FREE ESSAY ON TAOISM

TAOISM

Philosophy of Mind in China
Conceptual and Theoretical Matters 
Historical Developments: The Classical Period 
Historical Developments: Han Cosmology 
Historical Developments: The Buddhist Period 
Historical Developments: The Neo-Confucian Period 
Bibliography
Introduction: Conceptual and Theoretical Matters 
Classical Chinese theory of mind is similar to Western folk psychology in that both
mirror their respective background view of language. They differ in ways that fit those
folk theories of language. The core Chinese concept is xin (the heart-mind). As the
translation suggests, Chinese folk psychology lacked a contrast between cognitive and
affective states ([representative ideas, cognition, reason, beliefs] versus [desires,
motives, emotions, feelings]). The xin guides action, but not via beliefs and desires. It
takes input from the world and guides action in light of it. Most thinkers share those
core beliefs. 
Herbert Fingarette argued that Chinese (Confucius at least) had no psychological theory.
Along with the absence of belief-desire explanation of action, they do not offer
psychological (inner mental representation) explanations of language (meaning). We find
neither the focus on an inner world populated with mental objects nor any preoccupation
with questions of the correspondence of the subjective and objective worlds. Fingarette
explained this as reflecting an appreciation of the deep conventional nature of both
linguistic and moral meaning. He saw this reflected in the Confucian focus on li (ritual)
and its emphasis on sociology and history rather than psychology. The meaning, the very
existence, of a handshake depends on a historical convention. It rests on no mental acts
such as sincerity or intent. The latter may accompany the conventional act and give it a
kind of aesthetic grace, but they do not explain it.
Fingarette overstates the point, of course. It may not be psychologistic in its
linguistic or moral theory, but Confucianism still presupposes a psychology, albeit not
the familiar individualist, mental or cognitive psychology. Its account of human function
in conventional, historical society presupposes some behavioral and dispositional traits.
Most Chinese thinkers indeed appear to presuppose that humans are social, not egoistic or
individualistic. The xin coordinates our behavior with others. Thinkers differed in their
attitude toward this natural social faculty. Some thought we should reform this tendency
and try harder to become egoists, but most approved of the basic goodness of people. Most
also assumed that social discourse influenced how the heart-mind guides our cooperation.
If discourse programs the heart-mind, it must have a dispositional capacity to
internalize the programming. 
Humans accumulate and transmit conventional dao-s (guiding discourses-ways). We teach
them to our children and address them to each other. The heart-mind then executes the
guidance in any dao it learns when triggered (e.g., by the sense organs). Again thinkers
differed in their attitude toward this shared outlook. Some thought we should minimize or
eliminate the controlling effect of such conventions on human behavior. Others focused on
how we should reform the social discourse that we use collectively in programming each
other's xin. Typically, thinkers in the former group had some theory of the innate or
hard-wired programming of the xin. Some in the latter camp had either a blank page or a
negative view of the heart-mind's innate patterns of response.
For some thinkers, the sense organs delivered a processed input to the heart-mind as a
distinction: salty and sour, sweet and bitter, red or black or white or green and so
forth. Most had thin theories, at best, of how the senses contributed to guidance. While
it is tempting to suppose that they assumed the input was an amorphous flow of qualia
that the heart-mind sorted into categories (relevant either to its innate or social
programming). However, given the lack of analysis of the content of the sensory input, we
should probably conservatively assume they took the naive realist view that the senses
simply make distinctions in the world. We can be sure only that the xin did trigger
reactions to discourse-relevant stimuli.
Reflecting the theory of xin, the implicit theory of language made no distinction between
describing and prescribing. Chinese thinkers assumed the core function of language is
guiding behavior. Representational features served that prescriptive goal. In executing
guidance, we have to identify relevant things in context. If the discourse describes some
behavior toward one's elder, one needs a way correctly to identify the elder and what
counts as the prescribed behavior. Correct action according to a conventional dao must
also take into account other descriptions of the situation such as 'urgent', 'normal',
etc. These issues lay behind Confucian theories of rectifying names. 
The psychological theory (like the linguistic) did not take on a sentential form.
Classical Chinese language had no belief-grammar, i.e., forms such as X believes that P
(where P is a proposition). The closest grammatical counterpart focuses on the term, not
the sentence and point to the different function of xin. Where Westerners would say He
believes (that) it is good classical Chinese would either use He goods it or He, yi (with
regard to) it, wei (deems:regards) good. Similarly zhi (to know) takes noun phrases, not
sentences, as object. The closest counterpart to propositional knowledge would be He
knows its being (deemed as) good. The xin guides action in the world in virtue of the
categories it assigns to things, but it does not house mental or linguistic pictures of
facts.
Technically, the attitude was what philosophers a de re attitude. The subject was in the
world not in the mind. The context of use picked out the intended item. The attitude
consisted of projecting the mental category or concept on the actual thing. We
distinguish this functional role best by talking about a disposition rather than a
belief. It is a disposition to assign some reality to a category. The requisite faculty
of the heart-mind (or the senses) is the ability to discriminate or distinguish T from
not-T, e.g., good from bad, human being from thief. We might, alternately, think of
Chinese 'belief' and 'knowledge' as predicate attitudes rather than propositional
attitudes. 
Predicate attitudes are the heart-mind's function. A basic judgment is, thus, neither a
picture nor representation of some metaphysically complex fact. Its essence is picking
out what counts as 'X' in the situation (where 'X' is a term in the guiding discourse).
The context fixes the object and the heart-mind assigns it to a relevant category.
Hence, Chinese folk theory places a (learned or innate) ability to make distinctions
correctly in following a dao in the central place Western folk psychology places ideas.
They implicitly understood correctness as conformity to the social-historical norm. One
of the projects of some Chinese philosophers was trying to provide a natural or objective
ground of dao. 
Western ideas are analogous to mental pictographs in a language of thought. The composite
pictures formed out of these mental images (beliefs) were the mental counterparts of
facts. Truth was correspondence between the picture and the fact. Pictures play a role in
Chinese folk theory of language but not of mind. Chinese understood their written
characters as having evolved from pictographs. They had scant reason to think of
grammatical strings of characters as pictures of anything. 
Chinese folk linguistics recognized that history and community usage determined the
reference of the characters. They did not appeal to the pictographic quality or any
associated mental image individuals might have. Language and conventions are valuable
because they store inherited guidance. The social-historical tradition, not individual
psychology, grounds meaning. Some thinkers became skeptical of claims about the sages and
the constancy of their guidance, but they did not abandon the assumption that public
language guides us. Typically, they either advocated reforming the guiding discourse
(dao) or reverting to natural, pre-linguistic behavior patterns. Language rested neither
on cognition nor private, individual subjectivity. Chinese philosophy of mind played
mainly an application (execution of instructions) role in Chinese theory of language. 
Chinese theory of language centered on counterparts of reference or denotation. To have
mastered a term was for the xin and senses working together to be able to distinguish or
divide realities correctly. 'Correctly' was the rub because the standard of correctness
was discourse. It threatened a regress-we need a discourse to guide our practical
interpretation of discourse. Philosophy of mind played a role in various attempted
solutions. Chinese philosophers mostly agreed (except for innatists) that actual
distinguishing would be relative to past training, experience, assumptions and situation.
However, they did not regard experience as a mental concept in the classic Western sense
of the being a subjective or private content.
An important concept in philosophy of mind was, therefore, de (virtuosity). One classic
formulation identified de as embodied, inner dao. De though inner, was more a set of
dispositions than a mental content. The link seemed to be that when we learn a dao's
content, it produces de. Good de comes from successful teaching of a dao. When you follow
dao, you need not have the discourse playing internally. We best view it as the
behavioral ability to conform to the intended pattern of action-the path (performance
dao). It would be second nature. We may think of de, accordingly, as both learned and
natural. 
We can distinguish Chinese thought from Indo-European thought, then, not only in its
blending affective and cognitive functions, but also in its avoiding the nuts and bolts
of Western mind-body analysis. Talk of inner and outer did distinguish the psychological
from the social, but it did not mean inner was mental content. The xin has a physical and
temporal location and consists of dispositions to make distinctions in guiding action. It
is not a set of inherently representational ideas (mental pictograms). 
Similarly, we find no clear counterpart to the Indo-European conception of the faculty of
reason. Euclidean method in geometry and the formulation of the syllogism in logic
informed this Indo-European concept. Absent this apparatus, Chinese thinkers
characterized the heart-mind as either properly or improperly trained, virtuous, skilled,
reliable, etc. Prima facie, however, these were social standards threatened circularity.
The heart-mind required some kind of mastery of a body of practical knowledge. Chinese
thinkers explored norm realism mainly through an innatist strategy. Innatists sought to
picture the heart-mind's distinctions as matching norms or moral patterns implicit in the
natural stasis or harmony of the world. 
Return to Outline 
Historical Developments: The Classical Period 
Confucius indirectly addressed philosophy of mind questions in his theory of education.
He shaped the moral debate in a way that fundamentally influenced the classical
conception of xin (heart-mind). Confucius' discourse dao was the classical syllabus,
including most notably history, poetry and ritual. On one hand, we can think of these as
training the xin to proper performance. On the other, the question of how to interpret
the texts into action seemed to require a prior interpretive capacity of xin. Confucius
appealed to a tantalizingly vague intuitive ability that he called ren (humanity). A
person with ren can translate guiding discourse into performance correctly-i.e., can
execute or follow a dao. Confucius left open whether ren was innate or acquired in
study-though the latter seems more likely to have been his position.
It was, in any case, the position of China's first philosophical critic, the
anti-Confucian Mozi. Again concern with philosophy of mind was subordinate to Mozi's
normative concerns. He saw moral character as plastic. Natural human communion
(especially our tendency to emulate superiors) shaped it. Thus, we could cultivate
utilitarian behavioral tendencies by having social models enunciate and act on a
utilitarian social discourse. The influence of social models would also determine the
interpretation of the discourse. Interpretation takes the form of indexical pro and con
reactions-shi (this:right:assent) and fei (not this:wrong:dissent). The attitudes when
associated with terms pick out the reality (object, action, etc.) relevant to the
discourse guidance. We thus train the heart-mind to make distinctions that guide its
choices and thereby our behavior-specifically in following a utilitarian symbolic guide.
Utilitarian standards also should guide practical interpretation (execution or
performance) of the discourse.
At this point in Chinese thought, the heart-mind became the focus of more systematic
theorizing-much of it in reaction to Mozi's issues. The moral issue and the threat of a
relativist regress in the picture led to a nativist reaction. On the one hand, thinkers
wanted to imagine ways to free themselves from the implicit social determinism. On the
other, moralists want a more absolute basis for ethical distinctions and actions.
Several thinkers may have joined a trend of interest in cultivating the heart-mind.
Mencius' theory is the best known within the moralist trend. He analyzed the heart-mind
as consisting of four natural moral inclinations. These normally mature just as seeds
grows into plants. Therefore, the resulting virtues ('benevolence', 'morality', 'ritual',
and 'knowledge') were natural. Mencius thus avoided having to treat the ren intuition as
a learned product a social dao. It is a de that signals a natural dao. This view allowed
Mencius to defend Confucian ritual indirectly against Mozi's accusation that it relied on
an optional and, thus, changeable tradition.
Mencius' strategy, however, presupposed that a linguistic dao could either distort or
reinforce the heart-mind's innate program. In principle, we do not need to prop up moral
virtue educationally. Linguistic shaping, other than countering linguistic distortion,
therefore, ran an unnecessary risk. It endangered the natural growth of the moral
dispositions. The shi (this:right:assent) and fei (not this:wrong:dissent) dispositions
necessary for sage-like moral behavior should develop naturally. His theory did not imply
that we know moral theory at birth, but that they develop or mature as the physical body
does and in response to ordinary moral situations. The heart-mind functions by issuing
shi-fei (this-not this) directives that are right in the concrete situations in which we
find ourselves. It does not need or generate ethical theory or hypothetical choices. The
xin's intuitions are situational and implicitly harmonious with nature.
A well-known advocate with the natural spontaneity or freedom motivation was the Taoist,
Laozi. He analyzed the psychology of socialization at a different level. Learning names
was training us to make distinctions and to have desires of what society considered the
appropriate sort. Both the distinctions and the desires were right only according to the
conventions of the language community. Learning language not only meant losing one's
natural spontaneity, it was and subjecting oneself to control by a social-historical
perspective. We allowed society to control our desires. His famous slogan, wu-wei,
enjoined us to avoid actions motivated by such socialized desires. We achieve that
negative by forgetting socially instilled distinctions-by forgetting language!
His implicit ideal had some affinities with that of Mencius except that his conception of
the natural realm of psychological dispositions was considerably less ambitious in moral
terms. Interpreters usually suppose that he assumed there would be a range of natural
desires left even if socialized ones were subtracted. These would be enough to sustain
small, non-aggressive, agrarian villages. In them, people would lack the curiosity even
to visit neighboring villages. This primitivism still requires that there is a natural
level of harmonious impulses to action, but not nearly enough to sustain Mencius' unified
moral empire.
The LATER MOHISTS became skeptical of the neutral status of these allegedly natural
heart-mind states. They noted that even a thief may claim that his behavior was natural.
They watered down the conventionalism of Mozi by appealing to objectively accessible
similarities and differences in nature. Our language ought to reflect these clusters of
similarity. They did little epistemology especially of the senses, but supposedly, like
Mozi, would have appealed to the testimony ordinary people relying on their eyes and
ears. 
Others (See ZHUANGZI) insisted that any apparent patterns of similarity and difference
were always perspectival and relative to some prior purpose, standards or value attitude.
Linguistics did shape heart-mind attitudes but neither reliably or accurately carves the
world into its real parts. 
The Later Mohists had given a cluster of definitions of zhi (to know). One of these
seemed close to consciousness-or rather to point to the lack of any such concept. Zhi was
the capacity to know. In dreaming the zhi did not zhi and we took (something) as so. They
analyzed the key function of the heart-mind as the capacity to discriminate linguistic
intention. 
Zhuangzi takes a step beyond Laozi in his theory of emotions. Zhuangzi discusses the
passions and emotions that were raw, pre-social inputs from reality. He suggested a
pragmatic attitude toward them-we cannot know what purpose they have, but without them,
there would be no reference for the I. Without the 'I', there would be neither choosing
nor objects of choice. Like Hume, he argued that while we have these inputs and feel
there must be some organizing true ruler, we get no input (qing) from any such ruler. We
simply have the inputs themselves (happiness, anger, sorrow, joy, fear). We cannot
suppose that the physical heart is such a ruler, because it is no more natural than the
other organs and joints of the body. Training and history condition a heart's judgments.
Ultimately, even Mencius' shi-fei (this-not this) are input to the xin. Our experience
introduces them relative to our position and past assumptions. They are not objective or
neutral judgments. 
XUNZI also concentrated on issues related to philosophy of mind though in the context of
moral and linguistic issues. He initiated some important and historically influential
developments in the classical theory. His most famous (and textually suspect) doctrine is
human nature is evil. While he clearly wanted to distance himself from Mencius, the
slogan at best obscures the deep affinity between their respective views of human nature
and mind. 
Xunzi seems to have drawn both from the tradition advocating cultivating heart-mind and
from the focused theory of language. This produced a tense hybrid theory that filled out
the original Confucian picture on how conventions and language program the heart-mind.
Xunzi made the naturalism explicit. Human guiding discourse takes place in the context of
a three-tier universe-tian (heaven-nature) di (earth-sustenance) and ren (the social
realm). He gave humans a special place in the 'chain of nature,' but not based on reason.
Animals shared the capacity for zhi (knowledge). What distinguishes humans is their yi
(morality) which is grounded on the ability to bian (distinguish). 
Presumably, the latter ability is unique among animals with knowledge because it is
short-hand for the ability to construct and abide by conventions-conventional
distinctions or language. One of Xunzi's naturalistic justifications for Confucian
conventional rituals is economic. Ritual distinctions guide people's desires so that
society can manage scarcity. Only those with high status will learn to seek scarce goods.
His departure from Mencius thus seems to lie in seeing human morality as more informed or
filled-out by historical conventional distinctions. These are the products of reflection
and artifice, not nature. 
However, in other ways Xunzi seems to edge closer to Mencius. He also presents ritual as
part of the structure of the world-implicit in the heaven-earth natural context. One
natural line of explanation is this: while thought creates the correct conventions,
nature sets the concrete conditions of scarcity and human traits that determine what
conventions will be best for human flourishing. 
Return to Outline 
Historical Developments: Han Cosmology 
The onset of the philosophical dark age, brought on by Qin Dynasty repression followed by
Han dynasty policies resulted in a bureaucratic, obscurant Confucian orthodoxy. The Qin
thus buried the technical ideas informing philosophy of mind along with the active
thinkers who understood them. The ontology of the eclectic scholasticism that emerged was
essentially religious and superstitious. It was, however, overtly materialist (assuming
Qi (ether, matter) is material). So the implicit philosophy of mind of the few
philosophically inclined thinkers during the period tended toward a vague materialism. 
The Han further developed the five-element (five phases) version of materialism. They
postulated a correlative pentalogy linking virtually every system of classification that
occurred to them. The scheme included the organs of the body and the virtues.
Interpretation and analysis of correlative reasoning is a controversial subject. From
here, the mental correlations look more like a frequency selection from the psychological
lexicon than a product of philosophical reflection, observation or causal theory.
The Yin-yang analysis also had mental correlates. Following Xunzi, Orthodox Han
Confucians tended to treat qing (reality:desires) as yin (typically negative). The yang
(value positive) counterpart was xing (human moral nature).
The most important development of the period was the emergence a compromise Confucian
view of mind's role in morality. It eventually informed and dominated the scholastic
Neo-Confucianism of the much later Sung to Qing dynasties. The small book known as the
Doctrine of the Mean gave it an influential formulation. It presents the heart-mind as a
homeostasis-preserving input output device. The heart-mind starts in a state of
tranquillity. The account leaves open whether this is a result of ideally structured
moral input, resolution of inner conflicts, or the absence of (distorting) content.
Xunzi's view of the empty, unified and still mind seems the proximate ancestor of the
latter aspect of the view. The vagueness, conveniently, makes Mencius' doctrines fit it
as well. The input is a perturbation from the outer world. The output, the heart-mind's
action-guiding response, restores harmony to the world and the inner state to
tranquillity. If the inner state prior to the input is not tranquil, the response will
not restore harmony to the real situation. 
Han Confucianism filled out this cosmic view of this black-box interaction between
heart-mind and world harmony using qi materialism. Qi is a rather more a blend of energy
and matter than pure matter-translations such as life-force bring out an essential
connection with vitality. This makes it more appropriate for a cosmology that links the
active heart-mind with the changing world. Qi was the single constituting element of
spirits and ghosts as well. 
Wang Ch'ung's skeptical, reductive application of qi theory focused on shen
(spirit-energy). He did not view its consequences for heart-mind as particularly
iconoclastic. It still lacked a notion of consciousness independent of zhi (know). (Our
zhi, he argued, stops when we are asleep and so almost certainly it does when we are
dead.) His arguments that nature had no intentional purposes illustrated his reductive
behaviorism-if it has neither eyes nor ears, then it cannot have zhi (purposes or
intentions). This argument would hardly make sense if he had the familiar Western concept
of consciousness. Similarly, he argues that the five virtues are in the five organs so
when the organs are dead and gone, the virtues disappear with them.
Return to Outline 
Historical Developments: Buddhist Philosophy of Mind 
The next developments are related to the introduction of Buddhist mental concepts into
China. Most accounts credit a movement dubbed Neo-Taoism with paving the way for this
radical change in philosophy of mind. Wangbi's Neo-Taoist system was explicitly a
cosmology more than a theory of mind, but interpretations tend to read it epistemically.

Wangbi addressed the metaphysical puzzle of the relation of being and non-being. (See
YOU-WU) He postulated non-being as the basic substance. Non-being produced being. He
dubbed this obscure relationship as substance and function. Interpretations almost
inevitably explain this on the analogy to Kant's Noumenon and Phenomenon. As noted,
Wangbi had few epistemological interests, but the analysis did have implications for
heart-mind theory. He applied the metaphysical scheme to his Confucian slogan-Sage
within, king without. The mind was empty within while the behaviors were in perfect
conformity with the Confucian ritual dao. This tilts the Taoist tradition toward the
emptiness reading of the black-box analysis of heart-mind. 
Wangbi also placed li (principle) in a more central explanatory position. This paved the
way for its use in translating Buddhism's sentence or law-like 'dharma'. It played roles
in both Buddhist epistemology and theory of mind. In sparse pre-Han usage, li was
objective tendencies in thing-kinds. (Intuitionists and naturalists took them to be the
valid norm for that kind-species relative bits of dao.) Wangbi gave it a more
essentialist reading in the context of the Book of Changes. He postulated a li guiding
the mixtures and transformations of yin and yang. One should be able to bypass the
complexity of the system by isolating and understanding its li.
Buddhism introduced revolutionary changes into Chinese heart-mind conceptual scheme. The
original Indo-European religion probably originated the familiar Western phenomenalism
(consciousness, experience-based mentalism). Indian philosophy came complete with the
familiar Western sentential analyses, mental content and cognitive emphasis (belief and
knowing-that). It even mimicked the subject-predicate syllogism and the familiar
epistemic and metaphysical subjective-objective dualism. It introduced a semantic
(eternal) truth predicate into Chinese thought along with a representational view of the
function of both mind and language. Reason/intellect and emotion/desire formed a basic
opposition in Buddhist psychological analysis. An inner idea-world parallels (or
replaces) the ordinary world of objects. Soul and mind are roughly interchangeable and
familiar arguments for immortality suggest both metaphysical dualism and mental
transcendence or superiority over the physical. It conceptually links reality (knowledge,
reason) to permanence and appearance (illusion, experience) to change. A universal chain
of causation was a central explanatory device and a mark of dependence and impermanence.
Two caveats are in order, however. First, although Buddhism introduced a dualist
conceptual scheme, many schools (arguably) denied the dualism so formulated and rejected
any transcendent 'self'. Second, it is unclear how well the philosophy of mind was
generally understood and whether much of it actually took in China. One of the early and
notoriously unsuccessful schools was the Consciousness only school (translated as Only
Heart-mind) which translated the idealism of Yogacara Buddhism. The Yogacara analysis was
Hume-like in denying that anything linked the infinitesimal moments of awareness into a
real self. Scholars tend to blame its demise, however, as much on its objectionable moral
features (its alleged Hinayana or elitist failure to guarantee universal salvation) as on
its conceptual innovations.
The most successful schools were those that seemed to eschew theory of any kind-like Zen
(Ch'an) or Pure Land Buddhism-or those that opted for intuitive, mystical simplicity
(Tian T'ai and Hua Yen). The most important conceptual legacy of Buddhism, therefore,
seems to be the changed role and importance of the character li (principle). In Buddhism
it served a wide range of important sentential and mental functions. It facilitated the
translation of 'law', 'truth', and 'reason'. Neo-Confucianism would take it over (with
notoriously controversial implications) as key concept in its philosophy of mind.
Return to Outline 
Historical Developments: Neo-Confucianism 
Neo-Confucianism is a Western name for a series of schools in which philosophy of mind
played a central role. Scholars (somewhat controversially) present these schools as
motivated by an anti-foreignism that sought to resurrect indigenous classical systems.
These had lain dormant for six-hundred odd years when the freshness of Buddhism started
to attract the attention of China's intellectuals. Resurrecting Confucianism required
providing it with an alternative to Buddhist metaphysics. For this, they drew on ch'i
metaphysics, the black-box homeostasis preserving analysis of heart-mind, Wang Pi's and
Buddhism's li and Mencius' classical theory of the inherent goodness of heart-mind. 
The intricacies of Neo-Confucian systems are too rich to analyze in detail here. The
earliest versions focused on the notion of qi linkage between the heart-mind and the
world influenced by our action. They characterized the tranquil state of the black-box as
void. The school of li criticized that analysis as too Zen-like. (This was a typical and
damning charge to participants in this movement, although a Zen period in one's
development of thought was a common pattern among Neo-Confucians.) 
The li school insisted that any adequate account of heart-mind had to give it an original
moral content. It did this by postulating an interdependent and inseparable dualism of li
and qi. The li permeates the heart and all of reality, which is composed of qi. The most
tempting (and common) elaboration uses the Platonic distinction of form and content, but
that analysis teeters on the edge of incoherence. The school fell back on dividing the
human mind from some transcendental or metaphysical Tao-mind. This made it dubious as a
theory of mind at all-in the ordinary sense. It essentially became a metaphysics in which
heart-mind was a cosmic force.
One way of understanding the motivation that drove the otherwise puzzling metaphysical
gymnastics links philosophy of mind and ethics. Neo-Confucians were searching for the
metaphysical system such that anyone so viewing the cosmos and one's place in it would
reliably do what was right. The goal was having the metaphysical outlook of the sage. The
criterion of right and wrong was that the sage's mind would so judge it. If we could
replicate the outlook, we would be sage-like in our attitudes-including both beliefs and
motivations. The effect on motivation and behavior was more important than the
theoretical coherence of the system. The complexity of moral choice and human motivation
required so many perturbations into their account of the proposed system that it became
an almost infinitely flexible rationalization for intuitionism. 
Mencian optimism about innate heart-mind dispositions proved an uncomfortable legacy. If
human nature and the heart-mind are innately and spontaneously moral, it was unclear why
we require such mental gymnastics to cultivate and condition the dispositions. They
portrayed the li as inherently good in all things, but somehow humans, alone in all of
nature, might fail to conform to its own natural norms. The attempt to explain this via
the li qi dualism flounders on the metaphysical principle that the dualism pervades all
things. Despite this well known (and intractable) Confucian problem of evil, the school
again became the Medieval orthodoxy. Office holding required being able to parrot the
view in considerable detail to show their moral character.
The school of Heart-mind was a rebellion against that orthodoxy. We best understand this
rival as a species of normative, objective idealism. It saw the actual heart-mind as li
and therefore inherently good. The xin projects that li onto the world in the act of
categorizing and dividing it into types. Thus our normative, (phenomenal) world is good
but that good is a function of the mind. Moral categorization and action are a
simultaneous and combined responses of the heart-mind to the perturbations or the
disharmonies we encounter. The analysis of mind is functional-there is no goodness of the
mind separate from the goodness of its categorizing and acting. Knowing is acting. 
The school of heart-mind somewhat gingerly accepted the implication of their Mencian
heritage. There is no evil. I say gingerly because whether one should formulate or teach
this conclusion or not is itself a choice that the mind must assess for its contextual
value. In itself, as it were, the heart-mind is beyond good and evil. Others, hence,
criticized school of heart-mind was for its own Zen-like implications. Any moderately
clever student could figure out that whatever he chose to do was right (c.f., Zhuangzi's
initial criticism's of Mencian idealism). They, in turn, criticized the Buddhist
character of their rival's assumptions that some kind of state of mind (enlightenment,
realization) would magically result in sagehood. 
The moralistic name-calling of this inter-Confucian debate sapped further development of
theory of mind. That coupled with its irrational optimism in the face of growing
awareness of the vulnerability and weakness of China to resist Western and Japanese
military and political power resulted first in mildly more materialistic and utilitarian
systems. Eventually intellectuals developed a wholesale interest in the next
Indo-European thought invasion, which took the form of Marxism. Maoist theory of mind was
an unstable mixture of Marxist economic and materialist reductionism and traditional
Chinese optimism. The right political attitude (typically that of the part member) would
give good communists spectacular moral power and infallible situational intuitions about
how to solve social problems.
Again, the obvious failure in the face of irrational theoretical optimism has produced a
general antipathy to idealizations. One can guess that the next phase, like the Buddhist
phase, will be one of borrowing and blending. However, the current skepticism about the
general outlines of folk psychology in the West and its essentially alien character
probably will keep Chinese theory of heart-mind distinctively Chinese.
Return to Outline
Bibliography
Chan, Wing tsit. 1986 Neo-Confucian Terms Explained (New York: Columbia University Press)
pp. xi-277.
Fingarette, Herbert. 1972 Confucius The Secular as Sacred .
Graham, Angus. 1964 The Place of Reason in the Chinese Philosophical Tradition, in
Raymond Dawson (ed.), The Legacy of China pp. 28-56.
Graham, Angus. 1967 The Background of the Mencian Theory of Human Nature, Tsing Hua
Journal of Chinese Studies 6/1, 2 pp. 215-274.
Graham, Angus. 1989 Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China (La
Salle, IL: Open Court) .
Hansen, Chad. 1991 Should the Ancient Masters Value Reason?, in Henry Rosemont (ed.),
Chinese Texts and Philosophical Contexts: Essays Dedicated to A. C. Graham (La Salle, IL:
Open Court) pp. 179-209.
Hansen, Chad. 1992 A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought (New York: Oxford University Press)
pp. xv-448.
Hansen, Chad. 1993 Term Belief in Action, in Lenk et al (ed.), Epistemological Issues in
Chinese Philosophy (Buffalo: SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Cu) pp. 45-68.
Hansen, Chad. 12/30/95 Qing (Emotions) in Pre-Buddhist Chinese Thought, in Joel Marks and
Roger T. Ames (ed.), Emotions in Asian Thought (State University of New York Press) pp.
181-211.
Munro, Donald J.. 1969 The Concept of Man in Early China (Stanford: Stanford University
Press) .
Munro, Donald J.. 1977 The Concept of Man in Contemporary China (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press) pp. xii, 248.
Munro, Donald J.. 1985 in Donald J. Munro (ed.), Individualism and Holism: Studies in
Confucian and Taoist Values (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press) .
Munro, Donald J.. 1988 Images of Human Nature: a Sung Portrait (Princeton: Princeton
University Press) pp. 322.
Schwartz, Benjamin. 1985 The World of Thought in Ancient China (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press) .