Confucian Cultures of Authority

Intimate Authority: The Rule of Ritualin Classical Confucian Political Discourse

Intimate Authority: The Rule of Ritual in Classical Confucian Political Discourse Tao Jiang This chapter is a discussion of the nature of political authority in the normative political discourse of classical Confucianism. It is set against the background of the perceived particularism that characterizes a signi ficantportionoftheclassicalConfucianteaching.ClassicalConfucianism, as an ethical, political, and religious teaching, has often been regarded as advocating family-centered moral particularism. This is in sharp contrast with the universalism of Legalism advocating a universal legal code (Bodde & Morris, p. 29). However, both universalistic and particularistic elements are clearly present in the Confucian teaching. Those who claim that Confucianism is exclusively advocating particularism will have a hard time explaining why it became the orthodox teaching of a universal empire for much of the two thousand years of Chinese imperial history. The fact that Confucianism came to dominate the official political, ethical, and religious discourse in imperial China points to its universal appeal. It is hardly conceivable that an exclusively particularistic teaching could have become the source of political, moral, and religious legitimacy for a universal empire. On the other hand, however, one who claims that Confucianism advocates universalism exclusively will run into the apparent difficulty of explaining the family-centered nature of its moralism. The fact that orthodox Confucian texts often lean towards the interest of the family when there is a potential conflict between family and state is suggestive of its particularism. Hence, we find ourselves in a dilemma on how to categorize classical Confucianism in terms of universalism vs. particularism, since such categories appear to be misfits with respect to the nature of classical Confucianism. David Hall and Roger Ames have proposed a focus/field model to solve the dilemma of universalism vs. particularism: “The focus/field 21 22 Tao Jiang model results from understanding an item’s relation to the world to be constituted by acts of contextualization” (1995, p. 275).1 That is, At any given moment, items in a correlative scheme are characterizable in terms of the focal point from and to which lines of divergence and convergence attributable to them move, and the field from which and to which those lines proceed . . . Fields are unbounded, pulsating in some vague manner from and to their various transient foci. This notion of field readily contrasts with the one-many and part-whole models (ibid., p. 273). Applying this focus/field model to classical Confucianism would help us to see it in terms of both a family-centered moral particularism (focus) and “the kind of inclusive pluralism that is achieved with the flourishing community” (field).2 The focus/field model retains particularism as the focus while dissolving universalism into inclusive pluralism as the field. In this essay I would like to propose another way to approach the issue. I will make the case that it is better not to interpret classical Confucian teaching along the lines of universalism vs. particularism at all, which presupposes a clear boundary between the two; rather, universalism and particularism are not even clearly separated to begin with in classical Confucianism. The difficulty in applying the two categories to describe the nature of the classical Confucian teaching points to its peculiar orientation. To be more specific, classical Confucianism is an intimacy-oriented discourse and to interpret it along the line of universalism vs. particularism is an integrity-oriented analysis that is premised upon a separation between the two. I am using the terms “intimacy” and “integrity” as they are defined by Thomas Kasulis in his comparative study of cultures, Intimacy or Integrity: Philosophy and Cultural Difference. Accordingly, intimacy refers to a cultural model whose dominant orientation is characterized by personal—instead of public— objectivity, no sharp distinction between self and other, an affective dimension of knowledge, the connection between the somatic and the psychological, and a nonself-conscious ground for knowledge. By contrast , integrity refers to a cultural orientation with just the opposite characteristics. I will use the classical Confucian political discourse as an illustration of the overall intimacy orientation of classical Confucianism. I will argue that the classical Confucian paradigm of political authority is what I call “the rule of ritual,” idealized in the rule by sage rulers and scholar/offi- Intimate Authority 23 cials who exercise a personal form of authority, the source of which is their moral exemplarity in observing ritual propriety, and that it is essentially a...