A Brief Analysis Of Xunzi's "Ritual And Desire"

Xunzi is one of the earliest ideologists who systematically address the issue of ritual. He is the only one who discuss the problem from an both extremely wider perspective, exclusively taking human being itself as well as its nature into account. Thus, he traced the origin, the essence and the function. It is roughly same for the core concepts in Xunzi's philosophic thought and the traditional Confucianism. By ritual, he means the moral and behaving guidelines in a hierarchical system. There is a difference, however, between the two. The traditional Confucianism regards the source of ritual is an innate moral conception, while Xunzi considers it is originated from desire.The relation between the ritual and the desire proposed by Xunzi is a philosophy system based on the social reality, criticizing and inheriting from Pre-Qin scholars'thoughts. Many scholars generally believed the ritual originates from malicious human nature which comes from the desire. First, they think the desire itself is a wicked human nature, while omit its reasonability; second, dislike Xunzi, they have not considered the difference between the"human nature"proposed by Xunzi and the one by Mengzi, and have not realized a clear boundary. The issue should be discussed from the naturalness to the sociality of human beings. Ritual comes from the establishment of sage which is not its root, but"mingfenshiqun"and"huaxingqiwei"are also not its root, either. The function of the ritual is to dredge the desire. If the ritual is regarded to limit one's desire, the majority idea of the ritual, known as"the constant mean", also helps the desire. It satisfies and adjusts one's desire under a regulation, and thus achieves the aim that to meet most desires in the best case, while to limit them in a worse case. Xunzi introduces the law into the concept of the ritual and proposes"emphasizing on both the ritual and the law", as well as to connect the two tightly. Xunzi always uses"the ritual and the law"at a same time, by which he means they both act on the desire. However, the difference relying on them is that by the ritual, it gives more emphasis on active regulation and guidance, while by the law, it gives more emphasis on the external constraint.This thesis is organized based on Xunzi's thoughts on the ritual and the desire, and insists that the desire produces the ritual while the ritual helps assist the desire. The law is also introduced in order to act on the desire. By above means, the ideal social system in Xunzi's thought is realized.