Li (Ritual Propriety)

Li is the Confucian concept of ritual propriety, ceremony, and social form. The Chinese character originally referred to religious ritual, particularly the proper conduct of sacrificial offerings, but the philosophical use generalizes to all of the cultivated patterns of conduct through which a properly ordered human life and society are realized. Li includes everything from court ceremony and funeral observance to the manner of greeting an elder and the proper way to drink tea.

For Confucius, li is the means through which humanness (ren) is realized in practice. Without ren, li becomes empty formality; without li, ren has no concrete realization. Mencius and Xunzi disagreed sharply over the relation of li to human nature. Mencius held that li expresses and refines the moral feelings already present in human beings. Xunzi held that li is the means by which the bad raw material of human nature is shaped into virtue — the bending of crooked wood. The dispute over li and human nature shaped the development of subsequent Confucianism.

The Confucian and Mohist disputes over li were one of the central debates of the Warring States period. Mozi rejected elaborate Confucian ritual as wasteful — the resources spent on funerals and ceremonial observance could feed the people, and the sentimental graded concern Confucian ritual encodes works against impartial concern (jian-ai). The Confucians replied that ritual is not an obstacle to genuine moral conduct but its proper expression: human nature requires the structured patterns of li to develop ren rather than the calculative reasoning Mohist consequentialism employs.

Neo-Confucian philosophy refined the metaphysics of li. The character li (禮, ritual) should be distinguished from the homophonous li (理, principle) central to Zhu Xi's metaphysics; the two are different concepts, though both are central to Neo-Confucian thought. The relation of ritual li to principle li, and of both to humanness (ren), shaped the disputes between Zhu Xi's school and Wang Yangming's — disputes that organized East Asian philosophy from the twelfth century into the modern period.