Most classical Chinese philosophers accepted a moral history of humankind. Humankind, originally, suffered a miserable existence. Life was precarious. Starvation, storms, wild animals, and more contributed to anxious struggles to survive. Things changed with the sages – a series of culture-bearing geniuses who established the practices and institutions of civilized life, like literacy, agriculture, and the elaborate rituals of social life. From then on, life became peaceful and prosperous, a cultural and moral ‘golden age’.
This romanticised vision of the past contrasted, alas, with the dire realities of the Period of the Philosophers, from roughly the fifth to the third centuries BCE. It was also the Period of the Warring States – the two hundred years of warfare, treacherous scheming and misery that ended when the Qin dynasty unified China. Philosophy in China was shaped by these realities, especially when it came to the practical question of the best response to the chaos of the world. Many schools advocated a kind of ‘return’ to the earlier ideal state. Moral progress, for them, meant returning us to the original state of moral excellence initiated by the sages.
Progress meant going back to what we once were, even if the philosophers had different ideas about the earlier stage and the best way to return to it. Confucians advocated the restoration of the rituals and life of the Zhou Dynasty. ‘I am for the Zhou’, as Confucius announced, since it was, in his judgment, the best realisation of that earlier life. (One eminent scholar calls this ‘revivalist traditionalism’).
By contrast, Zhuāngzǐ interpreted that ritualised form of life as the source of the deterioration, rather than its means of rectification. Rituals, elaborate arts and learning are systems of ‘artifice’, apt to corrupt our inborn spontaneity and goodness. Other schools – the Mohists and Yangists – offered their own views, as did others now lost to us.
‘Legalism’
Ideals of return to the past were decisively rejected, however, by the last great figure of the classical period, Hánfēizǐ. An erudite thinker, he is usually classified as a ‘Legalist’ – a group of thinkers, including Shen Buhai and Lord Shang, whose work Hánfēizǐ synthesised.
As a group, their ethos was what political theorists today call ‘realism’ – an emphasis on the conflictual character of real-world political life. Conflict, plots, schemes and continuous calculations of opportunity and risk inform political relations within and between states. Scheming and treachery drive political life, which puts a premium on cleverness, adaptation, and strategy – the definitive European champion of political realism is Machiavelli.
Hánfēizǐ …
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