Modeling the Contested Relationship between Analects, Mencius, and Xunzi: Preliminary Evidence from a Machine-Learning Approach

[Mark Foote]

Thought this might be of interest to other 'bums:

"The contents of Topic 86 provide evidential support for an interpretation of Mencius as advocating internalist belief in the innate potential for goodness in human nature. This engages Mencius’s discussion at 3B9 in which he attacks the doctrines of Yáng Zhu¯ 楊朱 and Mò Dí 墨翟, who advocate egoism and altruism, respectively. Mencian Confucianism repudiates these act-based ethics in favor of the cultivation of character (Csikszentmihalyi 2002). This is uncontroversial, but it leads to an ongoing interpretive problem about self-cultivation. Consider Mencius’s four “sprouts” of virtues (sì dua¯n 四端) in 2A6, where he writes that “if one is without the heart (xı¯n 心) of compassion, one is not human.… The feeling of compassion is the sprout of benevolence” (Van Norden 2008, 46; see also the archer analogy at 2A7). On one interpretation of these passages, the cultivation of feelings appears to be the source of moral virtue in Mencius, making Mencius representative of what is known in philosophy as an “internalist” theory of moral motivation. This allegedly contrasts with moral motivation and cultivation as found in Analects and Xunzi. These two texts are thought to advocate a greater number of, and greater roles for, externalist sources of morality like ritual (lıˇ 禮), patterned civility (wén), and rectification of names (zhèngmíng 正名). Our evidence appears to support this interpretation of Mencius. We draw additional evidence for this interpretation from several sources in traditional scholarship. For example, Slingerland (2003) argues that Mencius is uniquely and distinctively “internalist,” and Kline (2000) that Mencius’s ethics are “inside-out,” as have others (Ihara 1991; Wong 1991). However, since Topic 86 has a high text weight in only Discourses on salt and iron, and not in our core Confucian texts, we must collect additional evidence for the internalist interpretation of Mencius before we can rest confident that it is correct."

(p 20)

 

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