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Finding Altruism in China: The Confucian corpus and the quest for universal benevolence1

Mark Csikszentmihalyi, UC-Berkeley

1. The Physiocrat, or There and Back Again

Sometimes things can get circular.

Take the discovery of laissez-faire in early Taoist texts.

In 1905, noted Sinologist Lionel Giles commented on the historical impact of the

classic Laozi: “The great political lesson of laisser-faire is one that the Chinese people

has well assimilated and perhaps carried to excess; it may even be said to impregnate

their national life more thoroughly than any doctrine of Confucius.”2 Whether or not the

“impregnation” of national life by the political lessons of the Laozi should be considered

a positive thing, Giles was followed in his assessment a decade later by the noted Chinese

translator Yan Fu 嚴復 (1854-1921). Yan drew parallels between the writings of the

French Physiocrats François Quesnay (1694-1774) and Jean Claude Marie Vincent de

Gournay (1712-1759) and a passage that begins chapter 11 of the Zhuangzi describing

wuwei 無為, most commonly translated as non-action. Yan Fu writes:

法蘭西革命之先 其中有數家學說正復如是 如 Laisser Faire et Laisser Passer

乃其時自然當人 Quesnay挈尼 及 Gournay 顧爾耐 備之惟一方針.

1 Presented at the Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions on February 25, 2014. The author would like to thank respondents Charles Hallisey and Michael Puett, organizers Anne Monius and Nancy Chu, and the members of the audience for their helpful comments. 2 Lionel Giles. The Sayings of Lao-Tzu, 1905, 14.

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Prior to the French Revolution, there were expert theories that made the same

point that this passage does. This can be seen in the “Laissez-faire et laisser-

passer” that the Naturalists Quesnay and Gournay made their guiding principle at

the time.3

Some 85 years after Yan Fu, in his January 15, 1988 “State of the Union” address, US

President Ronald Reagan cited “an ancient Chinese philosopher, Lao-tzu… ‘Govern a

great nation as you would cook a small fish; do not overdo it.’” Reagan used this

reference to the opening lines of chapter 60 of the Laozi 老子 as a summary of his own

vision of America, in particular of “ideas like the individual’s right to reach as far and as

high as his or her talents will permit; [and] the free market as an engine of economic

progress.”4

“Things get circular” is an assertion that the reason for the similarity is in part that

Chinese accounts of wuwei were a major influence on the development of laissez-faire.

The period before the French Revolution saw the rise of a view that the ideal society was

one that did not chiefly rely on human laws, but instead allowed the unfettered operation

of “laws of nature” through policies of laissez faire et laissez-passer. Physiocrats like

Quesnay and Nicolas-Gabriel Clerc (1726-1798) coined these terms as they argued that

natural law was the only authentic foundation for law and social order. They used China

as their primary example of a society that relied on natural law, eschewing a complex

legal system and theory of sovereignty. Quesnay wrote in his 1767 Chinese Despotism:

3 Yan Fu 嚴復, 1953. Zhuangzi pingdian 莊子評點. Hong Kong: Huaqiang yinwu. Yan writes this above the passage: 故君子不得已而臨邪天下，莫若無為, which Burton Watson translates as: “If the gentleman finds he has no other choice than to direct and look after the world, then the best course for him is inaction.” In his note, Yan Fu goes on to liken Zhuangzi to Rousseau’s “back to nature” philosophy. See Jian Guangming 簡光明. “Yan Fu yi Xixue quanshi LaoZhuang sixiang zhi tantao” 嚴復以西學詮釋老莊思想之探討. Pingdong jiaoyu daxue xuebao 屏東教育大學學報 (Humanities and Social Sciences) 34 (March 2010): 91-112. 4 http://millercenter.org/president/speeches/detail/5684 (accessed 2/20/14).

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L’objet capital de l’administration d’un gouvernement prospère et durable doit

donc être, comme dans l’empire de la Chine, l’étude profonde et l’enseignement

continuel et général des lois naturelles, qui constituent éminemment l’ordre de la

société.

The principal object of administering a prosperous and durable government must

be, just as in the empire of China, the deep study of and continuous education in

natural laws, which eminently make up the order of society.5

So Quesnay used examples like the sage-king Shun 舜 to describe that type of

administration, noting that he was chosen for his moral qualities, and solicited criticism

from the people. Shun is also the figure that the Analects associated with wuwei.6

Clerc’s A Chinese Story: Yu the Great and Confucius of 1769 argued the Chinese

did not need to rely on positive law because they allowed reason to uncover their moral

sense, which was “natural” in that it was inscribed on them by a deity:

Le Législateur unique c’est l’être Suprême: la sanction de ses lois est dans l’ordre

physique & moral. La nature est l’expression de cet ordre. Le Coeur humain est le

code où le doigt de Dieu en a grave les caracteres ineffaçables; chaque Homme

les y lie distinctement à l’aide de sa raison.

5 Despotisme de la Chine appeared in Éphémérides du citoyen (1767), and has been reproduced in Théré, et al., eds. François Quesnay: Œuvres économiques complètes et autres textes. Paris: Institut National d’Études Démographiques, 2005, pp. 1019. While Montesquieu criticized Chinese despotism, Quesnay called it an “enlightened despotism” and followed Jacques Philibert Rousselot de Surgy’s rebuttal of Montesquieu in the latter’s 1764 Mélanges interéssans et curieux. For a history of the Physiocrats, see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. The Origins of Physiocracy: Economic Revolution and the Social Order in Eighteenth-Century France. Ithaca: Cornell, 1976. A fascinating study from the perspective of the history of economics is Lewis A. Maverick, China, a Model for Europe. San Antonio: Paul Anderson Co., 1946. 6 Lunyu 15.5: 無為而治者 其舜也與 “Was Shun not a person who was without action yet governed well?”

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The Supreme Legislator is the Supreme Being: the sanction of his laws is in the

physical and moral order and nature is an expression of this order. The human

heart is the code that God’s finger traced in indelible characters; every person can

read it with the help of his reason.7

Both their books delve deeply into contemporary sources on the history of China to show

how Confucius and the sage kings were able to unite nature and reason and in so doing

rely on natural law, and, as a result, support agriculture without interfering with it. Just as

they believed the king, and then the Republicans, should do.

The choice of invoking Quesnay to explain the Chinese origins of what Bernard

Harcourt has called “the messianic belief in natural order in economics” is not to make

you like China less.8 I am not saying that wuwei was directly translated into laissez-faire,

after all, rather that it was transmogrified. Still, the transmogrification was literal enough

that Giles, Yan, and even Ronald Reagan’s speechwriters could see the resemblance.

2. Leibniz on the existence of a Chinese morality

My second example of circularity is not as direct. I will argue that as the

Confucian corpus was translated and spread across Europe in the late 17th and 18th

centuries, the awareness of the existence of another sophisticated moral system had a

profound effect. This awareness of not being alone evoked a set of responses that

7 Yu le Grand et Confucius, histoire chinoise. Soissons: Ponce Coutois, 1769, page 140. Dan Edelstein calls Clerc’s novel “a wordy Physiocratic treatise dressed up as chinoiserie.” See The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2009, pp. 204-6. It is worth pointing out here, that similarly to Leibniz below, Clerc insists on embedding the natural law framework in a theistic system, something from which the later French writers we will read break free. 8 In “Quesnay: The Despotism of Natural Law” Scott Horton writes that “the early works of the Physiocrats [...] provided much of the foundation upon which Milton Friedman and his followers constructed their school,” http://harpers.org/blog/2011/11/quesnay-the-despotism-of-natural-law/ (accessed 2/20/14).

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changed not just in response to the remarkable transformations going on in European

thought at the time, but was also implicated in those transformations.

The story I will tell about the reaction is roughly like this. Jesuit missionaries

initially thought that they had found a twin they had never known existed, only later to

have the Pope deny it. Secular thinkers, though, seized on the existence of the similar-

looking stranger to argue that the Church was not unique, pointing to the similarities in

their features as proof, and some even suggested that any differences were all to credit of

the stranger. Finally, in the 19th century, a movement started their own universal church

based on the notion that, having generalized the features the two had shared, they now

possessed the knowledge to take both their places. This oversimplified story of the

response covers a long arc of events and figures, and so I will focus on Leibniz,

Silhouette, and Comte as representatives of the three moments I have just outlined.

At the end of the 17th century, arguments about the nature of Chinese religion

were often proxies for debates about Christianity and the values of the Enlightenment.

Behind these arguments was a question: did the Chinese have a morality? This is not the

literal question that was asked at that time. Indeed, using an indefinite article in front of

“morality,” or conceptualizing it apart from religious commitments is arguably a product

of the history we are examining. But a series other questions that point to this question

were being asked in Europe: Is the practice of sacrifice to one’s ancestors idolatrous? Is

Chinese the antediluvian “primitive language”? Was the ancient culture hero Fuxi 伏羲,

who originated the divination system of the Classic of Changes, really just a

manifestation of the universal lawgiver known as Hermes Trismegistus?9

The early reception of China is usually seen through the lens of the missionary

accounts, hence the term “Jesuit accommodation” is used to describe how Jesuits like

Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) and Joachim Bouvet (1656-1730) used the similarities they

perceived between Chinese culture and Christianity as part of their conversion strategy. 9 On the connection between Primitive Language, Bouvet’s Figurist interpretations, and the Ancient Theology that was at the heart of Hermetism, see David E. Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500-1800, 3 ed. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009, p. 100-101. For the role of Athanasius Kircher in this movement see Mungello. Curious Land: Jesuit Accomodation and the Origins of Sinology. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989, pp. 134-173.

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Their answer to the question of whether the Chinese had a morality would have been

largely affirmative, as they believed in a “natural theology,” an early revelation of truth in

China that had become largely concealed beneath the idolatries of Buddhism and Daoism.

At the end of the 17th century, however, two Christian theological debates challenged

this view. They concerned the questions of whether the Chinese had a word for “God,”

and whether rituals concerned with ancestral sacrifice was compatible with Christianity.

In a test of the early Jesuit practice based on the reading strategy of finding precursors of

Christianity in Confucian texts, the Roman Church repeatedly rejected the Ricci’s

understanding of Chinese religion in the period from 1704 to 1742.10

The question of a Chinese morality then begins to spin out of the realm of Church

debate. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), today best known for contributions to

mathematics like analytic calculus and binary arithmetic, entered these debates. Together

with the Jesuit Bouvet, he argued for fundamental likenesses between Chinese and

Christian traditions.

Leibniz argued vociferously against the leading anti-accommodationist Jesuit

voices such as that of Nicholas Longobardi (1565-1655). In his 1716 Discourse on the

Natural Theology of the Chinese, Leibniz counters its assertion that the “ghosts and

spirits” (guishen 鬼神) are genies, writing:

The most ancient Chinese philosophers, and Confucius after them, have had

knowledge of the true God and of the celestial Sprits who serve Him, under the

names of Xandi [Shangdi 上帝] and Kuei-Xin [guishen].11

The Chinese had God and angels. They sacrificed to their ancestors as if they were

spirits, but Leibniz argues that is not incompatible with the practice of the early

10 Mungello, The Great Encounter, p. 88. During this period, a 1692 edict of toleration of Christianity in Qing China was reversed by an edict in 1724. In France, this lead to 11 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (Daniel J. Cook and Henry Rosemont, Jr., trans.) Writings on China. Chicago and LaSalle: Open Court, 1994, p. 110.

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Christians.12 His syncretist impulse extends to the way God imprints morality, which he

equates with the Neo-Confucian idea of li 理 “principle”. The Discourse explains:

What we call the light of reason in man, they call commandment and law of

Heaven. What we call the inner satisfaction of obeying justice and our fear of

acting contrary to it, all this is called by the Chinese... inspirations sent by the

Xangti [Shangdi] (that is, but the true God)... For me I find all this quite excellent

and quite in accord with natural theology... It is pure Christianity insofar as it

renews the natural law inscribed on our hearts—except for what revelation and

grace add to it to improve our nature.13

Just as Clerc said some 50 years later, a universal virtue was inscribed on the hearts of

both Christians and Chinese. The importance of revelation is added by Leibniz, because

not to do so would have seemed impious.

3. The move to universal moral sentiments: Silhouette to Voltaire

After Leibniz, the background question of whether China had a morality moved

from the Rites Controversy to the iddue of how virtues were inscribed on the heart. Clerc

did not add Leibniz’s reference to revelation after his description of the common

inscription of virtue on human hearts, and in the decades that followed the Church’s

suppression of Jesuit accommodation and the Sorbonne’s suppression of the descriptions

of China by LeCompte and Le Gobien, writers increasingly located moral sentiments in

the human heart without reference to the God or the Church.

12 Writings on China, p.78. Leibniz specifically likens their view to Matthew 22:30. 13 Writings on China, p.105. Leibniz equated a number of Chinese terms with God, creating a hierarchy from li (cosmic principle), Taiji 太極 (the Neo-Confucian term for most basic unity – a “great ultimate”), and Shangdi (the early term for highest ancestral god).

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In the period from 1739 to 1764, several sets of “Chinese letters” were published

as ways of putting social critique in the mouth of an “other” Chinese.14 When

Montesquieu, who was hostile to the admiration of China, published a similar work, he

called it Persian Letters. One of these Chinese letters was published by the French

official Étienne de Silhouette, who was read by both Quesnay and Adam Smith. In his

1731 A general outline of the government and the morality of the Chinese, and a

response to three critiques, he describes the Chinese view of virtue as intrinsic to human

beings:

Le Sage a pour baze de toutes ses Vertus, l’humanité. L’amour que l’on doit avoir

pour tous les hommes, n’est point quelque chose d’étranger à l’homme, c’est

l’homme lui-même: sa nature le porte à les aimer tous, & ce sentiment lui est

aussi naturel que l’amour de lui-même: c’est le caractére qui le distingue de tous

les autres êtres crées; c’est l’analise de toutes ses loix.15

The sage has humanity as the basis of all his virtues. The love he must have for all

people is not something alien to human beings, it is man himself. His nature leads

him to love everyone else and this sentiment is as natural as his love for himself:

this is the characteristic that distinguishes him from all other created beings, it is

the basis of all his laws.

Lewis Maverick has suggested that Silhouette’s description of this Confucian –

specifically Mencian -- view of morality as innate was an influence on Adam Smith’s A

14 Maverick identifies De Boyer, Goldsmith, and Silhouette. China, a Model for Europe, pp. 28. Both Jacques Philibert Rousselot de Surgy, who published Mélanges interéssans et curieux in 1764 and Quesnay explicitly rebutted Montesquieu’s disparaging comments on Chinese despotism, arguing that any despotism was benevolent. Where Montesquieu argued that moral action in China could only result from a “fear of being beaten,” Quesnay countered that it was the product of “inspiring emulation and honor.” Despotisme de la Chine §III.1, pp. 239-240. 15 Idée générale du gouvernement et de la morale des Chinois, et Réponse à trois critiques. Paris, G. F. Quillau, 1731.

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Theory of Moral Sentiments, which appeared a few years later.16 Indeed, Smith’s

presentation of moral sentiments is very close to Silhouette’s description of a Chinese

view that humanity (here likely ren 仁) is a natural part of being human, and a

complement to self-interest.

In locating morality in the human heart and leaving out laws and doctrine,

Silhouette had a model. In A general outline quotes Confucius’s contrast between the

reliability of words and deeds:

Le cœur de l’homme est ce que le sage doit s’expliquer le plus à connoître: cette

connoissance s’acquiert surtout par l'expérience. Je m’imaginois, dit Confucius,

lorsque j’étois jeune, que tous les hommes étoient sincéres, qu’ils mettoient en

pratique ce qu’ils dîsoient en un mot, que leur bouche étoit toujours d’acord avec

leur cœur: aujourd’hui j’écoute les hommes, mais j’examine avec soin leurs

actions, c’est par elles que je juge de la vérité de leurs Paroles.17

The heart of a person is what the sage explains is most suited to knowing a person,

and this knowledge is acquired primarily through experience. “I fancied,”

Confucius said, “when I was young, that all people were sincere, they put into

practice what they put into words, and their mouths were always in accord with

their hearts. Today, however, when I listen to people, I carefully consider their

actions, it is through them that I judge of the truth of their speech.”

People’s mouths are not in accord with their hearts. As a result one has to rely on the

experience of watching their actions and not listening to their words. While Adam Smith

(1723-1790) is more explicit about the moral action coming from the passions rather than

16 China, a Model for Europe, pp. 62-3. 17 Idée générale, pp. 61-2. Sihouette is quoting Lunyu 5.10: 子曰 始吾於人也 聽其言而信其行 今吾於人也 聽其言而觀其行.

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religion,18 both Silhouette and Smith identify the heart as the true seat of moral decision-

making and that moral decisions ideally come from sentiments and not following law.

18 Smith writes in 1759: “Religion affords such strong motives to the practice of virtue, and guards us by such powerful restraints from the temptations of vice, that many have been led to suppose, that religious principles were the sole laudable motives of action. We ought neither, they said, to reward from gratitude, nor punish from resentment; we ought neither to protect the helplessness of our children, nor afford to the infirmities of our parents, from natural affection... It may be a question, however, in what cases our actions ought to arise chiefly or entirely from a sense of duty, or from a regard to general rule; and in what case some other sentiment of affection ought to concur, and have a principal influence.” Theory of Moral Sentiments (London: A. Millar, 1759), pp. 233-234. Here Smith’s attack on religion is predicated on the idea that actions like protecting “the helplessness of our children,” should be outcome of “natural affection” rather than a “sense of duty.” Elsewhere he says “can there be a greater barbarity, for example, than to hurt an infant? Its helplessness, its innocence, its amiableness, call forth the compassion even of an enemy,” (p. 285), and “a child is a more important object than an old man, and excites a much more lively, as well as a much more universal sympathy,” (p. 299).

There is a strong parallel to Mencius 2A6 in this line of argument. Ricci was already aware of it, and in fact rebutted it in his Chinese missionary tract (or “Latin letter”) Tianzhu shiyi 天主實義 because it implied one could do virtuous acts out of natural affection and not righteousness: 乍見孺子將入於井 皆皆怵惕 此皆良善耳 鳥獸與不仁者何德之有？“When ordinary people suddenly see a child about to fall into a well they are humane of not. Such concern results from innate goodness. But what virtue is there in this when even animals and the unbenevolent do so?” See Douglas Lancashire and Peter Kuo-chen, S. J., The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven. St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1985, pp. 356-357, cf. 384-385. Since Ricci was oriented to a Divine Lawgiver, whose laws inscribed on the heart are the essence of morality, he could conceive of person who saves a child out of spontaneous moral reactions as being unbenevolent 不仁.

J-B. Du Halde (1674-1743) published a translation of Mengzi 2A6 (今人乍見孺子將入於井 皆有怵惕惻隱之心 非所以內交於孺子之父母也 非所以要譽於鄉黨朋友也 非惡其聲而然也 Suppose a person suddenly saw an infant about to fall into a well. This would certainly cause his compassionate heart to palpitate. This would not be to ingratiate oneself with the infant’s parents, nor in order to gain fame among one’s fellow citizens and friends, nor yet because one wants to avoid notoriety) in his 1736 Description géographique, historique, chronologique, politique, et physique de l’empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise. La Haye, H. Scheurleer, p. 340. It was translated by Richard Brookes into English in 1739-1741 as The general history of China. Containing a geographical, historical, chronological, political and physical description of the empire of China, Chinese-Tartary, Corea, and Thibet. It could be that Smith was influenced by Du Halde directly, and/or by Voltaire’s play (or the English version) L’orphelin de la Chine, which was adapted from Du Halde’s translation of “Tchao chi cou ell” or “The little orphan of the family of Tchao.” Du Halde translated Zhaoshi gu’er

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Writers who were even more explicit in carving out a secular space for discussing

morality include Christian Wolff (1679-1754) and Voltaire (1694-1778). Drawing on

Leibniz, his fellow mathematician Wolff gave a lecture at the University of Halle in 1721

where he argued, in Mungello’s words, “Confucianism confirmed their belief that it was

possible to have morality without Christianity.” Voltaire characterized Chinese religion

as rational, unified and free of superstition, in part as a way of criticizing both the

common European view that morality had to derive from Christianity, and the conflicts

between different Christian sects.19 With these writers, the question of whether the

Chinese had a morality was now close to being asked and answered explicitly: they

shared universal moral sentiments with Europeans, and because China was free of the

Church, their sentiments were more naturally expressed in society.

4. Comte’s science of altruism

Auguste Comte (1798-1857) was heir to a tradition of writers who were

mathematicians and doctors, looked at morality through the lens of their practice, and

were particularly eager to consume European stories about China. Similar to what

Quesnay had done a century earlier, Auguste Comte sought to write a scientific and

systematic view of the world that began with the mathematics of Leibniz, and ended

integrating the morality into the human sciences.20 Yet he was writing in the 19th century,

and instead of simply equating Confucian and Christian moral sentiments, Comte sought

to generalize moral sentiments, and in doing so free them from all such traditions. This 趙氏孤兒, a 13th century revenge drama by Ji Junxiang 紀君祥 full of tragic deaths of children and Confucian themes. Smith made similar remarks about natural affection for children around “that beautiful tragedy of Voltaire,” The Orphan of China (pp. 309-310). 19 The Great Encounter, pp. 126-127. 20 Quesnay began his table of contents with: 1) the elements, 2) the humors (including bilieuse, melancolique, pituiteuse, as well as lymph and blood), and 3) De parties solides (including temperaments that coincide with the humors). Comte begins with chapter two: mathematics, and begins mathematics with Leibniz. He follows this with astronomy, physics, acoustics, optics, electrology, chemistry, biology, intellectual or moral functions, and “social physics.”

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was part of the basis of a new religion, the Religion of Humanity, which he founded the

in 1849 and styled himself High Priest for Humanity.

Comte tried to integrate morality into biology. He based his view on what he

called the indisputable principle of the innateness of the fundamental dispositions, both

affective and intellectual. Comte’s relied in part on Dr. Franz Joseph Gall’s system of

phrenology to show that benevolence was located in a particular part of the body, in

much the same way Silhouette read the Chinese as locating humanity in the human

heart.21 Comte argued that his biological view as superior to culture-bound views:

The positive philosophy is the first that has ascertained the true point of view of

social morality. The metaphysical philosophy sanctioned egotism; and the

theological subordinated real life to an imaginary one; while the new philosophy

takes social morality for the basis of its whole system. The two former systems

were so little favorable to the rise of the purely disinterested affections, that they

often led to a dogmatic denial of their existence; the one being addicted to

scholastic subtleties, and the other to considerations of personal safety.22

Comte is in effect claiming that his scientific approach is better than religious and

philosophical views. When Leibniz discovered binary arithmetic in the Chinese Classic

of Changes, under the influence of natural theology he argued that the Chinese had

21 Comte locates altruistic impulses in the anterior region of the brain “where there are distinct organs for the sympathetic impulses and the intellectual faculties” in The Catachism of Positive Religion: (London: Kegan Paul, 1891), p. 176. I am indebted to an unpublished article by Thomas Dixon for this quotation. Dr. Franz Joseph Gall’s system of phrenology located benevolence in “the middle of the frontal bone in front of the coronal suture.” The Ninth Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica notes that Gall “noticed a rising on the head of the highly-commended servant of a friend, as well as on a benevolent schoolmate who nursed his brothers and sisters when they were ill,” (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1885), v. 18, p. 845. 22 Cours de philosophie positive. Paris: J.B. Bailliere et fils, 1877 rendered by Harriet Martineau, trans. The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1896, v. 3, p. 407.

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simply discovered scientific truth earlier than he had.23 Comte, by contrast, states that

scientific morality must supercede prior religious systems when he argued that

materialists had no motive to act unselfishly, while the religious only did so out of fear.

Instead, since the seat of the virtues is the organs of the body, by adjusting the body one

may become a moral person without fear.24 Positivism attracted and influenced a variety of philosophers of the time. In

English philosopher Henry Sidgwick’s (1836-1900) reminiscences, he succinctly

expresses the different role of China in a system like Comte’s:

What was fixed and unalterable and accepted by us all was the necessity and duty

of examining the evidence for historical Christianity with strict scientific

impartiality; placing ourselves as far as possible outside traditional sentiments and

opinions, and endeavouring to weight the pros and cons on all theological

questions as duly instructed rational beings from another planet-or let us say from

China-would naturally weigh them.25

Whereas the Chinese voices in the genre of 18th century Chinese letters got their

authority from their status as a twin separated at birth, whose tradition was on a par with

Europe, Sidgwick’s Chinese “being” is useful insofar as he lacks “traditional sentiments

and opinions.” In The Invention of Altruism, Thomas Dixon explains “the only rational

23 §68, Writings on China, p. 132-133. 24 In The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte (pp. 125-6), John Stuart Mill writes: “But M. Comte, taking his stand on the biological fact that organs are strengthened by exercise and atrophied by disuse, is convinced that each of our elementary inclinations has its distinct cerebral organ, thinks it is the grand duty of life not only to strengthen the social affections by constant habit and by referring all our actions to them, but as far as possible, to deaden the personal passions and propensities by desuetude.” 25 Arthur Christopher Benson, The life of Edward White Benson, sometime Archbishop of Canterbury . London: MacMillan, 1889, v. 1, p. 250.

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approach was to see moral problems ‘from the point of view of the universe’ (or of

someone from another planet, or from China.)”26

Comte’s positivism entailed the naturalization of a universal morality, uniting

body, mind and heart. The previous century used Confucian texts to universalize morality

by locating it in a universal heart-mind, but were not willing to decontextualize it in the

way that Comte attempted to do.

5. Altruism in China, or There and Back Again again

Once I was asked to write about whether there was altruism in China for a volume

called Altruism in World Religions. I wrote that the Chinese text Mengzi 孟子 responded

to the criticisms of the Consequentialist work Mozi 墨子, who assailed the particular

nature of Kongzi’s family-centric view of morality by arguing that “universal caring”

(jian’ai 兼愛) was superior. By locating the virtues that Kongzi extolled in the human

heart (or heart/mind, xin 心), the Mengzi’s system was closest to altruism among the

versions of Confucianism in early China.27 It is the Mengzi that revised the picture of the

Famously, the Mencius notes that whoever lacks any of the four cardinal virtues in the

heart “is not human” 非人也.28

When Jean-Baptiste Du Halde introduced Mengzi to Europe in 1736 with a

careful summary translation of the work, he used these words to explain this section: “Il

n’y a personne, continue Mencius, qui n’ait reçu de la nature une certaine tendresse de

26 The invention of altruism: Making moral meanings in Victorian Britain. Oxford and New York: Oxford, 2008, p.76. 27 “In the works of Mencius (Meng Ke or Mengzi, c. 380 - c. 290 B.C.E.), sometimes known as the ‘second sage’ (yasheng), a significant reform of the early Confucian idea that filial piety was the source of virtuous behavior took place. In the fourth and third century B.C.E. text Mencius, the virtue of benevolence takes on some of the generalized features of altruism because of the influence of the Mozi.” See “Altruism in China” in Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton, eds., Altruism in World Religions. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2005, pp. 179-190. 28 Mengzi 2A6.

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Coeur, qui rend sensible aux misères d’autrui” or “‘There is no one,’ continued Mencius,

‘who has not received from nature a kind of tenderness of the heart, which makes them

feel the misery of others.’”29 Here, in a text read by Voltaire and Hume,30 and which

predates Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments by two decades, is a concise

statement that sympathy is located in the heart, and causes one to feel the misery d’autrui

– the very word that altruism comes from.

When I said Mengzi was a version of altruism, I did not know this story. Of

course, it is usual to tell a version of this story in which Enlightenment values of

rationality and the Scientific Revolution caused Europeans to unmoor morality from

Christian revelation and ultimately attempt to distill it from religion altogether. Chinese

served as a convenient “other,” like savages or Persians, to contrast descriptions and

prescriptions that were really European.31

Today, I have tried to show that awareness of the Confucian corpus led to debates

about the nature of Chinese morality which strongly influenced Leibniz, that a

transmogrification of Mencius’s moral innatism influenced universalist writers like

29 Description géographique, historique, chronologique, politique et physique de l'empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise V. 2 p. 340. 30 Maverick, China, a Model for Europe, pp. 25-28. 31 Silhouette, of course, distinguishes between these others:

On s’est imaginé que les Chinois étoient des barbares: ce que nous pensions d’eux, ils le pensoient de nous avant que de nous connoître: ce sont les Peuples les plus polis de l'Asie. Ils ont eu la connoissance de la plûpart des sciences & des arts avant nous. Ils joignent à la pratique d'es vertus morales, l’usage de celles qui sont les agrémens de la société civile; & sont, comme dans ce pays-ci, grands faiseurs de complimens. It was thought that the Chinese were barbarians. They thought the same thing about us that we thought about them before they got to know us. They are the most polite people in Asia. They had knowledge of most of the arts and sciences before we did. They took part in the practice of moral virtues, the use of which is the charm of civil society, and they are, as in this country, great payers of compliments.

See Idée générale. 5-6.

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Silhouette and Voltaire, and that these views, and more generally the idea that the

Chinese had a morality was part of the background for Comte’s move to generalize

morality. In short, the usual version of the story is not the whole story. To be sure, for

some of the writers of Chinese letters, and after 1800, when Mungello shows that

Europeans began to reject Chinese culture and Confucianism, China may have played the

role of an “other” like Henry Sidgwick’s beings from another planet. But to write the

Confucian corpus out of these developments in 18th century European thought can only

be done by selective amnesia borne of cultural chauvinism and of the notion that cultures

are intellectually impermeable and so cross-cultural encounters only produce

misreadings.

What made the Jesuits and Enlightenment writers recognize a similar or suitable

moral system in China in part grew out of the needs of their own situation, but arguably

also had something to do with the similar challenges that complex societies face and the

resulting need to discover a set of shared values, arguably ones that are distributed

universally rather than monopolized in one sector of the society. Whether or not one

thinks that there is a universal impulse to something like altruism, we see the same move

being made in both the Mencius’s reaction to Mozi, and the Enlightenment and early

Positivist reaction Christianity, in grounding moral action in the organs of the physical

body. By grounding morality in the body, the Mencius was attempting to naturalize

morality in the way that some Sinophile Europeans in the 18th century did, and the move

to generalize morality as altruism was one end of a chain reaction to the awareness of the

Mencius.

As David Mungello notes, early Chinese converts to Christianity deployed the

Mencius’s argument for universality of the sages in favor of the missionary message in

China:

Shang Huqing, in a preface to The Touchstone of True Knowledge (Zhengxiu

liushi) (1698), cited the Confucian classic Mencius (chap. IV.b) to make the point

that the legendary sage-ruler Shun and King Wen, although originating in places

over a thousand li apart and with a thousand years separating them, had identical

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standards as sages. Shang wrote that regardless of whether one’s homeland is

north, south, east, or west, the minds and principles of the sages are the same.32

Since the Mengzi saw moral dispositions as universal, when early converts wanted to

translate natural theology into Chinese, they used the idiom of the Mengzi to do so.33

In the end, this second example of circularity is not as obvious as the first, but I

hope I have convinced you that Comte’s injunction to vivre pour l’autrui, “live for the

other,” was partly the result of the European awareness of a Chinese “other.”

32 The Great Encounter, p. 54. 33 These converts’ message was not especially convincing to the subjects of the Qing court, and indeed the Rites Controversy spelled the official end of natural theology in the Catholic Church. Indeed, I have argued that the Mengzi’s message of universality was also suppressed in the early empire because it also challenged the grounds for authority of the power that were. See Csikszentmihalyi, Material Virtue, p. 202ff.