Human Becomings

Theorizing Persons for Confucian Role Ethics

Roger T. Ames

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781438480800, 9781438480794
• eBook ISBN: 9781438480817
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy

Offers an in-depth exposition of the Confucian conception of persons as the starting point of Confucian ethics.

2021 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

In Human Becomings, Roger T. Ames argues that the appropriateness of categorizing Confucian ethics as role ethics turns largely on the conception of person that is presupposed within the interpretive context of classical Chinese philosophy. By beginning with first self-consciously and critically theorizing the Confucian conception of persons as the starting point of Confucian ethics, Ames posits that the ultimate goal will be to take the Confucian tradition on its own terms and to let it speak with its own voice without overwriting it with cultural importances not its own. He argues that perhaps the most important contribution Confucian philosophy can make to contemporary ethical, social, and political discourse is the conception of focus-field, relationally constituted persons as a robust alternative to the ideology of individualism with single actors playing to win.

Chapter One

The Question of Which Questions to Ask?

Setting the Problem: Where Should the Discourse on Confucian Ethics Begin?

As I have mentioned in the introduction, the influence of G. W. F. Hegel as a philosopher, for good and for bad, has still not waned almost two centuries after his death. In his introduction to the Encyclopaedia Logic, Hegel reflects at great length upon the following questions: Where does philosophy begin? Where does the inquiry start? And in this reverie, he concludes that because philosophy “does not have a beginning in the sense of the other sciences,” it must be the case that “the beginning only has a relation to the subject who takes the decision to philosophise.”1 For Hegel, it is the ultimate project of such philosophizing to bring this person—the finite spirit, the single intellect, the philosopher—into identity with God as the object of pure thinking. And for Hegel like Confucianism, the person is not a fact but an achievement that could not become what it does without the structures of the human community. In this inquiry into Confucian ethics, then, I first want to embrace Hegel’s concern about the importance of understanding the beginning of our philosophical inquiry, and I also want to heed his injunction to start from those who take the decision to philosophize—that is, human persons. At the same time, I am inspired by the philosophical hermeneutics of John Dewey, who began his long career as a Hegelian but early on abandoned Hegel’s teleology and idealism to embrace a process (and in many ways Darwinian) pragmatism. Within the philosophical narrative of his own tradition, Dewey challenges substance assumptions that commit us to a superordinate conception of discrete individuals and introduces his own radically disjunctive notion of persons as interpenetrating, irreducibly relational “habitudes.”

When we turn to Confucian ethics, we must begin from the expectation that within the ethical discourse of different philosophical traditions there have been significantly different assumptions about how the notion of person has been conceptualized. Heeding Hegel’s counsel to question the starting point of the inquiry, identifying and excavating these uncommon Confucian assumptions regarding persons might be a good place to begin. Indeed, taking the concept of persons as our starting point becomes a particularly apposite strategy when we consider what follows from it. That is, the cosmological assumptions that set the alternative interpretive contexts for the classical texts defining the Greek and the Confucian philosophical traditions need to be understood as a correlation between speculations about the life-forms and institutions that structure the daily lives of ordinary people and their respective interpretations of cosmic order. We need only to think of Plato who, in the Republic and the Timaeus, found a correlation between the harmony that orders the human soul in his formulation of political and cosmic order, respectively. This same assumption is at work in the interpretive studies by some of our most distinguished Sinologists. Nathan Sivin explores these correlations in his “State, Cosmos, and Body in the Last Three Centuries B.C.,” and on the analogy of landscape paintings, Michael Nylan makes the argument for soft boundaries and multiple centers and perspectives within the evolving Confucian moral geography (dili 地理).2 In her monograph on Cosmology and Political Culture in Early China, Wang Aihe provides a succinct statement regarding this claim about the symbiotic nature of Chinese cosmology:

Such a correlative cosmology is an orderly system of correspondence among various domains of reality in the universe, correlating categories of the human world, such as the human body, behavior, morality, the sociopolitical order, and historical changes, with categories of the cosmos, including time, space, the heavenly bodies, seasonal movement, and natural phenomena.3

We can generalize in saying that our world cosmologies, grounded as they are in our alternative conceptions of what it means to become persons, are themselves a reflection of how different cultures have come to understand the human condition. In what follows, I will be relying heavily upon the open-ended process cosmology made explicit in the Great Commentary commentary (Dazhuan 大傳) to the Book of Changes (Yijing 易經) as an interpretative context for reading and interpreting the classical Confucian texts. And I will be interpreting this cosmology as having evolved from earliest times in a contrapuntal relationship with an emerging, distinctive, and always changing human ethical, social, and political culture.

With respect to the mainstream discourse on ethics within the Western academy, we are turning a corner and are now at the happy juncture where we can anticipate that Confucian perspectives will be increasingly acknowledged and engaged by mainstream philosophers in the continuing conversation. And like my many colleagues who have been advocates for including Confucian resources in the debate, I also believe that this tradition has a significant role to play and a distinctive contribution to make. In this monograph I argue that the most important contribution Confucian philosophy broadly, and Confucian ethics more specifically, has to make to this conversation is to provide a robust alternative to the notion of the discrete and autonomous individual at a time when a foundational individualism has become a default position in most contemporary ethical discourse.

With respect to our understanding of Confucian ethics itself, there has been some debate among contemporary scholars working in this field over the appropriateness of categorizing this tradition as either a distinctively Chinese version of virtue ethics, or as a sui generis role ethics that belongs to the Confucian tradition itself. The choice between these classificatory alternatives again turns largely on excavating the conception of persons that is presupposed within the interpretive context of classical Chinese philosophy. If our goal is to take the Confucian tradition on its own terms, and in so doing to resist overwriting it with our own cultural importances, we must begin by first self-consciously and critically theorizing the Confucian conception of persons as the starting point of Confucian ethics.

It should be noted that we need the term “role” in the English expression “Confucian role ethics” to make clear the difference this gerundive notion of person has from other ethical traditions. But “role” is actually redundant when we turn to the Chinese language. That is, “role” is already presupposed in the Chinese translation of the term “ethics” itself as lunlixue 倫理學, with lunli 倫理 meaning specifically “the quality achieved in the patterns of human roles and relations.” Again, lun is not only used descriptively to mean roles such as “king” or “husband” but also has qualitative implications as “exemplary or ignoble” or “caring or indolent,” respectively.4 An interesting footnote here is that this same term lun also means “category” and “class,” suggesting that in this cosmology the construction of theoretical discriminations such as “categories” and “classifications” are a function of analogical correlations among things. Such a functional method of organizing experience stands in stark contrast to the classical Greek tradition in which categories are established through positing some assumed essence or selfsame and reduplicative identical characteristic—that is, some eidos—shared among members of a particular genus or species.5 In this Confucian cosmology, categories of things broadly including that of human beings are to be constructed by correlating what they do in the various roles they perform in relation to one another rather than by some ontological reference to what they are.

In the introduction I worried over the problem of an asymmetry in cultural translation that is marked by a constant theorizing of the Chinese tradition by appeal to Western categories. For me, an immediate example of this tendency has been our rush to tailor Confucian ethics to fit the category of virtue ethics. It is at least an interesting coincidence that early on in the Chinese-language literature many of our more influential scholars on Chinese ethics—Mou Zongsan and Lee Ming-huei might be two prominent examples—proffered a principle-based, Kantian interpretation of this tradition. In his survey of Confucian ethics, David Elstein argues that such a deontic interpretation of Chinese ethics has been predominate within Chinese scholarship broadly.6 But when Elizabeth Anscombe’s 1958 publication of “Modern Moral Philosophy” precipitated a revisionist rehabilitation of virtue ethics in the Western ethical discourse, prevailing interpretations of Chinese ethics in our Western sources seemed to follow this new direction in the evolution of Western ethical theory. In her essay, Anscombe accuses rule-based deontology and utilitarianism of being anemically legalistic and lacking any moral psychology. Her seminal critique anticipated Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue and the avalanche of publications on virtue ethics that followed in its wake.7 The concerted efforts in Western normative theory to rehabilitate virtue ethics as a significant voice in the discourse occasioned by Anscombe’s challenge has also been the story of an interpretive turn in the reading of Confucian ethics within the Western literature. Indeed, the majority of scholars in Confucian philosophy in the Western academy, along with many of their colleagues who do Western ethics, have become more than comfortable in invoking both classical and contemporary developments in virtue ethics as the best way to describe and understand the Confucian tradition.8 At the same time, many contemporary Chinese scholars themselves who specialize in Confucian moral philosophy remain resistant to any simple equation between Confucian ethics and virtue ethics, beginning from questioning the appropriateness of eliding the distinction between the Confucian notion of de 德 conventionally translated as “virtue” and the Greek concept of arête.

Aristotle defines arête (“virtue”) as

a state concerned with choice, lying in a mean relative to us, this being determined by reason and in the way in which the man of practical wisdom would determine it.9

The assumption is that such a virtue—such an excellence or efficacy or ability—is the character trait or settled disposition or state of mind of a particular person. By way of contrast, in the early Chinese cosmology, de as a particular “focus” or “insistent particularity” has to be understood in its holographic relationship with dao 道 that serves as the specific “field” as it is construed from this particular perspective. And the normative aspect of any particular thing—its excellence, efficacy, or ability—is a function of the quality of the coalescence this particular focus has been able to achieve with all things within its environing field. With respect to persons specifically, de does not simply reduce individuals to their character traits or states of mind but rather references the relational virtuosity that such persons evidence within the various activities that in sum come to constitute their life story. Many Chinese commentators would allow that while “virtue” ethics as it has evolved within the Western narrative might have some relevance for understanding Confucian ethics, given the cosmological implications of de, such a resonance does not tell the whole story.

I will argue that to the extent the language of virtue ethics broadly, including its many contemporary evolving variations and accretions, still appeals to the familiar vocabulary cluster of agents, acts, generic virtues, character traits, autonomy, motivation, reasons, choice, freedom, principles, consequences, and so on, introduces distinctions that assume some form of foundational individualism as its starting point. In our own time, but having deep roots in the classical Greek philosophical narrative, the individualism assumed in the vocabulary of the deontic, utilitarian, and indeed virtue ethical discourse, while certainly not one thing, has still become a default commonsense assumption, if not an ideology. By “ideology” I mean that when some variant of individualism that appeals to the vocabulary cluster of the discrete person has garnered a monopoly on our consciousness without any serious alternative to challenge it, this variant can best be described as an ideology: in the sense of being the characteristic thinking of an individual, group, or culture.10

I will clai...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter One The Question of Which Questions to Ask
• Chapter Two How Do the Confucian Canons Say “Role Ethics”?
• Chapter Three A Narrative Conception of Human Nature
• Chapter Four Holography and the Focus-Field Conception of Persons
• Chapter Five Relational Autonomy and Thick Choices
• Chapter Six Holism, Democracy, and the Optimizing of the Human Experience
• Chapter Seven From Human “Becomings” to a Process Cosmology
• Epilogue Why Theorize Confucian Persons for a Changing World Cultural Order?
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover