Polemic on the Rectification of Names
It is said that when Confucius was asked what he would do if he were appointed a governor, he said that he would “rectify the names” to make words correspond to reality. This (to English-speaking ears) unusual expression, written 正名 and pronounced zhèngmíng in Chinese and seimei in Japanese, is important in Confucianism and other East Asian philosophy and provides for some interesting harmonies and counterpoints with concepts in Western thought as well, such as direction of fit and disputes concerning linguistic prescriptivism. Unfortunately, the main setting in which one sees the term employed in non-specialist English is the so-called “intellectual dark web” and related far-right online environments—a milieu in which “rectification of names” is used both insufficiently and inaccurately.
The late sociologist Peter L. Berger appears to have been one of the first to (mis)use the term in online political commentary, in the January 2015 article “New Atheism and the Rectification of Names.” The article mounts a series of (in my opinion mostly well-founded) criticisms of atheist polemicists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, with most of which people familiar with current Anglophone public life will already be at least vaguely familiar: they make false dichotomies between faith and reason, aren’t in fact saying anything “new” but rather relitigating Enlightenment- or Victorian-era disputes, and so on. Berger attempts to ground these criticisms in the rectification of names, which he describes thus:
Confucius and other Chinese philosophers who followed him thought that much social disorder comes from the wrong names being used to describe groups of people. This mistake was supposed to be most dangerous if it was applied to the proper hierarchy on which social order must rest. For example, if people in the lower classes give themselves, or are given by others, names that properly belong to the higher classes, this will result in rebellion and social disorder. Confucian sages had the task of educating the populace in knowing and accepting the proper names of things, and government had the task of enforcing this vocabulary.[1]
Berger concedes that “our views on hierarchy differ somewhat from imperial China, or seem to differ,” but it is still easy to see the appeal of the idea, framed this way, to people on the authoritarian right. It provides a cogent philosophical basis both for cheerfully inegalitarian views on the order of society and for opposition to “political correctness,” “cancel culture,” and efforts to control or limit speech, especially online. In recent years I’ve seen everyone from Twitter-based Catholic pseudotheologians to crankish followers of the computer programmer-turned-rightist cultural critic Curtis Yarvin use “rectification of names” to argue for everything from insistently referring to gay people as sodomites to claiming that capitalism is a meaningless concept (and therefore cannot be intelligibly criticized). Berger, for his part, makes a valiant attempt at evenhandedness by identifying both “enhanced interrogation techniques” for “torture” and “gender” for (in some contexts) “sex” as unacceptably euphemistic in ways that run afoul of his Confucian terminological buzzsaw. However, Berger has the misfortune to be writing just at the beginning of the current especially nasty campaign in the cultural forever war, and I am not aware of anybody else using the term who has been so gracious, certainly not Yarvin and his ilk.
One problem with this use of the concept is that if one only wants to claim that much, or most, contemporary political language is euphemistic for malign reasons, one only needs to cite George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.”[2] There is no need to bring Confucius into it, given that Orwell is more accessible to English-speakers and thus invocations of him are easier for readers to check for themselves. Indeed, Berger’s example of “enhanced interrogation techniques” reminds me very much of Orwell’s observation that “political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.” The Bush administration’s use of the term to obscure the fact that it had a probably-illegal torture program fits perfectly into Orwell’s own list of cases in point. “Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended,” Orwell writes, “but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties.”
Leaving aside anything to do with Orwell, the second, and much more serious, problem with the current political use of the “rectification of names” concept is that it both reduces and misunderstands Confucian thought. Confucianism is, first of all, concerned about dysphemism as well as euphemism; harsh, cruel, and intemperate language runs clearly afoul of the core virtue of benevolence. Moreover, zhèngmíng as a concept has a great deal more active, positive political and moral content than merely “calling ‘em like one sees ‘em,” “telling it like it is,” or refusing to be “PC” or “woke” in the way one speaks. “It’s time to call you what you are: ORANGE MAN DONALD TRUMP #OrangeManDonaldTrump,” reads an infamous Twitter reply by the anti-Trump social media personality Ed Krassenstein. Certainly this rectifies the names in the sense that Donald Trump is indeed orange-hued and Ed Krassenstein presumably had not directly said so before. However, an equally important question is whether “Orange Man Donald Trump” is the sort of name that needs to be rectified. This is a question that Berger does not answer and that Yarvin and Krassenstein are probably constitutionally unable to answer, but Confucius sees its importance and it is a key consideration in his, and later Mencius’s, treatment of political and social legitimacy. Let’s look at what Confucius himself says in the Analects about the rectification of names:
A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve. If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot. Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.[3]
One is not only morally responsible for the content of one’s speech; one is also morally responsible for correctly carrying out the types of actions that the content of one’s speech implies. An example of this principle might be a person who says “I love my wife” and yet disregards the wife’s opinions and values, cheats on her, is unkind to her, undermines her in the presence of others, and so forth. As extended to affairs of state, it would include a king who does not behave according to qualities that are, according to Confucian theories of social relationships, implied by the title “king,” such as magnanimousness. Thus we have Mencius’s remark, discussing the overthrow of the tyrannical and incompetent King Zhou of Shang, that “I have indeed heard of the punishment of the ‘outcast Zhou,’ but I have not heard of any regicide.”[4] The implied principle here is that Zhou effectively abdicated by failing to use his royal authority in ways consistent with kingly virtues. Since being a tyrant is morally wrong and being orange is morally neutral, making the distinction between “outcast Zhou” and “King Zhou” is thus a morally and politically significant case of rectifying the names in a way that is not true for, say, “President Donald Trump” and “Orange Man Donald Trump.”[5]
The lack of any account of this important point even in the writing of the normally much subtler Peter Berger is, in my opinion, probably due to the aversion to prescriptivist accounts of language in modern Western academic thought, which when applied to political questions involves rejecting the idea that different political and social concepts and terms have implied moral content regardless of how they are used. The Yarvinite use of “rectification of names” is unsystematic about this, because it is unsystematic about just about everything; “rectify your names” coming from an extremely-online far-rightist is a call to accept certain moral implications that such people think proper language use involves, but very rarely implies any perceived need to change behavior, especially not that of the person insisting on it.[6]
Mental thoughts or words or intentions both influencing and being influenced by actions and behaviors in the external world, such that either can be “correct” or “incorrect” relative to the other, might be understood, in Western philosophical terms, through the concept of “direction of fit.” This is the idea, or principle, that just as it is possible for one’s psychology to conform or fail to conform to the mind-independent world, it is also possible for the world to conform or fail to conform to some psychological states. The classic treatment of this is in Elizabeth Anscombe’s Intention. In Intention Anscombe gives the example of a shopping list.[7] If I, for example, shlep to the Hannaford across the road from my apartment in search of pita, but there is no pita to be had because it is sold out or because of supply chain problems, the problem is not with my intention to buy pita; my shopping list that had pita on it was not attempting to faithfully represent the real world, in which the store turned out not to have any pita (in other words, it was not an inventory). Rather it expressed my desire and my will to buy certain items, and the unavailability of one of those items was a failure on reality’s part to conform to my desire and my will. This is not a moral failure on reality’s part, because reality does not “owe” me pita any more than it “owes” anything else to anybody else. Even so, the nature of the divorce between mind and world in situations involving intention or desire is, according to Anscombe’s analysis of action and the direction of fit concept, entirely reversed from the nature of that divorce in situations involving description or assessment. In the latter case, the incorrectness is mine; in the former case, the incorrectness, if it can be called incorrectness, is the supermarket’s. The way to rectify the situation would be for a shipment of pita to come in, not for me to strike pita off my shopping list or stop expecting the store to have it.
The fact that nobody could seriously believe that a supermarket is morally in the wrong for not having pita in time for a particular shopping trip is the main thing that distinguishes the rectification of names from the rectification, or vindication, of my shopping list. In large part the difference is that the mind-independent aspect in the rectification of names concept is the person’s own social behavior. There are implications of kingly behavior to the title “king,” implications of conjugal behavior to the title “husband” or “wife” or “spouse,” and so forth. Although it requires some creativity, it is possible to conceive of situations in which events outside of someone’s own control could lead to a rupture between words and reality when it comes to their social behavior; however, such situations, such as natural disasters leading to a rupture between “king” and kingliness, were in historical East Asian thought often interpreted as externalized portents of some kind of inward dysfunction.[8]
Similarly, for Anscombe, there is the possibility of an error in judgment in my supply chain example. Her own example presupposes that the only thing the shopper does wrong is simply forgetting to or choosing not to buy something that is on the shopping list.[9] This, then, is what rectification of names might actually look like when looked at through a Western philosophical lens, although we are still missing the fact that with the rectification of names the implications of the names are seen as objective or at least matters of a social and political consensus rather than freely chosen in the sense that Anscombe’s shopper (or, in a corollary example, the shopper’s wife) freely chooses to put butter rather than margarine on the shopping list. This idea that the names that one must rectify are not, ultimately, up to one is one of the things that makes Confucianism come across as an inherently conservative and authoritarian philosophy to many commentators. Even so, I think most people can think of examples of everyday situations in which a milder version of the concept motivates normal behavior—if you don’t rectify the name of “spouse” or “partner” by being unfaithful or abusive, you will (or should) suffer social odium, and if you don’t rectify the name of “employee” by going to work, you will (regardless of whether or not you should) get fired. Confucianism simply extends this to a more general theory of obligation as preceding choice when it comes to structuring relationships and society.
The link between correct language use and correct behavior is unfashionable in the contemporary West except in niche political arguments, and its association with those arguments if anything makes it even more unfashionable in other contexts. As I write this, off the top of my head I can think of people who insist on “person-first language” to refer to disabled people instead of actually advocating for disabled people, right-wing theologians who insist on dysphemisms like “same-sex attracted” to refer to homosexuality instead of actually defending the rationales for traditional religious teachings on the subject, and, of course, participants in the unending argument regarding third-person singular pronouns and how they relate to gender identity. Such people’s ideas do show some vague family resemblance to the morally substantive parts of zhèngmíng, but in an inverted and weakened form that probably owes more to the mostly-discredited Sapir-Whorf hypothesis than to any notion that choice of political language actually imposes moral obligations on the societies that use it to describe themselves.
So what is the basis for the rectification of names, if it is not a mere call for clarity in language and if a Sapir-Whorfian account of language choice affecting available thought processes misses, or does not entirely encapsulate, the point? In fact, I would argue that in order to really understand the concept, one must be willing to look at cosmological and metaphysical issues, not just disputes in the area of political theory or linguistics. For Confucius and his intellectual descendants, who include not only “Confucians” in the narrow sense but also many East Asian Buddhists, Taoists, irreligious people, and even Christians,[10] “the truth of things” and “affairs” relate conceptually to both human practices and broader natural realities. This is not meant to imply that there is a sacred language in the sense that Muslims hold Quranic Arabic to be sacred, or a language of truth in the sense that one occasionally encounters in science fiction or fantasy novels. Nevertheless, words can be used in ways and with implications that have either greater or lesser connections to understandings that will keep human affairs rooted in reality.
In some areas of East Asian thought this set of ideas and principles can get downright mystical. Japanese has the concept of 言霊kotodama, “word spirits,” an extension of the animist sensibility widespread in Japanese culture to include a spiritual dimension to words and names. This idea, while in my opinion aesthetically beautiful, is morally ambivalent. Much like Confucianism, it can easily be extended in authoritarian directions; one pair of Japanese authors even argues that freedom of speech will never gain wide acceptance as a Japanese value unless kotodama goes.[11]
However, the belief nevertheless imposes certain limits on the reasonable use of language by the rulers as well as by the ruled. A completely relative view of language in which all words are equally made-up no matter how long they have been in use for or how much consensus exists (or used to exist) about how to use them, is at least as liable to be put to authoritarian ends. Powerful people can just redefine criticisms out of existence. Berger, to his credit, understands this; just as in wartime Japan anybody who seriously discussed the possibility of defeat fell under suspicion due to the kotodama-derived idea that discussing defeat made it likelier,[12] in the 2000s US criticisms of the Bush administration’s war aims and war tactics could be defused by resort to euphemism and evasion.[13] As is so often the case, excessive realism and excessive relativism are thus both best avoided when it comes to political language. Instead of either, we should find a way of discussing public affairs and social life that implies some basic set of agreed-upon values without assenting to cosmological or metaphysical claims about different terms’ supposed innate and precultural significance.
So, then, we might say that the rectification of names in fact has important parallels to the tradition in Western philosophy concerning direction of fit, and that it is in conversation with concepts of desire, volition, and imperative that we can best understand it. It is not simply a matter of calling ‘em like one sees ‘em and telling it like it is, although rectifying names in that sense is probably a necessary precondition to rectifying them in the sense of behaving the way one’s purported social position or values dictate that one should. The concept also has to do with unchosen obligation, not necessarily in an authoritarian sense (although Confucius’s own development and use of it was certainly in the service of policies that were authoritarian) but in the sense that none of us always and in all places get to decide how we want to relate to the people, places, and things around us. If the concept is going to be invoked in political and social controversies in the modern West, it should be with a greater degree of respect for or at least awareness of its full meaning and rich texture of connections to other philosophical and spiritual ideas.
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[1] Peter L. Berger, “New Atheism and the Rectification of Names,” The American Interest, January 7, 2015, https://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/01/07/new-atheism-and-the-rectification-of-names/.
[2] George Orwell, "Politics and the Enlgish Language," Horizon 13, no. 76 (April 1946): 252-265.
[3] Confucius, transl. James Legge, Confucian Analects (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1971), 263-264. My emphasis.
[4] Quoted in Wm. Theodore de Bary, “Introduction,” in Confucianism and Human Rights, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary and Tu Weiming (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 8.
[5] Then again, since part of the problem with King Zhou was traditionally held to be that he indulged in crude, off-rhythm music, perhaps Trump’s reasons for tanning himself into orangeness are unaesthetic enough that Mencius would have seen it as relevant after all.
[6] I hesitate to cite specific social media accounts for this due to both the ephemerality of the medium and the fact that doing so blurs the line between criticizing socially relevant public thought and criticizing the opinions of private citizens, but searching the Tumblr tag for “rectification of names” gives a wealth of examples of the far-right usage, and very few examples of any other usage.
[7] G.E.M. Anscombe, Intention, Second Edition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1972), 56.
[8] This was a belief common in the West for many hundreds of years as well, hence practices like augury and the various “-mancy” disciplines by which Western religious and protoscientific leaders attempted to glean information from the natural world about how to correct or not to correct human affairs. I would argue that the search for meaning in seemingly random natural forces is still with us and probably always will be in one form or another. It is to some extent answered in teachings such as those of Averroes or John Henry Newman concerning “spiritual intelligences,” but the search for greater understandability of that meaning or greater ability to plan and take action based on it is left unanswered by those teachings and must be pursued through other means, such as, in our own time when many other options are widely seen as discredited, alternative medicine or astrology.
[9] Op. cit., Anscombe.
[10] For over three hundred years there was an on-and-off dispute within the Catholic Church over whether or not Chinese Catholics could licitly continue Confucian ceremonial practices. Eventually in 1939 Pope Pius XII ruled that they could, within certain limits.
[11] Yamamoto Shichihei and Komuro Naoki, 日本教の社会学Nihon-kyō no shakaigaku (Tokyo: Gakken, 1981), 58. (In Japanese.)
[12] Ibid.
[13] Op. cit., Berger; the previous citation of Berger’s essay includes the passage mentioning the “enhanced interrogation techniques” euphemism. At one point in the Bush administration the comedian Jon Stewart responded to an admission that the US was not winning the Iraq War “in the present tense” by speculating that the US was instead winning in the pluperfect subjunctive, a tense and aspect used to discuss things that might, could, or should have happened in the past.