Against Individualism by Rosemont Henry Jr.;

Author:Rosemont, Henry, Jr.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chinese Texts and Contexts

The views I will be considering under the heading of classical Confucianism were set down in four texts written and edited roughly between the fifth and second centuries BCE: The Analects (Lunyu)—our major focus—followed by the Mencius, with the same name as the purported author Mencius. Later enshrined as the Second Sage of Confucianism, his dates were ca.390–310 BCE. Next in importance was Xunzi, or Hsun Tzu, who lived from approximately 312 to 220 BCE, and whose work bearing his name is another of the texts I will be using. Last is the Li Ji, or Records of Ritual.[4] These four works are by no means in full agreement on all points, and there are several tensions within each one itself. Moreover, there are many highly ambiguous passages in all of these works, sufficient that reading them is often a creative activity. Nevertheless, in conjunction with a few other early texts that achieved canonical status—the Books of Changes, Odes, and History (or Documents)[5] these works do present an overall coherent view of the good society and the good life for human beings therein. This good life is an altogether this-worldly and social one, and central to understanding and appreciating it is to see that Confucian sociality has aesthetic, political, and spiritual no less than moral dimensions, all of which we must learn to integrate if we are to lead fully human lives.

The integration is sufficiently essential to the Confucian view of the role-bearing person that it is difficult at times to describe it thoroughly along one dimension—the ethical, say—without also bringing in other dimensions such as the political or the spiritual, which in turn makes it difficult to maintain a narrow analytic focus on occasion. In extenuation I can only say, first, that a theme dropped in one context to take up a related one will almost surely be taken up in another, related context later, which the careful reader will note I have already done frequently by mentioning chapters back and forth in my narrative. Relatedly, I hope readers will bear with me more gently on this score when they remember that these philosophical and religious categories—ethics, politics, religion, aesthetics, etc.—are Western, and linked to the view of human beings as free, autonomous individual selves, not as interrelated, interacting persons, henceforward our central, if not sole concern.

But the way I have just described the contrast I will be drawing may be misleading if it leads the reader to think I will be proffering a Confucian alternative view of a relational self to the Western conception of the individual self, because what I will be describing and analyzing is an alternative view of what it is to be a human being, not a self. On my interpretation, for the Confucians there are only interrelated persons, no individual selves. Thus I will not be considering alternative views of the self, because the position I wish to articulate and defend is that there are none, hence nothing to compare and/or contrast with the dominant Western conceptual paradigm.

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