Journal of chinese humanities 6 (2020) 43–63 brill.com/joch Beyond Respecting Mencius and Criticizing Xunzi: A Return to Equal Status for the Two Sages Liang Tao 梁濤 Professor of Philosophy, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China
[email protected] Abstract Mencius 孟子 took Confucius’ idea of benevolence and, based on it, developed his theory that human nature is good. Xunzi 荀子 emphasized Confucius’ idea of ritual propriety and developed his theory that human nature is bad. This juxtaposition largely came to define their philosophies and their place in the history of Confucianism. Reconciling the two has been a point of contention ever since the Han dynasty. By the end of the Han dynasty, the scales had tipped in favor of Mencius, and this favoritism continued through the Six Dynasties era, the Tang and Song dynasties and beyond. As the Mencius became canonized, the Xunzi fell further out of favor with academics. Through all this, there have still been attempts to directly reconcile and even combine the two branches of Confucianism. This is an important cultural enterprise, which has gained new force in recent years. This article threads out some of the more important arguments in this continuing discussion and advocates for viewing the two branches with equal import and authority in the Confucian tradition. Keywords Confucianism – Mencius – political philosophy – reconciliation – Xunzi 1 If Socrates [469–399 BCE] was the father of Western philosophy, Plato [427–347 BCE] and Aristotle [384–322 BCE] were the two greats. The German © Liang Tao, 2021 | doi:10.1163/23521341-12340089 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NCDownloaded 4.0 license.