Abstract
This essay explores Xunzi’s understanding of ritual and shows how he responded to the challenges he faced both from critics and from what he believed were popular misunderstandings of ritual. His response, as I describe it, involves a number of related sophisticated philosophical positions that I label as “meta-level awareness and reflexivity,” “participant-observer consciousness,” and “symbolic realism.” The essay focuses on Xunzi’s powerful description of the Confucian death rituals and puts Xunzi in conversation on the one hand with critics of ritual, such as Sigmund Freud, James Harold, and Howard Curzer, and on the other hand with those whose work resonates with Xunzi’s, such as Robert Bellah and Roy Rappaport. I argue that because Xunzi demonstrates how to reinterpret rituals away from supernaturalism and literalism—which he considered misguided and potentially harmful—and toward the beautiful and sacred realm of the symbolic, his hermeneutic approach can contribute significantly to contemporary ritual theory and can speak to many people who find themselves alienated from the rituals of their traditions.
Parts of this chapter appeared in the volume Ritual and Religion in the Xunzi, edited by T.C. Kline III and Justin Tiwald (Kline and Tiwald 2014). Reprinted here with the permission of SUNY Press.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
All citations from the work of Roy Rappaport come from his remarkable final work, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Rappaport 1999). Rappaport opens his book with a statement that illustrates the way in which his view is grounded in a picture of humanity that he shares with Xunzi. He writes that humanity is “a species that lives, and can only live, in terms of meanings it must construct in a world devoid of intrinsic meaning but subject to physical law” (Rappaport 1999: 1).
- 2.
Belief in the existence of ghosts and spirits was not only held by the “unsophisticated,” but was also given philosophical justifications by sophisticated thinkers like Mozi .
- 3.
Analects 10.12; much of Book 10 of the Analects provides illustrations of how Confucius conducted himself in a variety of situations
- 4.
The realm of understanding and knowledge is particularly important in Xunzi’s vision of li, as we will see; while both the common people and sages follow ritual, only the sages understand it.
- 5.
See Ivanhoe 2014.
- 6.
For a sensitive treatment of death rituals in the Xunzi, see Yearley 1995: 14–18.
- 7.
- 8.
This is true of all feelings, including the love for others. If uncultivated, even love for a child can lead to unethical action (e.g., undermining the career of another so as to help your child advance). This is why ritual cultivation of all feelings is necessary. See Hutton 2000.
- 9.
In this section and elsewhere, I point to similarities between Xunzi and Freud using terms like “pathology” or “symbolic object.” Some might question the justifiability of comparisons framed in such terms: e.g., does Xunzi have any notion corresponding precisely to “pathology” or “symbolic object”? I offer two responses here. First, I believe that in some cases, as with “symbolic object,” Xunzi does have terms to indicate virtually the same idea (he indicates the symbolic use of something with the word xiang 象—see below on p. 251), though he advocates a very different use of symbols than Freud. Second, in cases with no precise analogue in Xunzi, such as “pathology,” I believe that the concepts exist in Xunzi even without the exact word: for instance, Xunzi does believe that some ways of thinking, feeling and acting are potentially harmful to oneself (or others). See also Van Norden (2007: 21–23), who calls the notion that the lack of an exact word in a language (or the work of a particular author) indicates the lack of the concept “the lexical fallacy,” and gives other examples of authors who have no term for concept X, yet clearly have the concept.
- 10.
- 11.
For a discussion of these tensions in Melanesian funeral rites, see Malinowski 1948: 30.
- 12.
This notion of ambivalence can be seen in the common Chinese belief in the two-part nature of the soul. One part, the po 魄, represents the aspect of death as threatening, disintegrating and earthbound (it is the yin 陰 component, associated with gui 鬼 “ghost”), while the other, hun 魂, represents the ongoing connection with the family, the surviving “spirit” of the deceased (it is the yang 陽 component, associated with shen 神 “spirit”). It makes sense, then, that the former resides in the earthly grave and must be propitiated and the latter, associated with the heavenly realm, is thanked and honored. See Thompson 1979: 11, 19 and 47. See also Schipper 1993: 36.
- 13.
Rosemary Gordon examines the human response to the sight of an inert body where there was once an animated, loved human being, making the dead an “absent presence.” See Gordon 1978: 21.
- 14.
One of the most thoughtful early anthropological studies of secondary burials is Hertz 1960. Hertz demonstrates that one way in which death is represented is through certain ways of handling and manipulating the remains of the dead.
- 15.
One patient who suffered from prolonged grief disorder and successfully sought help said of the treatment, “It really gave me my life back” (apud Schumer 2009). Harold’s emphasis on the essential importance of grief, rather than on the healthy functioning of the whole person, would deprive an individual of the chance to “get her life back.”
- 16.
A key difference between the critique of Harold 2011 and the analysis of Seligman et al. 2008 is that the latter advocate less emphasis on sincerity and more on ritual participation. The sincerity that Harold 2011 strives to preserve is considered by Seligman et al. 2008 to be overemphasized and problematic in our culture.
- 17.
This is related to the problem of the role of theoretically-informed thought in other sensory experiences, such as listening to music. It seems as if someone who sits through a Beethoven symphony continuously thinking about the structure of the symphony or its position in Beethoven’s larger oeuvre misses a lot in the performance. In a sense, they are not fully present, are not focused on the music as it is being played. On the other hand, a listener who simply experiences the notes in a moment-to-moment, ongoing succession, decontextualized from the larger structure, has an impoverished experience as well. Appreciation of things that are complex takes time, repeated experience, and expanded awareness. This involves (but is not limited to) a perspective informed by theoretical knowledge. So I would hold that at the highest levels, listening to great music, like participating in ritual activity, involves not simply a deep moment-to-moment sensuous absorption, but also a theoretical awareness (though not necessarily the activity of discursive thinking itself).
- 18.
The literalist-supernaturalist delusion can, in extreme cases, lead to inhuman acts, a notable example being that of “accompaniment burials.” Xunzi thoroughly condemns the practice, whereby a powerful figure, normally a ruler of great stature, would be buried alongside an accompanying subterranean retinue (e.g., soldiers, loyal servants, concubines), members of which were “sacrificed” (in theory willingly) for this purpose. The practice was based on a belief that the spirit of the deceased entered the next world bearing with him the objects and people put with him in the grave. This is why great wealth, horses, and clothing were buried alongside rulers—they would need them. Xunzi, who emphasizes in his discussion of altered objects that these items are to be taken symbolically, not literally, addresses the practice by writing, “To execute the living so that they can escort the dead is termed ‘predation’” (HKCS 19/96/1; K III.68–69, 19.8; W 109). The inexcusable practice is based on a misguided supernaturalism.
- 19.
John Bowker explains Freud’s word choice: “The words ‘as if’ have a very precise context in Freud’s argument. The words ‘as if’ belonged, in his time, to a technical philosophical position, the als ob of Vaihinger , but Freud took Vaihinger’s ‘as if’ as a basic example of the defect and error of religious belief in general. But in fact what happened, at least in part, was that he extrapolated a specialized issue in the philosophy of knowledge into a general definition of the illusory nature of religious belief: religion is clearly false, but it serves practical purposes” (Bowker 1991: 15).
- 20.
Yearley writes that “for Xunzi, many religious activities are ‘necessary fictions’” (Yearley 1995: 18).
- 21.
See Campany ’s discussion of this passage in Campany 1992: 211ff.
- 22.
From a private communication. I am indebted to T.C. Kline III for this point.
- 23.
As Emil Benveniste observes, the entire process of psychoanalysis operates through language which “is nothing but symbolism” (Benveniste 1971: 73).
- 24.
I thank Chris Jochim for pointing me to the Bellah article.
- 25.
Bellah argues that while scientific symbols are those which express the nature of objects, religious symbols are those which “express the feelings, values and hopes of subjects, or which organize and regulate the flow of interaction between subjects and objects, or which attempt to sum up the whole subject-object complex, or even point to the context or ground of that whole. These symbols too express reality” (Bellah 1970: 93).
- 26.
Actually, as Bellah 1970 points out, Freud really did understand the power of symbols—after all, in order to explain one of his most important discoveries, he uses a myth—that of Oedipus. He employs the mythic language of struggle between eros and thanatos; and his therapy emphasizes the exploration of dreams—an implicit recognition that symbols are important in the process of healing. Yet he aimed to go behind the symbols to unmask the psychic forces that produce them, never seeing, as Jung did, the therapeutic power of the symbols themselves. Xunzi sees how ritual symbols can shape disordered, potentially destructive impulses into something harmonious and beautiful; to create ordered individuals and communities out of potential chaos. Freud thinks that the complete harmonization of our emotions and impulses is impossible, and that conflict among them, and the repression of some of them, are inevitable. In Civilization and its Discontents, he argues that people can never be fully at home in society, as membership in any community requires the repression of some of our instincts and desires.
- 27.
I am indebted to Laura Medin for this point.
- 28.
Freud questions the very notion of “higher-order” goods, stating that the beauty of a religious ritual or a work of art is a pale substitute for what we really want: satisfaction of our sexual or aggressive desires. I would suggest, however, that these are distinct orders of human satisfaction, that the aesthetic or religious is not merely a culturally acceptable substitute for the sexual, and that however much sexual gratification a person gets, his or her life would still lack something vital without ritual and art.
- 29.
Xunzi frequently employs words with a strong aesthetic dimension: mei 美 (“beauty”), ya 雅 (“elegance”), wen 文 (“cultural ornamentation”), fa 法 (“model ”), etc. For example, Xunzi writes, “If there were no conscious activity , then human nature would have no way to beautify itself” (HKCS 19/95/1–2, W 106).
- 30.
Information about the experiment can be found on Zimbardo’s website about it, http://www.prisonexp.org/.
- 31.
Guido Fackler writes of music in WWII concentration camps, “Music gave the prisoners consolation, support and confidence; it reminded them of their earlier lives; it provided diversion and entertainment; and it helped them to articulate their feelings and to deal with the existential threat of their situation emotionally and intellectually. Even the least conspicuous ways of making music took on a deep significance in the concentration camp” (Fackler 2007: 12–13). See also Berkowitz 1979.
- 32.
Research in recent decades shows that Xunzi is certainly wrong about the lack of these dimensions in non-human animals . But his error, which is shared by countless thinkers in the West (some of them still active), does not affect his overall argument. One need not defend a picture of human exceptionalism in order to make the case that these aspects of life are profoundly important to humans.
- 33.
Ironically, it is the Utilitarian Mozi who advocates the strongest form of obeying one’s superior in a hierarchy.
- 34.
This is one of the points made by Metzger 1986.
- 35.
Eric Hutton, private correspondence.
- 36.
Ted Slingerland has rightly argued against John Knoblock’s claim that at Xunzi’s hands, “ritual became a secular matter detached from the religious system that produced it” (Slingerland 1998: 385). As Slingerland emphasizes, demythologization (demystification) is not the same as secularization. In fact, what makes Xunzi so appealing for our time is that he showed how to reinterpret the tradition (away from supernaturalism and literalism) while retaining its deeply “religious” nature. (On the use of the term “religious” to describe Confucians, see Berkson 1999: 357–70.)
- 37.
This creation was the act of the sage kings; but a re-creation occurs with each performance of the li.
Bibliography
Bell, Catherine. 1992. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bellah, Robert. 1970. “Christianity and Symbolic Realism,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 9(2): 89–96. (An introduction to the concept of “symbolic realism” that serves as a critique of “symbolic reductionism” and suggests a way to avoid the division between the “religious” and the “scientific.”)
Benveniste, Emile. 1971. Problems in General Linguistics. Trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek. Coral Gables: University of Miami Press.
Berkowitz, Eliezer. 1979. With God in Hell: Judaism in the Ghettos and Deathcamps. New York: Sahhedrin Press.
Berkson, Mark. 1999. “Death and the Self in Ancient Chinese Thought: A Comparative Perspective.” PhD diss., Stanford University.
Bowker, John. 1991. The Meanings of Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Campany, Robert. 1992. “Xunzi and Durkheim as Theorists of Ritual Practice.” In Discourse and Practice, ed. Frank Reynolds and David Tracy. Albany: SUNY Press. (An examination of the theorist/practitioner and outsider/insider distinctions through a comparison of Xunzi and Durkheim.)
Curzer, Howard. 2012. “Contemporary Rituals and the Confucian Tradition: A Critical Discussion.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 39(2): 290–309. (A thought-provoking critique of Xunzi’s approach to ritual from a variety of perspectives, including Existentialist, Liberal and Utilitarian views.)
Fackler, Guido. 2007. “Music in Concentration Camps, 1933–1945.” Trans. Peter Logan. Music and Politics 1(1): 1–24.
Freud, Sigmund. 1959. “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 11, ed. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis.
Freud, Sigmund. 1963. “Obsessive Acts and Religious Practices.” Trans. R.C. McWatters. In Character and Culture, ed. Philip Rieff. New York: Collier Books. (One of Freud’s earliest writings on religion, this essay compares ritual with neurosis, and concludes that religious ritual is a shared “obsessional neurosis.” It is interesting to read this in light of Xunzi’s chapter 21, “Dispelling Obsession.”)
Freud, Sigmund. 1964. The Future of an Illusion. Trans. W.D. Robson-Scott. New York: Anchor Books.
Freud, Sigmund. 1989. An Outline of Psychoanalysis. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton.
Freud, Sigmund. 2008. “Mourning and Melancholia.” In General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology. New York: Touchstone/Simon and Schuster. (Freud lays out his picture of the process of mourning and contrasts this with pathological forms of melancholia.)
Gordon, Rosemary. 1978. Dying and Creating: A Search for Meaning. London: Society of Analytical Psychology.
Gross, Rita. 1998. “Helping the Iron Bird Fly: Western Buddhist Women and Issues of Authority in the Late 1990’s.” In The Faces of Buddhism in America, ed. Charles S. Prebish and Kenneth Tanaka. Berkeley: University of California Press. (An exploration of the notion of authority in Western Buddhism that contains a thoughtful defense of certain forms of religious hierarchy.)
Harold, James. 2011. “Is Xunzi’s Virtue Ethics Susceptible to the Problem of Alienation?” Dao 10(1): 71–84. (An in-depth analysis of the relationship between emotions and moral obligations in Xunzi, as well as an argument that Xunzi’s approach to ritual risks alienation in ritual participants.)
Hardt, Dale. 1979. Death: The Final Frontier. Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice Hall
He, Liankui 何聯奎 and Wei Huilin 衛惠林. 1956. Taiwan fengtu zhi 臺灣風土志. Taipei: Zhonghua Shuju 中華書局.
Hertz, Robert. 1960. “A Contribution to the Study of the Collective Representation of Death.” In Death and the Right Hand, trans. Rodney Needham and Claudia Needham. Glencoe, IL.: Free Press.
Hutton, Eric. 2000. “Does Xunzi Have a Consistent Theory of Human Nature?” In Virtue, Nature, and Moral Agency in the Xunzi, ed. T.C. Kline III and P.J. Ivanhoe. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing.
Hutton, Eric. 2014. Xunzi: The Complete Text. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ivanhoe, P.J. 2014. “A Happy Symmetry: Xunzi’s Ecological Ethic.” In Kline and Tiwald 2014. (A reflection on the way that Xunzi’s thought aims not only for social harmony, but also for a harmonious relation with the larger natural world, which results in a Confucian environmental ethic.)
Kline, T.C., III, and Justin Tiwald, eds. 2014. Ritual and Religion in the Xunzi. Albany: SUNY Press. (A collection of essays demonstrating the way that Xunzi’s critical, philosophical positions are located within a compelling religious vision.)
Lau, D.C. 1970. Mencius. New York: Penguin Books.
Lau, D.C. 1979. The Analects. New York: Penguin Books.
Lifton, Robert. 1983. The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life. New York: Basic Books. (A thought-provoking look at the role death plays in human psychology, and the way that the symbolizing imagination enables humans to develop notions of life continuity beyond death.)
Lipson, Channing. 1983. “Denial and Mourning.” In The Interpretation of Death, ed. Hendrik Ruitenbeek. New York, Jason Aronson.
Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1948. Magic, Science, and Religion and Other Essays. New York: Free Press.
Metzger, Thomas. 1986. Escape from Predicament: Neo-Confucianism and China’s Evolving Political Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.
McGrath, Alister. 2006. The Twilight of Atheism. New York: Doubleday. (A history and critique of atheism among influential Western thinkers like Nietzsche, Freud and Marx, and an examination of both the strengths and limitations of their arguments.)
Paper, Jordan, and Lawrence Thompson, eds. 1998. The Chinese Way in Religion. New York: Wadsworth Publishing.
Rappaport, Roy. 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A magisterial, multidisciplinary treatment of the way that ritual makes us human, and a reflection on how ritual and religion can be reconciled with science and will continue to be important in the postmodern world.)
Rosenblatt, Paul, and Patricia Walsh and Douglas Jackson. 1976. Grief and Mourning in Cross-Cultural Perspective. New Haven, CT.: HRAF Press. (A comprehensive review of mourning and death rituals in cultures around the world, examining themes that emerge across cultures as well as the differences that highlight the varying ways human beings approach mortality.)
Schipper, Kristofer. 1993. The Taoist Body. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Schumer, Fran. 2009. “After a Death, the Pain that Doesn’t Go Away.” New York Times, 9/29/2009, D1.
Seligman, Adam, and Robert Weller, Michael Puett, and Bennett Simon. 2008. Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity. New York: Oxford University Press. (An insightful and challenging look at the ways that ritual creates imaginative “as if” realms that help human beings flourish in a fragmented world; the text looks at the connection of ritual, play and creativity, and contrasts the focus on ritual with perspectives based on a problematic notion of “sincerity.”)
Slingerland, Edward G. 1998. “Effortless Action: Wu-wei as a Spiritual Ideal in Early China.” PhD diss., Stanford University. (An excellent study of the concept of wuwei in both Confucian and Daoist thought using conceptual metaphor analysis, and the applications of the notion of effortless action to our contemporary lives.)
Stafford-Clark, David. 1997. What Freud Really Said. New York: Schocken Books.
Storr, Anthony. 1993. The Dynamics of Creation. New York: Ballantine Books.
Thompson, Lawrence. 1979. Chinese Religion. New York: Wadsworth Publishing.
Timmerman, Gayle M., and Adama Brown. 2012. “The Effect of a Mindful Restaurant Eating Intervention on Weight Management in Women.” Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior 44(1): 22–28.
Trilling, Lionel. 1951. “Freud and Literature.” In The Liberal Imagination. London: Secker and Warburg.
Van Norden, Bryan. 2007. Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early Chinese Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Vohs, Kathleen D., and Yajin Wang, Francesca Gino, and Michael I. Norton. 2013. “Rituals Enhance Consumption,” in Psychological Science 20(10): 1–8. Accessed online at http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/07/17/0956797613478949.full.
Watson, Burton, trans. 2003. Xunzi: Basic Writings. New York: Columbia University Press.
Yearley, Lee H. 1995. “Facing our Frailty: Comparative Religious Ethics and the Confucian Death Rituals” In The Gross Memorial Lecture. Valparaiso, IN: Valparaiso University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Berkson, M. (2016). Xunzi as a Theorist and Defender of Ritual. In: Hutton, E. (eds) Dao Companion to the Philosophy of Xunzi. Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7745-2_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7745-2_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-017-7743-8
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-7745-2
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)