Philosophy East and West

Jeff Flynn’s comments on my methodological pluralism as well as the way I do political theory, namely explanatory evaluation, capture remarkably well what I struggled with most in writing Confucian Democracy in East Asia: Theory and Practice. As Flynn rightly notes, my research questions were inspired by actual problems with which contemporary East Asians (particularly Koreans) commonly struggle, and my goal was to derive philosophical inspirations from the actual social, cultural, and political realities of East Asia for normative political theory of Confucian democracy. To put this into a more personal perspective, my aim was to come up with a theory that would make sense to living East Asians (and I am one of them), as well as any ordinary people like my parents and grandparents who had only limited exposure to Western political philosophy but struggled for democracy and are now somehow practicing it.

Of course, in order to make philosophical sense of what East Asian citizens are doing as well as to evaluate and critique their ongoing democratic practices from [End Page 1347] the perspectives that they have already adopted without much articulation, I had to resort to the Confucian classics to weave my episodic empirical observations into a coherent normative “Confucian” political theory that at once explains and evaluates such practices. My hope was that this sort of political theory can function as a regulative ideal not only for existing democracies in East Asia but also for non-democratic countries in the region that were historically Confucian such as China, North Korea, and Vietnam. I appreciate Flynn’s overall positive assessment of my methodological strategy.

Flynn then raises a question on this very nexus between theory and practice: given that my political theory draws normative inspirations from Korea’s practical reality, what justifies this relatively contingent starting point, and what should we say about the theory’s general applicability? Obviously, my attention to Korea is due to the sheer fact that this is the country with which I am most familiar. But as Flynn notes, there are other more intellectually important reasons: first, as most historians attest, premodern Korea, at least since the sixteenth century, was the most Confucianized among East Asian countries, including China, and second, though arguably so, Korea remains the most Confucian to this day. After all, unlike their Chinese counterparts during the May Fourth Movement and the Cultural Revolution, Koreans never officially denounced Confucianism, and in spite of major interruptions in modern Korean history such as Japanese colonialism and the Korean War, they have embraced much of the Confucian legacy in their modern civil codes, criminal laws, and public policies.¹

Flynn’s second question is more challenging: can my theory, inspired by the Korean experience, be applicable to other East Asian countries? It is a question difficult for a theorist to answer; at the end of the day, I think, it is up to East Asian citizens themselves whether they would want to conceive of and conduct their public life in a parallel way that I suggested in my book. My hope, though, is that other East Asians can have a more concrete practical vision of what Confucian democracy looks like in the Confucian societal context, the generic features of which they still widely share with Koreans. Unlike in most Western liberal democracies, values such as filial piety, respect for elders, ancestor worship, ritual propriety, and harmony within the family are highly valued throughout East Asia and they are occasionally promoted as important public values by means of law and public policy. Of course, the exact cultural configuration of each Confucian value and the overall structure of the constellation of these values may be meaningfully different from country to country. But I believe my case studies on religious freedom, freedom of association, freedom of expression, insult law, and multiculturalism in Korea’s Confucian societal context can provide other East Asians with an important point of view so as to (re)think about the mutually enhancing relationship between their own distinctive Confucian culture and democratic politics and practices.

What if my observation is wrong that East...