Confucian Sentimental Representation: A New Approach to Confucian Democracy by Kwon Kyung Rok

Author:Kwon Kyung Rok [Rok, Kwon Kyung]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Democracy, Political Ideologies, Political Science, World, Asian
ISBN: 9781003132660
Google: GXmfzgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 58586815
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2022-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

Confucian Sentimental Representation as Acting with the People

Let us sum up what we have discussed so far regarding the basic structure of Confucian virtue politics. First, the true interest of society in Confucian virtue politics is to realize the ethically good life of political community. Material well-being is a precondition for this ideal in that ordinary people cannot maintain constant minds without decent material conditions. Second, the true interest of society is realized by the ruler’s moral virtue, which is incubated and cultivated within the ethical realm, particularly by filial affection, and its extension to the political realm. Third, an ethical relationship between the ruler and common people, which is formed by the extension of the ruler’s moral virtue, not only provides the ruler with proper moral sources for sound political judgments but it also constitutes an intrinsic good in the political realm. Therefore, the ruler must not transcend his/her affective moral grounds and his/her people’s emotions and feelings; he/she always tries to engage with and transform them into morally cultivated ones even in the process of making laws and policies in the political realm. From these facts, although the ideas of authorization by the people and accountability as enforcement cannot be directly derived from the idea of Confucian virtue politics, we can draw constitutive elements of Confucian sentimental representation in terms of representation as making sound judgments. The normative action of making sound judgments for the true interest of society in Confucianism is not to be detached from sharing emotions and feelings congruent with the people and transforming them into morally cultivated ones, thereby giving rise to an alternative conception of representation as ‘acting with the people’. Therefore, representation in Confucianism does not refer to the action of embodying, out in the public sphere, something originally immanent in each individual citizen’s or group’s interests, wants, and identities, and it does not rely on a representative’s actions and words transcending emotions and feelings. Rather, it refers to the action of projecting the innate goodness within human nature into people’s minds by relying on the ruler’s moral virtue and its extension to the people. In doing so, Confucian sentimental representation narrows the affective distance between the ruler and the ruled.

At this point, one might say that there have been sentimentalist conceptions of political representation in Western political philosophy and that they can better conceptualize a Confucian conception of political representation. Indeed, Western political theorists have paid attention to the sentimentalist dimension of political representation. For example, descriptive representation tells us why representatives should share characteristics with their constituents in terms of gender, race, class, nationality, and religion. According to this conception of political representation, representatives who have the same emotional experiences with constituents can spontaneously act like the people they represent and thus are capable of representing constituents’ true interests. Also, some symbolic representation accounts aptly describe how a representative symbolically represents or embodies something (e.g., national identity) regardless of his/her likeness with the represented. The problem is that even when

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