The Vulnerability of Integrity in Early Confucian Thought by Michael D. K. Ing (review)

In this ambitious work, Michael Ing offers a new account of early Confucianism as an intellectual tradition that was always in the process of becoming. It was defined less by a set of fundamental socio-ethical dogmas than by an anxious investment in a series of moral questions that were continually being debated by those who considered themselves adherents of the teachings of the historical Confucius. Ing began his effort at this thoughtful revision of our understanding of early Confucianism with his previous monograph, The Dysfunction of Ritual in Early Confucianism, and in many ways, this new book is a continuation and elaboration of its main arguments.¹ In that earlier work, Ing explored the contentious debate over failed rituals in early Confucian texts, most importantly the Liji 禮記, and observed how ambiguity in the etiology of ritual dysfunctions was mobilized as a source of productive tension for the cultivation of a tragic ethical imagination. Admitting their inability to comprehend the dysfunctions of their rituals, the early Confucians had rendered themselves into vulnerable beings.

The argument unfolds over seven chapters. They are preceded by the Introduction, where Ing sets forth the basic argument of the book as well as his methodology, which aims to recover the “plurality of Confucian thought as it relates to the vulnerability of integrity” (p. 4). The topic of vulnerability has long been neglected in the scholarship on Confucian ethics, as Ing had rightly claimed. This is due in part to the disproportionate amount of scholarly attention lavished on the few major Confucian texts, namely the Lunyu, Mengzi, and Xunzi, all of which tend to foreground notions of invulnerability instead. By drawing on a wider range of texts, including the Confucian compilations mentioned above as well as non-Confucian ethical and political writings from early China, Ing sets out to reconstruct the many “voices of internal dissent” over notions of vulnerability and invulnerability within the early Confucian tradition (p. 9).

Chapters 1 and 2 serve as a single unit, as they both deal with the invulnerability of integrity, first in the early texts themselves (and later commentaries) and then in contemporary scholarship. In the former, Ing gives detailed readings of passages from canonical Confucian texts, including the Lunyu and Mengzi as well as the commentaries by Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200) and others from later periods, to demonstrate that, indeed, there was a dominant claim of invulnerability of integrity in the Confucian tradition. The sages are extraordinary individuals who always manage to do what is right, with their integrity fully intact, even if they have to take apparently exigent actions. In chapter 2, Ing outlines what he calls the “harmony thesis,” widely embraced by contemporary scholars, which claims that early Confucian ethics does not recognize the possibility of real (or more precisely “ontological”) “value conflicts,” as they are ultimately “only apparent or epistemic” (p. 55). It follows that sages can always, in the end, reconcile competing values with their integrity intact. The remaining five chapters of the book serve, collectively, as a bracing, thorough critique of the deficiency of this “harmony thesis.” They do so with an appreciation of the diverse voices of the early Confucians, many of which had painstakingly developed notions of vulnerability toward a tragic perspective on the human condition, a possibility that has been effectively, forcefully preempted in much of the modern scholarship on Confucian ethics.

This critique begins in chapter 3, “The Sorrow of Regret.” It delves into the idea of regret in early Confucian thought, as the “moral distress” that results “as a response to frustrated desire for the world to be a place where more values might be realized” (p. 80). Moral agents not only grieve but regret, with “frustration and sorrow” over circumstances beyond their control that have rendered them vulnerable and a failure in their own ethical pursuits (p. 80). Chapter 4, “Regret, Resentment and...