Confucius’ discourse dao was the
classical syllabus, including most notably history, poetry and ritual. On one
hand, we can think of these as training the xin to proper performance. On the
other, the question of how to interpret the texts into action seemed to require
a prior interpretive capacity of xin. Confucius appealed to a tantalizingly
vague intuitive ability that he called ren (humanity). A person with ren can
translate guiding discourse into performance correctly—i.e., can execute or
follow a dao. Confucius left open whether ren was innate or acquired in
study—though the latter seems more likely to have been his position. It was, in
any case, the position of China’s first philosophical critic, the anti-Confucian
Mozi. Again concern with philosophy of mind was subordinate to Mozi’s normative
concerns. He saw moral character as plastic. Natural human communion (especially
our tendency to emulate superiors) shaped it. Thus, we could cultivate
utilitarian behavioral tendencies by having social models enunciate and act on a
utilitarian social discourse. The influence of social models would also
determine the interpretation of the discourse. Interpretation takes the form of
indexical pro and con reactions—shi (this:right:assent) and fei (not
this:wrong:dissent). The attitudes when associated with terms pick out the
reality (object, action, etc.) relevant to the discourse guidance. We thus train
the heart-mind to make distinctions that guide its choices and thereby our
behavior—specifically in following a utilitarian symbolic guide. Utilitarian
standards also should guide practical interpretation (execution or performance)
of the discourse. At this point in Chinese thought, the heart-mind became the
focus of more systematic theorizing—much of it in reaction to Mozi’s issues. The
moral issue and the threat of a relativist regress in the picture led to a
nativist reaction. On the one hand, thinkers wanted to imagine ways to free
themselves from the implicit social determinism. On the other, moralists want a
more absolute basis for ethical distinctions and actions. Several thinkers may
have joined a trend of interest in cultivating the heart-mind. Mencius’ theory
is the best known within the moralist trend. He analyzed the heart-mind as
consisting of four natural moral inclinations. These normally mature just as
seeds grows into plants. Therefore, the resulting virtues (‘benevolence’,
‘morality’, ‘ritual’, and ‘knowledge’) were natural. Mencius thus avoided having
to treat the ren intuition as a learned product a social dao. It is a de that
signals a natural dao. This view allowed Mencius to defend Confucian ritual
indirectly against Mozi’s accusation that it relied on an optional and, thus,
changeable tradition. Mencius’ strategy, however, presupposed that a linguistic
dao could either distort or reinforce the heart-mind's innate program. In
principle, we do not need to prop up moral virtue educationally. Linguistic
shaping, other than countering linguistic distortion, therefore, ran an
unnecessary risk.
It endangered the natural growth of the moral dispositions.
The shi (this:right:assent) and fei (not this:wrong:dissent) dispositions
necessary for sage-like moral behavior should develop naturally. His theory did
not imply that we know moral theory at birth, but that they develop or mature as
the physical body does and in response to ordinary moral situations. The
heart-mind functions by issuing shi-fei (this-not this) directives that are
right in the concrete situations in which we find ourselves. It does not need or
generate ethical theory or hypothetical choices. The xin’s intuitions are
situational and implicitly harmonious with nature. A well-known advocate with
the natural spontaneity or freedom motivation was the Taoist, Laozi. He analyzed
the psychology of socialization at a different level. Learning names was
training us to make distinctions and to have desires of what society considered
the appropriate sort. Both the distinctions and the desires were right only
according to the conventions of the language community. Learning language not
only meant losing one’s natural spontaneity, it was and subjecting oneself to
control by a social-historical perspective. We allowed society to control our
desires. His famous slogan, wu-wei, enjoined us to avoid actions motivated by
such socialized desires. We achieve that negative by forgetting socially
instilled distinctions—by forgetting language! His implicit ideal had some
affinities with that of Mencius except that his conception of the natural realm
of psychological dispositions was considerably less ambitious in moral terms.
Interpreters usually suppose that he assumed there would be a range of natural
desires left even if socialized ones were subtracted. These would be enough to
sustain small, non-aggressive, agrarian villages. In them, people would lack the
curiosity even to visit neighboring villages. This primitivism still requires
that there is a natural level of harmonious impulses to action, but not nearly
enough to sustain Mencius’ unified moral empire. The LATER MOHISTS became
skeptical of the neutral status of these allegedly natural heart-mind states.
They noted that even a thief may claim that his behavior was natural. They
watered down the conventionalism of Mozi by appealing to objectively accessible
similarities and differences in nature. Our language ought to reflect these
clusters of similarity. They did little epistemology especially of the senses,
but supposedly, like Mozi, would have appealed to the testimony ordinary people
relying on their eyes and ears. Others (See ZHUANGZI) insisted that any apparent
patterns of similarity and difference were always perspectival and relative to
some prior purpose, standards or value attitude. Linguistics did shape
heart-mind attitudes but neither reliably or accurately carves the world into
its real parts. The Later Mohists had given a cluster of definitions of zhi (to
know). One of these seemed close to consciousness—or rather to point to the lack
of any such concept. Zhi was the capacity to know.
