Why Traditional Chinese Philosophy Still Matters

The Relevance of Ancient Wisdom for the Global Age

Ming Dong Gu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138562714
• eBook ISBN: 9781351356008
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Traditional Chinese philosophy, if engaged at all, is often regarded as an object of antiquated curiosity and dismissed as unimportant in the current age of globalization.

Written by a team of internationally renowned scholars, this book, however, challenges this judgement and offers an in-depth study of pre-modern Chinese philosophy from an interdisciplinary perspective. Exploring the relevance of traditional Chinese philosophy for the global age, it takes a comparative approach, analysing ancient Chinese philosophy in its relation to Western ideas and contemporary postmodernist theories. The conversation extends over a broad spectrum of philosophical areas and themes, ranging from metaphysics, hermeneutics, political theory, religion and aesthetics to specific philosophical schools including Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. By engaging many time-honoured philosophical issues from a comparative perspective, this book bridges the gap between Eastern and Western thought and emphasises the need for a newly fortified global humanism and a deeper appreciation of different philosophical and religious values in an age gripped by large-scale crises.

Arguing that traditional Chinese philosophy has immediate relevance to the many challenges of modern life, this book will be useful to students and scholars of Asian Philosophy and Asian Studies in general.

Part I
The relevance of Confucian ethics for our time

1
Confucian role ethics

A challenge to the ideology of individualism¹

Roger T. Ames

The perfect storm

Within America itself, a localized front of a perfect storm is brewing. There is the beginning of an “American spring” in which the 99 percent will either reconfigure the economic and political structure of this country or accept the virtual disappearance of the middle class. A Honolulu newspaper columnist recently reflected on his own college experience in Ohio a generation ago. His father, on a butcher’s wage within a single-income family, gave him $600 for tuition. He was able to add $300 saved from his summer employment, and a $500 scholarship was awarded for his exceptional grades. With this support, he was able to attend Kenyon College and ultimately pursue a productive career as a college history professor with a sideline as a political pundit. I would suggest that this specific account of middle-class access to higher education resonates rather closely with the experience of many of us in our generation.²

Today, the yearly tuition for the same school would be over $54,000, an amount that few families with both parents working could possibly afford without a spiraling debt for both themselves and the student. What is alarming is that tuition has doubled over the past decade, with comparable compounding increases predicted for the immediate future. And relatedly, it has recently been reported that debt incurred by student tuition has now passed that of general credit card debt. The uncritical assumption of a college education for our youth is no longer tenable; indeed, tertiary education is slipping out of the reach of ordinary, middle-class people and their children.

But while it might be claimed that education is only one of the four pillars of the middle class, like the perfect storm that is gathering globally, there is a predicament in which education, a job, housing, and health care either come together or not at all. With the exodus of union manufacturing jobs that corporations have exported overseas, the remaining service-oriented jobs are thin in remuneration, and the employment picture is becoming increasingly bleak for college graduates. And the cost of health care is rising exponentially to a level where only the securely employed in union jobs can possibly afford it. Again, how can a graduating student with poor expectations in the labor market and an enormous college debt possibly afford to purchase a home?

But it might be argued that the American storm is only of local concern. As a matter of far greater urgency, for humanity as a species, a perfect storm of global proportions is gathering on the horizon. We are living in a world beset by climate change, by food and water shortages, by environmental degradation, by pandemics, by energy shortage, by international terrorism, by nuclear proliferation, by gross income inequities, by consumer waste, by an exponentially expanding population, by radiation contamination, by growing legions of the hopeless poor, and so on. This malaise is no longer a set of pressing problems that can be addressed and solved seriatim by individual players; rather, it is a largely human-precipitated predicament that has no borders, and that must either be engaged wholesale by the world community together, or not at all. In these pages, we will argue that this compounding predicament will only be addressed and arrested by effecting a radical change in human intentions, values, and practices. And that necessity itself will serve as the imperative.

While this perfect storm has been gathering both globally and locally, a dramatic reconfiguration has been occurring in the prevailing economic and political order that affects us all in an age of global interdependence. Over this past generation, the rise of Asia, and particularly of China, has precipitated a sea change in the world’s economic and political order. In the quarter century since its founding in 1989, the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) that now consists of 21 Asia-Pacific nations with 40 percent of the world’s population has shifted world wealth and power from a beleaguered Europe to an increasingly thriving Asia. For more than 30 years, the Chinese economy has been growing at double-digit rates and still now at around seven percent to recently have overtaken Japan as the second-largest economy in the world. In 2010, a G8 comprised of the world’s strongest yet declining economies that could claim less than 50 percent of world production became the G20 with 90 percent of world output, and China, as the new factory of the world, is located squarely in the middle.

Economic and political development generally, and the global impact of China’s own growth in these same sectors more specifically, produce changing patterns that are relatively easy to track. But what is happening within the world cultural order that has long been dominated by a powerful liberalism, and what will be the role of Chinese culture and values in its evolution? With the dramatic rise of “Schools of Canonical Learning” (guoxueyuan 國學院) domestically across college campuses and with the proliferation of literally hundreds of government-funded “Confucius Institutes” (Kongzi xueyuan 孔子學院) across the globe, we know that Confucian philosophy is being actively promoted by a collaboration of academic and political forces within China itself.

Will an ethic that locates moral conduct within a thick and richly textured pattern of family, community, and natural relations change our cultural world? Confucianism celebrates the values of deference and interdependence. Relationally constituted persons are to be understood as embedded in and nurtured by unique, transactional patterns of relations, a conception of person that contrasts starkly with the more familiar model of discrete individuals defined by common traits that we have come to associate with liberal democracy. Under these rapidly evolving conditions, will these family-centered Confucian values precipitate a new cultural world order over the ensuing decades? James P. Carse provides us with a distinction between finite and infinite games that might be useful in beginning to think through how these Confucian values could make a difference in a newly emerging cultural order.³ For Carse in formulating this distinction, “games” is really an analogy for the human experience broadly. The focus of finite games is on the agency of single actors who engage in a game played according to a finite set of rules that within a finite time guarantees a resolution – that is, a winner and a loser. Finite games thus have a finite beginning and end, and are played to win. The pervasiveness of individualism and the liberal values that attend it makes finite games a familiar model of the way in which we are inclined to think about our transactions as particular persons, as corporations, and as sovereign states, where such finite games seem relevant to most human activities that entail competition such as trade, business, education, foreign affairs, sports, and so on.

Infinite games have a different structure and desired outcome. There are no discernible beginnings or endings in infinite games. The focus is on strengthening relationships between entities rather than competition among single actors, and the ultimate goal is a shared flourishing as we continue to play the game. Further, infinite games are played according to rules that can be altered to serve the purpose of continuing the game when it appears that resolution is a possibility. The relationship among family members might be good example of the infinite games we play, where a mother is committed to continuing to strengthen the relationship she has with her son so that together they can manage whatever increasingly complex problems their lives lived together might present. In the case of infinite games, the interdependence of relationships means that mother and son either collaborate and continue to succeed together, or fail together. Infinite games are always win-win or lose-lose.

When we look for the cultural resources necessary to respond to the global and national predicament described above as a perfect storm, we might anticipate the need for a shift in values, intentions, and practices that takes us from the preponderance of finite games played among self-interested, single actors to a pattern of infinite games played through the strengthening of those relationships at every level of scale – personal, communal, corporate, and those among sovereign states – that is necessary to overcome what are the shared problems of our day. And it is a commonplace that Confucianism and East Asian philosophies broadly – Buddhism and Daoism as well – begin from the primacy of vital relationships where such primacy is indeed the hallmark of infinite games.

Autonomous individualism as an ideology

It is now half a century since John Rawls published his epochal A Theory of Justice, seeming at a stroke to bring to an end a 150-year-long dearth of basic works in political thought.⁴ In the wake of this publication, justice, long neglected by philosophers, became a topic of great moment and concern. This increased interest in justice was especially marked in the United States where the conversation was at least in part spurred on by the social and political dramas of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Robert Nozick followed Rawls fairly quickly with Anarchy, State and Utopia, a libertarian response to Rawls’s liberal theory.⁵ And a large commentarial tradition on both works ensued, and continues today, along with other substantive works with “justice” in the title, especially but not confined to those written by Robert Solomon, Michael Walzer, Derek Phillips, Susan Moller Okin, and, most recently, Amartya Sen and Michael Sandel.⁶

While a finer-grained definition of each of the several conceptions of justice is necessary for a full account of this subject matter, by procedural justice, I will accept the common understanding of this term as a conception of justice that gives priority to the right over the good. That is, it is the rigorous application of fair procedures rather than outcomes that determines what is just. It will only be in passing that I will have something to say about “retributive or criminal justice” that points to a consideration of theories of evidence and punishment. Differing nuances of meaning notwithstanding, I will use the two terms social and distributive justice synonymously as having to do with the fair distribution of material goods such as food, medicine, and clothing, together with other primary social goods such as dignity, health, and self-respect. I will also have occasion to refer to restorative patterns of justice where “restorative justice” – a relatively new concept – has been employed in the accounts compiled by truth and reconciliation commissions. Indeed, the major focus and concern of this study will occur at the interface between distributive or social justice and a conception of restorative justice that I will reconstruct from the Confucian conception of “harmony” (he 和).

Henry Rosemont Jr. in his Against Individualism has mounted a compelling argument that foundational individualism in its various iterations has become a malevolent ideology implicated in and aggravating many of the pressing problems of our time, and that the Confucian notion of a role-bearing, relationally constituted person provides us with a robust alternative way of conceiving of the human social, moral, and religious experience.⁷ The overall thrust of his thesis can be stated rather simply. The industrial democracies and most of the rest of the world are dominated by a corporate capitalism the interests of which are served largely by a procedural justice grounded in a foundational individualism that compounds the benefits of a few and marginalizes the possibility of realizing a distributive justice for the many. Hence, the more that academic and political forces are successful in defending and indeed championing the morality that grounds individualism and procedural justice, the less likely we will be able to make gains in social justice. Or, put another way, when viewed from a perspective that gives primacy to distributive justice, individual freedom for an elite and privileged few is being purchased at the expense of social justice for an increasing number of the world’s peoples.

In this essay, I will begin by rehearsing in summary terms what I take to be the thrust of Rosemont’s argument against the ideology of individualism, and then take the contemporary discourse on justice in moral and political philosophy as a substantial test case to see if Confucianism and its narrative understanding of person can provide a productive intervention in this conversation. I join Rosemont here in arguing that a default individualism constitutes a major underlying and entrenched conceptual problem that is exacerbating our current predicament – a predicament I have described above as the perfect storm. Indeed, this default individualism is appealed to first in defining what it means to be a moral person and then is extended as determinate of what it means for this putatively moral person to act justly. This foundational individualism with its roots deep in the Western philosophical narrative dilutes our sense of moral responsibility by allowing us in important degree to describe, analyze, and evaluate individual persons – psychologically, politically, and morally – in isolation from others. The pre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: why traditional Chinese philosophy still matters
• PART I The relevance of Confucian ethics for our time
• PART II Mutual empowerment of Chinese and Western thought
• PART III Modern illuminations of ancient wisdom
• Afterword: comments and reflections by an “outsider”
• Index