Yang Chu on Non-Violence: "We Are Bodies"

A Philosopher of the Body Versus the Philosophers of the State

The following essay is a continuation of the Book Review of "The Many Lives of Yang Zhu"

Jason Gregory, an author who writes about Daoist philosophy, credits Yang Zhu with inventing a philosophy of the body that served as a foundation for the martial arts. He accentuates that an effortless mind is necessary in martial arts. When Yang Zhu says that we are bodies, he is also saying that we are individuals, that we are real, and there are many other pragmatic and ethical repercussions. In this essay, I am interested in evaluating the philosophical and political repercussions of taking the body as our ultimate ontology.

Wei-wo: For Oneself

One of the main teachings of Yang Chu had to do with self-preservation. He argued that people should behave naturally, and that it is natural for an embodied being to wish to protect their body, and in general to seek pleasure and live and act for oneself (wei-wo). He argued that if all beings live and act for themselves, society would run smoothly. 

While some who are hostile to Yang Chu have considered his teaching anti-social and misanthropic, others have argued that a Yangist will naturally want to see others being happy and seeking pleasure, and that in this way Yangist philosophy leads to a better and more altruistic society (where altruism is the desire for the pleasure of others).

I believe that it is a mistake to claim that wei-wo and altruism are necessarily mutually contradictory. If the voluptuary wants pleasure for others too, then he is moral, even if he is not a moralist.

For some context: Yang Chu lived during the Warring States period of Chinese history. The parallels with the Hellenistic Era and the struggles for power among states are many. Master Yang used the wei-wo (for oneself) argument to resist the practice of warlords of recruiting young men into their army, often to fight petty wars for expansion of territory. Many young Chinese men died needlessly in these conflicts, which had nothing to do with them in most cases. 

In order to avoid these recruitment drives, people began to move away from urban spaces and into rural spaces, away from the cities and states that were in conflict. This led to the period of the “seven sages of the bamboo grove”. These were antinomian philosophers, artists, musicians (some of their compositions are still on record and are among the oldest known Chinese classics) who were heavily influenced by Taoist philosophy in general, and by Yang Chu in particular, and who ran away to the Bamboo Grove (a type of Daoist “Epicurean” Garden) in order to evade military recruitment.

The Yang-Mo Trope

Outside of the seventh chapter of Liezi, one of the main sources for Yang Chu is hostile and is only tangentially helpful to us. During the Warring States period, many philosophies were competing for hegemony. Confucianism (and, later, Taoism and Buddhism) ended up becoming the dominant ideology. During this period, the Confucian philosopher Mencius used Yang as “the radical egoist” and Mo as “the radical altruist”, and often compared them so as to disparage both of them and to present his own school as the middle and correct way. The Yang-Mo trope became a mechanism to discard all the other opinions so as to dismiss them more easily.

Yang-Mo (that is, the pleasure-seeking Yangists on the one hand, and on the other hand the “altruistic” Mohists who practice philosophy for the state or collective, rather than for the benefit of the individual) were punching bags for the Confucians. Persistent and unfair comparisons with Mo created an over-simplified portrayal of Yang as “selfish” as opposed to the “impartial love” of Mo and the hierarchical, conservative standards of the Confucians (which Mencius, of course, favored and considered correct). 

This is not to say that Yang and Mo were not obviously rivals. For instance, while criticizing Mo’ impartial love (page 238 of “The Many Lives of Yang Chu”), Yang Chu said that we must preserve nature (and that, therefore, impartial love is unnatural), that we should maintain the authentic (and that, ergo, impartial love is inauthentic), and that we should not allow outer objects to burden our bodies.

I read in the Yang-Mo trope a persistent tension between extremes of egoism and altruism, and Confucian attempts to find what they considered a healthy medium that served all of Chinese culture. Many opponents of Yang Chu and Mozi still argue that some modern secularists and atheists are modern Yangists, and that Christians are the modern followers of Mozi.

The Yang-Mo trope led to the categorization of Yang Zhu as an “ethical egoist” (for instance, in Yang Zhu’s over-simplified wikipedia essay), which also says he is “credited with the discovery of the body” as a philosophical concept. The essay then goes on to accentuate (the Confucian philosopher) Mencius’ views on Master Yang, which are heavily tinged with the interests of the ancient Chinese state. Like Epicurus, Yang Zhu was indifferent or hostile to the polis / state.

According to Mencius, "Yang's principle is, 'Each for himself'—which does not acknowledge the claims of the sovereign. 

Mencius constantly contrasts Mo’s “love all equally” and Yang’s self-love with the hierarchical Confucian ideal, so as to present Confucianism as the correct middle way.

In my view, Mencius and the Confucians represent the demands of education and culture, while Yang Zhu represents nature, and his idea of self-preservation is Darwinian and reminds us of selfish genes, and the Mohists represent collectivist demands for the self-sacrifice of the individual.

Hence, Yang Zhu is (together with others) accused by an opponent of being “wild and without rules” (page 24), and by another opponent of proposing a doctrine on “having no ruler” (page 167). Elsewhere, the accusations are mixed with praise. Confucians claim that Yang supposedly may contribute to diminishing benevolence (ren), and yet even Confucians claim to have benefited from Yang’s parrhesia (frank criticism) when they attribute to him yi (righteousness) for caring for the body. This means that even the enemies of Yang Zhu recognized that a sense of right is born of the body.

Confucius himself acted according to Yang Zhu on at least one important (and celebrated) occasion. Confucius convinced the king to abolish the barbaric practice of having the wives and slaves of the king buried with him. This reflects Yang’s defense of bodily autonomy, although Confucians will likely deny or begrudge this influence.

On the Moral Problems of War

Men in battle die like cattle. - Philodemus of Gadara

It seems natural that people who wish to live pleasantly and correctly will not want to spend their lives at war. Resistance against state violence, and in general the non-violent ethos of Principal Doctrine 31, make sense within the context of wanting to live pleasantly and correctly. On their face, peace seems naturally choice-worthy and conflict seems avoidance-worthy.

The book mentions a concept that reminds me of hedonic calculus that can be applied to war: quan, which translates as expediency, weighting, and this was used by Mencius to justify warfare. Yang Zhu rejects this, and the use of “benevolence” to justify war. The bottom line is that Yang Zhu was useless to the warlord / king, since his philosophy did not justify his ambitions. Yang doubts or distrusts state propaganda and does not wish his ideas to serve that purpose. On the other hand, it seems like to Mencius, “the right path” might be whatever the king says, and philosophy must be used to justify war and conquest if this is what the king demands. In page 84-85 of “The Many Lives of Yang Chu”, we see again that intellectuals were only valued if the state profited from them.

This caught my attention because in the book The Faith of Epicurus, by Ben Farrington, the author argued that the tyranny and abuse that Epicurus’ generation witnessed coming from the Greek states was sanctioned and inspired by Plato. Like the Confucians and Mohists were doing in China, the Platonists in the West were peddling beliefs that led to and justified mass slaughter, authoritarianism, and cruelty. Farrington argued–with multiple case studies–that Plato’s school had produced many tyrants, and that “Plato had a brutality that Epicurus found offensive”.

The Confucian propagandists like Mencius claimed that ren (benevolence) and yi (rightness) are out of balance in the Yang-Mo schools, and that there is some kind of happy medium embodied in Confucianism. But when we consider the historical forces involved in the controversy, and that Yangist anti-military stances are at the heart of these arguments, we see that this really means that the Confucians thought that the other schools were not useful to the state because they refused to justify involvement in war to conquer more states.

Yangists and Mohists both criticized warfare. For this reason, the Chinese state did not favor them or choose them as official philosophers, as they did not produce a philosophy of the polis or of the ruling class. We find their concrete arguments in page 50 of the book. (The Confucian) Mencius promotes war for unification under the pretext of solving constant interstate wars, while Yang Zhu argues that wars would naturally stop if no one sacrificed one’s own physical integrity or life by participating in wars, and Mozi argued that wars would stop if everyone was willing to care for others and sacrifice themselves to stop wars.

History Redeems Yang Zhu

(Japanese scholar) Takase perhaps made the most advance in the study of Yang Chu, equating him with Nietzsche (page 248), ignoring what he said about the body, and focusing on criticizing his egoism. His opponent “Kato denied the value of extreme altruism since it tended to destroy the psychological basis that assured the principle of individual independence” (page 247).

However, Takase died in 1950, around the 2nd World War. Precisely around that time, the Japanese state collapsed due to its military excesses. Thousands of his fellow Japanese men gave their bodies for the emperor (for a dramatic insight into this episode of history, see the video Last words of a kamikaze suicide pilot) after being brainwashed into the state ideology of Japan. Had the kamikaze followed Yang’s wisdom and doctrine, they would have refused to participate in the cruelty and power-hunger of the emperor. Ideas have pragmatic and historical repercussions. Fortunately, the horrors of the second World War brought an awakening among the Japanese population, and Japan today has moved away from these types of ideology.

This concludes the second part of my book review of The Many Lives of Yang Zhu, where I focus on wei-wo, and on the problems related to how philosophy has been used to advance military agendas of the state and ruling classes.

Conclusion

Yang Zhu is a treasure-trove of pleasure-wisdom. Many of his criticizers (like Mencius) had either sinister or naive agendas, and others who have been pitted against him (like Confucius himself was by his later adulators) look hypocritical when we consider that one of his most compassionate and humane moments (the time that he abolished the cruel practice of burial of wives and slaves with the king) was the one time when he most lived according to Yang Zhu.

Further Reading:

The Taoist Hedonism of Yang Chu - SoFE

Contemplations on Tao - SoFE

The Most SELFISH Philosopher of All Time: An Introduction | Philosophy of Yangzi (杨家)

Wikipedia: Yangism

The Ancient Chinese Individualism - Yang Chu (Yang Zhu)

Listen to the full audiobook: Yang Chu’s Garden of Pleasure, by Lieh Tzu