Theories of Human Nature in East and West: Does Human Nature Change, or Is It Fixed?

1) The Western Theory of Human Nature: A Human Nature That Does Not Change

Homo sapiens, East or West, is born with the same human nature. Philosophical systems must approach human affairs with the idea that human nature, made up of mind and instinct, does not change within any foreseeable time. The truth or falsity of every philosophical system human beings have devised is decided in the end by whether it was built on a right or a wrong understanding of human nature.

How have the civilisations of East and West analysed human nature? Philosophically, human nature is divided into three views: that it is good, that it is evil, and that it is neither good nor evil (or, in the West, the tabula rasa, the blank slate). This uniform division has the merit of simplicity, but it overlooks the fundamental difference between the theories of human nature of East and West. In the theory of human nature the West follows ontology, the philosophy of being, in which “what is created does not change,” and the East follows the philosophy of change (transformationism), in which “everything always changes.” Human nature as the West sees it does not change from birth. The Western theory of human nature needs a covenant with God, or a social contract, grounded in an ontological human nature. Human character as the East sees it “changes within the bounds of the nature one is born with, through the role of the mind.” The Eastern theory of human nature concentrates not on the social contract but on the cultivation of human character according to the philosophy of change.

The Western views that human nature is evil, that it is good, and that it is a blank slate all follow the philosophy of being. According to the Western view that human nature is evil (revealed religion and Hobbes), human beings are born evil and, because they “exist” so, do not change. Born with an evil character, they do not change until they die. They must reflect and repent before they die, and while alive must yield their rights to a prophet or a king in order to survive. According to the Western view that human nature is good (Plato or Rousseau), human beings are born good and their good nature does not change. By their good nature they can go on the road of seeking and discovering truth. Whoever discovers truth becomes the leader and guides the rest. True reality lies in the unchanging essence, the “Idea,” and whoever discovers it becomes the leader; or else the aim is to find “the general will,” which goes beyond individual interests to aim at the common good of the whole community. According to the Western blank slate (Aristotle and Locke), human beings are born like a blank sheet with nothing on it, so through education every human being can attain truth. It is the position that form is inherent in reality, seeking essence through experience and observation. Even from a blank slate, human beings are beings who can freely choose what they want. Since human beings have natural rights (life, liberty, property) from birth, it goes on to argue, government exists to guarantee them.

In the past, theories of human nature based on the thought of good and evil, and theories linked to the social contract based on them, were in fashion, but they have now lost much of their relevance. A theory of human nature of natural philosophy, on a different plane from past Western theories, has recently been put forward in the West. Professor Olson (1932–1998), analysing inductively how leadership forms in human society, offers a new account of human nature. The theory of human nature Professor Olson offers runs in the same vein as the Eastern theory in many respects, because, unlike the West’s past theories grounded in the philosophy of being, it rests on the philosophy of change.

Ancient Theories of Human Nature: The Religious View That Nature Is Evil, Plato’s View That It Is Good, Aristotle’s Blank Slate

In the West, theories of human nature long followed religious doctrine. Religion begins with the view that human nature is evil. In revealed religion God makes human beings in his own image. In Christianity, in the afterlife, far more important than life on earth, the good go to heaven and the wicked to hell. For the thousand years of the Middle Ages the church’s view that human nature is evil was partly modified by Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy of original sin and the like, but in essence it rested on a thoroughgoing view that human nature is evil. In this view instinct is seen as something that hinders human salvation.

In Greek myth, too, good and evil are depicted similarly. Prometheus shaped human beings out of clay, and the goddess Athena breathed into them, and so human beings came to be. But when Pandora, the first woman, opened the forbidden box, good and evil in human society began. The Old Testament, too, believed human beings were made in a similar way to the Greek myth. The almighty God made the earth, the sky and the stars over a week. Then he shaped clay in God’s image to make the man, and made the woman from his rib. The first human beings, Adam and Eve, disobeyed God’s command and ate the forbidden fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, and so sinned. The Christian fruit of the knowledge of good and evil and the Greek myth’s Pandora’s box become the sources that open the way to evil.

In Christianity this consciousness of original sin came to follow human beings everywhere. So until the Middle Ages the West, weighed down by the consciousness of original sin, could not have a rational discussion of human nature, because what mattered most was for everyone to repent and prepare for the Last Judgement soon to come. Augustine’s (354–430) philosophy of human nature, too, rested fundamentally on the thought of good and evil. According to his doctrine of original sin, human beings are born with a powerful “concupiscence,” a hurtful desire. Then, in the civilisation of God, which took the separation of mind and instinct for granted, instinct becomes an object of condemnation. The doctrine of original sin committed by humanity’s ancestors, and the doctrine of the concupiscence human beings are born with, survived intact through the Reformation. The leaders of the Reformation, Luther, Calvin and others, put forward original sin and concupiscence as the essence of human nature. In any case, to wash away original sin, human beings had to keep doing penance and repenting, and as part of this do good works so as to go to heaven. This doctrine of original sin swept the Western world for more than a thousand years. Because of this religious power, the West could not approach human nature philosophically until the early modern era.

In theories of human nature before the modern era, the philosophy set against religion’s view that human nature is evil can be found in Plato. Plato held that human beings have from birth certain “innate ideas” (innatism). Plato saw human beings as having a nature that seeks truth. His view that human nature is good rests on the claim that within human beings there are innate ideas that seek truth and absolute truth. For this Plato stresses the importance of the soul. Holding, as we saw earlier, that only the eye of the soul can see truth, he argued that truth must be grasped through the eye of the soul that we have from birth. It is an oppositional dualist theory of human nature that divides soul and instinct.

Aristotle put forward the blank slate, the view that there is no fixed human nature. It is expressed by the term “tabula rasa.” Tabula rasa, written in Latin, means a clean “blank slate” with nothing written on it. In Korean it is the blank-sheet theory. In the end, when it comes to human nature, the tabula rasa is the claim that human beings are born without any human nature. Because Aristotle believed that human nature lies in the mind, he did not recognise the role of instinct. He held that the mind could break free of the yoke of instinct, advance freely into new territory and lead the human being: the beginning of metaphysics. Here it differs at the starting point from the Eastern theory of changing human nature. The Eastern theory is a philosophy of change in which, while the role of instinct is recognised, human character changes according to the role of the mind. The Western blank slate holds an ontological value in which the blank state ignores the capacities of instinct.

Modern Theories of Human Nature and the Social Contract: Hobbes’s Evil Nature, Locke’s Blank Slate, Rousseau’s Good Nature

Modern Western theories of human nature head in a direction similar to the Greek theories, but they are distinctive in coming with a social contract. In modern society the West began to assess human nature by relying on the mind rather than the law of God. So modern Western theories of human nature came to posit human nature with a social contract in mind that would replace the Ten Commandments. In Western religion the relationship between God and man centres on the “covenant” made between them: “Behold, I make a covenant” (Exodus 34:10). The need to replace this covenant was pressing.

In the early modern era, with the rise of deism in the West, the human mind began to take God’s place. In this period discussion of human nature and theories of the social contract appeared together in the West. In place of a covenant between God and man relying on religion, a “social contract” commanded by the mind appears. A contract between human beings is needed, and here the nature of who human beings are becomes important, because the content of the social contract changes with human nature. A social contract theory had to emerge that acknowledges the existence of kings or governments according to the human mind rather than God’s doctrine.

Theories of human nature supporting the social contract appear together with it. The theories of human nature and social contract of Hobbes (1588–1679), Locke (1632–1704) and Rousseau (1712–1778) represent the West. The Western civilisation’s thought of good and evil does not recognise change in human nature: good or evil, that is where it ends. People must be governed by laws and institutions. Because a person has done evil, he must repent and do penance to God as an evil person until he dies, and God judges the result. On entering the modern age of the mind, the West kept the basics of a theory of human nature grounded in the philosophy of being intact. In Hobbes’s view that human nature is evil, too, evil human nature does not change. Evil human nature was used to argue that individual safety must be protected by acknowledging strong royal power. Locke argued not for good or evil but for the blank slate. His blank slate, too, aims to make everyone, through education, into good people who uphold freedom; one need only rely on the education and law that make good people. In Rousseau’s view that human nature is good, too, good human character does not change. The idea is to make a social contract relying on good human nature, and rely on it. The emphasis falls on making laws and institutions that make the general will effective.

For his theory of the social contract, Hobbes put forward the view that human nature is evil. Hobbes defined society in the state of nature as “the war of all against all,” and described human life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”³⁰⁵ Human beings are born with an evil nature, and it follows the philosophy of being that this human nature does not change. In his Leviathan, published in 1651, he stresses evil human nature again and again. Hobbes formed his philosophical thought after witnessing the fierce English Civil War between Royalists and Parliamentarians, which lasted ten years, from 1642 to 1651. He must have observed well the behaviour of human beings living in struggle. His social contract theory starts from the proposition that human beings with an evil nature protect themselves from the evil actions of others. The people gain the benefit of being protected by the king, and in exchange yield part of their rights to the king and are loyal to him.

Locke differs from Hobbes in his judgement of human nature. Locke argued for the blank slate, that human beings are born without a nature. The blank slate was first argued for by Aristotle, but became fashionable again in the West when the British empiricist Locke (1632–1704) argued for it anew: the human mind is at first like white paper, void of all characters, and it is experience that fills it. Locke therefore stresses the importance of education:

Of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education. It is that which makes the great difference in mankind.³⁰⁶

Locke held that, through education, human beings can be made to have a nature that can pursue freedom. He was convinced that ordinary individuals and leaders alike can be taught to respect freedom. So Locke argues for a right of resistance: that those in power who ignore individual freedom may be removed. It resembles the thought that the people are precious and the ruler light (民貴君輕), the foundation of Mencius’s minben, government for the people. Locke’s blank slate comes to stress an absoluteness grounded in the philosophy of being: the claim that human beings, wherever they are born, are born ecologically with a liberal blank slate. Locke argues that a government that respects freedom can make a contract with a people that respects freedom. In Locke’s social contract theory liberalism is the most important foundation. Rousseau’s thought, too, through the French Revolution, asserts freedom as the individual’s most important right. Locke argues for a social contract theory in which everyone can acquire liberal thought and society can be designed by it. Locke’s thought had much influence on the founding of the United States.

After Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau offers a new theory of the social contract and of human nature. Unlike Hobbes, who held human nature evil, Rousseau argues that it is good. Rousseau fiercely criticises Hobbes and Spinoza for arguing for a wicked human nature. According to him, human beings were born good. Rousseau held that wild animals have a noble character and a healthy body, but that as animals are domesticated they give up all these good qualities and come to have a weak, unbalanced character and body. Human beings, too, originally have “sincere friendship, genuine respect, complete trust,” but living in civilised society these turn into “jealousy, suspicion, indifference, fear, hatred, deceit.” So, to control the bad influence of civilisation, human beings set up government, to pursue the common good through it. Rousseau explained that “the general will” is what matters: it represents not individual interests but the interests of all members of society, is always right, and pursues freedom and equality. To realise this general will, a social contract must be made between the people and the government. Rousseau’s theory of human nature and social contract had great influence in the West of his time. The government born of the French Revolution was influenced by Rousseau, and liberty, equality and fraternity became its three goals.

Olson’s Modern Theory of Human Nature: Leadership Born of the Mutual Interest of Bandit and Inhabitants

Against these Western social contract theories, a new account of how leadership forms has recently appeared in the West. Western theories of human nature and the social contract rest on the philosophy of being, the centre of Western philosophy. But recently a theory of human nature grounded in “natural philosophy” has been put forward. The theory of Professor Olson (1932–1998) represents it.

Comparing Olson’s theory of human nature with Xunzi’s (荀子), both are alike in seeing human nature as self-interested and centred on desire, and in stressing that collective cooperation does not arise naturally and needs external factors. Olson voiced the view that human beings put private interest first, and that the public interest is possible only with coercion, such as laws and institutions, or selective incentives. Xunzi voiced the view that human beings instinctively pursue private interest, but through law and education can gain the ability to pursue the public interest. Olson, a twentieth-century modern, concentrated on economics; Xunzi, an ancient, had a side that concentrated on ethics. But despite the difference of ancient and modern, the two thinkers hold similar views on human nature and voiced the view that, in politics and economics, human character that pursues the public interest must be built. Olson’s theory of human nature is distinctive as the first among Western theories to argue for the philosophy of change, and forms an important meeting point of East and West in comparing their theories of human nature.

Olson kept his distance from the theories of human nature and social contract that traditional Western thinkers inferred to suit the political situations of their day. Instead, grounded in a realist natural philosophy, he analyses how leadership arose in human society. Professor Olson holds that government arose because of the interests that leader and inhabitants have in common.

Systems of rule in human society beyond the tribe are not created by social contracts or by the voluntary surrender of rights. Rather, they are created in the course of those with the greatest capacity for violence finding their rational interests.³⁰⁷

This rests on the natural principle of self-preservation, in the same vein as the principle of self-preservation on which the Eastern theory of human nature rests. From the standpoint of Eastern civilisation, government is made not by a social contract but, in the end, by the coincidence of the mutual interests of ruler and ruled. It shows how, even after a government is formed, it is maintained, or weakens and disappears, according to the content of the mutual interest of leader and inhabitants. This process can be seen as showing the endless checks between leader and ruled that arise as leader and inhabitants, all born with the same human nature, divide through their efforts after birth into those who seek mutual interest and those who seek only their own.

It is the theory that the “encompassing interest” of leader and inhabitants is the basic motive that makes up society. His theory supposes that human social life was at first moved by one principle of action: taking what belongs to others, the raid. Olson called these raiders “roving bandits.” But as time passed, some among the bandits realised that rather than carrying off the harvest every year, it was more advantageous to settle where the harvests were good and take a suitable share every year. So they became “stationary bandits,” who stay in one place.

As they become stationary bandits, they realise they must adjust how much they take from the inhabitants. They come to know that taking everything, like roving bandits, does not pay. Taking only after leaving the inhabitants a year’s food and the goods for the next round of production helps the stationary bandit. And they come to know that building roads, reservoirs and markets for the inhabitants to increase food production is better for the inhabitants and the stationary bandit alike.

Whoever rules a country for a long time provides it with public goods, because he has an “encompassing interest” in that country.³⁰⁸

In this way the stationary bandit turns from robber into leader. Olson explains that the “encompassing interest” between bandit and inhabitants gave birth to the leader.

So the stationary bandit is not a wolf that preys on deer. Rather, he becomes like a rancher who makes sure the animals he raises are well protected and can drink water freely.³⁰⁹

Olson gained this insight while looking at how the warlords of Manchuria in China were formed in the 1920s and which warlords secured power. Olson compared settled and roving bandits among the struggles of the Manchurian warlords. The cause of the roving bandits’ defeat lay in their failure to win the inhabitants’ support. He built his theory on seeing how the stationary bandits won the inhabitants’ support, became “leaders” and won in the end:³¹⁰ the theory of mutual interest between bandit and inhabitants. Olson’s theory is more realistic than the various Western social contract theories. The Eastern idea of the leader’s “Mandate of Heaven” can also be drawn from it. If a leader makes the people live well, he has the Mandate of Heaven; if he fails, the Mandate disappears.

From Olson’s outstanding insight we can learn something important about human nature. Olson’s theory starts not from putting forward the view that human nature is evil or good in order to argue for a social contract, but from looking at human nature as it is and examining how leaders came about. It rests on a theory of human nature of natural philosophy, and conceives a theory clearly different from those of early modern Western thinkers: leaders and inhabitants alike are born with a human nature that looks after its own interest, and relationships form on that basis. Living for one’s own interest is human nature, but the leader, for the sake of mutual interest, shows the attitude of yielding his immediate interest to the inhabitants and taking a sustainable interest instead. Eastern civilisation, going through the Warring States period 2,500 years ago, witnessed this situation, grasped human nature and built its philosophy of political ethics. Professor Olson depicted the process of leaders emerging in Eastern society as a situation very like the emergence of stationary bandits from roving bandits.

The petty thief is caught; the great thief becomes a lord. (Zhuangzi, “Robber Zhi”)

The formation of armies, too, arises likewise from mutual interest, by agreement between leader and inhabitants. The settled bandit, that is, the leader, also forms an army to protect himself and the inhabitants. When the inhabitants meet such a wise leader, they want him to keep leading them and come to wish him “Long live the King!” In the end king and inhabitants naturally create the institution called government for their mutual interest. But the situation is not settled just because a government has been formed. The contest of strength to secure mutual interest continues between those who lead the government and the inhabitants. Through this, Olson developed a natural theory of political economy that arises from the relationship between the settled bandit and the inhabitants. The mutual interest of both sides is the core.

Pursuing interest is everyone’s nature, and through nurture the settled bandit and the inhabitants use their minds to find the line of concession that benefits each other. Without nurture, everyone becomes a bad government and bad inhabitants, seeking only the immediate gain they were born with. This is a problem for leaders above all. In fact in the West, until the twentieth century, there were foolish kings who levied enormous taxes for their own gain without thinking of the inhabitants’ future.

History proves it. Despotic kings often collected as much tax as they could for their own military purposes. Think of the kings with the greatest despotic authority in Western history. The Bourbon kings (including the king before the French Revolution) collected as much tax as they possibly could. So did the Habsburg kings of Spain. The Roman Empire, too, kept trying to raise taxes, and maximised them at least to the limit of their sources of revenue.³¹¹

It is the same in the East. When an emperor fails to govern well (善政), a state arises in which he abandons the inhabitants’ interest and in the end seeks only his own immediate gain: the Mandate of Heaven disappears. When dynasties changed in the East, the first measure a new dynasty took was to lower taxes, because the falling dynasty had already raised the limits of taxation and exploitation as high as they would go. Lowering taxes was the idea of winning the people’s hearts, governing well and securing the Mandate of Heaven. Professor Olson’s theory of human nature is far closer to the essence of human nature than religion’s original sin or the theories of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. And it expresses astonishingly well the account of human nature, the formation of government and the tasks after its formation.

His working out of the problems between leader and participants through the interest inherent in human nature resembles the Eastern theory of human nature. Western civilisation in essence aims at producing theories and institutions. On this basis the West pursued democratic institutions, and created the institution of rational changes of government. In the area of institutions, where the East failed, the West succeeded, and the East is learning these institutions from the West. The problem lies in the institution of how changes of government are to be achieved. Every political system in the West is maintained by the party system. Will the party system work properly? The problem is that even the party system is managed by human beings who still hang on human nature. The question is whether Western parties, in situations where the people’s interest, the public interest, and the party’s victory, its private interest, conflict, can sacrifice private interest and pursue the public interest. Will human nature allow it?

Until faced with a situation in which all perish together, like war, human nature tends to take private interest over public interest. Now, long after the end of the Second World War, parties are used to taking private over public interest, because that is human nature. Global problems such as climate change and the deepening gap between rich and poor belong to the public interest. Yet parties are used to treating the solution of such problems as secondary and putting first the measures that can win the next election, that is, private interest. Here lies the problem of democratic institutions that Professor Olson grasped. He points out that democracy is a good institution for preventing a country’s leaders, kings, presidents or prime ministers, from spending state finances as they please, but has little effect in preventing interest groups from competing to pursue their own interests.

Although democracy is in a very favourable position to prevent its leaders from arbitrarily extracting society’s surplus, in a democracy that has long been stable it is very hard to stop special interest groups from dominating the whole of the nation’s economic policy.³¹²

Olson looked squarely at the fact that groups of individuals work for their private interest, not for the public interest. So he foresaw, and voiced concern, that political and economic policies made by special interest groups would harm the public interest. Western democracy succeeded in creating institutions that keep the top leader from harming the public interest, but it faces a new challenge. He pointed out that Western democracy guards well against statism, but is markedly lacking in guarding against special interest groups, that is, against tribalism. It is a brilliant insight into the collusion between parties and the businesses that handle capital that the West is experiencing now.³¹³

2) The Eastern Theory of Human Nature: Human Character That Changes Within the Human Nature One Is Born With

When the thinkers of East and West study human nature, each examines it within the bounds of the philosophical thinking, Eastern or Western, in which they stand. The West approaches human nature through the “philosophy of being”: human nature has not changed since God created human beings. Because the West posits in every case a fixed human nature, it takes the approach of managing human character through the law of religion, that is, through laws and institutions. The theory of human nature fixed in this way takes the covenant with God or the social contract as its framework. In the East the theory of human nature follows the “philosophy of change.” The core of the Eastern theory of human nature is that human beings are born with the same nature, but within its bounds human character changes after birth according to education and effort. This theory analyses the relationship between instinct and mind with instinct as the source of light and mind as the reflector.³¹⁴ Human character, that is, “changes” after birth, like yin and yang. In the East, which believed not in a supernatural God but in the Dao of nature, just as there was no covenant between God and man in antiquity, no social contract theory was needed in the modern era either, because the Eastern theory of human nature, grounded in the law of nature called the Dao, works unchanged in ancient and modern times alike.

The Eastern theory of human nature rests on the philosophy of change. Instinct and mind, connected to each other, create a character that shows endless change according to the individual’s effort. Here lie the irregularity and the charm of human society. In Western philosophy there is dualism, which argues for the separation of mind and instinct, as Descartes does, and opposed to it monism, as in Marx’s materialist monism: the Western division into dualism and monism. But if we analyse the content of the Eastern theories of mind and body and of li and qi, they argue not for monism or dualism of mind and body but for a theory of complementarity in which mind and instinct “complement each other and are in harmony.”³¹⁵ This has something in common with Spinoza’s connectionism, which connects mind and instinct. But the Eastern theory of complementarity, like the theory of the unity of mind and body, does not divide mind and instinct. The West argued over the relationship of mind and body as “separation or identity,” but the East never took separation itself as the question from the start, and argued for a “theory of complementarity” that values harmony and balance.

The Eastern Cultivation of Human Character vs the Western Theory of the Social Contract

The Western social contract theory was devised by Westerners ruled by the theory of a “covenant” between God and man that had dominated the Western world for more than a thousand years: an effort for Westerners ruled by the civilisation of God. That, valuing Western laws and institutions and helped by social contract theory, it established the institution of the democratic replacement of leaders is a very important advance in human history. On this point the East has something to learn. But from the standpoint of Eastern civilisation, the “Western theory of human nature” on which social contract theory was founded has shortcomings.

Hobbes’s view that human nature is evil fails to explain why the leader should keep order. It does not say whether the leader is an exception to evil human nature, or whether the leader alone gains altruism through God or the mind. Locke’s blank slate carries the error, or danger, that the mind is freed from instinct as a source of light rather than a reflector. The blank slate’s idea that teaching freedom yields a social order everyone accepts is unrealistic. Rousseau’s view that human nature is good finds the problem not in human beings but in civilisation, and infers backwards that human nature is good. But since civilisation, too, comes from human beings, it cannot explain how a bad civilisation came out of a good human nature. Hobbes seems to have grown up amid continuing war and extreme struggle and mistaken the evil that human nature shows there for the normal theory of human nature. This resembles the way Machiavelli (1469–1527) in the West and Han Feizi (280–233 BC) each lived their whole lives amid continuing war and struggle, as Hobbes did, set up a theory much like Hobbes’s that human beings are evil, and built on it their theories of realpolitik. On this human nature Hobbes seems to have designed a social contract needed for keeping order amid disorder, but hard to apply in times of peace.

Locke’s blank slate denies human nature. The theory that a person is made by education has contributed to the high value placed on education. At the same time it opens a very dangerous road: people can be beguiled by dogmatic doctrine. By the blank slate, human beings are free from nature. If there is no nature, the human being becomes “a human being who can do anything.” Educate people in dogmatic doctrine for the sake of the future, or of an imagined utopia, and you can turn them into monsters who ignore ethics. Who runs the education or the doctrine, and who does the training, settles the result in advance. Locke and Confucianism both value education. But we must recognise that Western tabula-rasa education and Eastern Confucian education rest on very different foundations in the theory of human nature. The West takes the position that because the “tabula rasa” human being has no nature, anything is possible through education and training. The East holds that there is a nature, and concentrates on cultivating human character, holding that within the bounds of that nature a person can be made into a person through ethics and education. It stresses educating character within the bounds of nature. In this sense Eastern education cannot go against the principles of ethics. But Locke’s theory that nature is neither good nor evil (性無善惡論), which does not recognise human nature, makes it possible to set up ideas that transcend or betray ethics.

Rousseau’s view that human nature is good is a revolutionary theory of human nature, set against Christianity’s view that it is evil. It offers new possibilities to the Western philosophical system. But his confidence in the goodness of human nature and in the general will has weak grounds. The confidence that the general will, born of Rousseau’s view that human nature is good, can always be right is a confidence without grounds. This “confidence” was abused more to justify dictatorships than to form democratic governments. In fact the French Revolution of 1789, despite the good early intentions of Robespierre and others, ended in the Terror. In the twentieth-century age of ideology, too, the fascist and communist dictatorships claimed that their politics all reflected “the general will.” Helped by the theories of human nature and social contract of Locke and Rousseau, individual freedom becomes especially important in Western civilisation. As Patrick Henry (1736–1799) cried, “Give me liberty, or give me death!”, freedom began to be seen as an absolute moral. But liberalism loses its force in the end before the more fundamental proposition of self-preservation. Britain’s Brexit, which we saw earlier, is an example. Not only Britain but the United States and the other Western countries, when things grow hard, have no choice but to pursue the principle of self-preservation, more important than freedom or human rights, for the preservation of the nation and its people. This principle of self-preservation has lately been gaining strength fast in the West. Liberty, equality and fraternity are important declarations. Society and the state can be healthy only if they are kept as far as possible. But they are creations of the mind. In the end, as situations change, keeping these principles as absolute propositions becomes impossible, because they must compromise with instinct. That is, we must remember that in the relationship of mind and instinct, instinct is the source of action, and the mind enjoys freedom within the bounds engraved in instinct.

In place of the Western “theory of the social contract,” the East offers a “theory of the cultivation of human character.” Such different directions are possible because East and West differ fundamentally in their theories of human nature. How does the theory of human nature that cultivates human character analyse instinct and mind, and how does it posit their connection? Just as the new brain cannot do away with instinct, the reverse holds too. The old brain cannot create or extinguish the human capacity of mind itself. That human beings, like other animals, have basic desires and emotions is fated. Likewise it is fated that human beings have the capacity of mind. We cannot remove or change it. Russell, even under the weight of a Western civilisation that had long seen mind and passion as in conflict and opposition, surmises that mind and passion must in the end come into harmony:

Desire, emotion, passion (you can choose whichever word you will) are the only possible causes of action. Reason is not a cause of action, but only a regulator.³¹⁶

Human existence is in the end born with the condition of “freedom within fate.” It is not that human beings could live like animals and choose not to, but that however hard they try they cannot. Unlike animals, human beings are born with a new brain. Here human beings can exercise two possibilities: it is the new brain that turns the instincts of the old brain into greed full of selfishness, and it is also the new brain that mobilises the small altruism in instinct so that a person shows a human character that can become a leader. But we must remember that selfishness is present in human nature far more powerfully than altruism.

Men are more prone to revenge than to pity. (Spinoza, Ethics, IV, Appendix XIII)

We cannot blame this setting of human nature by summoning up moral feeling, because selfishness, that is, desire, is the core of human nature, the reason we are alive, and the force that moves civilisation.

Desire is the very essence of man, that is, the endeavour whereby man endeavours to persist in his own being. (Spinoza, Ethics, IV, Prop. XVIII, Proof; III, Definitions of the Emotions, 1)

But instinct becomes the force that decides “human character”: in what direction it is “expressed” through the power of the mind. As we saw in Part 2, Chapter 2, it is a mistake to separate instinctive behaviour from learned behaviour.

The statement that distinguishing instinctive from learned behaviour is inaccurate shows that instinct and mind influence each other. Put ethically, amid the conflict of selfishness and altruism, human beings can grow their altruism. Conversely, they can grow their selfishness to the extreme. The mind cannot ignore instinct and act freely.

Human affairs grounded in this human nature are sometimes expressed in history as they are. Early modern Western history shows it. In the West, the Enlightenment and the rise of deism did not do away with all belief in theism among Westerners. Deism spread widely among Western thinkers, but many people, whatever the mental persuasion of deism, went on believing in and relying on theism as before. Religion remains something human beings need even after a process that rejects the dogma contained in religion, that is, after the process of holding that the Bible or the word of God is not absolute. This is because human nature is less a matter of mind than largely one of the heart and of instinct. Above all, if we accept the theory of human nature in which instinct is the source of light and mind the reflector, the need for religion remains.

This phenomenon “of the heart” is explained by the “contradiction” that the intellectual capacity human beings have holds limits and possibilities at the same time. Such contradiction was long rejected in modern Western culture. Classical physics was formed by rejecting such contradiction. But as with the particle-wave duality of light that we saw earlier, contradiction can instead be accepted as a basic property of nature. Units of matter smaller than the atom behave sometimes like particles and sometimes like waves. Light, too, shows this double nature.³¹⁷ In fact, when Einstein proved the particle nature of light, it was shown that something both dual and one, like mind and body, exists in the natural world too. The duality of light means a deeper and more important duality that is becoming general throughout nature, and may be a universal property of nature.

Light is thought to behave in some circumstances as a stream of particles and in others as a wave. This ‘wave–particle duality’ does not agree with our common sense. But it agrees well with the results of experiments on light.³¹⁸

The relationship between the human mind and body, which like light has a dual and a single character, is described as follows:

I do not think that body and soul form a pure and primordial duality. To me they seem rather one among many possible divisions. And this possible division appears in reality through the polarity (the polarisation) that I have called, very imprecisely, the opposition of subject and object.³¹⁹

In the end, seen from the side of thought, the harmony of the one and the two in nature should be seen not as an exception but as a universal law. Western philosophy saw it as contradiction, but Eastern philosophy, as seen in the theory of yin and yang, took for granted that the harmony, or complementarity, of contradictions is inherent in nature.

Instinct Is the Source of Light, Mind the Reflector

In the Eastern theory of human nature, the one who explained the roles of instinct and mind most persuasively is Yi Yulgok: “In every phenomenon qi (氣, instinct) issues forth, and li (理, mind) rides upon it and appears.” A theory of human nature almost the same as this appears in the West almost three centuries later. Russell expressed it. Agreeing wholly with Hume’s words that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions,” he put it that “reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.”³²⁰ Freud, too, had a similar theory of human nature: the mind (ego) is like a rider who must hold in check with the reins the superior strength of the horse called instinct (id), but who, if he is not to fall from his horse, is often obliged to guide it where it wants to go. Human nature is what we have at birth, and within it human character changes.

This shows that in human action instinct plays the role of the source of light, and the mind receives it and plays the role of the reflector.³²¹ Human character, which the Eastern theory of human nature takes as its core, is produced in this way, as instinct and mind act in connection. This division of roles, instinct as source of light and mind as reflector, also fits the scientific facts modern medicine keeps bringing to light. Modern medicine, too, puts it similarly in anatomical terms, using the expression: “The new brain (mind) sits astride the limbic system (instinct) like a rider sitting on a horse without reins.”

The Western theory of human nature claims that the thinking mind of human beings, the new brain, in the end made human history. This declaration is highly liable to misunderstand the roles of the new brain and the old brain when we discuss human beings. Let us look once more at the point that the old brain is the source of action and the new brain only plays the role of regulating it. In particular, if we think of the division of roles in which the source of human action comes only from the old brain, so that the new brain only plays the regulating role of enlarging or reducing it, we can reach the root of the problem.

Yet Western civilisation in particular claimed that the mind, the new brain, has autonomy and can create a new world and a new human nature. We must accept that human possibility can unfold only from what we were born with, that is, only within the bounds of instinct. Trying to go beyond this limit, concentrating only on “the capacity of mind” and undervaluing the original role of instinct, is the essence of Western civilisation. It can lead to the adventure of ignoring instinct, staking everything on “the mind God gave to human beings alone,” and trying to put utopia into practice. This actually happened in Western history: the twentieth-century age of ideology that the West created. But because such attempts ignore human nature to the extreme, they easily bring about tragedies that ignore ethics.

Instinct is understood in the West as human bondage, and in the East as qi (氣). When the West understands instinct as human bondage, it wants to believe that without instinct human beings could use the mind freely and pursue infinite possibilities. To leave the bondage of instinct and become free like God has been the Westerners’ dream from Greek times until now. The goal of life, too, is to be happy, and since Aristotle Westerners have defined the highest happiness human beings can attain as “to be happy like God.” In fact in Greek and Roman times the gods were thought not to differ much from human beings, and there were demigods. In Roman times there was even a period when, if someone testified to having seen the soul of a person rise at the cremation, that person was treated as a god.

Eastern civilisation, on the other hand, did not recognise the existence of a God who created nature, and stood on a philosophy that recognised nature, that is, the Dao of nature, as the absolute value. Eastern natural philosophy, unlike the West, understood instinct as the source of force. Without qi, li cannot work. It is the idea of accepting instinct as the source of human action, and of seeking within it the possibilities open to human beings. So human character comes to be formed only within human nature, that is, only within the bounds of instinct, according to the role of the mind. To hold that the mind can freely leave instinct behind and set out in search of utopia is to commit a basic error about human nature.

In the West the division of roles between mind and instinct is approached differently from the East. In the civilisation of God, because the mind is something God gave especially to human beings, an oppositional division that ignores instinct is unavoidable. This division of roles, “mind above, instinct below,” forms the mainstream of Western civilisation. But the claim that mind and instinct cannot be divided and must be seen as one is the human nature that Eastern civilisation posits, and such claims appear in the West as well. The best known view that they should be seen as one is, of course, Spinoza’s in the seventeenth century, which we saw earlier. Medical books, too, keep making clear the view that “psychology and physiology,” another way of saying mind and body, are a single unity: “Psychology and physiology are an indivisible unity.” As said before, intellectual capacity, too, cannot go beyond the limits of physiology, desire and emotion.

But along with instinct, human beings have the role of the mind. Spinoza used the expression human bondage in the sense that human beings who fail to use their minds end up living like slaves of instinct.

Man is necessarily always subject to the passions (Spinoza, Ethics, IV, Prop. IV).

Spinoza gave great weight to the central role of passion in human nature, but at the same time he gave weight to the role the mind can play in relation to passion. He analysed that the mind has a role, yet human beings do not follow the counsel of the mind.

Passion is the nature of man. By passion man goes on affirming his own existence… Man does not follow the counsel of the mind. (Spinoza, Ethics, IV, Prop. XVIII)

Unlike Spinoza’s realism, which argues for the connection of passion and mind, Western civilisation is used to maximising the role of the mind. The claim that the mind is the source of the theory of human nature, fused with Christian doctrine after Socrates, ruled the Middle Ages, and in the modern era held sway in the West through Descartes’s rationalism. One step further, and the ideological claim that the mind is everything becomes possible. Early modern Western philosophy was in the hands of the so-called rationalists. Rationalists such as Descartes began to argue, apart from religion and by “scientific and rational” methods, the principle written in the Bible: that the mind was given to human beings by God. It created in the West the habit of thinking that the mind, apart from God, is the subject of the human being.

The counter-theory to these rationalists can be found in British empiricism. Following the empiricists, the idea appears that not the mind but instinct is the subject of human action. Hume argued that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” The source of every human action derives from instinct. Looking at the process of human evolution, we may come to show a larger understanding of this analysis. Seen this way, the old brain plays the role of the source of light, and the new brain that of the reflector. If so, the source of ethics, too, comes from instinct, because if instinct had no such source, ethics could not arise. In other words, the theory that the mind is not the source of light but the reflector is explained by the analysis that the source of ethics lies not in the mind but in feeling. Several thinkers, summoning their foresight, saw ahead to the idea that the mind is a reflector. Spinoza, David Hume, Russell and others showed such foresight. At the same time, in modern times, with the help of modern medicine, important scientific discoveries that mind and instinct are connected keep being made.

Hume’s theory of ethics as feeling essentially mirrors, in the theory of human nature, Kant’s theory of ethics as mind. Hume’s theory of ethics as feeling runs in the same vein as the theories of human nature of East and West. For Hume, ethics is formed as the reflector of feeling; for Kant, the mind, leaving feeling behind, itself plays the role of forming morality and ethics as a source of light. For Kant morality enjoys a complete “freedom” released from instinct. Hume argues for “freedom within instinct,” Kant for “freedom apart from instinct.” In fact Kant’s claims won the support of Western rationalism more than Hume’s complicated theory. Kant, as the mind replaced God, argued that morality still exists in human beings through the mind as an undeniable duty, as if given by God. He came to be praised by Western rationalists as having achieved a “Copernican” revolution.

Hume came to be treated as a renegade by the major thinkers of the West, much as Spinoza was. As said before, Hume was suspected of being a “heretic” and failed to gain a professorship, and his book on religion was published only after his death. The eighteenth-century age Hume lived in was a time when blasphemy (瀆神罪) was a recognised crime. In 1697, fourteen years before Hume was born, a twenty-year-old student, Thomas Aikenhead, was hanged in Edinburgh: it had become known that he had mentioned Muhammad and remarked to friends that Western religion, the doctrine of the Trinity and the like, had its absurd sides. Blasphemy was the charge. Hume’s claim that instinct is the source of light and the mind the reflector was hard to accept for the theocentric thought, still going strong in his day, that prized the mind.

The Theory of Human Nature as Change: Gaozi’s Nature Neither Good Nor Evil, Mencius’s Good Nature, Xunzi’s Evil Nature

The Eastern philosophy of change arises from the cosmology of “nature that is always changing,” the principle of Eastern thought. The Eastern theory of human nature rests on the philosophy of change: “Human beings are born with the same human nature, made up of instinct and mind. But the actions they express after birth, that is, human character, differ.” The Eastern views that nature is neither good nor evil (Gaozi), that it is good (Mencius) and that it is evil (Xunzi) all follow this system. What matters is that, while recognising an unchanging human nature, they concentrate on self-cultivation and education because the human character that changes after birth is what counts. These theories of human nature follow the natural philosophy of change. Because the Eastern theory of human nature was neither combined with religion nor linked to a social contract theory, it has, unlike the ancient and modern Western theories, the staying power of a single theory of human nature continuing from antiquity to the present.

Gaozi (告子, 420–350 BC) left his thoughts on human nature in his debate with Mencius. Gaozi thought human beings no different from other animals. Human beings are born with two desires, the appetite for food and the sexual appetite. His claim is that animals have neither goodness nor its lack, and neither do human beings. He rejects both the view that human nature is good and the view that it is evil, arguing that it is neither good nor evil (性無善惡論):

Gaozi thought that human nature is not divided into good (善) and not-good (不善), just as water is not divided into east and west. (Mencius 6A:2)

The books in which Gaozi reflected on human nature were not handed down to later ages. What is quoted in Mencius’s book is all we know of Gaozi on human nature. The book Mencius, Book 6, “Gaozi” (告子), contains the various accounts of human nature. Gaozi’s philosophy that nature is neither good nor evil (性無善惡論) resembles, depending on interpretation, the blank slate of Aristotle or Locke. But in the East no one developed Gaozi’s claim about human nature and used it for their own theory of social reform. Gaozi’s view followed not the philosophy of being but the Eastern philosophy of change. In that case it is likely that Gaozi, too, argued for a theory of human nature in which good and evil are not decided by human nature, and the emphasis falls on nurturing the human character that changes after birth. This is the fundamental difference between the philosophy of the Western blank slate and Gaozi’s view that nature is neither good nor evil: the difference between the philosophy of being and the philosophy of change.

After Gaozi, thinkers’ reflection settles in the direction of nature having good or evil rather than nature having neither. It divides into Mencius’s view that human nature is good and Xunzi’s view that it is evil. But the Eastern views that human nature is good or evil do not stop at a philosophy of being in which human beings are bound by their nature. They approach it through the philosophy of change: whatever their nature, human beings must do their utmost for the “nurture” of human character. In taking the nurture of human character as their final aim, Mencius and Xunzi do not differ; and going back to Confucius, the teacher of both, this remains the same core aim, unchanged. Seen in this light, Gaozi’s view that nature is neither good nor evil, from the standpoint of the philosophy of change, does not differ from Mencius’s view that it is good or Xunzi’s that it is evil in concentrating on the nurture of human character.

Mencius (372–289 BC), against Gaozi’s claim, held that there is a difference between human beings and animals. A person is not like water: human beings are divided not into east and west but into up and down. He argued that if human beings do not distinguish good from not-good, ethics such as humaneness and rightness (仁義) collapse:

All human beings have a heart that cannot bear to see others suffer… The heart of compassion is the sprout of humaneness (仁); the heart of shame is the sprout of rightness (義); the heart of deference is the sprout of propriety (禮); the heart of right and wrong is the sprout of wisdom (知). Human beings have these four sprouts just as they have four limbs. (Mencius 2A:6)

This is the heart of Mencius’s view that human nature is good (性善說). He explained that humaneness, rightness, propriety and wisdom issue from four hearts: the heart of compassion (惻隱之心), the heart of shame (羞惡之心), the heart of deference (辭讓之心) and the heart that knows right from wrong (是非之心). In the West Rousseau also argued that human nature is good, but he sought the root of what goes wrong with human beings in civilisation and institutions, and tried to fix it through social reform. “Man is born good,” he argued, “but society corrupts him.” If Rousseau sought the problem outside, Mencius sought it inside. Mencius saw the obstacles to the goodness of human nature in the individual’s outward circumstances or lack of education, and sought the remedy in effort and cultivation. Mencius explained that human beings are born with ethics. Everyone has the heart that wants to help when it sees someone in difficulty, and wants to set things right when it sees someone meet misfortune. Mencius held that this ethics may show itself or stay hidden according to circumstances such as education. Just as crops fare differently in years of plenty and years of famine, he argued, human morality may show itself or stay hidden according to education. The conclusion of Mencius’s view that human nature is good is: let us nurture human beings well, as nature meets a year of plenty.

Xunzi (310–235 BC) sets out his position in his book Xunzi, Chapter 23, “Human Nature Is Evil.” What matters in Xunzi’s view is that human beings are born with a nature that, left as it is, makes social life hard:

Human nature is evil; its goodness is made afterward… If people follow only their nature and act only on their feelings, the result is a violent society of fighting and seizing. That is why law and ethics are needed. Through ethics and law people yield to one another and keep to norms, and a stable society can be made. (Xunzi 23:1)

This is the heart of Xunzi’s view that human nature is evil, and its root lies in seeing human nature as it is, in its natural state. The leader (junzi, 君子) and the follower (xiaoren, 小人) alike are born with the same inborn nature, which no human being can escape:

Nature is what one is born with. It cannot be changed by learning, nor altered by work. Ethics and law are what the sages achieved. They are made by learning, made by transformation. (Xunzi 23:5)

So all human beings pursue their own interest, and if left unchecked this may spread into strife in society. The tendency to follow greed is something the leader and the follower are both born with. Xunzi’s aim is to nurture it so that it helps keep social order. In the West Hobbes, arguing that human nature is evil, used the expression “man is a wolf to man” for human beings fighting for their own interest. The expression comes from the Latin proverb “Homo homini lupus est.” It was first used by the ancient Roman playwright Plautus, a phrase that coldly lays bare the nature of human society. Hobbes offered a social remedy: because the state of nature is like anarchy or a state of war, an absolute monarch with strong power is needed.

Where Hobbes looks for a remedy outside, Xunzi offers one inside. Xunzi’s emphasis was that since human beings have selfish desires from birth, these should be refined through individual effort and education, so that of the leader and the follower, one becomes like the leader. Xunzi’s view that human nature is evil holds no idea that human nature must be fixed. It is the idea of seeing human beings naturally, as they are, and managing this so as to nurture human character that helps society.

The Eastern philosophy of change is hard to understand. It holds that in instinct human beings are the same, but according to the effort of the mind, differences arise in the actions in which instinct appears. They held that the leader and the follower do not differ in human nature, but that differences arise in the human character that appears in action, according to what they learn after birth.

In their nature the sages do not differ from the common people. They differ in their actions. (Xunzi 23:5)

Mencius and Xunzi are both Confucian thinkers. Their teacher Confucius had already laid the foundation of their philosophy by setting out a similar theory of human nature.

By nature, people are close to one another. In their actions, they grow far apart. (Analects 17:2)

The theories of human nature of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau hold that human beings were born that way and do not change, and on this ground put forward social contract theories that value institutions and laws. And by the social contracts they put forward, human beings come to be judged in terms of good and evil.

The theories of human nature of Gaozi, Mencius and Xunzi concentrate on the part of human character that changes: human beings are born with human nature, but what kind of person they become after birth changes. According to their own effort, people turn into those with a human character that helps society and those with a human character that does not. Mencius’s view that human nature is good and Xunzi’s view that it is evil are not ontological accounts that human beings are good or evil.³²² They are only expressions of how human beings are made, by fate and by nature. The account that human nature is fixed, unchanging, as good is not the core of Mencius’s philosophy. Nor is the idea that it is fixed, unchanging, as evil the core of Xunzi’s. Mencius and Xunzi hold that human beings, whether born good or evil, are bound to cause problems in social life. The core of Mencius’s philosophy is that even those born good can be badly influenced in social life after birth, so they must train themselves well and be educated to grow their good part. Xunzi’s view that human nature is evil, too, is a philosophical system for training powerful selfishness well through ethics and law so that people have a fine human character.

In Mencius’s view that human nature is good and Xunzi’s view that it is evil, what matters is the induction that arrives at ethics. In the Western philosophy of being what matters is that goodness or evil of nature has a deductive, unchanging importance. In Hobbes’s view that human nature is evil, the institutions and system by which the individual yields his rights to the king are what matter; Rousseau’s view that human nature is good concentrates on making institutions and laws that secure the general will. So the core of Western systems lies in regulating the ontological human nature, evil or good, through law and institutions. In the Eastern philosophy of change, by contrast, goodness or evil of nature has an inductive importance of change. What matters is not normative law but persuasive ethics.

Seen in this light, the Eastern theory of nature is a theory of becoming. Mencius’s view that human nature is good and Xunzi’s that it is evil both concentrate on producing the nurture of human character. To the question whether human beings are born with a “fixed human nature,” the answer of the Eastern theory of human nature is clear. Human nature has both good and evil in it. That is, human beings are born with both powerful selfishness and weak altruism. In the East, as with yin and yang, this human instinct, the old brain, is born with both possibilities. The core is that after birth the new brain manages this yin-and-yang human nature and shapes human character towards enlightened self-interest.

When you see a person of good character, try to become like them; when you see a person of bad character, look into yourself and try not to become like them. (Analects 4:17)

Xunzi voices a similar view. Anyone can become a sage. What matters is that one must want it oneself, and ethics and law can help. The cultivation of human character becomes the aim.

The man in the street can become a sage. He can become so through ethics and transparent law. (Xunzi 23:11)

In the East, even where views of nature differ, they agree in pursuing the aim of nurturing human character within its bounds. But the Western theory of nature is used to head towards an aim already set: it is applied to social contract theory. The Western view that human nature is evil was used to acknowledge royal authority, the blank slate to advance liberalism, and the view that human nature is good to aim at popular sovereignty. So the theories of nature of East and West differ in essence in their purposes and aims.

The Eastern theory of human nature aims to acknowledge the human nature one is born with, manage it within its bounds through ethics and law, and grow right human character to benefit society. It is a theory of human nature untouched by religion or metaphysical theory, applied without change in the East from antiquity to the present.

3) Managing Human Nature: The East’s Freedom Within Fate vs the West’s Opposition of Determinism and Free Will

There are countless trees on earth. One tree has many leaves. Yet every leaf looks different. There is not one pair of identical leaves in the world. The human beings on earth now number over eight billion. Each lives with a different character. There is not one pair of people on earth who go through life with the same character. We then reach the conclusion that human beings are born with the same nature but all live with different characters. Eastern civilisation holds that human nature is what one is born with, but human character is made after birth. Yet human character is not free from nature. It moves within the bounds of “the interplay between powerful selfishness and weak altruism” within nature. And within those bounds, what human character one comes to have is wholly up to the individual. Human beings born with this nature, “instinct as source of light, mind as reflector,” enjoy “freedom within fate.”

All human beings are in the end born within the bounds of the same human nature. Of course, within human nature there are differences in the strength of the various passions that govern us, and differences in the relative size of selfishness and altruism. But it is hard to deny that we are born with powerful selfishness and weak altruism, and a passion to dominate others. For example, even for people born with a great passion to dominate others, the direction in which this instinct is expressed depends purely on education and their own effort. Asked to name two people who played important roles in the Second World War, one would name Churchill and Hitler. Both were born with a rare nature: a powerful passion to extend their dominance. But one became a person honoured in history, and the other is treated as someone close to a madman. It was not nature but their circumstances and their own efforts that set the two apart. In the end, it is not human nature but human character that decides what kind of person someone is, and becomes the factor that decides how they are judged in history.

Human civilisation arises from the selfishness inherent in human nature. But if this selfishness is not managed, civilisation cannot be sustained. Eastern ethics and Western religious law began as attempts to manage the selfishness of human nature. Western civilisation begins with law and ethics as things God gave to human beings. The Ten Commandments of Moses and Jesus’s ethics of loving one’s neighbour both came from God. The East explains law and ethics as arising from human nature. Left as it is, human nature makes quarrels and competition in human society unavoidable. Selfishness is the most powerful part of human nature. And selfishness is the engine of human society. That is why the idea is to make law and ethics to manage human society. What matters here is that law is made not by God but by human beings, and so easily causes problems in the end; Eastern civilisation therefore takes ethics, a concept above law, as more important than law. The central concept of the Daodejing and the Analects is ethics. Comparing the civilisations of East and West, the East holds the idea of valuing the ethics the Dao represents over the religious law that God represents. Ethics is set not by God’s command but, in human society, by the principle of self-preservation, in order to manage human nature.

Examining Mencius’s and Xunzi’s views that human nature is good and that it is evil, we can see that the final destination of their discussion of human nature lies in the education of human character. Mencius’s view that human nature is good and Xunzi’s that it is evil are not meant to build a social contract theory; they concentrate on education in ethics. The books of Mencius and Xunzi alike concentrate not on defining what human nature is, but on how human beings with such a nature can be brought through education to have good human character. In this, Mencius and Xunzi both resemble their teacher Confucius, for Confucius, without discussing human nature, concentrates on the nurture of human character.

They concentrate on putting forward humaneness, rightness, propriety and wisdom as the aims of the character human beings should have. This resembles the philosophy the West produced as it went through the Enlightenment and thought about human nature. In particular it is the same as Benjamin Franklin’s philosophy. Franklin, examining Western metaphysics, reached the conclusion that metaphysical debate has no great meaning. And he writes that what matters in living a life is what human beings have always valued: the relations between one person and another, that is, consideration for others, sincerity, industry, honesty and the like.

In this sense the Eastern discussion of human nature can be seen as having already left metaphysics and approached the substantive side of “human character.” What matters is that human character is formed by the agreement of nature and mind; that is, character was seen as what the mind makes as it approaches nature. From this point of view Mencius’s a priori view of ethics can be seen as teaching the altruism that lies in instinct. In this sense Mencius’s a priori has the important meaning of relying on instinct. That Mencius values only the faint altruism in instinct rather than its powerful selfishness may be his own effort towards the ultimate formation of human character. But his neglect of powerful selfishness draws criticism from Xunzi’s view that human nature is evil. And Xunzi, concentrating wholly on powerful selfishness to the neglect of faint altruism, may be criticised by Mencius’s followers. Since altruism, too, is part of instinct, Xunzi’s idea that all ethics arises after birth does not fully take the a priori into account. But we should note that the thought of Mencius and Xunzi alike lies in making character through the complementary roles of instinct and mind. If the Western theory of human nature developed in the end into social contract theory, or into law and institutions, the Eastern theory of human nature can be seen as having developed in the end into a theory of human character: into political ethics and political economy.

Law and ethics in the end arise from human nature. Xunzi’s philosophy of human nature, looked at above (Xunzi 23:1, 23:5), expresses this well.³²³

If we work out the relationship between the theory of nature and the theory of nurture in the Eastern way, the problem of “determinism and free will” that so troubles the West disappears. The civilisation of God, believing that God created human beings and watches over human affairs, derived for itself the hard problem between “determinism and free will.” Human nature is the part that corresponds to determinism. Nurture is the part that corresponds to free will. In the end human beings need both nature and nurture. Nature cannot be helped, since we are born with it anyway. But making that nature useful in social life is the role of nurture. The theory of struggle inherent in the West’s civilisation of God finds the problem of determinism and free will hard to solve. Following the idea that God decides everything supports determinism. But stressing the role of the human mind supports free will. The difficulty comes from the position that one of the two must be chosen. But follow the theory of harmony inherent in the East’s civilisation of the Dao, and the problem is easily solved. Think that determinism and free will are both needed, and the problem disappears. The old brain is determinism; the new brain is free will. So only by considering both together is the puzzle of human nature solved. But there is one condition: the new brain is free within the frame of the old brain. That is, the concept of freedom within fate holds.

The question of why Eastern civilisation values education so highly is also easily answered. One’s own effort and education become an absolute and vital task that human beings must take up once born. So in the civilisation of the Dao, education was practised almost two thousand years before the civilisation of God. The story of how Mencius’s mother, in the fourth century BC, took pains over her son’s education, moving house three times at great cost, is a story every parent knows.

In the thousand years of theocentrism in the Middle Ages, everything was written in the Bible, and carrying it out well to go to heaven was the highest purpose. There was no need to study anything other than the Bible. The education that ruled the thousand years of the Middle Ages was scholasticism, that is, study of the Bible. It was education not in wisdom but in knowledge. For almost a thousand years Western scholarship and writing centred on religion and God. Humanist writing outside religion came out in earnest only in the fourteenth century, with the Renaissance. So in their interest in the nurture of character, East and West are two thousand years apart. In the West, interest in national education centred on the nurture of character began in earnest in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries under the influence of Locke, Rousseau and others. Confucius’s Analects, from the sixth century BC, is a book about the nurture of character from beginning to end. It concentrates on making leaders (君子). Mencius’s and Xunzi’s views that human nature is good and that it is evil are something like prefaces to the nurture of character. Their theories of human nature only served as something like primers, for concentrating on making leaders through the nurture of character.

In Eastern civilisation the views that human nature is good and that it is evil settled in people’s minds as “the view that nature has both good and evil”: that human nature holds both selfishness and altruism. But Western civilisation took a different path. Hobbes’s view that human nature is evil is the core of his social contract theory, so it cannot be harmonised or revised. Since it was meant to support monarchy, it lost its base of support as monarchy fell. Locke’s theory of free government, too, was founded on the blank slate. It is a theory that holds only if leaders and participants alike can confirm their free will through education. Without an a priori free will, it becomes a claim that cannot stand. Rousseau’s view that human nature is good becomes a theory arguing not for monarchy but for popular sovereignty. But if the “general will” he argued for does not hold, his social contract theory and his view that human nature is good collapse too. In particular, by combining the refusal to recognise private property with the view that human nature is good, his view left room for combining with totalitarianism through popular sovereignty. It is an idea the West’s leaders made active use of in the West’s age of ideology.

What matters is that among Western thinkers, and especially among those who discussed human nature, none concentrated on the aim of nurturing human character. Locke and Rousseau alike wanted education not for the nurture of ethics but for asserting the free will or the general will they argued for. Confucius, Mencius and Xunzi, on the other hand, all aimed at the nurture of human character.

Because of powerful selfishness, everyone wants wealth and power: it is the instinct of self-preservation, which seeks to protect one’s own interest. However hard we try, the people of the next generation are born with the same powerful selfishness and feeble altruism. And however hard we try, we cannot make a society that runs on altruism. This is human nature.

How, then, does nurture work? Nurture works within the possibilities of human nature. The work of nurture is, through effort, to grow altruism and to learn and practice ways of restraining selfishness. They must use altruism so that their own interest lasts long. Altruism must become enlightened self-interest. Here lies the role of nurture. Medically, nature is the old brain. Nurture is the new brain. The two are connected, a phenomenon medicine calls “encephalisation.” Being connected means that nature and nurture work complementarily. Through the complementary efforts of nature and nurture, selfishness must be kept from growing without limit into greed. For that, we must wake up to altruism. That is how good human character grows. Selfishness that has woken up to altruism becomes enlightened self-interest. It is the essential requirement of a leader.

If we set aside the blank slate, all human beings are born with one human nature. According to how the selfishness and altruism inherent in human nature are adjusted, people divide into leaders and followers. In human society two kinds of human groups form: leaders and followers. “One human nature and two human groups”: this is an element common to the make-up of society in East and West. The East divides them into the leader and the follower. Anyone can become a leader, and anyone can become a follower. The two are colleagues. If one group is gone, the other disappears too. The theory of harmony connects the two groups.

The West, too, divides human beings into two groups. But the two human groups are not decided after birth by the nurture of character; they are already decided at birth. It is a typological division, by religion, race and region: the difference between the civilisation of the Dao and the civilisation of God. In Greek times people were divided into Greeks, who had souls, and soulless “barbarians.” Barbarians, it was argued, were like animals and should be made slaves. Under Christianity people were divided into believers (the saved) and unbelievers (the damned). The papacy, too, issued a bull that pagans might be enslaved. In the age of the mind, people were divided into Westerners, who had “mind,” and non-Westerners, who did not. And in the age of ideology they came to be divided into believers in the ideological doctrine and its opponents. Those who oppose ideological doctrine must be eliminated. To be treated properly, one had to be born in Greece and have a soul, or be born in the West and have a mind. So the West’s division into two groups depends largely on where one is born and who one’s parents are: a division by birth and by belief. The two groups form a relationship of struggle. Each will not tolerate the other.

The East divides human beings not typologically but relationally. Its division is between the leader and the follower. Leaders and followers exist in every human society. It rests on an image of the human being prior to any sorting into types. The West, too, has leaders and followers (participants). But in the West’s combative division, human beings are split by whether they possess soul, spirit, reason or ideology. Those who do not are excluded from the place of human beings. In such a division the theory of nurture has no place to stand. If you are born in some unknown place, however well you are nurtured, the soul, spirit, reason or ideology the West insists on, which you were not born with, will never arise. But the Eastern division of leader and follower is decided entirely by nurture. Every society always has leaders and participants. Of human beings born with powerful selfishness and weak altruism, some, through education and awakening, adjust their selfishness and altruism and go the way of the leader, and some remain followers whose selfishness becomes greed. The theory of nurture decides it all.

Eastern civilisation, more than two thousand years ago, settled its discussion of human nature and moved on to nurture. It held that every human being is born with a human nature that strives to take its own interest. And going beyond human nature, it concentrated on discussion and philosophy of human character (人性, 品性, temperament, personhood and the like). The West concentrates on what human nature is; the East concentrates on growing human character. When is character formed? Does it vary according to signals already settled in nature, or according to nurture? Do nature and nurture work separately, or do they make character through interaction? The civilisation of the Dao set up the philosophy that nature and nurture make human character through their interaction.

As said before, the West came to think about the importance of education only after Locke and Rousseau, but Eastern civilisation concentrated on the importance of education for two thousand years, because it acknowledged nature but held that the formation of human character, how a person grows, is the power of nurture. Western thinkers of the early modern era could get news of the East passed on by the Jesuit fathers. They expressed astonishment and envy at the civil service examinations, by which everyone in the East devoted themselves to education and officials were chosen according to their success in it. In the West at the time every office was bought and sold as a matter of patronage.

The East’s Management of Reality vs the West’s Pursuit of Ideals

The Western human being who pursues meaning chases a vision for all humanity. The spread of religion and the pursuit of ideology are the typical examples. At first sight they hold something great and grand. But as with all proselytising and spreading of ideology, the root problem is that they are unrealistic. The visions pursued in ideology in particular were all built by distorting human nature. The problem lies in a theory of human nature that treats the soul, the spirit or reason as the essence of the human being.

The meaning the West pursues rests in the end on the philosophy of individualism. The relationship between the individual and God, or between the individual and ideology, becomes more important than relationships with other people. The Eastern human being who pursues meaning stands on the philosophy of the unmanifest and on relationalism. The confessions of Daoism and Confucianism teach it: “The Dao has no end,” “Life has an end, but knowing has none,” “The Dao is never completed,” “In practising ren, one does not yield even to one’s teacher (當仁不讓於師).” The human being who seeks meaning on the ethical side pursues not a vision but, through endless effort, harmony in human relationships. Eastern meaning rests on the philosophy of relationalism. Relationalism rests on the philosophy of change. The conditions under which human beings live change endlessly with time and situation.

Western civilisation concentrates on laws and institutions for the flourishing of an “individualism” that pursues happiness, for happiness is individualistic. In the East, ethics grounded in the “relationalism” among human beings forms the core of civilisation. Ethics comes from vigilance towards the selfishness inherent in human nature. The idea is to take the ethics of relationalism to heart against the greed that naturally issues from selfishness, and so achieve harmony among human beings in social life. Eastern Daoism aims at the sage. Confucianism aims at the junzi (君子). The sage and the junzi alike come down to the aim of “the leader”: a relational expression. In the West, the thinkers of the unmanifest such as Spinoza aimed at “the wise man”: an individualistic expression.

The manifest, the centre of Western philosophy, represents the core value of individualism. The truth (God, metaphysical truth, ideology and the like) becomes most important to me, and my relationship to the truth becomes more important than my relationship with any other human being. This is because my relationship with others is subordinated to my relationship with the truth, and I come to judge others according to religion or ideology. On this ground individualism holds the individual’s autonomy and freedom most important of all. Pursuing the truth I have grasped and winning many sympathisers becomes the Westerners’ pattern of life.

As said before, the core of Eastern civilisation is the unmanifest: “the truth exists, but human beings cannot express it.” According to the thought of the civilisation of the unmanifest, the “truth” human beings claim to have discovered cannot go beyond ethics, ren (仁, humaneness), the core of the relation between one human being and another. Nor can one force on others the “truth” one has discovered. This philosophy is the core of the relationalism given to human beings.

The ideas Eastern civilisation established for nurturing a changing human character are the Confucian idea of the leader and the Daoist idea of wuwei (無爲, non-action). At their core is a philosophy not of realising ideals but of managing the reality of human nature. Xunzi holds that the troublesome inborn nature human beings come with cannot be helped. He accepts it as part of nature. But because human nature has its problems, he concentrates on governing it well after birth through ethics and law, to make a human character that helps society; this connects with the philosophy of “freedom within fate.” In the end Xunzi’s aim is not to change inborn nature because it is troublesome, nor to remove it or leap beyond it, but to “nurture” human character through ethics and law. That is why ethics and law are needed in human society. He defined ethics and law as things that do not fall from heaven but were made by leaders and sages, arising from their grasp of the currents of human society. He denies the a priori and the transcendent.

Eastern civilisation of this kind comes to concentrate on engagement with reality: the idea of the leader and the idea of wuwei. It concentrates on managing human society by nurturing a changing human character. That is, it is a philosophy of how human beings, with the human nature we are born with, can adapt to society. It comes to concentrate on political ethics and political economy, in contrast to Western civilisation’s concentration on theology, metaphysics and ideology. Every Western theory of human nature aims not at managing human society but at realising utopia.

It becomes clear that Mencius understood human beings mainly from the side of the mind, the new brain, and Xunzi, conversely, mainly from the side of instinct, the old brain. Yet Mencius did not ignore human feelings or instincts or treat them as sinful, and likewise Xunzi did not dismiss morality or social norms as things that shackle human instinct. Mencius and Xunzi both recognised the existence and necessity of instinct and mind. Their aim is one. Mencius and Xunzi alike put the emphasis on “the nurture of human character.” Xunzi stresses that human nature knows what is right and has discernment about it, but that one must meet a fine teacher and good friends and cultivate oneself:

Every human being has an inborn nature that can know what is right, and a heart that can discern it. But one must meet a good teacher to learn from, and good friends to keep company with, to grow this nature (Xunzi 23:15)

In the West it is Spinoza who voices the view of human nature and of nature most like Xunzi’s. Xunzi’s theory of human nature resembles Spinoza’s. Spinoza called the human nature that chases its own interest according to the instincts it was born with human bondage. He held that within human beings, along with these instincts, there is mind, and the mind has the capacity to govern instinct. But he held that only very few people attain this. Spinoza called them free men, and called the rest, who live in bondage, the multitude. Spinoza’s division of human beings into “free man and multitude” is very like Xunzi’s division into “leader and follower.” But Spinoza, unlike Xunzi, defined the side of political ethics as lying in the freedom of the individual; Xunzi determined that it lies in the leaders of society. Spinoza’s Ethics aims at the free man. Xunzi aims at how to make human beings keep ethics and become politically able leaders.

As we saw earlier, Xunzi (in “A Discussion of Heaven”) and Spinoza (in the Ethics) take the same position in their view of nature too.

Mencius’s and Xunzi’s nurture of human character is already expressed as it is in Confucius. The Confucian Great Learning explains the path that runs through cultivating oneself and ordering the family (修身齊家) in Chapter 8, governing the state (治國) in Chapter 9, and bringing peace to all under heaven (平天下) in Chapter 10. Its meaning, to govern oneself, the family, the state and all under heaven, is widely known as 修身齊家治國平天下. The aim of the leader lies in right government. To that end, it concentrates on nurturing human character into leaders:

People all have the same nature and the same abilities. Yet some become leaders and some followers. The reason they differ lies not in any difference in their nature and abilities, but in their habits and their effort. (Xunzi 4:7)

Mencius and Xunzi, along with Confucius, share strongly the political side peculiar to Confucianism: that leaders must be raised. Xunzi stresses action in political ethics:

Hearing is better than not hearing. Seeing is better than hearing. Understanding is better than seeing. Acting is better than understanding. Learning has its end in action. (Xunzi 8:9)

Here Xunzi asks the next question: can all human beings be made sages? If everyone wants it, they can become so. But the problem is that no one can be forced to want it. In the end the individual’s choice is what matters:

A person can become a sage by learning and action. Why, then, do not all people become so? It is possible, but it cannot be forced. The follower can become a leader, but cannot if he does not want to. The leader can become a follower, but cannot if he does not want to…. It is not that it is hard to become. It only means it cannot be made by force. (Xunzi 23:12)

Here lies a difference between the civilisations of East and West: the difference of “faith in God” vs “the nurture of human character.” In the civilisation of God, one becomes a believer by declaring faith in the set religious law. Once one becomes a believer, the believer is managed “from outside” by the law. In the civilisation of the Dao, the leader is decided not from outside but “from inside.” One decides for oneself whether one is a leader or a follower:

What the leader seeks lies within himself. What the follower seeks is set from outside. (Analects 15:20).

This thought of Confucius is explained more clearly by Xunzi. The leader has an aim as one who leads: to bring peace to all under heaven. The leader moves according to this aim. The follower has no such ethical aim and follows personal desire.

The leader makes use of ideas and things. The follower is made use of by ideas and things. (Xunzi 2:5).

The Confucian idea of the leader runs in the same vein as the Daoist idea of wuwei. The law of wuwei is to minimise outward action. With religious law, what matters is outward persuasion and the acceptance of it. That is why Christianity recognises conversion. Since one need only follow the set law, a Catholic may become a Protestant, and the reverse. But in the civilisation of the Dao, leader and follower cannot trade places by converting. Historically, conversion has in many cases come about by force: decrees that Jews must become Christians or have all their property confiscated. But as Xunzi explained, one cannot be made a leader or a follower by force. It is possible only when one wants it oneself and it shows in action.

The Analects also speaks of this: “The leader seeks what he wants in himself; the follower seeks it in others.” “The leader judges his own ability; the follower is decided by whether others recognise him.” “The leader worries about the Dao; the follower worries about poverty.” If it is hard to judge a person directly, look at the people around him. Xunzi, in his chapter “Human Nature Is Evil,” says to look at those around: “If you wonder what a man is like, look at his friends. If you wonder what a king is like, look at his ministers.”

4) The Purpose of Human Nature: The Pursuit of Meaning in Life vs the Pursuit of Individual Happiness

The Western theory of the social contract and the Eastern cultivation of human character both aim at managing human society. This bears directly on how human nature is made up and how it is put to use. In light of human nature, what do human beings in the civilisations of East and West want and pursue? The theories of human nature of East and West differ at their starting point: the philosophy of change and the philosophy of being. Accordingly, the aims human beings pursue in the civilisations of East and West differ. We need a substantive inquiry into what the human being pursues: not the mind, but the human being made up of human nature, that is, of instinct and reason.

Revealed religion stands on the premise that God’s will is above the human mind. But Western rationalism proceeds in the direction that the mind God gave to human beings can show a God-like capacity. The East takes as the foundation of its civilisation a theory of human nature in which mind and instinct are connected. In this theory of human nature, the East aims at finding meaning among human beings. Unlike individualism, which pursues heaven or happiness, relationalism pursues the meaning of life. The meaning of life rests on ethics, with my relationship to others at its core: “If you want to stand, help others stand.” The Eastern life that pursues the meaning of life differs from the vision, grounded in the Western manifest, of realising a utopian world. Efforts to pursue utopia sometimes bear great fruit, but easily slide into a humanism that ignores ethics.

The West of the Age of Discovery wanted to enlarge the greatness of the human mind. The West, all the more confident in its civilisation of mind worship, came to dream of an ideal world. Helped by the astonishing progress of science, it was swept up in a passion that human beings could provide an ideal world. A vast philosophical system took shape: that human beings were born to pursue ideals and exist for them. In this period the modern West achieved progress hard to find in human history. The theory of checks and balances made peaceful changes of government real, and brought humanity astonishing progress in art, music, sport and science alike. Along with the West’s conquest of the world, philosophical systems arose that proclaimed the greatness of the Western spirit, and most Westerners came to agree. The idea of extending this to the world, with the West at the centre, boiled up. They came to dream of an ideal world for Westerners, and for the world.

The idea that a utopia led by the mind can be put into practice in human society is an impossible dream. Because instinct is the source of light and mind the reflector, a utopia that ignores instinct cannot be achieved in human society. According to the Eastern philosophy of change, in human society periods of clinging for a while to utopia and periods of destruction that tear it down only alternate. Historically, the human idea of building utopia, combined with “Social Darwinism,” opened the age of ideology. With this, Western ideology in the twentieth century created all manner of ideologies that produced ethically horrific situations, and humanity threw everything it had into them. Western philosophy, having witnessed the dreadful results, came to know the fiction of Social Darwinism, and gradually came to know the limits of the human mind too.

Where will Western civilisation go now? It need only accept that the human mind exists under the law of God, or of nature. The problem is that the West cannot go back to the God of revealed religion either, because the question of a God who works miracles and presides over human affairs was settled in the Enlightenment. A God who does not preside over human affairs can then be arrived at by identifying God with nature, in the way Spinoza proposed. This way comes, in the end, to accepting the natural philosophy of the Dao on which Eastern civilisation relies. But natural philosophy differs at its core from the mind worship that has been the keynote of Western civilisation for thousands of years, so this is not easy either. Here the fundamental problem is laid bare: Western civilisation cannot find its way forward.

In the West after the Enlightenment, as the mind replaced God, philosophy concentrated on finding the foundation of ethics. Within the system of deism, Kant put forward a philosophy that within human nature there exists a nature that seeks ethics. Kant’s deontology of ethics by “the mind” is far less persuasive than the deontology of ethics by the “religious law” God commanded in revealed religion. So Westerners, whose sense of ethical duty had weakened, came to think about the question “why should human beings live?”

What Westerners concentrate on here is the theory of happiness. They show a tendency to concentrate more on a “theory of happiness” in life than on a “theory of duty” by the mind. Bentham held that since human nature in the end seeks happiness, the purpose called ethics arises from seeking happiness.³²⁴ The West has a long tradition of finding the purpose of life in the pursuit of happiness. It runs from Thales and Socrates through Epicurus to Bentham’s utilitarian ethics in the modern era. Thales stressed the importance of happiness: “The happiest man is one who has a healthy body, a resourceful mind and a well-trained character.” Socrates believed knowledge brings happiness: “Human wrongdoing comes from ignorance. Knowledge is virtue. Virtue is happiness.”

Western civilisation rests on an individualism that pursues “each one’s happiness.” In the East there were, rarely, those who argued for individualism. The thought of Yang Zhu (楊朱), one of the Hundred Schools contending in the Warring States period, is very like Western individualism. It put the emphasis on doing everything for oneself, and was indifferent to social morality. The core of Yang Zhu’s thought is “for myself” (爲我), acting only for oneself, and “keeping one’s nature whole and preserving what is genuine” (全性保眞), keeping human nature as nature made it. Opposed to Yang Zhu, the thought of Mozi (墨子) also held sway in the Warring States period. Mozi argued for universal love (兼愛) and against aggression (非攻). He put the emphasis on loving others, and argued that one must never attack under any circumstances. In the Warring States period, when war went on without end, Mozi’s thought came into fashion. But the thought of Yang Zhu and of Mozi, though each has its insight, leans to one side or the other.

Confucius’s thought argued for a relationalism that embraces both the emphasis on oneself, like Yang Zhu, and the emphasis on others, like Mozi. It is the claim that self and others should be connected. The relationalism of Confucius’s thought is the concept that if others are not happy, one cannot be happy alone either. In the end Confucius’s thought, as Confucianism, became the centre of Eastern thought. Because Eastern civilisation values the relationalism of “we,” it values not the relationship between human beings and an absolute being but that between one person and another.

Ren (仁), which Confucianism holds to be the highest ethics, aims precisely at a relationalism centred on the relationship between one human being and another. At its centre is not the “truth” claimed by religion or metaphysics but a relationalism of “let others live and let me live,” which holds the relationship between human beings as the highest value:

Wishing to stand, he helps others stand; wishing to arrive, he helps others arrive. (Analects 6:28)

In relationalism, happiness too cannot be had alone; the idea is to feel the emotion of happiness, positive psychology, together with other people. So in comparing the civilisations of East and West, the Eastern philosophy set against Western individualism can be expressed not as collectivism but as relationalism. As said before, the concept of relationalism does not exist in the Western philosophical system. In the West what matters is individualism: that religious truth, philosophical truth or ideological truth, for me, transcends my relationship with other people. But Eastern relationalism is a philosophy that values the relationship between one person and another, and means protecting my interest through consideration for the other. The philosophical meaning of relationalism connects with the simple truth: “Without you, there is no me.”

The happiness felt in Western individualism is momentary. The feeling of happiness does not last. People who seek happiness feel unhappy when they are not happy. The problem is in how the frame is set. Happiness and unhappiness are very much a zero-sum game. People who seek the meaning of life, as in the East, measure it in their relationships with others or in learning. Relationalism stands outside the zero-sum game. The pursuit of meaning is continuous and gradual; there are degrees to it. Because the pursuit of happiness is zero-sum, people who feel not happy but unhappy easily look for the solution in drugs or elsewhere outside themselves. People who seek meaning measure it by their relationships with others or by what they have gained from learning, so meaning and achievement are measured from within.

The ethical views of Mencius and Xunzi in the East are far removed from happiness or Epicurean pleasure. Mencius, a thinker born in the civilisation of the Dao, held that the purpose of life does not lie in pursuing happiness or pleasure. The thinkers of Eastern civilisation had one goal: pursuing political ethics and choosing “leaders (君子)” well. This is a mark of Confucianism, a goal that Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi and others all shared. Daoism originally aims at avoiding direct participation in politics and delving into the Dao of nature, but even Daoism divides human beings into sages (聖人) and the people, and explains the leadership of the sage.

The Eastern life that pursues meaning seeks meaning, on the ground of relationalism, in relationships with nature and with other people. It rests on a humanism centred on the ethics of being together, not on individual happiness. Because this includes both the other and the self (彼我), it is not a sacrifice of self-interest but enlightened self-interest, that is, an expression of relationalism.

Ren (仁) is “consideration for others,” that is, compassionism. Ethics is “relational”: it cannot be achieved alone. If happiness rests on individualism, ren rests on a relationalism that necessarily connects one with others. Relationalism values consideration for the other because it pursues not happiness but a “meaningful life” or a “life of worth” (worthiness, or worthwhileness).

This shows that Eastern relationalism differs from Western communitarianism. Western communitarianism is used in the sense of replacing individualism, but Eastern relationalism embraces individualism. In the sense that Eastern relationalism does not deny Western individualism, it can be seen as a philosophy that combines Western individualism and communitarianism.

Westerners’ attachment to happiness is peculiar, because on the ground of the philosophy of being they believed that happiness does not come intermittently and temporarily, but that eternal happiness is possible. According to the Eastern philosophy of change, the definition of happiness changes. Happiness matters, but like everything in the universe it can only come to human beings intermittently and be temporary. So Eastern thought did not single out time-bound “happiness” for special importance. It came to value instead the real “meaning” of life found in human affairs: in family, friends, learning and nature.

In the Analects, in the chapter “Yong Ye,” Confucius explained: “Better to love it than to know it, and better to delight in it than to love it” (Chapter 18). Knowing (知), loving (好) and delighting (樂) differ from the Western theory of happiness. Confucius’s explanation describes the process of reaching understanding through one’s own effort. It means that one reaches true accomplishment and understanding only when one does not stop at knowing something, but loves it and, beyond that, can delight in it.

Among the Greek philosophers who argued for a theory of happiness, Epicurus is famous. Epicurus’s theory of happiness is pleasure. But his theory of happiness is not kinetic pleasure but “tranquility of mind” (ataraxia). He argued for restraining desire, valuing friendship and trust, and reaching happiness by achieving tranquility of mind through a wise life. The Western obsession with happiness does not exist in Eastern civilisation. In the modern era Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill put forward the theory of happiness as the reason for the existence of human beings and society. Going beyond the individual to argue for the happiness of society as a whole, they developed the measure of happiness to a political level.

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it.³²⁵

Bentham (1748–1832) argued that morality arises for utilitarian reasons. Bentham held that ethics arises according to purpose. Utilitarian ethics takes as its purpose that “morality is the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” Mill (1806–1873), a fellow utilitarian, differs from Bentham. Against Bentham’s “quantitative hedonism,” Mill argues for “qualitative hedonism”: “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied” (the words widely known as ‘better a hungry Socrates than a well-fed pig’) is his claim.

They believed that virtues such as justice, courage, sincerity and truthfulness bring the happiness of “the individual” (or the utilitarian happiness of individuals added together). Virtues like humaneness, rightness, propriety and wisdom all matter in the East too. But the East holds that such virtues are not sought by “the individual” alone, and can be pursued in “relationships” with other people or between nature and human beings. So the East seeks not “individual happiness” but “the human being who pursues the meaning of relationships.” The meaning of life means that human beings achieve harmony with nature, and harmony with others in friendship, family and learning. The Eastern meaning of life is relationalistic. In life it comes to have the meaning of being together with nature or with others. Western happiness, by contrast, is individualistic. One becomes happy alone. The best happiness as the Greeks defined it is for them to become happy like the gods.

Happiness has become the goal of life for Westerners. It is a concept spreading in the East too. People pursue truth, money, honour, love and the like, and when they get them they feel happy at the time. Easterners want to live life worthwhile, that is, meaningfully. The idea is to feel the meaning of being together with others, not of me alone. What matters is not my own happiness but what relationships I form with the people connected to me, family, friends, colleagues, and with nature, and what we have achieved together. There one feels the worth of life. Here the importance of ethics is stressed.

The state of the drug problem in West and East lays bare the problem of the pursuit of happiness. Westerners try to find the cause in differences of law and enforcement and differences of smuggling and supply chains. The West, and the United States in particular, seeks the solution not in the users within, the root of the problem, but in the “supply” of drugs coming from outside. Easterners find the meaning of life not in individual happiness or unhappiness but in family, friends and learning. When this is lacking, they look for the solution in improving family and personal relationships and raising what they gain from learning. Drugs cannot take its place. Among the systems of thought that divide East and West is this difference of philosophical systems: individualism and relationalism.