The Anti-Confucius

Shang Yang and Violence

John Brady

Introduction

I n The Book of Lord Shang one is greeted with something

truly other. A cursory glance will find repeated entreating
that minor crimes deserve major punishments, that virtuous
men should not hold office, but, rather, corrupt ones who can be
depended upon to turn against their peers for personal gain, and
that the people should be kept busy and stupid and afraid. In
other words, every single word of solace for a psychopathic
despot. What’s striking about these words is their utter
unsayability today. Comparisons to Machiavelli are, of course,
on hand (and not just on the superficial level of perceived
immorality) and we today know what that name signifies. One
hears these words coming from some other and monstrous time.
To our ears these words sound nightmarish, we who “know
better”. But knowing better does not equate to understanding,
and not understanding the work we put it down, and putting it
down we miss what is, in fact, occurring in it. We will argue here
that Shang Yang perceived a singular insight into the being of
violence, and not just its willful application to all matters within
The State, as the cursory glance suggests.

Though we will be looking deeper than this cursory glance, and

we will be contextualizing Shang Yang heavily within the
intellectual miasma of his days in order to go to his plane of
imminence, we’re not interested in “redeeming” his ideas via a
cultural relativism, instead we will be looking closely at a certain
revolutionary potential, a certain Philosophizing With a
Hammer, occurring within the architecture of his views. Shang
Yang is, first and foremost, a philosopher of violence, which is to
say a philosopher of forces. We will need to proceed with care
to demonstrate what we mean by this.

We will not engage in any biographical or authorial discussion,

merely point out that, like most ancient works of Chinese
philosophy, it could be said to have been constructed by a
number of different writers merely using “Shang Yang” as a
pseudonym, and that Shang Yang was a government minister in
the short lived, and first, Qin Dynasty in the second century
BCE, and be done with that.
This paper is divided into two parts, part A dealing with giving an
account of Confucian virtue which will form the target of most of
Shang Yang’s critique, with Part B focusing on Shang Yang
himself. Part A is necessitated by a need to set the ground for the
entry of Shang Yang, and his philosophy of violence, but also
serves an introduction to a body of thought, Confucianism, that
would have a profound effect on the Chinese consciousness to
today. It is important to keep in mind that Confucianism, as it is
signified in such statements as “China is a Confucian country”
actually refers to Neo-Confucianism, a Song dynasty revival of
Confucianism that read Confucius and Mencius through the lens
of subsequent intellectual movements, Shang Yang, and the
school of thought Legalism of which he is seen as the founder,
included. Accordingly, one should not seek the essence of
modern Confucian China in Confucius himself, but should
rather grasp it dialectically in concert with its own subsequent
critiques (from Legalism, Taoism, and Buddhism). The present
inquiry hopes to render a fragment of this dialectic, as it was
staged in the 5th to 3rd centuries BCE, as a way of laying the
ground to the genesis of a way of thought, a plane of imminence
that gives sense to ways of being, as well as an opportunity to see
paths of flight and circuits that can be shorted at the root of
Chinese thought itself.

Between the two parts there is a small intermission that hopes to

cast some light on the Master-signifier that structures Chinese
thought, that grounds the very needfulness of virtue within the
machinations of all of the thought discussed.
Part A: Confucian Virtue

Shang Yang is predominately the Anti-Confucius. There is a lot

of rage directed towards the Confucian school, towards the
itinerant moral philosopher, contained in the pages of The Book
of Lord Shang. We will sketch out an account of the Confucian
ethic in order to see more clearly the target of Shang Yang’s anti-
Confucian violence. We will use Confucius directly, and his
student (and contemporary of Shang Yang) Mencius, in order to
facilitate our sketch.

The four Confucian virtues are benevolence/humanity (ren, 仁),

propriety/ritual (li, 礼), justice/righteousness (yi, 义), and wisdom
(zhi, 智 ). However, we will not be drawn into the ancient
Chinese philosophical propensity for making numbered lists,
and merely indicate that these, taken by themselves, tell us
nothing of any philosophical value. What is needful is the
proper philosophical questions for any ethical system; firstly, why
these virtues and not others? Of what deliberation are they the
result? And secondly, what is the value of the value of these
virtues themselves? Why virtue, these or any others? The
intermission will deal with this second question, the first will be
explored presently.

The Why of the Virtues

Confucianism argues from nature like its philosophical

predecessors and opponents (Taoism, Moism, and Yangism
(Yang Zhu, not Shang Yang)). The whole Chinese philosophical
project embodied in these writers was to take nature and work
from there, but all travelled in vastly different directions (perhaps
owing to the emptiness of the very signifier “nature”, which lends
itself to as many interpretations and purposes as can take it up).

Confucianism takes up nature under the mode of the “is”, not as

ontology, but as a firm trust in empirical propositions. Negating
“superstition” (transcendence), reality, in the way that it merely is,
is the point of departure. Accordingly, deriving an ethic (a dao,
“a way”, perhaps the key problematic of ancient Chinese
philosophy) needs to avoid extremes as demarcated by the
bounds of things that actually are, and build itself from the solid
material, present to hand.

The first result of this is an insistent style of argumentation based

on historical paragons. History is essential to this approach, this
way, as it is full of instances of things that were, that can be, and
showed themselves to “settle out”, away from the extremes that
would have burnt them out into obscurity or infamy. Famous
personages and mythological heroes are read and interpreted,
and the Confucian view of right action stumbles forth. It is,
perhaps, hard to tell how crucial these Confucian
characterizations of these figures were at the time the arguments
were made, as these characterizations are largely the lens
through which they have been interpreted through the ages.

The second result, of taking the task of “proceeding from nature”

and following it through via empirical propositions, was that the
early Confucians had to discover virtue in humanity itself as it
was. Parallel to this was the Confucian demand for “The fixing
of names”. Seemingly tautological statements (“Let fathers be
fathers, and sons sons” (Confucius, 12.11)) bring the normative
and the factual to bear upon each other. Here is a holding up of
what is against what is, with this first state of Being being The
State, in its network of policy engineered social relations, and the
second being the network of lived, solid, sentiments that
demarcate their relations. That is, “fathers”, as they exist within
states and perform social functions (as labourers, as subjects of
the law, as soldiers, and so on), should be made to coincide with
“fathers” as they exist within the very familial relations that make
them fathers to begin with (as the begetter and moral guide of
sons, as husbands, etc).

They negotiate the incommensurable Humean divide between

facts and normative claims by appealing to sentiment, and the
innate senses of human nature: “to proceed by analogy from
what lies nearest by” (Confucius, 6.30). What lies nearest by is
our spontaneous capacity for sentiment, and our uncultivated
senses of empathy, shame, fear, love, and so on:

“Now the sense of dismay on another’s behalf is the seed

of ren (humanity, 仁) planted within us, the sense of
shame is the seed of righteousness (yi, 义), the sense of
deference is the seed of ritual (li, 礼), and the sense of
right and wrong is the seed of wisdom (zhi, 智 ).”
(MengZi, 2A.6)

Given this raw material of sentiment what was needful was a

meditated cultivation and expansion of these senses, by analogy,
a focusing on, where one takes the self-evident and spontaneous
isness of these sentiments, that one discovers empirically in
oneself, and then attributes them to the other. The other feels as
I do, so I will comport myself towards them as I myself want to
be comported towards. Via this process the virtue of
benevolence is reached necessarily, from any starting point. This
is the one transcendence the Confucians must, out of necessity,
allow themselves. They place it in the realm of thought; the
sense organs don’t think, the eye, the ear, are all the victims of
forces of attraction and repulsion. Only the mind thinks, and if it
is used then one can “grasp it” (MengZi, 6A.15) One can “grasp”,
in thought, what is present to hand, that is, grasp it in its
possibility. This grasping, this understanding, of that which is in
itself and letting it be for itself, is the Confucian ethical
manoeuvre.

The Confucian ethic demands that we discover sentiment within

ourselves, as that which lies closest and is the fullest of being and
substance, the most present at hand, and then “expand out” or,
perhaps, rather, refract the sentiment (more on this below) in
thought until we have transcended our particular life world and
entered into a network with an other. Because I feel this
particular sentiment, then I can know that the other feels it too,
and I should then comport myself accordingly.

However, any similarity to the Christian ethic ends here. Mozi

advocated a human equality and “universal love” (like
Christianity), but the Confucians held that taking things to these
universalized extremes negates the very foundation of the
enterprise: virtues need to be firmly entrenched in the
sentiments from which they came in order to maintain possibility,
vitality, and authenticity, they never achieve true universality,
which is, instead, seen as an empty position. Accordingly the
transcendental other (the object of Christian and Mohist love) is
replaced by the structural relationships reified out of the isness
of “nature” and its web of sentiments. Mencius argues with a
Mohist who works from the same starting premises (the
spontaneous, proto-benevolence contained in human nature)
and arrives at universality. Mencius dismisses him by merely
saying that nature creates entities with a single root, universality
presupposes that there is a “second root” (MengZi, 3A.5). This
“second root”, the grounding of entities on something
transcendent and universal, is rejected by the Confucians who,
point out instead, that one cares for one’s brother more than the
children of a neighbour; this is the first and sole root they believe
in, that sets up, in its growth, the network of lived sentiments that
can be the only empirically substantial grounds for ethics.
What’s interesting is the use of numbers - one root stands for the
present to hand, a second root thus symbolizes every promise of
universal, infinite, transcendence. Two is infinitely too many
when one will do...

The Confucians argue that whenever we discover our feeling, it

is never of some universal extraction, rather it is linked
definitively to some object, it is a feeling of feeling higher, or
lower, or to the side of, or disconnected from, it is a textured
sentiment that carries with it the imprint of the situation and my
position in regards to the particular others likewise enmeshed in
it. This is why Confucius is quick to shoot down the Lord of She
upon his praise for the son of a livestock thief who ousted his
father to the authorities, Confucius, instead, indicating that this
was, rather, a miscarriage of virtue (13.18). Had the son
grounded his action upon “that which lies closest” he would have
discovered his obligation to his father stronger a foundation (as
an actual lived, present to hand, relationship) than his obligation
to The State (as an abstract and distant notion), the sentiments
involved are of different textures, with the former being more
grainier and more organic, more weighty, the sole and only root.
As it was, the act of the son (reporting his father to the
authorities) could not have achieved authenticity, been
adequately grounded in the way things just were in their being
present to hand, and the way this network of sentiments
distributed weights and distances between its nodes. Advocating
this virtue (of holding the law as highest obligation), insofar as it
is a virtue unfurnished by the substance of that which is, attempts
to twist nature, what is closest and most inherent, and replace it
with something ghostly with which to expand virtue out of, which
is efficacious to the production of even ghostlier virtues. It
requires the imagined second set of roots.

Meanwhile, Mencius reproaches Song Keng who, on his way to

stop a war from breaking out by petitioning the rulers of the two
states involved, is questioned by Mencius as to how he will
convince them to cease their course. “I will explain that there is
no profit (lì) in it.” (MengZi, 6B.4) Mencius’ subsequent
reproach is that, despite the goal being noble, if it is successful
then profit will have become the ground of action. It strengthens
(reinforces) the desire for profit rather than the sentiments which
can be expanded to result in virtue.

We should be careful here to avoid a trap. The desire for profit

is itself a sentiment, a natural one, weighty and textured and
given its proper, empirical, orientation between the subject and
others. The Confucians are unable to divide the sentiments into
good and bad, as their determination of good itself is that which
is expanded from the material of the sentiments that are, present
to hand. Mencius risks sounding circular here, by emphasizing
the four virtues, and then approving of only their sources, as
opposed to the sources of other ways of being that could arise
through the “expanding out by analogy” of other sentiments
(such as desire for profit).

But, in fact, there is no difficulty here, for the Confucian view of

virtue is merely this very “expanding out” of a sentiment. Even
the desire for profit, if “expanded out”, becomes benevolence
and righteousness:

The ren (仁) person is one who, wishing himself to be

settled in position, sets up others; wishing himself to have
access to the powerful, achieves access for others.
(Confucius, 6.30)
Refraction as Metaphor

However, “Expanding out” is perhaps not the most accurate

term, despite the Confucians using it repeatedly, as it gives the
sense of an expanding, homogenous, circle that aims to
universality, which we have already said is not a part of the
Confucian ethical universe. Perhaps a better term would be
“refracting”. One strikes one’s sentiments, as a substantial
present to hand substance, like iron, and lets them ring out,
hearing the refracted echo pattern sounding out the structure
within which one is embedded, like a kind of ethical
echolocation. This term, to refract, also introduces the positional
properties of difference inherent in Confucian thought; the other
is never just a universal other, but always a father, a ruler, a child,
an elder. One is always lower, higher, along side, or far-away
from, or even retreating from, or marching to. It’s this positional
character that creates the network of sentiments, that is formed
by a mutual, but heterogeneous, entanglement between its
nodes1. This is why Mencius’ opponents try to trip him up with
the paradoxes that arise when, for example, a villager is a year
older than one’s elder brother; who is served first? (6A.5)
Despite seeming merely like hair splitting questions about social
etiquette, these questions get to the very structure of the
Confucian meta-ethical investment.

Likewise, with the debate with GaoZi, there is the question of

whether “elder-ness” is an intrinsic property of the relation the
subject has (a present to hand (for the subject) part of the root)
or an extrinsic property of the elder “out there” as transcendent
idea (6A.4). Mencius argues that it is intrinsic within the relation,
not a universal property instantiated in the elder that the subject
discovers outside of themselves through a platonic ascription of
the form to the copy. That the content of the relation is
invariable (Old men of Chu are treated like old men of one’s
hometown) does not mean it is an external property (universal
idea) instantiated in the thing being related to (i,e, universality
does not imply transcendence over empirical reality). Invariable,
intrinsic, structural relationships can hold, with the subject as
anchor. The subject is the seat of these relations, with their own,
textured and differentiated sentiments as the substance that these
relations stem forth from.

Going back to Mencius’ reproach of Song Keng, he tells Song

that he should press the kings to engage in this “sounding out”,
this refraction, rather than pressing them to “shrink in” to

1
A network requires at least the two dimensions; positions
(objects/subjects) and distances, with the distances, even if counted not in
spatial terms but rather in number of connections, being the defining
characteristic of the network). A three node network differs from a two
node network, and a two node network, with one connection, differs from
a two node network with two connections, in a way more than from
another two node network with differing lengths of its connections.
thoughts of profit, which would be to leave desire uncultivated,
unmoralized. Though the result would be the same if Song is
successful in both cases, the effects of this result would be
different; the sentiment of the ruler is expressed, and virtue is
defined, through their policy (for example, the policy of
withdrawing from a war on the grounds of its profitlessness).
With these policies The State is altered in its symbolic network
that defines the relationships between subjects, and the The
State, thus altered, is either conducive to the network of actual
existing sentiments that is, with its differing weights and distances
between its nodes, or not. If The State is not organized through
laws that reify accurately, and in the proper proportions, that
which is, that network of differentially distributed sentiments
present at hand, then The State will collapse. Avoiding the
collapse of The State is how the ruler “refracts” their desire for
profit into virtue. So, withdrawing from war on the grounds of its
profitlessness instantiates, for the ruler as well as the people, a
theme of social relations based on profit. This theme, taken to
its denouement, organizes people at odds with the network of
sentiment that is, its textures and echoes. It distracts. It denies
the set of roots, the embeddedness of the subjects within their
own textured, substantial webs of sentiment.

The same goes for the son of the sheep thief, and the admiration
of Lord She; this creates a theme whereby conduct is based
upon abstract relations (child to State), devoid of the animation
of spontaneous sentiment, that are ultimately unsustainable,
rather than more present and tangible relations (child to father).
Any implied connection of moral obligation from the subject to
something beyond their tangible, and lived, experience (the state,
the abstract other, etc) is to call for a second set of roots; the
appeal to transcendence. A second set is infinitely too many...

Solidness and Emptiness

The key to understanding this “unsustainability” of transcendent

turns is the way the Chinese language employs the concept of
“solid” (shi) and its opposite, “empty” (xu).

“Solidness” features as a root or component of words like “fact”,

“honest”, “to realize”, “earthy”, and, even, “reality” itself, along
with “realistic”.

“Emptiness”, on the other hand, marks the ideas “void”, “guilty

uneasiness”, “humble”, “nothingness”, “hypocrisy”, “untruthful”,
“deceptive”, and “blurry/out of focus”.
Now as empiricists, the Confucians placed the substantial
solidness of “facts” above metaphysical speculation. To be
honest in Chinese is to speak solid things, facts, to express reality
substantially. The sentiments are this solid matter from which
virtue will spring (it is a fact that all sons have such and such
feelings towards their fathers). On the other hand, acts empty of
this substantial content result in deceptive hypocrisies, they have
no ground, and accordingly are insubstantial phantasms, which
no really existing person, state, or action should use as its
foundation. These two words create a scale, between substance,
present to hand, on the one hand, and indistinct, deceitful and
guilty blurriness on the other, with reality and deception played
out along this scale.

The Confucian Circle

In the end, there is a circle sustaining the Confucian ethic:

Firstly, the sentiments are, they are the raw and spontaneous
feeling that can be empirically attributed to all. From this ground,
if one contemplates the weights and distances of the relations
that these sentiments entail, one can refract out along paths
within this network to reify the social relations that are, and fix
them in place. All action must be based on these sentiments for
their content, their “animating force”, to gain reality and
substantiality, as opposed to hypocritical or deceptive emptiness.
This animated network, once reified, creates the totality of social
relations, fixes the names, with subjects related to one another in
heterogeneous lines that find their source in the subjects
themselves.

Secondly, the network of sentiments, once reified (considered in

thought), will, on account of the commonality of sentiments,
create a strata of uniform cultural practices that are in line with
this network. Names will have become “fixed” so to speak, and
The Big Other has taken shape within this strata of practices. It
is important for the ruler to create a state such that the people
are able to engage in propriety (the following through of the
reified network), that is, they have sufficient leisure, education
and security:

“When a ruler attends to the education given in village schools

and sees that it is extended by the example of behaviour that is
filial to parents and deferential to elders, then none with white
hair will carry heavy loads along the roads.” (MengZi, 1.A7)
An old man carrying heavy loads along the roads is the death of
propriety, and education is needful to teach the people the
cultural practices that just are reified sentiment so that the names
can be fixed (old men can be old men, not laborers). Why? The
reified structure of sentiments should be reinforced at the
external level of imitation, and given the force of compulsion
that social weight can provide. Admittedly, not everyone
conforming to this code of behaviour, traversing this social
structure, will be focusing on and refracting their spontaneous
sentiment, they may just be following the motions emptily, but
one who resists and rejects this structure will be, necessarily, not
acknowledging what is natural and closest to them, as, the
Confucians believed, the names being fixed was a mere
redoubling of that which always-already is. At this stage of the
circle, the sweep, it is sufficient that people blindly conform to
the social rules and codes. “The people can be made to follow it,
they cannot be made to understand it.” (Confucius, 8.9, my
italics). This is the Confucian test, perhaps analogous to the
Platonic test of the Model, Copy and Simulacra. If one merely
“grasps” their feelings, present to hand, then being filial to one’s
parents, and burying them in the “proper way” is intuitive and
easy, from there one can refract out to greater and nobler virtues.
But one who purports to higher and nobler virtue, without
attending their household and the proper ceremony, can
instantly be discounted as an empty and guilty hypocrite,
following a ghostly and paper-thin dao. What is then needful is a
complex network of monitoring and surveillance, enterprising on
the spontaneous human sense of shame to enforce the
appearance of propriety via the appearance of righteousness.
The appearance, at this stage, is enough.

Finally, with people blindly conforming to the reified structure of

sentiments, comes the demand for authenticity, for sincerity.
One first conforms their body to the motions, then conforms
their will. Through doing this the sentiment that is at the heart of
the motion will reveal itself as an object of focus. The logic of the
entire reified system reveals itself to connect seamlessly over the
Humean divide of the normative to the empirical sentiment.
The reproductive cycle of the “virtuous”, empirically “natural”,
re-doubled, Confucian universe is complete.

Part A Conclusion

The early Confucians thought they had avoided appeals to

transcendence by basing ethics on an empirical project that
looked to the way “naturally occurring” human relationships
worked based on sentimental relations. The subject does not will
their sentiments, but are subject to them. Using these as a base
certain courses of universal action could be derived, just so long
as they didn’t achieve total universality, but were always
conditioned by the relation and the sentiment embodied in it.
These semi-universalized courses of action could be reified and
taught as propriety. Propriety, then, should be based on
extending what is intuitive, and stretch out to encompass all
actions occurring within a state, from households to military
policy. The resultant state would be a mirror of the very
substance of human, natural, relations itself. Finding this
agreement the state would be as robust as the passage of the
seasons or the mountains to the west.

This emphasis on the continuation of the state moves us to our

second general question regarding ancient Chinese philosophical
projects, the value of value itself.