Thanks for the detailed commentary, and welcome to LessWrong!
I think we have two main disagreements, and two minor ones.
First is what I set out to do, which is perhaps tied up with what I should have set out to do. I’m not trying to explain Xunzi, or even all of the I Ching; I’m trying to open a door that was rightfully closed on the likes of fortune cookies and astrology to rescue things like the I Ching, that seem superficially similar but have a real depth to them.
And, as Xunzi points out when describing the Way, “No one corner is sufficient to exhibit it fully.” If someone is going to get something real out of the I Ching, they’re going to do it through practice, not through a summary, or reading it cover to cover, and the best I can do is point at why that would be good in a way that they can see from the other side of the door.
From the shape of your disappointment, I’m guessing you wanted me to explain Xunzi more fully, instead of just making an indirect pitch, or more fully grapple with philosophy or classicism. If I were out to do the former, my preferred strategy would be to see if Hutton would let me post the entirety of his translation of Undoing Fixation (which I think is way more readable than the in-public-domain one I found). For the latter, I’ll readily admit I’m an amateur instead of an scholar, following trails as they appear and catch my interest instead of hoping for completion. I didn’t reference Wang Bi because this is the first I’ve heard of him, but I’m not surprised to hear this is an old viewpoint. [Indeed, I suspect if this sort of thing hadn’t been appreciated in Xunzi’s time by his audience, he would have written an essay about it instead of just mentioning it and moving on.]
This bears on our second disagreement, which might be illusory. I agree that ritual, in Xunzi’s conception, is primarily social instead of individual. But this isn’t exclusively the case, and my impression was that divination as performed by individuals was primarily about cultivating reflection and broadmindedness; if there’s a social dimension to it that I’m missing, I’m very interested in hearing more.
The minor disagreements:
To the extent that Xunzi’s work is richer than theirs, it is richer because Xunzi can build on their work. Xunzi can argue against Mozi and Mencius; Mozi and Mencius can’t argue against Xunzi.
Surely it is the case that later thinkers have an advantage over earlier thinkers. I, for example, relied on the mathematicians who worked through set theory to understand the point that “white horses are not horses,” whereas Xunzi dismisses it as unproductive sophistry.
Nevertheless, I think people do vary in both the speed and the shape of their thoughts, and this can sometimes be picked up on from the texts they write, even in the presence of other advantages. I hesitate to judge the latter across the gulfs of time and translation; it may have just been bad luck that other thinkers failed to translate as well as Xunzi. Nevertheless, the translations are what we have, and my sense is what it is, and given the agreement of someone who knew more than I it seemed worth sharing.
[And, note the corollary; given that ancient thinkers are disadvantaged in this way compared to modern thinkers, a busy reader needs special inducement to look at the past instead of a modern textbook. Sometimes it’s a desire to see the foundations; sometimes it’s a belief that times have changed and bad ideas then might have become good ideas now; sometimes it’s a glimpse of a genius making sense of another time and another place. Someone who shared my desire to read the original works from the classical period wouldn’t need my recommendation to do so, whereas someone looking for a glimpse of genius benefits from the recommendation.]
All in all, it’s an excellent way to miss out on reading the past honestly on its own terms and to not realise that there were rationalists in the past as well.
I thought it was clear in my post that I thought Xunzi had enough of rationality figured out to count as a rationalist, in a way both evident in the text and in the historical record. (Sadly, he didn’t approve of Qin, and so maybe he regrets teaching what he knew to others.)
I have more complicated thoughts about meeting the past on its own terms; it definitely has its uses, but ‘steelmanning’ is normally a different move.
Both the SEP and the IEP are freely available
As it happens, while I agree with the current (as of 2018) SEP article on Xunzi, when I first researched this I thought that SEP article badly misunderstood Xunzi’s disagreement with Mencius, in a way that made me pessimistic about reading more SEP articles about it.
Nothing, except that it stunts learning.
There are two different claims here; the first is about my (already professed) ignorance, which I agree with, and the second is about whether or not it is contagious, which I think I disagree with. That is, suppose I read all of Xunzi, and tell others to read a single chapter. This implies that the other chapters are lower value, and so some in the audience will be more willing to move on after reading that chapter; but also presumably it increases the number of people who have read that chapter, and if you picked a good one that’s worth it. And the most interested will be excited by that chapter, and then read more.
---
I so far have not had the time to write up what I like about Xunzi as a whole, and his relevance to modern institutions and individuals, and I’m not sure that I will. I’d be excited to read anything you wanted to write here on the subject, or related ones; another thing on my “someday maybe” list is the relevance of Mohism to modern utilitarianism and effective altruism.
Thank you for your generous response. Upon rereading my comment, parts of it sounded overly strident and accusatory, and I retract the tone of my comment. I was overly critical and didn’t mention the good parts of your post. I’ve edited it slightly to downplay those and have added portions to emphasise that your post is an overall good for LessWrong. There’s not enough discussion of these things, and I hope that my earlier post makes it clearer that I think your contribution is valuable.
I’d welcome anything further on these that you write here, especially the possible posts on Xunzi and Mozi! I hope my comments haven’t discouraged you. I’d like to see more of your work.
Our main disagreement
Our main disagreement perhaps came from the fact (only realised after reading your comment) that you were focusing on steelmanning the I Ching, while I focused on interpretations of Xunzi as a rationalist. Yes, I would have liked you to explain Xunzi better and more fully grapple with the philosophy in ways mentioned above. But now I realise that this wasn’t your main aim and that it was uncharitable of me to ask you to do so.
Xunzi on ritual
I’ll quote Berkson’s paper in The Dao Companion to the Philosophy of Xunzi:
Li is not merely repetitive, instrumental action (as might happen on an assembly line, or when we brush our teeth every day), but has a symbolic element. It is also essentially social, and so would not encompass what we might call “private rituals” that we create for ourselves. We do not invent li, we inherit them from the sages. By participating in and investing ourselves in the rituals, we are engaged with tradition, and in turn preserve and transmit that tradition.
[. . .]
Xunzi argues that rituals accomplish the following things—
(1) create and sustain social order, fostering right relationships with others (ritual’s ordering function);
(2) harmonize human beings with the larger natural order (ritual’s ecological function);
(3) enable the cultivation of good character in individuals, in particular virtues, right attitudes, emotions, and ways of thinking (ritual’s developmental / cultivative function);
(4) connect people with and educate them about their history and tradition (ritual’s pedagogical function);
(5) provide the means of transition from one period of life or status to another, i.e., rites of passage (enabling ritual to create a new status, an example of its performative function);
(6) allow the appropriate expression of feelings and attitudes (ritual’s expressive function); and
(7) beautify our lives (ritual’s aesthetic function, e.g., turning the act of nourishing ourselves through eating into a beautiful family meal).
[. . .]
Chapter 27 of the Xunzi is filled with examples of particular rituals. They include how one responds when being summoned by one’s superiors, what clothes are appropriate to wear given the occasion and one’s position, how ambassadors should comport themselves when on missions, words to be said at a wedding, the appropriate gifts for different occasions, and even how to stand and where to look when in the presence of others. In chapter 20, there is an extended description of a village wine ceremony.
Is ritual exclusively social? All of Xunzi’s examples of rituals are social, rituals must be socially handed down and taught, and one of their main purposes is to sustain social order. It’s not conclusive, but if rituals could be individual, it seems strange that Xunzi didn’t give a single example of one.
Our minor disagreements
The question of mental horsepower is a very subjective one. The reason I bring it up is the possibility that due to your comment readers would unfairly prefer Xunzi over other authors without knowing much about them. (“Oh, Xunzi? I’ve heard he’s good. Very rationalist. Mencius, Mozi, Laozi? Probably not so good. Vaniver doesn’t think they have as much mental horsepower.”)
I do think you read Xunzi as a rationalist. My concern was that other readers would read your post and come away with the false implicature that there were no other rationalists in China, or that no-one else considered the possibility of the I Ching being used for perspective-taking. I apologise for the phrasing of “Nothing, except that it stunts true learning.” It comes off as overly sarcastic and I’ve edited it in the original comment.
I was concerned about the mindset of readers more than their likelihood of reading Xunzi. Ignorance is not contagious, but framing is. The impression given by the post is that almost everything Xunzi says about the I Ching was said indirectly by Brian Eno. What reason, then, is there to read Xunzi? My concern is that readers would take the implicature that Xunzi adds essentially nothing new to Eno and so there’s no real reason to read Xunzi at all.
Once again, I want to reiterate that I think your post is a net good. I misunderstood what you were aiming for, and your post succeeds very well in steelmanning divination. My criticisms only relate to the parts on interpreting Xunzi. I hope that my comments came across as useful rather than dispiriting, and I hope one day I’ll be able to read your posts on Xunzi and Mozi.
Thanks for the detailed commentary, and welcome to LessWrong!
I think we have two main disagreements, and two minor ones.
First is what I set out to do, which is perhaps tied up with what I should have set out to do. I’m not trying to explain Xunzi, or even all of the I Ching; I’m trying to open a door that was rightfully closed on the likes of fortune cookies and astrology to rescue things like the I Ching, that seem superficially similar but have a real depth to them.
And, as Xunzi points out when describing the Way, “No one corner is sufficient to exhibit it fully.” If someone is going to get something real out of the I Ching, they’re going to do it through practice, not through a summary, or reading it cover to cover, and the best I can do is point at why that would be good in a way that they can see from the other side of the door.
From the shape of your disappointment, I’m guessing you wanted me to explain Xunzi more fully, instead of just making an indirect pitch, or more fully grapple with philosophy or classicism. If I were out to do the former, my preferred strategy would be to see if Hutton would let me post the entirety of his translation of Undoing Fixation (which I think is way more readable than the in-public-domain one I found). For the latter, I’ll readily admit I’m an amateur instead of an scholar, following trails as they appear and catch my interest instead of hoping for completion. I didn’t reference Wang Bi because this is the first I’ve heard of him, but I’m not surprised to hear this is an old viewpoint. [Indeed, I suspect if this sort of thing hadn’t been appreciated in Xunzi’s time by his audience, he would have written an essay about it instead of just mentioning it and moving on.]
This bears on our second disagreement, which might be illusory. I agree that ritual, in Xunzi’s conception, is primarily social instead of individual. But this isn’t exclusively the case, and my impression was that divination as performed by individuals was primarily about cultivating reflection and broadmindedness; if there’s a social dimension to it that I’m missing, I’m very interested in hearing more.
The minor disagreements:
Surely it is the case that later thinkers have an advantage over earlier thinkers. I, for example, relied on the mathematicians who worked through set theory to understand the point that “white horses are not horses,” whereas Xunzi dismisses it as unproductive sophistry.
Nevertheless, I think people do vary in both the speed and the shape of their thoughts, and this can sometimes be picked up on from the texts they write, even in the presence of other advantages. I hesitate to judge the latter across the gulfs of time and translation; it may have just been bad luck that other thinkers failed to translate as well as Xunzi. Nevertheless, the translations are what we have, and my sense is what it is, and given the agreement of someone who knew more than I it seemed worth sharing.
[And, note the corollary; given that ancient thinkers are disadvantaged in this way compared to modern thinkers, a busy reader needs special inducement to look at the past instead of a modern textbook. Sometimes it’s a desire to see the foundations; sometimes it’s a belief that times have changed and bad ideas then might have become good ideas now; sometimes it’s a glimpse of a genius making sense of another time and another place. Someone who shared my desire to read the original works from the classical period wouldn’t need my recommendation to do so, whereas someone looking for a glimpse of genius benefits from the recommendation.]
I thought it was clear in my post that I thought Xunzi had enough of rationality figured out to count as a rationalist, in a way both evident in the text and in the historical record. (Sadly, he didn’t approve of Qin, and so maybe he regrets teaching what he knew to others.)
I have more complicated thoughts about meeting the past on its own terms; it definitely has its uses, but ‘steelmanning’ is normally a different move.
As it happens, while I agree with the current (as of 2018) SEP article on Xunzi, when I first researched this I thought that SEP article badly misunderstood Xunzi’s disagreement with Mencius, in a way that made me pessimistic about reading more SEP articles about it.
There are two different claims here; the first is about my (already professed) ignorance, which I agree with, and the second is about whether or not it is contagious, which I think I disagree with. That is, suppose I read all of Xunzi, and tell others to read a single chapter. This implies that the other chapters are lower value, and so some in the audience will be more willing to move on after reading that chapter; but also presumably it increases the number of people who have read that chapter, and if you picked a good one that’s worth it. And the most interested will be excited by that chapter, and then read more.
---
I so far have not had the time to write up what I like about Xunzi as a whole, and his relevance to modern institutions and individuals, and I’m not sure that I will. I’d be excited to read anything you wanted to write here on the subject, or related ones; another thing on my “someday maybe” list is the relevance of Mohism to modern utilitarianism and effective altruism.
Thank you for your generous response. Upon rereading my comment, parts of it sounded overly strident and accusatory, and I retract the tone of my comment. I was overly critical and didn’t mention the good parts of your post. I’ve edited it slightly to downplay those and have added portions to emphasise that your post is an overall good for LessWrong. There’s not enough discussion of these things, and I hope that my earlier post makes it clearer that I think your contribution is valuable.
I’d welcome anything further on these that you write here, especially the possible posts on Xunzi and Mozi! I hope my comments haven’t discouraged you. I’d like to see more of your work.
Our main disagreement
Our main disagreement perhaps came from the fact (only realised after reading your comment) that you were focusing on steelmanning the I Ching, while I focused on interpretations of Xunzi as a rationalist. Yes, I would have liked you to explain Xunzi better and more fully grapple with the philosophy in ways mentioned above. But now I realise that this wasn’t your main aim and that it was uncharitable of me to ask you to do so.
Xunzi on ritual
I’ll quote Berkson’s paper in The Dao Companion to the Philosophy of Xunzi:
Is ritual exclusively social? All of Xunzi’s examples of rituals are social, rituals must be socially handed down and taught, and one of their main purposes is to sustain social order. It’s not conclusive, but if rituals could be individual, it seems strange that Xunzi didn’t give a single example of one.
Our minor disagreements
The question of mental horsepower is a very subjective one. The reason I bring it up is the possibility that due to your comment readers would unfairly prefer Xunzi over other authors without knowing much about them. (“Oh, Xunzi? I’ve heard he’s good. Very rationalist. Mencius, Mozi, Laozi? Probably not so good. Vaniver doesn’t think they have as much mental horsepower.”)
I do think you read Xunzi as a rationalist. My concern was that other readers would read your post and come away with the false implicature that there were no other rationalists in China, or that no-one else considered the possibility of the I Ching being used for perspective-taking. I apologise for the phrasing of “Nothing, except that it stunts true learning.” It comes off as overly sarcastic and I’ve edited it in the original comment.
I was concerned about the mindset of readers more than their likelihood of reading Xunzi. Ignorance is not contagious, but framing is. The impression given by the post is that almost everything Xunzi says about the I Ching was said indirectly by Brian Eno. What reason, then, is there to read Xunzi? My concern is that readers would take the implicature that Xunzi adds essentially nothing new to Eno and so there’s no real reason to read Xunzi at all.
Once again, I want to reiterate that I think your post is a net good. I misunderstood what you were aiming for, and your post succeeds very well in steelmanning divination. My criticisms only relate to the parts on interpreting Xunzi. I hope that my comments came across as useful rather than dispiriting, and I hope one day I’ll be able to read your posts on Xunzi and Mozi.