Mencius v Xunzi
Were we born to love or hate one another?
This is Who made our minds?, my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024). Next week: Spinoza’s God
ARE HUMAN BEINGS inherently good or evil?
That question troubled Confucius’ heirs, because the Master left little guidance on the matter and had not dwelt on questions of ‘the soul’ and the ‘inner self’.
The Confucian idea of the ‘self’ was relational: that is, you were defined by your relationships with others, not by your qualities as an individual.
The Confucian self thus benefited from morally good relationships and suffered from bad or ‘toxic’ ones.
A Confucian did not ask, ‘Who am I?’; rather, he asked, ‘Who am I to others?’ This turned the question of inherent good and evil into one of inter-relational perceptions. In ancient China ‘identity’ was a phil…