This book rewrites the story of classical Chinese philosophy, which
has always been considered the single most creative and vibrant
chapter in the history of Chinese philosophy. Works attributed to
Confucius, Mozi, Mencius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Xunzi, Han Feizi and
many others represent the very origins of moral and political
thinking in China. As testimony to their enduring stature, in
recent decades many Chinese intellectuals, and even leading
politicians, have turned to those classics, especially Confucian
texts, for alternative or complementary sources of moral authority
and political legitimacy. Therefore, philosophical inquiries into
core normative values embedded in those classical texts are crucial
to the ongoing scholarly discussion about China as China turns more
culturally inward. It can also contribute to the spirited
contemporary debate about the nature of philosophical reasoning,
especially in the non-Western traditions. This book offers a new
narrative and interpretative framework about the origins of
moral-political philosophy that tracks how the three normative
values, humaneness, justice, and personal freedom, were formulated,
reformulated, and contested by early Chinese philosophers in their
effort to negotiate the relationship among three distinct domains,
the personal, the familial, and the political. Such efforts took
place as those thinkers were reimagining a new moral-political
order, debating its guiding norms, and exploring possible sources
within the context of an evolving understanding of Heaven and its
relationship with the humans. Tao Jiang argues that the competing
visions in that debate can be characterized as a contestation
between partialist humaneness and impartialist justice as the
guiding norm for the newly imagined moral-political order, with the
Confucians, the Mohists, the Laoists, and the so-called fajia
thinkers being the major participants, constituting the mainstream
philosophical project during this period. Thinkers lined up
differently along the justice-humaneness spectrum with earlier ones
maintaining some continuity between the two normative values (or at
least trying to accommodate both to some extent) while later ones
leaning more toward their exclusivity in the political/public
domain. Zhuangzi and the Zhuangists were the outliers of the
mainstream moral-political debate who rejected the very parameter
of humaneness versus justice in that discourse. They were a lone
voice advocating personal freedom, but the Zhuangist expressions of
freedom were self-restricted to the margins of the political world
and the interiority of one's heartmind. Such a take can shed new
light on how the Zhuangist approach to personal freedom would
profoundly impact the development of this idea in pre-modern
Chinese political and intellectual history.
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