philosopher and intellectual polymath believed by many to be the most
important Confucian scholar of the Qing (Ch'ing) dynasty (1644-1911
CE). He was also the foremost figure among the sophisticated new class
of career academics who rose to prominence in the mid-Qing. A
prominent critic of the Confucian orthodoxy of the Song and Ming
dynasties (known today in the West as "Neo-Confucianism"), Dai charged
his predecessors with philosophical errors that had dire moral
consequences for their adherents and brilliantly showed them to be
rooted in misreadings of the Confucian classics. Chief among these
errors was the tendency to understand feelings and desires as being
obstacles to proper moral deliberation and action, a view that Dai saw
as opening to the door to frictionless moral judgments, free of
calculations of benefit or harm and not responsible to the felt
responses of others. Dai aimed to restore feelings and desires to
prominence by assigning a central place to sympathetic concern (shu)
in moral deliberation. He thus reconceived the fundamental nature of
the Neo-Confucian universe in a way that explained moral claims in
terms of the human affects. He accomplished this dramatic
reconfiguration of the Neo-Confucian thought against the backdrop of
social institutions that showed little enthusiasm for, and sometimes
outright hostility to, his philosophical endeavors.
1. Life and Works
Born in 1724 to a poor cloth merchant of Anhui province, Dai Zhen
emerged from an unlikely educational background, attending local
schools because his father could not afford the customary private
tutorials. By the time Dai was eighteen, however, his genius and
scholarly accomplishment had won him the acclaim of his elders and
shortly thereafter the backing of a reputable literary scholar in his
own clan. Bolstered by a series of endorsements and his own evident
academic success, Dai came under the tutelage of the famous classicist
Jiang Yong (1681-1762), through whom he became acquainted with many
figures in the thriving community of mid-Qing academics. Dai soon
proved to be not just a precocious and prolific scholar but a
versatile one as well. His 1753 commentary on the Poetry Classic was
finished contemporaneously with his first major work in phonology, and
both followed closely on the heels of a celebrated treatise in
mathematics. Although Dai's interest in philosophical topics was
evident quite early, he did not finish his best-known treatises in
this field of intellectual endeavor until late in life, the two most
important being On the Good (Yuan Shan) and An Evidential Study of the
Meaning and Terms of the Mencius (Mengzi ziyi shuzheng). Between these
it is the Evidential Study that is generally regarded as his
masterwork, being widely appreciated for its sophistication and rigor.
By his own account, hisEvidential Study was his greatest labor of
love. Several of the last years of his life were spent writing and
revising it, and it is likely that he would have continued to revise
the work if it were not for his untimely death 1777.
Dai became a leading figure in the dominant new philological or
evidential studies (kaozheng) movement, partly because of his interest
in mathematics, calendrical studies, and ancient languages and partly
because of his exacting standards of argument. Yet Dais relationship
to the philological movement was an uneasy one. Like other
philological thinkers, he shared an interest in using hard evidence
and careful exegesis to reconstruct the language and practices of the
ancients. He also shared with many of them the deep conviction that
the orthodox Confucianism of Zhu Xi (1130-1200), which by his time had
reigned for several centuries, was thoroughly contaminated with Daoist
and Buddhist ideas and needed to be corrected with the tools of
evidential scholarship. But Dais contemporaries in philological
studies tended to believe that the misreadings and obfuscations of
orthodox Confucianism were an inevitable part of theoretical
speculation about the meanings and principles (yili) of the classics.
For Dai, in contrast, the purpose of evidential studies was to
reconstruct the meanings and principlesincluding the ethics and
metaphysicsof the Confucian canons ancient authors.
This difference of opinion regarding the study of meanings and
principles appears to have led Dai to part with his philological
contemporaries in two crucial ways. First, while the professional
scholars of his time increasingly valued specialization in certain
subfields such as astronomy or geography, Dai nevertheless remained a
devoted generalist, seeing all of the various disciplines as
potentially working together to reconstruct the often highly
theoretical meanings of terms and moral practices contained in the
classics. Second, while Dais contemporaries believed it was his
contributions in fields such as phonology and mathematics that made
him the most formidable scholar of his time, Dai himself believed his
greatest contributions to be his treatises on such theoretical topics
as human nature, metaphysics, and (especially) moral deliberation and
cultivation. In his own lifetime Dais highest accolade was a
prestigious position on the staff that compiled the Complete
Collection of the Four Treasuries (Sikuquanshu) for the Imperial
Librarya collection of classic texts that heavily favoredworks of
philological interest. Admirers in Dais own era regarded his treatises
on meanings and principles as a monumental waste of time, and most of
his early biographers barely mentioned such work, even though it
became the central focus of his thought and efforts by the end of his
life. But while Dais more speculative labors may have been judged
harshly in the mid-Qing, his own appraisal of his work and its
importance has been vindicated by later scholars. He has come to be
hailed as the foremost representative of Qing dynasty philosophy and
is routinely presented as such in surveys of Chinese thought.
2. Moral Agency
a. Dai's Critique of the Neo-Confucian Account
Dai presents his best-known philosophical work, the Evidential Study,
as an indictment of Neo-Confucianism. Of particular concern to him is
the reigning orthodoxy of Cheng Yi (1033-1107) and Zhu Xi (1130-1200),
whose thought had been deeply embedded in China's governing
institutions for centuries, and whose very moral and metaphysical
language had come into popular use. At the heart of Dai's critique is
an array of worries about the Neo-Confucian picture of moral agency,
where acting well is conceived primarily as a matter of freeing
certain native, spontaneous instincts from the influence of feelings
and desires. Of particular concern to Dai is the view that merely by
eliminating or paring away such feelings and desires one can somehow
become a good moral agent. As Dai sees it, this view neglects not just
the deliberative, non-spontaneous work that one must do in order to
act well, but also the crucial role that affects should play in those
deliberations. Thus his critique is aimed in particular at the idea
that our native instincts, once freed of the influence of our feelings
and desires, are somehow "complete and self-sufficient"—adequate by
themselves to give proper moral guidance (Evidential Study,ch. 14,
27).
In Dai's view, this Neo-Confucian account is factually wrong, and as
such does profound injustice to the role that education and
cultivation should have in the development of the moral understanding.
If we see our work in moral self-cultivation as primarily
eliminative—as a matter of overcoming bad feelings and desires so as
to let the refined parts of the nature act of their own accord—then,
Dai maintains, it makes no sense to think of moral education as
contributing to the growth and maturation of the moral understanding.
What we learn in the process of study (xue) might be understood as
having instrumental value, helping to free us from the grip of our bad
dispositions and realize the dormant moral sensibilities in ourselves,
but once that is accomplished the content of our knowledge would seem
to play noconstitutive part in moral comprehension. It is this
demotion of education to mere instrument that the erudite Dai Zhen
finds to be deeply mistaken. When we learn from the classics, he
argues, they have a transformative effect on the faculty of the
understanding (xinzhi), helping it to see the morally salient features
of one's life more clearly and respond more appropriately (ch. 14).
Just as the nourishment of food and water actually becomes a part of
the thing it is meant to nourish, he maintains, so too do the
contributions of one's education become, in a psychological analogue
to digestion, a part of the understanding (ch. 9, 26).
Dai is particularly troubled by the pernicious effects the
Neo-Confucian account has on its adherents—and, after centuries of
Neo-Confucian orthodoxy, on popular culture as well. When the account
is strictly followed, he argues, it does not allow the feelings of
others to have the right kind of purchase on our own moral evaluations
and judgments. If the principal work of moral action lies in
eliminating meddlesome emotions, Dai argues, then our deliberations
could not be informed by personal acquaintance with the feelings of
others (the kind we get from imagining ourselves asthe other person,
which is presumably distinct from the kind we get by inferring merely
from general rules or observational data). The sentiments stirred by
such an acquaintance would be seen as interfering with the authentic
expression of the good natural instincts within oneself. Left
unchecked by a proper understanding of the felt responses of others,
however, Dai maintains that a person's moral conclusions are at best
subjective "opinions" (yijian) and not what Dai calls "invariant
norms" (buyi zhi ze)—so named because they represent views that could
under ideal circumstances attain a kind of universal agreement across
all times and places (ch. 4, 42). In several remarkable passages, Dai
writes movingly about the abuses of power that such a doctrine would
condone when adopted by those in a position to impose their decisions
on the weak or institutionally disadvantaged, unconstrained by the
feelings of the helpless people most affected by such decisions (ch.
5, 10).
Another pernicious feature of the Neo-Confucian account, and for Dai
Zhen the most alarming one, is that it prevents proper consideration
of benefits and harms from figuring in one's moral deliberations. This
problem inspires Dai's most passionate remarks, as he notes repeatedly
how the Neo-Confucian view would blind its adherents to the
detrimental effects of their own actions. Unable to consult their
desires, he argues, moral agents would have no practicable way of
discerning what really matters to the well-being of others (nor, he
hints, would they even be capable of recognizing what would or would
not contribute to their own well-being). Combined with the first
worry, about the inability of others' claims to suitably inform one's
own personal deliberations, this leaves agents in what Dai describes
as "a state of profound blindness," unable to know what behaviors
qualify as good and incapable of being alerted to their mistakes by
others (ch. 4). When the doctrine of native self-sufficiency is deeply
embraced, Dai concludes, "its harm is great, and yet no one is able to
be aware of it" (ch. 43).
b. Sympathy as a Form of Moral Deliberation
Dai Zhen's corrective for the shortcomings of the Neo-Confucian view
(and its Daoist and Buddhist forebears) is an emotional attitude known
as "shu," whose meaning for Dai most closely approximates what we
might call "sympathy" or "sympathetic concern." The characteristic way
of exercising shu,for Dai, is to imagine oneself in another's shoes
and so ask what one might desire if one were that person. By
reconstructing another person's desires one can better appreciate the
extent to which certain states of affairs would benefit or harm that
person. Dai assumes that some simulation of desires (and resultant
feelings) is necessary to take proper account of potential benefits
and harms, and he insists that the desire-averse picture of moral
action upheld by the Neo-Confucians rules out such an exercise from
the start. Thus he concludes that the Neo-Confucian picture is unable
to fulfill what he takes to be a fundamental demand of any viable
account of moral deliberation.
Not just any exercise of shuwill provide reliable information about
human well-being. For Dai, as for most other Confucian thinkers, shu
can be done well or poorly. Given the rather cerebral form of moral
cultivation Dai advocates, he believes that most moral agents need a
great deal of education before they can make truly informed judgments.
Even with this caveat in mind, however, Dai's critics and occasionally
his admirers have often constructed accounts of shuthat make it all
too easy to dismiss.
One temptation for those whose intuitions are driven by the English
word "sympathy" is to see Dai as advocating an exercise in mirroring
or replicating the psychological states of others, especially their
desires. If this were the case, shuwould seem a poor indicator of the
mirrored person's well-being, since the person may well want things
that are bad for her. But in fact Dai's account of shuleaves it open
to the moral agent to simulate counterfactual psychological states.
Strictly speaking, Dai understands shu as the act of "taking oneself
and extending it to others" (ch. 15), leaving it to the agent to judge
which states would be the appropriate ones to synthesize.
A more common temptation is to say that Dai advocates bringing
whatever desires we happen to have into our sympathetic reconstruction
of the other's point of view. If I am a solitary type of person,
presumably, then I am to imagine others with the same preference for
solitude. But this interpretation leaves Dai vulnerable to the charge
of sympathetic paternalism, whereby one reconstructs another's point
of view on the basis of affective predispositions that are not the
other's. If this is how shuis supposed to work, then it would again
seem a flawed measure of well-being, for others might benefit a great
deal more from friendship and company than I, for instance.
The problem with this reading is that it assigns shuno critical role
in selecting the desires that are to be synthesized. Just as the first
interpretation depicts shuas naÃ"vely mirroring or replicating the
wants of another, the second depicts it as naÃ"vely adopting one's own
wants, with no regard to whether these are true indicators of the
other's well-being. In fact, there is considerable evidence that Dai
Zhen, at least in his more cogent moments, understands shuas being
much more selective than either of these models would suggest. More
than just imagining others with the same desires that one happens to
have, Dai also sees shuas helping to identify the desires that really
matter for welfare in the first place, which he understands as the
desires that contribute to "life" (sheng) or "the fulfillment of life"
(sui sheng). These are the basic desires which, upon sufficient
reflection, we find that we all share—a common core that belong to
what Dai sometimes characterizes as "the ordinary human feelings" (ren
zhi changqing) and more often describes as the "true feelings" (qing)
(ch. 5). In using shu,Dai suggests, one finds similarities that cut
across distinctions in power or position: "If one genuinely returns to
oneself and reflects on the true feelings of the weak, the few, the
dull, the timid, the diseased, the elderly, the young, the orphaned,
or the solitary, can those [true feelings] of these others really be
any different from one's own?" (ch. 2).
While there is evidence to suggest that Dai sees shuas having a robust
role in selecting desires, it is less clear what the precise mechanism
of selection is supposed to be. Possibly the very exercise of
constructing a new point of view is supposed to help free one of the
clutter of one's own misguided or excessively idiosyncratic
predilections. And Dai probably sees the special care or concern for a
person inherent in shuas drawing attention to the desires that really
matter to her, much in the way that grief or love draw attention to
the features of a person to which the griever or lover is most
attached. Dai also hints that there should be some sort of comparative
exercise in shu,where one reconstructs the emotional reactions of
others and measures them against those that one would have oneself
under similar circumstances.
However Dai understands shuto work in detail, he is emphatic about its
use as a form of moral deliberation. So understood, Dai suggests, it
relies upon our desires in ways incompatible with the Neo-Confucian
account of moral agency. His criticisms point to at least two such
ways. First, proper moral action as Dai conceives of it requires that
we use our desires in the process of deliberation. Second, it requires
that we have a certain baseline of dispositions to want the right
things. In other words, moral deliberation requires that we "have
desires" both in an occurrent sense (as when I am described as
actively feeling some inclination to eat good food) and in a
dispositional sense (as when I am described as the kind of person who
wants good food, even if I am presently working on an essay and not
thinking about food at all). Thus, Dai's picture of moral agency
conflicts with the Neo-Confucian account not just in how it envisions
moral deliberation but also in its conception of the kind of person
that a good moral agent should be. Dai maintains that good human
beings should have robust dispositions to desire beneficial things,
which in turn requires that they have a healthy interest in their own
well-being or life-fulfillment. Without the desire to "fulfill one's
own life," Dai contends, one will "regard the despairing conditions of
others with indifference" (ch. 10). Dai thus unabashedly asserts that
even self-interested desires should figure prominently in the life of
the virtuous moral agent.
3. Human Nature and Moral Cultivation
Like most Confucian philosophers, Dai Zhen shows a great deal of
interest in the moral proclivities of human nature, a topic which by
his time had long taken its bearings from Mencius' (391-308 BCE)
famous claim that the natural dispositions are good, and Xunzi
(310-219 BCE) equally renowned polemic against this Mencian view.
Although Dai is not alone in taking up this particular debate between
Mencius and Xunzi, it nevertheless presents him with an important
opportunity to sort through an apparent tension in his work, for it is
Mencius that Dai takes to speak with final authority, and yet many of
Dai's own views carry an undisguised debt to Xunzian thinking about
the relationship between nature, agency, and self-cultivation. Unlike
most major figures who have weighed in on the Mencius-Xunzi debate,
then, Dai has an interest in confirming much of Xunzi's position while
showing with great care and nuance how Xunzi's views can be rendered
compatible with the thesis that human dispositions are good by nature.
The parts of Xunzi's doctrine that resonate most deeply with Dai Zhen
concern the need to reshape the natural dispositions. If they are
already more or less good, Xunzi reasons, it is hard to see why we
would need an education that in any meaningful way transforms them.
Our nature would already provide adequate or nearly adequate resources
for moral self-improvement. Furthermore, Xunzi is plausibly read as
upholding a picture of moral cultivation where the heart-and-mind must
often overrule the desires, directing the body to act in ways contrary
to the tug of one's felt inclinations.
Like Xunzi, Dai is particularly concerned to develop a picture of the
natural dispositions that would countenance a transformative account
of self-cultivation. After all, one of the centerpieces of his
philosophical work is a critique of the Neo-Confucian account of
cultivation as merely eliminative—as helping us to remove the bad
parts of our nature, but forming no constitutive part of the
cultivated self. Dai also shares with Xunzi the presupposition that
this transformation requires some sort of power by the heart-and-mind
to overrule the desires, and even uses language nearly identical to
Xunzi's to describe the mechanism of control—likening the
heart-and-mind to the ruler (jun) of the body in that it issues orders
of "permission or denial" (ke fou) to act on the desires of the latter
(ch. 8). Thus Dai believes both that our dispositions begin in need of
a great deal of reshaping and that one's heart-and-mind must often
resist the pull of the natural dispositions in order to reshape it.
One can consistently maintain this view while upholding the doctrine
of natural goodness, Dai thinks, simply by acknowledging that there
are parts of one's nature that are not manifest in the raw,
pre-cultivated state. Dai recognizes (as is now routinely observed)
that much of Xunzi's argument depends on a narrow understanding of
"nature," by which anything that appears before the deliberate
activity of moral education is considered natural, and anything that
appears afterwards is a product of human artifice. But Dai insists
that one's nature consists of latent capacities as well,
potentialities which may not always be immediately manifest but which
could nevertheless be said to be part of one's nature, or in one's
nature, as the potential to grow into a peach tree is in the pit of a
peach (ch. 25, 29).
In saying this, Dai takes himself to be making a much stronger and
more capacious claim than one might think, for if human beings have in
their nature the potential to become good, Dai believes, then this
happy outcome could be brought about only by building upon nascent
goodness, or virtues, already in existence. In other words, if we are
to be capable of both understanding the good and being motivated by
it, then we must already have some germ of moral understanding and
some ability to delight in the good, even if these moral buds have no
discernable effect on our behavior. This is because, as Dai puts it,
moral inquiry and study are to one's moral capacities as the nutritive
powers of food and drink are to the material endowments of the body:
one cannot use them to nurture or grow their intended objects unless
some budding form of that object already exists (ch. 26).
This particular move in Dai's argument might seem controversial. It
assumes, after all, that the operations of moral inquiry and study
really are like the nurturing of something that already exists, and
not, for example, like the procreation or generation of something
entirely new. But underlying this argument is a larger commitment to a
picture of moral education as always building on some prior ability to
appreciate the relevant norms, and it may have been this commitment
that in the end makes the Xunzian account of the natural dispositions
untenable in Dai's eyes. For Dai, even at the earliest stages one
learns by drawing upon one's pre-existing grasp of propriety (li) and
righteousness (yi), enlarging and expanding upon the understanding
that one already has. In contrast, for Xunzi (as Dai reads him), those
who aspire to goodness must start from scratch, without the benefit of
nascent tendencies to appreciate the good (ch. 25-26).
4. Metaphysics and Metaethics
Most accounts of Dai Zhen's place in the history of Chinese philosophy
focus on his contributions to the ongoing dispute about the
ontological status of li(pattern, principle) and qi(vital energy,
material force), the two things most often proposed as the fundamental
constituents of the universe in later Confucian metaphysics.
Neo-Confucians such as Zhu Xi were arguably dualists about liand
qi,acknowledging that the two could not exist apart from one another,
but also seeing them as mutually irreducible. By contrast, Dai's
treatises seek to explain away the phenomena and the canonical
terminology that strike so many of his predecessors as referencing
irreducible notions of li,often by recasting them as references to the
cyclical movements of yin and yang, or as particular arrangements of
emotions or material bodies—all of these being typically understood as
qi-based phenomena. Dai never declares himself a monist about qiin any
unambiguous way,but he nevertheless devotes himself to showing how
conceptions of the former should be explained in terms of the latter,
and he is now frequently cited for the philological ingenuity and
argumentative creativity that he brought to bear against Zhu Xi's
dualism.
As the great synthesizer of Neo-Confucian thought, Zhu Xi understands
lias the cosmological patterns or principles that both make a thing
the kind of thing it is (e.g., a human being rather than a goat) and
determine the norms to which a thing should conform (e.g., serving
one's family, being of sound mind, and so on). Proper accounts of a
thing's kind and its norms should, Zhu believes, ultimately appeal to
these patterns, not to the endowment of qi—the stuff that makes up
one's body and embodied feelings and desires—that a thing happens to
have. Zhu understands li both as patterns that belong to the cosmos as
a whole and, as Dai is fond of pointing out, as formless things that
somehow exist inside all concrete individuals, including the
heart-and-mind of every human being. These internalized liare, for
Zhu, the "parts" or "manifestations" (fen) of the cosmological li,
which implies in turn that the patterns belonging to each concrete
individual are produced by (and thus harmonize with) the patterns that
govern Heaven and Earth.
Dai Zhen's trenchant criticism of the metaphysical picture offered by
Zhu and other Neo-Confucians is that they wrongly took liand qito be
"two roots" (er ben)—that is, they mistakenly saw lias being "rooted"
separately from qi (ch. 19). This critique encapsulates two general
sorts of errors that he finds in the thought of his Neo-Confucian
predecessors. The first is their tendency to see lias being separately
"rooted" in the sense of having independent causal power.For example,
Dai never embraces the view that the liare somehow responsible for
making an individual thing the kind of thing it is. If li have
anything to do with distinguishing between kinds, he maintains, it is
simply because they represent the fine-grained features of things that
we use to identify what kind they are, not the causal agent that makes
them what they are (ch. 1). Similarly, he takes issue with the
Neo-Confucian assertion that there is some li-based cosmological force
that gives rise to qi'stendency to fluctuate between two extremes
(yinand yang). For Dai, the term for this purported cosmological
force, known from the Classic of Change as "extreme polarity" or
"taiji," simply describes or names the fundamental oscillation in the
cosmic qi. It is not a distinct force that makes the qimove as it does
(ch. 18).
The second sense in which Dai's predecessors see lias separately
"rooted" is in conceiving of it as having independent explanatory
power, such that one could give an adequate account of liwithout
appealing toqi.The consequences of this sort of error are most
apparent in moral claims. For Zhu Xi, to say that someone's behavior
is virtuous or good is to say that it is a proper expression of the
liin her, which means in turn that it is a proper expression of some
natural endowment of patterning imbued in her heart-and-mind by
Heaven. Dai sees this as the wrong sort of story to tell, not just
because it presupposes the existence of an unlikely causal agent (the
formless "li" of the individual heart-and-mind), nor because he
rejects the view that our Heavenly-endowed nature is predisposed in
some small way to recognize and delight in the good (in fact, Dai
seems to accept some version of this picture). Rather, Dai sees it as
mistaken because it has nothing to do with whysuch behavior is good.
Dai's own preferred account invokes not the proclivities of Heaven as
a basis for moral claims, but instead the proper arrangement of such
worldly qi-based things as emotional dispositions and desires. Things
are in accordance with their proper patterns, Dai asserts, when "the
feelings do not err" (ch. 2).
Ever the attentive classicist, Dai traces much of the confusion he
finds in the Neo-Confucian usage of "li" to a subtle misreading of the
Confucian canon. In the Confucian classics, Dai notes, when the term
"li" is used in its moral sense it tends to refer to the state of
things when they are patterned in the right way, or "well-ordered"
(tiao li) (ch. 1). Thus to speak of the "li" of something (e.g., a
person, a boat) is not to refer to some formless object in that thing,
but simply to the perfected state of that thing. The Neo-Confucians
run afoul of this original sense of the word in assuming that "li"
must denote something like an actual object, existing in esse.In so
doing, Dai suggests, they open the door to a very different
explanation of how someone becomes a "li" or "well-ordered" version of
herself, where what makes her well-ordered is not simply that she has
improved upon her feelings and desires in the right way, but that some
quasi-object in her has expressed itself in the right way. For Dai, in
contrast, it is enough to think of lias the state of things as they
ought to be:
The exhaustive grasp of human li is nothing but an exhaustive grasp of
what is imperative (biran) in human relations and daily affairs, and
that is all. "What is imperative" is to push something to its greatest
limit, where it can no longer be altered, and this is to speak of its
perfection, not to trace out its root. (ch. 13)
5. Influence
At the time of Dai Zhen's death he was widely revered for his
scholarship in such fields as mathematics and phonology but ignored or
dismissed as a philosopher. Among his contemporaries, the best-known
admirers of his work on metaphysics and ethics were Hong Bang
(1745-1779) and Zhang Xuecheng (1738-1801), though their admiration
had little impact on other scholars of the era. Dai's most successful
student and friend, Duan Yucai (1735-1815), wrote a biography of Dai
in which he dutifully reported his teacher's profound devotion to and
enthusiasm for his less popular philosophical works. But Duan never
shared that enthusiasm and himself worked on conventional philological
issues.
Only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were Dai's On
the Goodand Evidential Studytaken up with much interest, notably by
reform-minded thinkers such as Zhang Taiyan (1868-1936), Liu Shipei
(1884-1919), and Liang Qichao (1873-1929), who were particularly drawn
to Dai's suggestion that Cheng-Zhu thought countenanced abuses of
power unchecked by the feelings and desires of the disadvantaged or
powerless. Later, with the rise of Marxist thought in China, Dai's
attack on Neo-Confucian li—and his concomitant interest in explaining
phenomena in terms of qi—made his work a convenient centerpiece for
sweeping narratives about the decline of "idealism" and rise of
"materialism" in the Ming and Qing dynasties. To some extent this
preoccupation with Dai's place in the li-qidebate lingers in the
literature today, although scholars have increasingly turned to focus
on his moral philosophy in its own right. Throughout the last two
centuries, Dai has remained one of the chief sources of inspiration to
those Confucian scholars who find Song and Ming Confucianism to be
unviable or fundamentally contaminated with Daoist and Buddhist
concepts. As such, he continues to be regarded as one of the most
prominent internal critics of the Confucian tradition today.
6. References and Further Reading
Although the study of Dai Zhen's life and work has become a minor
cultural industry in the last couple of decades, there is still
relatively little published material that focuses primarily on his
philosophy, and even less that is accessible to those unfamiliar with
the exegetical disputes prominent in his day. Readers are encouraged
to begin with Feng Youlan and Philip J. Ivanhoe (below), and to make
use of general surveys of the history of Chinese philosophy.
* Chin, Ann-ping, and Freeman, Mansfield. Tai Chen [Dai Zhen] on
Mencius: Explorations in Words and Meanings.New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1990.
o A widely available summary of Dai's life and thought, with
a complete if not always careful translation of Dai's most important
philosophical work, the Evidential Study.
* Ewell, John W. Reinventing the Way: Dai Zhen's Evidential
Commentary on the Meanings of Terms in Mencius (1777).Berkeley: Ph.D.
dissertation in history, 1990.
o Includes the strongest of the available English
translations of Dai's Evidential Study.
* Feng Youlan [Fung Yu-lan]. A History of Chinese
Philosophy,volume II. Trans. Derk Bodde. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1953.
o An English translation of this well-known scholar's
monumental survey of history of Chinese philosophy. The portion
devoted to Dai Zhen is replete with ample quotations from Dai's works.
* Hu Shi. Dai Dongyuan de zhexue(The Philosophy of Dai Dongyuan).
Reprinted in Taipei: Taiwan Shangwu, 1996.
o An important and thorough if somewhat dated introduction
to Dai Zhen's philosophy and his place in Qing dynasty academics. This
edition also includes the full texts of Dai's On the Goodand
Evidential Study,as well as several of his letters.
* Ivanhoe, Philip J. "Dai Zhen." In Confucian Moral Self
Cultivation,2nd ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company,
2000): 89-99.
o The best introduction to Dai Zhen's moral thought in the
English language. This work also exhibits the rare virtue (in Dai Zhen
studies) of being accessible to those less familiar with classical
Chinese language and Neo-Confucianism.
* Lao Siguang. Xin bian zhong guo zhe xue shi(History of Chinese
Philosophy, new edition). Taipei : San min shu ju, 1981.
o A view of Dai Zhen from one of his more strident critics,
presented as the final chapter of a survey of Chinese philosophy. Lao
uses little charity in attempting to understand Dai, but his is one of
the very few lengthy studies that focuses primarily on the
philosophical content of Dai's views.
* Nivison, David S. "Two Kinds of ëNaturalism': Dai Zhen and
Zhang Xuecheng." In The Ways of Confucianism: Investigations in
Chinese Philosophy,ed. Bryan Van Norden (Chicago: Open Court, 1996):
261-82.
o Nivison's contribution to the academic "cottage industry"
in studies of Dai's influence on Zhang. Like most such studies, this
piece is primarily an exercise in intellectual history, but Nivison's
passing summaries of Dai's views are careful and insightful.
* Shun, Kwong-loi. "Mencius, Xunzi, and Dai Zhen: A Study of the
Mengzi ziyi shuzheng." In Mencius: Contexts and Interpretations, ed.
Alan K. L. Chan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002): 216-241.
o An overview of Dai Zhen's masterwork. This piece is
particularly helpful in sorting out Dai's several ways of
understanding the doctrine that human nature is good.
* Yu Yingshi. Lun Dai Zhen yu Zhang Xuecheng(On Dai Zhen and Zhang
Xuecheng). Taipei: Dong da tu shu gu fen you xian gong si, 1996.
o Originally published in 1976, this is one of the best
Chinese language works on Dai Zhen's philosophical life and writings,
although the focus is on Dai's influence on Zhang Xuecheng and Qing
dynasty academics.
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