On the Nature of Early Confucian Classical Chinese ...

On the Nature of Early Confucian Classical ChineseDiscourse on Ethical Norms

Christoph Harbsmeier1

Published online: 23 September 2015

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Around 1983, at Peking Airport, I saw a “no smoking” sign accompanied by some

information for would-be offenders in finer print: “Fine 18 RMB.”

A heavy smoker of my acquaintance walked up to a policeman who was standing

near that “no smoking” sign and asked: “Can one smoke here?” The policeman

smiled politely, pointed to the sign above his head and explained: “Of course you

can! It will cost you 18 yuan, though, as you can see.”

The policeman read the “no smoking” sign as a conditional rule: “If anyone

smokes here he must pay a fine of 18 RMB.” The fine print (the meta-norm) had

deeply affected the very nature of the normative statement itself.

The present paper starts out from this personal experience at Peking Airport in

more ways than one. On the one hand, any “no smoking” sign in China is expected

to be routinely disregarded by any person of sufficiently high social status. Such a

person will be expected to disregard this kind of a notice without being charged the

fine or asked any questions. More generally, norms – like any other rule – have an

intended audience, and they involve cultural felicity conditions for their

implementation. This is one important point. But even more importantly, the

injunction on the “no smoking” sign, with its specification of the fine, is read in this

Chinese context in a radically different way from what one is used to in - for

example - Germany, the home of Immanuel Kant. The present paper, then, is an

inevitably tentative piece of philosophical fieldwork in the ethnography of classical

Chinese ethical discourse. Inevitably, I can only discuss what has come down to us

The author wishes to thank Paul Goldin (University of Pennsylvania) for crucial advice on an earlier

version of this paper.

& Christoph Harbsmeier

[email protected]

1 University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

123

J Value Inquiry (2015) 49:517–541

DOI 10.1007/s10790-015-9530-9

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s10790-015-9530-9&domain=pdf

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s10790-015-9530-9&domain=pdf

from antiquity. And what has been transmitted is clearly biased in favor of the

transmitters.

The logical form of a moral norm for a Confucian tends to be “as an… you must/

one should …”.1 This is the default logical style of traditionalist Confucian

normativity. I call it traditionalist in the spirit of Confucius himself who declares

himself a follower of the Zhou 周 dynasty (1045-221 BC) with its overwhelmingly

impressive wén 文 “cultural elegance”:

子曰 : The Master said:

「周監於二代, “The Zhou looked back upon two dynasties!

郁郁乎文哉! How impressive their elegance was!

吾從周。」2 I follow the Zhou.” (LY 3.14)

In matters of ethical orientation, Confucius seems to declare himself to be a

traditionalist ethical aestheticist. He nowhere explains why anyone else should share

his traditionalist aesthetic taste for the Zhou. The norms he follows are never

questioned. They are never justified. One notes that Plato (who did try to justify the

norms he advocated) was very much preoccupied with to kalon (“the beautiful”) or

the kalokagathon (“the beautiful and the good.”) Plato did go on to try to explain

and define such things. Confucius never zeroed in to analyze what exactly it was

that was so impressively wén 文 “beautifully dignified” about the former kings of

the early Zhou.3 It is difficult to be sure of the exact force of the word wén, but theaesthetic side of this concept does seem to have played an important part in shaping

its essential meaning. Ethical thought, at the outset, had very much to do with the

aesthetics of a well-ordered but hierarchical rather than egalitarian society.

Analytical philosophers argue about what is morally right and therefore

imperative. Many have realized that there is a huge problem about the unspoken

“one” that lurks implicitly in the impersonal Greek verb dei (“one must; it is morally

right that one should.”)

I do believe Plato had it structurally wrong – as it were syntactically or valency-

wise – insofar as he asked about to dikaion (“the morally just”) as such. When

simply asking this kind of question he forgot the crucial problem of the implicit

moral subject.4 Moral duties are never moral duties per se. They are duties for a

1 For a recent treatment of this phenomenon see Roger T. Ames, Confucian Role Ethics, A Vocabulary(Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2011).2 All references to classical Chinese texts are keyed to the editions in Thesaurus Linguae Sericaeavailable with translations and analysis on-line at tls-uni-hd.de.3 See Lothar von Falkenhausen, “The concept of wen in the ancient Chinese ancestral cult,” ChineseLiterature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, Vol. 18, (1996), pp. 1–22 and Martin Kern, “Ritual, text, and the

formation of the canon: historical transitions of wen in early China,” T’oung Pao, Vol. 87, Fasc. 1/3,(2001), pp. 43–91.4 For an inspiring historical survey of Western approaches to the concept of justice see Alasdair

MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998),

especially pp. 349–369 on the contrastive aspects. What one would need, from a more general

philosophical point of view, are globalized versions of this kind of thematically focused survey of

conceptual history. Robin R. Wang, ed., Chinese Philosophy in an Era of Globalization (New York:

SUNY Press, 2004), pp. 123–162. For an anthropological perspective see D. F. Pocock, “The ethnography

of morals,” International Journal of Moral and Social Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1, (1986), pp. 3–20, and for a

518 C. Harbsmeier

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such and such and under such and such pragmatic conditions for the felicity of moralperformance. Conceptually this is all very messy, and pragmatically it is all very

untidily tied up with matters of contingent cultural differences.

The Chinese question is, then: Who exactly “must” or “should” do whatever is

morally right, and under exactly what kind of morally felicitous circumstances thatkind of person must or should do whatever the norms prescribe. “Musting” and

“shoulding” in any real context is always a “musting as a…” and a “shoulding asa…”, and under given situational felicity conditions. And the blank after “as a…” is

not to be filled in with such generic nouns as “human being,” “rational being,” et

cetera. What is intended here are social roles such as those of a ruler, subject, father,

son, husband, wife, elder brother, or younger brother. Significantly, the relation

between a younger sister and an elder sister is radically defocussed withoutargument. The ethical world is a men’s world. The ethical universe is not only

anthropocentric: it is androcentric to the point where obligations of women are very

largely defined in terms of women’s obligations towards men, as Han dynasty

biographies of distinguished women attest systematically and comprehensively.5 A

Han legal provision determined that the penalty for beating one’s elder sister should

be harsher than that for beating a younger sister.6 Whereas the well-documented

discourse on early Chinese legal discourse7 is full of references to women as legal

subjects in their own right, moral discourse is predominantly concerned with female

agents only insofar as their actions impinge on males or on parents.

My quotations from the early Chinese sources that follow aim to illustrate and

document my necessarily tentative analysis of how this “musting” and “shoulding”

Footnote 4 continued

survey of the state of the art in 1997 see the editor’s introduction in Signe Howell, ed., The Ethnographyof Moralities (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 1–23. James D. Faubion, An Anthropology of Ethics(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) does not in my opinion live up to the promise of its title.

The most challenging empirical ethnographic work within this field I know of is Colin M. Turnbull, TheMountain People (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), a shocking and inevitably controversial portrait

of a culture in which a whole range of supposedly universal moral norms are found to be absent by the

visiting anthropologist. (See the highly critical review by the linguist Bernd Heine, “The mountain

people: some notes on the Ik of north-eastern Uganda,” Africa: Journal of the International AfricanInstitute, Vol. 55, No. 1, (1985), pp. 3–16.5 See the classic translation Albert R. O’Hara, tr., The Position of Woman in Early China, According tothe Lieh Nü Chuan, “The Biographies of Eminent Chinese Women” (Washington: Catholic University of

America, 1945), and now Anne Behnke Kinney, tr., Exemplary Women of Early China: The Lienu Zhuan

of Liu Xiang (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). For a well-documented and very readable

survey of the role of women in ancient China, focusing mainly on the Qın and Han dynasties, see Bret

Hinsch, Women in Early China, Second edition (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010).6 See Hinsch 2010, p. 85.7 A. F. P. Hulsewe, Remnants of Han Law. Vol. I: Introductory Studies and Annotated Translation ofChapters 22 and 23 of the History of the Former Han Dynasty (Leiden: Brill, 1955). A. F. P. Hulsewe,

Remnants of Ch’in Law: An Annotated Translation of the Ch’in Legal and Administrative Rules of the 3rdcentury B.C. Discovered in Yün-meng Prefecture, Hu-pei Province, in 1975 (Leiden: Brill, 1985). Ulrich

Lau and Michael Ludke, Exemplarische Rechtsfälle vom Beginn der Han-Dynastie: Eine kommentierteÜbersetzung des Zouyanshu aus Zhangjiashan/Provinz Hubei (Tokyo: Research Institute for Languages

and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA), Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 2012). (An English

version of this latter extraordinarily useful and well-documented work with an extensive bibliography is

in press.)

On the Nature of Early Confucian Classical Chinese… 519

123

works in pre-Buddhist China. My general comments on these primary sources try to

bring out what appear to me to be points relevant to our modern more general

philosophical concerns.

For Confucius, to be morally good is to “fall into place,” to “fill one’s proper

role,” as they say in modern Chinese duì hào rù zuò 對號入座, which means

literally “enter one’s seat according to one’s seat number.” One is a moral agent as aruler, subject, son, husband, wife, and so on, and always as culturally feasible under

given situational conditions.

Confucian virtues are not what you simply “should have” as a human being. It is

what you “should have as a …”, and the blank is to be filled by the ascription of a

social role. Chinese virtue ethics, if that is what one wants to claim there is, would

have to be concerned not with virtues tout court but with “virtues for a …”, for

people in specific socially determined positions.8

As a pre-meditation, consider self-reference in Chinese. To a remarkable extent,

self-reference in classical Chinese texts, especially from imperial times (221 BC)

onwards, is in terms of one’s role as a speaker. There is a whole range of role-

concepts that function as quasi-pronouns in modern Chinese. In classical times, this

phenomenon was hugely more widespread and even obligatory. For example, when

writing to a ruler, one refers to oneself as chén 臣 “(I, Your Majesty’s) minister.”

When writing as a senior wife to one’s husband one would take care to use qiè 妾,

“(I, your) concubine” when referring to oneself.9 Thus, in the preserved classical

Chinese texts, one commonly speaks of oneself and conceives of oneself as “I as

…”, and one speaks of one’s audience as “you as …”. Self-reference is in terms of a

“person as in the role imposed by the discourse situation.” Confucius’s discourse is

always to a “you, as a …”, to an audience in a given situation.10

8 For detailed treatments of the concept of virtue in China see Donald Munro, The Concept of Man inAncient China, With a New Foreword by Liu Xiaogan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001);

Bryan Van Norden, Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early Chinese Philosophy (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Mark Csikszentmihalyi, Material Virtue. Ethics and the Body inEarly China, (Leiden: Brill, 2004).9 In my Thesaurus Linguae Sericae I have so far registered 183 first person pronouns and role-based

quasi-pronouns in classical Chinese literature. For second person reference I have so far registered 146

lexicalized expressions that function as pronouns or role-based nominal quasi-pronouns.10 See Heiner Roetz, Confucian Ethics of the Axial Age (Albany: State University of New York Press,

1993) and Paul R. Goldin, “The theme of the primacy of the situation in classical Chinese philosophy and

rhetoric,” Asia Major, Vol 18, No. 2, (2005), pp. 2–25 for extensive discussion on the basic nature of earlyConfucian ethics. For detailed discussion of the virtue of filial piety see now Roger T. Ames and Henry

Rosemont Jr., The Chinese Classic of Family Reverence, A Philosophical Translation (Honolulu:

University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), pp. 6–104. See also Alan K. L. Chan and Sor-hoon Tan, eds., FilialPiety in Chinese Thought and History, (London: Routledge/Curzon, 2004), and Philip J. Ivanhoe, “Filial

Piety as a Virtue,” in R. L. Walker and P. J. Ivanhoe, eds., Virtue Ethics and Contemporary MoralProblems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 297–312.

520 C. Harbsmeier

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1 The “Ad Personamness” of Abstract Philosophical Discoursein the Analects

Sir Karl Popper has famously ventured to introduce the notion of “ad hocness.” He

writes:

One can show that the methodology of science (and the history of science

also) becomes understandable in its details if we assume that the aim of

science is to get explanatory theories which are as little ad hoc as possible: a

‘good’ theory is not ad hoc, while a ‘bad’ theory is.11

The discourse of Confucius as we have it in the Analects is often demonstratively adhoc in the sense that it addresses a certain situation and is rarely decontextualized

and abstract. (When the discourse appears to be decontextualized, I have come to

suspect, this may in fact be because the relevant context was not transmitted!) This

discourse is also ad hominem or rather ad personam in the sense that it claims

relevance and even validity specifically for those fathers, sons, etc. intended by the

discourse.

Questions themselves must be understood as embedded in a determining context.

Thus in the Analects the seemingly abstract question “X asked Confucius about Y”

is answered by Confucius not as a question about “Y as such,” but as a question

about “Y for a person in the kind of situation Z that X is assumed to be in as he is

asking the question about Y.”

As an illustration of this deliberate context-sensitiveness in the discussion of

abstract issues in the Analects I shall now present and briefly analyze some of the

famous occasions in which Confucius is being asked about zhèng 政 “administra-

tion” or “government.”

When the notoriously rich disciple Zıgong 子貢 asks about zhèng “government,”

Confucius is not in doubt about the answer appropriate for that particular man:

子貢問政。 Zıgong asked about government.


「足食, “One should provide sufficient food,

足兵, one should provide sufficient military strength

民信之矣。」 and the people one should cause to be trusty.” (LY 12.7)

For the formidable duke of Qı, the message is quite different, as indeed it turns out

in the remaining cases I shall present. This answer to the duke of Qı has

reverberated through East Asian history:

齊景公問政於孔子。 Duke Jıng of Qı asked Confucius about government.

孔子對曰 : Confucius said:

「君君, “(In good government) the ruler should act as a ruler,

臣臣, the minister as a minister,

父父, the father as a father,

子子。」 the son as a son.” (LY 12.11)

11 Conjectures and Refutations (London: Basic Books, 1962), p. 60.


123

Good governance consists in creating the conditions for everyone to fulfill culturally

pre-ordained social roles properly. As the Oxford logician A. N. Prior pointed out a

long time ago, the logic of this kind of derivation of an “ought” from an “is” is

impeccable: “From the premise ‘He is a sea-captain’, the conclusion may be validly

inferred that ‘He ought to do whatever a sea-captain ought to do’.” Alasdair

MacIntyre claims that the “ought” conclusion drawn from the “is” premise is validly

derived but insubstantial in meaning: “… the conclusion in Prior’s example

certainly does lack any such (scil. substantial evaluative) content.”12 Leaving aside

the sea-captains, I think that for the ancient Chinese a statement to the effect that a

son should act as a son should does not lack substantial evaluative content. It is just

that the substantial evaluative content is conventional only, presupposed as

generally understood by the intended audience, and not made explicit in the

statement. And note that Confucius’s claim here is not merely about rulers,

ministers, fathers, and sons. It is about all well-defined roles in society. Good

governance is claimed to be constituted by everyone properly acting out the roles

they have. Hence the importance, in Confucian ethics, of zhèng míng 正名 “getting

the names (particularly of social roles) right”:


「必也正名乎!」 “What is necessary is getting the

terminology right.” (LY 13.3)

Confucius derives social obligation from social role as defined by role terminology.

Disciple Zızhang gets yet another piece of advice in terms of seriousness of moral

effort required for good government: “Pull your socks up!”:

子張問政。 Zızhang asked about government.


「居之無倦, “In one’s personal conduct one should be untiring,

行之以忠。」 and in one’s action one should make a dedicated effort.”

(LY 12.14)

When asked about government in general, Confucius responds to his notoriously

ritualistic and ostentatious disciple not with abstract and decontextualized “political

science discourse.” On the contrary, he offers a piece of concrete personal advice to

his disciple.

For the shameless usurper of the rulership in Confucius’ small home state of Lu,

Jı Kangzı, the message is reported to be in the form of outrageous thinly veiled

political criticism:

季康子問政於孔子。 Jı Kangzı asked Confucius about government.

孔子對曰 : Confucius replied politely:

「政者, “Government

正也。 consists in correcting.

子帥以正, If you take the lead with correctness

孰敢不正 ? 」 who would dare not to be correct?” (LY 12.17)

12 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, Second edition (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University, 1984), p. 57.

522 C. Harbsmeier

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This sounds very much like what Confucius or his disciples might have wished JìKāngzǐ had said. And this in itself is of interest to us. Confucius is portrayed here as

refusing to enter into any decontextualized wise-cracking mode.

In his desperation, the usurper Jı Kangzı comes up with his own suggested

strategy:

季康子問政於孔子曰 : Jı Kangzı asked Confucius about government

and said:

「如殺無道, “If one kills those who do not behave according

to the Way

以就有道, and one keeps close to those who behave

according to the Way,

何如?」 How about that?”

孔子對曰 : Confucius replied:

「子為政, “If you conduct government (properly),

焉用殺? how should there be use for killing people?

子欲善而民善矣。」 If you have a desire to be excellent then the

people will be excellent.” (LY 12.19)

Confucius refuses to respond to the general question of what one should do in

government. He is unusually specific in his use of the second person pronoun, zǐ 子“you, Sir!” His response remains on the level of explicitly personal advice.

The over-politically swash-buckling senior disciple Zılu gets yet another piece of

advice that does not, on the face of it, have much to do with administration or

government specifically:

子路問政。 Zılu asked about government.


「先之, “Deal with things before they arise,13

勞之。」 work hard at them.”

請益。 He asked the Master to add something.

曰 : He said:

「無倦。」 “You should do so relentlessly.” (LY 13.1)

Here the advice is: “Instead of responding in your hot-headed manner to problems

that have arisen, anticipate these, and work hard (at that!).” And when Zılu insists

on more concrete advice, Confucius refuses again. He just insists on an untiring

effort.

The legalist philosopher Han Fei (d. 233 BC) juxtaposes such responses with the

deliberate and malicious intention to poke fun at the incoherence of Confucian

responses to one and the same question.

葉公子高問政於仲尼, Prince Gao of She asked Confucius about government.

仲尼曰 : ∙ Confucius said:

13 In Danish this would be, “Kom tingene i forkøbet.”


123

「政在悅近 “Good government consists in making those who are

close feel satisfied

而來遠。」 and rallying those who are far away.”

哀公問政於仲尼, Duke Ai asked Confucius about government.


「政在選賢。」 “Good government consists in selecting the talented.”

齊景公問政於仲尼, Duke Jıng of Qı asked Confucius about government.


「政在節財。」 “Good government consists in economic use of

resources.” (HF 38.7.1)

At a later stage Wang Tong 王通 (d. AD 617) celebrates Confucius’s refusal to be

decontextualized in his discourse on good governance through imitation. Wang

Tong insists that taking proper account of the ad-hocness of all sincere and relevant

ethical discourse is just what made Confucius into a sage rather than a mere learned

hack:

越公問政。 When Lord Yue, i.e. Yang Su (楊素)14 asked about political

administration

子曰 : the Master said:

「恭以儉。」 “Show polite economy of effort.”

邳公問政。 When Su Wei 蘇威15 asked about political administration


「清以平。」 “Be morally pure and even-handed.”

安平公問政。 When Lı Delın 李德林16 asked about political administration


「無鬥人以

名。」

“Never to fight with people for fame.” (ZHONGSHUO 6.20, ed.

張沛, 中說校註, Beijing, 中華書局, 2013, p. 161.)

The predominant discourse on government in the Analects and in its successor, the

Zhōngshuō, is not abstract, decontextualized but situational: it is something like adhominem or rather ad personam advice in the sense that the making of the moral

statements is intended to be relevant to the persons and the situations under

discussion, and not in any sense valid generally and abstractly. The logical form of

this moral discourse is “I hereby declare that what is relevant to you in your role and

in your current situation is as follows: …”.

Who then is that imagined paradigmatic moral agent addressed and more

distantly intended by Confucius’s discourses? Before one can begin to decide on

this kind of question it is important to focus on very ancient and still current Chinese

14 He died 606, poet and general, appointed Duke of Yue 越公, member of Wang Tong’s group of

visitors and interlocutors.15 AD 542-623, important politician, also referred to as Duke of Pei 邳公.16 Suı dynasty official, died AD 591, also known as Duke of Anpıng 安平公.

524 C. Harbsmeier

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notions of social mobility and of universal solidarity. The early Confucian

philosopher Mencius went out of his way to stress the moral potential in all human

beings:

人皆可以為堯舜。 “Every human can become a (sage emperor)

Yao or a (sage emperor) Shun.”

And Confucius himself advocated fraternité:

四海之內, 皆兄弟也。 ”All men within the Four Seas are brothers.” (LY 12.5)

The potential for moral behavior is present in every human being even according to

the systematizing philosopher Xunzı 荀子 (ca. 313-238 BC) who, having argued

very forcefully and repetitively that by nature man was bad, went on to show how

man does have an innate capacity of being taught to become good.17 Thus, there is

no sense in which followers of Confucius denied that all men are potential moral

agents. In principle, all men were taken to have the potential to become as wise and

as creative as a sage emperor.18 In principle, there is no question that the early

Chinese thinkers could have formulated their moral principles in this universal

spirit, in terms of no other role than that of being human. And sometimes they do.

Yet, it turns out that in communicative practice - and for understandable practical

reasons - early Confucian moral discourse is in general addressed to the social class

of the shì 士 “educated persons” only, and what is philosophically more serious,

moral norms are typically expressed as adapted to and appropriate for the members

of the ruling classes only, even when these moral norms have the welfare of the

common people as their aim, as they should do, according to Mencius:

民為貴, “The people are of the greatest importance;

社稷次之, the state [literally: the altars of the gods of earth

and grain] is next in importance;

君為輕。 the ruler is least in importance.” (MENG 7B14)

Good government serves the interests of the people who do take precedence over the

nation. And the moral norms are conceived for those who are to conduct that good

government. Pre-Buddhist Chinese philosophical literature remains court literature.

Aspirations for the Way are naturally ascribed to the shì 士:


「士志於道, “If an educated person aspires to the Way

而恥惡衣惡食者, but he considers poor clothing or poor food as disgraceful,

未足與議也。」 then he is not quite worth entering into discussions with.”

(LY 4.9)

17 See Paul Rakita Goldin, Rituals of the Way: The Philosophy of Xunzi (Chicago: Open Court, 1999).18 See Tu Weiming, The Global Significance of Concrete Humanity: Essays on the Confucian Discoursein Cultural China (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd, 2010) for a forceful advocacy

of this traditional Confucian humanistic tradition. Compare also W. T. de Bary, Asian Values and HumanRights: A Confucian Communitarian Perspective (Wing-Tsit Chan Memorial Lectures)(Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 2000).


123

The social class of the shì士 consists pretty exactly of those literate few from whom

the governing officialdom is recruited. The social history of this class has been

described in an exemplary manner by Yu Ying-shih of Princeton University in an

important Chinese book entitled The Shì and Chinese Culture.19

One passage, recently excavated, and dating to around 300 BC indicates that it is

the shì who may aspire to the jūn zǐ dào 君子道 “the Way of the jūn zǐ”:

士有志於君子道謂之志士 “The shì who aspires to the Way of the jūn zǐ iscalled a shì with proper aspirations.”20

The paradigmatic ideal moral agent of the shì class, who is to implement proper

zhèng 政 “administration/government” is the morally superior cultivated shì. He is

referred to throughout the literature as the jūn zǐ 君子 “gentleman: person of

superior character.” In the Confucian miscellany Book of Rites (4th - 3rd cent. BC),the very disciple Zızhang I mentioned a moment ago is given a more lively and

indeed more conventional answer to the same question about government. And this

answer assumes that the proper practitioner of good governance is a jūn zǐ:

子張問政, Zızhang asked about government.

子曰 : The Master said,

「師乎! “Shı,

前,吾語女乎? ∙ did I not instruct you on that subject before?

君子明於禮樂, The gentleman (jūn zǐ) who is well acquainted

with ceremonial usages and music

舉而錯之而已。」 has only to take and apply them (in order to

practice good government).” (LIJI 21.8.24)

The conversational style of all this is of philosophical significance: Confucius seems

to refuse to enter a mode of discourse in which what he says abstracts from the

audience and the situation of utterance. It is almost as if Confucius refuses to enter

the kind of generalizing mode which we tend to associate with philosophy, since

Aristotle at least. But one thing is clear: zhèng 政 “administration” is paradigmat-

ically the business of the jūn zǐ 君子 “gentleman” insofar as such a gentleman is a

member of the ruling class. Confucius himself was consumed by unfulfilled

ambition. He did consider himself as a member of this ruling class.

2 The Concept of the Jūn Zǐ 君子 “Gentleman”

The problem concerning the pre-supposed social construal of the moral agent

implicit in moral statements in classical Chinese comes out clearly when we

consider this term jūn zǐ 君子 “son-of-a-ruler/person of superior status/gentleman/

person of superior character/exemplary person” more carefully. Confucian ethics is

19 Yu Yıngshı 余英時, 士和中國文化 (上海 : 上海人民出版社, 1987).20 郭店, 五行. Scott Cook, The Bamboo Texts of Guodian: A Study and Complete Translation (Ithaca:

East Asia Program, 2012, vol. 1, p. 489).

526 C. Harbsmeier

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all about specifying the moral attributes of a true jūn zǐ, the ideal moral agent. Since

jūn zǐ is a core concept of Confucian moral philosophy it deserves a close

conceptual analysis.

To begin with it is not philosophically irrelevant that this pre-supposed moral

agent never is and never could be a woman in the contexts envisaged in the

Confucian Analects. The exclusion of women, however, is not a dogma maintained

by anyone. Especially by Han times, the social virtue of filial piety, as we shall see,

was exemplified mostly by women serving their parents in exemplary ways.21

Moreover, the Assorted Biographies of Women of the early first century AD, already

referred to above, provides a rich panorama of expected moral behavior by

women.22 The translation “exemplary person” fails to bring out this essential feature

of early Chinese moral thinking. I shall return to this issue in the brief discussion of

filial piety below.

The term jūn zǐ 君子 literally “ruler son” is generally taken to have two separate

meanings of which the first predominates in pre-Confucian literature, and the second

in the Confucian Analects:

1. literal: “man of superior status, gentleman”

2. figurative: “man of exemplary character; exemplary person.”

Similarly, xiǎo rén 小人 “little person” is taken to have two separate meanings:

1. literal: “man of inferior status, ordinary person”

2. figurative: “man of inferior character, petty person.”

I believe the separation between the literal and the figurative, here as often

elsewhere in early Chinese literature, is far from absolute. The philosophically

disconcerting fact is that from Confucius’s time onwards there is not so much

equivocation as semantic oscillation between these two meanings in the same

context, and even something like suspended deliberate ambiguity. It is as if a

resonance of the literal meaning tends to attach to the figurative meaning as some

kind of unacknowledged vaguely presupposed reminiscence.

It seems that whereas jūn zǐ commonly has a clearly social meaning, namely

“person of superior status” without any connotation of moral superiority, it is not so

clear that when used figuratively to mean “person of superior character,” the term

ever quite completely dispels the suggestion that such a “person of superior

character” will naturally happen not to be anyone like beggar of low birth. The

celebration of supreme “Taoist” wisdom in persons of extremely low social status in

the book Zhuāngzǐ has no comparably insistent parallel in pre-Han “Confucian”

texts.

A “proper” upper-class formation (though not necessarily upper-class origins) is

perceived to be a necessary condition for becoming a person of superior character in

21 Consider here the extremely popular early 14th century illustrated book Guo Jujıng 郭居敬, Èrshísìxiào 二十四孝 “Twenty-four Instances of Filial Piety” which concentrates entirely on filial females.22 See Kinney 2014.


123

early texts; but as all too many historical examples prove, having enjoyed such an

education, being brought up as a member of the upper classes, being a person of

superior status is not a sufficient condition for becoming a person of superior

character.

In the great historical narrative commentary Zuǒzhuàn 左傳 (ca. 4th century BC)

the term xiǎo rén “petty man” is used literally to refer to persons of low status,

ordinary people. The opposition jūn zǐ versus xiǎo rén is often social rather than

moral in contexts that have become proverbial in Chinese culture:

是故君子勤禮, 小人盡力。 “Therefore the gentleman exerts himself

on ritual propriety, the ordinary person

uses all his physical strength.” ZUO

8.13.2.3; see also ZUO 9.13.3.)23

君子勞心, 小人勞力, 先王之制也。 “The gentleman works with his mind, the

ordinary person works with his physical

strength: that is the system of the Former

Kings.” (ZUO 9.9.5.5)

Occasionally, the difference between jūn zǐ and xiǎo rén appears to be one between

the civil and the military part of administration, where our literary sources would

naturally come down heavily in favor of the former:

立君子以修禮樂, “One appoints gentlemen (jūn zǐ) tocultivate the rites and music,

立小人以教用兵 and one appoints ordinary people to train

and deploy troops.”24

The Confucian philosopher Mencius spells out the political implications of this:

或勞心, “Some work with their minds,

或勞力。 others work with their physical strength.

勞心者治人, Those who work with their minds govern others,

勞力者治於人。』 those who work with their physical strength are

governed by others.

治於人者食人, Those who are governed by others, feed others,

治人者食於人, those who govern others are fed by others.

天下之通義也。 That is the pervasive principle of rectitude in All

under Heaven.” (MENG 3A 4.11)

Relevant discourse involving the purely social meaning of jūn zǐ is well known to becommon in the Confucian Analects:

子路曰 : Zılu said:

「君子尚勇乎?」 “Should the gentleman set highest store by

courage?”

23 See also Book of Songs 167.5 which contrasts upper class jūn zǐ君子 with lower class soldiers xiǎo rén小人.24 逸周書, 大聚解 ed. Huang Huaixın, Yì Zhōushū huìjiào jízhù (逸周書匯校集注), p. 424.

528 C. Harbsmeier

123


「君子義以為上。 “The gentleman should be concerned with

rectitude, and that is what he should set highest.

君子有勇而無義為亂, If a gentleman has courage but no rectitude he

will engage in political revolt,

小人有勇而無義為盜。」 and if a man of low status has courage but no

rectitude he will engage in thievery.” (LY 17.23)

The supposition that someone should be an “exemplary person” and lack a sense of

what is right is rather like the supposition that something should be a circle but have

four corners. What makes this statement meaningful and indeed analytically

interesting is the fact that for Confucius the notion of jūn zǐ here does primarily refer

to social status as such: it refers to a person belonging to the actual or potential

ruling class.

孔子曰 : Confucius said:

「侍於君子有三愆 : In serving a gentleman jūn zǐ there are three kinds of

wrong procedure:

言未及之而言, when one’s public presentation has not got to a certain

point and one already speaks up on it,

謂之躁 ; that is called rashness;

言及之而不言, when discussions have reached the relevant point but

one does not speak up

謂之隱 ; that is called reticence;

未見顏色而言, when one speaks before one has seen the facial

expression of one’s audience

謂之瞽。」 that is called being unobservant. (LY 16.6)

Again, the reference of the term jūn zǐ must be to a person of potentially high status

though not necessarily of literally high rank. This quotation demonstrates that in the

Analects the term jūn zǐ is currently used in its social and not in its moral sense.

The continuing connotation of high social status for jūn zǐ and low social status

for xiǎo rén comes out nicely in a very famous quotation from the Confucian

philosopher Mencius:

君子之德, The virtue of the gentleman

風也 ; is like wind;

小人之德, the virtue of the small man

草也。 is like grass. (MENG 3A 2.10)

It is the influence of the wind that will make the grass bend, no matter whether the

grass wants to bend or not. The point here is not that Mencius is guilty of

equivocation on the term jūn zǐ. The point is that even when the term is primarily

one of moral appraisal, the social connotation is by no means absent. It is

backgrounded, suggested, presupposed.

In other cases, Mencius takes the opposition between jūn zǐ and xiǎo rén to be

clearly social and not at all moral:


123

其君子實玄黃于篚 The gentlemen filled baskets with black and yellow silk

以迎其君子, to bid the gentlemen welcome;

其小人簞食壺漿 the common people brought baskets of food and bottles

of drink

以迎其小人。 to bid the common people welcome. (MENG 3B5.9)

君子犯義, When gentlemen offend against what is right

小人犯刑, and common people risk punishment,

國之所存者, if a state survives

幸也。 then it is good fortune indeed. (MENG 4A 1.6)

Offenders against what is right yì are not “exemplary persons.” The reference of jūnzǐ here must be to persons of high status, to “gentlemen.”

Similar observations are relevant to the following:

君子去仁, 惡乎成名? “If a jūn zǐ rejects human-heartedness, how can

he make a name for himself?” (LY 4.5)

An “exemplary person” who rejects human-heartedness would cease to be an

exemplary man. If he became famous, it would no longer be an exemplary man who

became famous. The reference, here, is to a person of the ruling class. It cannot be to

an “exemplary person.” The person who is said to be unable to make a name for

himself must be a member of the ruling class, not an exemplary person.

Against the background of the preceding, let me now turn to a potentially crucial

text from the Analects in which the issue of the relationship between status and

moral potential is perhaps even topicalized, if we take the preceding readings of jūnzǐ and xiǎo rén as applicable to this text:


「君子而不仁者有矣夫? “There are those who are jūn zǐ but who are

devoid of human-heartedness, aren’t there?

未有小人而仁者也 ! 」 There has never been any such thing as a xiǎorén who was human-hearted.” (LY 14.6)

On the face of it, it might appear that Confucius is claiming here that persons of

high status, members of the ruling classes surely show a lack of kind-heartedness, as

we all know. And then he might be taken to go on claiming that on the other hand

persons of low status are never found to show human-heartedness. He would be

saying that those ordinary people can be well-governed, loyal, obedient, 不犯上

“non-recalcitrant with respect to his superiors” and so on. But this particular

gentlemanly virtue of kind-heartedness rén 仁 they have not.

To be sure, this is not how Confucius has been understood, traditionally. But the

problem is that traditional readings of this text first tend to attribute to Confucius a

self-contradictory notion that one can be an exemplary person and lack the

exemplary virtue of rén 仁 “human-heartedness,” and then, second, they attribute to

him the perfectly tautological thought that a morally deficient xiǎo rén could, by

definition, never be rén 仁 “human-hearted.” As if anybody could be in any doubt

about such a tautological observation. I have illustrated in some detail above how

the interpretation of xiǎo rén as a primarily social term is current before the Analects

530 C. Harbsmeier

123

as well as in the Analects. If we are entitled to read this passage in the spirit of those

examples, then our passage becomes plain, though clearly at variance with what

many traditional interpreters have wanted to read as a remarkably tautological

statement. If a xiǎo rén is defined as one lacking in moral sensibilities like that of

human-heartedness, then to say that such a xiǎo rén never is human-hearted is not

meaningless but curiously vacuous.

But are there any other indications that rén 仁 is a virtue that somehow

paradigmatically links up with rulers and with the ruling elite rather than with subjects

and ordinary people? That is the question which I pursue in the following section.

3 The Concept of RÕn 仁 “Human-Heartedness” and the HierarchicalEmbedding of Some Early Chinese Virtues

Consider now first the very general term yì 義 “rectitude; duty.” This is how that

term is semantically unpacked in the Book of Rites (a Confucianist ritual miscellany

dating from the 4th to 2nd centuries BC, perhaps compiled even later) and it is

resolved and analyzed into a set of ten role-defined virtues. Abstract rectitude

dissolves into concrete duties towards others.

何謂人義? What are “the things which men consider right?”

父慈, Kindness on the part of the father,

子孝, and filial duty on that of the son;

兄良, gentleness on the part of the elder brother,

弟弟, and obedience on that of the younger;

夫義, righteousness on the part of the husband,

婦聽, and submissiveness on that of the wife;

長惠, kindness on the part of the elders,

幼順, and deference on that of the juniors;

君仁, with human-heartedness on the part of the ruler,

臣忠, and loyalty on that of the minister;

十者, - these ten

謂之人義。 are the things which men consider to be right. (LIJI 9.2.19)

It is in contexts like these that the intimate presupposed link of moral virtues to social

hierarchies becomes explicit. Consider the cardinal virtue in the Analects, rén 仁

“human-heartedness.” The notion is generally expounded without reference to any

social hierarchy, as the cardinal virtue that applies everywhere and to everyone. And

yet our text here makes it very clear that in fact the notion of “kind-heartedness” in

early Confucianism is very basically a virtue one has insofar one governs or has

responsibility for others. It is the paradigmatic virtue or ethical domain of a jūn君, or

by extension of a jūnzǐ君子 “gentleman/(ruling-class) person of superior character.”25

25 And yet, LY 8.2 shows that this ruler’s virtue can indeed huà 化 “transform through education” the

people and cause them to rise to the task of imitating him, as Huang Kan’s 皇侃 (AD 488-545)

commentary takes care to explain in his commentary: 下民效之不為薄行 “The people below imitate/

emulate him and do not engage in ungenerous action.” 黃小懷,論語彙校集釋, (上海:上海古籍出版社,

2008), p. 676. See also


123

The following quotation makes the same point about the cardinal virtue of

human-heartedness. Here the roles relevant for the definitions of virtues are made

explicit. In classical Chinese this is idiomatically expressed by the addition of the

word rén 人 “of others” before the name of each role:

為人君, As a ruler of others,止於仁 ; he rested in benevolence;

為人臣, as a minister of someone,止於敬 ; he rested in respect;26

為人子, as a son of someone,止於孝 ; he rested in filial piety;

為人父, as a father of someone,止於慈 ; he rested in kindness;

與國人交, in interaction with senior men of the state,止於信。 he rested in good faith. (LIJI 42.1.19 (Great Learning); italics mine)

Here, on the other hand, is a splendid example where Confucius might appear to

disregard hierarchical relations and to speak of some kind of symmetrical

reciprocity:

子曰 : 忠恕違道不遠, 施諸己而不願, 亦勿施於人。“If you do your loyal

best and you practice reciprocity/fairness, you will not deviate far from THE

WAY: If, when someone does something to you you wish he did not do it, then

you should likewise not do this to another person.” (LIJI 31.1.32.)27

Doing one’s loyal best and practicing reciprocity are kinds of behavior that inscribe

themselves into the social hierarchical system.

Supposing for a moment that the passage that follows this should be read as

unfolding that WAY from which one does not deviate when doing one’s loyal best

and practicing fairness, this would illustrate if not demonstrate the predominantly

role-based nature of the norms implicit in the notion of the Way:

君子之道四, “In the Way of the superior man there are four things,

丘未能一焉 : and I am not yet capable of any of these:

所求乎子, - To serve my father

Footnote 25 continued

子曰 :「如有王者, “If there is a True King

必世而後仁。」 then first after one generation human-heartedness will prevail.” (LY 13.12)

Here again, kind-heartedness is construed as originating with the ruler. In this instance it remains an open

question where in society human-heartedness is to prevail.

26 On the central topic of the Chinese virtue of jìng 敬 “reverence; proper respect” see the comparative

study Paul Woodruff, Reverence. A Review of a Forgotten Virtue, (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2001). Woodruff compares the cases of ancient Greece and of ancient China. In particular, he points out

how Plato and Confucius do converge in the importance they attach to reverence as a crucial constituent

of the moral life.27 Contrast the translation in Goldin 2005, p. 1.

532 C. Harbsmeier

123

以事父, as I would require my son to serve me,

未能也 ; I am not yet capable;

所求乎臣, to serve my ruler

以事君, as I would require my minister to serve me,


所求乎弟, to serve my elder brother

以事兄, as I would require a younger brother to serve me,


所求乎朋友, to behave to my friends first

先施之, as I would require them to behave to me,

未能也。 I am not yet capable.”

子張問仁於孔子。 Zı Zhang asked Confucius about human-heartedness.


「能行五者於天下, “Anyone who can practice five things in the world

為仁矣。」 must count as Good.”

「請問之 ? 」 “May I ask about those?”

曰 : Confucius replied:

「恭、寬、信、敏、惠 : “These are politeness, forgiveness, trustworthiness,

skillfulness, and generosity.

恭則不侮, If one is polite one will not humiliate others.

寬則得眾, If one is forgiving one will win over the multitudes.

信則人任焉, If one is trusty then others will rely on one.

敏則有功, If one is adroit then one will succeed.

惠則足以使人。」 If one is generous then one is qualified to deploy

others.” (LY 17.6)

Only people of high status can tend to humiliate others, hope to win over the

multitudes or deploy others, and so on.

Take the important virtue of shù 恕 “reciprocity” which might appear at first

sight to conceptualize the abstraction from relations of social hierarchy: “What you

yourself do not desire, do not do unto others.” This sounds like the Golden Rule, but

as Paul Goldin (2005: 1) points out “in the context of early China, shù means doing

unto others as you would have others do unto you, if you were in the same socialsituation as they.” (Italics mine)28

Up to now I have found it necessary to illustrate through extensive documentation the

deep underlying, presupposed link between social rank on the one hand and morally

expected behavior on the other. Now I have to turn to an example that on the face of it

seems to indicate that the common people are indeed expected, in an ideal world, to

become human-hearted themselves. Indeed, this is how I have always interpreted this

passage, much in the light of the memorable statement that “All men are capable of

becoming a (sage emperor)Yao or a (sage emperor) Shun” that I havementioned above:

顏淵問仁。 Yan Yuan asked about Goodness.


28 See also Harbsmeier 2011 on the same subject.


123

「克己復禮為仁。 “Gaining control of one’s Self and

turning to ritual constitutes Goodness”

一日克己復禮, If for one day one gains control of one’s

Self and turns to ritual

天下歸仁焉。 then all the world will rally to the human-

hearted. (LY 12.1)29

The Confucian commentator Huang Kan 皇侃 (AD 488-545) is the earliest source I

have come across which addresses our problem. He glosses the relevant passage

very helpfully:

天下之民咸歸於仁君也 “…then the people of All under Heaven

will all rally to the human-hearted ruler.”(ed. Huang Huaixın 黃懷信 p. 1061)

Tobe human-heartedwill naturally lead others to rally to one as a human-hearted leader.30

The operative phrase guī rén歸仁 recurs in the Mencius (an important Confucian

text dating to the 4th century B.C.):

民之歸仁也, The people rally to the human-hearted

猶水之就下, as water flows downwards

獸之走壙也。 or as animals run off to the wilds. (MENG 4A9.3)31

The oldest commentator on the Mencius, Zhao Qı 趙歧 (d. AD 200), comments

explicitly on the point that interests us here and identifies the attitude of the people

as an attitude to the human-hearted ruler (as enlightened through his human-

heartedness) and not to human-heartedness as an abstract object:

民之思明君猶水樂埤下… “The people’s thought of their enlightened ruler islike water’s delighting in lower territory.” (ed. Jiao Xun 焦循, Mèngzǐ zhèngyì孟子正義, Beijing: 中華書店, 1987, p. 505)

There is another passage that would appear to be problematic for my account of the

social context of human-heartedness in the Analects:

樊遲問仁。 Fan Chı asked about goodness.


「愛人。」 “It is caring properly for others.”

問知。 He asked about understanding.


「知人。」 “Understanding others.” (LY 12.22)

Here comes the crux: What exactly does ài 愛 “care properly for; love” refer to in

such a context? And the point is that ài rén 愛人 “take good care of others” is

something that behooves a rén jūn 人君 “ruler of men” who is beholden to take

29 For further detailed discussion on this passage see Paul Goldin, Confucianism, (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 2011), pp. 19–21.30 I have taken this to refer to “turning to the human-heartedness” for many decades, as do most

translators, and it is only now that I find the other interpretation in the early commentaries.31 See the authoritative translation by D. C. Lau which has “the people turn to the benevolent.”

534 C. Harbsmeier

123

proper care of his subjects. In order to understand this, it is helpful to concentrate on

the proverbial idiom jìng shàng ài xià 敬上愛下 “respecting those above and taking

good care of those below,” for which Google returns over one million results. (This

comes in Shuōyuàn 說苑19.3 (First century AD edifying compendium), and the

Tàipíngjīng 108.32 (Taoist compilation of uncertain date, perhaps ca. 4th century

AD)).

The Discussions on Iron and Salt of the first century BC sum up the directionality

of ài 愛 “love; loving care” and put politics into that characteristic family-clan

context:

古者, 人君敬事愛下, 使民以時, 天子以天下為家, 臣妾各以其時供公職, 古

今之通義也。 “In ancient times rulers went about their business with respectful

diligence and took good care of ài愛 those below. They deployed the people in

accordance with the seasons and treated All under Heaven as a family. Male and

female subjects each performed their public duties in accordance with the

seasons. That was the pervasive moral rule in ancient and modern times.”

(Yántiělùn 鹽鐵論 29)

There can be little doubt that human-heartedness is a virtue appropriate for members

of ruling class even though the discourse about it is mostly directed personally at an

interlocutor. Thus in the following “winning over the multitudes,” for example, as

well as “employing others” are not for any ordinary member of society.32

Norms of morally proper behavior are predicated upon the social roles and social

situations of those to whom norms apply. And if a systematic attempt were made in

a culture to philosophically (rather than traditionally) justify those norms hallowed

by a tradition that attaches to social roles we begin to have “role ethics” combined

with something one might call “situation ethics.”33 Until such a philosophical effort

is made by Chinese thinkers, what we have is role-governed, situation-based

traditional and conventional morality. And it is worth remembering that what we

have, there, - no matter how we judge it from our modern analytic perspectives - is

one of the historically most profoundly influential moral frameworks the world has

known.

4 The Concept of Xiào 孝 “Filial Piety”

The anthropological source of ethically evaluative sentiments in ancient China is

adumbrated already in the Confucian Analects. By such sentiments I mean the

emotional attachment to moral rules or moral virtues. At the very basis of rén 仁

“human-heartedness,” we are told, are the role-based virtues of xiào 孝 “filial piety”

and tì 弟/悌 “brotherly love”:

32 It will be remembered that Confucius is concerned with human-heartedness as a virtue appropriate for

ruling classes that he is educating also in Analects 17.6 quoted above.33 Joseph Fletcher, Situation Ethics (Westminster: John Knox Press, 1997). See the lengthy method-

ological introduction by James F. Childress.


123

君子務本, “The gentleman concentrates his efforts on what is basic.

本立而道生。 Once what is basic is established, then the Way will

[naturally] emerge.

孝弟也者, As for filial piety and fraternal love (in general),

其為仁之本與!」 these must count as the basis for Goodness, mustn’t they?”

(LY 1.2)

The Classic of Filial Piety (a Confucian work, ca. 2nd century BC) makes the ethical

point explicit:


「夫孝, “As for filial piety,

德之本也, it is the basis of virtue dé,教之所由生也。 it is that from which (moral) teaching jiào arises.” (XJ 1.2)

The evolving functionality of filial piety is laid out thus:

「夫孝, “Now as for filial piety,

始於事親, it begins with serving one’s parents,

中於事君, it has its middle part in serving one’s ruler,

終於立身。」 and it has its final part in establishing one’s person.” (XJ 1.4)

Thus filial piety is not only the source of one’s service-mindedness vis-a-is one’s

ruler. It is also that which constitutes one’s shēn 身 “personality/personal identity.”

Filial piety is the alpha and omega of all moral conduct. And at the center of it is

indeed the service and service-mindedness vis-a-vis a person in charge. The moral

sentiments attaching to xiào “filial piety” are those attaching to the values

established and personified by a superior. The father does “stand for” all the moral

values that make him deserving of this xiào. But his authority is unconditional and

conceptually quite independent of the question of his moral excellence or his moral

character. A father is owed filial piety even after it has become clear that he has

committed a crime. The son of such a father has two contradictory obligations: one

to his father and one to the legal system represented by the ruler. Confucius is in no

doubt which should take precedence:

葉公語孔子曰 : The Duke of She told Confucius:

「吾黨有直躬者 : “In my village there was someone of morally straight

personality:

其父攘羊而子證之。」 his father had stolen a goat and as a son he witnessed

against his father.”


「吾黨之直者異於是 : “The morally straight in my village were different from

such a person:

父為子隱, the father would hide things on behalf of the son,

子為父隱, and the son would hide things on behalf of the father.

直在其中矣。」 There is moral straightness in this.” (LY 13.18)

And here, then, is a derivation of some virtues from that relational virtue of xiào“filial piety”:

536 C. Harbsmeier

123

曾子曰 : 11. Zengzı said,

「身也者, “The body

父母之遺體也。 is that which has been transmitted to us by our parents;

行父母之遺體, dare any one allow himself to be irreverent

敢不敬乎? ∙ in the employment of their legacy?

居處不莊, If a man in his own house and privacy be not grave,

非孝也 ; he is not filial;

事君不忠, if in serving the ruler, he be not loyal,


蒞官不敬, if in discharging the duties of office, he be not reverent,


朋友不信, if with friends he be not sincere,

非孝也; he is not filial;

戰陳無勇, if on the field of battle he be not brave,

非孝也 ; he is not filial.

五者不遂, If he fail in these five things,

災及於親, the evil (of the disgrace) will reach his parents;

敢不敬乎? ∙ - dare he but reverently attend to them?” (LIJI 24.2.24)

Political compliance is genealogically derived from filial piety already in the

Confucian Analects:

「其為人也孝弟而好犯上者, “That anyone whose personality conforms to filial

piety and fraternal love should yet be prone to

offend the authorities,

鮮矣 ; that is quite rare.

不好犯上而好作亂者, For someone not prone to offending superiors yet

to be prone to creating political rebellions,

未之有也。 that never occurs. (LY 1.2)

Indefatigable reverential conformity to paternal moral prescript and practice defines

morality, and the ethical, philosophical question why a father does deserve this

obedience, and why the mother does not get problematized at this point. Paternalism

is postulated not only as a principle of public government, it is at least as much a

principle of family governance:

三年無改於父之道, If for three years he in no way tries to introduce

improvements to (and thus deviate from) his

father’s ways of behavior

可謂孝矣。」 that may properly be called filial piety. (LY 1.11;

4.20; see also LIJI 1.2.4)

It is something like blasphemy to openly suggest a need for improving on one’s

father, and most texts try not to think of the possible cases in which a father is found

to offend the moral norms. Too much emphasis on this is felt to be, as it were

“culturally ungrammatical.” As we have seen above, the traditional ethical norm

would seem to be for a son to hide any minor crimes of his father, and for a father to

hide any minor crimes of his son. Really serious crimes are not, as far as I know,


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envisaged in the early Confucian texts. It is in the nature of classical Chinese

philology that questions of this order would be best studied in the vast commentarial

literature attaching to the locus classicus, which remains Analects 13.18.When it comes to a realistic assessment of what needs to happen, sons of bad

fathers must quietly turn a new moral leaf. It is the preponderance of polite

sentimental moral rhetoric over cool moral analysis in our sources that makes the

task of a modern philosophical analysis so difficult. Philosophical analysis would

need to take such sources as the above literally to sound out its philosophical

consequences. But in fact the Chinese “reception history” of Confucian texts shows

that such rule conflicts could be discussed quite realistically without mechanical

adherence to such rules as that in LY 1.11 and elsewhere in the classical literature.

Filial piety consists in never showing wéi 違 “recalcitrant disobedience.”

Obedience is crucially defined in terms of traditionalist lǐ 禮 “ritual propriety.”

樊遲御, When Fan Chı was driving the chariot

子告之曰 : the master reported this to him:

「孟孫問孝於我, “Mengsun asked me about filial piety.

我對曰, I replied politely:

無違。」 ‘It is not to be disobedient.’”

樊遲曰 : Fan Chı said:

「何謂也 ? 」 “What did you mean?”


「生, 事之以禮 ; “While they are alive one serves them

according to ritual propriety;

死, 葬之以禮, When they die, one buries them

according to ritual propriety,

祭之以禮。」 and one sacrifices to them according to

ritual propriety.” (LY 2.5)34

The basic notion of a moral agent as his own autonomous master, as Kant would

have it, is not so much rejected as not contemplated here as elsewhere in the

Analects. The basicness of the virtue of filial piety is at the same time a fundamental

deference to seniority on the one hand, and to old established tradition of ritual

propriety on the other. To be moral is to morally defer. And to understand morality

is to know how to defer properly and judiciously, according to the concrete

situations one is exposed to. And it is here that ancient Confucian ways of thinking

do come fairly close to some post-Kantian approaches in moral philosophy.

Such deferential obedient ritual observance must be imbued with the true

spiritual attitude of diligent reverence, jìng 敬.

子游問孝。 Zıyou asked about filial piety.


「今之孝者, “As for filial piety these days,

是謂能養。 this refers to being able to nourish.

至於犬馬, But when it comes to dogs and horses

34 Compare also LY 12.1.

538 C. Harbsmeier

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皆能有養 ; they are all able to have those they take proper

care of and nourish.

不敬, If one is not showing proper respect,

何以別乎。」 whereby is one to make the distinction?” (LY 2.7)

The art of filial piety involves a demonstrative cultivation of ritual self-denying

abstemiousness:

孔子曰 : Confucius said,

「啜菽飲水盡其歡, “Slurping bean soup, and drinking water, while

making one’s parents completely happy,

斯之謂孝. such may be pronounced filial piety.” (LIJI 4.2.44)

Nothing demonstrates this self-abnegation more dramatically than the abundantly

publicized and well-documented filial medical cannibalism, a practice of filial

daughters (and less often sons) feeding their own flesh to their acutely sick parents

in the hope that such excruciating acts of filial piety will effect a cure on those

whom they serve.35

Han dynasty (206 BC to AD 220) endemic obsession with filial piety, with all its

evident demonstrative excesses, did have a very philosophical basis in the

derivation of all moral behavior from just this one supremely natural virtue. Filial

piety was felt to be so natural because all humans naturally owe their shēn 身

“physical bodies,” also “persons” to their progenitors and indirectly to those

ancestors filial piety obliged them cultivate through ritual sacrifices of many kinds.

Thus sustained attempts are made to justify the moral obligations of men as

“natural” consequence of one’s human condition as inherited from one’s parents and

one’s ancestors. Role ethics is made abundantly explicit in ancient Chinese writings.

The moral obligations are construed not as concerning Die Stellung des Menschenim Kosmos, but as ontogenetically relational and interpersonal as well as culturally

historical. The matter of status ethics is different. In this case the texts we have are

clearly written for members of a certain elite of leaders or aspiring leaders.

Unwittingly more than deliberately Chinese virtues are formulated (and often

interpreted) as paradigmatically and primarily characteristic of and appropriate for

the leadership group. Understanding the early Chinese Confucian Chinese virtues is,

then, fundamentally a matter of understanding their family-relational specificities

and their situational susceptibilities. The later history of ethical discourse in China is

the steady decontextualization of the early Confucian discourse tradition, and the

gradual detachment of morally evaluative discourse from role ethics, from status

ethics, and from situation ethics.

35 For an exhaustive historical documentation of this filial cannibalism see Key Ray Chong, Cannibalismin China (Wakefield: Longwood Academic, 1990),黃文雄,《中國食人史》(Taipei:前衛出版社, 2005),

Bengt Pettersson, Cannibalism in the Dynastic Histories (Stockholm: Bulletin of the Museum of Far

Eastern Antiquities, no. 71, 1999, p. 140), and more marginally also the interesting book Tina Lu,

Accidental Incest, Filial Cannibalism, and Other Peculiar Encounters in Late Imperial Chinese Literature(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). Of course, there was much more to filial piety than such

carnal self-sacrifice. For much narrative and historical detail see For medieval developments see the rich

monograph Keith Knapp, Selfless Offspring: Filial Children And Social Order in Medieval China(Honolulu: Hawai’i University Press, 2005).


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The philosopher Xunzı 荀子, an admirer of Confucius, was no longer just in

moral and political conversation with rulers above and disciples below. He was

writing systematic “decontextualized” thematic essays.36 (One can easily see why

he is sometimes described as China’s Aristotle.) But his writings still were a kind of

philosophical court literature, designed for perusal by leaders or aspiring courtiers,

as was indeed the remarkable writings of Xunzı’s anti-Confucian disciple Han Fei

韓非 (d. 233 BC).37 The intended readership of this kind of philosophical literature

still was a fairly narrow class of leaders and rulers. By Song times, the philosopher

Zhu Xı 朱熹 (AD 1130-1200) cultivated a more abstract and philological ethical

discourse directed at a wider intellectual readership which came to include most if

not all of the literate population of China. His table talk, the Zhūzǐ yǔlèi 朱子語類

“Collected Table Talk of Master Zhu” is a masterpiece of easily readable colloquial

Chinese. One of his followers even went as far as to publish a dictionary of

philosophical terms in colloquial (and not the ubiquitous classical) Chinese.38

Epilogue

How, then, did the philosophical lesson our heavy smoker received at Peking

airport manage to inspire these reflections on Chinese moral thinking? It is because

he overlooked a very important underlying consequentialist pragmatism that has

permeated Chinese normative behavior throughout history. Norms were not

conceived as out-of-this-worldly absolutely mandatory imperatives. Neither moral,

political, legal, nor even religious norms tended to be of this sort. Chinese norms

always remain context-sensitive, as they say. One follows Buddhism or Taoism

because one deems it to be advisable to do so: It is inauspicious to break these rules,

it bodes ill, it carries the risk of natural cosmic retribution. One follows political

norms because one deems it advisable to do so: It would be dangerous for oneself

and for one’s family to do otherwise; one follows legal norms to the extent legal

sanctions make it advisable to do so. And there we are: One follows moral norms

because one deems it advisable to follow them insofar as they are taken to confirm

one’s secure place in the socially and politically pre-established hierarchy one has

grown to belong into.

Our heavy smoker, I conclude, was being given a crucial lesson on the modality

of the implementation of normativity in Chinese society. All norms inscribe

themselves into a social context. They do not impose themselves as absolutes onto

any social context. (Witness the open political disregard of the provisions of basic

freedoms in the Chinese constitution and in the Chinese legal system.) Immanuel

Kant thought very differently on what he regarded as the moral law. My

grandfather, a mathematician and a fundamentalist Kantian, held on to a strict view

of the moral law. When he saw this law broken by my aunt Hedwig who, when she

was about 10 years old, had faked his signature for a leave of absence in grammar

36 See John Knoblock, Xunzi: A Translation and Study of His Complete Works, 3 vols., (Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 1994).37 I have prepared an extensively annotated bilingual edition of this work which is being edited for

publication. Meanwhile, Thesaurus Linguae Sericae (URL: tls.uni-hd.de) contains an earlier line-by-line

translation of this book with linguistic annotation.38 Wing Tsit Chan, tr., Neo-Confucian Terms Explained: The Pei-hsi Tzu-i (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1986). Chen Chun 陳淳, 北溪字義, (北京 : 新華書局, 1983).

540 C. Harbsmeier

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http://tls.uni-hd.de

school, he forgot all about the social context of that breach of the norm: He

concluded – disastrously for my dear aunt Hedwig’s later life – that his little

daughter was somehow very fundamentally morally and humanly deficient. The

moral norm, for my grandfather, was absolute and not relative to social context.

This, perhaps, is one deep reason why Kant’s ethical thinking holds such fascination

for Chinese philosophers today. Kant offers a profound “fundamentalist” ethical

challenge. One such challenge concerns the status of norms regarding human rights.

But that is a different story.


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