Zhu Xi
Chinese philosopher, 1130–1200, and the synthesizer of neo-confucianism. Discovered while ingesting the-pattern-and-the-mind, which is the corpus’s only source on him — a T4 self-published article, so treat the outline as a starting point rather than a settled account.
He took five heterogeneous Song thinkers — Zhou Dunyi, Shao Yong, Zhang Zai, and the Cheng brothers Hao and Yi — and made one system out of them, with li (principle) as the ground of both the cosmos and morality. The Cheng brothers had already split the difference he had to resolve: Hao leaned toward the heart-mind, Yi toward the externalism Zhu built on.
The position
Principle is objectively in things. Two things follow, and the second is what gave the first its history: study can reach principle systematically, through the investigation of things (gewu zhizhi); and because it can be reached systematically, competence in it can be examined. His commentaries duly became examination orthodoxy under later dynasties.
That makes him the closest thing this spoke’s corpus has to a foundationalist outside Europe — like rene-descartes, he wants a ground that study can reach and rest on. Unlike Descartes, the ground is in the world rather than in the thinking subject, and it is normative: li tells you how to act, not only how things are.
His system is also reported to borrow substantially from Buddhism while concealing that it does (the-pattern-and-the-mind) — uncorroborated here, and the kind of claim that wants a second source.
Connections
- synthesized neo-confucianism; the externalist pole
- opposed by wang-yangming
- compare rene-descartes on foundations, epistemology on where the standard lives