Abstract

John Dewey was familiar with the philosophy of Mencius, but he suffered from the common misconception that Mencius taught that human nature was “inherently good,” a misconception that ascribes notions of species essentialism and teleology to Mencius’s theory. On this basis, Dewey departed from Mencius’s position. Had Dewey better understood Mencius, he might have seen that their outlooks corresponded more closely. Once Mencius’s botanical metaphors are understood within the context of natural philosophy as broadly represented in the early Chinese corpus, his “developmental” theory of human nature can be seen to entail a notion of organism-environment continuity similar to Dewey’s own. Restoring this feature of Mencius’s thought requires revisiting the meaning of “nature” (xing 性) in Warring States philosophy, and bringing it more in line with observations about organic development prevalent in the period.