A Response to “Feminist/Confucian: A Search for Dignity” Roger T. Ames Abstract: In responding to Dr. Michael Nylan’s talk, Professor Ames explores further the difference between the Western concept of an autonomous human being and the Confucian concept of human becoming.
D
rawing on a lifetime of scholarship on the Confucian canons, Michael Nylan in her talk has provided us with a powerful challenge to the familiar kind of ethical deliberation that grounds liberal individualism. Under the three correlated headings of Confucianism, feminism, and dignity, Professor Nylan uses her Confucian texts and her own insights to develop a substantive alternative vision of how another tradition has undertaken the project of promoting moral competence among its population. My response to Professor Nylan’s talk is intended first as a compliment, and only then as a further complement. I, like most students of Chinese culture, have enormous respect for Michael’s continuing contribution to both sinology and comparative philosophy, and, appealing to the Confucian terms of “transformation through education” (jiaohua 教化), I have deep affection for the gracious person her studies have enabled her to become. I am grateful for this opportunity to express this heartfelt professional and personal compliment to my friend in history. And what I have to say is also a complement in the sense that, inspired by her insights, I want to both endorse them and to continue the conversation that her talk has begun by trying to add to it one more perspective. First, Confucianism. The philosopher and teacher Kongfuzi 孔夫子 (Latinized as “Confucius”) lends his name to the English (but not the Chinese) expression of this tradition called “Confucianism.” Confucius was certainly a flesh-and-blood historical person who lived, taught,
Issue 11, October 2012
21
Roger T. Ames
and died a frustrated teacher, like the rest of us will, some twenty-five centuries ago. He was able to consolidate in his own time a formidable legacy of wisdom that has been passed down and applied through the ages to shape the character of an entire culture. In and of itself, the profoundly personal model of Confucius, remembered by his protegés through those intimate snapshots of his life collected in the middle chapters of the Analects, has its own continuing value and meaning. But then, as Confucius reportedly said of himself, most of what he has on offer has ancient roots, and further, that he is one who is inclined to follow the established path rather than to strike out in new directions.1 Indeed it is perhaps for this reason that in the Chinese language itself the tradition he transmitted is not identified specifically with Confucius as “Confucianism,” but rather with the ru 儒 literati class, which over the centuries provided the tradition with its evolving “literati learning” (ruxue 儒學). And consistent with Confucius’s own premises, this legacy called ruxue—the always porous core of an aggregating Chinese culture—is both vital and corporate. That is, Confucianism has been appropriated, commented upon, reinterpreted, and reauthorized by each of some eighty generations of Chinese scholars and intellectuals who across the ages have contributed their own best thoughts to this literati learning as a continuous, living tradition. What is a human “being”? This was a perennial Greek question asked in Plato’s Phaedo and Aristotle’s De Anima. Perhaps the most persistent answer from the time of Pythagoras was an ontological one: The “being” of a human being is a permanent, ready-made, and self-sufficient soul. And “know thyself”—the signature exhortation of Socrates—is to know this soul. Each of us is a person, and from conception, has the integrity of being a person. As Michael avers, the modern Enlightenment iteration of what has become an evolving foundational and hyper self-conscious individualism assumes a discreteness, autonomy, rational capacity, and free will that ostensibly come into play in the process of ethical deliberation. In what way does a person become consummately human? This then was the perennial Confucian question asked explicitly in all of the Four Books: in the Great Learning, in the Analects of Confucius, in the Mencius, and again in the Zhongyong. The answer from the time of Confucius was a moral, aesthetic, and ultimately religious one. One becomes human by cultivating those thick, intrinsic relations that constitute one’s initial conditions and that locate the trajectory of one’s life force within family, community, and cosmos.2 “Cultivate your person” (xiushen 修身), the signature exhortation of the Confucian canons, is the ground of the Confucian project of becoming consummate as a person (ren 仁). It is
22
Religion East & West
A Response to “Feminist/Confucian”
to cultivate one’s conduct assiduously as it is expressed through those family, community, and cosmic roles and relations that one lives. In this Confucian tradition, we need each other. If there is only one person, there are no persons.3 Becoming consummate in our conduct (ren) is something that we do, and that we either do together, or not at all. Henry Rosemont and I have over these recent years been making an argument that Confucianism, far from reducing to one of our familiar ethical theories—deontic (Kant), utilitarian (Mill), or virtue (Aristotle)—is a sui generis vision of the moral life that we have come to call “Confucian role ethics.” Perhaps one way of getting at the distinction we would want to maintain between virtue ethics and Confucian role ethics would be to look at the notions of person that ground these two positions and the principle of individuation that each entails. What does it mean to be an individual? We might begin from observing that the key Confucian philosophical term ren 仁 does not offer us the familiar distinction between the character traits of individual agents and the actions that follow from them, and hence ren can in most cases quite properly be translated as either “consummate person/s” or “consummate conduct.” I would suggest that the reason for this ambiguity between singular and plural and between agent and action is because the holistic cosmology that gives the classical Confucian tradition its interpretive context gives priority to situation over agency. Said another way, the Confucian notion of person cannot be separated from the continuing context that is itself integral to what persons are becoming. Confucian persons are irreducibly relational and gerundive. The difference between a human being and a human becoming reflects a different default ontology. In the former case, human beings have sufficient metaphysical and biological uniformities to individuate them as discrete agents and to make them Individuality is not members of the same natural kind. By contrast, the Confucian notion of human becoming begins from a something given, but unique manifold and focus of thick but as yet inchoate family relations that serve as an initial resource whence something achieved. persons, through a process of continuing transactional cultivation, will eventually emerge. Again, the notion of a human being invests persons with a foundational individualism that makes them numerically distinct as “someone” or “somebody.” As human beings they acquire virtuous character traits through a process of habituation. In the notion of human becoming, the principle of individuation itself is a process of becoming personally distinctive and distinguished through efficacious, or we might say, virtuosic conduct in their roles and Issue 11, October 2012
23
Roger T. Ames
relations. Individuality is not a given, but something that persons achieve through nurturing the relationships that constitute them. We might appeal to the language of the Book of Changes to provide further context for this Confucian project. It provides a correlative vocabulary that distinguishes this worldview from the reductive, single-ordered, “one-behind-the-many” ontological model that grounds classical Greek metaphysical thinking wherein one comes to “understand” the many by coming to know retrospectively the foundational and causal ideal that lies behind them, the notion of human being itself being a case in point. Instead, we find that in Chinese cosmology there is a symbiotic and holistic focus-field model of order that is illustrated rather concisely in the organic, ecological sensibilities of the Great Learning 大學. The meaning of the family is implicated in and dependent upon the productive cultivation of each of its members, and by extension the meaning of the entire cosmos is implicated in and dependent upon the productive cultivation of each person within family and community. Personal worth is the source of human culture, and human culture in turn is the aggregating resource that provides a context that facilitates each person’s efforts at personal cultivation. While certainly having important theoretical implications, the enduring power of this Confucian project is that it proceeds from a relatively straightforward account of the actual human experience and reminds us of how we really do achieve moral competence in the everyday events that constitute a human narrative. It is a pragmatic naturalism in the sense that, rather than relying upon metaphysical presuppositions or supernatural speculations, it focuses on the possibilities for enhancing personal worth available to us here and now through enchanting the ordinary affairs of the day. A grandmother’s love for her grandchild is at once the most ordinary of things and yet becomes the most extraordinary of things. By developing his insights around the most basic and enduring aspects of the ordinary human experience—family reverence, deference to others, friendship, a cultivated sense of shame, education, community, and so on—Confucius guaranteed their continuing relevance. One characteristic of Confucianism that is certainly present in the words of Confucius himself, and that has made his teachings so resilient in the Chinese tradition, is that it is porous and adaptable. His contribution was simply to take ownership of the cultural legacy of his time, to adapt the wisdom of the past to his own present historical moment, and then to recommend to future generations that they do the same.4 The personal model of Confucius that is remembered in the Analects does not purport to lay out some generic formula by which everyone
24
Religion East & West
A Response to “Feminist/Confucian”
should live their lives. Rather, the text recalls the narrative of one special person who in his relations with others cultivated his humanity and lived a fulfilling life, much to the admiration of those around him. We might take liberties and play with the title of the Analects by reading “conversing” or “discoursing” (lunyu 論語) more specifically as “role-based discoursing” (lunyu 倫語). Indeed, in reading the Analects, we encounter the relationally constituted Confucius making his way through life by living his many roles as best he can: as a caring family member, as a strict teacher and mentor, as a scrupulous and incorruptible scholar-official, as a concerned neighbor and member of his community, as an always critical political consultant, as the grateful progeny of his progenitors, as an enthusiastic heir to a specific cultural legacy, even as a member of a chorus of joyful boys and men singing their way home after a happy day on the river Yi. He offers us historical models rather than principles and exhortations rather than imperatives. The power and lasting value of his insights lie in the fact that these ideas are intuitively persuasive and readily adaptable to the conditions of ensuing generations, including our own. Indeed, invoking the Chinese natural cosmology as context, what makes Confucianism more empirical than empiricism—that is, what makes Confucianism a radical empiricism—is that it respects the uniqueness of the particular and the need for a generative wisdom that takes this uniqueness into account in anticipating a productive future. Rather than advancing universal principles and assuming a taxonomy of natural kinds grounded in some notion of strict identity, Confucianism proceeds from generalizations that are always provisional and that are made from particular historical instances of successful living—the specific events recounted in the narrative of Confucius himself being a case in point. Among the most distinctive aspects of Confucian role ethics is that it is grounded in a relationally constituted conception of persons—that is, gerundive human becomings—who begin their project of achieving moral competence in immediate family relations. Through the education and apposite application of a moral imagination captured in the vocabulary of “deferring by putting oneself in the others place” (shu 恕) and then “acting conscientiously” (zhong 忠) to realize “what is optimally appropriate in the circumstances” (yi 義), one “achieves propriety in one’s roles and relations” (li 禮) and “emerges in one’s habits of conduct as a consummate person” (ren 仁). The passage that Michael Nylan cited captures this continuing dynamic of family and community as expressed through patterns of deference: Issue 11, October 2012
25
Roger T. Ames
仲弓問仁。子曰：“出門如見大賓，使民如承大祭。己所不 欲，勿施於人。在邦無怨，在家無怨。 Zhonggong inquired about consummate conduct. The Master replied, “In your public life, behave as though you are receiving dignitaries; employ the common people as though you are overseeing a great sacrifice. Do not impose upon others what you yourself do not want, and you will not incur personal or political ill-will.”5 The role of family relations in this growth in moral competence is vital. As we find in the opening passages of the Analects: 君子務本，本立而道生。孝弟也者，其為仁之本與。 Exemplary persons concentrate their efforts on the root, for the root having taken hold, one’s vision of the moral life will grow therefrom. As for family reverence (xiao 孝) and fraternal deference (ti 弟), these are, I suspect, the root of becoming consummate in one’s conduct (ren 仁).6 “Family” in this Confucian tradition is the governing metaphor and is the considered strategy for getting the most out of our relationships. We have argued that Confucian role ethics is not an ethical “theory,” but is rather a vision of the moral life that, through fostering the strength of roles and relations, seeks to be preemptive with respect to the emergence and the resolution of moral problems. We might appeal to James Carse’s distinction between “finite” and “infinite” games.7 Self-sufficient, autonomous individuals (or by extension, independent countries) might be able to find a self-serving yet mutually beneficial common ground that enables them to negotiate with others a solution to pressing yet finite ethical problems and to emerge a winner. But a cultivated strength in the relationships that obtain among members of a family (or a community of nations) is infinite in the sense that a daughter is always a daughter and neighboring Canada is always Canada whatever issues might arise, and that such a strength enables us to collaborate on confronting and resolving whatever complex problems might emerge and to continue the play. In infinite games, most hard cases are averted, and where they do occur, their resolutions are a by-product of relational tenacity. Unrelenting attention to the quality of relationships must come first. Speaking globally, one human relation that has not been well served in most traditional cultures past and present is that of gender. Michael Nylan makes the point that sexism has been a historical problem that has diminished the lives of both men and women then and now. Like
26
Religion East & West
A Response to “Feminist/Confucian”
Professor Nylan, I am an advocate of both Confucianism and feminism as a deliberate redress to prevailing sexist practices. To the extent that culturally determined values have “shut down” or “shut out” women from full participation in family and community, they have perpetrated the insidious “violence of ignoring.” Tolerance as a value is hollow and impotent; it does not require deference or even engagement. But on this score I would perhaps be more critical than Professor Nylan of the attitude toward women in classical Confucianism that is captured in the passages of the Analects she cites. Although there might be commentarial support for reading the expression “nuzi yu xiaoren nanyang 女子與小人難養” in Analects Sexism diminishes 17.25 as “women and servants are difficult to serve,” I would take the entire Analects itself as a case in point of the lives of both men women being largely “shut out” and thus “shut down” as a voice that might make a difference.8 But I would and women. then hasten to argue that patriarchy is a seemingly pervasive human condition that in the Chinese context is certainly antecedent to Confucianism. And further, that Confucianism in violation of its own premise that morality is growth in relations has been hijacked by those who would diminish the possibilities of the human experience for men and women alike. Gender discrimination vitiates the fundamental assumption that consummate conduct (ren) can be achieved only through optimal appropriateness in relations (yi). Further, I would argue that Confucianism has the internal resources needed to resolve gender discrimination without appeal to contemporary liberal values. It is precisely to acknowledge that Confucianism is a living tradition equipped to deal with the issues of our present historical moment that the Ames/Rosemont translation of the Analects is inclusive and gender-neutral. In her recent work, Martha Nussbaum has been an advocate of liberal individualism because she believes that we must retain to autonomy as a guarantee against the abusive and misogynistic roles and relations that have diminished our family and communal lives.9 I would rather follow Susan Okin, who in her search for justice in the family rejects any final separation between private and public life and seeks to address gender prejudice by rehabilitating family roles themselves.10 It is not that roles and relations are necessarily pernicious; rather those of us who would advocate role ethics must take responsibility for shedding light on how to achieve the equity in our family and social relations that has so far eluded us. Turning to human dignity, as a proud daughter of Kentucky, Professor Nylan appeals to Wendell Berry, who insists that the “greatest Issue 11, October 2012
27
Roger T. Ames
disaster in human history” is “the conceptual distinction between the holy and the world.” If we begin by allowing that there can be no morality without life, we can understand the underlying Confucian premise that morality is nothing but growth in relations, and that such growth ultimately transforms the secular into what is profoundly sacred. The same consummatory conduct that is a warrant for the sense of belonging in family and community has its cosmic proportions by leading radially and directly to that overwhelming feeling of a human-centered sense of worth and dignity, a possibility captured in the mantra that has become the signature of the Confucian religious sensibility: “the continuity of the human and the numinous” (tianrenheyi 天人合一). Having missed out on the good fortune of being born in Kentucky, to naturalize my own religiousness I would have to appeal to Ralph Waldo Emerson, that fatherly hero of American immigrants each of whom has been promised an American soul. Emerson in “The Divinity School Address” identifies and rails against what he takes to be a major defect in institutionalized Christianity. For Emerson, the fact that Jesus was a man who through his own efforts became divine is a challenge to each and every one of us to achieve our own divinity by becoming most consummately ourselves. By making Jesus into a god, the Church has offered its shallow guarantee while at the same time depriving us of both the inspiration of Jesus and the aspiration to become our own best thoughts. In an America that continues its invincible ignorance of Chinese history and culture even as China has precipitated a sea change in the economic and political world order, Professor Nylan has made a persuasive argument that we continue to ignore Confucianism to our own detriment. While Confucianism might not be the answer to all of the pressing issues of the day, it is clear that it has important resources for reconsidering our most fundamental issues, and it certainly deserves its place at the table. Notes 1. Analects 7.1: “The Master said, ‘Following the proper way, I do not forge new paths; with confidence I cherish the ancients—in these respects I am comparable to Old Peng.’” 2. See Analects 12.1: “Through self-discipline and observing ritual propriety one becomes consummate in one’s conduct (克己復 禮為仁).” All translations are from Roger T. Ames and Henry Rosemont, The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation (New York: Ballantine, 1998). 3. “For Confucius, unless there are at least two human beings, there can be no human beings.” Hebert Fingarette, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred (New York: Harper Row, 1983), 217.
28
Religion East & West
A Response to “Feminist/Confucian” 4. 5. 6. 7.
Analects 7.1. Analects 12.2. Analects 1.2. James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Life of Play and Possibility (New York: Ballantine, 1987). 8. With more than 25 cases of xiaoren in the Analects referring to morally retarded persons, I would be hesitant to allow a single case to mean “servants.” 9. Martha Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 10. Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1997).
Issue 11, October 2012
29