Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary

Section III. The Confucian Project: Attaining Relational Virtuosity

III The Confucian Project: Attaining Relational Virtuosity “Human Beings” or “Human Becomings”? What is a human “being”? This was the perennial Greek question asked in Plato’s Phaedo and in Aristotle’s De Anima. And perhaps the most persistent answer from the time of Pythagoras was an ontological one: The “being” or essence 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. In what way does a person become consummately human? This 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. And 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.1 “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): It is 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. Becoming consummate in our conduct (ren) is something that we do, and that we either do together, or not at all.2 It will be the argument of this chapter that insufficient attention has been paid to this fundamental difference between ontologically 88 Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary constituted human “beings” and the Confucian project of “becoming” human. As a consequence, there is a real danger of inadvertently shoehorning the Confucian foot into a Greek sandal. The exciting documents recovered in recent archaeological finds have persuaded our present generation of scholars to go back and take another look at our received texts. In doing so, we have found some issues that we have overlooked, and other things that we have been able to clarify by reference to these new materials. As an example, we have found that an epistemology of concrete “feelings” (qing 情) is fundamental to an emerging Confucian tradition that, after the death of Confucius himself, we associate with the lineage traced from Confucius’s grandson, Zisizi 子思子, down through Mencius (simengpai 思孟派). As a consequence, we have had to rethink our more cognitive, conceptual, and theoretical interpretations of the early Confucian canons to make sure that we have given the affective dimension of personal cultivation appropriate consideration. Further, I believe that these same archaeological documents provide us with additional textual evidence for clarifying the Confucian notion of relationally constituted “human becomings” and for distinguishing this notion of “person” fundamentally from an essentialist understanding of discrete human beings. The philosophical implications of this distinction between the Confucian ren and a foundational individualism that had its beginnings in classical Greece are pervasive and enduring, and unless and until we are clear on this difference, we will continue to theorize Confucian philosophy according to assumptions that are not its own. How have contemporary scholars who are not inclined to distinguish ren from the notion of the discrete individual and who thus read it in an essentialistic way come by their interpretations? I will begin to address this question by examining one familiar passage from the Analects: Exemplary persons (junzi 君子) concentrate their efforts on the root, for the root having set, one’s proper path in life (dao 道) will emerge 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). 3 What does it mean to take the practical activities of revering family members (xiao 孝) and of deferring appropriately to elders (ti 弟) as the III · The Confucian Project: Attaining Relational Virtuosity 89 root (ben 本) of becoming consummate in one’s conduct as a person (ren 仁)?4 Should we not rather regard such xiao and ti activities as a practical expression of ren as human nature? In making what is taken to be “human nature” the product rather than the ultimate source of human conduct, are we not putting the cart before the horse? Zhu Xi 朱熹, the Southern Song philosopher who compiled the Four Books, seems to worry over this...