Xunzi
荀子 (Xunzi)
Human nature is bad, born selfish and prone to conflict, so goodness is not something inside people waiting to be uncovered but something ritual, teachers, and law must painstakingly construct against nature, the way a bent piece of wood is straightened by a press-frame.
- human nature is bad and must be reshaped by ritual
- ritual and law as artificial construction against nature
- Heaven as impersonal natural regularity, not moral agent
- taught the Legalists Han Feizi and Li Si
A systematic, argumentatively rigorous defense of Confucianism by the last major pre-Han Confucian philosopher, three times head (libationer) of the prestigious Jixia Academy in the State of Qi. Xunzi directly rejects Mencius's claim that human nature is intrinsically good, arguing instead that people are born with appetites that produce conflict unless deliberately reshaped by ritual, education, and law, a position that puts him closer to Legalism than any other major Confucian and that in fact numbers Han Feizi and Li Si, both later architects of the Qin Legalist state, among his students. His essays on ritual, music, logic ('Rectifying Names'), and Heaven, which he insists operates by impersonal natural regularity rather than moral response to human conduct, are the most philosophically systematic writing in the Confucian canon before the Song dynasty.
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