Abstract
John Dewey was familiar with the philosophy of Mencius, but he suffered from the common misconception that Mencius taught that human nature was “inherently good,” a misconception that ascribes notions of species essentialism and teleology to Mencius’s theory. On this basis, Dewey departed from Mencius’s position. Had Dewey better understood Mencius, he might have seen that their outlooks corresponded more closely. Once Mencius’s botanical metaphors are understood within the context of natural philosophy as broadly represented in the early Chinese corpus, his “developmental” theory of human nature can be seen to entail a notion of organism-environment continuity similar to Dewey’s own. Restoring this feature of Mencius’s thought requires revisiting the meaning of “nature” (xing 性) in Warring States philosophy, and bringing it more in line with observations about organic development prevalent in the period.
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- 1.
The most representative example, perhaps, is Ivanhoe, who sees in the Mencius “a teleological view about the flourishing of human nature expressed in an ideal or paradigmatic model of what it is to be human” (Ivanhoe 2013: 29).
- 2.
As others have noted, in Van Norden’s work, “All Chinese thinkers are interpreted in terms of Western philosophical doctrines,” which negatively affects his “interpretive precision” (Lau 2015: 523).
- 3.
Needham, for instance, finds that Chinese causal thinking is “reticular and hierarchically fluctuating,” rather than “singly catenarian and particulate” (Needham 1956: 289). Cheng describes Chinese thinking as “holistic,” “internalistic,” and “organistic” (Cheng 1976: 13). Wu finds mechanistic causality to be “alien to Chinese metaphysics,” which treats events as “organically interrelated,” a “comprehensive continuum” that exhibits a “process of never-ceasing growth” (Wu 1975: 19, 14).
- 4.
Culture being what it is (namely, something that exhibits continuity), it should not be surprising to learn that research in cognitive psychology suggests that cultural traditions continue to have an influence on how we view the world. As Norenzayan and Nisbett find even today: “East Asian and American causal reasoning differs significantly” (Norenzayan and Nisbett 2000: 132).
- 5.
Other versions of this chapter omit de 德 here, suggesting that dao 道 is what “rears, grows, nurtures,” and so on. This also makes sense. The chapter states at the outset, however, that de is what “rears” a living thing. I retain the Wang Bi version here.
- 6.
“We say ‘this-is-for-the-sake-of-that’ whenever there appears to be some ‘end’ toward which the movement proceeds if nothing impedes it.” (Part of Animals, 641b.23).
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Behuniak, J. (2023). Mencius, Dewey, and “Developmental” Human Nature. In: Xiao, Y., Chong, Kc. (eds) Dao Companion to the Philosophy of Mencius. Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy, vol 18. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27620-0_34
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