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Chapter 3 Humanity or Benevolence? The Interpretation of Confucian Ren and Its Modern Implications Qianfan Zhang Introduction If we had the fortune of inviting a sage of the Warring States period (481–256 bce), say, Mengzi, to visit China today, he would find the landscape transformed beyond recognition. Yet to his surprise, he would also find many problems familiar to his distant age. Despite rapid economic development over the past three decades, China, like many developing nations in the world today, is still a peasant-dominant society plagued by poverty. And poverty is not the only problem; the moral standard of the whole population apparently is in decline. One need not deliberately search the Internet to read dramatic headline stories. If one needs a specific example, one only has to read the tragic story of Sun Zhigang (which did produce massive public outcries at the time), a young migrant college graduate who was falsely detained by the Guangzhou city police and died of a beating by fellow inmates.1 Here we see both official wrongs (illegal police detainment) and private wrongs (inmates’ abuses, possibly with official sanction or even encouragement). Examples of incidents as bad and worse can easily be multiplied. I suppose sages like Kongzi (Confucius) and Mengzi faced just this kind of society when they tenaciously put forward their theories in order to save the declining moral and political order from total collapse. Of course, the specific situations are necessarily different, but the nature of the problems is nevertheless the same. Were Mengzi asked to comment on Sun Zhigang’s case, he would unhesitatingly point to the root cause of the tragedy, 53 54 Qianfan Zhang that humanity (ren 仁) and benevolent government (renzheng 仁政) have been missing. China today and China two millennia ago confront precisely the same moral and political predicaments. The theme of this chapter concerns the Confucian concepts of ren and renzheng, for the way our government treats its people is rooted deeply in the Confucian tradition, and unless this cultural tradition is changed, the nature of our political and administrative processes will remain the same. By and large the political culture that shapes the Chinese government today is still under the influence of the Confucian tradition, a tradition that consistently identifies a good government as one that serves the best interests of the people. Yet this apparently benign starting point may end up in paternalistic despotism if care is not taken to distinguish the Confucian moral concept of ren from its political applications. The purpose of this chapter is to identify the original meaning of ren, a concept that has occupied a central position in Confucianism. The word was of relatively late origin and found its popular use only after the Analects (Lunyu), where its meaning was articulated for the first time by Kongzi. But so many meanings have been attributed to ren, sometimes inconsistently by the same philosopher, that to translate it as “humanity” would be already to assume the conclusion of this chapter. The word could also be translated, for example, as “care,” “love,” or “benevolence.”2 However, none of these translations, taken in their ordinary senses, can properly capture the true meaning of ren as the highest moral ideal for every Confucian. This chapter seeks to discover a consistent development of the idea among the works of Kongzi and Mengzi and to establish the conceptual linkage between ren and humanity in the Kantian sense; that is, to treat a human being “always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means.”3 References to Kant are made in this chapter primarily because Kantian and Confucian ethics are humanistic ethics centered on respect for human dignity. Although there are important differences between the Confucian approach and Kant’s rationalistic approach, they do seem to corroborate each other and eventually agree on major moral premises. In the next part of the chapter I argue that, as a moral concept, Confucian ren goes beyond the limit of the materialistic concept of benevolence and agrees with a formulation of the Kantian categorical imperative. The original idea of humanity, as illustrated in the Analects, implied the requirement that one ought to respect others as ends in themselves and adopt actions that are acceptable to other human beings. More than a century later, Mengzi went further and developed an ontological theory for humanity based on the assumption that [18.227.24.209] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 16...

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