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60 Li

Chapter 4 Beyond the Politics of Redemption: Tradition-Based Visions of Responsibility in the Thought of and Mou Zongsan

Quan Li

1 Introduction

One of the most disturbing questions for the new-century political is this: who should take responsibility for the massive human tragedies under the hegemonies of , , and recently, militant neoliberalism? In- deed, despite the abuse of power by only a few dictators or monopolists, the decline of collective responsibility of people under these political regimes de- serves most serious reflection. This question, emerging across the West and the East, has compelled thinkers to re-examine the intellectual and ethical foun- dations of modern politics. For contemporary liberals following , these are the people obsessed by certain kinds of political . The noted American historian of ideas Mark Lilla, in his provocative The Stillborn (2007), made this charge of the abuse of Christian political in the modern political arena, which is misled by obscure doctrines like the trinity, incarnation or eschatology.1 Moreover, political philosopher John Gray, in his acclaimed Black Mass (2007), attributed such collective irresponsibility to the utopian projects of human perfection driven by apocalyptic religions and then Enlightenment philosophies.2 For certain reasons, these thinkers share a com- mon worry that the moderns can easily be led astray by the fantasy of redemp- tive politics. Therefore, in order to keep the integrity of politics, it has been

1 Lilla questioned, for instance, “Withdrawal into monasticism, ruling the earthly city with the two swords of church and state, building the messianic New Jerusalem – which is the true model of Christian politics? For over a millennium Christians themselves could not decide, and this tension was the source of almost unremitting struggle and conflict, much of it doc- trinal, pitting believer against believer over the very meaning of Christian revelation. … All politics involves conflict, but what set Christian politics apart was the theological self-con- sciousness and intensity of the conflicts it generated – conflicts rooted in the deepest ambigui- ties of Christian revelation.” See M. Lilla, The Stillborn God: , Politics and the Modern West (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2007), pp. 51–52. 2 See J. Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (London: Penguin Books, 2007), pp. 1–35.

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Tradition-Based Visions of Responsibility in Barth and Mou 61

considered necessary to reject the teleological ethics in either religious or hu- manist forms. For Lilla, the religious doctrine of Christianity has never offered a clear direction for such an ethics. For Gray, the humanist self-projection of the ultimate goals for the humankind and their is a catastrophe for modern history. While some ethicists may disagree with these functionalist readings of moral traditions, they cannot ignore the challenge posed here: Is there a better way of ethical thinking to sustain moral convictions of responsi- bility and to also avoid its misuse in pursuit of utopias? The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to uncover robust moral accounts of responsibility from a cross-cultural perspective. Specifically, we take into ac- count two ethical thinkers, the Christian theologian Karl Barth (1886–1968) and the Confucian philosopher Mou Zongsan (1909–1995) and aim to compare their distinct views of responsibility connecting moral beliefs to political ac- tions. This selection for comparison is based on two considerations: first, it is because these two thinkers represent the distinctive traditions of Christianity and in the modern age. It is safe to say that Barth was the west- ern theologian of the last century who had the greatest impact on the church and its theology. Similarly, Mou is widely acclaimed as the most accomplished philosopher of New Confucianism, i.e., those scholars who have revived genu- ine Confucian ideas and extended Confucianism to its modern form. Second, and more importantly, it is also because these two thinkers dedicated their life-long careers to exploring a particular kind of that would be compatible with their religious or moral convictions. In other words, they are two exemplary cases in their integration between theory and praxis, or more specifically, between their ethical reflection and political engagement. In the sections below, we review the major debates in this area, suggest the compara- tive method, and then examine the architectural elements of their distinct ac- counts of responsibility.

2 The Modern Conceptions of Responsibility

In a memorable phrase, Reinhold Niebuhr states, “It is important to point out that men do possess, among other moral resources, a sense of obligation to- ward the good, as their mind conceives it. This moral sense does not give con- tent to moral judgments. It is a principle of action which requires the individual to act according to whatever judgments of good and evil he is able to form.”3 It can be said that the idea of responsibility not only illuminates the

3 R. Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral : A study in Ethics and Politics (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960), p. 37.