Confucian Culture and its Responsiveness to Our Current Global Challenges

Tianxia 天下,conventionally translated as “all-under-Heaven,” is a familiar term in everydayChinese parlance that simply means “the world.” But tianxia is also a geopolitical term found throughout the ancientChinese canonical literature that has a deeper philosophical and historicalmeaning as a tianxia “world order.”Over the past few decades, the significance of this technical term as apossible Chinese framework for thinking about a new, evolving, andall-inclusive world order and a new model for world governance has, primarilyin the Chinese literature, been a subject of much debate.

Althoughthe understandings of tianxia aremany, within the Chinese process cosmology made explicit in the Book of Changes (Yijing 易经), theseinterpretations generally begin from a centered, ecological understanding of intra- rather than inter-national relations that begin from acknowledging themutuality and interdependence of all economic and political activity. Tianxia, conceived of as anall-inclusive planetary order, resists relativism in the fragmenting andpernicious sense that would decontextualize self-sufficient, autonomous, andequal sovereign states, and in so doing, makes them into multiple absolutes.Again, “if it is not relativism then it must be absolutism” is not a choice wehave to make.

Confucianphilosophy’s alternative to a pernicious relativism is an inclusive pluralismcaptured in the core values of relational equity and achieved diversity, thatis, the pursuit of a “superlative and inclusive harmony out of difference” (he’erbutong 和而不同). Atthe same time, it eschews the kind of “homogenizing uniformity” (tong 同) we wouldassociate with a transcendent universalism in which the “many” reduce to adominant and thus hegemonic “one.” Simply put, such an ontological univocitythat comes in the door with transcendental universalism is anathema toConfucian pluralism.

Tianxia as“taking the world as the world” assumes the primacy of vital relationality. Itthus relegates the nation state as a discrete, sovereign entity, to the statusof a second-order abstraction from the unbounded, organic, and fluid relationsthat in fact constitute our world. When applied to the relations that obtainamong nation states, intra-national relations within the global whole referencea radical contextuality that can be characterized in the Confucian cosmologicallanguage of Tang Junyi 唐君毅 as the inseparability of the many focalaspects from the one planetary order (yiduobufenguan 一多不分观)(Tang, Complete Works of Tang Junyi 唐君毅全集, Vol.11, pp. 16-17).

Itdescribes a manifold of unique nation states within the political organism,China being only one among them, with each of them construing the intra-national order from its ownparticular perspective. The one is many, the many one. The dynamic of thisglobal ecology then is the emergence of an always provisional and resolutelyunsummed totality of all orders constituted by just these particular ordersthemselves. Said another way, absent in this model is any single, privileged,and dominant order that would override its others.

Theidentity of each focal , holographic state emerges from its unique pattern ofrelations within the vital functioning of the world organism, and the living,unbounded global ecology itself is the holistic and inclusive aesthetic order(rather than a reductionistic, rationalized order) engendered by the mutualaccommodation of these unique focal states. In this vision of a new planetary order,is there a shared minimalist morality that can provide the solidarity to bringa fragmented world with all of its diversity together? By minimalist, I don’tmean “thin” or “superficial,” but a morality close to the bone.

Ifwe begin from the fact that the population of China is as large as the continentof Africa and almost twice that of a combined eastern and western Europe, wecan appreciate the scale of the diversity that has been pursued over millenniaamong so many disparate peoples, languages, ways of life, modes of governance,and so on. While this diversity is truly profound, there seems to have beenenough of a shared minimalist morality to hold it together as a continuousChinese history and civilization for four thousand years and counting. What hasover time provided a sustained cultural “consensus” in the etymological senseof “shared feelings” lies in the family-based values promoted through thewritten Chinese character and the classics born of this writing system.

Withrespect to social and political order, the Confucian conception of thepolitical is an isomorphism between family, state, and world, wherein state andworld are simulacra of family. Confucian role ethics takes the cluster of termssurrounding “family reverence” (xiao 孝) asits prime moral imperative. Family feeling is not only the explanation of itsminimalist morality, but also the root and the substance of the livingConfucian social, political, and global order: its “continuity in change” (biantong 变通).

Iffamily feeling as a value has provided solidarity for Chinese culture fromancient times to the present, perhaps this value has relevance beyond Chineseculture itself. The argument herein is not that the world beyond China shouldbe persuaded by the Confucian emphasis on family feeling, but rather that otherof the world’s major traditions might be prompted to acknowledge that onreflection, their version of family feeling is the minimalist morality in theirown thick culture as well.

ForConfucian culture, it is the family that is the ultimate source and theindispensable ground of an achieved propriety (li   礼) in all of our roles and relations. The Analects makes this point explicitly:

礼之用，和为贵。先王之道斯为美，小大由之。有所不行，知和而和，不以礼节之，亦不可行也。

Anoptimizing harmony (he) is the mostvaluable function of achieving propriety in our roles and relations (li). In the ways of the Former Kings,the sustaining of this quality of harmony through achieving propriety in theirroles and relations made them elegant, and was a guiding standard in all thingslarge and small. But when things are not going well, to realize harmony justfor its own sake without regulating the situation through an achieved proprietyin roles and relations, will not work. (Analects 1.12)

Perhapsthe most prominent example in the Confucian tradition that illustrates thecentrality of this aesthetic, superlative sense of “harmony” (he) is the role that the institution offamily occupies as the governing and pervasive cultural metaphor.

Family—amodel of order that when optimally functional, is one and many at the sametime—is that powerful social nexus to which members are most inclined to investthemselves utterly and without remainder. That is, persons as required are inclinedto give their families their time, their fortunes, their body parts, and eventheir lives. Confucian philosophy promotes this institution of family with itsprimary moral imperative of “family reverence” (xiao 孝) as its governing cosmological trope as a deliberatestrategy to maximize the creative possibilities available within all of thehuman activities as they are rooted in family and extend outward socially,politically, and religiously from this resilient core. Importantly, such acommitment to family, far from entailing self-sacrifice or self-abnegation,requires the full expression of personal worth, and thus becomes that contextin which one can most effectively pursue personal realization.

Fromits origins in the prehistoric past, an ever-evolving Chinese culture has beenunique among the world’s civilizations, both in terms of its unbrokencontinuity, and in the rich and varied institutional, material, and conceptualartifacts its peoples have produced. Upon entering into China’s past, certainmajor themes emerge as they are repeatedly expressed in different facets ofChinese life. One of these themes is the centrality of the family that hasthoroughly permeated the sociopolitical, economic, metaphysical, moral, andreligious dimensions of Chinese history since at least the early Neolithic period.It should therefore come as no surprise that family reverence (xiao 孝) was one of themost basic and defining values of the Chinese people, especially the earlyConfucians.

ZhaoTingyang 赵汀阳 reflects on how first setting the root,and then on that basis, pursuing growth is the beginning and the projected endin the Confucian way of becoming consummately human:

人道问题首先正是“生生”，而“生生”的第一步便是生长，这正是中国思想演化线索的始发点。生长之事，必求生长之物“深根固柢”而使存在获得生长的依据，因此生长首先要扎根。“生长”和“扎根”这两个隐喻表示了中国思想的行径。

Theprimary issue for the human way is that of generation and regeneration, and thefirst step herein is growth. This is the starting point for the evolutionarythread of Chinese thought. The “doing” of growth must seek what a thing reliesupon to be “deeply rooted and firmly planted” in its growth. Therefore, growthfirst of all requires putting down roots. The two metaphors of growth andputting down roots set out the path for Chinese thought. (Zhao, The Making and Becoming of China:Its Way of Historicity   惠此中国, pp.148-149)

Inthe Confucian project of personal growth, the root must be set and firmlyplanted within the family itself. In reflecting on Confucian philosophy as aresource for an ecological geopolitical order, we must give full weight to theperceived isomorphism that obtains among the familial, political, and globalorders as they are rooted in and emerge from a regimen of personal cultivationwithin the family. This same organic symbiosis is described in the Mencius:

人有恒言，皆曰“天下国家”。天下之本在国，国之本在家，家之本在身。

Thereis a popular adage heard among the people who all say: “The world, the state,the family.” The world is rooted in the state, the state in the family, and thefamily in one’s own person. (Mencius 4A5)

Theidea that the root of governance lies in the institution of family is madeexplicit in the Book of Documents asone of the Five Classics. Confucius is making an astute observation when heasserts that within this cultural tradition, the proper functioning of theinstitution of family is integral to the production of the sociopolitical orderof the state:

或谓孔子曰：“子奚不为政？”子曰：“《书》云：‘孝乎惟孝，友于兄弟，施于有政。’是亦为政，奚其为为政？”

Someoneasked Confucius, “Why are you not employed in government?” The Master replied,“The Book of Documents says: ‘It alllies in family reverence. Being filial to your parents and finding fraternitywith your brothers is in fact carrying out the work of governing.’ In doingthese things I am participating in governing. Why must I be employed ingovernment?” (Analects 2.21)

Fromearliest times, “ family reverence” has served the Confucian tradition as itsprime moral imperative. Morality as it is cultivated through the commitment to“consummate conduct in one’s roles and relations” (ren 仁) is thus an extension and expression of immediatefamily feeling. In the Analects we read:

君子务本，本立而道生。孝弟也者，其为仁之本与。

Exemplarypersons concentrate their efforts on the root, for the root having beenproperly set, the vision of the moral life will grow therefrom. As for familyreverence and fraternal deference, they are I suspect, the root of consummateconduct (ren 仁). (Analects 1.2)

Inthis Confucian process of world-making, persons are imbricated as unique,relationally-constituted perspectives within the family, polity, and cosmos.Through dedication to the cultivation of deliberate growth in their ownrelations, every person has the capacity for bringing resolution and moredistinctive, meaningful focus to the roles and relations that constitute them.At the center of this personal project, the meaning of the family is implicatedin and dependent upon the productive cultivation of each of its members. Thenby radial extension, the meaning of the community, polity, and the entirecosmos is in turn implicated in and ultimately derived from the cultivation ofeach person as a family member.

Moralityso understood describes the cultivation of a quality of conduct that isdirected at making familial bonds stronger, thicker, and more enduring. Butwithout such accord among persons being properly negotiated through our livedroles and relations, our actions can be meaningless or worse. That is, aputative “harmony” that is achieved by imposing external mechanisms andconstraints as a means of enforcing order—the application of laws, policies, orrules—is dehumanizing to the extent that such “harmony” precludes personalconfirmation and participation. The goal of healthy living is a livedequilibrium in which we avoid both excess and insufficiency in our giving andgetting, in our doing and undergoing, in our shaping and being shaped. We areonly able to get the most out of the ecology of the human experience byachieving full measure (du 度) inboth the particularities and the scope of our transactional activities.

Thispursuit of the superlative in our conduct is explained by medicalanthropologist Zhang Yanhua 张燕华 in the followingterms:

Harmonydefined here is related to the Chinese sense of du 度 (degree, extent, position)... In other words, in adynamic interactive environment, harmony is brought about when each particularunfolds itself in its unique way and to an appropriate du such that “eachshines more brilliantly in the other’s company” (xiangdeyizhan 相得益彰). (Zhang, Transforming Emotions with Chinese Medicine:An Ethnographic Account from Contemporary China, p. 51)

Anoptimizing harmony, understood in these Confucian terms, serves the ultimategoal of aestheticizing the human experience. This aesthetic dimension— the needfor elegance and moral artistry in ethics—is integral to this holisticunderstanding of human conduct in which all aspects of the life experience havemore or less relevance, and thus have some value for determining a worthwhileoutcome.

Thereis a default individualism that constitutes a major underlying and entrenchedconceptual problem that is exacerbating the current human predicament. Thisfoundational individualism is appealed to first in defining what it means to bea moral person, and then it is extended as a determinate of what it means forthis putatively moral person to act justly. The presupposition that definespersons ideally as free, autonomous, rational, and properly self-interestedindividuals is ubiquitous in much if not most of modern Western moral andpolitical philosophy. And it takes on an analogous form at the extended levelof corporate culture and the sovereign state.

Zhang Yanhua, Transforming Emotions with Chinese Medicine:

An Ethnographic Account fromContemporary China

Thisfoundational individualism with its roots deep in the Western philosophicalnarrative, dilutes our sense of moral responsibility by allowing us, in someimportant degree, to describe, analyze, and evaluate individual persons—psychologically, politically, and morally— in isolation from others. Yet thisostensibly foundational individual is at every level an ontological fiction. Wedo not live our lives inside our skins. Moreover, because the individual sodefined provides the moral and political justification for an increasinglylibertarian economic and political system, it has become an insidious fiction.Indeed, it can be fairly argued that it is this same libertarian economicsystem justified as it is by appeal to individual liberty and autonomy that,far from being the cure for the world’s ills, has come to aggravate and toexacerbate the disease itself.

Individualautonomy and equality are thus desideratum within the ethical discourse ofliberal thinking—high values grounded in ontological thinking that bring withthem the familiar language of individuality, rationality, freedom, rights, andpersonal choice. Drawing upon the process cosmology of Confucian philosophy, weare able to formulate an alternative to the values of autonomy and equalitythat are prioritized in liberal thinking. The counterpart to these values inthe Confucian ethics would be an inclusive “relational equity” and theconsequent “achieved diversity.” Both autonomy and equality are grounded in adoctrine of external relations that subordinates our relations with otherpersons to our individual selves.

Adoctrine of external relations prioritizes our personal integrity as discreteindividuals over our interdependence with each other, and again the ostensivesameness that obtains among us—our “equality”—over our many differences. Thatis, we certainly do have differences among us that we do best to register andtolerate, but such differences are in some important degree mitigated by theassumption that, having the integrity of autonomous individuals, we are stillto be treated as equals. And as persons who would assert their individualautonomy, the relations they enter into remain external and contingent ratherthan intrinsic and constitutive. The Confucian alternative to liberalism’sautonomy and equality is relational equity that respects difference, and afirst-order relationality that is grown into the achieved diversity as itsoutcome. This distinction is captured nicely in the Confucian mantra “harmonynot uniformity” (he’erbutong 和而不同),where equity and diversity are the values behind the pursuit of an optimizingsymbiosis.

Roger T. Ames, Seeking Harmony Not Uniformity:

Comparative Philosophy and East-West

Understanding

Comparativeequality and individual autonomy guarantee that differences can only bevariations among basically similar people (variety). On the other hand, in theConfucian model, the inclusive pursuit of relational equity and an achieveddiversity in first-order, constitutive relations allows for the continuingdiversification of qualities and propensities that grow our differences intoresources for mutual enrichment (diversity).

Humanbeings are different in the various stages that together constitute a fulllife, and perhaps more importantly, are most distinctive in the scale to whichone person differs from another in their interests and their circumstances.Valorizing relational equity begins from not only an acknowledgment, but alsoan appreciation of these differences, and its goal is to achieve fairness inserving the interests of all within their different circumstances. Being muchmore complex than simple equality, it allocates resources and opportunitiesthat respect differences in the pursuit of social justice for all and for theirshared well-being. And the outcome of this quest for social justice is anachieved diversity as the conserving and coordinating of personal differencesfor the full appreciation of the creative possibilities of any situation.

Relationalequity begins from respect for the uniqueness of each person and each stagethey are at in the shared human narrative, where the infant having her glass ofmilk to strengthen her bones is analogous to grandpa having his glass of wineto guarantee a good night’s sleep. Such equity reconciles the tension betweenhierarchy and equality by construing the evolving relations that obtain amonginfant, mature person, grandparent, and ancestor not in an egalitarian way, butin terms of the affordances provided by relational equity. Further, suchaffordances that allow for the inclusion of real differences at every level ofgrowth allow for the complexity of the human experience, and are ultimately theground for an achieved diversity within the human narrative. There are twoimportant corollaries to the Confucian valorization of relational equity andachieved diversity that we might note. First, within the human ecology, equityand diversity cannot be engineered by individual agents (who do not exist), butinstead must emerge as a function of the coordinated activity amongrelationally-constituted members of family, community, and environment. Andsecondly, these same values of equity and diversity in the absence ofindividual agents are holistic in their compass, and extend beyond our humanparameters to guarantee the mutual implication and inseparability of ethical, economic,and importantly, ecological and environmental considerations.

Relationalequity and an achieved diversity can be scaled up from the cultural differencesamong persons within a particular community to the differences that obtainamong the thick cultures within the world community. An exclusive monochromeculture existing within its own parameters has little to offer its inhabitantsother than stability and continuity. When cultural differences within any levelof community are merely tolerated but do not produce growth, the community hasvariety perhaps, but very little diversity. But when there is relational equityamong cultures and all of them in their differences are included and treatedfairly, there is a mutual accommodation among their different ways of livingand thinking in which the cultural differences interact with each other togenerate an achieved diversity. Simple variety among equals stands in ratherstark contrast to the complex diversity that can only be achieved by fullyactivating and appreciating the important differences we have from each other.That is, we need to acknowledge not only that we differ from each other(variety), but that this gives us the opportunity to actively differ for eachother, and in so doing, to allow our differences to really make a difference(diversity).

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