Where is “the Way”? The Mencian Discourse as Ritual Site for Imaginative Reconstitution of Social Categories

How did we come to imagine the world in the ways that we do? How did we begin to use the categories we use? How did these concepts and categories acquire “meaning” so that using them we can make “sense”?

To answer these questions, we turn to some ancients – the Mencius, the Laozi and the Zhuangzi – to explore how they imagined their worlds, the categories they used and how “sense” coalesced around “categories” such as the Way, the Heavens, the Sage, etc.

To do so, we will focus on rituals – both discourse as ritual and discourse on ritual – that serve as site where the cosmic and the nomic are dynamically calibrated and the social world is reproduced.

Language – linguistic signs – is a narrowly marked domain of a wider range of sign phenomena. The phenomenological world of experience reduced to language undergoes a great dilution. Apeculiar consequence of symbolic logic has been the loss of indexical relations that permeate our discursive practices and constitute the pragmatics of the social.

Yet, it is through linguistic signs, or language as generally understood, that we must bring into awareness the world of pragmatics. Thankfully, language in its “true symbolic mode” also allows for meta-semantic discourse on the nature of language itself, and opens a door into pragmatic and metapragmatic discourse through indexicality.

Following these indexical relations that point towards the extra-denotational context within and outside of a text, in a dialetic of en-textualization and con-textualization, we can arrive at the semiotics of the social. Doing so requires that we go beyond literal denotation and referentiality so thoroughly dependent on the segmentability of extension towards an aesthetic encounter with the intensional, a domain of experience and qualities that coalesce around symbolic categories.

Therefore, instead of asking “What” is the Way, and searching for its literal denotations, let us ask “Where” is the Way? What other qualities come fused together with categories such as kingship and subjectivity, humaneness and benevolence, and how they socially coordinate human relations in the works from the Warring States period. To do so, and to facilitate an aesthetic encounter with the world of antiquity and its cosmologies, we will ask the sages – Mencius, Laozi and Zhuangzi – to be our guides in this journey.

From Conceptual Categories to Qualia: Where Mencius Makes the Familiar Strange

We are riddled with names. In the Semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, Man and Word are all the same. They are both signs, and the most abundant type of signs are Rhemes. Think of a Rheme like a vessel, better yet a balloon with two mouths, air slowly flowing in from one end and leaking out of another. What separates the air briefly inside the balloon from air outside is but the illusion of a balloon. Such are names.

But before there are rhemes, there is a firmament of sensations, pure qualities or mere possibilities – qualia – such as the quality of heat emanating from a furnace, a certain shade of crimson and our correspondence with it. Qualities rarely come to us alone but always bound up and bundled with other qualities. And so, arise sensations.

It is a curious predicament of human condition that we are a continuity of intensions amidst a continuity of phenomena separated by and mediated through discreet pockets of perception and faculties of interpretation. Our ears do not register frequencies lesser than twenty hertz and greater than twenty thousand hertz. Imagine the sounds we cannot directly hear.

Our eyes, alas, are blind to the electromagnetic radiations above and below the visible spectrum. Think of the lights we cannot see. And yet our proclivities are such and so little cultivated that we see lesser still, hear less, perceive a tiny bit of what we can because we forget to cultivate our senses, or “talents” as Mencius calls it.

Thankfully, Mencius is here to help us see the strange world beyond conceptual categories. Like his teacher Confucius who saw through the trickery of names and wanted first and foremost to rectify the names, Mencius is alert to the difference between the fact of names and their truth. Although his interlocutors are often kings (王: wang) – he knows that they are not “true” Kings (王不王: wang bu wang: the king does not King). And his life’s quest is to relate to those who would listen to him the nature of “true” Kings in the hope that there might be some out there willing to pattern themselves in accord with the Way (道: dao).

His methods might appear quaint to us descendants of five hundred years of Cartesian dualism, practitioners of analytical philosophy, weavers of symbolic logic and doyens of rationality. It is not philosophy, so many have decried, and dismissed entire traditions with the charge of obscurantism and mysticism.

But it is not so, and I will show and illustrate that “what” is at stake in the Mencian quest is nothing less than an aesthetic encounter between the worlds within and worlds without, worlds forever in flux and correspondence with each other. The world of Mencius is more tangible, a better approximation of our lived experience and a keener guide to life, or to ventriloquize the master, “true” Life.

Mencius, the Way, and the ways of the Noble Person (sheng ren: Sage)

In the Mencius, there is an ambivalence about the notion of the Heaven (天: tian). I would like to posit the concept of Heaven as “History”, and its mandate as legitimacy bestowed by the people. It is simultaneously made transcendent, beyond the pale of this-worldly, and also made immanent in this world, and emerges as the site of people as a “collective” anthropomorphized.

Understood in terms of transcendence, the Heaven is discerned as the constitutive outside:

What happens without anyone’s causing it is owing to Heaven; what comes about without anyone’s accomplishing it is the mandate. [5A6]

There is an ambivalence in what can be discerned about the heaven, and where human beings lack. What is clear is that the mandate to rule is bestowed by the Heaven upon the worthiest – the Son of Heaven (天字: tian zi) – but it is not done so in words, as when the mandate is bestowed upon Shun:

Heaven does not speak. This was [Heaven’s mandate] is manifested simply through Shun’s actions and his conduct of affairs. [5A5]

A discussion on transfer of Heaven’s mandate follows:

The Son of Heaven can present a man to Heaven, but he cannot cause Heaven to give him the realm. [5A5]

From these sections, Heavens emerge as a transcendental entity whose exact workings cannot be figured out. Yet, in a series of passages, an indexical link connects the Heaven to the people, as when the Mencius quotes the Great declaration, saying:

Heaven sees as my people see,

Heaven hears as my people hear. [5A5]

To locate upon whom the Heaven’s mandate has fallen, look who the people of the realm follow. Another section highlights the Way for a ruler to obtain the world:

One gains it by gaining the people; when one gains the people, one gains the world. There is a Way of gaining the people. By gaining their hearts one gains the people. There is a Way to gain their hearts: gather for them things you desire. Do not impose on them things that you dislike. [4A8]

The Heaven in Mencius finds a locus in people, and its mandate, when it is bestowed on a ruler or stripped away from one, depends on the nature of relations between a ruler and his people, but before we turn to that, let us explore the pragmatics of sageliness, and understand what being a noble person entails.

As with everything of importance in the Mencius, there are two levels (or kinds) of nobility, and they are compared to many parts of the body, “some parts of the body are superior and others inferior; some are small, and others are great” indexing a relationship that relates the two levels of nobility. There is the “Nobility” of the Heaven and the “nobility” of man. Nobility of the Heaven dwells in humaneness (仁: ren), rightness (儀: yi), loyalty (信: xin) and wisdom (智: zhi) whereas nobility of humans is measured by ranks, so there are dukes (公: gong), ministers, and officials. [6A16]

Yao and Shun emerge as exemplars of sageliness, both figures of antiquity that by understanding the Noble ways of the Heaven, were able to bring the human world in accord with the Way of the Heavens, and therefore by virtue of their actions, the Heaven’s mandate fell upon them.

In the Mencius, one finds an entire cosmology taking shape around a series of relationships. On top rests the Heaven’s seasons, followed by earth’s advantages and human accord, respectively. But the latter, says Mencius, is more crucial than both earth’s advantages as well as Heaven’s seasons. [2B1]

In later sections, he builds up on the notion of human accord and its relations to Heaven’s seasons and earths advantages:

Whether calamities or happiness – these are always the results of one’s own seeking. [2A4]

The statement is immediately followed by a poetic equivalence between the season of the Heavens and the human accord, as illustrated through a passage from the Odes, quoted twice in the work:

            When Heaven makes misfortunes,

            It is still possible to escape them.

            When the misfortunes are of our own making,

            It is no longer possible to live. [2A4]

In the cosmology of the Mencius permeating the Way of the Heavens, the advantages of the earth and human accord, the sages emerge as figures, who having cultivated themselves can anticipate the Way, and by loving “goodness” and forgetting “power” [7A8], they were able to settle the world, and pave the way for humans to have constant means of livelihood.

Driven by a permanent anxiety about the people: first, so they can have a constant means of livelihood. and then, once they have a constant means, to prevent so that they are no different from beasts, the sages are anxious about education and moral cultivation so that people may develop constant minds and can hold on to it. Moved by a concern for all people, the Mencius writes, sages such as Yao, Shun, and Confucius, are as if:

Washed in the waters of Jiang and Han and bleached in the autumn sun – how glistening is its purity! Nothing can be added to it.  [3A4]

Sages are often discussed in matters of education, moral cultivation, remonstrance. Their relation with the people – kings and commoners alike – is that one between teachers and disciples. Because sages can anticipate the Way, both, a ruler and a commoner, by learning from them, move towards true Kingship and achieve unmoved minds and understand “true” Words from “distorted” words that cause obscuration, “licentious” words that lead to corruption, “deviant” words that promote waywardness and “evasive” words of desperation. [2A2]

Because a key aspect of Mencius is illustration via images and metaphors, he presents the following analogy relating the place of the sages vis-à-vis others and their role in human society more broadly:

I have heard of departing from a dark valley to repair to a tall tree; I have not heard of descending from a tall tree to enter a dark valley. [3A4]

Elsewhere, the sages (noble persons) and their methods of teaching are listed in detail using metaphors and images. The sages teach others by: exerting a transforming influence, like a timely rain; by causing their virtue to be fulfilled; furthering their talents; answering questions; and enabling them to cultivate and correct themselves on their own. [7A40]

Note the metaphor of timely rain to index how sages intervene at the right occasion to better the people. We will now turn to discussion of human nature and see how each of the aspects highlighted with respect to the sages are further indexed and elaborated.

Four Sprouts of Human Nature

In the cosmology that emerges in the Mencius, one finds an order where the Heaven above, the sages in between, and human relations below, are all settled in harmony. Elaborating on the kinds of human relations, Mencius highlights the following, each one of which is suffused with a certain quality – affection between parent and child, rightness between rulers and ministers, proper order between old and young, separation of functions between a husband and a wife, and faithfulness between friends. [3A4]

These qualities are compared to four limbs – or four sprouts – pity and compassion, shame and aversion, feeling of modesty and compliance, knowledge of right and wrong. A mind lacking these qualities would not be human.

Precisely these very qualities developed to their utmost fulfilment are the marks of sageliness: to feel pity and compassion is to be humane (仁: ren); to have shame and aversion is to have rightness (儀: yi); to feel modesty and compliance is to have ritual propriety (禮: li); and to possess the knowledge of right and wrong is to have wisdom(智: zhi). To have these four is to possess four limbs – they are compared to four sprouts – that every man is endowed with. Not to have these four sprouts and limbs and what they entail is to not be human. [2A6]

These four sprouts serve as a means to illustrate the relationship between sages and people further. In possessing them, the sages are no different from people. They are similar to other people. Where the difference lies is illustrated through the example of Yi Yin who thinks:

Heaven, in giving birth to this people, causes those who are first to know to awaken those who are later to know and causes those who are first awakened to awaken those who are later to be awakened. [5A7 and 5B1]

Being the first to know the Way of Heaven, and the ability to anticipate, is what distinguishes the Noble person from an ordinary one. It is only that the sages have been able to cultivate the four sprouts first. Possessing a constant mind and humaneness, such sages may like Yi Yin think:

I am one of those of Heaven’s people who has awakened first; I will take this Way and use it to awaken this people. If I do not awaken them, who will do so? [5A7 and 5B1]

But all sages may not think so, or act upon such thought, so the Mencius says:

Sages have differed in their actions. Some have kept their distance; others have approached. Some have departed; others have not. The point of convergence has been in keeping their persons pure, that is all. [5A7]

(Musing #1: Reading this passage, I was struck by the Buddhist imagery of enlightenment, and the Buddha being referred to as ‘the awakened one’ in the discourses by his disciples and monks. Like the Mencian sage, he weighs whether to teach others or not. In the days after his enlightenment, according to the canonical accounts, he was convinced by Brahma to help those who can still follow the Way and become awakened. Further it resembles the distinction between the “paccekabuddhas” who do not teach and guide others towards awakening from the “sammasambuddhas” who teach and guide other towards enlightenment.)

Of the fundamental relationships discussed in the Mencius and which orders the world, some are hierarchical and others egalitarian. Prime among the hierarchical relationships are that between a ruler and his people: sovereignty and subjectivity are always discussed together, and the pragmatics of kingship are to be found in how the king treats his people. True Kingship is illustrated via how the king ought to behave towards his people, protect his people, enable their flourishing. The ability to commiserate with each other makes people humane and such commiseration is at the heart of “true” Kingship, to which we turn in the next section.

Metaphor as Method to the Root of the Matter

In Mencius, the sovereign is rarely spoken of in the singular. Kingship is always discussed in relation to what the king does unto his ministers and his people. A “true” King, Mencius says, does not “entrap” his people. What does he mean by “entrapment”? Great you ask for Mencius lays it out, twice, first in response to King Hui of Liang:

The people, lacking a constant means of livelihood, will lack constant minds, and when they lack constant minds there is no dissoluteness, depravity, deviance, or excess to which they do not succumb. If, once they have sunk into crime, one responds by subjecting them to punishment – this is to entrap the people. [1A7]

And the second time, in response to Duke Wen of Teng’s inquiry about governing the state, he repeats almost word for word:

The way of the people is this: that when they have a constant livelihood, they will have constant minds, but when they lack a constant livelihood, they will lack constant minds. When they lack constant minds, there is no dissoluteness, depravity, or excess to which they will not succumb. If, once they have suck into crime, one responds by subjecting them to punishment – this is to entrap the people. [3A2]

In these instances, the category of kingship begins to fill up with substance, it indexes beyond the mere term (rheme) king to index what it entails in a series of relationships. To be a “true” King, for Mencius, is not to entrap the people, and to not entrap the people is to not deprive them of their livelihood. The title of king without entailment of what it means in relation to his subjects is indexically empty, and therefore, away from Way of the “true” Kings.

At the root of the matter of being a “true” King is to ensure that people do not lack a constant livelihood. Sovereignty and subjectivity are related to each other in a series of indexical relationships that etch out the pragmatics of social relations. Mencius does not merely argue via a series of indexically arid propositions as logicians are prone to, but his interlocuters as well as readers are confronted with aesthetic encounters. If under the reign of a King, Mencius remonstrates:

People die, and he [the King] says, ‘It was not I; it was the year.’ How is this different from killing a person by stabbing him and then saying, ‘It was not I; it was the weapon’? [1A3]

Such a king is not a “true” King not because he cannot do something but because he does not do it, and Mencius illustrates the difference through parallels. First, he asks the King Xuan of Qi:

Suppose someone were to report to the king, saying, ‘My strength is sufficient to lift a hundred jun, is not sufficient to lift a feather. My sight while sufficient to scrutinize the tip of an autumn hair, is not sufficient to see a cartload of firewood.’ Would the king accept this? [1A7]

When the king replies, saying no, Mencius draws a parallel with the king’s own conduct. If the king was kind to prevent the slaughter of an animal whose trembling he could not bear, how is it that his people are not protected? Surely, it is not because he is incapable of kindness but merely unwilling.

In dialogue with Mencius, his interlocutors are made to measure their conduct in one situation in the light of their judgement of another situation. They stand implicated, embarrassed and chastised. Walking with Mencius through his discourses, one begins to see the coalescing of qualities around concepts, an indexical thickening that brings to fore the pragmatics of “true” Kingship.

It is no longer confined to the domain of rhematic symbolic legisign (the terrain of symbolic logic) but moves towards images and metaphors of what kingship entails, and it finds a sharper focus in discussion of rituals, the eminent domain of indexical-iconicity, where the cosmic and the earthly (the “there” and “then” and the “here” and “now”) are dynamically calibrated, and the metapragmatics that mostly remains implicit finds explicit illustration. To rituals, then, we turn next.

Discourse on Ritual, Discourse as Ritual

Pursuing the web of indexical relations in Mencius, one finds an entire cosmology, with an origin story or a cosmogony embedded within:

In the time of Yao the world was not settled. The Waters of the deluge overran their channels, and the world was inundated. Grasses and trees were luxuriant: birds and beasts proliferated. Birds and beasts crowded in on people, and the prints of beasts and tracks of birds crisscrossed each other throughout the middle kingdom. [3A4]

Implicit in the picture of an unsettled world is a distinction between humans and beasts and birds, but the distinction is not yet one of culture. That would come later. Inundated by an unsettled world, people although higher in the hierarchy of animate beings do not yet possess the more refined qualities of humaneness. They are little better than beasts, often bested by them.

Sages appear at this crucial juncture in the Mencian cosmology. Although arising among the people, the sages rise above the fray. Yao and Shun are such sages, and so (later on) will be Confucius. What elevates the sages above the station of ordinary beings is their capacity to anticipate and aid the progress of civilization. They are anxious about the people, and their efforts create the possibilities for people to cultivate the land and eat:

Yi set fire to the mountains and marshes and burned them, and the birds and beasts fled into hiding. Yu dredged the nine rivers. He cleared the courses of the qi and the Ta, leading them to flow to the sea, opened the way for the Ru and the Han, and guided the courses of the Huai and the Si, leading them to flow to the Yangtze. Only then could those in the Middle Kingdom [cultivate the land and] eat. [3A4]

Rising above the concern of the ordinary for themselves, the sages are able to see through the larger breadth of society, identify and put the humane (other sages) to institute the regulations of government and prepare the ground for the flourishing of civilization.

Once the concern for “food, warm clothing, and comfortable dwellings,” has been taken care of, anticipating the need for education lest ordinary human beings become little more than beasts, the sages anticipate the need for education to teach people about relations.

Making the Strange Familiar with Laozi: Cosmological Transcendence

With a better sense of the pragmatics of Mencian categories (human relations on earth), we embark upon the next stage of our journey with Laozi. In its refusal to grant a substantive reality to familiar categories, and the quest to reveal the schismogenesis at play in the origin of dualities, the Laozi posits the Way beyond the domains of the sayable, or even knowable. Laozi warns that the seeds of the bad lie in speech about the good, therefore, the sages do not make such distinctions and dwell in harmony with the Way.

Think of all the dualities that we inherit and tirelessly reproduce – man-nature; mind-body; foreign-domestic; private-public; social-personal; psychological-somatic; etc. – and in the process forget that they are deeply bound together and are schismogenetically defined against each other. The tragedies of great-power politics and international relations are in the ultimate a consequence of belief in the separation of discourse around domestic politics and foreign policy. While Mencius insists one should turn within and examine oneself, Laozi sees through the differences in words that obfuscate the oneness underneath apparent differences. The way one acts without, one ends up acting within. Wars of conquest and stasis are not unrelated. They are the one and the same. 

In Laozi, the Way loses its immanent qualities so espoused in the Mencius. It is no longer to be in located the “here” and “now”, nor in the sages of history (Laozi seems to be the kind of sage who keeps his distance and departs, dwells outside of history). Rituals no longer serve as the site for nomic calibration of the cosmic with the worldly. When rituals become ossified, the aesthetic seeps away and mere forms, indexically emptied, and iconically unrecognizable, persist. Just as qualities undergo rhematicization, terms, concept and categories loose indexical connection with the real. An overused metaphor, image, phrase loses its capacity to move.

In the absence of novel metaphors that can evoke an aesthetic response, it is no longer possible to produce the Way of their Sages repeatedly in the persons of the great Confucians. And all efforts to elucidate the Way end up obfuscating and muddling it further. Theories undergo a similar indexical dilution. Use Democracy long enough and it ceases to excite the imagination, wave the flag too often, and it cannot evoke patriotism. Emblems that once aroused fervour (mana), rituals that reproduced the social, varieties of religious experience that brought forth conversions sound hollow, meaningless. They still literally denotate, but no longer dynamically calibrate the cosmic with the “here” and “now”.

The Laozi and the myth surrounding its author seems to have understood the pragmatic decay of the aesthetic surrounding rituals, words, even language as such. Although he writes of the Way, he is unconvinced his words would lead to it. Therefore, pursuing Ariadne’s threat of indexical relations emanating from discussions of the Way, one no longer finds it in this world, it is transposed to a transcendent domain, beyond the pale of language, understood negatively in terms of what it is not. To possess the Way is to lose it.

As indexical relations lose their anchor in the world of immanence, the encounter with the Way that the Laozi induces takes the shape of radical firstness. Impermanence of the world, names, ways, means, good and bad, all find anchor in the permanent but unnamable, indistinguishable, unknowable, unsayable. Language loses all referents except in a purely negative sense, to buttress that while being one with the Way might be possible, to elucidate, posit and constitute the Way will escape language.

Where Transcendence dwells in Immanence: “Goodbye” Language and the Transformation of All Things with Zhuangzi

Language and understanding, while it could be distinguished between “true” and “false” in the Mencius and becomes a shaky guide at best in the Laozi, is shown to be futile in search of any knowledge whatsoever in the Zhuangzi. Even knowledge as such, and authorities from the past can be summarily dismissed, including Zhuangzi himself. Five hundred years of rationality, empiricism, and its synthesis is cast in doubt as soon as we follow in the footsteps of Zhuangzi.

As if he were saying, there is no there there, Zhuangzi makes us experience the limitations of language as a means to understand and interpret ourselves and the world. When someone asks him his opinion about something Confucius said, he playfully dismisses it as idle chatter. Confucius was dreaming. And Zhuangzi, too, is dreaming, that he is a butterfly, or perhaps, a butterfly is dreaming that it is Zhuangzi. Dwelling in the pastures of aesthetic encounters with firstness, beyond the domain of sign-phenomena, we encounter qualia and come to grip with our inability to put it into words.

Traveling with Zhuangzi as guide can be likened to a fever dream. An anti-philosophy that casts doubt on knowledge, being, existence, life and death itself. “How do I know,” Zhunagzi says, “that loving life is not a delusion? How do I know that hating death I am not like a man who having left his home in youth, has forgotten his way back?” The effect, on the reader, is not one of nihilism, but rather an experience of radical freedom, unchained by the mores of the society, and from shackles of inherited belief.

(Musing #2: We are a people obsessed with analytical reduction, expertise to the point of alienation, measuring for measuring sake without questioning what is it that a measure measures? Take GDP, for instance, what does it measure? Zhuangzi would call it Gross Delusional Product! For it fails to measure those aspects of human existence that cannot be discretized, the phenomenal world of experience, company of friends, dwelling in nature. Afterall, if you were to take a day off to mourn the dead, or take a walk along the course of a river, it causes a decrease in GDP. Such measures fail to measure the immeasurable qualities of care that is involved in social reproduction and reduces exchange and kinship to transaction based on forecasts of growth.)

Zhuangzi continues: How can the short-lived know the long-lived? What does the summer cicada know about the fall? To take temporary labels, words, rituals, customs, and confuse them for the ceaseless transformation of all things, Zhuangzi warns, is to thoroughly misunderstand the Way.

His critique is devastating for the seekers of certainty. Confronted with Zhuangzi, positivism of any sort is shown to be hollow of any abiding substance. The Way, too, ceases to be “there” as such, transcendentally or otherwise. The Zhuangzian Way is one of flux and transformation of all things all the time, including categories of time and space, being and becoming, and the Way dwells with all beings so long as they do not brood over its meaning, but simply be in flux with it.

Indexical Coalescing of Qualia around Categories – Pursuing the Thread of Relations

Standardized accounts of history usually blur the dialogical background of the preceding eras to present a linear emergence of the present “social” as inevitable. The Bakhtinian approach to polyphony and heteroglossia, which has been used to analyze the novel, can be employed to reveal the contestations and counter-voices in history. Michael Puett achieves something similar in his account of self-divinization in early China.

Combining a sense of Jacobsonial “poetics” and Bakhtinian “polyphony” to study Mencius and other texts from pre-Qin period allows us to explore how ritual fuses two disparate worlds through metaphors (indexical icons) and constitutes the social “here” and “now” in dynamic collaboration with a cosmological “there” and “then”. Michael Silverstein’s approach to the study of rituals helps us to see how persons are socially coordinated in a discursive ritual, and redefined according to categories that are indexically embedded with a bundle of qualities that are poetically selected from the metaphor and applied to the situation at hand.

In the Mencius, we do not find a definitional paradigm of abstractions but a relational approach to illustrating a particular instance. The two modes differ sharply on questions such as what is knowledge, its relation to the real/truth and where is the role of language in culture.

The Mencian register indexes a particular social class as such, which can be understood as a sociolect. Looking at the abundance of discourse on China today, one may find that quantity of writing may all index a certain sociolect and lacks heteroglossia that Bakhtin talks about. The Mencius presents a cosmology and as one proceeds through the text, one may uncover a semiotic ideology at play that orders the social into its contextually invoked categories that are then ritually realized (i.e., made real or good to “work” with.)

Thus, questions such as immanence and transcendence may be rephrased as to where lies the locus of qualities that index a category? Is it to be found in relations of persons or does the indexical anchor lead away from the “here” and “now” towards a cosmic “there” and “then” (as is the case in Laozi). Take the example of sageliness. Mencius locates qualities of sageliness in the figures of Yao and Shun, who might or might not be historical but their accomplishments are very earthly indeed (channeling the waters, working to elevate man from birds and beasts).

The Laozi refuses to associate qualities of sageliness with any human figure (real or mythical). His suspicion of language means he suggests or hints at qualities of the Sage or the Way in negative terms, leaving it up entirely to a pure aesthetic encounter beyond signification. The Zhuangzi is interesting in that it retains the Laozian suspicion of language but indexes the qualities of the Way in figures such as Cook Ding. He is simultaneously very this-worldly (a butcher in the “here” and “now” and very ordinary for that) and also very otherworldly in his unique relationship or approach towards existence as such (how Cook Ding turns ordinary work of butchering into the sublime manifestation of oneness with the Way). The Zhuangzi immanentizes in the “here” and “now” what the Laozi transcendentalizes in a “there” and “then”, namely, the Way.

The basic scenario in the Mencius is a dialogue – which may be coded and analyzed using Silverstein’s framework yielding a denotational text and an interactional text that establishes the social coordinates and their token types and towards the culmination of a dialogic ritual, the type category is aesthetically reconstituted, and it serves a function of moral chastisement for the token at hand. This aesthetic reconstitution may be expressed in the following steps.

1.     Hui of Liang (Token) is a King (Type)

2.     Through metaphors and images that take Yao and Shun as tokens par-excellence of Kingship, the Mencius typifies Kingship in aesthetically novel qualities.

3.     Measured against such aesthetic reconstitution of Kingship (type), the bad token at hand (Liang Hui Wang) is chastised.

It is precisely the positing of a type – King, Sage, and so on – that at first distinguishes the immediate (“here” and “now”) token from a cosmic (“there” and “then”) type illustrated by an image, a metaphor, and not definitionally circumscribed, thus, allowing for social reconstitution when we have no indexical connection to categories and vice-versa. Hence, the need for a new metaphor, one that can calibrate the dialectics of textualization to the aesthetics of contextualization.

The Mencian discourse can be en-textualized as a genre that operates with a certain logic of enregisterment of the interlocutors. At first it may appear like a Socratic dialogue but while the Socratic dialogue operates within strict sense of symbolic logic. The Mencian discourse aims at an aesthetic transformation of the pragmatics of social categories. The labels while they may remain are indexically emptied of understood qualities and re-embedded with a novel bundle of qualities. The symbols may remain but the qualities that became rhematized are altogether transformed within the canopy of a Mencian semiotic ideology.

Following Mencius as he takes us through relations that order the world, we find a dense principle of poetic equivalence that fuses diachronic images and metaphors into a nomic calibration of the cosmic with the nomic, thereby producing a synchronicity. Categories such as the Way, the sage (noble person), king, people, etc. are etched out by a coalescing of qualities around them expressed indexically through relationships mediated by aesthetics of humaneness, rightness, trustworthiness and wisdom, filiality and remonstrance, that bring to life what it means to be a sage, the nature of “true” Kingship, cultivation of virtues and bring it all in accord with the Way.

The Mencius offers an aesthetic mode of philosophy, which is different from an axiomatic one. The latter dwells in the domain of symbolic logic and works with terms, propositions, and arguments while ignoring the pragmatics of the social. By pursuing logic through poetics as metaphors, diagrams, and images are brought into a fused space of discourse as ritual, such a way of philosophy brings the indexical iconicity at the heart of social pragmatics into light. This paper has tried to illustrate the indexical embedding of pragmatics of social relations in sign-categories and poetic logic that projects principles of equivalence across instances to induce an aesthetic encounter with the truth of how relations are felt as opposed to how they are codified.