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Centrality and Commonality: An Essay on Confucian Religiousness
Book by Tu, Wei-Ming
- GenresPhilosophy
165 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 1989
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May 6, 2020
I was sent over to this volume to back-translate a block quote in a related project, and ended up absorbed by its odd rhetorical organization. Like the text of which it is hermeneutics, Professor Tu's essay is a re-enactment of a ritual, essentially like poetry, repeating and cycling through terms, images, analogies, and reworking Confucianism into a dish fit for English-based liberalism. This seems to have been his quiet, near life-long project from his post at Harvard. I doubt whether it got any traction back then, but in a strange fashion, his work seems perfect for this moment in Chinese ethics: good personhood is an exercise in human-relatedness; good government is authority with adequate reciprocity; and the best moral rules send us back on the quest to improve our true selves.
"Human-relatedness" comes up a lot. It's a mouthful, but what comes through is a core idea in the ancient text on "centrality and commonality," that the more profound of a person you shape yourself to be, the more carefully you balance prudent introspection with caring, humane outward observation. This takes a lot of work, so you have to be able to devote your whole life to it. The great sage Confucius himself admitted failure at it. But the opportunity is there to "formulate an ultimate order of existence which is powerful and pervasive enough to become a defining characteristic of human heritage." A corollary of human-relatedness is that such ambition avoids hubris.
Perhaps the most attractive feature of this vision of Confucian ethics is that we all understand and experience the basic, ordinary feelings and relationships that are the building blocks of the ideal society based on trust -- fiduciary communities. As long as we focus on the sincerity to uncover our connection to reality, we will access a path to politics based on fiduciary communities, with conscientiousness and altruism alike. Where this all becomes religious is in the identification of an athropocosmic vision -- humanity is analogous to cosmos. Transcendence is in the heart.
As I finish, I wonder again about Eugene Thacker's notion that we have to deal with a cosmos that doesn't care for us, is without us, on a fundamental level. Did this idea of alien and unwelcome univese, not have shape and relevance in the time the Zhongyong was created? What if "centrality and commonality" are the aims of the profound person, but margin and difference characterize the universe?
Moreover, I was a little surprised that Prof. Tu does not really even try to defend against the most obvious criticism he'll face here: Confucianism defends authoritarian governments, and continues to do so today. This is a factual truth, whatever the hermeneutics of the Zhongyong might be. And where Prof. Tu seems to call to us, in 1976 and again in 1989 (how much Chinese history lurks behind these years!), to see the possibility of human-relatedness bolstered by reciprocity to avoid authoritarianism, it seems more likely to me in 2020 that the practitioners of the Dao will simply tout the positive aspects of authoritarianism. Finally, Tu's vision of study as ritual leading to goodness is a cold, bloodless thing. I can see why Qian Mu hoped to salvage the same text by dragging it back to the forces of nature and the human passions. Still, one does wonder if this odd snapshot of Confucian ethics can find productive common ground against, say, Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments.
I'm not sure if this dense little nugget of a book from a SUNY series on Chinese philosophy and culture is still in print, but fortunately I was able to access it easily at the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/centralit...
"Human-relatedness" comes up a lot. It's a mouthful, but what comes through is a core idea in the ancient text on "centrality and commonality," that the more profound of a person you shape yourself to be, the more carefully you balance prudent introspection with caring, humane outward observation. This takes a lot of work, so you have to be able to devote your whole life to it. The great sage Confucius himself admitted failure at it. But the opportunity is there to "formulate an ultimate order of existence which is powerful and pervasive enough to become a defining characteristic of human heritage." A corollary of human-relatedness is that such ambition avoids hubris.
Perhaps the most attractive feature of this vision of Confucian ethics is that we all understand and experience the basic, ordinary feelings and relationships that are the building blocks of the ideal society based on trust -- fiduciary communities. As long as we focus on the sincerity to uncover our connection to reality, we will access a path to politics based on fiduciary communities, with conscientiousness and altruism alike. Where this all becomes religious is in the identification of an athropocosmic vision -- humanity is analogous to cosmos. Transcendence is in the heart.
As I finish, I wonder again about Eugene Thacker's notion that we have to deal with a cosmos that doesn't care for us, is without us, on a fundamental level. Did this idea of alien and unwelcome univese, not have shape and relevance in the time the Zhongyong was created? What if "centrality and commonality" are the aims of the profound person, but margin and difference characterize the universe?
Moreover, I was a little surprised that Prof. Tu does not really even try to defend against the most obvious criticism he'll face here: Confucianism defends authoritarian governments, and continues to do so today. This is a factual truth, whatever the hermeneutics of the Zhongyong might be. And where Prof. Tu seems to call to us, in 1976 and again in 1989 (how much Chinese history lurks behind these years!), to see the possibility of human-relatedness bolstered by reciprocity to avoid authoritarianism, it seems more likely to me in 2020 that the practitioners of the Dao will simply tout the positive aspects of authoritarianism. Finally, Tu's vision of study as ritual leading to goodness is a cold, bloodless thing. I can see why Qian Mu hoped to salvage the same text by dragging it back to the forces of nature and the human passions. Still, one does wonder if this odd snapshot of Confucian ethics can find productive common ground against, say, Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments.
I'm not sure if this dense little nugget of a book from a SUNY series on Chinese philosophy and culture is still in print, but fortunately I was able to access it easily at the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/centralit...
Displaying 1 of 1 review