Ritual and Religion in the Xunzi

T. C. Kline, Justin Tiwald, T. C. Kline, Justin Tiwald

• Editore: SUNY Press
• Anno: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781438451961
• Argomento: Theology & Religion
• Categoria: Asian Religions

Xunzi, a founding figure in the Confucian tradition, is one of the world's great philosophers and theorists of religion. For much of the last century, his work has been seen largely as critical of religion, particularly the popular beliefs and invocations of supernatural forces that underpin so many religious rituals. Contributors to this volume challenge this view and offer a more sophisticated picture of Xunzi. He emerges not as critic, but rather as an adherent of religion who seeks to give religious practices meaning even though many religious beliefs are mistaken or self-serving. Each essay offers a powerful illustration of Xunzi as both a religious devotee and as a philosopher of religion, drawing on a wide array of disciplines and methodologies.

RITUAL THEORY

CHAPTER 3

Ritual and Religion

A Lesson from Xunzi for Today

ROBERT C. NEVILLE

That Xunzi was marginalized in the tradition of Confucianism framed by Zhu Xi’s edition of the Four Books had a worse result than relative neglect by East Asian and Western scholars.¹ The genius of his original philosophy has not yet had the impact it deserves on framing the contemporary philosophic discussion.² The scholarly neglect is being remedied with great efficiency at the present time, building on the modern edition and translation into English of Xunzi’s works by John Knoblock and exemplified by a burgeoning commentarial literature, not the least of which is the present volume and its predecessor.³ The purpose of this essay is not to contribute to the scholarly retrieval of Xunzi but rather to his philosophical retrieval.

After some initial remarks on themes in Xunzi, I shall develop three main points of contemporary interest to which Xunzi has much to contribute. The first is an intriguing connection between ritual theory (especially in Xunzi) and semiotics. The second relates ritual to the proper formation of desire. The third addresses the question of diversity and integration of desires and relates this question to a religious thesis about ritual connecting the “depths” with civilization and joy.

Initial Considerations of Ritual in Xunzi

Ceremony is one of the meanings of ritual for Xunzi, as for the rest of the Confucian tradition. Ceremonies fall into five sorts in Xunzi’s thought, as Knoblock has pointed out:

those dealing with such auspicious occasions as sacrifice and marriage; those dealing with inauspicious occasions such as mourning and the loss of the state; rites of hospitality involving tribute offerings and appearances at court; usages involving warfare, especially the display of weapons, types, and decorations of chariots, and the use of banners; and festivities, notably serving elders, showing respect for the aged, making offerings, presenting gifts, and giving daughters in marriage.⁴

Late-modern societies have versions of all these ceremonies, if you count retirement parties as “respect for the aged” and back off from “giving away” modern daughters in marriage (paying for the wedding is still a custom, if not a ceremony, even when daughters do not want their father to give them away). Modern democratic societies may have more ceremonies for political transitions than Xunzi’s Chinese states had because of frequent formalized elections of officials. Late-modern societies observe a sharp distinction, lacking in Xunzi’s culture, between political or court ceremonies (secular) and religious ceremonies, based on the modern Western division between public and private spheres of life.

Ritual (禮 li) means far more than ceremony, however, for all of Confucian thought. Knoblock points out that in Xunzi’s thought it includes “the highest sense of morality, duty, and social order as well as the most minor rules of good manners, the minutiae of polite forms, and insignificant, it seems to us, details of costume and dress.”⁵ I have developed a more elaborate spectrum of meanings of ritual as convention, starting with penumbral conventions such as eye contact, posture and movement, semiotically coded signs such as language and gesture, sign-shaped behavior the very exercise of which constitutes social institutions, manners regarding the playing of socially defined roles, the cultivations of personal relationship, and the practices of etiquette, and then explicit ceremonies themselves.⁶ This list obviously can be subdivided and extended, reaching to all thought and practice shaped by learned conventions.

The clue to the broad extension of ritual in Xunzi is his conception of human nature and what is added to its biological givens, as Edward Machle has pointed out.⁷ Heaven and Earth (nature) provide human beings with their bodies, their various senses, a range of emotions, and a mind capable of governing the natural elements and relating them to external things such as food.⁸ Simply as given by Heaven and Earth, these elements are too underdetermined for human life. Given the range of possible postures, for instance, people can stand with their feet parallel (the ritual way in East Asia) or with the toes angled a bit to the side (the European way). Given the senses, everything is a cacophony, a “blooming, buzzing confusion,” in William James’s celebrated phrase, without learned discrimination and a sensibility as to what is important.⁹ Emotions as given have little or no measure and no intrinsic connection with proper objects. Conventionally learned signs and sign-shaped behaviors are required to determine the naturally underdetermined givens of nature in order for human life to be possible.

I take ritual (li) to encompass all conventions, all learned signs and sign-shaped behaviors. For Xunzi, these human-building conventions are what need to be added to Heaven and Earth in order for human life to be possible and, as constituting the human, they complete the potentials of Heaven and Earth. This is Xunzi’s version of the Trinity of Heaven, Earth, and the Human.¹⁰

The importance of the ancient kings and sages of old is that they hand down the conventions that determine human nature so as to make civilized human life possible. Lacking a strong evolutionary view of nature and society, Xunzi and many of his sophisticated colleagues avoided supernaturalistic explanations. The popular culture, perhaps, within which Xunzi worked, had a supernatural view of the culture-building imagination of the ancients: the rituals had to originate from somewhere. In any historical situation, the rituals need to be given and learned. Xunzi did not conceive a sharp boundary between the merely natural and the elementary human. He said, “The inborn nature of man is certainly that of the petty man.”¹¹ Without tutoring, such a petty man will be selfish and contribute to chaos. Even selfishness requires a modicum of internal organization and regulation, and capacity to relate to things outside. So he would admit that a purely unritualized or untaught person would be impossible. But sageliness requires learning the sophisticated rituals and learning them well. “The sage purifies his natural lord, rectifies his natural faculties, completes his natural nourishment, is obedient to the natural rule of order, and nourishes his natural emotions and thereby completes nature’s achievement.”¹² Not just individual perfection but civilization itself depends on ritual mastery in the sense that humaneness cannot arise unless there are ritual social habits that allow for its expression. Without ritual there is no family life, only procreation, no division of family responsibilities, only the desire to get free as soon as possible, no political life, only strong-man rule, no loyalties to a political entity larger than proximate community (e.g., the nation or empire/emperor), only clan-based self-serving. Civilization involves the move from face-to-face (usually clan) organization to more nearly universal role-based behavior, which means ritual. The great Confucian contribution to contemporary philosophy is calling attention to the moral weight of rituals that undergird every other sense of the social meaning of moral actions.

Our own late-modern science is very different from Xunzi’s, emphasizing evolution and biological continuities up through sign-shaped behavior and language.¹³ Nevertheless, his point is well taken, namely, that the causal processes of interpreting signs are different from causal processes that are merely natural and do not have signs, to put the point a modern way. Many human processes are mixtures, with some elements best understood in terms of chemical reactions, say, and others in terms of signs. Human life is a kind of biopsychic dance. Chemical states cause the stomach to contract and growl, stimulating thoughts of food, purposeful eating, pleasurable digesting, and chemical metabolic nourishment; most meals also involve social interaction. Any explanation or understanding of this process that leaves out the chemical patterns of causation or the semiotic ones is stupidly reductive. Insofar as semiosis is involved, there is an element of Xunzian ritual.

Ritual and Semiotics

Rituals across the spectrum are conventions. Conventions are not innate but are signs that need to be learned. The upshot of this is that semiotics, the study of signs, should be brought in to the paideia of religious studies in an important way. The semiotic theory most attuned to the ritual point is that of Charles S. Peirce, for whom it is closely connected with his pragmatic theory of engaging the world and also with his metaphysics of nature.¹⁴ Implicit in my argument here and drawn out elsewhere is that religious symbols serve to engage us with realities where otherwise we would have no handle. Other theories of signs take them to be distancing substitutes for addressing the realities. The chief distinction between Peirce’s semiotics and that of the European tradition associated with Saussure is that whereas the latter takes the interpretation of texts to be paradigmatic, Peirce takes the interpretation of nature to be paradigmatic. For Peirce, interpretation is the process of engagement with realities. The interesting question, then, is not so much the decoding of signs within semiotic systems, the European preoccupation, as the analysis of how signs arise within semiotic systems, how they take on definiteness, and sometimes lose definiteness. The reasons for this “genetic history” of signs have to do with pragmatic concerns for their roles in engaging realities, that is, whether they make proper discriminations for the contexts and purposes of interpretation.¹⁵ That signs “grow” within semiotic systems illustrates Peirce’s metaphysics, according to which there is a cosmic propensity for growth of connection and relationship, which is what signs produce. All of this resonates with the contextualism of Xunzi’s theory of ritual that marks its conventionality. For instance, ritual for him was seasonable; he adjusted periods of mourning to the station and importance of the deceased, as well as to the resources of the family.¹⁶ He knew there were alternative calendars and different classifications of social merit, all conventional distinctions but articulating something real.

Peirce’s semiotic theory introduces many distinctions that are obscure or wholly nonexistent in Xunzi’s theory of ritual. Peirce said there are three main topics of semiotics.¹⁷ One is the analysis of signs themselves in their meanings relative to one another; Xunzi does some of this, as in 19.7a–7b. A second topic is the context within which signs are used. The context determines the respects in which the signs stand for objects, thus what is taken to be important in the context. Context connects what is important in the object with what is important in the purposes and values of the interpreters. Xunzi is massively brilliant in analyzing the appropriateness of ritual behaviors for particular situations, dealing on the one hand with the objective occasion for ritual and on the other with the nature and contexts of the participants. The entire Confucian tradition has important contributions to make to this theme of contextual interpretation, so important to the pragmatic tradition. The theme was particularly important for John Dewey, and the fact that he failed to address the connection with Confucian culture was a significant missed opportunity.¹⁸

The third main topic of semiotics, according to Peirce, is reference, and he distinguished at least three kinds, conventional (which he called symbolic), iconic, and indexical. Conventional reference means that signs refer according to the ways their semiotic systems define, the way language does. Any kind of sign that can be talked about is at least conventional. Iconic reference takes reality to be like what the sign says. Simple iconic reference is like an isomorphism between the form of the thing and the form of the sign, as a cross is an icon of Jesus’s crucifixion (to use Peirce’s example). More complicated kinds of iconic reference go all the way to descriptions in which the words paint a picture, if you will, or present a theory, of the way the referent is supposed to be. Xunzi recognizes iconic reference in saying, for instance, that the cost and elaborateness of funerals should be in proportion to the importance of the deceased: “The funeral of the Son of Heaven affects all within the four seas and brings together the feudal lords.… The funeral of a castrated criminal does not involve uniting his family and neighbors, but brings together only his wife and children.… As soon as his body is interred in the earth, everything ends as though there had never been a funeral.”¹⁹ In his discussion of music, Xunzi relates instruments to great themes. The general idea of correlative thinking in ancient Chinese, especially Confucian, thinking is a kind of iconic reference.

Indexical reference, the third kind, is most important for Confucianism. Signs can refer by pointing, which is to say they can establish a causal relation between the object and the interpreter like getting the person to turn and look. More significantly, many signs refer by requiring deep and important changes in the interpreter. This is especially significant for religious signs upon which people meditate or that guide religious practices: only long practice can transform the person enough to properly engage the object as the sign would require. The Confucian theme of the rectification of names should not be understood as an attempt to get the right icon or description but as the attempt to get the right index.²⁰ The right index causes the interpreter to be properly comported toward the object, treating it according to its true nature and worth. A description might be involved in a rectified name, but then again the descriptive or iconic elements of the “right name” might be quite fanciful, plainly false if interpreted literally. Chad Hansen’s “Daoist” interpretation of language can be seen as rightly emphasizing the indexical, as opposed to iconic, character of reference, according to ...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Conventions
• Introduction
• Religious Vision
• Ritual Theory
• Comparative Approaches
• Selected Bibliography
• About the Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover