Confucianism as Pol Philo

Confucianism as Political Philosophy: A Postmodern PerspectiveAuthor(s): Hwa Yol JungReviewed work(s):Source: Human Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1/2, Postmodernity and the Question of the Other (1993),pp. 213-230Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20010997 .

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Human Studies 16: 213-230, 1993. ? 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Confucianism as political philosophy: A postmodern perspective

HWA YOL JUNG

Department of Political Science, Moravian College, Bethlehem, PA 18018

There is neither a first word nor a last word. The contexts

of dialogue are without limit. They extend into the deepest past and most distant future. Even meanings born in

dialogues of the remotest past will never be finally grasped once and for all, for they will always be reviewed in later

dialogues.

Mikhail Bakhtin

1. Postmodernity and the hermeneutics of dialogue

The postmodern mood is well disposed to pluralism - that is, decentered

pluralism - of all kinds whose principium is ready receptivity to difference.1

Above all, it brings to focus and even preeminence the marginalized other

in philosophical discourse: it delegitimates the center and legitimates the

margin. For the perspective of this essay, the marginalized other of the

Occident in philosophical discourse is the Orient. Armed with the Foucaul?

dian genealogy, the literary theorist Edward W. Said (1978) brought to our

attention the marginalization of the Orient in the Western nexus of

knowledge and power. He calls the phenomenon of this marginalization "Orientalism."

The postmodern deconstructs the modern. In the context of this essay,

postmodernity as the philosophical counter-discourse of modernity is post Western (see Jung, 1989). By calling for the end of modernity, it intends to

loosen or deregulate the hegemonic grip by the West on truth. By deconstruction I wish to convey Heidegger's formulation (1982:23): that is, "a critical process in which the traditional concepts, which at first must

necessarily be employed, are de-constructed down to the sources from

which they were drawn."

Hermeneutics rules the life and times of postmodernity. Zygmunt



214

Bauman relegates the "jesterly" metaphor of an "interpreter" to the role

played by the postmodernist, whereas the "priestly" metaphor of a

"legislator" is reserved for the modernist. The interpreter facilitates com?

munication between autonomous participants, while the legislator authenti?

cates the validity of opinions by his superior knowledge (Bauman,

1987:4-5).2 As the art of interpretation, hermeneutics is the way of under?

standing the world in the plural. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

which is a noble attempt to formulate hermeneutics-centered postmodernity

by overcoming epistemology-centered modernity particularly in Descartes,

Locke, and Kant, the American neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty (1979:325) defines hermeneutics simply as "what we get when we are no longer

epistemological." It is the "edifying" way, as he puts it loosely and bluntly, of continuing humanity's conversation which is nothing other than a

multiple of dialogues. Hermeneutics and dialogue are inseparable, they go hand in hand.

Dialogue is in truth the soul of hermeneutics.3 There is, however, a radical

difference between hermeneutics as dialogue (dialogism) and dialectics in

the Western tradition of philosophy from Plato to Hegel and Marx. The

former is truly open-ended, while the latter is not. Dialogism is

"unfinalizable" - to use the expression of the Russian dialogist Mikhail

Bakhtin. In the context of comparative philosophy, the question of

dialogism is not a matter of "legislating" commensurability but of

"interpreting" comparability.4

Dialogism, as it has become known to us today, is the result of the

momentous discovery by Ludwig Feuerbach of a "thou." In dialogism or

dialogical ontology, there is nothing holier than the uneliminable presence of thou. In other words, the other as thou is the soul of dialogue. The

cardinal sin of modernity committed by the (Cartesian) Cogito is primarily twofold. In the first place, the Cogito is inherently monologic because it is

always and necessarily ego cogito (the "I think") - the ideal model of an

invisible man in splendid isolation from others, both other minds and other

bodies. In the second place, the mind as a thinking substance (res cogitons) is independent of the body (res extensa), it needs nothing more than itself to

exist. The Cogito is a magisterial system of disembodied intellection in

which the body is abandoned as the marginalized other of the mind. Once

the self and the other are viewed as disembodied substances, two self

contained substances, monologism - or even solipsism in extremis - is

inescapable. For Descartes, moreover, the disembodied mind as Cogito weaves the privatized cacoon of "clear and distinct ideas." Cartesian

metaphysics whose epicenter is the Cogito is identifiable with the panoptic

hegemony of vision or ocularcentric metaphysics. As a matter of fact, visual

metaphysics goes hand in hand with the monologism of the Cogito because



215

vision is not only isolating or distancing but also anaesthetic in denying the

sociability of the (other) senses: there is a narcissism and social amnesia of

and in all vision. In short, there is an identity between the "I" and the "eye." The Cogito is video ergo sum or the mind's I is the mind's eye. Heidegger

(1977:115-154) contends that the "I" (or the "eye") of the Cogito as

thinking substance becomes the center of thought from which the "I

viewpoint" or subjectivism of modern thought originates: "the subjectivity of the subject is determined by the T-ness' (Ichheit) of the T think.'" For

him, the "I-viewpoint" of the Cartesian Cogito highlights and heightens the

modern age as "the age of the world picture" (Weltbild). What is often overlooked in the structure of dialogue, unfortunately, is

the primacy of the other as alterity. It is the structure of the other as

"altarity" - to appropriate Mark C. Taylor's (1987) interesting concept

which signifies the sanctifying presence of the other as alterity. Thus

heteronomy becomes the regulative principle of dialogue. In this regard, it

is worth noting that in her controversial reporting of the 1961 Adolf

Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt attends to the issue of

"thoughtlessness" or the "banality of evil" in his crimes against humanity.

Thinking does not, for Arendt, refer to man's special gift and ability for

abstract and theoretical reasoning. Rather, for her, it is the natural gift for

humans, of all "rational" men and women, as common-sense or prudential wisdom (the true meaning of which is uncovered in the original Latin

expression sensus communis). Most importantly, Arendt (1965:49) faults

Eichmann's thoughtlessness for his lack or absence of other-directed

thinking, that is, heteronomic thinking: his thoughtlessness is identified

with his inability to think from the standpoint of others (see also Arendt,

1971). This point in relation to the issue of Eichmann's "banality of evil"

has rarely been noticed. Be that as it may, in Bakhtin's dialogism, in

particular, the primacy of the answer dictates the event of a dialogue. The

anticipated presence of the answer in the horizon gives the dialogue the

assured sense of pragmaticity. In Heidegger's formulation, too, the word

Unterschied has the double meaning of difference and the between

(Unter/schied): it works like a hinge that connects and conserves difference

and the relational, that is, difference as dif/ference (Differenz as

Unter/schied) (see 1971:202-203. Cf. also Jung, 1987). The relational is

marked by the play of difference: the more difference, the more reciprocity and the more the other, the more the self. In the world of identity, which is

the opposite of difference, without the otherness of the other, the question of ethics is also unthinkable simply because there would be no genuine

reciprocity. In the universe of one person unpopulated by others - were it

imaginable - there would be no need for ethics.



216

2. Confucianism as political philosophy

Confucianism defines the quintessence of Sinism. Sinism is, as far as I

know, the term that was coined by the Sinologist H. G. Creel (1929) to

specify or identify that cluster of characteristics which are uniquely Chinese. The phenomenon of Sinism, I suggest, is not confined to China as

a geographical region. It encompasses all the geographical regions - Korea

and Japan as well as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore - where the

Chinese ideograms have been and are in use. The ideographic language embodies and expresses the Sinitic mindscape whose outlook is manifestly

this-wordly, practical, concrete, inductive, and particular rather than other?

worldly, speculative, abstract, deductive, and general (see Nakamura, 1964:173-294 and Suzuki, 1959). This Sinitic mindset is manifested in

Confucianism, Taoism, and Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism alike.

Before I go on further, two preliminary remarks are in order. First, my

rediscovery of Sinism, of Confucianism in particular, was rooted in my

response and reaction to the reading of the marginalization by Occidental

philosophers -

specifically Hegel - of the Orient (see Hulin, 1979). As the

true value of the hammer, according to Heidegger, will not be grasped until

it is broken, so the value of Confucianism cannot be appreciated until it is

subjected to a Eurocentric critique.5 The Eurocentric critique of Sinism or

Confucianism is essentially logocentric. By logocentrism I mean the long

process of the spoken word (logos) transforming itself into purely specula? tive reason and culminating itself in the "calculative thinking" of the

modern technological age which is called by Heidegger Gestell (Heidegger,

1977). It is also the disembodied reason which disengages itself from the

quotidian concerns of the sociocultural life-world. In other words, the

logocentric critique of Confucianism concludes that Confucianism is not a

philosophy as such but only a social ethics.

Second, one may contend that because of its reverence for the authority of tradition, Confucianism's relevance for the changing world should be

minimized. However, hermeneutics envisions truth as a dialogical event.

Received truth is the coming together of the past and the present at the

moment of interpretation. There is indeed the "fusion of horizons"

(Horizontverschmelzung) in interpretation, and history is "effective"

(Wirkungsgeschichte) because tradition effectuates the present or the

interlocutor at the moment of interpretation (see Gadamer, 1991). The idea

of "horizon" defines the interlocutor's "range of vision" from his/her own

vantage point. In hermeneutics as a dialogical event, there is no "last word."

Postmodern hermeneutics celebrates the birth of the reader at the death of

the author - Confucius notwithstanding (see Barthes, 1977:142-148 and

Foucault, 1977:113-138. Cf. Jung, 1985). Paul Ricoeur (1974:27) sums up



217

the living dynamics of tradition itself when he writes:

... tradition ..., even understood as the transmission of a depositum, remains a dead tradition if it is not the continual package we pass from hand to hand, without ever opening, but rather a treasure from which we draw by the handful and which by this very act is replenished. Every tradition lives by grace of interpretation, and it is at this price that it

continues, that is, remains living.^

Having completed the two preliminary remarks, it should be said from

the very outset that reciprocity is the basic cornerstone of Confucianism,

indeed of Sinism itself.7 Reciprocity characterizes man's own distinct

humanity and points to the basic precept of Confucianism. Man is said to be

nothing but a network of relationships: he/she is condemned to relation?

ships. If man is defined as language, then language itself is a communica?

tive system of relationships. According to the basic precept of Con?

fucianism, however, man is neither an individual self nor a collective self

but is a "familial self'8 which, as a relationship of social proximity, is the

root of all other relationships. When it is elevated to the level of religiosity,

reciprocity becomes piety. As the sanctification of reciprocity, moreover,

piety is always heteronomic. Saintliness may be defined as the quality of

one's moral deed desired and performed exclusively for the sake of the

other (see Wyschogrod, 1990).9 Confucian jen (humaneness) no doubt

approaches such an ethical ideal. As the pillar of Confucian humanism, jen is jen: humaneness (jen) defines the quality of being human (jen). Without

jen, without practicing it, man would not be fully human. In the Analects,

jen is the apotheosis of such virtues as righteousness (i), propriety (//), wisdom (chih), and faithfulness or fidelity (hsin).

The political has always been the architectonic form of reciprocity in the

tradition of Sinism, particularly of Confucianism. As it is made up of three

horizontal lines connected by one vertical line, the Chinese ideogram king

(or ruler), which is the supreme political symbol, stands for the unifier of

three "cosmic" elements: heaven, earth, and man (Granet, 1950:319).10 Even in the most important Taoist text Tao Te Ching that represents the

heterodoxy of Sinism and political inactivism (wu wei or "no-action"), the

king is portrayed as one of the four cosmic "greats." Interestingly, moreover, the Chinese ideogram (hypogram) sage is composed of three

satellite ideograms: ear, mouth, and king. Thus the sage stands for the

unifier of heaven, earth, and man by speaking and listening truthfully or

with fidelity. Lastly, The Art ofRulership is one of the central treatises in

the anthology of diverse philosophico-political discourses called Huai Nan

Tzu which was compiled in the Han dynasty. Like Plato's Republic and

Aristotle's Politics in ancient Greece, The Art ofRulership is "a systematic

political philosophy" based on the "creative syncretism" of the Confucian,



218

Taoist, and Legalist traditions of ancient China. It is interesting to observe

that the concept of li min ("benefiting the people") is decisively Confucian

and constitutes the "unifying spirit" of political philosophy propounded in

The Art ofRulership (Ames, 1983). Having stressed the utmost importance of political philosophy in Con?

fucianism, the remaining pages of this essay will focus on the conception of

performance which is, I submit, already a postmodern concept (see Benamou and Caramello, 1977; Poirier, 1971; and Scheduler, 1988).n Performance is indeed the regulative principle of Confucianism, of Sinism.

The "inter(dis)course" of performance may be said to have the fourfold

characteristic: (1) pragmatic, (2) linguistic, (3) corporeal, and (4) ethical. Performance is a pragmatic field, it is the field of doing

- of dialogue in

action. We have already argued that the Cartesian Cogito (or the "I think") is egocentric or monologic. However, the "I do" as performance is neces?

sarily dialogic and heteronomic. In it reason is the human faculty that

promotes prudential knowledge, sensus communis. Performance as dialogue in action is inseparable from the idea of cultivation, of self-cultivation with

regard to the matters of both the mind and the body. As such, it is most

important to note that the concept of performance as cultivation defies the

determination of human events and affairs by physis, God, or nature (as in

ethology or sociobiology). The ancient Greek conception of mousike as the family of performing

arts included oral poetry, drama, and dance as well as music (see Geor

giades, 1973). Performance is a web of inter(dis)courses. Nietzsche, whose

academic career began as a Greek philologist, is the master of unmasking the "performative self." In his first opus The Birth of Tragedy, the juvenes? cent Nietzsche (1967:52 and 141) declared that "it is only as an aesthetic

phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified." Music is

for him one way of making the aesthetic intelligible and grasping it directly:

"Quite generally, only music, placed beside the world, can give us an idea

of what is meant by the justification of the world as an aesthetic

phenomenon." Confucius, too, was a devotee of music and noted a close

kinship between humaneness (jen) and music presumably because the

former, like the latter, aims at the harmony of relationships.12 Confucius concludes the Analects by saying that it is impossible to

understand man without understanding the power of words (language). By the power of words, he surely means words as "performative utterances" or

"speech acts" which are identified as "doing things with words." The

American poet Ezra Pound (see Kenner, 1951:38) describes Chinese

ideographic writing as "a discipline of morale and of morals." The Con?

fucian formulation of the "rectification of names" (cheng ming) - the "rite"

of calling things by their right names - exemplifies the ethics of language as



219

"performative utterances": it points to moral orthographies by the use of

"rite words." The rectification of names is the accountability of speaking as

moral performance which is also affiliated with fidelity (hsin) -

etymologi

cally speaking, "man standing by his words." Interestingly, moreover, both

ideograms to rectify and to govern are pronounced the same (i.e., cheng)

and, in Chinese ideography, the former contains the latter as its radical.

Cheng ming defines politics as rectitude: it is a politico-jurisprudential

concept, that is, truly a "re(s)publican" principle. Although it is no doubt an

influential concept in the Chinese body politic and the history of Chinese

political thought, the rectification of names is mentioned explicitly and

directly only once - in the Analects - in conjunction with the proprietary conduct of the ruler in the affairs of the body politic: the first necessary

thing the ruler (of Wei) had to do in administering the affairs of govern? ment, Confucius pronounced, is "to rectify names," for "if names be not

rectified, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language is not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to

success" (Analects, 13:3, 2-5) (cf. Hu, 1963:24-27).

Sincerity (ch yeng) is the moral fibre that produces the fabric of Chinese

philosophy or thread that weaves the warp of knowledge and the woof of

action in Chinese philosophy and, for that matter, the Sinitic way of

thinking and doing.13 It embodies and consummates the Confucian ideal

that knowledge is the beginning of action and action is the completion of

knowledge, i.e., the unity of knowledge and action (chih hsing ho i).

Sincerity is, in other words, the embodiment of performance as a pragmatic field. It is the most important moral precept that underpins, motivates, and

governs the thought and action of a Sinitic soul. It means "we mean what

we say" or "we perform in action what we promise in words." The

ideogram sincerity spells syntactically "word" and "achievement" (in Giambattista Vico's sense of factum). That is to say, the word as "achieved"

or "performed" actually embodies an index of moral value. The idea of

performance not only denotes the fulfillment of the spoken word in and/or

as action but also transcends the dualism of mind and body. For perfor? mance as the consummation of one's deed requires corporeal completion. The following statements from the Analects, for example, exemplify

performance as moral ideal: (1) When the superior man "is heard to speak, his language is firm and decided" (19:9); (2) "The wise err neither in regard to their men nor to their words" (15:7); (3) "The virtuous will be sure to

speak correctly, but those whose speech is good may not always be vir?

tuous" (14:5); (4) "The superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in

his actions" (14:29); and (5) Friendship with the "glib-tongued" is injurious (16:4). All in all, the purpose of sincerity buttressed by fidelity is to bond a

"fiduciary community"14 based on prudentia and sensus communis. In



220

Confucianism, saying things with words and doing things without words are

the two reversible sides of performance. Performance is an inter(dis)course, a corporeal dialogue in action.

Shoshana Felman (1983) evokes the psychoanalytic sense of corporeality or

the carnal dimension of language when she views speech (parole) as

"corporeal promise" (promesse corporelle) which beckons a conjugal

relationship between John Austin's philosophy of language as speech acts

and Freudian/Lacanian psychotherapeutic discourse as "talking cure." The

originality of Lacan, according to Felman (1987:56 et passim), lies in his

dis/covery of an "irreducibly dialogic" structure in psychotherapeutic discourse and knowledge: structured like language, the unconscious is the

discourse of the other. Speaking of Lacan's psychoanalytic theory, Felman

(1987:118-119) stresses the fact that the "true thrust" of the psychoanalytic

dialogue between the therapist and the client as "talking bodies" is illocu

tionary: "fundamentally, the dialogic psychoanalytic discourse is not so

much informative as it is performative"15 and thus is by necessity ethical as

well.

Corporeal movement, I suggest, is most elemental to the ideogram as

performance. Indeed, ideograms "perform" very well. Ralph Waldo

Emerson (n. d.: 10) sounds as if he were speaking about them when he says:

"words are actions, actions are a kind of words." Vico had the keenest and

most perceptive sense of the anatomy of language. Not only does he define

man as "only mind, body and speech" but also he locates speech as standing somewhere "midway between mind and body." As he (1984:78) writes, the

universal principle of etymology is that "words are carried over from bodies

and from the properties of bodies to signify the institutions of the mind and

spirit." Vico (1984:129-130 and 78) observes that the human and the

natural as well as mind and body are linked by means of words: we signify

inanimate, natural things in terms of metaphor from our body - in?

numerable examples of which, he rightly claims, could be found in all

languages. As a matter of fact, every ideogram is the metaphor of a thing

human or natural. An ideogram may be a gesture and as a gesture it is

"mute speech." To put it in another way, it is silencing speech into a

gesture, into a moving anthropogram. R. P. Blackmur (1952:4) insists that

gesture is indigenous to language; and "if you cut it out you cut roots and

get a sapless and gradually a rotting if indeed not a petrifying language."16 The body speaks, and the "language" it speaks is silence: "Silence,"

Norman O. Brown (1960:264) says, "is the mother [(m) other] tongue," and

"to recover the world of silence ... is to recover the human body ... What is

always speaking silent is the body." The body as "mute speech" or a

dialogue of gestures, to sum up, is the "silent spring" of language.

Indeed, Chinese ideography (calligraphy in particular which has been



221

revered as much as painting in China) is a kinetic art: it is the human body in fluid motion. In very significant measure, Chinese ideography is a

choreography of human gestures.17 Doing calligraphy may be described as

the dancing of the hand whereby the calligrapher maintains an equilibrium with his brush.18 Marshall McLuhan (1968:39), who reportedly fancied

writing his magnum opus, The Gutenberg Galaxy, in the medium of

ideograms - so it might have been called The Ideographic Galaxy \ -,

considers the ideogram as "a vortex that responds to line of force" and "a

mask of corporate energy." St?phane Mallarm? (see Kermode, 1962:25) is

equally poignant in characterizing the dance as "corporeal writing" (?criture corporelle) and the "visual embodiment of idea" (incorporation visuelle de l'id?e). Ideographic writing or calligraphy as the frolicking of

human gestures may very well be likened to Paul Val?ry's (1956:27-62)

description of the dance as the "intense festival of the body in the presence of our souls." In this sense, the ideogram is a metaphor of the human body or embodied soul in motion. Picasso's Swimmer (1929) and Acrobat (1930) are two choreographs of the human body in graceful motion or dancing

kinegraphs which are approaching ideography or calligraphy. They are

indeed calligraphed ideograms when the ideogram man is an anthropogram

shaped in the simplified or abstract form of the body's "upright posture" (or

"rectitude"). One may be characterized as the pianissimo, and the other as

fortissimo, of bodily movement. Each, in its own way, bursts with vigor in

the eloquent expressivity of the miraculous body. Samuel Beckett is

incontrovertible when he (1929:11) says in his discussion of Vico and James Joyce that in language as gesture the spoken and the written are

identical. An ideogram, as already stated, may be "mute speech" or a

"speaking picture" because "you don't have to be able to pronounce it to

know what it means." If, as R. G. Collingwood (1939:243-244) says

(following St. Augustine, I might add), every natural language is a special? ized form of bodily gesture, Chinese ideography deserves to be -

naturally, of course - the "mother tongue" of all languages.

When gesture "speaks" or "performs," it inescapably "speaks" and

"performs" the language of an ethic: there is indeed an ethic of gesture (see Schmitt, 1989). As the language of gesture, Chinese ideography or orthog?

raphy may be said to be "didactic" - the term that has its etymological root

in the Latin didax signifying the teacher's forefinger (Murray, 1991). It is

truly a testimony19 to the ethic of language, of the ethic of a fiduciary

community, of an ethic with a human face. Such an ethic, I believe, is

embodied in the "meontology" of Emmanuel Levinas based on the primacy of the other (VAutrui) or heteronomy. In Levinas's meontology, "Being" and "value" are chiasmic twins; in it Being is defined as value. It is an

embodied ethic because it is an ethic with a human face. The face is an



222

ethic, a human ethic: "the epiphany of the face is ethical" (Levinas,

1969:83). Levinas's phenomenology of the face (visage) is an ethic of the I

who is capable of facing -

or, to put it negatively, incapable of de/facing or

ef/facing - the other as "thou." The face to face the other may be called an

"interface" (Levinas and Kearney, 1986:20). In Levinas's heteronomic ethic

of social proximity, subjectivity is affirmed never for itself (i.e., it is never

monologic) but for another (Vautre) (i.e., it is dialogic). Subjectivity comes

into being as "heteronomic": "it is my inescapable and incontrovertible

answerability to the other that makes me an individual" (Levinas and

Kearney, 1986:27).20 Thus the notion of responsibility or answerability coincides with the ethical or the ethics of proximity itself. Only in respon?

sibility is the we placed as the midterm between the isolated / and no/body

(das Man or the "anonymous other" in Heidegger's sense) both of which, it

should be emphasized, are equally faceless. In essence, Levinas's

"meontological" conception of subjectivity corresponds to the "moral

metaphysics" of "sincerity" (cWeng) in consonance with the Confucian

program of self-cultivation and self-realization which is integral to the

moral requirements of a fiduciary community. It becomes, when extended,

the ethic of political power or "politics as rectitude."

To sum up: Confucianism is thoroughly heteronomic. It celebrates the

primacy of the ethical over the epistemological, of the relational over the

individual, and of the other over the self. As the apogee of Confucian

ethics, jen epitomizes the ethics of responsibility in which the primacy of the other goes hand in hand with personhood and self-fulfillment.

3. On the way to dialogue as lateral universal

While modernity is the condition which has marginalized the Orient,

postmodernity stands for the opportunity and hope of opening an

inter(dis)course between the Orient and the Occident. This is, in essence,

what it means to be post-Western. To be sure, it is not and cannot be a call

or plea for Sinocentrism. For any centrism - whether Sinocentric or

otherwise - violates the esprit de corps of postmodernity which endeavors

to decenter the privileged center.

The American poet, Gary Snyder (1990:41), who is also a devoted

student of Eastern cultures in general and Zen in particular, points to an

elemental truth when he faults Eurocentric prejudices toward uniformity,

universality, and centralization ingrained deeply in the "ideology of

monotheism." Merleau-Ponty contends that the Eurocentric path of Hegel, which disprivileges Oriental thought from universal knowledge and draws a

great divide between philosophy and non-philosophy, also marginalizes a



223

good part of the Western past. Philosophy as a perpetual beginning is

destined to examine its own idea of truth again and again because truth is

not divided among preformulated dogmas and doctrines but, instead, is

discovered in the deep sediments of the preconceptual life-world prior to all

conceptual formuli and determinations. Thus Western philosophy itself is

subject to the reexamination not only of its own idea of truth but also of

related matters and institutions such as science, technology, economy, and

politics (see Merleau-Ponty, 1964:133-140).

Comparative political philosophy is meant to be a postmodern project which must be carried out in the true spirit of dialogue. As such it will be an

arduous search for the politics of the world in the plural based on mutual

recognition in which one is awakened in the echoes of the other. It is a

search and research for what Merleau-Ponty calls the "lateral universal"

that allows interpretation across cultural boundaries. To invoke Arendt's

formulation of human plurality grounded in the combined idea of "equality" and "distinction": without equality, human communication is impossible and but for distinction, it is unnecessary. Postmodern politics may be

envisaged on the firm ground of a new ethic, of an ethic of heteronomy that

acknowledges the primacy of the other and respects difference. It is com?

munal in that it is neither individualist nor collectivist, that is, it is post individualist and post-totalitarian. Postmodern politics is the politics of

rectitude and responsibility wherein freedom is never absolutely autonomous or sovereign but always relational. It is dialogic or else nothing at all. To conclude with an unforgettable passage of the dialogist Mikhail

Bakhtin (1984:252):

dialogue ... is not the threshold to action, it is action itself. It is not a means for revealing, for bringing to the surface the already ready-made character of a person; no, in dialogue a person not only shows himself

outwardly, but he becomes for the first time that which he is - and, we

repeat, not only for others but for himself as well. To be means to

communicate dialogically. When dialogue ends, everything ends (italics added).21

Notes

1. Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard (1984:xxv) contends that "Postmodern knowledge is not

simply a tool of the authorities; it refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable. Its principle is not the

expert's homology, but the inventor's paralogy." 2. I added the terms priestly and jesterly which are borrowed from Leszek

Kolakowski. He (1968:33-34) writes that "The antagonism between a

philosophy that perpetuates the absolute and a philosophy that questions



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accepted absolutes seems incurable ... This is the antagonism between the

priest and the jester, and in almost every epoch the philosophy of the priest and the philosophy of the jester are the two most general forms of intellectual culture. The priest is the guardian of the absolute; ... The jester's constant effort is to consider all the possible reasons for contradictory ideas. It is thus dialectical by nature -

simply the attempt to change what is because it is. He is motivated not by a desire to be perverse but by distrust of a stabilized system."

3. Following the footsteps of his mentor Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gianni Vattimo

(1988) treats hermeneutics as dialogue. 4. Bakhtin (1984:252) speaks of the "unfinalizability of dialogue." Cf. Gary Saul

Morson and Caryl Emerson (1989:47) who write that "Bakhtin accuses 'theoretism' of 'transcribing' events in such a way that they lose their 'eventness.' Later in his life, the concept of monologization replaced that of

transcription: abstract systems, such as Marxist or Hegelian dialectics, remove the dialogue from dialogue, and monologize the world."

5. In this connection, I should mention two fascinating views on being Chinese out of China: Tu Wei-Ming (1991) and Leo Ou-fan Lee (1991).

6. It is noteworthy that Herbert Fingarette (1972:7), who is an astute Western student of Confucius, comments on the contemporary relevance of Confucius and Confucian philosophy: "When I began to read Confucius, I found him to be a prosaic and parochical moralizer; his collected sayings, the Analects, seemed to me a archaic irrelevance. Later, and with increasing force, I found him a thinker with profound insight and with an imaginative vision of man

equal in its grandeur to any I know. Increasingly, I have become convinced that Confucius can be a teacher to us today

- a major teacher, not one who

merely gives us a slightly exotic perspective on the ideas already current. He tells us things not being said elsewhere; things needing to be said. He has a

new lesson to teach."

7. On the subject of reciprocity in Sinitic thought, see Jung (1965, 1966, 1969, 1986 and 1991).

8. The term familial self is borrowed from Alan Roland's study of the Oriental self (1988). I am grateful to Kazuhiko Okuda for bringing to my attention this fine book.

9. The Confucian philosopher of jen would give the seal of approval to Edmund Husserl's conception of the philosopher as the "civil servant of humanity" (Funktion?r der Menschheit).

10. Here the importance of "etymosinology," which was "discovered" by the American philosopher Ernest Fenollosa (1964), cannot be overlooked.

Etymosinology is a hermeneutic of deciphering the Sinitic cultural mindset by "decomposing" ideograms (see also Jung, 1984). To apply etymosinology: for

example, the ideogram poetry refers to the activity of "enshrining words." The

thirteenth-century Chinese scholar Tai T'ung produced a jem of Chinese

etymology called The Six Scripts or the Principles of Chinese Writing (1954). In Visible Speech (1989), John DeFrancis is insistent on proving that writing

-

including Chinese ideography - is nothing but "visible speech" or the transcrip?

tion of speech. He (1989:248) writes that "The concept of writing as visible

speech summarizes the insistence throughout this book that the primary defining feature of writing is the representation of speech. The dichotomy between full and partial writing is intended to sort out graphic symbols which are capable of conveying any and all thought from those which can convey



225

only limited areas of thought, chiefly ones that are picturable. No end is served

by lumping the two kinds of symbols together. The pervasive confusion which

has resulted from doing so needs to be cleared up by stressing the empirical fact that all full systems of writing are based on representation of sounds, and that no sets of symbols not based on representation of sounds have been shown

capable of conveying anything more than a limited range of thought." 11. A postmodern focus on performance would benefit particularly the develop?

ment of the body politic (e.g., feminism and ecology) and ethical theory. There

is a plethora of literature on both subjects. For the theory of the ethical, see

particularly Charles E. Scott (1990). 12. Let me quote a superb passage from Fingarette (1972:53) on performance as

an integrating and consummately concept in Confucianism: "Acts that are // are not mere rote, formula-conforming performances; they are subtle and

intelligent acts exhibiting more or less sensitivity to context, more or less

integrity in performance. We would do well to take music, of which Confucius was a devotee, as our model here. We distinguish sensitive and intelligent musical performances from dull and unperceptive ones; and we detect in the

performance confidence and integrity, or perhaps hesitation, conflict, 'faking,' 'sentimentalizing.' We detect all this in the performance; we do not have to

look into the psyche or personality of the performer. It is all 'there,' public. Although it is there in the performance, it is apparent to us when we consider the performance not as 'the Beethoven Opus 3' (that is, from the composer

perspective), nor as a 'public concert' (the // perspective), nor as a 'post Mozartian opus' (the style perspective), but primarily as this particular person's performance (the personal perspective)."

13. Tu Wei-Ming propounds ch'eng in Chung-yung (The Doctrine of the Mean)

broadly as "moral metaphysics" (see Tu, 1989:67-91). 14. The phrase fiduciary community is borrowed from Tu Wei-Ming

(1989:39-66). While I was reading some years ago Ivan Morris's fascinating study of the Japanese mind and tradition called The Nobility of Failure (1962), I was deeply moved by the fact that this is the essence of the Sinitic moral soul. This phenomenon emanates from the Confucian moral ideal of sincerity

(makoto in Japanese), and one cannot minimize the influence of the philosophy of the sixteenth-century Chinese neo-Confucianist Wang Yang-ming (O Yomei in Japanese) who accentuated the unity of knowledge and action as well as the unity of mind and body. The apotheosis of a tragic hero is Saigo Takamori from the Meiji Restoration, who was also influenced by Wang Yang-ming. Saigo was a corpulent, "death-defying" hero whose eyes, legs,

hands, and fingers were depicted as ready "tools for action." Here I should mention the forgotten work by the American philosopher Josiah Royce, The

Philosophy of Loyalty (1908) in which he defines the concept as "the willing and practical thoroughgoing devotion of a person for a cause." For him, loyalty is a central principle of our moral life and the other moral concepts such as

justice, charity, industry, wisdom, and spirituality are definable in terms of it. 15. Cf. Daelemans and Maranh?o (1990:237) who write that "Therapeutic

discourse is primordially dialogic, and that dialogicality is not merely a 'formal

requirement' of the therapeutic 'talking cure': the therapeutic dialogue constitutes the evocative meeting place where the unconscious speaks both in and between the analyst and the analysand, but only when they meet; that is,

only when there is an Other." Cf. also Donald P. Spence (1982:272) who says



226

that "A pragmatic statement is a certain kind of speech act, and it might be

argued that the analyst making an interpretation is performing a certain kind of

speech act in the analytic situation." See Pratt (1977) for an applied theory of

speech act for literary discourse. 16. Blackmur (1952:3^4) also contends that "Language is made of words, and

gesture is made of motion. There is one half the puzzle. The other half is

equally self-evident if only because it is an equally familiar part of the baggage of our thought. It is the same statement but the other way around. Words are

made of motion, made of action or response, at whatever remove; and gesture is made of language of words ... When the language of words fails we resort to

the language of gesture. If we stop there, we stop with the puzzle. If we go on, and say that when the language of words most succeeds it becomes gesture in

its words, we shall have solved the verbal puzzle with which we began by

discovering one approach to the central or dead-end mystery of meaningful

expression in the language of the arts." 17. For a detailed discussion on the subject, see Tchang Tcheng-ming (1937).

There is an interesting interview with Jacques Derrida (Derrida and McDonald,

1982:66-76) on thinking the feminine which begins with his reflection on

Emma Goldman's pronouncement that "If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution." Confucian patriarchical monologism and unilateralism, that is, the Confucian deformation and displacement of women, is notorious.

To say that the body is the "mother" of all languages or the body "invaginates" all languages is not to say that etymosinology privileges "gynesis" or

gynogenesis. The Chinese ideogram mother represents "woman with two

breasts." The etymosinology of "mother" that defines the mother's role as

nursing or nurturing babies does not valorize the feminine. For a scathing

postmodernist critique of the masculine monologism of Confucius and

Confucianism, see Kristeva (1977). 18. In Chinese Calligraphy (1973), Chiang Yee regards calligraphy as "the most

fundamental artistic manifestation" of the Chinese mind. He discusses the

aesthetic philosophy of calligraphy and its relation to painting, sculpture, and

architecture. In the Chinese (Sinitic) tradition of art, calligraphy has been

blended with painting. Interestingly, moreover, Chiang also relates calligraphy to dance and speaks of the style of one calligrapher as "the dancing of the

corps de ballet." He (1973:126-127) writes: "It is not unprofitable to compare

calligraphy with dancing. The calligraphy of a great master is not the piecing

together and lining up of certain written symbols to convey meaning, but an

adventure in movement very similar to good dancing. A skater, preoccupied with the evolution of his legs and feet, will sometimes forget to balance his

arms and hands, but a dancer's whole body and all his limbs must be woven

into a harmonious rhythmic movement. The pleasure derived from looking at

good calligraphy, or felt in practicing it, is exactly this delight of watching a

beautiful dancer. We are told that the writing of Chang Hsu ..., a calligrapher

highly esteemed for his Grass Style characters, was suddenly improved and

inspired after he had watched the Lady Kung-Sun ... perform[ing] the 'Dance

of the Two-Edged Sword'." Cf. Foucault (1983:21) who writes that "... the

calligram aspires playfully to efface the oldest oppositions of our alphabetical civilization: to show and to name; to shape and to say; to reproduce and to

articulate; to imitate and to signify; to look and to read." In Martin Heidegger's What Is Called Thinking? there is an irresistible passage which describes the



227

uniqueness of the human hand and links thinking with the action of the hand. He (1968:16-17) writes: "We are trying to learn thinking. Perhaps thinking, too, is just something like building a cabinet. At any rate, it is a craft, a

'handicraft.' 'Craft' literally means the strength and skill in our hands. The hand is a peculiar thing. In the common view, the hand is part of our bodily organism. But the hand's essence can never be determined, or explained, by its

being an organ which can grasp. Apes, too, have organs that can grasp, but

they do not have hands. The hand is infinitely different from all grasping organs

- paws, claws, or fangs

- different by an abyss of essence. Only a being who can speak, that is, think, can have hands and can be handy in achieving works of handicraft. But the craft of the hand is richer than we commonly imagine. The hand does not only grasp and catch, or push and pull. The hand reaches and extends, receives and welcomes - and not just things: the hand extends itself, and receives its own welcome in the hands of others. The hand holds. The hand carries. The hand designs and signs, presumably because man

is a sign. Two hands fold into one, a gesture meant to carry man into the great oneness. The hand is all this, and this is the true handicraft, and commonly we

go no further. But the hand's gestures run everywhere through language, in their most perfect purity precisely when man speaks by being silent. And only

when man speaks, does he think - not the other way around, as metaphysics still believes. Every motion of the hand in every one of its works carries itself

through the element of thinking, every bearing of the hand bears itself in that element. All the work of the hand is rooted in thinking. Therefore, thinking itself is man's simplest, and for that reason hardest, handiwork, if it would be

accomplished at its proper time." 19. For Shoshana Felman (1991:39-81), testimony is "to bear witness" which, in

turn, is "to take responsibility for truth." 20. In this connection, see O'Connor (1988) for a brief discussion of the ethical

and political implications of Levinas's formulation of the absolute alterity of the other. See also Liberman (1989) for a glimpse of the non-egocentric formation of the self from a non-Western perspective.

21. See Smith (1991) for a thoughtful exploration of Gadamer's hermeneutics as the unending continuum of dialogue commensurate with human finitude and its ethical implications, which are not discordant with the tradition of Con? fucianism and Bakhtin's formulation of "unfinalizable" dialogism.

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