Confucianism between the Philosophers and the Psychologists

David Brooks has a thought-provoking piece today, and the thoughts it provokes in me are about Confucianism.  It is a continuation of another of his recent articles, and is related to this review in the New York Review of Books.  All of these are about the differences between how philosophers and psychologists understand virtue and character.  In today's piece Brooks sums it up this way.  First the philosophers:

In this view, what you might call the philosopher’s view, each of us has certain ingrained character traits. An honest person will be honest most of the time. A compassionate person will be compassionate.

Versus the psychologists:

...According to the psychologist’s view, individuals don’t have one thing called character.

The psychologists say this because a century’s worth of experiments suggests that people’s actual behavior is not driven by permanent traits that apply from one context to another. Students who are routinely dishonest at home are not routinely dishonest at school. People who are courageous at work can be cowardly at church. People who behave kindly on a sunny day may behave callously the next day when it is cloudy and they are feeling glum. Behavior does not exhibit what the psychologists call “cross-situational stability.”

The psychologists thus tend to gravitate toward a different view of conduct. In this view, people don’t have one permanent thing called character. We each have a multiplicity of tendencies inside, which are activated by this or that context....

And when he holds them next to each other he comes up with this metaphor:

The philosopher’s view is shaped like a funnel. At the bottom, there is a narrow thing called character. And at the top, the wide ways it expresses itself. The psychologist’s view is shaped like an upside-down funnel. At the bottom, there is a wide variety of unconscious tendencies that get aroused by different situations. At the top, there is the narrow story we tell about ourselves to give coherence to life.

OK, so where does Confucianism fit into this picture?

Some well respected scholars suggest that Confucianism is closer to a "virtue ethics" ideal, which would place it on the philosopher's side of Brooks' distinction.  I have thought about his idea in another post (three years ago!).  But Brooks' funnel image is making think about his again.

I would like to think about how Mencius might come close to the psychologists' view; that is, he sees that, at base, we have various and contending elements to our humanity.  Of course, we must first recognize that Mencius believes that we all have within us an innately good human nature.  That is the "heart" that makes us all human:

Mencius said: "Everyone has a heart that can't bear to see others suffer..."

"Suddenly seeing a baby about to fall into a well, anyone would be heart-stricken with pity... (3.6; 2A.6)

What I want to draw out of this famous passage is the "everyone" and "anyone."  That could suggest the funnel-shaped notion of character: we all have a fundamental human character that tends toward the good, unless it is pushed toward the bad.

But Mencius is not quite that simple.  He also writes:

We each contain precious and worthless, great and small.  Never injure the great for the sake of the small or the precious for the sake of the worthless.  Small people nurture what is small in them; great people nurture what is great in them. (11.14;6A.14)

Hmmm... That seems to suggest that we have multiple (or at least dual) elements within us and that we must consciously cultivate the good in order to suppress the bad.  Might Mencius agree that, beyond small and great, worthless and precious, there could be other innate tendencies that might influence our response to the social world?  We all have good in us, but we also all have a lot of other stuff.

Of course, for Mencius, what matters, ultimately, is how we perform, how we enact our Duties according to Ritual to move toward Humanity.  If we think about our internal Duty, and if we commit ourselves, willfully, to follow it, and if we then actually do it, we will actively build character.  If you are going to claim good character you must enact it.  And if you act badly, you can always redeem yourself by looking inward, realizing your fault, and then acting correctly.  As he says:

There's only one way to know if people are good or evil: look at the choices they make. (11.14;6A.14)

But Mencius is not a psychologist.  When confronted with a sentence like: "Behavior does not exhibit what the psychologists call “cross-situational stability.”" he would respond that we should.  That is, the whole point of life is to work to stabilize our moral behavior, to find and enact the right thing an any situation.  Stability does not mean rote repetition; rather, the moral agent will discern the particulars of each situation and creatively perform the right thing for that specific context.  What is consistent is the intention and the effort, even when specific actions might vary depending on circumstance. 

That woud put Mencius, I believe, somewhere between Brooks' philosophers and psychologists: character is not existential, it is performative. It is not rooted in a single human trait but must be produced from the conscious cultivation of those good traits that all humans possess.

Comments

[Bao Pu]

Excellent post Sam :-)

I have become familiar with the situationist camp this year, and I think your "answer" that whether or not there is cross-situational stability, we should strive towards it, is a good point. Robust character traits/virtues seem to be very rare, (I think Confucians would agree), but that doesn't mean one shouldn't bother trying.

However, "If we think about our internal Duty, and if we commit ourselves, willfully, to follow it, and if we then actually do it, we will actively build character" : a Daoist might argue that this could easily turn out to be a self-delusional sham. Just because we act virtuously, doesn't mean we are genuinely virtuous. Joel Kupperman, (who has written alot about Character, Virtue Ethics, Situationist Ethics and Chinese Philosophy), has pointed out that studies do tend to suggest that Hume was correct in saying that it is most difficult to change one's established character by will.

Eric Hutton (http://www.philosophy.utah.edu/faculty/hutton/) has also written about this, e.g., a paper entitled "Character, Situationism, and Early Confucian Thought"