Confucianisms

     In commenting on an earlier post, Sperwer and Gordseller both challenge the idea that Confucianism can be taken out of its traditional Chinese or Korean context and refurbished for liberal purposes, which is something I'm interested in.  These are useful criticisms and I take them seriously.   

     The problem they point to, as I understand it, is this:  The thing we call "Confucianism" is hopelessly bound up with a variety of social and political practices that have, over the centuries, brought to the fore its hierarchical and patriarchal and inegalitarian and conservative features.   It makes little sense, this line of critique goes, to assert that pre-Qin dynasty Confucian thought can somehow be separated from this long historical experience and used as a basis for a more egalitarian and progressive ideology. 

    This is a powerful point, especially if we grant that there is a thing called "Confucianism."  But what if we reject the idea of a singular "Confucianism"?  What if we argue that there is not one Confucianism but many, and that it is  precisely in the historical fact of many Confucianisms that we can defend an effort to revise, yet again, the ideas of the early texts in a manner that suits modern, more liberal, societies?  That is what I will suggest below. 

     Let me start by saying that my purpose is not to excavate a more genuine or authentic Confucianism.  I think it is true that pre-Qin dynasty Confucian thought, especially the Analects and Mencius, was more distinct from Legalism than the Confucianism that emerged from the Han Dynasty.  But it is also true that in the context of its own time, pre-Qin Confucian thought was certainly based on presumptions about social hierarchy and sexual divisions of labor that we, today, would find objectionable.  Confucius was not a liberal.  But neither was he a Legalist. 

    Moreover, from the very beginning - and I am thinking here about differences among the various Adepts mentioned in the Analects - there were differences of opinion among those who took Confucian thought seriously over just what that thought required in specific contexts.   The different views about human nature that separated Mencius and Xun Tzu are, perhaps, the most famous pre-Qin contention.  It does no good to ask "who was right," or "who was closer to the real intentions of the author," because each text came to have a life of its own beyond the influence of Confucius's own intentions, whatever they might be.  Yes, this is a version of "the author is dead" argument.  To repeat: from the very beginning, the meaning of Confucius's thought was contested.   There is not one, single strand of "correct" Confucian thought.  There is a field of interpretive possibility that has been called upon in many different ways, by many different subjects over the centuries. 

     When I complain about Legalist appropriations of Confucius I do so to point out how they might contradict what appears to be Confucius's own preferences about political action as found in the Analects.  But I also recognize, as my good commenters have implied, that a liberal appropriation of Confucian thought runs the very same risk of contradicting the Venerable Sage's own understandings and preferences.  Such is life.  This is nothing new.  Neo-Confucianisms, in attempting to respond to Buddhism and Taoism, may also have wandered off the original author's intentions (I do not know enough about Neo-Confucianism to say much more). 

    Here's my main point: what matters is not what Confucius would say about any of the many appropriations of this thought.  What matters is how well any given appropriation can be justified by philosophical elements internal to specific Confucian texts. 

     For example: I think we can make a strong case the Humanity (ren) was the highest virtue articulated in the Analects.  Confucius said that he himself did not live up to this ideal; it was, thus, the highest ideal.  As such, I think it reasonable to use Humanity as a leading justificatory tool when assessing appropriations of Confucian thought - even when we stray into areas, like, say, gay marriage, that would be wholly alien to Confucius himself.   So, I think we can say that the use of torture or political killing is more violative of the central Confucian virtue of Humanity than is gay marriage.   Indeed, I think that too great a reliance on coercion in general, as Legalist are wont to do, is more violative of Humanity than is gay marriage.

     Where does that leave us?   Again, I am not saying that something like gay marriage is a more "authentic" Confucian practice.  It obviously is not.  Rather, I am trying to say that  we can make judgments about whether certain social and political practices are more or less in keeping with the ideas and ideals of specific Confucian texts.  Our Confucian judgments can be more or less consistent with concepts derived from the ancient books; they do not have to be, nor can they be, more or less "authentic."

    Whether a particular application of Confucian thought will be persuasive or not will depend upon the intellectual and social and political context within which the application is made.  After all, Legalism was grafted on to Confucianism and accepted by many generations of very smart people.  It obviously made sense to them and was not seen as an unjustifiable change.  But that is just the point.  In doing so, they were revising and changing the tradition to suit their own times.  That is what we are doing now: changing and revising the tradition to suit our times, really nothing different than Xun Tzu or the Neo-Confucians or the Koreans or whoever has done through history.  We are, like them, creating another Confucianism.   A modern, liberal appropriation of Confucius will ultimately rise or fall depending upon how well it can find resonance in a modern, liberal context.  We'll see.

     In the end, my critics are right.  When someone says "Confucius," the ideas that pop into the listeners mind, if any ideas come to mind at all, are most likely to be "hierarchy," "patriarchy," "conservative," and the like.  I know.  I run into this all the time.  My job - and the job of much smarter people than me, like Tu Wei-Ming and Roger Ames - is to create a different set of associations, just as the many, many tinkerers of the tradition before us have done.

    And if it doesn't work, there's always Chuang Tzu....

Comments

[Sperwer]

Sam:

Hear, hear [and hear him] for Chuang Tzu!

In the menatime, I'm grateful and glad that my little barbs helped to stimulate such a thoughtful post from you.

Once correction, though. I don't think it's impossible (or unuseful) to take Confucianism out of its Chinese or Korean (or Vietnamese, etc.) context(s).

My point was that, if you wish to do so, you'd do better just to get on with it, rather than tussling with issues such as whether or not the Hwang stem-cell fiasco (and all the elements of Korean society that produced it) has any roots in Confucianism, and whether in that case, the Confucianism in question is "authentic" or not.

Given the way, as you describe it, in which Confucianism became many ConfucianismS - some of which arguably were effective adaptations to circumstance, but took Conficianism pretty far afield from its roots -- its quite a daunting task.

Here's a little provocation for you, stimulated by my recent reading of Weatherford's "Ghengis Khan and the Making of the Modern World": Was Ghengis Khan the best Confucian of them all?

That probably needs to be unpacked, but I'm just going to leave it out there for now.

[Sam]

My original post on Dr. Hwang was in anticipation of critics who would tie his failings to some notion of "Confucianism." Perhaps I jumped the gun. I have not yet seen such criticism. Have you? Still, it has been a productive exchange, helping to develop my ideas on how to apply Confucius to our times.
As to Ghengis Khan, I have not seen that book. My first response to your first suggestion is: no, Ghengis is not Confucian. Too much killing. All the death overshadows the prolific extension of his Y chromosome.

[Allan Lian]

A marvelous article as expected from a Confucian scholar. Keep up the good work, Sam.

As the year is coming to a close, perhaps some time for a bit more ‘confusion’.

Of the four cardinal virtues it seems that only propriety/mores (Li) can be adapted to changes in time. It is rather difficult to water down or modernize benevolence (Ren), righteousness/justice (Yi) and wisdom (Zhi)?

Therefore a thousand or more years ago, some learned Neo Confucians, Neo Daoists and Chan Buddhists decided to have an integrated study of the three Doctrines to return to Tao. After all they had first studied the four books and five classics before taking up Daoist and/or Buddhist studies.

Happy New Year!

[gordsellar]

Hey, I just found this link to my site and I was quite impressed with what you write.

I think the problem might be that there's a little impetus, and that anyway, whatever adaptation Confucianism gets in the West is going to be so different from the original that one might as well create a new system from whole (Western) cloth if one wants something specific as an outcome.

As an example, Protestant Christianity in Korea is a rather different beast that anything I've even encountered in Canada. Okay, there are tons of Protestant nutjobs in America, but they tend not to be Presbyterians. In Korea, you see a kind of acceptance of absolutely cult-like behaviours in mainstream religions. Some of these Protestant churches are among the most judgmental, materialist organizations in the country, and they're very powerful, too. This misapplication of Christianity is just an example of the weird stuff that can happen when a foreign "philosophy" is imported into a society.

(One could argue the Classical importation of Middle-Eastern religion into Europe also involved an almost-complete loss of its fundamental tenets as it was institutionalized, as well as profound loss in Europe of what they'd had there previously.)

Of course, the last problem would be that I don't see a very big impetus for Westerners to adopt Confucian values. Korean Neo-Confucianism, like most major changes in culture, was embraced in a top-down manner, I recently was told. It was after Japan tried to invade Korea sometime in the 1500s, I think, that Korean rulers began to push the Neo-Confucian hardline. Christianity was adopted by Rome because of a vision, and maintained itself through sometimes very violent suppression of heresy. Islam didn't spread across much of the world by word of mouth alone, either. (I don't know if Buddhism is an exception.) I'm sure popular movements matter too, but I don't see a great impetus to embrace something new right now. I could, of course, be deeply wrong about this.

Anyway, I enjoyed your post very much and will return when I have time to read more.