Oneness: East Asian Conceptions of Virtue, Happiness, and How We Are All Connected by Philip J. Ivanhoe (review)

Ivanhoe lays out his “Oneness” thesis that human beings are intricately and inextricably intertwined and share a common destiny with the “other people, creatures, and things of this world” (ix). He then unpacks this thesis by weaving back and forth using Confucian, Neo-Confucian, and Western philosophical threads of personhood, virtue, human community, and so on until he has produced for the reader a very serviceable cross-cultural tapestry of humanity that would be serviceable in graduate courses and academic symposia in both the East and the West. To mix metaphors, Ivanhoe for Westerners builds and paves a bridge from the distant past in a faraway culture to the contemporary world that makes this book both compelling and accessible to a wide reader-ship well beyond sinologists. In some ways, Ivanhoe’s work can complement Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s 1989 masterpiece, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, by outlining a “new relational view about the nature of the self, which offers an alternative to more individualistic accounts” (p. 3).

The book is organized into an Introduction, Conclusion, and six chapters, which examine in turn (1) Oneness with the World, (2) Conceptions of the Self, (3) Selfishness and Self-Centeredness, (4) Virtues, Inclinations, and Oneness (5) Oneness and Spontaneity, and (6) Oneness and Happiness. Though concentrating on Confucianism, Ivanhoe also makes appropriate reference to all the major East Asian traditions, including Buddhism and Daoism. All these, he demonstrates, despite coming from “different metaphysical theories or views about human nature and anthropology” (p. 5) share and support the “oneness” hypothesis. Likewise, Ivanhoe is quite conversant with major modern Western thinkers, from Freud to Rawls, who present the “self ” as “an autonomous, rational executive authority strongly if not inevitably disposed to pursue largely self-interested (i.e., self-centered) calculations and plans and entering into agreements and contracts with others in a strategic effort to maximize its own best interests” (p. 44).

Contrasted with this, Ivanhoe outlines a Neo-Confucian conception of the self as sharing “an original endowment of principle and pattern that is present, though manifested in infinitely varied ways, throughout the universe, and this fundamental nature is what enables people not only to understand other people, creatures, and things but also to feel their deep and integral connection with the rest of the universe” (p. 46). Moral self-cultivation in this framework expanded to “generate a corresponding moral imperative to care for the world as oneself ” (p. 46).

“Virtue” runs throughout the book, and in chapter 4 Ivanhoe makes connections to Western virtue ethics, (e.g., with Philippa Foot), but perhaps not surprisingly these discussions remain somewhat basic. Probably it would take him too far afield, but a major difference in the virtue ethics of the West and East Asia is their roots in their different conceptualizations of the “individual” and individual accomplishments or moral cultivation. Particularly helpful, though, is Ivanhoe’s emphasis on the moral “spontaneity” one finds in Mengzi and Wang Yangming, that is contrasted with “thinkers such as Aristotle and Xunzi, [where] there is no corresponding sense of the unfolding or blossoming of innate tendencies that fulfil human nature” (p. 100). Ivanhoe develops this idea at greater length in chapter 5, looking first at “untutored” spontaneity, then contrasting that with “cultivated” spontaneity (e.g., in mastering the piano), before turning ultimately to the role of “principle” or “pattern” in a Neo-Confucian understanding of moral spontaneity, which leads to a “sense of oneness [that] is the result of an accurate appraisal of how the world truly is” (p. 119).

The final chapter turns to a consideration of the relationship between the self and genuine happiness, which should not be confused with an emotional state, but rather “involves rather complex cognitions and beliefs and disposes us to undertake certain characteristic actions” (p. 129). Happiness “lies in following the Way (Dao), and...