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