Autonomy and the confucian moral person

Journal of Chinese Philosophy

Volumn 29, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 251-268

  Yunping, Wang ^a  

^a XIAMEN UNIVERSITY   (China)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61049550101     PISSN: 03018121     EISSN: 15406253     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1540-6253.00080     Document Type: Article

References (57)

1. I limit my reading to early Confucians, namely, Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi. The translations of the Analects and the Mencius are my own, based on Yang Bojun's Lunyu yi zhu (Hong Kong: Zhong Hua Publishing House, 1997)
2. and Mengzi yi zhu (Hong Kong: Zhong Hua Publishing House, 1997)
3. In preparing my own translations, I have consulted the translations by D. C. Lau, Wing-tsit Chan, James Legge, and Arthur Waley See Lau, The Analects (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979)
4. and Mencius (Harmonds-worth: Penguin Books, 1970)
5. Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book of Chinese Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963)
6. Legge, Confucian Analects, The Great Learning and The Doctrine of the Mean (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893, 1971)
7. Waley, The Analects of Confucius (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938)
8. Henry Rosemont, A Chinese Mirror. Moral Reflections on Political Economy and Society (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1991), p. 72 (emphasis in original)
9. Rosemont, A Chinese Mirror, p. 74
10. Herbert Fingarette, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 34
11. See also Fingarette, "The Problem of the Self in the Analects," Philosophy East and West 29, no. 2 (1979): 129-240
12. See Fingarette, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred, pp. 16-17
13. See Benjamin Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 79-81
14. See Lin Yutang, ed., The Wisdom of Confucius (New York: The Modern Library, 1938)
15. See, for example, Analects 1:6 and 6:20
16. Analects 7:37
17. For example, 6:2, 9:11, 14:28
18. See Analects 4:17, 5:27, 2:4, and 6:7
19. A better way of understanding the point may lie in that Confucius does not divide the self consciously into the internal and external. Rather, Confucius takes the self as having an integrity of the internal and external. My argument only tries to bring out the point that the inner dimension is not absent in Confucius. I therefore do not commit myself to any particular Western theory of the mind in interpreting Confucius. In presenting a Chinese doctrine of liangxin (literally, the "good heart"), He Huaihong describes the historical transformation of the meaning of xin (heart) in traditional Chinese literature. He Huaihong found that in the Shijing (The Book of Poetry), the notion xin appears 165 times where the usage of xin is frequently tied with you ("worry"), bei ("grief"), can ("misery"), and other inner/psychological expressions. See He Huaihong, Liangxin lun: Chuantong liangzhi de xiandaiz zhuanghua (On conscience: The social transformation of traditional Liangzhi) (Shanghai: San Lian, 1994), p. 8. It indicates well that the notion xin is a rather old concept with the meaning " consciousness" used much earlier than the age of Confucius
20. Schwartz, World of Thought, p. 113
21. Quite a few passages of the Analects may serve to support this interpretation. See, for example, 1:1, 1:14, 4:11, 8:4, 14:28, 15:21, and 32
22. Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 150
23. Sandel, Liberalism, p. 179
24. By "effective agency," David B.Wong refers to "the set of abilities that allow us to formulate reasonably clear priorities among our ends, and to plan and perform actions that have a reasonable chance of realizing our ends, given all the conditions beyond our control" ("On Flourishing and Finding One's Identity in Community," in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 13, Ethical Theory: Character and Virtue, edited by Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein [Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988], p. 327)
25. See, for example, A. C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Arguments in Ancient China (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989), p. 3
26. For this point, see He Huaihong, Shixi shehui ji qi jieti: Zhongguo lishi shang de Chunqiu shidai (The hereditary society and its breakdown: The spring and autumn period in Chinese history) (Beijing: San Lian, 1996), pp. 8-9
27. See He, Shixi shehui ji qi jieti, p. 9
28. For this point, see, for example, Heiner Roetz, Confucian Ethics of the Axial Age (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), pp. 34-35
29. See Roetz, Confucian Ethics, p. 33
30. Burton Watson, trans., Hsun Tzu: Basic Writings (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), pp. 46-47
31. See Mencius 3B:9
32. Mencius presents the point when he criticizes the doctrine of Mozi (c.468-c376 B.C.E.), whose advocacy is a sort of impersonal and universal love, as well as that of Yangzi, whose idea is that one only has duty to love oneself
33. Actually, this claim is equally applicable to other schools of ancient Chinese philosophy. The utilitarian feature of Mohism naturally leads to the conclusion that the foundation of universal love is based on the consideration of the unification of the whole country rather than that we should take individuals as independent units. The justification of universal love beyond the hierarchical order is not derived from this distinction and the resulting tension between individuals. When Mo Di talks about human beings, he does not refer to individuals but to the people in certain states or under Heaven. For the Legalist school (Fajia), bad human nature does not indicate that individuals have irreducible rights that need to be taken seriously by rulers and thus serve as the ground on which democratic government will be founded. Instead, it is merely a foundation on which rulers make their decisions - a benevolent and thus moralized politics or a politics based on fa (law). It seems to be more possible for Daoism (Daojia) than other schools to admit the diversity of human beings, and thus to take a somewhat relativist perspective on value judgments. According to the Daoists, it is unnatural for human beings to be assigned a hierarchical order. However, the freedom of the individual needs to be admitted not as a rebel against society, nor as an essential distinction between individuals. As the opponent of Confucian ethics, Daoism does not go so far as to imply an individualistic understanding of person and social structure. In short, as a reaction to the breakdown of the once wellestablished social order, early Chinese philosophy aimed at searching for the preferred way of leading to the stability of society, but the modern Western conception of stability based on the notion of individual rights was familiar to none of them
34. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972)
35. See Analects 5:12
36. See Analects 3:19 and 12:11
37. Mencius 3B:2; see also 3B:1
38. See Gerald Dworkin, The Theory and Practice of Autonomy (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 9-12
39. Henry Rosemont, "Notes from a Confucian Perspective: Which Human Acts Are Moral Acts?" International Philosophical Quarterly, no. 1 (1976): 55
40. Herbert Fingarette, "Comments on Charles Fu's Discussion of Confucius: The Secular as Sacred," Philosophy East and West 28, no. 2 (1978): 225
41. "The good" in a Confucian context can be further understood as the Confucian ethical ideal of virtue and moral personality expressed and embodied in ren, a concept I discuss comprehensively in the last chapter of my Ph.D. dissertation entitled "The Confucian Conception of a Moral Person" (The University of Hong Kong, 2000). As many commentators have noted, ren is a central concern in Confucian ethics. As a defining characteristic of junzi, ren provides the unifying thread to the Confucian virtues by way of underling other virtues and giving meaning to them. Therefore, the attainment of ren requires a whole person and lifelong cultivation. It is especially in this sense that ren serves as the key notion expressing the Confucian conception of the good (virtuous) life. Taken in this most abstract and inclusive meaning, furthermore, ren can be equivalent to dao in the Confucian context, particularly as an expression of the Confucian sense of the good
42. See Dworkin, Theory and Practice of Autonomy, p. 21
43. John Benson, "Who Is the Autonomous Man?" Philosophy 58, no. 1 (1983): 17
44. See Bruno Bettelheim, The Informed Heart (London: Free Press, 1970)
45. Benson, "Who Is the Autonomous Man?" p. 16
46. As for the point that Jehovah's Witnesses might have an authoritarian dimension, we need a clarification here. First of all, even if Jehovah's Witnesses had a strong sense of authoritarianism, it is not necessarily the case that the authoritarian dimension qualified Jehovah's Witnesses as "having the ability of preserving integrity" even under the most difficult conditions. On the other hand, it would simplify the case if one concluded that Confucian ethics had a similar sense of authoritarianism. Indeed, Confucians had a strong sense of authority, but that does not amount to authoritarianism. Mencius even allowed for a revolt against a ruler who has not served in a properly moral manner (see Mencius 1B:8)
47. and Mencius 3B:2
48. Mencius 7A:10
49. See also Mencius 7A:9
50. See Mencius 4A:17
51. Analects 15:28
52. See Mencius 4B:30
53. Rosemont, "Notes from a Confucian Perspective," p. 51
54. See Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 424
55. Seen in this perspective, we can understand why, as Rosemont puts it, "some scholars have tried to find traces of the concept [of human beings as autonomous, freely choosing rights-bearing individuals] in the writings of early Greeks" (A Chinese Mirror, p. 60)
56. Kwang-Sae Lee, "Some Confucianist Reflections on the Concept of Autonomous Individual," Journal of Chinese Philosophy 21, no. 1 (1994): 57
57. This conception of choice and its presupposed conception of a person have been cast into doubt by some conceptually enlightened liberals such as Richard Rorty (see Lee, "Some Confucianist Reflections," p. 52)