The Beauty of Ritual: The Emergence of Order in Xunzi's Political Theory

• In Event: Voegelin's Reception in China

Abstract

State of nature arguments seek to explain how a justified or legitimate government might come into existence. Such arguments generally have two distinct parts. They consist of both (a) an account of what human life was (or would be) like in the absence of government and (b) an explanation of how and why people sought (or would seek) to establish government and leave the state of nature. Any attempt to offer (b) must clarify how people could overcome a collective action problem. Even when everyone has good reason to want a government to be established, the absence of government and its sanctions makes it difficult to motivate the conduct required in order to establish it. In this paper, I argue that Xunzi provides a powerful way of addressing such problems by rooting the appeal of norms in part in the sense of beauty. I defend the merits of Xunzi’s view through an extended comparison with that of Thomas Hobbes.

Hobbes offers one of the most comprehensive and influential accounts of the state of nature. In recent years, scholars have suggested that Xunzi addresses some of the same questions as Hobbes and defends answers that are similar in important respects (Wong 2000, 136-137). Xunzi’s presentation of human life in the absence of good government does indeed resemble Hobbes’ account of the state of nature. Both thinkers claim that under such circumstances our lives would be riven with conflict due to our unruly desires. Hobbes, however, seems to offer a more definite account of how people could get out of the state of nature. In Hobbes’ theory, people recognize the ills of that state and agree to establish a sovereign to rule over them. While Xunzi makes it clear that the true king resolves the problems that arise in the absence of government, it is not entirely clear how his government is actually established.

According to Benjamin Schwartz, the justification of government is simply not something that Xunzi considers (1985, 295). Harris, on the other hand, points out that Xunzi indicates that the ruler’s position is justified by his ability to provide various goods for the people (2016, 117). Even this, however, does not explain how the ruler actually gets people to comply with ethical, legal, or ritual norms. What we need is an account of how the ruler can provide an individual with good reason to support his claim to rule before being able to guarantee that his commands will be backed up with punishments or that they will receive general compliance.

I argue that Xunzi does in fact provide the theoretical resources with which to address the collective action problems raised by state of nature theories. This is an advantage of his theory in relation to that of Hobbes. The individuals in Hobbes’ state of nature are interested in right conduct only insofar as it is instrumentally rational in the sense that it helps them satisfy their desire to preserve their lives. While it is desirable, from the point of view of the Hobbesian individual, to lay down one’s arms if others will do the same, one can never be sure that they will do so. Individuals supposedly agree to create the sovereign, but that agreement cannot be enforced before the sovereign is in existence. For Xunzi, on the other hand, right action in general, and compliance with ritual in particular, involves its own distinctive satisfactions. That is to say, it is in part an end in itself. Its beauty exerts an attractive force on human beings. This suggests that human beings in the state of nature would have some reason to comply with the ritual obligations introduced by the original rulers. Xunzi thus gives us at least the beginning of a theory of how the sage kings might have overcome the collective action problem that confronts individuals in the state of nature.

Author

• Lincoln Rathnam, Duke Kunshan University