VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 11, SECTION 3
The Understanding of Yourself
This chapter has been taking the hard bedrock apart. The first section, language and food. The second, the reactions between people and the sense of time. This section is the close of the chapter, and it takes up the deepest and hardest layer of all. How a person sees himself, that who am I. And then it brings in Xunzi, man can form a group, the deepest root of the Chinese relational self. This is the deepest lesson.
All the layers before this, language, food, reactions, the sense of time, run together in the end into one deepest question. Who am I? How a person answers that is the deepest thing a culture carves into him. And different cultures give very different answers. Simplify it into two typical ones. One answer is, I am an independent individual. I am myself, a self-contained person with clear edges, standing on my own. My worth is in me, my choices are mine to make, my life is my own. This independent self is more common in Western culture, which stresses the individual's independence, self-rule, and uniqueness. The other answer is, I am a point in a web of relationships. Who am I? I am my parents' child, my child's parent, my friend's friend, my hometown's native son. I am defined inside these relationships. Take the relationships away, and the I can hardly be spoken at all. This relational self is more common in Chinese culture, which stresses a person's position and responsibility within the web of relationships. There is no absolute right or wrong between these two answers to who am I, no higher and no lower. They are the deepest base color of two cultures. But mark this. That base color settles, at a great depth, how you live your whole life.
Set this section on the root of the relational self, because it is the deepest hardness of Chinese culture, and it governs the life of every Chinese at a depth. A Chinese, from the day he is born, is set into a web of relationships. His name, perhaps given by an elder, carries a family's hopes. His conduct is not his own affair alone, but touches the face of the whole family. Do well, and it is that his family raised him well. Do badly, and it is that his parents failed to teach him. See how a Chinese I is bound up, from the start, with family, with hometown, with the group. His success is not his alone, it is the whole family's glory. His failure is not his alone, it is a loss of face for the group. This relational self has a warm side. You are never a lonely individual, but always inside a web that holds and warms you. Fall on hard times, and the whole web comes to help. Reach an achievement, and the whole web rejoices with you. That is the warmest side of what the Chinese call relationship. And it has a heavy side too. Because you are defined by your relations, you carry a great many responsibilities and expectations that are for others. You read a good subject at school for your parents' sake. You marry for the sake of the family line. You work yourself hard so as not to lose the family face. There are times when the relational self is heavy enough to leave a person short of breath. So the Chinese relational self has a warm belonging in it and a heavy burden both, two sides of one body, and this is the deepest base color of Chinese life.
The root of this relational self was carried to its depth by Xunzi, two thousand three hundred years ago. In one of his writings he asked a sharp question. A man is not as strong as an ox, and not as fast as a horse, so why is it that the man can make the ox and the horse serve him? And Xunzi's answer was three words. Man can group. An ox or a horse, one on one, may be stronger or faster, but they cannot, the way a man can, organize themselves into a society, a body of many together. A man's strength is not in the single man. It is in that he can group, can organize the many into one whole, and the power of that whole runs far past any single one. So from the very start Xunzi did not see a man as an isolated individual. He saw him as a being that can group. The heart of what a man is does not lie in the lonely I, but in the group, in living together with others. This man can group is the deepest root, in thought, of the Chinese relational self. Why do Chinese care so much about relationship, about the group, about the web? Because ever since Xunzi, our culture's understanding of man was never that of an isolated individual, but of a being that lives inside relationship and group. And Xunzi did not stop at man can group. He asked deeper. How is a man able to group? What does it rest on, to organize the many into an orderly whole instead of a chaos? And his answer comes back to that word from the last section. Ritual, and righteousness. It rests on ritual and righteousness to divide up each person's position and responsibility, the dividing from the second chapter. So the whole line of Xunzi's thought runs like this. Man can group, and the group needs dividing, and the dividing rests on ritual and righteousness. And that is exactly the backbone of Chinese culture. A relational self, living inside a group, held in order by ritual and righteousness. The credit is Xunzi's.
One thing has to be made clear. In speaking of the independent self and the relational self, there is no absolute higher and lower. Each has its strength and its weakness. The independent self's strength is that individual freedom and creativity are easily set loose. Its weakness is that the individual is easily left isolated and lonely, short of support. The relational self's strength is that the web gives warm support, so that the individual is never alone. Its weakness is that the individual is easily bound by the web of relations, and hard put to be wholly free. It is not that this one is good and that one bad. They are two different choices of two cultures. Why does it matter to see this clearly? Because only by seeing the base color of your own can you understand the root of the many things you do that feel natural. A Chinese, understanding that his self is a relational self, understands why he cares so much what others think, why he finds it so hard to refuse people, why he carries his family's expectations so heavily. It is not that you are not independent enough. It is that this is the base color your culture gave you. See it, and on that base you can choose better, keeping the warmth of the web while loosening, where it fits, the part of the burden that is too heavy to carry. That is what it means to see your base color. Not to deny it, but on seeing it clearly, to live a little freer.
That closes the eleventh chapter. Pull together what it has set down. The hard bedrock, taken apart layer by layer. Language and food, culture's first hardness, reaching into dreams and into the taste of childhood. The reactions between people and the sense of time, a deeper layer, where Confucius, without learning ritual you have no way to stand, makes ritual a person's footing in the world. And the deepest, who am I, the Chinese relational self, whose root is Xunzi's man can group, and whose backbone is a relational self living inside a group held in order by ritual and righteousness. That is the eleventh stake this chapter drives. Culture's hard bedrock runs from the shallow to the deep, from language and food, to the reactions between people and the sense of time, to who am I, and the deepest is that relational self. This whole set of hardnesses, layer over layer, builds one complete cultural person.
So this bedrock, so hard and so deep, how exactly does it get handed to the next generation? How does it become second nature, hard enough to reach into the cells, into the very seed of a person? The next chapter brings in Xunzi's word wei, the working of culture upon nature, and the handing down that runs unbroken from one generation straight to the next, and looks at how this bedrock is hard all the way into the cells, and hard into a seed. See you in the next chapter.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.