Mou Zongsan, Hegel, and Kant: The Quest for Confucian Modernity

Transcription

1 Mou Zongsan, Hegel, and Kant: The Quest for Confucian Modernity Stephan Schmidt Philosophy East and West, Volume 61, Number 2, April 2011, pp (Article) Published by University of Hawai'i Press DOI: /pew For additional information about this article Access provided by National Taiwan University (17 Jul :24 GMT)

2 MOU ZONGSAN, HEGEL, AND KANT: THE QUEST FOR CONFUCIAN MODERNITY Stephan Schmidt Graduate Institute of the Humanities and Social Sciences, National Taiwan University Many historians of philosophy, with all their intended praise, let the philosophers speak mere nonsense. They do not guess the purpose of the philosophers.... They cannot see beyond what the philosophers actually said, to what they really meant to say. Immanuel Kant, On a Discovery (1790) Introduction Mou Zongsan ( ) is one of the key figures of contemporary New Confucianism ( 當代新儒家 ) who to this day remains largely unknown and grossly understudied in the West. 1 This neglect by the Western academy contrasts sharply with the ever-growing output of literature by Chinese and Taiwanese scholars in which Mou Zongsan emerges as one of the most discussed and most controversial Chinese philosophers of the twentieth century. Given this unfortunate East-West divide as well as the widely differing opinions of Chinese scholars, some of whom see in Mou the greatest modern Chinese thinker while others dismiss his texts as fanciful contortions of traditional Confucianism it is difficult to determine the status quo of contemporary discourse on Mou Zongsan. This is particularly true with regard to a key element of Mou s philosophy, namely the apparently intimate relation of his mature thought to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, a connection that in turn touches upon the more general relation of New Confucianism to Western philosophy. My own inquiry will first focus on Mou s appropriation of Kant s philosophy, but will then broaden its scope in order to demonstrate how Mou s much discussed Kantianism is rooted in his often overlooked reading of Hegel s philosophy of history. To bring this connection to light, I shall discuss Mou s philosophy under three related headings. 1. Mou Zongsan and Kant. There appears to be a broad consensus among both the critics and the followers of Mou Zongsan that his system of New Confucianism grew out of a critique and transformation of Kant s critical philosophy. 2 These s cholars therefore take as one relevant standard by which to judge the soundness of Mou s philosophy the degree of fidelity of his categories to those Kantian concepts the thing-in-itself, intellectual intuition, and so on on whose model they were constructed. Against this consensus a smaller number of both Chinese and Western scholars have argued that the relation of Mou Zongsan to Kant is rather an external and instrumental one. 3 This position implies that, simply put, Kant does not provide the ultimate standard by which to assess the validity of Mou s philosophy. On this 260 Philosophy East & West Volume 61, Number 2 April by University of Hawai i Press

3 issue, I side with the latter camp and will try to show that in order to come to terms with Mou Zongsan we need to dismantle his Kantian terminology and to unpack its sometimes very un-kantian meaning. If we do so, however, we will have to answer a question that, as far as I can see, has not yet been conclusively answered by any of the scholars who refuse to accept the transformation thesis, namely: why does Mou Zongsan express his own philosophy in Kantian terms in the first place? What does he hope to achieve by doing so? These questions will be taken up under the second heading. 2. Mou Zongsan and Modernity. I will suggest a reading of Mou Zongsan s m ature philosophy that understands his thought as a response to the challenge of Western modernity and the need to anticipate what I call with a term not prominent in Mou s writings Confucian Modernity. If we follow the title of Thomas Metzger s well-known study and understand modern Confucian thinking as an attempt to escape from a certain predicament, then the term Confucian Modernity stands for where the particular escape route chosen by the New Confucians is supposed to lead. 4 In other words, I read Mou Zongsan s Kantianism mainly as a strategy to argue for both the possibility and necessity to develop a Confucian Modernity or, more precisely, to develop a philosophical concept of Confucian Modernity that can serve as a guideline for the practical effort to achieve what the concept stands for. This interpretation is opposed to an understanding that has been voiced by prominent critics of Mou Zongsan such as Yü Ying-shih and Zheng Jiadong, who reproach him for having walked out of history, that is, to have abandoned the traditional practical concerns of Confucianism and to have replaced them with purely t heoretical reflections in the ivory tower of philosophy. This I take to be a one-sided reading that overlooks a crucial element of Mou s philosophy the importance of which I shall highlight in the third section, on Mou Zongsan and History. 3. Mou Zongsan and History. The subject of this section will be Mou Zongsan s hidden and highly selective Hegelianism. For all we can deduce from his writings, Mou never properly studied Hegel, and yet it was Hegel s metaphysics of history that provided him with an understanding of the workings of historical development and opened a door for him through which he, in my reading, walked right into history and embarked on his quest for Confucian Modernity. I will show that in order to understand the full picture of Mou s Kantianism, we have to include its Hegelian frame. Only then will the whole strategy that connects Mou s writings on Chinese history and politics from the 1950s to the system of his mature thought become fully visible. Mou Zongsan and Kant Mou s struggle with Kant was a long one that can be divided into two logically connected phases. 5 The first phase is represented by Mou s landmark 1968/1969 study on Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism, Heart-and-Mind and Moral Nature as Actuality (Xinti yu xingti 心體與性體 ) (hereafter XT ), especially the general introduction in volume 1, 6 while the second phase is comprised in two slightly later works, Intellec- Stephan Schmidt 261

4 tual Intuition and Chinese Philosophy (Zhi de zhijue yu Zhongguo zhexue 智的直覺與中國哲學 ) (1971) 7 and Phenomenon and Thing-in-itself (Xianxiang yu wuzishen 現 象與物自身 ) (1974). 8 According to Mou s own testimony, the partial reorientation in between was initiated by his reading Heidegger s two books Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik and Einführung in die Metaphysik, both of which he read in English translations in 1968/ Phase I: Confucianism as an Ethics of Autonomy Let us start with the first phase. Mou s discussion in the general introduction to XT makes it plain that he is well aware of the fundamentally different paradigms of Confucian and Western philosophy. His position is this: Confucian thinking from antiquity on has been dominated by a concern for moral agency ( 道德行為 ) and the attainment of virtue ( 成德 ) and therefore by practical problems in a sense that the Western tradition has failed to grasp. This can be seen from the absence of the concept of gongfu 工夫, that is, the individual moral effort that realizes moral values through human agency. 10 I suggest to understand gongfu as the dynamic point of contact between the real and the ideal, between Is and Ought, and thus between the domains of ontology and moral theory in Western philosophy. In Confucianism, this point of contact constitutes its own quasi-ontological realm, which is congruent neither with purely objective and factual reality nor with mere ideality, but is instead a kind of actuality ( 實體 ) what comes into being through human agency and constitutes the human life-world with its intrinsic moral quality. 11 In Mou s view, Confucianism is essentially a moral-effort-teaching ( 工夫論 ) or a teaching to attain virtue ( 成德之教 ), and only as such can it effectively tackle the problem of moral agency. In the West, on the other hand, moral agency has been treated as a theoretical problem, and that is why moral philosophy in the West remains abstract, flawed, and ultimately unconvincing, not because of the shortcomings of individual thinkers, but because of a fundamentally inadequate paradigm that has never been effectively overcome. This even applies to the Western thinker who in Mou s view has come farthest on the way to a sound philosophical moral teaching: Immanuel Kant. 12 The Neo-Confucianism of Song and Ming China, Mou writes, already contains a moral philosophy more mature and complete than Kant s. 13 To give a name to the incompleteness of Kant s philosophy, Mou calls it a moral theology ( 道德的神學 ), w hereas what is needed and what Confucianism has come closest to achieving would be a moral metaphysics ( 道德的形上學 ). 14 This exposition makes one wonder why a New Confucian thinker like Mou Zongsan should develop a serious interest in Kant in the first place. What can the allegedly more mature and complete philosophy of the Confucian tradition gain from engaging in a dialogue with a less mature and complete one, such as Kant s? To this, Mou gives no direct answer, but instead claims the following: Kant s central concepts Mou names the thing-in-itself and the autonomy of the will by their very nature belong to a system of moral metaphysics that is at the same time what Kant was somehow aiming for but what he could not completely realize. 15 So first 262 Philosophy East & West

5 of all, we are invited to conclude, it is Kant who will profit from being drawn into the Confucian context, for it is only here that his own true intentions can be f ully r ealized. 16 Once they are realized, however, the Kantian system of practical philosophy moral theology will no longer be of any use and will be replaced by a Confucian-style moral metaphysics, for there is no need for both systems to c oexist. 17 At this point Mou Zongsan makes the interesting remark that this kind of Aufhebung of Kant s philosophy into a more complete system, a development he seems to be anticipating as a future event in the context of Confucianism s modernization process, is actually in line with what has already happened in the context of post-kantian philosophy in the West. Although Mou does not explicitly say so at this point, his remark can only be referring to German Idealism. 18 But if Mou s assertion is correct and Kant s philosophy has already been aufgehoben in the various systems of the German Idealists, then the question raised above becomes only more pressing: why should Mou Zongsan focus on Kant? If he wants to further develop Kant s philosophy in a way akin to the project of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, then why does he not consult the writings of these thinkers, who have already proceeded a great deal on this very way? This is one of the questions I will try to address from a different perspective in the second section below, on Mou Zongsan and Modernity. For now, we need to understand that although Mou Zongsan appears to be occupied with raising Kant s moral philosophy to a new level, thereby assisting Kant in achieving his own goals, it is, of course, Confucianism, especially Song-Ming Neo- Confucianism, that he is really concerned with. After all, this is the introduction to a three-volume study in which Mou uses Kant s concepts in order to reinterpret Confucian writings, and not the reverse. For Mou Zongsan, the New Confucian, it is Confucian thinking that needs a conceptual clarification of its own philosophical import and a better understanding of what it means philosophically to be a Confucian. The answer, in a word, is that it means to advocate an ethics of autonomy ( 自律道德 ) in the sense of Kant s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, that is, in the sense of the self-legislation of the will. 19 Applying Kant s concept to the Neo-Confucian texts, Mou wants to show that there is a principle of autonomy on which orthodox Confucian ethics is based and that it is this very principle that can serve as a criterion to distinguish between orthodox and heterodox Neo-Confucian teachings. 20 He d evoted no less than seven years of intellectual labor to his detailed textual studies of Song- Ming Neo-Confucianism, which came to fill the three volumes of Moral Mind and Moral Essence. These studies led him to the revolutionary move to expel Zhu Xi ( ) from the canon of Confucian orthodoxy on the grounds of his advocating an ethics of heteronomy ( 他律道德 ). At this point my inquiry faces a problem in that it is impossible within the scope of this essay to do what appears to be the logical thing to do: to check all the textual evidence assembled by Mou in the three volumes of XT and to make an assessment of its validity. Yet not only would this approach burden the discussion with and ultimately bury it under many new philological problems, it would also be misguided on general theoretical grounds. For it would force us to ask the question exactly in Mou s way: is Confucian ethics an ethics of autonomy or is it not? Obviously, the Stephan Schmidt 263

6 texts in question do not explicitly draw a distinction between autonomy and heteronomy; that is, they do not have two words to express this specific opposition. So the real question is somewhat less precise: is it possible to read certain expressions in the Neo-Confucian texts as implying/referring to/being in accordance with the notions of autonomy and heteronomy? My answer to this question is that it might indeed be possible, but that there remains an unavoidable circular element to this kind of r econstruction, 21 because, strictly speaking, there is not and cannot be any direct textual evidence for a claim such as Mou s. The procedure of reconstructing Confucianism in an entirely different language involves the crucial step of translation qua equalization of Chinese and German/Kantian terms with the respective English translations functioning as a sometimes unreliable bridge that renders the entire undertaking highly ambiguous. Let us consider the example of Mencius expression liyi 理義 in the book Mencius (7A7). It appears in the following context: Mencius argues that there is a certain moral quality that all human beings have in common a claim later Confucians have usually summarized as Mencius advocating the doctrine of the goodness of man s moral nature ( 性善說 ). Mencius draws a number of analogies to judgments of taste (food, music, the good looks of a person) regarding which, in his opinion, everybody necessarily agrees, thereby demonstrating that everybody s palate, ears, and eyes are alike ( 同 ). Then Mencius applies these analogies to the faculty in question, namely the function of the human heart-and-mind ( 心 ) as the organ of a person s intuitive and reflexive morality, and says: What is it, then, that is common to all hearts ( 心 )? Reason (li 理 ) and rightness (yi 義 ). The sage is simply the man first to discover this common element in my heart. Thus reason and rightness (liyi 理義 ) please my heart in the same way as meat pleases my palate. 22 The two terms that come to represent what is common to all human hearts-and-minds, li and yi, are both extremely rich in semantic content and therefore difficult to translate. 23 Li later on became a key notion of Neo-Confucian thinking, but in the Mencius it is not prominent at all. In fact, we have just witnessed its only occurrence in the text, hence also the only occurrence of the combination of both characters in Mencius. In Mou Zongsan s reconstruction of Confucianism, however, this combination liyi, on the exclusive evidence of the passage just cited, acquires a rather precise meaning and is accorded high systematic significance, for, in Mou s reading, liyi means the moral law ( 道德法則 ) in Kant s sense. 24 At first glance, this may seem absurd, but we have to keep in mind that Mou wants to reconstruct the guiding ideas and basic convictions of Confucianism philosophically, so as to sharpen their profile and to conceptualize them in a more precise way. As such, his approach does not differ from what Western scholars do when they elaborate on, say, the ethics of scholasticism, thereby using concepts that were not available to the medieval authors. Yet the gap between the terminology Mou applies and the texts he applies it to seems to be an extremely wide one. There is a universalistic thrust both in Mencius notion of the human heart-and-mind and Kant s moral law, but it is obvious that the textual evidence alone does not enable us to decide whether liyi in this particular context is closer to Kant s moral law than to, say, David Hume s benevolent principles of our 264 Philosophy East & West

7 frame. 25 Neither the semantics of the expression nor its context are specific enough to compel us to exclude this alternative translation/interpretation, or, to put it another way: while we can say that liyi has some features in common with both Kant s moral law (mainly the claim to universality) and Hume s moral sentiments (their immediate givenness), we do not find any evidence in Mencius that forces as to ascribe to his expression liyi precisely those features that Kant s concept does contain w hereas Hume s does not for example the procedure by which the moral law is generated in the mind of an agent or the involvement of a notion of duty (Pflicht) in Kant s sense. For these reasons, I hold that the search for direct textual evidence for Mou s claims would necessarily be in vain and should be dismissed. Instead, I suggest we take a closer look at the crucial concept of autonomy itself as Mou understands it and claims it to be the underlying principle of orthodox Confucian thinking. It is relatively easy to infer from Mou s discussion in the section titled Ethics of Autonomy and Moral Metaphysics ( 自律道德與道德的形上學 ) 26 the general line of his criticism of Kant: Kant is consistently mistaken in the focus of his inquiry, which is theoretical in nature and wants to demonstrate how freedom of the will is possible, or, in the language of Kant s transcendentalism, what is the condition of the possibility of a free will? This is Kant s vantage on the whole problem of ethics, and all subsequent and more specific questions such as how is it possible for our will to have an interest in the moral law? are all asked in the same theoretical fashion. 27 This approach is mistaken in that it tries to prove the theoretical possibility of something (free will), instead of starting with the fact of its existence and exploring the practical consequences thereof. 28 For, according to Mou Zongsan, we do, as a matter of fact, have a free will, which in turn does have an interest in the moral law. The problem is not the theoretical proof of the possibility ( 可能 ) of a will that submits to the selfgiven moral law, but the practical effort to realize ( 呈現 ) 29 our freedom through moral agency, that is, through acts and deeds in accordance with the moral law. Since Kant did not succeed in his effort to theoretically prove the possibility of a free will, he had to call it a mere postulate ( 假設 ) and to state that it is beyond human reason to grasp its possibility. 30 Yet a mere postulate is hardly a sufficient basis for a moral metaphysics, which instead needs to rest on our practical ability to be free and to make freedom real in a way that renders the possibility question superfluous. 31 Obviously, this line of criticism is less a deconstruction of Kant s argument than a kind of Fundamentalkritik that calls on Mou s readers to dismiss Kant s mistaken approach and to follow the Confucian one instead. 32 By doing so, however, Mou does occasionally refer to certain key notions of traditional Confucian ethics mostly taken from Mencius and his Neo-Confucian followers such as the heartand-mind, 33 the so-called good knowledge ( 良知 ), 34 and the alleged moral law mentioned above. It is from these sparse references that we have to gather how Mou Zongsan thinks the notion of autonomy can be spelled out in Confucian terms. The crucial point is this: Mou dismisses Kant s possibility question because of the facticity of what Kant was after. On a textual level, the proof for this is simply that the canonical texts of Confucianism state this facticity. Mou Zongsan never deduces Stephan Schmidt 265

8 the basic premises of his system through anything like Kant s Transcendental Deduction, but only introduces them by way of a reference to the canonical writings and thereafter presupposes their validity. Consequently, when Mencius says that reason and rightness [Mou reads: the moral law] please my heart in the same way as meat pleases my palate, then for Mou Zongsan this is evidence enough that, as a matter of fact, all human beings do have an interest in the moral law. If further corroboration were needed, the proof for the facticity is that the faculties in question are innate. They have to be nurtured and cultivated, but they are an essential part of our predisposition as human beings, and unless our moral vision is blurred by the wrong kind of theory or selfish desires, we live in a state of awareness of this fundamental fact. What the Mencius (7A15) calls good knowledge ( 良知 ) and good ability ( 良能 ) refers to what we know and what we are able to do without having to reflect on it or learn it, because it is in us from day one. In the particular Confucian tradition that reaches from Mencius to Lu Xiangshan and Wang Yangming and on to Mou s own philosophy, this innate morality was at the same time the conditio sine qua non for the entire program of gongfulun or moral effort teaching : unless there is something in us that predisposes us to moral agency, what could there be for moral cultivation to cultivate? Mou s reliance on this line of Confucian thinkers enables him to dismiss Kant s theoretical approach and to take the facticity of this basic moral faculty for granted, which he now calls by its new Kantian name, autonomy. We are autonomous in that the principle of morality is already in us and we do not have to acquire it from outside. 35 Those who hold that moral cultivation requires something that does not have its origin in our own moral nature promote an ethics of heteronomy. For Mou Zongsan, the innateness of the moral law is particularly important, because what is innate does not rely on our experience and hence seems to meet the Kantian standard for what is a priori and, of course, only when the moral law is a priori it can be said to be universal. Mou draws on Kant s introduction of the a priori in the first Critique (B1 5), but reinforces the apparent temporal element of the notion when he translates it into Chinese as xian yan ( 先驗 ) or prior to experience, whereas Kant carefully defines it as independent of all experience (von aller Erfahrung unabhängig). That which is prior to experience can only be what is innate, whereas that which is independent of experience is, in Kant s view, also what is generated by human beings through the faculty of reason. Therefore, what Mou seems to have overlooked is the more complex meaning that the crucial notion of the a priori acquires in the argument of Kant s Groundwork, especially with regard to what Kant calls the third practical principle of the will, namely the principle of the autonomy of the will. 36 Autonomy is an exercise of our faculties, and through this exercise we generate the moral law. The difference may seem negligible at first, but is in fact crucial, as the Kant scholar Allen W. Wood has stated very clearly: It is important that on Kant s theory, what is a priori is produced by our faculties, not given to them, whether through sensation or otherwise. This means that for Kant a priori cognition is utterly different from innate cognition, whose existence Kant emphatically denies.... What is innate is implanted in us at birth (by God, for example, or through 266 Philosophy East & West

9 our genetic constitution), independently of both sense experience and the exercise of our faculties. What is a priori, by contrast, we ourselves produce through the exercise of our faculties. This point is especially important in the case of practical principles. A moral law can be truly autonomous only if it is a priori; but an innate moral principle would be an instance of heteronomy. This is because an a priori principle is one we give ourselves, in contrast to one that we are given from outside (whether environmentally, by authority, custom, or tradition, or innately, by supernatural divine infusion or some nonrational genetic predisposition). 37 Hence, Mou s attempt to claim autonomy as the underlying principle of orthodox Confucian ethics leads him to a conceptualization of this concept that turns it into an instance of heteronomy at least as long as we view the matter from Kant s perspective. Simply put, Kant s Autonomie and Mou s zi lu (autonomy) are not the same thing. The crucial difference is that according to Mou s Confucian theory we do not produce the moral principle on which we act, but receive it from our natural predisposition as human beings (enlightened by the superior wisdom of Mencius, who provides us with the best understanding of our own nature). Therefore, Confucianism still may be said to advocate an ethics of autonomy, but not in Kant s sense of the notion. 38 In the second and third sections below we will see that the difference between the two notions of autonomy is the result of the strategic logic of Mou s project, which forces him to abandon the enlightenment side of Kant s philosophy and to replace it with the more conservative effort to not give up the Confucian tradition in the age of modernity. However, before we can address this issue, we have to take a look at the second phase of Mou s dialogue with Kant. Phase II: Man as an Unlimited Being As we have seen already in XT, Mou Zongsan strives to go beyond Kant and to overcome the restrictions of the Western philosopher s theoretical approach to ethics. He is convinced that Confucianism provides the means to do so, but at the same time he knows that in order successfully to go beyond Kant, it is not sufficient to deal with the Groundwork alone, as he did in XT. In Mou s own reading, Kant s ethics is part of a systematic philosophy the foundations of which are laid out in the Critique of Pure Reason, 39 and unless it has been demonstrated that Confucianism provides a solution for the many unsolved problems of this first Critique, Mou Zongsan, by his own s tandard, can hardly claim to have proven the superior philosophical potential of Confucianism. Apparently it was Heidegger s ontological interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason that provided Mou with an angle from where he could launch his critical attack on Kant s system. 40 Having read Heidegger s book Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, it took Mou less than two years to sketch the outline of his solution in his Intellectual Intuition and Chinese Philosophy and then another two years to give it its final systematic form in a book that many consider to be the conclusive expression of Mou s Kantian Confucianism: Phenomenon and Thing-in-itself. The key he received from Heidegger s book on Kant is the notion of human finitude (Endlichkeit). Stephan Schmidt 267

10 To call Heidegger s book on Kant, first published in 1929, an interpretation of Kant s thought certainly means to stretch the term to its limits. Rather, Heidegger tries to present the Critique of Pure Reason as an insufficient forerunner of Being and Time. Kant, in Heidegger s reading, was pointing toward the insights into the constitution of human existence that Heidegger himself then presented in greater clarity in his own magnum opus. To make his case, Heidegger has to argue that the Critique is not an epistemological study but raises the question of the essence of the truth of ontological transcendence. 41 Heidegger emphasizes the primacy of Anschauung in Kant, and since the crucial feature of the human condition according to Heidegger is finitude (mortality), he emphasizes the finite character of human Anschauung and knowledge, which is perceptive (hinnehmend), by contrasting it with a kind of limitless Anschauung, which is creative (schöpferisch). This latter kind of Anschauung, Heidegger agrees with Kant, is a faculty that human beings do not possess. In Kant s first Critique it is called intellektuelle Anschauung (intellectual intuition ), 42 a limiting notion that Kant positively ascribes only to God, since He is an immortal and infinite being. However, it is not easy to decide to what extent this reference to God is systematically important within the epistemological framework of the first Critique. 43 As far as I can see, these rather unspectacular observations already exhaust the significance of Heidegger s book on Kant for Mou Zongsan s own purpose. Inspired by Heidegger s ontological reading of Kant, Mou develops a terminology of Western origin to which he now gives a completely different meaning, which meaning he then claims to be what the Western philosophers themselves were dealing with without really knowing it. By doing so, he presents his own Confucian system so that it appears to be an Aufhebung of Kant s philosophy and indeed of Western philosophy as a whole. Because of the critical nature of Kant s philosophy critical in the sense of drawing the limits of human reason it is comparatively easy to see what is required in order to go beyond him, especially when you reconstruct his thought in Mou s Chinese terms: Kant claims that human beings are limited ( 有限 ), that they do not have intellectual intuition ( 智的直覺 ) and therefore have no access to the thing-in-itself ( 物自身 ). Accordingly, to go beyond Kant means to claim that human beings are limitless ( 無限 ), that they do have intellectual intuition and therefore are indeed able to grasp things-in-themselves. As simple as it sounds, this is the exact line of Mou Zongsan s argument. Now it is clear that within the Kantian system this argument can only strike one as silly. It makes no sense to claim that human beings can grasp the things as they are in themselves, because such a claim violates the meaning of the term in question. It is like arguing for a faculty that makes us see the corners of a circle. In Kant, things as they are in themselves are not transcendent objects residing in a realm beyond the reach of human reason. 44 The thing in itself is not a thing at all, but a notion that has to be presupposed from the standpoint of (finite) human reason. Therefore, one cannot argue for a particular kind of faculty that provides access to it. By presenting his concept of intellectual intuition Mou seems to argue for a faculty that Kant had overlooked or misunderstood, but his whole argument ultimately rests on a change 268 Philosophy East & West

11 of meaning of what the thing in itself is. 45 Therefore, we need not follow the argument itself here, 46 but we do need to find out what new meaning Mou Zongsan gives his alleged Kantian categories. Let us start with the surface: the Heideggerian/Kantian notion of Endlichkeit (finitude as mortality) is rendered into Chinese as youxianxing ( 有限性 ), which could be literally translated as having-limits-ness. It is important to note that the Chinese translation does not refer to the fact of human mortality, as the German term Endlichkeit so clearly does. Neither does it contain any element of Heidegger s existentialist notion of Zeitlichkeit, which is, of course, informed by the anticipation of death as the ultimate end (Ende) of life. A similar change of meaning can be observed in a nother key term, Kant s Anschauung, rendered first into English the language in which Mou Zongsan read both Kant and Heidegger as intuition, which is an easily misleading translation, since Anschauung relies on our visual sense and the eye as the organ of human knowledge the German verb anschauen means to look whereas intuition refers to a kind of insight not necessarily to do with the eye. Following the meaning of the English term rather than the German, Mou translates it into Chinese as zhijue ( 直覺 ) or direct perception, thereby connecting the activity directly to the human heart-and-mind and making it look like an activity of our intellect. Thus, we see that even before he sets out on his argument, Mou Zongsan has already significantly altered the meaning of the key terms he appropriated from Kant through an act of implicit interpretation, that is, translation. The defining features of Kant s Endlichkeit (mortality) and Anschauung (sensory perception) are erased, and we have to see what they are replaced with. In order to do so, however, we first need to understand why it is so extremely difficult to get to the core of Mou s thinking. As Hans-Rudolf Kantor has pointed out in a recent essay, the foundation of Mou Zongsan s mature philosophy consists in a confoundation of at least two different sets of distinctions that as such have little to do with each other. 47 One is Kant s transcendental distinction between Erscheinung and Ding an sich (or phenomena and noumena), the other is of Buddhist origin and distinguishes two different modes or realms of existence: one in which human beings mistakenly cling to what is constantly changing and another in which they do not. In Chinese, this complex meaning is comprised in the two brief terms zhi 執 and wu zhi 無執, which for the sake of brevity I translate as clinging and not clinging, respectively. The Buddhist distinction refers to the unwholesome realm of ignorance that causes sentient beings to cling to what constantly arises and perishes and consequently to suffer from the frustration of unfulfilled desires, over against the wholesome realm of enlightenment and insight into the impermanence of all things. The Buddhist distinction has implications we could with some reservations call ontological and epistemological, but, as Kantor points out, its most fundamental meaning is a soteriological one: it is meant to guide sentient beings from the former realm or state to the latter and thus from suffering to salvation. In earlier Chinese Buddhism, for example in Seng Zhao ( ), this distinction was bound up with the Daoist opposition of you 有 and wu 無, which to this day informs Chinese notions of a whole range of issues in Western philosophy. Stephan Schmidt 269

12 And there is yet another distinction on which Mou s New Confucianism draws: probably to a certain degree inspired by Buddhist ideas, the Neo-Confucian thinker Zhang Zai ( ) had come to distinguish sensory knowledge ( 見聞之知 ) from a kind of awareness of moral import that he called knowledge of virtue and (moral) nature ( 德性之知 ). 48 In the terminology of Mou Zongsan s teacher, Xiong Shili ( ), himself a Confucian with intellectual roots in Buddhism, the distinction reappears as one between quantitative knowledge ( 量智 ) and knowledge of (moral) essence ( 性智 ). 49 Following the universalistic logic of his panjiao 判教 approach the effort to synthesize different doctrines into one all-encompassing super-theory called y uanjiao 圓教 or perfect teaching Mou Zongsan reads all these distinctions as so many different expressions of one fundamental and universal mode of metaphysical dualism. 50 By drawing on Kant and the teachings of Tiantai and Huayan Buddhism, Mou hopes to develop New Confucianism into the most perfect kind of philosophy, a y uanjiao for the age of modernity, restricted neither to the tradition of Buddhism nor to the cultural heritage of East Asia, but representative of all humankind. As can be expected, this approach burdens his thought with insoluble problems. In my view, the apparent complexity of Mou s philosophy does not mirror the intricacy of what he argues for and tries to defend, but the complexity of the way he thought he had to argue for it, given the circumstances and his rather ambitious goal. Mou Zongsan s major works consist largely of an enormous effort to synthesize different terminologies and to translate the traditional expressions of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism into his new hybrid Chinese Kantish. Many of the argumentative steps on this way are but jumps from one terminology to another. 51 Therefore we can make it short: in order to synthesize the different components into his Confucian-style unified field theory, Mou had to violate the specific contents and meanings of almost all of them. As Kantor has shown with regard to the distinctions of noumena/phenomena and clinging/not-clinging, they are not convertible into one another in that there is not one coherent distinguishing criterion applicable to both pairs. 52 Lehmann, after more than four hundred pages of detailed textual analysis, comes to a similar conclusion with regard to Mou s appropriation of Kantian terms. 53 Yet, to be sure, this only means that the project to develop a New Confucian yuanjiao has failed, but it does not mean that the ideas Mou tried to express were in themselves self-contradictory or of no interest. In fact, we still have not even seen what these ideas could possibly be, because forced by his impossible goal Mou disguises them behind a language grotesquely unfit for his purpose. In the following subsection I shall try to see through the veil of Mou s Kantian terminology and to get at least a first glimpse of his guiding moral vision. Mou Zongsan s Confucian Moral Vision As It Is in Itself In the many pages of Mou s mature work I find only one occasion on which he presents his Confucian moral vision in terms that relate it directly to certain empirical phenomena instead of couching it in theoretical concepts taken from the various teachings he discusses. Hardly surprising, it is by way of a reference to the Mencius 270 Philosophy East & West

13 that Mou presents his view. In Mencius 2A6, Mencius argues that all human beings have a kind of innate moral character that becomes apparent in our responsiveness to the suffering of others: My reason for saying that no man is devoid of a heart sensitive to the suffering of others is this. Suppose a man were, all of a sudden, to see a young child on the verge of falling into a well. He would certainly be moved to compassion, not because he wanted to get in the good graces of the parents, nor because he wished to win the praise of his fellow villagers, nor yet because he disliked the cry of the child. 54 On an occasion like this, Mencius claims, we become aware of this inner morality of ours that at other times may be hidden from our own consciousness but presents itself forcefully vis-à-vis the potential or actual suffering of a fellow human being. Mou Zongsan calls this inner morality the original/authentic heart-and-mind ( 本心 ), which is original and authentic in that it is spontaneous and uncorrupted by the nonmoral motives Mencius has excluded from his thought experiment. 55 It is our pure moral nature that now realizes ( 呈現 ) itself. 56 Mou states that although the contact with the child is first established by our sense of vision ( 見 ), the moral significance of the situation the imperative Thou must act! immediately taken in by the man in the story, is not a matter of sensory perception and not an instance of intellectual speculation or conceptual analysis either. 57 Mou writes: Instead it is our original and authentic heart-and-mind realizing itself and giving itself unconditionally the direction of action. 58 Let us not get distracted by the fact that Mou in the next phrase calls this an instance of intellectual intuition (which would force him to call the child what the object of an intellectual intuition is called in Kant, namely a thing in itself this he does not do), but let us instead focus on the experience itself. Mou speaks of a shock to my Self ( 自我震動 ), an awakening ( 驚醒 ) to my Self and a selfconfirmation of myself ( 自肯認其自己 ). Since for Mou intellectual intuition is just another name for self-transcendence, we can infer from here what is being transcended in this moment: the atomistic isolation of the individual, which is but an abstraction from every person s own true moral Self. 59 What Mou seems to argue for is a kind of connection between human beings that is more fundamental to their Selves than mere individual self-identity. Without this connection the fact of compassion with the Other would be inexplicable, for without it the potential suffering of the child could not shake the man in Mencius story so deeply as to awaken him to the fact that he is more than a mere individual a true moral being. It is an old Confucian topos that the hearts-and-minds of all human beings are essentially one and that this oneness transcends individual particularity. Morality, we could say, is essentially another name for non-individuality or maybe we had better call it trans-individuality : a connection with others that precedes and grounds individual self-identity. The individual moral agent is at the same time the agent of something that transcends her agency. The limited person in Kant and most of Western philosophy, on the other hand, is denied access to her own morality, because she is confined to her own individuality (more on this below). In Mou s view, moral philosophy that starts from this concept of the person is doomed to miss the Stephan Schmidt 271

14 very meaning of the term moral. Kant, for one, entirely missed the impact of the self-transforming experience of moral action, because he clung to a concept of man that defies self-transcendence. Yet as long as we cling to the notion and self-image of the mere individual in Western philosophy, this clinging has been institutionalized in the concept of the (epistemological) subject or Cogito 60 our self-transcendence and indeed the whole moral dimension of our being remains opaque. We do not reach what New Confucians call awareness of our own moral nature ( 自覺 ). Mou calls his brand of New Confucianism a two-tiered ontology ( 兩層存有論 ). This is his attempt to synthesize all the vastly different dualisms listed above into a new, comprehensive system. With regard to the different components he claims to have successfully aufgehoben, this is unpersuasive to the point of caricature. But on its own terms it is a challenging attempt to establish ethics as first philosophy. Note that Mou does not deny the usefulness and indeed the necessity of categories like the epistemological subject that is the main agent of Western science (indeed of Western modernity as a whole) and hence of one of the great success stories of humankind. Neither does he deny the factual individuality of human beings. But he does argue that the basic mode in which the epistemological subject relates to other beings/ things is objectification and that the relationship between human beings must not be constructed on the model of the subject-object relation of epistemology. 61 There ought to be a categorical distinction, and Western ethicists commit a category mistake in that they fail to draw it. 62 On the ground level of Mou s two tiers I call it the level of reality instead of clinging we are individual subjects and we deal with whatever we deal with as objects. But we have the ability to transcend this level toward another level that I call the level of actuality (instead of not clinging ). The vehicle of this transcending step is moral agency as carried out and experienced in the thought experiment of the child on the well. The shocking encounter with the Other s (potential) suffering initiates a sudden awareness of our obligations as moral beings, and these obligations are grounded in the trans-individual togetherness between me and the other person. The prefix com in compassion, when taken literally, expresses this togetherness that is not an objective fact and hence is not real, but it reveals a kind of truth about ourselves that we are called upon to make true and to actualize through our actions. 63 It is not something we know through our sensory knowledge, but something we become aware of through a kind of intuition in a nonvisual (i.e., non-kantian) sense. Therefore, there is no theoretical proof for this togetherness either, but as moral beings we are free to act it out and thus to bring togetherness about. 64 Indeed, once we have been awakened to the realization of this togetherness, we will want to act it out and will experience the obligation to help the child not as a duty (in the Kantian sense of something potentially opposed to our inclinations) but rather as a kind of inner urge and desire to do so. If we follow this urge we will then experience the level of actuality as the kind of satisfaction and happiness that results from fulfilling moral obligations and engaging in harmonious relationships with other people or, in different language, from our mutual recognition as moral subjects. 65 Seen from the perspective of the level of reality, moral agency is the transcending step toward a morally higher state of existence. From Mou s Confucian perspective, 272 Philosophy East & West

15 however, we had better look at it the other way: epistemological subjectivity is the result of a self-negation ( 自我坎陷 ) of the moral subject. This crucial notion of selfnegation is sometimes ridiculed by critics as just another one of Mou s fanciful contortions of traditional concepts, which on the surface level of terminology it might very well be. 66 The idea behind it, however, I find perfectly intelligible. What is under debate here is the way we look at ourselves. What is our guiding sense of self and how does it guide our actions? As epistemological subjects we occupy center stage in our worldview and field of vision. Around us we see nothing but objects with which we deal by applying concepts to them; that is, we name and define them and thereby fix them in their respective positions. In Sartre s telling expression, we are the masters of the situation. And as long as we cling to this perspective, the logical way to deal with other people is the like way: we assign them a place in our field of vision and treat them as objects. In Mou s view, Western philosophy has internalized this perspective to a degree that even ethical reflections take it as their starting point, but he insists that the truly ethical perspective is the reverse one: we are the addressees of the Other s call for help/respect/assistance/attention/recognition. We are responsible. Responsibility, taken literally, means to look at ourselves from the perspective of the Other, for example the child on the well. And if we do look at ourselves that way, we are to find out that epistemological subjectivity abstracts from this whole dimension of responsibility and thus negates it. Therefore, we must not think of epistemological subjectivity as our natural and necessary state of existence although to a certain degree it is necessary, as Mou Zongsan knows but as a deficient and inauthentic one in which we temporarily deny our moral subjectivity in order to go about the business of daily life. Put differently, we should assume the role of the epistemological subject, but not cling to it when dealing with other people, and we should not mistake it for true selfhood or the realization of personal freedom. This is what Mou Zongsan means when he argues for what Buddhists would have to call a contradictio in adjecto: an enlightened clinging ( 明的執 ), 67 which means to assume the role of the epistemological subject in a state of self-awareness, knowing that because of the necessities of practical life we have to assume this role, but that we should be ready to give it up as soon as we are called upon to be responsible moral subjects. An u nenlightened clinging ( 無明的執 ), on the other hand, is one that takes epistemological subjectivity for granted and hence clings to it without knowing, unable to give it up when the moral necessity to do so presents itself, as it does in Mencius thought experiment. In Mou Zongsan s view, this unenlightened clinging is epitomized in Western philosophy. In my view, the preceding is at least a brief sketch of the kind of moral vision Mou Zongsan tries to bring across in his mature philosophy. It is as deeply rooted in traditional Confucianism and Buddhism as it is thoroughly disguised in a new and mostly misleading vocabulary, or rather in layer upon layer of vastly different vocabularies that resist Mou s attempt to make them speak with one clearly understandable voice. As an attempt to surpass Kant, Mou Zongsan s philosophy is an obvious failure, but as an exercise in moral thinking and an eventual alternative to established Western Stephan Schmidt 273

16 ways of moral thinking, Kant s included, it is not. There seems to be a fair amount of optimism in this thinking, one that contrasts sharply with the pessimism prevalent in Western ethics, especially after the Holocaust (although Mou Zongsan would hold that this pessimism has deeper roots and reflects the Christian concept of man see below). Confucians insist that the basic truth about human beings is that they have the possibility to become perfectly cultivated and hence perfect moral beings. Moral perfection, however unlikely and rare, is possible, and it is possible because we are moral beings in the sense of being part of a trans-individual togetherness with others, and therefore responsive to their needs. This is something we need to know in order to experience it, that is, in order to not misread our own experiences as, say, sudden bouts of altruism and exceptions to the rule of proven egoism. We need to be guided by the correct self-image and the correct moral vision. 68 Western philosophers are misguided by the wrong self-image of us as mere individuals (epistemological subjects) and the wrong moral theory through which we see the Other as a mere o bject which amounts to saying that we do not see her at all. So far I have tried to deconstruct and dismantle Mou s Kantianism his philosophy as it appears to us, so to speak, through his Kantian vocabulary and to reconstruct and unpack some of the ideas that come to the fore once the packaging is removed, Mou s philosophy here rather ironically dubbed as it is in itself. In the following section I will try to offer an answer to the question why Mou Zongsan chose to speak Kantian even when he was not talking Kant at all. His option for Kant and all the damage it did to the reception of New Confucian thinking stems from an idiosyncratic response to a situation that Mou experienced as objectively given, i ntensely painful, and impossible to run away from. Therefore, he chose to face it head-on. Mou Zongsan and Modernity Although the impact of New Confucian philosophy is still much debated in academic circles in mainland China and Taiwan, it is safe to say that New Confucianism arose as a specific response to the challenge of Western civilization in general and Western-style science and philosophy in particular. Under the onslaught of Western ways of thinking not to forget the imperialist setting in which this first took place tradition-minded scholars saw their cultural identity under attack, 69 first from outside China but then increasingly so from within, that is, from the Chinese a dvocates of modernization and Westernization the May Fourth iconoclasts who identified the Confucian heritage as the major obstacle on China s road to a better future. 70 During the first decades of the twentieth century the basic alternative seemed to be that China could either maintain her traditional ways at the cost of remaining scientifically backward and politically weak or she could modernize along the lines of Western civilization, thereby abandoning her own cultural heritage, especially its Confucian core. As a cultural movement, New Confucianism can be understood as the rejection of this alternative and the search for a third way. To put it differently, New Confucians wanted to cut the nexus between modernization and Westerniza- 274 Philosophy East & West