Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China
Contestation of Humaneness, Justice, and Personal Freedom
Tao JiangTells a dramatic and often unexpected story about early Chinese moral-political philosophy through a new interpretative framework that brings to light a new arc and dialectic of its development
Explores tensions in the works attributed to Confucius, Mozi, Mencius, Laozi, Shang Yang, Shen Dao, Zhuangzi, Xunzi, Han Feizi and others, to understand what motivated early Chinese thinkers
Brings together Sinological and philosophical research of the last several decades
Structured in such a way that readers can choose to engage the part of the book that interests them most
$35.00
Paperback
Published: 10 September 2021
536 Pages
Hardcover
Ebook
Also Available In:
Oxford Scholarship Online
Bookseller Code (06)
Description
This book rewrites the story of classical Chinese philosophy, which has always been considered the single most creative and vibrant chapter in the history of Chinese philosophy. Works attributed to Confucius, Mozi, Mencius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Xunzi, Han Feizi and many others represent the very origins of moral and political thinking in China. As testimony to their enduring stature, in recent decades many Chinese intellectuals, and even leading politicians, have turned to those classics, especially Confucian texts, for alternative or complementary sources of moral authority and political legitimacy. Therefore, philosophical inquiries into core normative values embedded in those classical texts are crucial to the ongoing scholarly discussion about China as China turns more culturally inward. It can also contribute to the spirited contemporary debate about the nature of philosophical reasoning, especially in the non-Western traditions.
This book offers a new narrative and interpretative framework about the origins of moral-political philosophy that tracks how the three normative values, humaneness, justice, and personal freedom, were formulated, reformulated, and contested by early Chinese philosophers in their effort to negotiate the relationship among three distinct domains, the personal, the familial, and the political. Such efforts took place as those thinkers were reimagining a new moral-political order, debating its guiding norms, and exploring possible sources within the context of an evolving understanding of Heaven and its relationship with the humans. Tao Jiang argues that the competing visions in that debate can be characterized as a contestation between partialist humaneness and impartialist justice as the guiding norm for the newly imagined moral-political order, with the Confucians, the Mohists, the Laoists, and the so-called fajia thinkers being the major participants, constituting the mainstream philosophical project during this period. Thinkers lined up differently along the justice-humaneness spectrum with earlier ones maintaining some continuity between the two normative values (or at least trying to accommodate both to some extent) while later ones leaning more toward their exclusivity in the political/public domain. Zhuangzi and the Zhuangists were the outliers of the mainstream moral-political debate who rejected the very parameter of humaneness versus justice in that discourse. They were a lone voice advocating personal freedom, but the Zhuangist expressions of freedom were self-restricted to the margins of the political world and the interiority of one's heartmind. Such a take can shed new light on how the Zhuangist approach to personal freedom would profoundly impact the development of this idea in pre-modern Chinese political and intellectual history.Show less
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part I: Humaneness-cum-Justice: Negotiating Humans' Relationship with Heaven
Chapter 1: Ritual and Ren in Confucius' World: Humaneness-cum-Justice at the Incipience of Chinese Moral-Political Philosophy
Part II: Humaneness versus Justice: Grappling with the Familial-Political Relationship Under a Naturalizing Heaven
Chapter 2: The Great Divergence: Mozi and Mencius on Justice and Humaneness
Chapter 3: Justice and Humaneness in a Naturalist Cosmos: Laozi's Dao and the Realignment of Values
Chapter 4: Modeling the State after Heaven: Impartiality in Early Fajia Political Philosophy
Part III: Personal Freedom, Humaneness, and Justice: Coming to Terms with the State Under a Naturalized Heaven
Chapter 5: Zhuangzi's Lone Project of Personal Freedom
Chapter 6: Xunzi's Synthesis of Humaneness and Justice: Ritual as the Sages' Partnership with Heaven and Earth
Chapter 7: Universal Bureaucratic State as the Sole Agent of Justice in Han Feizi's Thought
Conclusion: Regime of Self-Cultivation and Tragedy of Personal Freedom
Author Information
Tao Jiang teaches at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. His research interests include pre-Qin classical Chinese philosophy, Mahayana Buddhist philosophy, and cross-cultural philosophy. He is the author of Contexts and Dialogue: Yogacara Buddhism and Modern Psychology on the Subliminal Mind (University of Hawai'i Press, 2006) and the co-editor of The Reception and Rendition of Freud in China (Routledge, 2013). He is chair of Religion Department and director of Center for Chinese Studies at Rutgers. Jiang co-chairs the Neo-Confucian Studies Seminar at Columbia University as well as the Buddhist Philosophy Unit at the American Academy of Religion. He serves on the editorial boards of several leading Asian and comparative philosophy journals.
Reviews and Awards
Honorable Mention, 2023 AAS Joseph Levenson Prize on Pre-1900 China
"A grand and well argued history of early Chinese philosophy." -- Taisu Zhang, Yale Law School
"In this very important book, Tao Jiang provides a dynamic model of the development of moral political philosophy in early China (ca. 551â221 BCE), which embodies a new approach to thinking about freedom in complicated socio-political realities. It convincingly demonstrates that thinkers of early China are important for philosophical studies today not only because they cover the themes that remain fundamental in contemporary debates but also because their argumentations came out of intellectual exchanges that were no less robust than their 'Western' counterparts." -- British Journal for the History of Philosophy
"Jiang's book as a whole is a brilliant work on early Chinese philosophy that reflects on big issues from fresh perspectives. I would strongly recommend it to anyone who is interested in pre-Qin thoughts." -- Zemian Zheng, Journal of Chinese Philosophy (JCP)
"Tao Jiang has provided a coherent and sweeping narrative of the development of moral and political philosophy in the classical period of Chinese philosophy. He integrates many plausible insights gleaned from sinology and philosophy to argue provocatively that the classical period can be understood in terms of a struggle to deal with conflicts between the values of humaneness (pertaining to the personal and familial realms) and of justice (pertaining to the political realm). This book is highly recommended both to specialists and to those with a more general interest in Chinese moral and political philosophy." -- David Wong, Duke University
"Tao Jiang in this hugely intelligent monograph provides his readers with an interpretive context twice. First, his project of rehearsing the story of the origins of Chinese moral-political philosophy is located within a state-of-the-art account of the politics of the Western academy and the best efforts of its Sinologists and philosophers to make sense of the complex textual narrative of pre-Qin China in all of its parts. Again, appealing to a cluster of seminal themes—humaneness, justice, and personal freedom—he recounts the way in which different philosophical voices advocated for their own disparate and competing models of structuring and construing personal, familial, and political relations within the overarching context of what are fundamentally different valorizations of the notion of Heaven." -- Roger T. Ames, Peking University
"Jiang ranges over the entire foundational period of Chinese philosophy with effortless erudition, unfailing intellectual sympathy, and, above all, a brilliantly economical conception that shines a uniquely revealing and integrating light on all the major figures and schools of thought. The result is that rare kind of book which has the potential to change the way Chinese philosophy is viewed and practiced, and has all the scholarly and philosophical attributes that should make it a classic in due course." -- Jiwei Ci, The University of Hong Kong, and author of
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