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Another quick reflection on teaching Chinese philosophy. A central debate in Classical Chinese philosophy is the debate over human nature. Although this debate crosses a number of traditions, the debate between Mengzi and Xunzi (two early Confucians) is the most well-known.
Given how accessible the Confucian debate is, I& #39;ve taught it twice now: Once in my Intro to Phil Problems course and now again in Intro to Chinese Philosophy. And both times I gave the same response exercise, which was fun, so I thought I& #39;d share it and my favourite answer.
Mengzi argues that human nature is good, by which he means (roughly) that each of us has innate feelings that, if cultivated, can be developed into full-fledged virtues. To argue for this view he gives an example of someone seeing a child about to fall into a well.
Mengzi claims that everyone would have an immediate and unreflective feeling of compassion upon seeing the child about to fall into the well. That the feeling is immediate and unreflective, and not motivated by gain, is Mengzi thinks, evidence that it is a natural feeling.
The feeling is not motivated by gain but it may still be stifled by it. If the bystander stands to profit from the death of the child, for example, they may let it fall into the well. The feelings are merely sprouts: They need to be cultivated to grow into virtues proper.
By contrast, Xunzi claims that human nature is bad, by which he means (roughly) that each of us has innate dispisitions which, if not constrained through learning and ritual, would, if acted on, lead to social strife and disorder.
Xunzi has some of his own examples to illustrate how these dispositions lead to these bad outcomes, and how ritual and learning can constrain them. But he& #39;s not as explicit as Mengzi in providing an argument that clearly demonstrates that they are innate.
So one exercise I have my students do is to provide an example that supports Xunzi& #39;s view of human nature, but that has the clear structure of Mengzi& #39;s example. That is, an example in which someone immediately and unreflectively has one of the & #39;bad& #39; reactions described by Xunzi.
My favourite response so far was that of catching a fly ball at a baseball game. The student argued that everyone& #39;s instictive reaction is to get the ball for themselves. Even the guy who graciously gives it to a nearby child after catching only does so as a result of learning.
A nice thing about this exercise, aside from the fact that it& #39;s fun, is that it gets the students to recognise the difficulty of separating learned & innate responses. E.g the reaction in the above example clearly depends on a cultural understanding of baseball. Does this matter?
Anyway, it& #39;s a pretty straightforward debate and it& #39;s easy to explain, and easy for your students to understand, without knowing much about Classical Chinese philosophy, so if you& #39;re looking to integrate some Chinese philosophy into another course I& #39;d recommend it.
You can get a (bad) translation of the Mengzi free online at http://ctext.org"> http://ctext.org . (For the passage I mentioned above: #n1634">https://ctext.org/mengzi/gong-sun-chou-i #n1634)">https://ctext.org/mengzi/go... And you can get a (good) translation of the Xunzi through Jstor at https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt6wq19b.">https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.... (p.248 for the quotation above.)
If you want a good translation of the Mengzi I& #39;d recommend @BryanVanNorden& #39;s, which you can buy in full, with a commentary, from Hackett, or you can get excerpted, along with a bunch of other great translations, in Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy (also Hackett).
