Zhu Xi
Study the principle (li) of things to perfect oneself.
Zhu Xi (1130 – 1200, China (Southern Song dynasty)) : neo-confucianism. Everything that exists is made of two inseparable things: a principle (li), which makes a thing what it is, and a vital stuff (qi), the matter-energy it is made of. Humans receive from Heaven a nature that is the principle itself, hence good; if some become bad, it is because their qi is turbid. On AskPhilosophy: 3 reconstructed arguments, 5 quotes checked word for word against the original texts, and 3 common beliefs examined; every text carries an authenticity badge (written by the author, posthumous, student notes, reported, apocryphal).
Why he matters
Zhu Xi gave Confucianism its shape for the next seven centuries. In 1313 the Yuan dynasty made his commentaries on the Four Books the basis of the civil-service examinations, and they stayed so until 1905. Millions of scholars in China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam therefore learned to read Confucius through him.
His times
The Southern Song had lost northern China, conquered in 1127. Zhu Xi held office only for a few years; he mostly taught, notably at the White Deer Grotto Academy, which he had reopened. Dismissed from court in 1194, his teaching was banned as "false learning" in 1196. He died in 1200, before being rehabilitated.
Reading his texts
There are two Zhu Xis in our sources. The one of the commentaries he wrote and published (the Great Learning, the commentaries on the Analects and Mencius). And the one of the Classified Conversations (Yulei), talks recorded by his students over thirty years and published in 1270: his thought, not necessarily his words, and the student may have caught an earlier or later state of his thinking. We flag this at every quotation from the Yulei. Almost no free translation of these texts exists: the translations are ours, and we say so.
His positions
click a row to see the evidenceFor him, the "Heaven" and the "Lord on High" of the old texts are the principle: nothing is higher, which is why it gets that name. He rejects the idea of a person handing out orders from above, but he also refuses to say that nothing governs. Neither the biblical creator God nor the absence of any order: an impersonal order of the world.
One must go to things: read, discuss, observe affairs, one by one. But what is found there is a single principle, already present in the mind. The Western opposition between experience and reason fits poorly: his critic Lu Jiuyuan reproached him with looking too much outward, others with believing too much in a single principle.
Complete and sure knowledge is possible, but after long labour and all at once, when everything becomes clear. This does not mean knowing everything: "how could one need to know everything?"
His great distinction is not mind and body, but principle ("what is above form") and qi ("what is below form"). What he says about the mind (xin) and the soul is not in our corpus: this axis must be completed before it is scored.
No "free will" in his language. The qi received at birth fixes part of our lot (virtue, rank, length of life), but effort can transform what is natural: "where another does it in a hundred, I do it in a thousand".
Goodness is not a convention: it is the principle, present in all things, of which humans receive a whole share. "The principle as it ought to be has nothing bad in it."
He keeps the rites and says spirits exist, but reduces them to qi coming and going; he asks us to deal first with what is near and clear. Priority goes to the study of things, not to faith.
Heaven gives everyone the nature of humaneness, righteousness, propriety and wisdom; education serves "to recover it". Life therefore has a given meaning: to become fully what one already is in principle.
Nature (the principle received) is good. But most of us are born with a more or less turbid qi that veils it: this is not a claim that all humans are good in fact.
Government starts from moral order (cultivating oneself, then the family, then the state), not from a programme of government: Heaven charges the wisest to be "ruler and teacher" of the people, to govern and instruct them. He also writes that what everyone approves, Heaven approves.
Ethics is the cultivation of the virtues (humaneness, righteousness, propriety, wisdom) which are our very nature. But the foundation is not just character: it is an objective principle of the world that virtue realises. It is ranged under virtues for want of a better box.