The Good Is One, Its Manifestations Many: Confucian Essays on Metaphysics, Morals, Ritual, Institutions, and Genders by Robert Cummings Neville (review)

Robert Cummings Neville is a well-known member of the so-called "Boston-Confucianism" school, a philosopher and theologian, and the Dean Emeritus of the School of Theology at Boston University. As he is a proponent of Confucianism as a global philosophy, it is by no means coincidental that his new book aims to provide a new interpretation of the moral and metaphysical traditions of Confucianism, suitable for filling the "vacuum of values" that prevail in the present globalized, yet alienated world.

The book is a collection of essays, consisting of a preface, fifteen chapters, an epilogue, and three appendices. The collection represents a well-structured cumulative anthology including various, seemingly fairly unrelated topics reaching from Neville's own theory of "being-itself", which epitomizes his original solution to the ancient problem of the relation between the one and the many through the analyses and re-interpretation of various central Confucian concepts and values, to topical themes pertaining to contemporary theories of selfhood and feminist philosophy.

However, all of these topics are more closely interrelated than they might appear at first glance. The common thread connecting these essays into a coherent whole does not lie merely in their joint topical significance for the contemporary globalized world, but also in the optics they share. This common perspective can be found in the Confucian rituality and the multifarious forms of its revitalization and modernization, without excluding its possible abuses. The book emphasizes that in the postmodern world, it is rituals that could enable us to achieve a qualitatively higher degree of human culture and civilization. However, we need to be cautious in their implementation, for without responsible prevention, certain rituals could lead to an increase in negative phenomena and attitudes, such as for instance, new forms of racism or sexism.

Therefore, the author, who is a contemporary Western Confucian, aims to show his readers a number of productive alternatives and methods for shaping and implementing positive rituality. However, he does not proceed from articulating the problems prevailing in contemporary societies in order to find a solution for them in a modernized form of Confucian rituality. In contrast to such–more common and certainly more comfortable–procedures, Neville chose to follow a different, somehow inverted path; he begun with the revitalization and methodical construction of a comprehensive Confucian system, suitable for the contemporary world, and addressed–from this newly established outlook–certain problematic issues, searching for a constructive solution. In this sense, the book is much more than a handbook of receipts aimed at teaching the readers how the ancient Confucian rituals should (or could) be changed and modernized in order to support gender, national, racial, and other marginalized and suppressed minorities. Although certain issues and ideas concerning these problems are mentioned in the earlier parts of the book, in the final chapter the author formulates a comprehensive and theoretically consistent "New Confucian" reply to the issues of discrimination, through the lens of feminist philosophy.

It is Neville's conscious and intentional decision to construct his new Confucian philosophical system along three streams of thought, namely metaphysics, morals (as not exhausted in the virtue-ethics), and the relation between the individual and society. However, in this overall structure the central theme of the work as a whole is undoubtedly to be found in Neville's elaborations on Confucian rituality. In a number of chapters, Neville exposes its importance for social and individual life, clearly showing why and how it intrinsically connects people with one another, with their institutions, and their natural environments. These connections bring about a particular identification pattern that differs from the dualistic binary patterns of either individual or collective identities. The basic supposition of the former is that one is defined by its own subjective experience, because of which there is...