Abstract
Though there was no “Daoist school” in Xunzi’s time, he was familiar with the thinkers that we think of as Daoist. He rejected them, aligning himself with the school of Confucius instead, but he also learned important things from them, specifically about the natures of Heaven, the Heart, and Ritual. Ultimately, however, it was the failure of Daoism to establish limits for things like violence, social freedom, and wealth, that revealed to Xunzi the rightness of the Confucian Way.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
There are reasons to wonder whether Laozi and Zhuangzi even existed, at least as they are traditionally imagined. In what follows I make no suppositions about that but use the names to refer to the texts and their supposed authors.
- 3.
- 4.
See Louden 2002.
- 5.
Translations from Zhuangzi are based on my own in RCCP.
- 6.
See Goldin 2011.
- 7.
See Huang 2015 for a more elaborate analysis of the relationship between virtue and diversity in Zhuangzi.
- 8.
See Ivanhoe 2011.
- 9.
To disambiguate for Western philosophers, the “heart” includes emotions as well as thought. Training the heart has more to do with cultivating the right kinds of feelings than with vetting proper motives.
- 10.
See Stalnaker 2003.
- 11.
- 12.
These arguments are fleshed out in Kjellberg 1996: 16–19.
- 13.
Hu 乎 can be read either as a question mark, as I have done here, or as a preposition, in which case the line reads “Things are appropriate in being appropriate, inappropriate in being inappropriate.” The ambiguity may be intentional: the question can be its own answer depending on how you read it.
- 14.
For a different interpretation of Xunzi’s conventionalism with regard to language, see Van Norden 2000.
- 15.
- 16.
See Pines 2005.
- 17.
I thank Eric Hutton for clarifying this point and providing the examples.
- 18.
See Knoblock III.332, n. 65.
- 19.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the reviewer and particularly the editor of this volume whose suggestions, too numerous to cite individually, have added significantly to this essay.
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Kjellberg, P. (2016). What Did Xunzi Learn from the Daoists?. In: Hutton, E. (eds) Dao Companion to the Philosophy of Xunzi. Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7745-2_13
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