Xunzi's Bad Nature and the Legalist Argument From It

Han Feizi studied under the Confucian philosopher Xunzi before breaking decisively with the school that trained him, and the break makes more sense read alongside what Xunzi actually taught rather than against Confucianism generally. Xunzi held, against the more optimistic reading of human nature associated with Mencius, that people are born with desires for profit and pleasure and no innate inclination toward the ritual propriety, li, that makes ordered society possible, so goodness in a person is not a natural endowment awaiting cultivation but an achievement built by deliberate effort against nature's own grain, chiefly through education in ritual and the example of sage kings. Xunzi still trusted that effort, rightly directed, could reliably produce a genuinely virtuous person and a genuinely legitimate ruler. Han Feizi kept his teacher's pessimistic starting point and discarded the confidence built on top of it: if human nature really does respond chiefly to reward and punishment rather than moral instruction, he argued, then a system of government staking everything on rulers and officials becoming virtuous through education is building on a foundation that will fail as often as it succeeds, and a state cannot survive on a foundation that merely usually works. Clear law, uniformly enforced reward and punishment calibrated to what people actually want and fear rather than to what a sage hopes they might become, requires no wait for virtue to arrive and no trust that it will. Confucian critics ever since have read this as Legalism abandoning its teacher's project; Han Feizi would have said he was the one who took Xunzi's own diagnosis of human nature seriously enough to follow it all the way.