Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China

This book offers a new narrative and interpretative framework about the origins of moral-political philosophy that tracks how the three core 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 humans. It makes three key points. First, the central intellectual challenge during the Chinese classical period was how to negotiate the relationships between the personal, the familial, and the political domains (or between the private and the public) when philosophers were reimagining and reconceptualizing a new moral-political order, due to the collapse of the old order. Second, the competing visions 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 intellectual project during this period. Third, Zhuangzi and the Zhuangists were the outliers of the mainstream moral-political debate who rejected the very parameter of humaneness versus justice in the mainstream discourse. Zhuangzi and the Zhuangists were a lone voice advocating personal freedom. For them, the mainstream debate about humaneness and justice was intellectually banal, morally misguided, and politically dangerous.