"Why does Mengzi tell rulers that their love of wealth and women poses no obstacle to ideal rulership, even as he venerates sage kings who seemingly lack such desires? How can he advocate for universal moral response in the child-in-the-well scenario while explicitly rejecting impartial concern? Why does he advise King Xuan to avoid looking at sacrificial oxen-effectively telling him to ignore his compassionate impulses-if moral sprouts are meant to guide ethical action?"
"I propose that these puzzles dissolve when we shift our focus from theoretical systematization to dao construction. Rather than seeing Mengzi primarily as a theorist of human nature, a virtue ethicist, or a political philosopher, I argue he is best understood as a constructor of dao: an engineer of workable frameworks for guiding conduct and organizing social life. Like an engineer, Mengzi builds with available resources-human psychology, institutions, cultural forms-within real-world constraints, prioritizing sustainability over theoretical purity."
Mengzi resolves apparent contradictions by prioritizing dao construction: engineering practical frameworks for guiding conduct and organizing social life. He treats human psychology, institutions, and cultural forms as building materials and accepts real-world constraints. He redirects self-interested desires rather than suppressing them, preserves Zhou institutional structures while encouraging ethical renewal, and accommodates natural family attachments without making them the normative basis. He favors hereditary offices over meritocratic appointments as part of sustainable political engineering. Motivational permissiveness, institutional conservatism, and coordination mechanisms that work with actual human nature characterize this pragmatic constructivist approach.
Read at Warpweftandway
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]