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Confucianism CONFUCIAN CULTURES Roger T. Ames and Peter D. Hershock, series editors Confucianism: Its Roots and Global Significance Ming-huei Lee, edited by David Jones Confucianisms for a Changing World Cultural Order Edited by Roger T. Ames and Peter D. Hershock Confucianism Its Roots and Global Significance MING-HUEI LEE Edited by DAVID JONES University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu East-West Center Honolulu © 2017 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Li, Minghui, author. | Jones, David Edward, editor. Title: Confucianism : its roots and global significance / Ming-huei Lee; edited by David Jones. Other titles: Confucian cultures. Description: Honolulu : University of Hawai‘i Press : East-West Center, [2017] | Series: Confucian cultures | Collection of previously published articles. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017009064 | ISBN 9780824867300 (cloth ; alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Confucianism. Classification: LCC BL1853 .L5 2017 | DDC 181/.112—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017009064 An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. The open-access ISBNs for this book are 9780824878320 (PDF) and 9780824878313 (EPUB). More information about the initiative and links to the open-access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. The open access version of this book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that the work may be freely downloaded and shared for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. Derivative works and commercial uses require permission from the publisher. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Design and composition by Wanda China Calligraphy by Peimin Ni Contents Series Editors’ Preface vii Editor’s Foreword ix Acknowledgments xiii Introduction: Destinies and Prospects of Confucian Traditions in Modern East Asia 1 Part I Classical Confucianism and Its Modern Reinterpretations 11 1 Mou Zongsan’s Interpretation of Confucianism: Some Hermeneutical Reflections 13 2 Modern New Confucians on the Religiousness of Confucianism 26 Part II Neo-Confucianism in China and Korea 39 3 The Debate on Ren between Zhu Xi and Huxiang Scholars 41 4 The Four-Seven Debate between Yi Toegye and Gi Gobong and Its Philosophical Purport 54 Part III Ethics and Politics 77 5 Wang Yangming’s Philosophy and Modern Theories of Democracy: A Reconstructive Interpretation 79 6 Confucianism, Kant, and Virtue Ethics 92 7 A Critique of Jiang Qing’s “Political Confucianism” 102 Notes 113 Bibliography 135 Index 149 Series Editors’ Preface Confucian traditions are often regarded in purely historical terms. Having been transmitted and transformed over nearly two and a half millennia, this focus on history is well-justified. But Confucian traditions are by no means solely of historical interest and significance. In the last quarter century, amid remarkable advances in science and tech- nology that have dramatically transformed practices in virtually every domain of human endeavor, recognition has dawned that human activity is capable of adversely affecting planetary-scale phenomena such as climate and that the greatest challenges we will face in the coming decades will not be technical but ethical. We now know that human beings and our ways of being in the world are complicit in the predicaments we are facing—among them global warming; the persistence of hunger in a world of food excesses; widening gaps of wealth, income, resource use, and risk; and the increasingly intimate interdependence of economic and political vitality and volatility. Secondly, we know that these predicaments are not constrained by national or social boundaries. Pandemics and global warming have global reach and affect everyone regardless of nation- ality or status. Thirdly, an organic relationship obtains among this set of press- ing challenges that renders them zero-sum: We either address them all or we can resolve none of them. In short, these challenges cannot be met seriatim by individual players but must be addressed instead by a world community acting in concert. Finally, the predicaments with which we find ourselves ever more powerfully confronted can only be addressed by effecting a radical change in human intentions, values, and practices. When we look for cultural resources that will enhance capabilities for resolving these global predicaments, primary among them are values and prac- tices that will support replacing the familiar competitive pattern of single actors pursing their own self-interest with a collaborative pattern of players strengthening possibilities for coordination across national, ethnic, and reli- gious boundaries. And it is in this context that Confucian traditions assume distinctive contemporary relevance. As is now widely appreciated, Confucian vii viii Series Editors’ Preface cultures celebrate the relational values of deference and interdependence and understand persons as constitutively embedded in and nurtured by unique transactional patterns of relations. This series is committed to exploring how and to what extent contemporary Confucian ethics that locate moral conduct within a thick and richly textured pattern of family, community, and natural relations may be a force for challenging and changing the international order. At the same time, the series is committed to raising critical questions retrospec- tively about the contributions and failings of Confucianism in its long history as a pan-Asian phenomenon, as well as prospectively about the globalization of Confucian values in response to contemporary global dynamics. A key element in our Confucian Cultures series is the translation of sem- inal works in Confucian cultures from Asian language sources. While Asian scholars continue to translate much of contemporary Western scholarship into Asian languages, including Western commentaries on their own cultures, the opposite has not been true. Translations of the best Asian scholarly literature into English remain rare. But the scope of the series is not limited to promoting literacy on Con- fucian cultures as understood within those cultures themselves. An essen- tial parallel element in the series will be critical research on Confucianism by scholars outside of these Asian traditions. Moreover, the series is committed to approaching Confucian traditions in a manner that respects the diversity of those traditions, and will welcome scholarship that looks at Confucian cultures through a range of disciplinary lenses, including literary, anthropological, and historical perspectives, and those that are philosophical and religious. Finally, the series is committed to publishing works that explicitly place Confucian thought and cultures in conversation with other traditions. This, we hope, will contribute to the collaborative realization of a more just, equitable, and harmo- nious global future. In this inaugural volume in the series, Lee Ming-huei offers an interpreta- tion of traditional Confucian themes from a contemporary perspective. In light of the demise of Confucianism as a state ideology in East Asia, Lee surveys the prospects Confucianism still has as a cultural resource for the modern world. With a strong sense of history and an unrelentingly rigorous philosophical methodology, he assesses the strengths, the failures, the possibilities, and the limitations that might still be relevant to the moral education and the social and political philosophies of these different yet continuous Asian Confucianisms. Roger T. Ames and Peter D. Hershock Series Editors Editor’s Foreword The project of comparative philosophy is almost exclusively associated with Western philosophers opening their minds and hearts to non-Western ways of thinking. Even the term “comparative philosophy” was coined by a small group of Western philosophers who founded the University of Hawai‘i’s philosophy program. This new vision was borne primarily through the imagination of Charles A. Moore, who wished to create an opportunity where outsiders “could most closely approach the ideal of understanding other traditions as the people of those traditions understand themselves.”1 We may forget in the twentieth- first century how radical an idea this must have been in 1939, when the first East-West Philosophers’ Conference was held. As Moore realized, one must understand from within before creating a new philosophical approach. And before a new approach can gain ascendancy as method—that is, before considering the way in which comparative philosophy is to be done—the way in which it is approached is fundamental and crucial. In other words, we need to have a clear direction before the process develops and a theoretical framework before techniques and practices are put into place—only after the approach to comparative philosophy is developed, is there an opening for deciding what method or methods we wish to engage. But comparative philosophy is not exclusively a Western undertaking as some think. In fact, many non-Western philosophers have been engaging in their own approaches and development of methods. In seeking an understand- ing of European ways of thinking, Ming-huei Lee left his native Taipei for the University of Bonn, where he studied