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Chapter 2 Social Individuals Asians challenging what they perceive as cultural hegemony of Western nations in the human rights debate and Western communitarians within liberal democracies criticizing liberalism reject the overemphasis on individual autonomy that is based on a conception of the individual as a ready-made self conceptually and ontologically prior to social relations. The central disagreements between liberals and communitarians stem from different understandings of individuals and societies. To find a balance between liberal and communitarian concerns, we need notions of individuals and societies that do not posit any kind of radical separation and inherent opposition. An adequate understanding of individuals needs to bring in the irreducibly social dimension of being human and show how this is connected with, rather than merely opposed to, individuality. This chapter aims to show how the views of individuals and of societies in early Confucianism and in Dewey’s philosophy meet this requirement without succumbing to the problem of subordinating either to the other. Liberal Self and Autonomy The conception of the individual as an autonomous self dominates Western modernity. It underlies the individualism central to liberalism and characteristic of contemporary Western capitalist societies.1 Though there are terms that could be translated as “self” in Greek and Roman philosophy, the philosophical problematic of self concerned with radical inwardness and independence 17 from others emerged only with the consciousness of subjective, self-conscious experience as the principal medium of self-articulation. Charles Taylor traces the sense of “inwardness” to Augustine’s “Do not go outward; return within yourself. In the inward man dwells truth.”2 While the ancients sometimes adopt a reflexive stance in their philosophizing, reflexivity does not become radical until we not only experience ourselves as in the world, but more important , we experience the world as for us. Without this radical reflexivity, there could be no disengaged subject and its associated ideals of self-responsible freedom and dignity, which are so important to modern individualism; nor would there be an emphasis on the kind of self-exploration or self-knowledge predominant in individualistic, modern cultures.3 The belief that no life is truly good unless freely and wholeheartedly chosen by one’s own will—thereby placing personal choice and commitment at the center of moral life, contributing significantly to the status of the individual as an autonomous agent—has its roots in Augustine’s thinking about the will. His thought combines two ideas about the will, resulting in some tension and difficulty: the will as the power to confer or withhold assent, and the will as our basic disposition. The will in the first sense may be strong or weak; in the second sense, good or bad. The varying strength of the will introduces potential conflicts between knowledge and desire; knowing what is good, contrary to Socrates’ teaching, is no longer enough for one to do good. As Augustine quoted St. Paul’s words to the Romans: “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.”4 Akrasia, weakness of the will, for Augustine poses not an intellectual problem but a central crisis of moral and religious experience. His cry, “A question have I become for myself,” acknowledges this moral and religious struggle. Augustine retained the ancients’ belief in an ontic logos. The turn inward is to open the inward man to God, “As the soul is life of the flesh, so God is the blessed life of the man.”5 The inwardness becomes truly modern and the disengagement of the subject from the world complete, with the fading of that ontic logos, so that the only order and certainty to be found must come from within. Self-questioning became first an epistemological struggle before a moral one. The problematic of the self as reflexive meditation on the positing of the subject begins with Descartes’s doubts and his answer to the question, “Who, or rather what, am I?” “Cogito ergo sum . . . sum res cogitans.” For Descartes, the mind becomes the exclusive locus of thoughts and values; what once existed between the knower/agent and the world, linking them and making them inseparable, becomes located within the subject. This defines a new understanding of the subject and object, where the two are independent— the subject is over and against the object.6 In moral and political philosophy, the Augustinian-Cartesian legacy gives rise to the modern notion of freedom as autonomy...

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