Abstract
Yat-hung Leung debates Chenyang Li’s view of harmony (he) and benevolence (ren) in Confucian teachings: Which is the more fundamental and important value, and ultimate ideal? In The Confucian Philosophy of Harmony (2014), Li delineates a distinctively Confucian conception of “deep harmony” as the basic ideal of Chinese culture and especially Confucianism. Leung questions that depiction of things, arguing that benevolence does and should hold that place of honor. Leung focuses his arguments against two claims: firstly, that harmony should be understood as the supreme value in Confucian thought, and secondly, that the ideal of harmony is of greater value to us today than that of benevolence. Leung points out that in the influential texts and traditions of Confucian philosophy, benevolence is of higher value than harmony. He disputes both the representative nature of the texts Li relies on as well as Li’s portrayals of some of those texts. We more properly understand Confucian harmony and benevolence in the inverse relation, with harmony as the product of benevolence, and thereby come to see that the substantive action-guiding content of benevolence in fact has the greater value to contemporary life.
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Notes
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To my knowledge, the author-meets-critics session took place in the Conference of the International Society of Chinese Philosophy, Hong Kong, July 21–24, 2015. The journal reviews include Chiu (2014), Bell (2015), Tan (2015); the series of discussions on journal include Jiyuan Yu (2016), Kam-por Yu (2016), and Li (2016a) in Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy; and Chiu (2017), Fan (2017), Yao (2017), and Li (2017) in Philosophy East and West.
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An anonymous reviewer highlights the difficulty of identifying the most important or central concept for a highly diverse, extremely voluminous interpretative and argumentative tradition extending back 2500 years. Indeed, which texts are “canon-representative” is a controversial issue, and one must be careful of cherry-picking of textual support for his or her own favored ideal. The reviewer suggests identifying instead core Confucian ideals and virtue concepts whose relative importance was debated and differentially elevated at different times; and then, through rigorous analysis, “family resemblances” are identified in treatment of this core of ideals and virtue concepts in different eras and schools of Confucian thought. Perhaps this approach implies a doubt neither I nor (arguably) Prof. Li share, namely a doubt whether we can speak of a most important or central concept of this tradition at all. I agree that since Confucianism is a long tradition, attempts to generalize or summarize it may risk bias. That is shown in my acknowledgement of the historical and interpretative nature of the inquiry. Nevertheless, whether we can identify a single most important concept in this tradition is determined on the strengths of arguments and counterarguments. The present critique is an attempt to refute harmony as the candidate for this and suggests benevolence as an alternative. In particular, my emphasis on Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism argues against Li’s underemphasis of it. Rather than seeing either (or both) as biased and a matter of cherry-picking, we may better view the arguments on either side as being more or less persuasive.
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There have been controversies on whether the Great Learning and Doctrine of the Mean are pre-Qin texts, although they are collected in the Book of Rites that appears in the Han dynasty. With more excavated texts available, scholars tend to think that they were written in the pre-Qin period. See Liang (2008: 102–118 and 261–91 respectively). For convenience, I take them to be Classical Confucian texts henceforth.
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En passant, for the sake of simplicity, we could even grant that harmony is the most important concept in the Five Classics. The point is that the Five Classics are less representative and influential than other parts of the tradition.
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For instance, Zhu Xi says, “For the Analects and the Mencius, it takes fewer efforts [to read] but the benefits are huge. For the Six Classics, it takes more efforts but the benefits are not many” (Zhu 1986: 428).
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This is the first sentence of his famous passage that we name as “On Understanding Benevolence.” We will refer to it again below.
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JeeLoo Liu comments that the Neo-Confucian worldview can be taken as “a version of teleology— the world is governed by the principle of life and the overarching telos assumed in this worldview is simply the creation and sustenance of life” (Liu 2017: 4).
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The “knowing” or “understanding” (shi 識) here refers to some kind of studying and practicing but not just simply noticing the presence of certain concept. This is related to the distinction between genuine knowledge (zhenzhi 真知) and common knowing (changzhi 常知) mentioned by the Cheng brothers (see Cheng and Cheng 1981: 16, 188). For explanations, see Huang (2014: 112–115).
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Mou ingeniously points out that the “substance,” “principle,” “way,” and “heart-mind” in the above passage can all be regarded as referring to benevolence, as they are different aspects of the ultimate reality of benevolence (see Mou 1968 v. 2: 219–220). That is why it is pertinent to insert “of benevolence” in square brackets into the passage. This illustrates that although these concepts point to different aspects of the same thing, it is benevolence that is the comprehensive or ultimate concept to be emphasized.
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According to Mou Zongsan, these are the two main themes in Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism (see Mou 1968 v.1: 8).
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The case may be more interesting in Zhang Zai, who emphasizes on the concept of ultimate harmony (taihe太和), but unfortunately Li does not mention Zhang in the book. However, it seems to me that given his emphases on ontological substance and vital forces, as well as the cultivation of our vital forces, whether Zhang would take harmony per se as more than an ideal outcome remains a question.
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Some complexities are involved in the translations of these terms. The Chinese word de 德 has “virtue” as its closest counterpart. In the Chinese tradition, it also means “attainment” (de 得). The “Record of Music” in the Book of Rites reads “virtue means attainment” (dezhe deye 德者, 得也) (Sun 1989: 982; see Hall and Ames 1987: 216–26 and Angle 2009: 51–59). The Chinese word xing 行 primary means “conduct” or “behavior”; but it can also derivatively mean virtue. That is why in contemporary Chinese there are compound words like dexing 德性 and pingxing 品行, which approximately mean virtue or conduct. But with the unique qualification of the text, I suggest rendering xing 行 as “virtue,” while rendering de zhi xing 德之行 as “obtained virtue.” The difference lies in that the former being not in fact genuine virtue possessed by someone but connoting rather just virtue terms that can be attributes describing the moral behavior which is in conformity with moral norms; “attained virtue” in contrast refers to virtue that is genuine, in that it is rooted in the heart-mind. This rendering nicely captures the meaning of “attainment” in the term de.
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For simplicity, I focus on ethical encounters by taking the political ones as particular complex cases of the ethical ones.
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Li also writes, “Equilibrium has to be exercised in moving back and forth in the process of interpretation—the only process in which meanings are obtained” (Li 2014: 123).
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This is not dogmatic. Such “Confucian constitutive rules are amendable,” for “they may not have been perfectly conceptualized” (Fan 2017: 252); so in this case, “Confucian moral epistemology is foundationalist, not fundamentalist in the Western religious sense” (Fan 2017: 252). As I understand Fan, the foundationalist approach allows changes of the principles or rules according to the better understanding of human basic structures. Therefore, the rules are not absolute as in the case of the fundamentalist approach.
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Li also mentions Zhu’s idea that “principle is one and its manifestations are many” (Li 2014: 144), but he does not take it to elaborate my point here.
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Michael Slote’s ethics of care and empathy comes close to the Confucian view that takes benevolence as the core moral judgment. He holds that “actions are morally wrong and contrary to moral obligation if, and only if, they reflect or exhibit or express an absence (or lack) of fully developed empathic concern for (or caring about) others on the part of the agent” (Slote 2007: 31).
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For instance, Martin L. Hoffman, an American psychologist, argues that psychological findings may suggest that empathy “is reliably aroused in humans in response to misfortune in others, it predisposes the individual toward helping action… and it appears to have neural base that may have been present early in human evolution” (Hoffman 1981: 121). He also suggests that certain kinds of inducing of empathy are important for moral education and moral development (Hoffman 2000).
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Leung, YH. (2021). Harmony as a Manifestation of the Central Confucian Concept of Benevolence: A Critique of Chenyang Li’s The Confucian Philosophy of Harmony. In: Carleo III, R.A., Huang, Y. (eds) Confucian Political Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70611-1_1
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