Trouble with Korean Confucianism: Scholar-Official Between Ideal and Reality

This essay attempts a philosophical reflection of the Confucian ideal of “scholar-official” in Joseon Korea’s neo-Confucian context. It explores why this noble ideal of a Confucian public being had to suffer many moral-political problems in reality. It argues first that because the institution of Confucian scholar-official was actually a modus-operandi compromise between Confucianism and Legalism, the Confucian scholar-officials were torn between their ethical commitment to Confucianism and their political commitment to the state; and second, that because the Cheng-Zhu neo-Confucianism vigorously imported and indigenized by Joseon Koreans exalted the family over the state, Joseon neo-Confucian scholar-officials were torn between two competing moral obligations, filiality and loyalty. The essay concludes by discussing whether, given the problems with which the ideal of the Confucian scholar-official was frequently entangled, liberal individualism should be pursued as its normative alternative.     

A Pluralist Reconstruction of Confucian Democracy

In this paper, I attempt to revamp Confucian democracy, which is originally presented as the communitarian corrective and cultural alternative to Western liberal democracy, into a robust democratic political theory and practice that is plausible in the societal context of pluralism. In order to do so, I first investigate the core tenets of value pluralism with reference to William Galston??s political theory, which gives full attention to the intrinsic value of diversity and human plurality particularly in the modern democratic context. I then construct a political theory of Confucian pluralist democracy by critically engaging with two dominant versions of Confucian democracy??Confucian communitarian democracy and Confucian meritocratic democracy. My key argument is threefold: (1) the unity in Confucian democracy should be interpreted not as moral unity but as constitutional unity; (2) Confucian virtues should be differentiated (or pluralized) between moral virtues and civic virtues; (3) in Confucian democracy minorities have the constitutional right to contest public norms in civil society.     

The Confucian Self and Experiential Spirituality

Since the publication of his book on Zhongyong (Tu 1976), Tu Weiming has worked for more than 30 years on an anthropocosmic reconstruction of the Confucian universe, in which self-transformation is defined both as the starting point and as the necessary vehicle for one’s spiritual journey. This article is primarily intended to examine Tu’s attempts to reconstruct Confucian spirituality but further to take a step forward to argue that in the spiritual world as construed by Confucius and Mencius, the experiential functions as transcendental by which the self initiates and empowers the transformative process. Through exploring the spiritual significance of Confucian experiences, this essay will conclude that although “transcendental experience” is only one of many dimensions in other religious or intellectual traditions, it is the most important path for Confucians by which the self is enabled to become fully integrated with ultimate reality.     

ESOTERIC CONFUCIANISM,MORAL DILEMMAS,AND FILIAL PIETY

Two controversial cases in Confucian literature present the demands of filial piety as conflicting with those of impartial justice. Let us call them the Case of Concealment (Analects 18.13) and the Case of Evasion (Mencius 7A53). A dogmatic reading of the texts indicates that both Confucius and Mencius give more weight to filial piety than to justice. This essay, however, provides an alternative reading of the cases: the liberal reading. I argue that the Confucian teachers used the cases as moral dilemmas that force Confucian students to learn how to use a cluster of Confucian virtues, including practical wisdom, discretion, and straight determination, under difficult circumstances. The liberal reading views these moral dilemmas as rhetorical tools; they guide Confucian students in meditative exercises and ultimately transform students’ mode of seeing and being.     

儒家社群主义略论

As a social and political thought, communitarian ideas appeared in the Pre-Qin Confucianism. By the Song Dynasty, it had become a systematic theory, namely, the learning of the “four books.” As a social and political theory, not only can Confucian communitarianism contribute to Western liberalism, but it can also be an intellectual resource for the development of democracy in East Asian countries and regions. The future of the Confucian communitarianism lies in its critique of itself and its discourse with Western liberalism, by which Confucianism evolves from communitarianism into liberalism. __________ Translated from Wenshizhe 文史哲 (Literature, History and Philosophy), 2006, (4): 31–37     

后现代自由主义:罗蒂政治哲学批判

Richard Rorty’s philosophy has two basic commitments: one to postmodernism and the other to liberalism. However, these commitments generate tension. As a postmodernist, he sharply criticizes the Enlightenment; as a liberal, he forcefully defends it. His postmodernist liberalism actually explains liberalism using irrationalism. Translated by Xiang Yunhua from Jianghai Xuekan 江海学刊 (Jianghai Academic Journal), 2007, (1): 57–61     

Defending a Law of Peoples: Political Liberalism and Decent Peoples

In this paper I reconstruct and defend John Rawls' The Law of Peoples, including the distinction between liberal and decent peoples. A “decent people” is defined as a people who possesses a comprehensive doctrine and uses that doctrine as the ground of political legitimacy, while liberal peoples do not possess a comprehensive doctrine. I argue that liberal and decent peoples are bound by the same normative requirements with the qualification that decent peoples accept the same normative demands when they are reasonably interpreted and from their comprehensive doctrine, not from political liberalism. Normative standards for peoples appear in a law of peoples in two places: as internal constraints carried forward from political liberalism which regulate domestic affairs and as principles derived from a second original position that provide the normative ground for a society of peoples. This first source of normative standards was unfortunately obscured in Rawls' account. I use this model to defeat the claim that Rawls has accommodated decent peoples without sufficient warrant and to argue that all reasonable citizens of both liberal and decent peoples would accept the political authority of the state as legitimate. Although my reconstruction differs from Rawls on key points, such as modifying the idea of decency and rejecting a place for decent peoples within a second original position, overall I defend the theoretical completeness of political liberalism and show how a law of peoples provides reasonable principles of international justice. This paper explores theoretical ideas I introduced in embryonic form in a paper presented at the International Conference on Human Rights: Theoretical Foundations of Human Rights, 17–18 May, 2003, Mofid University (Qom, Iran). That paper, “Political Liberalism and Religious Freedom: Asymmetrical Tolerance for Minority Comprehensive Doctrines” (forthcoming in the Proceedings of the conference), addressed specific issues related to religious toleration, but left unexplored theoretical questions regarding the status of decent peoples. I wish to thank participants in the conference for their helpful feedback on my interpretation of Rawls' international political theory, especially Jack Donnelly, Michael Freeman, Stephen Macedo, Samuel Fleishacker, Omar Dahbour, Yasien Ali Mohamed, and Saladin Meckled-Garcia. In addition, I wish to offer my sincere appreciation to the Executive Committee of the Conference and especially to Sayyed Masoud Moosavi Karimi, Nasser Elahi, and Mohammad Habibi Modjandeh.     

<Emphasis Type="Bold">Virtue Ethics and Being Morally Moved</Emphasis>

This essay shall discuss the moral feeling of “being morally moved” (daode gandong 道德感动) and explore its philosophical significances in understanding the nature of virtue ethics, especially that of Confucian ethics as exemplary ethics. I would like to argue that the feeling of being morally moved, similar to other feelings such as resentment or indignation, should be seen as one of the most important testimonies or manifestations of our morality or moral consciousness. It has played a very important role of moral judgment and moral cultivation in the history of Chinese moral philosophy and in its everyday moral practices. Instead of being a testimony of morality as cold laws or norms, “being morally moved” is a testimony to our moral virtues, and it should be a living motive of our moral actions as well.     

SAVING THE “SECULAR”: The Public Vocation of Moral Theology1

The London suicide bombings of July 7, 2005 were partly the revolt of moral earnestness against a liberal society that, enchanted by the fantasy of rationalist anthropology, surrenders its passionate members to a degrading consumerism. The “humane” liberalism variously espoused by Jürgen Habermas, John Rawls, and Jeffrey Stout offers a dignifying alternative; but it is fragile, and each of its proponents looks for allies among certain kinds of religious believer. Stanley Hauerwas, however, counsels Christians against cooperation. On the one hand, he is right to resist, insofar as liberalism illiberally excludes theology from public discourse. On the other hand, not all humane liberalism does this: Stout's, for example, is genuinely polyglot, requiring not a common secularist language but a common ethic of communicating. Such a liberal ethic and its attendant anthropology merit the support of Christians: there may be more to be said about the Kingdom of God than respect, tolerance, and fairness, but there will not be less. The Christian has good theological reasons to expect some concord with other inhabitants of secular space. Ethical distinctiveness is no measure of theological integrity; and neither theology (pace Barth) nor biblical narrative (pace Richard Hays) should be expected to do all of the ethical running. If Christians are to be thorough in their moral theology and intelligible in their public statements, then they must borrow non‐theological material, formulate abstract concepts, and engage in casuistical analysis. Nevertheless, if an anxious insistence on distinctiveness is a mistake, concern for theological integrity is not. When the moral theologian borrows ethical material from elsewhere, he should integrate it into a theological vision structured by the Christian salvation‐historical narrative, which will sometimes modify the meaning of what is incorporated. So in affirming humane, polyglot liberalism, the moral theologian will at the same time make salutary qualifications. One of these is the assertion of the need of liberal institutions to own and promote their moral and anthropological commitments. In such a confessionally liberal society, universities in general, and the Arts and Humanities in particular, would recover their vocation to form citizens in communicative virtues and to offer them a dignifying, morally serious vision of human being that could save future generations from a degrading consumerism on the one hand and violent over‐reaction on the other.     

Liberalism and Democracy

ABSTRACT Political liberalism and the democratic ideal together supply the foundation of almost all contemporary political thinking. This essay explores the relation between them. It argues that, despite common parlance, there is an inevitable tension between the two. Furthermore, attempts to resolve this tension by showing that democracy is a good thing in its own right, or that it is the inevitable development of liberal aspirations, or that it is conceptually connected to fundamental liberal ideas, all fail. The conclusion to be drawn is that liberalism requires a pragmatic rather than a principled approach to democratic aspirations.     

儒家伦理与情感

The Confucian understanding of emotions and their ethical importance confirms and exemplifies the contemporary Western renewed understanding of the nature of emotions. By virtue of a systematic conceptual analysis of Confucian ethics, one can see that, according to Confucians, the ethical significance of emotions, lies in that an ethical life is also emotional and virtues are inclinational. And a further exploration shows that the reason for the ethical significance is both that emotions are heavenly-endowed and that there exists a union of emotions and reason in Confucian ethics. This will constitute a challenge to the so-called mainstream ethical theories which have been popularly engaged in seeking justifications for abstract moral rules. __________ Translated from Zhexue Yanjiu 哲学研究 (Philosophical Research), 2007, (3): 86–92     

MODERN LIBERALISM AND PRIDE An Augustinian Perspective

In “Toward an Augustinian Liberalism,” Paul Weithman argues that modern liberal institutions should be concerned with the political vice of pride as a threat to the neutral, legitimate use of public power that liberalism demands. By directing our attention to pride, Weithman attempts to provide an incentive to and foundation for an Augustinian liberalism that can counteract this threat. While Weithman is right to point to the centrality of pride in understanding the modern liberal tradition, an investigation of the early modern reflections on pride in politics reveals a deeper tension between Augustine and modern liberalism than Weithman's analysis acknowledges. This essay discusses this tension by focusing on Hobbes's account of pride and equality in the commonwealth, asking whether Hobbes can be understood as a thinker in the Augustinian political tradition. In order to provide a background on pride as a political vice, this essay contrasts Aristotelian magnanimity with Augustinian humility. Finally, Aquinas's attempt to reintroduce magnanimity into the Augustinian political tradition is considered as a more consistent development of Augustine's thought, thereby revealing more pointedly the tension between Augustine and modern liberalism. By way of conclusion, the possibility of deflating this tension is briefly addressed by considering Jean Bethke Elshtain's discussion of an Augustinian liberalism that does not rely upon a “secular” conception of human nature.     

The limits of religion: liberalism and anti-liberalism in the Islamic Republic of Iran

This essay investigates the ways that ‘religion,’ as a particular category of discourse, organised Muslim debates in the Islamic Republic of Iran during the 1990s and early 2000s. Recent work in the study of religion has highlighted not only liberalism’s privatised and largely protestant notion of religion, but also the ways that understanding of religion affects the representation of Islam in the West. Studies of Islam, continuing the critique of liberal assumptions regarding religion, often uphold a traditionalist understanding of Islam as an equally valuable way of being in the world. This article, in contrast, explores the ways that liberal religion figures in both liberal and anti-liberal Muslim debate. Specifically, it traces the ways that Muslim theology (kalām) draws upon and contests the rationality and secularity of the world and, in so doing, turns the gaze back to continuing discontents with liberalism in the West.     

Richard Rorty and the concept of redemption

It is curious why a secular pragmatist like Richard Rorty would capitalize on the religiously-laden concept of redemption in his recent writings. But more than being an intriguing idea in his later work, this essay argues that redemption plays a key role in the historical development of Rorty’s thought. It begins by exploring the paradoxical status of redemption in Rorty’s oeuvre. It then investigates an overlooked debate between Rorty, Dreyfus and Taylor (1980) that first endorses the concept. It then contrasts Rorty’s notions of essentialism and edification to link redemption to self-transformation. After providing a historical legitimation to the idea of redemption, the essay reconstructs Rorty’s modern version of the concept. Redemption for Rorty centers on human relationships and not religion or philosophy; it is also pluralist and liberal in character. Finally, it concludes that Rorty uses redemption—a primary component of religious language—to capture the salvific force of religion. This power is redirected toward the protection of secular, democratic hopes, which are demanding and fragile by nature.     

圣贤之后的人生追寻:冯友兰《新世训》的伦理学意义

Feng Youlan’s Xin Shixun 新世训 (New Treatise on the Way of Life) written in the late 1930s differed from traditional moral teachings because it focused on nonmoral life lessons and how to “virtuously” pursue success. It advanced an interpretation of traditional virtues as life lessons for young people, so that these virtues could transform an individual life in modern society. Thereby the morals of ancient sages could transfer to the modern, individual, and morality. The problem is just how the ideals of traditional Chinese culture have adjusted themselves to modern society. Following the phrase “after-virtue”, this effort can be called a pursuit of “after-sage”. Translated by Yan Xin from Zhexue Yanjiu 哲学研究 (Philosophical Researches), 2006, (2): 36–44     

The capabilities approach and Catholic social teaching: an engagement

This essay brings Martha Nussbaum's politically liberal version of the Capabilities Approach (CA) to human development into critical dialogue with the Catholic Social Tradition (CST). Like CST, Nussbaum's focus on embodiment, dependence and dignity entails a social use of property which privileges marginalized people, and both theories explain the underdevelopment of central human capabilities in social rather than exclusively material terms. Whereas CST is metaphysically and theologically ‘thick', however, CA is ‘thin’: its proponents positively eschew metaphysical commitments, believing a commitment to quasi-Rawlsian ‘overlapping consensus' is more consistent with political liberalism. This creates two tensions between CA and CST. The first is that CST understands the internal virtues of essentially social practices to be inseparable from their concrete instantiation in actual communities, while CA sometimes describes these virtues as political entitlements which can be supported independently of the comprehensive doctrines of particular communities. We argue, therefore, that CA's commitment to political liberalism tends to ‘crowd out’ particular conceptions of the good, such as those found in CST. Second, because CST recognizes a plurality of spiritual purposes of property that CA does not, including promotion of what Pope Benedict XVI calls the ‘logic of gift', from the perspective of CST, CA will tend to be motivationally deficient in ways that negatively impact human development.     

儒学的一种缺弱:私德与公德

In a society dominated by Confucian ethics, a spirit of Confucian public morality can be seen in the Confucian debate over publicness and privateness, but it is usually activated in circumstances of large ethical crisis. Confucian theory mainly uses ethical relationships to create self and social identities, causing problems of identification in the public life and hindering the expression of moral feelings and actions, thus revealing a weakness in public morality. This is a space that Confucianism has not yet been able to cover, and also where it has room for growth. Translated by Huang Deyuan from Wen Shi Zhe 文史哲 (Journal of Literature, History and Philosophy), 2006, (1): 30–36     

A Defence of Liberal Ironism

Richard Rorty’s notion of ironism has been widely criticized for entailing frivolity and light-mindedness, for being inimical to moral commitment and, perhaps most importantly, for its putative incompatibility with his vision of liberalism. This paper suggests that these criticisms are misplaced, stemming from a misunderstanding of ironism that Rorty’s presentation has itself in part encouraged. The paper goes on to argue that ironism is not only consistent with the liberal society which Rorty favours, but that it can serve such a society by helping to illustrate the ways in which those societies contain unrecognized injustices.     

The Role of Evil in Kant's Liberalism

Carl Schmitt distinguishes between political theories in terms of whether they rest on the anthropological assumption that man is evil by nature or on the anthropological assumption that man is good by nature, and he claims that liberal political theory is based on the latter assumption. Contrary to this claim, I show how Kant's liberalism is shaped by his theory of the radical evil in human nature, and that his liberalism corresponds to the characterization of liberalism that Schmitt himself offers. My discussion of this issue will be shown to have certain implications with respect to the view that for Kant evil is the product of society. I show that this view is mistaken insofar as it fails to recognize that Kant's political philosophy implies that human beings require the type of society that best suits their radically evil natures, namely, a commercial one in which the “vices of culture” largely have free play, while the state's role is limited to that of preventing the antagonisms found in society leading to the mutual destruction of its members.     

From the lonely crowd to the cultural contradictions of capitalism and beyond: The shifting ground of liberal narratives

This paper investigates how key social issues related to American culture, social character, and politics are addressed in the work of two of America's leading liberal sociologists, David Riesman and Daniel Bell. It maps out the trajectory of Riesman's and Bell's early contributions to a critique of mass society in post‐war America, as well as Bell's later formulation of “liberalism in crisis” and his assessment of culture in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. This analysis pays particular attention to the intellectual, biographical, and social settings that helped to shape the often conflicting ideas of each thinker, and examines the discursive shifts within liberal thinking as it attempted to explain and deal with perceived new social crises from the 1950s to the present. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.