Dr. Alexus McLeod at Central APA

“Jia Yi and Lu Jia on Shame, Self-Cultivation, and Social Order”

Abstract:
Confucius’ claim in Analects 2.3 that guiding people with virtue (de 德) and ritual (li 禮) is better than guiding them with laws and punishments because it creates a sense of shame (chi 恥) and leads people to order themselves has been widely discussed by the later Confucian tradition, and by contemporary philosophers. The connection of self-cultivation to orderly government is a central theme in Confucianism in general. However, it is not altogether clear how a cultivation of shame in the people through de and li (by the ruler) and the resulting self-cultivation efforts are supposed to lead to order in the state, based on what we find in the Analects alone. Although Mencius and Xunzi both offer accounts of the connection of self-cultivation to order in the state, in the Han dynasty we see a different account of how the ruler initiates self-cultivation, and how this is effective in producing ethically positive behaviors leading to the orderly state. The early Western Han thinkers Jia Yi (200-168 BCE) and Lu Jia (d. 170 BCE) offer similar explanations of the efficacy of virtue and ritual, and that of shame. I examine here the views of these two as a way to explain how the shame in Analects 2.3 might operate (both how it is produced and how it is effective in bringing about social order). I consider whether this is a plausible way to ensure ethical behavior on a large scale and to keep political order. In specific, I argue that the accounts of Jia and Lu are based on a dual-aspect view of ethical cultivation that requires both selective punishment by rulers (only in certain segments of the society) and modeling on exemplars. I argue that this view may ultimately turn out to be more plausible than either the Mencian or Xunzian accounts of the link between self-cultivation and social order, as it combines features of the Mencian internalist and Xunzian externalist accounts of self-cultivation, more clearly specifies the ruler’s role in the process, and gives us a more detailed (and psychologically plausible) account of how shame produces social order, which relies in part on visible disparities between the ruler’s response to shameful behaviors of ministers and to those of the people in general (shu ren 庶人).