Shengsheng as Progressive Temporality: A Zoetological Account of Moral Progress

Imagine trying to guide a garden toward a better future. You want the plants to grow, to flourish, and to become their best selves. But you face a difficult question: do you know exactly what the perfect garden looks like before you start? If you do, you might force every plant into that single, rigid shape, pruning away anything that doesn't fit your plan. If you don't, you might worry that without a clear destination, the garden will just grow wild and chaotic. This is the central puzzle facing a modern movement called Progressive Confucianism. It seeks to update ancient Chinese wisdom to fit our current world, believing that people and societies can improve over time. However, critics have asked a sharp question: if we say we are moving toward progress, where are we actually going? Is there a final, perfect state of human life that we are trying to reach, or is the future something we cannot fully predict?

A new article by Yuchen Liang, a researcher at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, offers a fresh way to think about this problem. Instead of looking for a fixed destination, Liang suggests we look at the very nature of how life grows. The paper draws on two main ideas to build its argument. First, it uses a concept called "tempology," which is simply a way of describing how we understand time and how the past, present, and future connect to one another. Second, it focuses on an ancient Chinese term, shengsheng, which roughly translates to "life generating life" or "ceaseless procreation." In the context of this paper, shengsheng is not just about having children; it is a description of how the world works as a continuous, creative process where things are always becoming something new, never quite finished.

Liang argues that moral progress should be understood through this lens of shengsheng. In this view, a person or a society is like a living process that is inherited from the past but is never complete. We are shaped by our history and our relationships, but we are also open to change. The paper suggests that true progress is not about marching toward a pre-determined ideal, like a train heading to a specific station. Instead, progress is about creating conditions where people and communities can keep growing, adapting, and flourishing in ways we cannot fully predict in advance. It is a non-finalist approach, meaning it does not assume there is one single, perfect end state that everyone must reach.

The author carefully distinguishes between the simple fact of growth and the moral value of that growth. Just because something changes or grows does not mean it is getting better. A cancer grows, but it harms the body. Similarly, a society might change and become more efficient, but if that change crushes the ability of people to participate in their own lives, it is not progress. Liang proposes a specific test for what counts as moral progress: does a change enlarge the capacity of people to respond to their world, to relate to one another, and to keep developing? If a new law, a new school, or a new family arrangement helps people become more capable of shaping their own futures, then it is progressive. If it locks them into a fixed role or stops them from growing, it is regressive, even if it claims to be helping them.

To explain how we should treat this growing potential, the paper turns to two ancient concepts from the philosopher Mencius. The first is cun, which is often translated as "preservation" or "to keep." Liang reinterprets this not as keeping something frozen in time, like a museum piece, but as caring for something so that it can continue to develop. You do not preserve a seedling by keeping it a seedling forever; you preserve it by giving it the water and sunlight it needs to become a tree. The second concept is wuwang wuzhu, a phrase meaning "do not forget, do not force." This is a guide for how to care for others without taking over their lives. "Do not forget" means you must pay attention, provide support, and remove obstacles. "Do not force" means you must not pull on the sprout to make it grow faster, nor decide exactly what the final tree must look like before it has even started.

This approach solves a major tension in how we think about progress. It rejects the idea that we must have a complete blueprint for the future before we can start building. It also rejects the idea that we should just leave everything alone and let nature take its course. Instead, it suggests a middle path of active, attentive care that respects the agency of the person or community being helped. The paper argues that when we treat the future as something already known and fixed, we risk becoming oppressive. We might force people into molds that do not fit them, claiming we are helping them progress while actually closing off their possibilities. This is what happens when a society claims to know the "perfect" way to live and tries to force everyone to conform.

Liang's work also addresses a specific worry raised by critics of Progressive Confucianism: that the idea of "progress" is just a tool used by powerful groups to impose their own values on others. By using the framework of shengsheng, the paper shows that progress does not require a universal, one-size-fits-all destination. It allows for many different forms of flourishing to emerge. A family, a school, or a government can be progressive if it helps its members develop their unique capacities and relate to one another in healthy ways, without demanding that they all become the same. The goal is to keep the door open for new possibilities, rather than locking it with a rigid plan.

The paper concludes that the task of moral progress is not to determine the future in advance, but to preserve the conditions that allow people and communities to create that future for themselves. It is a shift from seeing time as a straight line leading to a finish line, to seeing it as a living, breathing process of renewal. In this view, the most important thing we can do is to nurture the relationships and environments that allow life to keep generating new forms of meaning and connection. We do not need to know the final shape of the garden to know that we are caring for it well; we only need to ensure that the soil is rich, the water is available, and that every plant is free to grow into what it is meant to be.