Through all the parables and anecdotes in the Zhuangzi, we are meant to consider what it would be like to be liberated from our confining, singular human perspective. On a metaphorical level, this means seeing the world as a butterfly, a bird, a tiger. On a more immediate level, this means understanding the world from another person’s point of view. If you’re a woman, imagine seeing the world as a man. Or seeing the world from an old man’s perspective, even though you’re young. Or putting yourself in the tattered shoes of an impoverished artist, despite your being a wealthy lawyer. Imagine seeing the world through the eyes of an ally—or an adversary. Opening up to the possibilities of all perspectives allows us to see the entire cosmos from the most expansive place possible, which is how we begin to understand the endless transformation of things.
This is the vision Zhuangzi proposes: unlimited perspective and trained spontaneity. Our ability to transcend the human comes precisely from the fact that we are human. We can embrace far more of the cosmos than any other creature on Earth because of our vast capacity for imagination. Only we can enter endless as-if worlds to see the universe through the perspective of another. We get there only through the constant work of keeping ourselves open to everything, moving spontaneously with the Way, and becoming an active part of the transformation of things.
8
On Humanity: Xunzi and Putting Pattern on the World
We often hear that self-acceptance is the key to personal growth: Love who you are. Be at peace with the person you are in this moment. This leads us to accept not just ourselves but also our lives; in doing so, we gain some measure of serenity.
But one of our philosophers would have been concerned about this level of self-acceptance. Xunzi, a Confucian scholar born in 310 BC, didn’t believe we should accept ourselves as we are. Rather, he argued that we should never complacently accept what we think is natural to us.
Yes, just about anyone would rush to rescue a child from a well, but Xunzi didn’t want us to forget our less altruistic impulses in everyday moments. Our very worst cravings and desires are also a part of what’s natural about us.
We feel a flash of rage when stuck in traffic and someone beeps at us to get moving. We gossip about a friend’s misfortunes, spilling secrets she’s shared in confidence. We stew for days over a critical remark someone made to us; we binge shop online to quell our anxieties. Imagine what it would be like if we always allowed our worst, undomesticated sides to emerge constantly—if we accepted our “authentic” selves in every moment. As Xunzi wrote:
Human nature is bad. Its goodness comes from artifice. It is in the nature of humans to be born with a fondness for profit . . . They are born with hates and dislikes . . . That is why people will inevitably fall into conflict and struggle if they simply follow along with their nature and their dispositions.
For Xunzi, the notion that “natural is better” was dangerous. And he wasn’t referring just to human nature. He was also referring to our assumption about the world at large.
Patterning the World
Consider the following tale, a story much like the many as-if stories that Xunzi told:
In distant antiquity, at times the rains would come, at times they would not. No one knew when. At times it would be cold, at times it would be hot. When it was cold, humans, who had no clothes to wear, were at risk of freezing to death. When rain did not fall, plants did not grow. When the rains came, plants and berries grew, which humans could eat to nourish themselves, but just as often the plants were poison, and made them ill.
Gradually humans began to understand that these events were not random. They came to realize when it would rain and when it would not; when it would be cold and when it would be warm. They began to realize which plants they could eat, and which were poison. They began to domesticate the plants. They would plant them according to the changes in the weather, which they came to know as the seasons. The process continued as they cleared more ground for planting, domesticated animals to help with the process, and drove out those animals that they could not tame.
Eventually, what had once seemed like unpredictable chaos of natural phenomena—random rains, wind, cold, heat, nourishment, and poison—were turned into a harmonious system. That which grew from the earth was now correlated with the larger patterns of the heavens. But this was not natural. Humans had domesticated the world. Humans had made it so that these disparate phenomena became a harmonious set of processes.
This story about the invention of agriculture reminds us that the world as we know it was constructed by humans, who took elements in nature and reconstituted them, reworked them, and domesticated them to serve human needs.
In other words, human beings are the ones who give pattern to the world. Xunzi reminds us that we were born into this world, but the patterns we see in it were created by us:
Heaven and Earth gave birth to us. We give pattern to Heaven and Earth. We form a triad with Heaven and Earth, are the summation of the myriad things, and are the father and mother of the people. Without us, Heaven and Earth have no pattern.
He thought that any loyalty to nature, whether it is our own human nature or the nature out there, any acceptance of the world “as it is,” was inherently limiting and destructive. He asks us to consider how we would live differently if we understood just how much the world is already our creation. If we have made the world that we experience, then we should not be asking ourselves how to find our proper place within it. We should be asking whether we have structured it well.
The Age of Xunzi
Xunzi, who lived about two hundred fifty years after Confucius, is a fitting cap to our exploration of Chinese philosophy because of how he synthesized the works of all the thinkers who came before him.
A highly respected teacher and the leading Confucian scholar of the day, Xunzi lived at the end of the Warring States period, the events of which very much shaped his thought. By this time, several states had become highly militarized and dominant, and it was clear that whichever one took power would bring about a world in which the ideas of Mencius would be inadequate.
The new political climate influenced the intellectual world. Witnessing the disorder and chaos of the times, thinkers such as Xunzi sought not just a unifying solution to the political situation, but also a synthesis that would take the disparate lines of philosophical thought from past eras and unify them into a coherent whole. Just as he portrayed humans as actively weaving together random natural elements to pattern the world, he gave pattern to the many vibrant ideas and notions of the past three centuries.
As Xunzi developed his philosophy, he came to believe that the thinkers preceding him had indeed captured concepts of great significance. Mencius was right to focus on self-cultivation, for example, and the Laozian idea about how we connect things was crucial. But he also argued that each of these thinkers had blind spots. Each had understood something important, but none saw the big picture.
None but Confucius, that is. Xunzi believed that Confucius alone had understood the most important, most fundamental practice: that of ritual training to become a better person.
But Xunzi would do something very different with ritual. For Confucius, ritual was a means to construct miniature as-if moments endlessly to create pockets of order in human relationships. Xunzi expanded this notion so that instead of constructing pockets of as-if moments, we could create vast as-if worlds. He believed that ritual works to transform our natures when, and only when, we recognize it as the artifice it is. It is that very consciousness of artifice that Xunzi exhorts us to apply to the world at large. This is how ritual not only helps us to become better people, but to construct a better world.
The Importance of Artifice
In his writings, Xunzi famously likened human nature to a crooked piece of wood, one that had to be straightened forcibly from the outside. But unlike other commentators on human nature (such as Kant, who centuries later would declare, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight th
ing was ever made”), Xunzi believed that the crooked wood of human nature could be straightened. It just required wei, or “artifice,” from which ritual emerged.
But that artifice had to be used well. We tend to distrust those who seem artificial or phony. However, as Xunzi would likely remind us, each of our personas is constructed. Even when we think we’re being natural and “real,” being like that is a choice, and thus it is a kind of artifice too. For Xunzi, being artificial is a good thing—as long as we’re aware we are doing it so that we can do it well.
Artifice helps us corral our spontaneous natures and unruly emotions. A toddler throws a noisy tantrum when he is tired, hungry, and doesn’t get to play immediately with his favorite toy. But as adults, we are capable of more self-control. When we haven’t slept well, are famished, and are all packed up and about to leave work for the day, if our coworker asks for ten minutes of our time to discuss a problem she is having with the boss, we don’t submit to what we “naturally” feel and throw our coffee mug at her head in annoyance and tell her absolutely not. We act as-if. We tell her that of course we have time for her, it is our pleasure—and, as we help her, we find ourselves enjoying the interaction, we feel better for having taken the time to assist a colleague, and we forget that we are tired and hungry. When we end up leaving for the day fifteen minutes later than we’d planned, we are in better spirits than we would have been had we succumbed to who we “naturally” and really are.
That which is used as it was from birth is called human nature. The part of human nature that . . . resonates and responds spontaneously and without interference is also called human nature. The likes, dislikes, happiness, anger, sorrows, and joys of human nature are called emotions.
When the emotions are thus, and the mind acts [wei] upon them and makes choices, this is called thinking. When the mind thinks and is able to act [wei] upon its thoughts and move, this is called artifice.
Xunzi argued that we should consciously work on our natures to help us refine and order our emotions and impulses. Through artificial constructs such as rituals, we can impose patterns on our natures much as agriculture gave pattern to the world around us. We can control our impulse to have a tantrum like a toddler, and in doing so, we are helping to shape our responses to things.
But there is a paradox: if the sages were human, with inherently bad human natures, how did they come up with the idea of creating rituals in the first place? How could they transcend that stew of questionable human impulses to consciously act better?
In another as-if story, Xunzi asks us to imagine how the sages came up with these innovations that would help us to live well together. He compares this innovation to making pots:
All rituals and propriety were generated from the artifice of the sages. Thus a potter kneads clay and makes vessels; the vessels are generated from the potter’s artifice, not originally generated from human nature . . . The sages accumulated their considerations and thoughts and made a practice of artifice and precedents; they thereby generated rituals and propriety and made laws and standards arise.
One might assume that Xunzi was comparing the creation of human standards, laws, and rituals to the creation of pottery: two grand ideas that transformed what humans can do. But on the contrary, he was actually comparing the creation of human society to the humdrum, incremental work of learning over time how to make a pot. He was calling attention to the idea that ritual didn’t merely emerge by happenstance; it was an intentional, created endeavor. The creation of ritual by the sages was like the actual work a potter does to train herself to make a pot, by working with and feeling the clay, and imagining what shape it should take. The sages applied artifice to their human natures and honed their senses to perceive how people’s interactions might be shifted and to imagine what sort of as-if interactions could help them to live well together. Over time they were able to produce rituals precisely as a potter learns how to produce a pot. In Xunzi’s mind, the rise of human culture and social rituals came not as one great innovation but through everyday craft, generated through artifice.
Human nature is the basis, beginning, material, and substance; artifice is the pattern, the principle, and the source of abundance and profusion. If there were no human nature, there would be nothing for artifice to add to. But if there were no artifice, human nature would be unable to beautify itself . . . When human nature and artifice combine, all under Heaven is put in order.
Our nature, given by Heaven, awaits the patterning of human activity. The result is a thing of beauty: humanity elevated to an unimaginable degree.
The Danger of Thinking the World Should Be Natural
If you use a chariot and horses, your feet have not improved one bit, but you can travel a thousand li.
If you use a boat and paddle, you haven’t learned to swim, but you can still cross the rivers and seas.
One who is cultivated is no different from others at birth; he is simply good at making use of things.
Many people worry about the impact of human “progress” on our globe and climate. We debate the ethics of genetically engineered crops or stem cell research, fret over toxins in plastic wrap or the use of fluoridated water. We see kids glued to electronics and wonder what happened to the days when childhood was spent playing out in the backyard. Many of us respond to the onslaught of technological advances by romanticizing the natural, wishing we could go back to a time before human actions seemed to make everything worse. And these are understandable concerns in this hyperconnected, hyperengineered era. But is natural always better?
Not surprisingly, Xunzi didn’t think so. In his time too, there were longings for a more natural world. But Xunzi had much to say about the dangers of blindly revering nature.
Xunzi saw our ability to create an artificial, constructed world as a good thing. After all, the world in its natural state is full of struggle. Fish swim and birds fly, and it is true that these actions flow with the Way, but those fish include salmon, battling their way upstream to return to their birthplaces to spawn. Those birds include birds of prey, swooping down fiercely on small, frightened animals. All these creatures are living spontaneously in accordance with nature. And we, too, left in our natural state, would spontaneously live this way. But we shouldn’t want to be like nature, endlessly spontaneous and endlessly struggling. We, uniquely among all these living creatures, can construct worlds within which we can transform ourselves and transcend this natural state. The mind’s tendency to distinguish us from the rest of the world is an asset, one that allowed us to create human morality, rituals, and innovations.
The danger of thinking the world should be natural is that it prevents us from recognizing what great things we are capable of creating, and it negates our responsibility for the world around us. Xunzi wanted us to harness the mind to improve upon our natural selves and our natural world and become the best human beings we can be.
Remember Zhuangzi’s story of Cook Ding, who eventually became so able to sense the patterns in the meat that his knife flowed between them and never needed to be put to the grindstone? While Zhuangzi would see these patterns as existing in nature, Xunzi would challenge the notion that anything about this scenario is even natural at all. He would have us remember that the ox that the meat comes from is domesticated; the knife is manmade. The very fact that Cook Ding has a job as a butcher is an artifice; the job was created by humans. The entire situation is a social construction. The patterns that emerge are the result of human interventions, and that is where our focus should be. We domesticate, organize, and pattern nature. How we do so is up to us.
Nothing Is Natural
In Xunzi’s tales of the invention of human civilization, he reminded us that human endeavors were about building on what is “natural” and making it incomparably better.
By putting pattern on the world, we left behind an era in which humans would freeze to death in the winter because they had no clothing, had to live in caves and in trees because they had no shelte
r, and had to forage for food, occasionally finding edible berries but just as likely dying from poison berries nearby. With the innovations of clothing, shelter, and agriculture, we domesticated the natural world and transformed it for our own prosperity.
Of course, human intervention can also have many dangerous ramifications. Xunzi’s response, though, would not be to pull back from intervention but to encourage us to become conscious that we have created the world we live in and notice where we have made mistakes, so that we can improve upon them, intervene better, innovate better, create better.
We have already imposed “pattern and order” on our world. Some of these constructions are apparent to us; others, less so.
Here’s one example: we often use the word natural in relation to childbirth. Usually proponents say that a natural childbirth is childbirth the way nature intended it: no medications, no interventions, sometimes even outside a hospital. This is said to be the way that women used to give birth before the advent of medical interventions. The implication is that natural is better for both mother and child.
But actually, what we think of as natural childbirth in the modern age is itself filled with interventions. One of the most revolutionary of these is hand washing by the birth attendant. The maternal mortality rate in the period immediately following birth used to be very high; one of the leading causes was postpartum fever from unsanitary conditions. When a Hungarian doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis noticed in the mid–eighteen hundreds that women giving birth in hospitals had a much higher rate of mortality than those who birthed at home, where there were fewer foreign germs for the body to contend with, he embarked on a large-scale study to investigate the cause. He was ridiculed for his conclusion that hand washing with an antiseptic could drastically reduce these deaths. (One doctor responded, “Doctors are gentlemen, and gentlemen’s hands are always clean.”) While the hospital where Semmelweis worked took up his suggestions and reduced its maternal mortality rate by 90 percent, his recommendations were largely ignored elsewhere. Semmelweis, broken down by the criticism and lack of faith in his idea, died in an asylum at the age of forty-seven. It wasn’t until the French microbiologist Louis Pasteur proved the existence of germs several decades later that doctors began washing their hands as a matter of routine before attending a birth.
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