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Thesis Dai Zhen was right: moral principle used to crush desire is itself a cruelty

Lin Pei-shan Fellow
· 5 replies
Moral psychologyChineseConfucianismNeo-ConfucianismDai ZhenMencius#desire#li-and-qi#moral-repression#moralism
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Where it stands

My students memorise Zhu Xi for their exams, and one slogan of the Cheng–Zhu school always sticks: preserve heavenly principle, eliminate human desires. They write it down without blinking.

Dai Zhen (1724–1777) blinked. A Qing scholar trained in the philological methods of evidential learning, he wrote An Evidential Study of the Meaning of Terms in the Mencius in large part as an attack on that slogan. His argument, roughly: li, principle, is not a thing lodged in us apart from our feelings and desires. It is what our feelings and desires look like when they are rightly ordered, when my wish to eat and live is extended into concern that others eat and live too. A doctrine that teaches people to treat their desires as enemies does not make them good. It makes them miserable, and it hands a weapon to the powerful. He complained that superiors use "principle" to condemn inferiors, and that while people pity those who die under harsh law, nobody pities those killed by principle.

I want to defend the strong version: moralism that suppresses desire is not merely a mistaken theory. It is a harm, a form of cruelty, and the people who suffer it most are always the ones with least power to talk back.

Objections welcome, especially from people who love Zhu Xi more than I do.

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5 replies

For the thesis 2

  1. Martín Iriarte

    For Fellow

    The reader of Freud in me is entirely with Pei-shan. Freud spent the later part of his career arguing, in Civilization and Its Discontents and elsewhere, that the renunciation civilisation demands has a price, paid in neurosis and in aggression turned inward. Dai Zhen saw the moral and political version of the same thing a century and a half earlier. Desire that is condemned does not vanish. It returns in other forms, often crueller ones.

    Helpful · 2
  2. Elif Yıldız

    For Fellow

    There is also experimental support, for what it is worth. The classic thought-suppression studies, where people are asked not to think about a white bear, found that suppression can make the unwanted thought come back more often afterwards. It's a long way from white bears to Qing family morality, but the pattern fits Dai Zhen better than his opponents.

    Helpful · 3

Against the thesis 2

  1. Ji-woo Ryu

    Against Fellow

    The Korean tradition I teach follows Zhu Xi, so let me defend him. When Zhu Xi speaks of eliminating human desires, he does not mean all desire. Wanting food when hungry is not the problem. The target is selfish desire, desire that has gone beyond its proper measure. Toegye and his successors were very careful about this. Dai Zhen is attacking a vulgarised version of Zhu Xi, the one used in exam halls and family courts, not the philosopher.

    Helpful · 1
  2. Henrike Vogel

    Against Fellow

    Kant is often accused of the same crime, and he is not guilty of it either. He does not say inclinations are evil. He says that the moral worth of an act lies in its being done from duty, which is compatible with enjoying it.

    My worry about Dai Zhen is different. If principle is just desire "rightly ordered", who decides what rightly ordered means? The same people with power. He has moved the danger, not removed it.

Other replies

  1. Lin Pei-shan

    Fellow

    Ji-woo, I accept the correction about Zhu Xi himself. And Henrike, your question is fair. So, revised: the cruelty Dai Zhen saw lies in principle once it has been separated from feeling and placed in the hands of those who judge others. His remedy was to keep principle answerable to the desires of ordinary people, to ask of any rule whether it lets people live. That is not a complete answer to "who decides", but it says which way to look.

    Helpful · 1