Zhongshu and the like end up in the last instance with a limp henotheism still rooted in the ultimate spontaneity of yin-yang processes that undermine total control by any one agent.   For a full account, see my Ironies of Oneness and Difference.

[19] I will try to justify this unorthodox translation of Zhu Xi’s key term Li below.

[20]問：「天地之心亦靈否？還只是漠然無為？」曰：「天地之心不可道是不靈，但不如人恁地思慮。伊川曰：『天地無心而成化，聖人有心而無為。』」問：「天地之心，天地之理。理是道理，心是主宰底意否？」曰：「心固是主宰底意，然所謂主宰者，即是理也，不是心外別有箇理，理外別有箇心。」道夫言：「向者先生教思量天地有心無心。近思之，竊謂天地無心，仁便是天地之心。若使其有心，必有思慮，有營為。天地曷嘗有思慮來！然其所以『四時行，百物生』者，蓋以其合當如此便如此，不待思維，此所以為天地之道。」

曰：「如此，則易所謂『復其見天地之心』，『正大而天地之情可見』，又如何？如公所說，祇說得他無心處爾。若果無心，則須牛生出馬，桃樹上發李花，他又却自定。程子曰：『以主宰謂之帝，以性情謂之乾。』他這名義自定，心便是他箇主宰處，所以謂天地以生物為心。中間欽夫以為某不合如此說。某謂天地別無勾當，只是以生物為心。一元之氣，運轉流通，略無停間，只是生出許多萬物而已。」

問：「程子謂：『天地無心而成化，聖人有心而無為。』」

曰：「這是說天地無心處。且如<4>『四時行，百物生』，天地何所容心？至於聖人，則順理而已，復何為哉！所以明道云：『天地之常，以其心普萬物而無心；聖人之常，以其情順萬事而無情。』說得最好。」

問：「普萬物，莫是以心周徧而無私否？」曰：「天地以此心普及萬物，人得之遂為人之心，物得之遂為物之心，草木禽獸接着遂為草木禽獸之心，只是一箇天地之心爾。今須要知得他有心處，又要見得他無心處，只恁定說不得。」道夫。

萬物生長，是天地無心時；枯槁欲生，是天地有心時。(Zhuzi yulei, pp. 52-53.)

[21] See for example Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1.44.4, “Treatise on Creation,” “Whether God is the Final Cause of All things.”   See Summa Theologica by St. Thomas Aquinas, Translated by The Fathers of the English Dominican Province

[1947], available at http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/aquinas/summa/:  “Every agent acts for an end: otherwise one thing would not follow more than another from the action of the agent, unless it were by chance.”

Schopenhauer equivocates on this point: when he is speaking more strictly in delineating his metaphysics, he specifies quite clearly that “the Will” has no specific end, that it is blind in precisely the sense of wanting no particular object, just wanting.  But in his more popular writings, or when discussing living organisms, or perhaps when he is being less careful, he does speak of a “Will to Life.”

[23]Here I take shengli 生理 to be an explicit explication of the meaning of the usually abbreviated and general term 理 itself, so I translate them the same way.

[24] 問：「曾見答余方叔書，以為枯槁有理。不知枯槁瓦礫，如何有理？」曰：「且如大黃、附子，亦是枯槁。然大黃不可為附子，附子不可為大黃。」

問：「枯槁之物亦有性，是如何？」曰：「是他合下有此理，故云天下無性外之物。」因行街，云：「階磚便有磚之理。」因坐，云：「竹椅便有竹椅之理。枯槁之物，謂之無生意，則可；謂之無生理，則不可。如朽木無所用。止可付之爨，是無生意矣。然燒甚麼木，則是甚麼氣，亦各不同，這是理元如此。」

 

[25]問：「枯槁有理否？」曰：「才有物，便有理。天不曾生箇筆，人把兔毫來做筆。才有筆，便有理。」又問：「筆上如何分仁義？」曰：「小小底，不消恁地分仁義。」 Zhuziyulei, p. 81.

[26] 如有人平生不識一字一日病作卻念得一部杜甫詩。卻有此理；天地間事只是一箇有一箇無。既有即有無即無。如杜甫詩者是世界上實有杜甫詩。故人之心病及至精一，有箇道理自相感通以至人心.

[27] 衣食動作只是物，物之理乃道也。將物便喚做道，則不可。且如這箇椅子有四隻脚，可以坐，此椅之理也。若除去一隻脚，坐不得，便失其椅之理矣。…且如這箇扇子，此物也，便有箇扇子底道理。扇子是如此做，合當如此用，此便是形而上之理。Zhuxi yulei, p. 786.  （The complete passage: 楊通老問：「中庸或問引楊氏所謂『無適非道』之云，則善矣，然其言似亦有所未盡。蓋衣食作息，視聽舉履，皆物也，其所以如此之義理準則，乃道也。」曰：「衣食動作只是物，物之理乃道也。將物便喚做道，則不可。且如這箇椅子有四隻脚，可以坐，此椅之理也。若除去一隻脚，坐不得，便失其椅之理矣。『形而上為道，形而下為器。』說這形而下之器之中，便有那形而上之道。若便將形而下之器作形而上之道，則不可。且如這箇扇子，此物也，便有箇扇子底道理。扇子是如此做，合當如此用，此便是形而上之理。天地中間，上是天，下是地，中間有許多日月星辰，山川草木，人物禽獸，此皆形而下之器也。然這形而下之器之中，便各自有箇道理，此便是形而上之道。所謂格物，便是要就這形而下之器，窮得那形而上之道理而已，如何便將形而下之器作形而上之道理得！飢而食，渴而飲，『日出而作，日<1496>入而息』，其所以飲食作息者，皆道之所在也  。」）

[28] The premise here seems to be, as Cheng Yi insists (in an attempt to out-Buddhist the Buddhists emphasis on flux and impermanence), that to exist is to be in process: “Production 生 and change 異 only, not abiding 住 and no nothingness 滅 [the Buddhists claiming that process consists of all four].”  (Citation)

[29] …天下之物，至微至細者，亦皆有心，只是有無知覺處爾。且如一草一木，向陽處便生，向陰處便憔悴，他有箇好惡在裏。至大而天地，生出許多萬物，運轉流通，不停一息，四時晝夜，恰似有箇物事積踏恁地去。天地自有箇無心之心。

[30] 程先生說『天地以生物為心』，最好，此乃是無心之心也: “Master Cheng put it best: Heaven and Earth take generating things as their mind.   This is non-mind mind.”

• [31] 天地以生物為心者也，人物之生，又各得夫天地之心以為心者也。。… 蓋天地之心，其德有四，曰元、亨、利、貞，而元無不統。其運行 焉，則為春、夏、秋、冬之序，而春生之氣無所不通。故人之為心， 其德亦有四，曰仁、義、禮、智，而仁無不包。其發用焉，則為愛、 恭、宜、別之情，而惻隱之心無所不貫。。。。亦有謂愛非仁，而以心有知覺釋仁之名者矣。。。。彼謂心有知覺者，可以見仁之包乎智矣， 而非仁之所以得名之實也。

 

 

[32] See also Schopenhauer, Ibid., p. 269.

[33] See for example Nietzsche, The Gay Science, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), Section 11, pp. 84-85: “Consciousness is the last and latest development of the organic and hence also what is most unfinished and unstrong.  Consciousness gives rise to countless errors that lead an animal or man to perish sooner than necessary….If the conserving association of the instincts were not so very much more powerful, and if it did not serve on the whole as a regulator, humanity would have to perish of its misjudgment and its fantasies with open eyes, of its lack of thoroughness and its credulity—in short, of its consciousness….”