Mencius, like Confucius, wanted to transform society and believed the best way to begin was through the education of individuals. The chief content of this teaching was how to live humanely, which is to say humanly. But this means that we can trust our humanity, our nature, to naturally harmonize with the world, ourselves, and others given the opportunity to do so. Human nature is essentially good. We must re-connect with our inner-most selves.
–
Given his unexplained reference to his experience of “flood-like qi”, some have said that Mencius was more a mystic than Zhuangzi. By some definitions of mysticism, this may be true. We needn’t, however, let such judgements obscure how they are very similar in their appreciation of the value of reconnecting with our precognitive selves. They differ in that, for Zhuangzi, this movement is not mediated by a belief in the “goodness” of human nature, but by its “isness”. Nature, for Zhuangzi, does not make moral discriminations, a purely human activity. This does not mean that Mencius was mistaken or that the result of such a mystical reconnection with one’s pre-cognitive self and through it with Nature itself does not lead to greater humaneness; it is simply that for Zhuangzi this outcome is incidental—a happy circumstance.
–
They may also differ in that Mencius may have thought of qi as a something. Typically, mysticism is defined as identification with something Other; and this would lend itself to thinking Mencius more a mystic than Zhuangzi whose mysticism turns on the emptiness of any concept of an Other. However, qi can also simply refer to Life and the life-experience, which is to say, an experienced mystery.
–
Zhuangzian mysticism does differ significantly from Mencius’ (I believe) in that his rests entirely on an emptiness of content. To depend on nothing means to depend on no one interpretation of reality, and no morally-inspired program. Be like experienced Nature itself. Be yourself. Look into the night sky (like Camus’ Stranger) and be like that. Vast and limitless. Morally indifferent. Now come back and live the particular, moral you.