the xunzi as the basis of a metarational ruling ideology
nebulosity and pattern, the zhou dynasty, and how to order the world
The Taixue (太學), or "Highest Learning," contains the most perfect statement of the essence of Confucianism:
The ancients, in wishing to display enlightened virtue in the world, first brought good order to their states. Wishing to bring good order to their states, they first regulated their households. Wishing to regulate their households, they first cultivated themselves. Wishing to cultivate themselves, they first rectified their minds. Wishing to rectify their minds, they first made their intentions pure. Wishing to make their intentions pure, they first perfected their knowledge. Perfecting knowledge lies in coming to things.
Come to things, and subsequently knowledge is perfected. Make knowledge perfect, and subsequently intentions are made pure. Make intentions pure, and subsequently the mind is rectified. Rectify the mind, and subsequently the self is cultivated. Cultivate the self, and subsequently the household is regulated. Regulate the household, and subsequently the state is brought to good order. Bring good order to the state, and subsequently the world is at peace.
From the Son of Heaven down to the ordinary people everyone without exception should take cultivation of the self as the root. It is not possible for this root to be in disorder but the branches to be well ordered. It should never be the case that what is important is trivialized or what is trivial is given importance. This is called knowing the root; this is called the perfection of knowledge.
Firstly, the passage exemplifies the Confucian ethos by its structure. "Society" is not a distinct entity in its own right. It's simply a label for the people as a whole and the layers of individual relationships between them.
The world is a collection of states, states are collections of households. Households are made up of people with specific relationships to each other. And each of those people is their own person, containing their mind, containing their knowledge and moral sense.
You can break society down into these parts, and you can assemble these parts into society. But, ultimately, it is the person who matters most. Individual human will is the most important thing: not a well-designed system of government, not the outworkings of nature or heaven, not a shared unconscious culture-memory or inborn disposition toward goodness.
Secondly, the passage exemplifies the Confucian ethos by its exhortation. If individual human will is the most important thing, then we have a duty to cultivate virtue. As we do so, our ability to coordinate on increasingly grand scales emerges as a consequence. Virtue is the basis of social trust, and of truly inspiring, rather than fearsome, charisma. The virtuous king inspires his people to contribute to building a better world, and a virtuous people coming together to accomplish goals finds they can work together effortlessly.
Legalists believe in strict social order through well-designed incentive structures. Mohists believe in universal brotherhood through the eradication of family and class. Daoists believe in natural harmony by shedding all that is artificial.
Confucians believe in the human spirit, in choosing to be better than we are. Knowing virtue to be the fulcrum, and human will to be the lever, we are obligated to cultivate ourselves.
And from our selves to our households to our states. Until we can regulate the entire world. 天下, All Under Heaven.
The bywords of metarationality are nebulosity and pattern1.
Nebulosity: recognizing and accepting that there are no discrete categories, boundaries are always fuzzy, language never corresponds directly to reality, no rule can apply in all cases, any would-be total system of logic is self-contradictory.
Pattern: recognizing and exploiting that common motifs arise ubiquitously, that perspectives can be taken for the sake of effectiveness even if they're not profoundly true, that we can cultivate virtue and strive for good outcomes even if language and logic can't precisely define "virtue" or "good outcomes."
The pre-rational mode is defined by unchosen obligations, unquestioned traditions, living in a perpetual present defined by emotions and relationships. It is the body, the spirit, the convulsions of the disordered will.
The rational mode attempts to detach from and manage these things, imposing structure, schedule, priority, and most importantly justification. By ordering and explaining the world, the rational mode gives us a system to convince ourselves to do what is correct, even if it conflicts with our emotions and base urges. The rational mode is the fullness of mind, reigning over heart and gut.
The rational mode was broken forever by the world wars and the reckoning in meaning-making that followed, but no new system for making meaning and ordering the world has emerged. Formulating a metarational framework, that can use rational-mode systems as tools while drawing ultimate meaning from nebulosity and pattern, is necessary to advance the state of human civilization rather than repeat the mistakes of the past or fall into further decline.
But this isn't the first time this has happened. Some 2000 years before Western Europe, Classical China made the same transition from communal-relational to rational-bureaucratic society, leading directly to the founding of the first imperial dynasty. What's more, some thinkers moved past it, though the postmodern and metarational ideas were so radically far ahead of their time they couldn't truly be made use of.
My model of Classical Chinese philosophy is this:
Confucius was the bridge from the pre-rational mode into the rational, taking the traditions and folkways of the Zhou Dynasty and attempting to revive them, buttressed by justification rather than blind adherence.
Mohism, and Legalism before Han Fei2 , were competing rational systems, based on different premises but trying to accomplish the same ends.
The Daoism of Laozi and Zhuangzi were rejections of the rational worldview, critiquing total systems as fundamentally incoherent and giving themselves over to the nebulosity inherent in all things.
And Xunzi was the first metarational synthesizer, fully aware of the difficulties of nebulosity, but insistent on the usefulness of pattern.
Xunzi's sensibilities were those of an orthodox Confucian, basing everything in the cultivation of virtue and enlightened rule. He could take the perspective of any of the various rationalisms, and he even argued they weren't wrong per se, but merely overly fixated on one perspective to the exclusion of others. He accepted the truth of the Daoist critique and understood the necessity of fluidity, but did not become trapped by it and succumb to inaction. And he combined all these currents into a meta-system capable of ordering the world. In this way, he moved past the constraints of his time and described a full metarational framework.
We live in a time like the Spring and Autumn, where our world is held together more by inertia than the active force of the system that created it. We will have our own Hundred Schools of Thought, contending with each other to articulate new ways to replace the old. Avoiding a repeat of the Warring States will depend on whether something workable can be assembled sooner rather than later.
There are countless possible vocabularies to describe a metarational framework. There's no ultimate truth in the building blocks, just in the flow that they attempt to capture the essence of, to within acceptable tolerance. But out of infinite choices, we must choose, and I choose to follow Master Xun.
At the beginning of the Spring and Autumn, Zhou society was fragmented. The king, once mighty, had largely become a ceremonial figure, held in some esteem but militarily impotent. There were dozens of states, most of them small but prestigious, geographically central, enfeoffed by the Zhou king and related to him by blood. After King Huan was defeated in battle by one of his nominal vassals, the states largely behaved as independent powers.
Competition between the inner states took the form of courtly politics, ritual oneupsmanship, and quasi-ceremonial war. Reading the Zuozhuan, a typical war in the 700s BC looked like seizing a single town to avenge an insult, receiving the proper obeisances, and returning it. There are episodes of one state sending grain to another, while at war with it, to save their people from a bad harvest.
While the inner states engaged in gentlemanly sport, the outer states fought real opponents: the barbarian tribes that surrounded the Zhou heartland on every side. These outer states had weaker ties to the royal clan, and some were even sinicized barbarians. Chu was noted for its unusual customs from the very start of the Annals, and Wu and Yue emerged directly from settled non-Han tribes to join the Chinese state system. These states lacked prestige and fineries but controlled vast tracts of land compared to their genteel cousins, and they cut their teeth fighting actual, existential wars.
As the Spring and Autumn went on, the larger states eclipsed the small. War evolved from polite sport to true invasion, first for territory, and eventually for outright annexation. The king lacked an army but still retained his title, and for a time he could shore up his position by naming a heavyweight duke as hegemon, giving them a reason to uphold the system as it existed instead of overturning it.
But unbacked legitimacy always gives way to naked power. While the Spring and Autumn was a declining society, the Warring States was a protracted cataclysm that would erase that society and create something new. Hereditary nobility was wiped out, as chariots were abandoned for the saddle and gentlemen were forced off the battlefield in favor of a professional officer corps. With the nobles basically useless in this rapidly evolving society, a new standard for the ruling class emerged: the scholar-gentry. And from them came the Hundred Schools of Thought, the sole foundation of Chinese philosophy for centuries, until the introduction of Buddhism.
Confucius lived in an inner state, during the Spring and Autumn, and famously bemoaned that there was no ruler who would take him on and allow him to implement his vision of society. By contrast, the Warring States was a paradise for the young, enterprising statecraft consultant. The zeitgeist was one in which countless scholars, baptized by over a century of chaos and bloodshed, tried to invent ruling ideologies from first principles. They traveled from court to court, pitched their theories to dukes and princes, and the lucky ones earned free rein to reorganize a state based on their designs.
Eventually, the Qin state, with its systematic and uncompromising Legalist system, eclipsed all the others. It went on to extinguish them one by one, and then established the first imperial dynasty. The brutal philosophy quickly wasted its vital energy and was toppled in civil war, with what would become the Han dynasty triumphing over a resurgent Chu. The Han for a time implemented something like an economically liberal religious Daoism, but their true golden age under Emperor Wu saw the formulation of a largely Xunist system, albeit operating in a rational mode, which would serve as the model for various Chinese administrations for hundreds of years to follow.
The Master's Analects serves as an initial bridge from pre-rational to rational thought. Being a collection of stories and sayings, rather than a discursive tract, the text depends on commentaries to be fully understood. But in it is the seed of a total system.
Confucius is an antiquarian, mourning the fallen state of his society and wishing that people would return to the rites of Zhou. A pre-rational thinker could easily arrive at such a position, but he would argue the old ways must be upheld for fear of offending the gods, or because that's how things are done, or for no reason at all. Such a one's distress would be without logic, only the creeping dread of knowing that things which need doing were no longer being done.
But Confucius is not like this: for him, the old ways are better because they made society work, and he knows why things were done that way, and he's going to tell you. The hallmark of the rational mode is that every "why" can be met with a "because." Things are no longer taken for granted: they must be understood, explained, and justified.
Confucius is far from the only thinker to arrive at a rational system, and many of the Hundred Schools of Thought sought to invent or discover a total system that could order the world. Most notable were the Legalists and Mohists, who both describe materialist-utilitarian systems after their own fashion.
Legalism sought to banish all the complexity and nebulosity inherent in ideas like humaneness, righteousness, and virtue, and instead order society on instrumental lines, with impartial laws and the incentives of reward and punishment. Mohism likewise valued impartiality, instead arriving at it via the idea of universal love, treating everyone like a special member of your family, rather than no one. Ardent pacifists, they built defensive fortifications in the hopes that offensive war could be made too costly to prosecute, and advocated for the eradication of all pleasures and extravagances so more people could be supported at base subsistence.
The Daoists, unlike many of the schools, did not have their own program for society per se. They moved beyond the rational mode, pointing out the failure of language to correspond to reality, the impossibility of drawing clear distinctions between things, and the folly of attempting to understand the world on purely intellectual grounds. In essence, they arrived at a postmodern critique of the rational mode. With no answer for where to go from there, however, they were left advocating personal freedom and irresponsibility. Let the task of how to provide for the people fall to someone else.
A story in the Zhuangzi tells of the state of Chu sending two officials to the philosopher to announce that he is to be appointed prime minister. Zhuangzi says to them, there's a sacred tortoise, dead for thousands of years, wrapped in silks and decorated with jades, venerated in the halls of Chu by the king himself. He asks the officials if that tortoise would rather be dead with its bones worshiped, or alive and dragging its tail in the mud. The officials reply that it would rather be alive and dragging its tail in the mud. "Then go away!" Zhuangzi shouts, "And leave me to drag my tail in the mud!"
There is a stereotype of the serious Confucian scholar who, upon retirement, retreats to the mountains to become an eccentric Daoist sage. To indulge in whimsy after a career of serving the people is acceptable, but the issue now is this attitude becoming endemic to all generations, leaving the people imperiled. While the rational mode is inadequate to fully describe reality, it may be sufficient to order society. However to deconstruct it and give up any responsibility to replace it with something better is a tragedy.
Xunzi is the great syncretizer, who borrows from all these traditions and assembles something that transcends them. Xunzi deeply believes in Confucian moral principles, but he sees how the system Confucius describes is too dogmatic and unrealistic to enact those principles in the world. He comprehends Legalism and Mohism as well as its adherents do, and he perfectly understands the essentially postmodern Daoist critique of the insufficiency of language and systems. He blends these schools of thought together into an ideology that takes timeless morality as its root, then wields systematic rationality as its sword and wears fluidity and contingency as its cape.
In "Nothing Improper" he argues that the honest and the upright can do good in simple ways. "If he is untalented, then with respect and modesty he carefully serves other people" (3.38). But "the sage is one who makes himself a measure" (5.148). The greatest talents are not tied down by systems: they can adapt to things as they arise, discern the proper responses, and motivate others through spirit-like power. They then leverage the many to accomplish great things. "Thus, his grasp is quite restricted, but his deeds are quite grand" (3.169).
In "Against Physiognomy" he admits that culture is not eternal, but a fragile thing, which has to be invented, and can fade away. "Culture persists for a long time and then expires; regulations persist for a long time and then cease" (5.123). But the design principles of culture allow a sage to assemble one from basic principles. "Use the near to know the far; use the one to know the ten thousand; use the subtle to know the brilliant" (5.136).
In "Enriching the State" he starts from the most basic Daoist axiom that nature has its Way without reference to mankind, but then argues human interpretation of things in nature give them merit and meaning, "The myriad things share the same cosmos and have different bodies. They have no intrinsic fittingness but are useful for humans" (10.1). From this basis, he builds up an entire model of human relations, justifying the purpose of society detached from any metaphysical truth.
Likewise, in "Correct Naming," he argues that linguistic objects have no inherent meaning. "Names have no predetermined appropriateness. One forms agreement in order to name things" (22.120). But while they have no inherent meaning, they become tools when imbued with meaning, and tools can be judged on their merits. "Names do have a predetermined goodness. If they are straightforward, simple, and do not conflict, then they are called good names" (22.126).
In "The Rule of a True King" and "A Debate on Military Affairs," he goes against Confucius in admitting that law and punishment are appropriate for extreme cases, or when necessary to protect the people. But he goes against the Legalists in recognizing that harshness leads to a downward spiral, and ineffable things like virtue and charisma obviate the need for much brutality. He predicts the downfall of Qin, that "to capture and take over others is [easy], but consolidating and solidifying one's grip [is hard]" (15.580), expecting that once their strength flags, all will rise up against them. The "guiding factor that is fundamental" (15.230) is the spirit-like power of the sage-king.
In "Discourse on Heaven" he asserts that Heaven does not have a will and then arrives himself at the idea that ritual and sacredness are necessary for human functioning. Not because they're literally true, not because they're instrumentally useful, but because there is something ineffable in the human organism that is nurtured by them which we can only gesture at3. And then in "Discourse on Ritual" he leaps beyond this point and provides what is essentially an instruction manual for building ritual-systems from scratch.
But in illustrating his awareness of the need for a framework which makes use of many systems, rather than a single system that explains everything, no essay goes further than "Undoing Fixation":
In most cases, the problem for people is that they become fixated on one twist and are deluded about the greater order of things. If they are brought under control, then they will return to the right standards. If they are of two minds, then they will be hesitant and confused. There are not two Ways for the world, and the sage is not of two minds.
Nowadays the feudal lords have different governments, and the hundred schools have different teachings, so that necessarily some are right and some are wrong, and some lead to order and some lead to chaos. The lords of chaotic states and the followers of pernicious schools all sincerely seek what they consider correct and put themselves into achieving it. They resent what they consider to be erroneous views of the Way, and others are seduced into following their same path. [...] Is this not because they have become fixated on one twist and missed the true object of their search (21.1)?
Xunzi lists various historical figures and notes mistakes they made because they were overly focused on one thing. He describes his contemporaries each in turn, each fixating on one aspect of the Way and overreacting to it, establishing an extremist philosophy that can't see the full scope of things. All of their views are true, in some sense, in that they recognize some aspect of the Way and respond to it. Their great error is forgetting all the others, and declaring their solution to a specific problem is generalizable to all problems.
On the one hand, Xunzi says the Way is multifarious, and the broad-minded gentleman must keep all aspects in mind. On the other, he asserts the Way is singular: it is the entire nature of how things are. Looking at one or another aspect in isolation is just a matter of perspective, in the same way that distant trees may look tiny, but you still can act knowing their true size.
To his core, he recognizes the futility of the total system:
If one takes the human ability to know that comes from human nature and uses it to seek the underlying patterns of things that can be known, but one has no point at which one will stop, then even with old age and the end of one’s years, one will not be able to cover them all (21.364).
Trying to model the entire world is totally intractable. One can never complete the task, and in the end, with a wealth of information but no ability to use it, "one will be the same as a foolish person" (21.371). There must be a stopping point, and that stopping point is "utter sufficiency" (21.377). Contenting oneself with accomplishing the task of running society, rather than obsessing over crafting the perfect system, this is the mark of the sage.
This is the essence of metarationality: treating systems as objects to appreciate and harness, not becoming trapped in one frame of reference, switching between them fluidly, seeing multiple aspects of a thing at once. And, above all else, employing the models that help you achieve good ends and ignoring those you don't need in the moment.
And as for good ends, per the Taixue: "The Way of highest learning lies in displaying enlightened virtue; it lies in loving the people; it lies in coming to rest in the utmost goodness."
We still live in a world ordered on the rational mode, but that world is flagging. Both because the masses no longer believe in the rightness of the system, and because it's harder to train and integrate new generations of administrators to maintain its orderly operation.
On the level of the state, institutional decline often looks like rational-bureaucratic proceduralism turning into kafkaesque process for process sake, papered over by pre-rational reliance on personal relationships to keep things running at all. It wouldn't matter if it were a question of aesthetic or style, but the rational mode is a social technology for coordinating humans at scale to accomplish complex tasks. Without it, the scale at which effective action is possible collapses.
On the level of the world, the so-called international community ceases to function, and an anarchic order of conquest and subjugation will replace it unless a successor system emerges. From the Napoleonic Wars to World War I, Europe enjoyed relative peace under the internationalist system laid out at the Congress of Vienna, while Africa and Asia were fair game for conquest. The unification of Germany threatened the stability of the system, but Bismarck, aware of this, attempted to set the German Empire up as a benevolent hegemon and mediator by renouncing global ambitions. This balance was destroyed by Wilhelm II, and the world wars followed.
After the world wars, the USA and USSR collaborated to destroy the European colonial system and establish their own neo-colonial empires: the Communist International, and the liberal international order. Direct conflict between superpowers was replaced by proxy wars and contests of prestige, and outright foreign conquest was replaced by interventionism and regime change. By blurring the distinction between sovereign power, and protectorate or tributary, both superpowers found it easier to manage their colonial dependencies.
It is plausible the USA could have established a true global order after the collapse of the Soviet Union, or after 9/11, but in both cases it chose national interest over international prestige. Perhaps we haven't yet unlocked the social technologies to coordinate at a planetary scale, or perhaps our rulers failed to cultivate the virtue necessary of a true sage-king. Regardless, those windows of opportunity are now closed.
The liberal international order thus remains as a multi-regional, but not truly global, hegemony. And it is failing. In part this is due to material constraints, both the rise of China as a potential future hegemon and the failure of the USA to preserve its industrial base and capacity for grand-scale tech development, the successes of some private-sector firms aside. But in part this is due to loss of faith in the mission, and even ignorance that the global system is something that needs to be run, rather than an emergent and collaborative phenomenon.
If there is a way forward that would be a genuine improvement in the condition of the human race, rather than just a changing of the guard, it is through a metarational ideology that can admit the inadequacy of any total system, but embrace the usefulness of various systems in accomplishing particular ends.
It must be able to train functionaries to operate within a system, as the rational mode does, while making them capable of taking a fluid approach, treating their system as a tool without depending on it as a foundation of meaning. And it must educate rulers and ministers in the outlook necessary to supervise the ballet of systems, being able to take various perspectives at the same time, to see from within a system while seeing how all the systems interact, to produce the desired order.
"The gentleman is at home in what is graceful" (4.167). The rational mode and the pure intellect are sufficient to be a hegemon. But nebulosity and pattern, these are foundation of wisdom4, the tools of the sage-king.
As our equivalent of the Zhou state system falls into decline, we are sure to have our own Hundred Schools of Thought. The ideologies of all the last great Western upheavals—the American and French Revolutions, the Springtime of Nations, and the world wars—took for granted what came before, and tried to build on it, or overthrow it. The philosophies, cults, and movements of the 21st century will need to grapple with first principles.
Unquestioned belief in the rational mode and the rational-bureaucratic system it entails is, in the West, for now, over. If society falls back on communal-relational modes of organization to cope with this loss, the ability to marshal men and resources and coordinate them at mass-scale will be severely damaged. In the worst case, societies that regress to this state will suffer deprivation and strife until all higher ideals are bled away and the people will accept any ruler who can impose order, no matter how violently.
To escape this fate, we will need to develop a new kind of society, one not built on the total system, but on a framework of meaning capable of orchestrating systems. There are myriad bases for such a framework, with their own advantages and trade-offs, and many are different perspectives on and vocabularies for the same underlying Way.
Xunzi provides clear guidelines for how to construct this framework.
He lays out a theory of human relations and the purpose of society and the role of the individual within it. He provides us with a moral framework to judge our actions, offers guidance on both practical statecraft and designing the symbol-language of ritual to gladden the people's hearts.
But he also shows how one can manage myriad individual systems to accomplish day-to-day governance without succumbing to fixation on any one of them. He received from the Daoists the essence of the postmodern critique some 2500 years ago, but while many today are stricken with despair from it, he learned to flow, as the Daoists do.
Flow, yet never shirk one's responsibility to the people. This is the model for us to emulate.
"Those who cross waters mark out the deep places, to make it so that people will not fall in. Those who order the people mark out what is chaotic, to make it so that people will not err" (27.58).
Thank you to David Chapman for reviewing a previous version of this post.
For a fuller introduction to the framework I'm borrowing, David Chapman's "A Bridge to Meta-Rationality vs. Civilizational Collapse" remains the best entry.
Han Fei was Xunzi's student and based on my amateur reading of the Hanfeizi I believe he probably understood the problem of nebulosity just as well, his text is too sophisticated to assume otherwise. Han Fei probably arrived at his view of Legalism from seeing clearly the philosophical problems nebulosity causes and trying to slam the box shut before they got out.
I first encountered this argument about ritual from Sarah Perry, and I believe this specific idea is what cleaves the postrats from the rats: belief that reason isn't enough, the human spirit needs succor.
Maybe what we call metarationality is an imperfect and immature form of what our elders call wisdom. There is no program to train wisdom, and by definition there can never be, because while knowledge is accumulated information, wisdom is accumulated good sense, hard-won by experience.
But who needs to be perfect! Real artists ship! I'd love if everyone could have a bespoke watch, lovingly teased out from raw metal by the littlest old man in Switzerland. But we have business to take care of. Better to slap Casios on the youth and put them to work.
Our task is to discover the principles on which a new kind of society can be built and package them up in an easily digestible format such that future generations can be trained in them earlier. It sounds grandiose but it's probably not that big a deal. It takes a lot more work to write code than it does to execute it.
Thanks for writing, Alice. This is fantastic and is exactly what I'd like to see more of on the internet. I'd love to read more of your favorite passages -- maybe even an addendum to this that is just "selected passages from Chinese history and philosophy, with some context."
How are you studying the xunzi? Via translated texts or the original?