Confucianism’s Piety Problem – David K. Schneider

Habi Zhang and James Dominic Rooney have specified us a intriguing debate about the nature of Confucianism: does it are likely inevitably toward the authoritarian political outcomes that characterize China’s political heritage, or, is it philosophically consonant with Western concepts of normal regulation and consequently able of supporting a political get dependent on organic legal rights and liberal political institutions?

Citing the Common of Filial Piety (孝經, 2nd century BC), Zhang argues that “Confucian man does not presume to own his have physique. He only assumes his personhood via integrating himself into the household line.” Consequently, Confucianism and Chinese society are likely toward the “social details in China,” which are “obedience and uniformity, not freedom and individuality as in the West.” 

Citing nineteenth-century “Progressive Confucians” and the scholar-diplomat Hu Shih (胡適1891-1962), Rooney argues that Confucianism is a purely natural regulation philosophy like that identified in Cicero, Aristotle, and Aquinas. He concludes, contrary to Zhang, that Confucianism does “recognize that the open society, supported by liberal institutions and norms, instantiates those people true moral norms represented by equality, dignity, and human rights.”

There is some fact in both equally positions. Confucianism does certainly emphasize the moral reason and the constraints of government, and asserts a vision of human nature that displays some qualities akin to thoughts of all-natural law in the West. At the same time, Confucian assumed originates in what Confucius (孔子 551-479 BC) noticed as his mission, the restoration of China’s ancient and crumbling feudal get. At the heart of the feudal buy was a social and political hierarchy that demanded obedience and submission to authority.

Foremost is the essential issue of authority—what is Confucius’ top resource of authority and what does that supply inform us about political authority? The remedy is Heaven 天. Confucius’ marriage with the divine is twofold. Initial, understanding Heaven and conforming to its will is the quite purpose of the excellent and flourishing human life, and this turned the job of his entire existence. Next, Confucius observed himself as Heaven’s agent or prophet. He tells his disciples “Heaven has endowed me with advantage,” and is employing him to restore the Way on earth. He promises that due to the fact the loss of life of King Wen 文王, six generations ahead of his individual time, Heaven is preserving the society of the Way in him, in the prophetic determine of Confucius himself, whose mission is the restoration of King Wen’s product.

King Wen represents the last of a sequence of figures Confucius and Mencius (孟子 372-289 BC) considered to be “sage-kings” from antiquity, who have been suitable kings mainly because they modeled Heaven’s political tradition in human culture. “Heaven is good and King Yao took Heaven as his pattern,” Confucius tells his disciples. Confucius envisions a Heavenly Way that acts in heritage by an perfect kingship that is explicitly ethical. The historical Kings Shun 舜 and Tang 湯 appointed the most effective gentlemen of their times as ministers and chased the “unbenevolent” 不仁者 absent. So, the objective of political authority, the function of the Way, is a benevolent modern society.

Benevolence is the basis in Confucianism for an plan of a universal human mother nature. Confucius states that benevolence is not distant just one must just desire it to have it, suggesting thereby that benevolence is natural to the human constitution. For Mencius, benevolence is intrinsic to the very definition of what it usually means to be human. “One who lacks a heart that feels pity and distress [at the sufferings of others] is not human… A heart that feels pity and distress [at the sufferings of others] is the origin of benevolence.” For Mencius all are equivalent in that all human beings possess at minimum the commencing seeds of benevolence. For Mencius, as for Confucius, the reason of political authority is a benevolent modern society ruled by what Mencius calls “benevolent government” 仁政: “In the Way of Yao and Shun, if they had not utilized benevolent governing administration, they would not have succeeded in bringing peaceful buy to the planet.”

This principle of benevolence as inherent in the human structure, and as the foundation of govt, arrives in some approaches rather shut, as Rooney argues, to certain suggestions of purely natural law in the Western tradition. The problem, as Zhang implies, is hierarchy. Whilst the possession of benevolence may well be the exact for all, it is cultivated not in a condition of democratic equality, but alternatively in a hierarchy of social position and position. Thus, the operational meaning of benevolence is basically not the exact same for all people today. Benevolence, while natural, must be cultivated into total fruition from the seeds of the coronary heart. This is first achieved in the family and then in public company, major ultimately to the political ideal of a benevolent society. As one of Confucius’ disciples puts it:

Conditions in which a person conducts himself with filial and fraternal piety, and nevertheless is fond of offending his superiors are virtually nonexistent there has never been a situation in which 1 who dislikes offending his superiors is also fond of fomenting rebellions. The Gentleman devotes himself to the root. As soon as the root is proven the Way grows from it. Filial and fraternal piety – these are the roots of benevolence!

The cultivation of benevolence is a willpower of subordination of the self to one’s superiors in all conditions: son to father, youthful to more mature brother, matter to ruler. It is the outcome of the follow of family members piety – xiao 孝. Benevolence is defined and practiced differently in accordance to family members, social and political placement, in accordance to the obligations of xiao.  

Rooney equates Confucian xiao with pietas as conceived in Cicero and Aquinas, and argues that “[n]atural legislation politics in the West rested on assumptions mostly shared by the Confucians.” But there are crucial dissimilarities concerning xiao and pietas. Look at the scenario of Aquinas. His thought of pietas is very similar to xiao in that it recognizes obligations because of to family members and social place. But pietas does not outline the self xiao does. In Aquinas all individuals are equivalent in advance of God as beings created in the picture of God. Pietas factors to a increased, final, fantastic as the foundation of a self that transcends society. 

For Confucius and Mencius, xiao points to the better fantastic of a harmonious modern society, not to Heaven itself. The individual does not have equality as a remaining created in Heaven’s impression, but relatively as a human being endowed similarly with the ability for benevolence, not a common benevolence but an operational benevolence outlined in the context of a divine ritual 禮 order ordained by Heaven and embedded in social-political hierarchy. Benevolence is obtained by conquering the self and submitting to the imperatives of ritually identified social and political roles that start for the individual in the exercise of xiao. Each human being subordinates the self to his remarkable in a variety of communal yielding and deference, the social subjection of the self as an integral element of a divinely mandated moral order. One’s privileges and obligations are decided by one’s area in the ritual buy.

Rooney appropriately argues that Christianity in its earliest expressions approved social hierarchies. Paul in his Letter to Philemon “did not aspiration of an conclude to slavery.” But in Galatians all those inequalities of social placement in the fallen planet are rendered meaningless: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor absolutely free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” This equality less than God tends to make all-natural regulation and pure rights possible. For the Confucians, Heaven’s buy is to be understood on earth, in historical past, by the restoration of an historical ritual purchase that conceives inequality as the foundation of social and political harmony. Heaven’s purchase does not annihilate distinctions it mandates them.

Rooney’s pure legislation argument qualified prospects to his political argument: the development in the West of the purely natural regulation custom gave increase to the plan of organic rights “that undergirds democratic and liberal varieties of government,” and on top of that, that these “natural regulation commitments mirror, in all pertinent respects, the Confucian custom. Ergo, Confucians could follow the similar route that purely natural legislation thinkers have currently trodden.” 

This place has two elements, natural legal rights and liberal varieties of governing administration. 

On the level of organic rights, as we have viewed, the Confucian mirror reflects a distorted picture of Western organic regulation, at best, and therefore could not guide to the very same or equivalent results as in the West. The pure rights custom, as formulated by Rousseau, Locke, and Jefferson, posits a primal point out of mother nature in which each individual specific possesses full self-sovereignty and equivalent legal rights with all other folks. As civilization varieties, some legal rights are provided up to social and political authorities for the sake of civic lifestyle and peace. Other legal rights are unalienable as endowed by Nature and Nature’s God, as Jefferson famously phrased it in the Declaration of Independence. Federal government is recognized but the men and women continue to be sovereign.

A thing akin to this concept, with no the social agreement principle, is to be identified in Chinese philosophy, but not in Confucianism. The Taoist 道家 philosopher Zhuangzi 莊子 (c. 286 BC) envisions an historical golden age before the advancement of civilization, a point out of character, in which the individual was autonomous and self-sovereign, and in which there have been no social or political distinctions. These came with the introduction of what the Confucians connect with the “human relations” 人倫, father and son, ruler and issue, spouse and spouse, the aged and the youthful, and friendship. All of these, with the feasible exception of friendship, are hierarchical and unequal. As a result, for Zhuangzi they depict a corruption of original human character and a variety of bondage. For Mencius these relations and their appropriate inculcation in the schooling of the populace are vital to the realization of the good and flourishing culture beneath Heaven. In Confucianism, one’s endowments from mother nature are determined by the relationships of ritual hierarchy, not by all-natural autonomy or appropriate.

As a result, liberal government is antithetical to the Confucian great of benevolent authorities. In Mencius, the joy of the folks is the evaluate of fantastic government. But the individuals are not sovereign. Only a king is sovereign and conformity with Heaven’s ritual get is the responsibility of an educated political and economic elite, which is billed with the obligation of acting as parents to the men and women, who in turn are obliged to post.

How to preserve the ethical top quality of the elite is a single of the central troubles tackled in Confucian believed, a significant section of which was devoted to the establishment of a ethical tradition that would make certain the longevity of the Way in heritage, and hence the continuing benevolence and, ultimately, the security of the point out. But both of those Confucius and Mencius have been keenly knowledgeable of the almost Quixotic nature of the enterprise. Confucius himself complained that, even though all folks experienced the capability to observe benevolence, couple in his expertise chose to do so. Thus, the Way would be active in certain moments and destinations and inactive in others, as he teaches his disciples:

Do not enter a risky state and do not reside in a condition suffering insurrection. When the Way prevails in the globe you will have to make yourselves seen and when the Way does not prevail, you have to go into hiding. 

The Confucian is helpful in authorities only when the Way is present. And this is dependent on the moral tenor of the moments. For each philosophers, the ethical problem of the environment had presently been in decline for hundreds of years. As Confucius claims in the quotation over, the Way experienced been absent because the death of King Wen that is, for practically 600 a long time. Confucius asserts that the political authorities of his possess working day unsuccessful to rise even to the lowest criteria of moral perform. 

This dependence on the vagaries of personalized ethics was a crucial weak spot ruthlessly exploited by the Legalist 法家 critics of the Confucian university, who argued for an institutional program of despotic, virtually totalitarian, rules designed to implement ethical norms and political obedience by implies of rewards and punishments. It was a synthesis begun early in the Han dynasty (漢 206 BC-220 Advert) by thinkers this kind of as Jia Yi 賈誼 (200 BC – 169 BC) that combined Confucian ethical philosophy with Legalist authorities and legal establishments that gave increase to the autocratic Confucianism that reigned in China for two thousand decades. For Zhang, this was inescapable. Rooney asserts that the Legalist institutional foundations of a present day state Confucianism could be replaced with a system that, nevertheless not classically liberal, would not be authoritarian. 

Offered the Confucian plan of hierarchy, such a technique would implement to the ruling elite by itself in its capacity as the mom and dad of the people today. It is the elite that would be necessary to remedy the difficulty posed by Madison in Federalist 51: “You will have to very first allow the governing administration to manage the governed and in the upcoming spot oblige it to manage alone.”

As The Federalist argues, the crucial factor for a liberal consequence is coequal branches of authorities that can examine and stability every single other, operate by citizens possessing equality underneath the law. But in the Confucian conception, the elite itself is also stratified, not comprising a cohort of equal citizens, but rather a feudal entire body politic that depends on deference of inferior to superior. This assures at least an intolerant result, if not outright despotism inside of the elite alone. Has there ever existed a political process run by a despotic elite that was not similarly despotic toward the men and women it governed?