Jingyi Jenny Zhao follows, with her book Aristotle and Xunzi on Shame, Moral Education, and the Good Life, in the footsteps of other authors comparing Chinese and Greek philosophy. Until now it was usually Aristotle and Confucius who were compared.[1] Zhao turns to Xunzi, a major exponent of Confucian thought from the third century BCE (probably in the generation following Mencius). The works that have been transmitted under his name may not all have been written by him. That is why Zhao writes at times about Xunzi the person and at times on Xunzi, the work where his and other writings have been transmitted. (For simplicity, I will use “Xunzi” to mean both.)
The book is part of the Oxford series Emotions of the Past. It belongs to the so-called “emotional turn” in classical scholarship and then more broadly within debates about virtue ethics. Zhao analyzes shame in its social role and its value for moral education. The author claims that this emotion serves as a kind of social glue that holds together societies and conduces to the integration of young people within them.
Zhao develops a unique methodology for comparing these two philosophers and discusses broadly the caveats that apply to such an undertaking. The author defends her choice of comparanda on the ground that both Aristotle and Xunzi seem to follow into the footsteps of their intellectual predecessors—Plato and Confucius/Menzi, respectively—, developing their thoughts on shame and its role within the society.
In the first chapter, Zhao draws the backdrop in order to provide the reader with the necessary ground for comparing such distant thinkers. She underlines the fact that both thinkers lived in times of political fragmentation that seem to have fostered intellectual creativity. Both Aristotle and Xunzi write treatises dissimilar to the those of their predecessors, who chose dialogical forms. The detailed analysis here enables readers to foster their own thoughts on the topic of comparison and the comparable.
In the second chapter, Zhao describes the vocabulary of “shame” in its Greek and Chinese versions. This study is a revelation of its own. Not only does the reader get a detailed map of differentiated vocabulary but they also get a chance to understand the implications of those different terms for the respective cultures.
In chapter three, Zhao looks at the definitions of a human being in Aristotle and Xunzi. She stresses repeatedly that for Xunzi the nature of a human being is principally bad, a view that obviously has implications for a person’s moral education and conduct. Every human being is nevertheless able to become even a sage king. In Aristotle, humans are differentiated: a slave completely lacks the deliberative part of the soul, a woman has it only partially, and a child has it in an underdeveloped degree. In that respect the outlook of the two philosophers differs. Zhao makes her authors’ respective understandings of human nature very clear and comprehensible and never loses focus on her primary interest: the implications this has in regard to shame.
In chapter four, Zhao underlines the fact that, for both thinkers, shame is the one emotion that enables the internalization of social values. For Aristotle it plays an important role in youth, whereas Xunzi stresses the fact that learning is a life-long enterprise.
In the fifth and last chapter, Zhao investigates the social institutions and the politics of moral education. Zhao shows convincingly that Aristotle and Xunzi differ considerably here: Xunzi stresses ritual (li) and Aristotle law or custom (nomos) as the mechanism to enforce moral education. She makes the sociohistorical background a plausible cause of that differentiation.
The book is a valuable contribution on many levels. Zhao has developed a clear methodology to compare two distant thinkers. It would be highly valuable if more research could be done employing her methods. The emotion of shame gets a thorough and in-depth analysis that enables an understanding of its social function across cultures. In that way one may even start thinking that shame can be understood as moral integrity or a proto-virtue, a virtue that enables the development of any other virtue. Finally the reader gets an insight into two great thinkers, Aristotle and Xunzi, and sees them in a new comparative perspective that allows a deeper understanding of both of them.
Notes
[1] A small selection: R. Wardy, Aristotle in China: Language, Categories and Translation (Cambridge University Press, 2000); M. Sim, Remastering Morals with Morals and Confucius (Cambridge University Press, 2007); J. Yu, The Ethic of Confucius and Aristotle. Mirror of Virtue (London: Routledge, 2007); Hanxia W. Lan, Aristotle and Confucius on Rhetoric and Truth: The Form and the Way (New York: Routledge 2017).