From Cannibalism to Empowerment: An Analects-Inspired Attempt to Balance Community and Liberty Author(s): Sor-hoon Tan Source: Philosophy East and West, Vol. 54, No. 1 (Jan., 2004), pp. 52-70 Published by: University of Hawai'i Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1399862 Accessed: 09/04/2010 03:38 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=uhp. 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[F]inally I began to make out what was written between the lines; the whole volume was filled with a single phrase: EAT PEOPLE! Lu Xun' The Confuciantradition has often been creditedwith a strongallegiance to the value of community. It recognizes that certain goods might be attained through special formsof humanassociation, but not by any solitaryindividual. Are such community goods attained at the expense of the liberty of individual members?Philosophers have struggledwith the tension between libertyand communitysince the dawn of Western philosophy. Aristotlecomplained about the false idea of libertyas "doing what one likes," which is contradictoryto the true interestsof the polis.2 Such lib- erty,or ratherlicense, is undoubtedlydetrimental to any peaceful coexistence, not to say the harmonious and mutually beneficial association of community. Without regulation,such license would, accordingto Thomas Hobbes, resultin a "warof all againstall," makinglife "solitary,poor, nasty, brutishand short." It is not just illiberalphilosophers who are concerned about libertyturning to license and destroying itself. John StuartMill remarked,"Freedom for the pikes is death for the minnows." While recognizing a need to limit liberty, liberals are also perenniallyconcerned that any group exercising power over individualsmight deny memberstheir status qua separate and autonomous individuals,and thereby threatenliberty. On the other hand, communitariansobject, among other things, to the liberal conception of autonomous selves as fundamentally,even ontologically, separate units, who then choose whether or not to enter into relations with one anotherto formcommunities. From such a startingpoint, communitygoods are often neglected, and in extreme cases the insistence on the priorityof individualrights could lead to "the moralfabric of community... unravelingaround us."3 While it is not impossible,with human intelligence and imagination,to resolve the conflicts between communitygoods and individualliberty, and while there are circumstances in which one could benefit the other, or both could be mutually beneficial, the likelihood of tension and outrightcontradiction between these two key values of democracy remains,in any group of humanbeings, blessed or cursed, depending on how you look at it, with what Kantcalls "the unsocial sociabilityof men, that is, their tendency to come together in society, coupled, however, with a 52 Philosophy East & West Volume 54, Number 1 January 2004 52-70 ? 2004 by University of Hawai'i Press continual resistancewhich constantlythreatens to breakthis society up." The aver- age person is torn between the conflictinginclinations to live in society and to live as an individual,among fellows "whom he cannot bear yet cannot bear to leave."4We value libertyfor the protectionit providesfor the individual,for its empowermentof her in her search for human fulfillment.The value of communitycaptures our con- cern to render our unavoidable social existence as meaningful and beneficial as possible for all, or at least for as many as possible. The need to balance the two values-a perennialproblem of ethics and politics-has been broughtto the fore by the liberalism-communitarianismdebate.5 This essay aims to develop an account of how to balance libertyand community throughwhat Confucianscalled /i X, which has been translatedas "rites,""rituals," "ceremony,""ritual action," "ritualpropriety," "propriety," "decorum," "manners," "courtesy,"and "civility." I shall adopt the translationof "ritual."While I draw most of my textual materialsfrom the Analects, I do not offer my perspective as a straightforwardinterpretation of its content; the problematicof libertyversus com- munityis not germaneto pre-Qinphilosophical discourse. This exercise is motivated by a belief that the Analects, together with an interdisciplinarystudy of ritual in differentcontexts, could provide resources for new ways of handling the tension between libertyand community. Confucianism's Hostility to Liberty Focusing on historical practices, many have accused Confucianismof having no place for individualliberty. Writers like LucianPye and W.J.F.Jenner have blamed Confucianismfor China'sauthoritarian social structureand political culture.6Lest it be thought that this is just a simple case of culturalimperialism, or of ignorantbar- barianspontificating on things they know little about, Chinese writerslike Fei Xiao- tong and Ch'OT'ung-tsu have presentedChinese traditionalsociety, usuallydeemed Confucian, in ways that justifythe conclusion that Confucianismis hostile to indi- vidual liberty-a view still prevalent among many Chinese and other EastAsians who could claim a Confucianlegacy.7 Some scholars have tried to rescue Confucianismfrom such charges by arguing that there is a strandof liberalthought in the tradition,based on the expressed ideals of self-cultivationand ethico-polilticalpractices that sanction challenges to author- ity. Others have emphasized the humanisticcharacter of Confucianphilosophy, re- gardlessof historicalmalpractices. Insofar as they have reconciled libertyand com- munity in Confucianism,these approaches have been assisted by challenges to the liberal conception of the self and by argumentsthat Confucian conceptions of the self as fundamentallyrelational have a better chance of resolving the traditional contradictionsbetween self and society. Some have argued that the key ideal of ren { (what Wing-tsitChan considers the general virtue of "humanity")provides a meaningful synthesis of individual liberty and community. While I agree with that suggestion, focusing on this most benign and too readilyacceptable ethical notion, especially when we translateit as Sor-hoonTan 53 "benevolence," is too easy a way out if we do not tackle the close connection between ren and li. Even the severest critics of Confucianismhave little to say against ren-at most they attackthe failureof practice to live up to theory;but the ethical value of Confucianritual has always been more problematic.On the other hand, Confucianism'shostility to individualliberty has often been attributedto the Confucian li, equated with traditionaland conventional "rulesof conduct," which historicallywere sometimesso destructiveof individualsthat they were condemned for "cannibalism." I proposeto rescue the Confucianconcept of li fromsuch chargesand show that it should instead be understoodas a concept of moral empowermentof the free individualin community.Moreover, as a concept about empowermentit is still rel- evant to contemporarysociety and can offer some clues on how contemporary Confuciansmight balance libertyand community. CreatingCommunity through Ritual While there is no consensus among contemporaryscholars who study rituals in various contexts, the Confucian li fits quite comfortablyinto Eric Rothenbuhler's definition of ritualas "voluntaryperformance of appropriatelypatterned behavior to symbolically affect or participatein the serious life."8 Ritual is the constitutive means of Confucian community. RobertEno presents early Confucianismnot pri- marilyas a body of doctrine but as a community with ritualactivity as its distin- guishing core. The Analects contain "not merely instructivesayings of the Master but inter-subjectivelyvalidated ideas, communal values exemplified by life experi- ences of the speakersin the act of li."9Creating community through ritual is central to Confucianism.As a norm to aspire to, Confucian community should be under- stood not as a closed collective-an abstractentity to be set above its individual members-but as an open network of relationships.10What separates one such communityfrom another community is a matterof relativelyweak, marginalrela- tionships, not necessarily a