On the Nature of Early Confucian Classical Chinese Discourse on Ethical Norms

J Value Inquiry (2015) 49:517 541 DOI 10.1007/s10790-015-9530-9 On the Nature of Early Confucian Classical Chinese Discourse on Ethical Norms Christoph Harbsmeier 1 Published online: 23 September 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015 Around 1983, at Peking Airport, I saw a no smoking sign accompanied by some information for would-be offenders in finer print: Fine 18 RMB. A heavy smoker of my acquaintance walked up to a policeman who was standing near that no smoking sign and asked: Can one smoke here? The policeman smiled politely, pointed to the sign above his head and explained: Of course you can! It will cost you 18 yuan, though, as you can see. The policeman read the no smoking sign as a conditional rule: If anyone smokes here he must pay a fine of 18 RMB. The fine print (the meta-norm) had deeply affected the very nature of the normative statement itself. The present paper starts out from this personal experience at Peking Airport in more ways than one. On the one hand, any no smoking sign in China is expected to be routinely disregarded by any person of sufficiently high social status. Such a person will be expected to disregard this kind of a notice without being charged the fine or asked any questions. More generally, norms like any other rule have an intended audience, and they involve cultural felicity conditions for their implementation. This is one important point. But even more importantly, the injunction on the no smoking sign, with its specification of the fine, is read in this Chinese context in a radically different way from what one is used to in - for example - Germany, the home of Immanuel Kant. The present paper, then, is an inevitably tentative piece of philosophical fieldwork in the ethnography of classical Chinese ethical discourse. Inevitably, I can only discuss what has come down to us The author wishes to thank Paul Goldin (University of Pennsylvania) for crucial advice on an earlier version of this paper. & Christoph Harbsmeier christoph.harbsmeier@ikos.uio.no 1 University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

518 C. Harbsmeier from antiquity. And what has been transmitted is clearly biased in favor of the transmitters. The logical form of a moral norm for a Confucian tends to be as an you must/ one should. 1 This is the default logical style of traditionalist Confucian normativity. I call it traditionalist in the spirit of Confucius himself who declares himself a follower of the Zhōu 周 dynasty (1045-221 BC) with its overwhelmingly impressive wén 文 cultural elegance : 子曰 : The Master said: 周監於二代, The Zhōu looked back upon two dynasties! 郁郁乎文哉! How impressive their elegance was! 吾從周 2 I follow the Zhōu. (LY 3.14) In matters of ethical orientation, Confucius seems to declare himself to be a traditionalist ethical aestheticist. He nowhere explains why anyone else should share his traditionalist aesthetic taste for the Zhōu. The norms he follows are never questioned. They are never justified. One notes that Plato (who did try to justify the norms he advocated) was very much preoccupied with to kalon ( the beautiful ) or the kalokagathon ( the beautiful and the good. ) Plato did go on to try to explain and define such things. Confucius never zeroed in to analyze what exactly it was that was so impressively wén 文 beautifully dignified about the former kings of the early Zhōu. 3 It is difficult to be sure of the exact force of the word wén, but the aesthetic side of this concept does seem to have played an important part in shaping its essential meaning. Ethical thought, at the outset, had very much to do with the aesthetics of a well-ordered but hierarchical rather than egalitarian society. Analytical philosophers argue about what is morally right and therefore imperative. Many have realized that there is a huge problem about the unspoken one that lurks implicitly in the impersonal Greek verb dei ( one must; it is morally right that one should. ) I do believe Plato had it structurally wrong as it were syntactically or valencywise insofar as he asked about to dikaion ( the morally just ) as such. When simply asking this kind of question he forgot the crucial problem of the implicit moral subject. 4 Moral duties are never moral duties per se. They are duties for a 1 For a recent treatment of this phenomenon see Roger T. Ames, Confucian Role Ethics, A Vocabulary (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2011). 2 All references to classical Chinese texts are keyed to the editions in Thesaurus Linguae Sericae available with translations and analysis on-line at tls-uni-hd.de. 3 See Lothar von Falkenhausen, The concept of wen in the ancient Chinese ancestral cult, Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, Vol. 18, (1996), pp. 1 22 and Martin Kern, Ritual, text, and the formation of the canon: historical transitions of wen in early China, T oung Pao, Vol. 87, Fasc. 1/3, (2001), pp. 43 91. 4 For an inspiring historical survey of Western approaches to the concept of justice see Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), especially pp. 349 369 on the contrastive aspects. What one would need, from a more general philosophical point of view, are globalized versions of this kind of thematically focused survey of conceptual history. Robin R. Wang, ed., Chinese Philosophy in an Era of Globalization (New York: SUNY Press, 2004), pp. 162. For an anthropological perspective see D. F. Pocock, The ethnography of morals, International Journal of Moral and Social Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1, (1986), pp. 3 20, and for a

On the Nature of Early Confucian Classical Chinese 519 such and such and under such and such pragmatic conditions for the felicity of moral performance. Conceptually this is all very messy, and pragmatically it is all very untidily tied up with matters of contingent cultural differences. The Chinese question is, then: Who exactly must or should do whatever is morally right, and under exactly what kind of morally felicitous circumstances that kind of person must or should do whatever the norms prescribe. Musting and shoulding in any real context is always a musting as a and a shoulding as a, and under given situational felicity conditions. And the blank after as a is not to be filled in with such generic nouns as human being, rational being, et cetera. What is intended here are social roles such as those of a ruler, subject, father, son, husband, wife, elder brother, or younger brother. Significantly, the relation between a younger sister and an elder sister is radically defocussed without argument. The ethical world is a men s world. The ethical universe is not only anthropocentric: it is androcentric to the point where obligations of women are very largely defined in terms of women s obligations towards men, as Han dynasty biographies of distinguished women attest systematically and comprehensively. 5 A Han legal provision determined that the penalty for beating one s elder sister should be harsher than that for beating a younger sister. 6 Whereas the well-documented discourse on early Chinese legal discourse 7 is full of references to women as legal subjects in their own right, moral discourse is predominantly concerned with female agents only insofar as their actions impinge on males or on parents. My quotations from the early Chinese sources that follow aim to illustrate and document my necessarily tentative analysis of how this musting and shoulding Footnote 4 continued survey of the state of the art in 1997 see the editor s introduction in Signe Howell, ed., The Ethnography of Moralities (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 1 23. James D. Faubion, An Anthropology of Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) does not in my opinion live up to the promise of its title. The most challenging empirical ethnographic work within this field I know of is Colin M. Turnbull, The Mountain People (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), a shocking and inevitably controversial portrait of a culture in which a whole range of supposedly universal moral norms are found to be absent by the visiting anthropologist. (See the highly critical review by the linguist Bernd Heine, The mountain people: some notes on the Ik of north-eastern Uganda, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 55, No. 1, (1985), pp. 3 16. 5 See the classic translation Albert R. O Hara, tr., The Position of Woman in Early China, According to the Lieh Nü Chuan, The Biographies of Eminent Chinese Women (Washington: Catholic University of America, 1945), and now Anne Behnke Kinney, tr., Exemplary Women of Early China: The Lienü Zhuan of Liu Xiang (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). For a well-documented and very readable survey of the role of women in ancient China, focusing mainly on the Qín and Hàn dynasties, see Bret Hinsch, Women in Early China, Second edition (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010). 6 See Hinsch 2010, p. 85. 7 A. F. P. Hulsewé, Remnants of Han Law. Vol. I: Introductory Studies and Annotated Translation of Chapters 22 and 23 of the History of the Former Han Dynasty (Leiden: Brill, 1955). A. F. P. Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch in Law: An Annotated Translation of the Ch in Legal and Administrative Rules of the 3rd century B.C. Discovered in Yün-meng Prefecture, Hu-pei Province, in 1975 (Leiden: Brill, 1985). Ulrich Lau and Michael Lüdke, Exemplarische Rechtsfälle vom Beginn der Han-Dynastie: Eine kommentierte Übersetzung des Zouyanshu aus Zhangjiashan/Provinz Hubei (Tokyo: Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA), Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 2012). (An English version of this latter extraordinarily useful and well-documented work with an extensive bibliography is in press.)

520 C. Harbsmeier works in pre-buddhist China. My general comments on these primary sources try to bring out what appear to me to be points relevant to our modern more general philosophical concerns. For Confucius, to be morally good is to fall into place, to fill one s proper role, as they say in modern Chinese duì hào rù zuò 對號入座, which means literally enter one s seat according to one s seat number. One is a moral agent as a ruler, subject, son, husband, wife, and so on, and always as culturally feasible under given situational conditions. Confucian virtues are not what you simply should have as a human being. It is what you should have as a, and the blank is to be filled by the ascription of a social role. Chinese virtue ethics, if that is what one wants to claim there is, would have to be concerned not with virtues tout court but with virtues for a, for people in specific socially determined positions. 8 As a pre-meditation, consider self-reference in Chinese. To a remarkable extent, self-reference in classical Chinese texts, especially from imperial times (221 BC) onwards, is in terms of one s role as a speaker. There is a whole range of roleconcepts that function as quasi-pronouns in modern Chinese. In classical times, this phenomenon was hugely more widespread and even obligatory. For example, when writing to a ruler, one refers to oneself as chén 臣 (I, Your Majesty s) minister. When writing as a senior wife to one s husband one would take care to use qiè 妾, (I, your) concubine when referring to oneself. 9 Thus, in the preserved classical Chinese texts, one commonly speaks of oneself and conceives of oneself as I as, and one speaks of one s audience as you as. Self-reference is in terms of a person as in the role imposed by the discourse situation. Confucius s discourse is always to a you, as a, to an audience in a given situation. 10 8 For detailed treatments of the concept of virtue in China see Donald Munro, The Concept of Man in Ancient China, With a New Foreword by Liu Xiaogan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001); Bryan Van Norden, Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early Chinese Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Mark Csikszentmihalyi, Material Virtue. Ethics and the Body in Early China, (Leiden: Brill, 2004). 9 In my Thesaurus Linguae Sericae I have so far registered 183 first person pronouns and role-based quasi-pronouns in classical Chinese literature. For second person reference I have so far registered 146 lexicalized expressions that function as pronouns or role-based nominal quasi-pronouns. 10 See Heiner Roetz, Confucian Ethics of the Axial Age (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993) and Paul R. Goldin, The theme of the primacy of the situation in classical Chinese philosophy and rhetoric, Asia Major, Vol 18, No. 2, (2005), pp. 2 25 for extensive discussion on the basic nature of early Confucian ethics. For detailed discussion of the virtue of filial piety see now Roger T. Ames and Henry Rosemont Jr., The Chinese Classic of Family Reverence, A Philosophical Translation (Honolulu: University of Hawai i Press, 2009), pp. 6 104. See also Alan K. L. Chan and Sor-hoon Tan, eds., Filial Piety in Chinese Thought and History, (London: Routledge/Curzon, 2004), and Philip J. Ivanhoe, Filial Piety as a Virtue, in R. L. Walker and P. J. Ivanhoe, eds., Virtue Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 297 312.

On the Nature of Early Confucian Classical Chinese 521 1 The Ad Personamness of Abstract Philosophical Discourse in the Analects Sir Karl Popper has famously ventured to introduce the notion of ad hocness. He writes: One can show that the methodology of science (and the history of science also) becomes understandable in its details if we assume that the aim of science is to get explanatory theories which are as little ad hoc as possible: a good theory is not ad hoc, while a bad theory is. 11 The discourse of Confucius as we have it in the Analects is often demonstratively ad hoc in the sense that it addresses a certain situation and is rarely decontextualized and abstract. (When the discourse appears to be decontextualized, I have come to suspect, this may in fact be because the relevant context was not transmitted!) This discourse is also ad hominem or rather ad personam in the sense that it claims relevance and even validity specifically for those fathers, sons, etc. intended by the discourse. Questions themselves must be understood as embedded in a determining context. Thus in the Analects the seemingly abstract question X asked Confucius about Y is answered by Confucius not as a question about Y as such, but as a question about Y for a person in the kind of situation Z that X is assumed to be in as he is asking the question about Y. As an illustration of this deliberate context-sensitiveness in the discussion of abstract issues in the Analects I shall now present and briefly analyze some of the famous occasions in which Confucius is being asked about zhèng 政 administration or government. When the notoriously rich disciple Zǐgòng 子貢 asks about zhèng government, Confucius is not in doubt about the answer appropriate for that particular man: 子貢問政 Zǐgòng asked about government. 子曰 : The Master said: 足食, One should provide sufficient food, 足兵, one should provide sufficient military strength 民信之矣 and the people one should cause to be trusty. (LY 12.7) For the formidable duke of Qí, the message is quite different, as indeed it turns out in the remaining cases I shall present. This answer to the duke of Qí has reverberated through East Asian history: 齊景公問政於孔子 Duke Jǐng of Qí asked Confucius about government. 孔子對曰 : Confucius said: 君君, (In good government) the ruler should act as a ruler, 臣臣, the minister as a minister, 父父, the father as a father, 子子 the son as a son. (LY 12.11) 11 Conjectures and Refutations (London: Basic Books, 1962), p. 60.

522 C. Harbsmeier Good governance consists in creating the conditions for everyone to fulfill culturally pre-ordained social roles properly. As the Oxford logician A. N. Prior pointed out a long time ago, the logic of this kind of derivation of an ought from an is is impeccable: From the premise He is a sea-captain, the conclusion may be validly inferred that He ought to do whatever a sea-captain ought to do. Alasdair MacIntyre claims that the ought conclusion drawn from the is premise is validly derived but insubstantial in meaning: the conclusion in Prior s example certainly does lack any such (scil. substantial evaluative) content. 12 Leaving aside the sea-captains, I think that for the ancient Chinese a statement to the effect that a son should act as a son should does not lack substantial evaluative content. It is just that the substantial evaluative content is conventional only, presupposed as generally understood by the intended audience, and not made explicit in the statement. And note that Confucius s claim here is not merely about rulers, ministers, fathers, and sons. It is about all well-defined roles in society. Good governance is claimed to be constituted by everyone properly acting out the roles they have. Hence the importance, in Confucian ethics, of zhèng míng 正名 getting the names (particularly of social roles) right : 子曰 : 必也正名乎! The Master said: What is necessary is getting the terminology right. (LY 13.3) Confucius derives social obligation from social role as defined by role terminology. Disciple Zǐzhāng gets yet another piece of advice in terms of seriousness of moral effort required for good government: Pull your socks up! : 子張問政 Zǐzhāng asked about government. 子曰 : The Master said: 居之無倦, 行之以忠 In one s personal conduct one should be untiring, and in one s action one should make a dedicated effort. (LY 12.14) When asked about government in general, Confucius responds to his notoriously ritualistic and ostentatious disciple not with abstract and decontextualized political science discourse. On the contrary, he offers a piece of concrete personal advice to his disciple. For the shameless usurper of the rulership in Confucius small home state of Lǔ, Jì Kāngzǐ, the message is reported to be in the form of outrageous thinly veiled political criticism: 季康子問政於孔子 Jì Kāngzǐ asked Confucius about government. 孔子對曰 : Confucius replied politely: 政者, Government 正也 consists in correcting. 子帥以正, If you take the lead with correctness 孰敢不正? who would dare not to be correct? (LY 12.17) 12 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, Second edition (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University, 1984), p. 57.

On the Nature of Early Confucian Classical Chinese 523 This sounds very much like what Confucius or his disciples might have wished Jì Kāngzǐ had said. And this in itself is of interest to us. Confucius is portrayed here as refusing to enter into any decontextualized wise-cracking mode. In his desperation, the usurper Jì Kāngzǐ comes up with his own suggested strategy: 季康子問政於孔子曰 : Jì Kāngzǐ asked Confucius about government and said: 如殺無道, If one kills those who do not behave according to the Way 以就有道, and one keeps close to those who behave according to the Way, 何如? How about that? 孔子對曰 : Confucius replied: 子為政, If you conduct government (properly), 焉用殺? 子欲善而民善矣 how should there be use for killing people? If you have a desire to be excellent then the people will be excellent. (LY 12.19) Confucius refuses to respond to the general question of what one should do in government. He is unusually specific in his use of the second person pronoun, zǐ 子 you, Sir! His response remains on the level of explicitly personal advice. The over-politically swash-buckling senior disciple Zǐlù gets yet another piece of advice that does not, on the face of it, have much to do with administration or government specifically: 子路問政 Zǐlù asked about government. 子曰 : The Master said: 先之, Deal with things before they arise, 13 勞之 work hard at them. 請益 He asked the Master to add something. 曰 : He said: 無倦 You should do so relentlessly. (LY 13.1) Here the advice is: Instead of responding in your hot-headed manner to problems that have arisen, anticipate these, and work hard (at that!). And when Zǐlù insists on more concrete advice, Confucius refuses again. He just insists on an untiring effort. The legalist philosopher Hán Fēi (d. 233 BC) juxtaposes such responses with the deliberate and malicious intention to poke fun at the incoherence of Confucian responses to one and the same question. 葉公子高問政於仲尼, Prince Gāo of Shè asked Confucius about government. 仲尼曰 : Confucius said: 13 In Danish this would be, Kom tingene i forkøbet.

524 C. Harbsmeier 政在悅近 Good government consists in making those who are close feel satisfied 而來遠 and rallying those who are far away. 哀公問政於仲尼, Duke Ai asked Confucius about government. 仲尼曰 : Confucius said: 政在選賢 Good government consists in selecting the talented. 齊景公問政於仲尼, Duke Jǐng of Qí asked Confucius about government. 仲尼曰 : Confucius said: 政在節財 Good government consists in economic use of resources. (HF 38.7.1) At a later stage Wáng Tōng 王通 (d. AD 617) celebrates Confucius s refusal to be decontextualized in his discourse on good governance through imitation. Wáng Tōng insists that taking proper account of the ad-hocness of all sincere and relevant ethical discourse is just what made Confucius into a sage rather than a mere learned hack: 越公問政 When Lord Yuè, i.e. Yáng Sù ( 楊素 ) 14 asked about political administration 子曰 : the Master said: 恭以儉 Show polite economy of effort. 邳公問政 When Sū Wēi 蘇威 15 asked about political administration 子曰 : the Master said: 清以平 Be morally pure and even-handed. 安平公問政 When Lǐ Délín 李德林 16 asked about political administration 子曰 : the Master said: 無鬥人以 Never to fight with people for fame. (ZHONGSHUO 6.20, ed. 名 張沛, 中說校註, Beijing, 中華書局, 2013, p. 161.) The predominant discourse on government in the Analects and in its successor, the Zhōngshuō, is not abstract, decontextualized but situational: it is something like ad hominem or rather ad personam advice in the sense that the making of the moral statements is intended to be relevant to the persons and the situations under discussion, and not in any sense valid generally and abstractly. The logical form of this moral discourse is I hereby declare that what is relevant to you in your role and in your current situation is as follows:. Who then is that imagined paradigmatic moral agent addressed and more distantly intended by Confucius s discourses? Before one can begin to decide on this kind of question it is important to focus on very ancient and still current Chinese 14 He died 606, poet and general, appointed Duke of Yuè 越公, member of Wáng Tōng s group of visitors and interlocutors. 15 AD 542-623, important politician, also referred to as Duke of Péi 邳公. 16 Suí dynasty official, died AD 591, also known as Duke of Ānpíng 安平公.

On the Nature of Early Confucian Classical Chinese 525 notions of social mobility and of universal solidarity. The early Confucian philosopher Mencius went out of his way to stress the moral potential in all human beings: 人皆可以為堯舜 Every human can become a (sage emperor) Yáo or a (sage emperor) Shùn. And Confucius himself advocated fraternité: 四海之內, 皆兄弟也 All men within the Four Seas are brothers. (LY 12.5) The potential for moral behavior is present in every human being even according to the systematizing philosopher Xúnzǐ 荀子 (ca. 313-238 BC) who, having argued very forcefully and repetitively that by nature man was bad, went on to show how man does have an innate capacity of being taught to become good. 17 Thus, there is no sense in which followers of Confucius denied that all men are potential moral agents. In principle, all men were taken to have the potential to become as wise and as creative as a sage emperor. 18 In principle, there is no question that the early Chinese thinkers could have formulated their moral principles in this universal spirit, in terms of no other role than that of being human. And sometimes they do. Yet, it turns out that in communicative practice - and for understandable practical reasons - early Confucian moral discourse is in general addressed to the social class of the shì 士 educated persons only, and what is philosophically more serious, moral norms are typically expressed as adapted to and appropriate for the members of the ruling classes only, even when these moral norms have the welfare of the common people as their aim, as they should do, according to Mencius: 民為貴, The people are of the greatest importance; 社稷次之, the state [literally: the altars of the gods of earth and grain] is next in importance; 君為輕 the ruler is least in importance. (MENG 7B14) Good government serves the interests of the people who do take precedence over the nation. And the moral norms are conceived for those who are to conduct that good government. Pre-Buddhist Chinese philosophical literature remains court literature. Aspirations for the Way are naturally ascribed to the shì 士 : 子曰 : The Master said: 士志於道, If an educated person aspires to the Way 而恥惡衣惡食者, but he considers poor clothing or poor food as disgraceful, 未足與議也 then he is not quite worth entering into discussions with. (LY 4.9) 17 See Paul Rakita Goldin, Rituals of the Way: The Philosophy of Xunzi (Chicago: Open Court, 1999). 18 See Tu Weiming, The Global Significance of Concrete Humanity: Essays on the Confucian Discourse in Cultural China (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd, 2010) for a forceful advocacy of this traditional Confucian humanistic tradition. Compare also W. T. de Bary, Asian Values and Human Rights: A Confucian Communitarian Perspective (Wing-Tsit Chan Memorial Lectures)(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

526 C. Harbsmeier The social class of the shì 士 consists pretty exactly of those literate few from whom the governing officialdom is recruited. The social history of this class has been described in an exemplary manner by Yu Ying-shih of Princeton University in an important Chinese book entitled The Shì and Chinese Culture. 19 One passage, recently excavated, and dating to around 300 BC indicates that it is the shì who may aspire to the jūn zǐ dào 君子道 the Way of the jūn zǐ : 士有志於君子道謂之志士 The shì who aspires to the Way of the jūn zǐ is called a shì with proper aspirations. 20 The paradigmatic ideal moral agent of the shì class, who is to implement proper zhèng 政 administration/government is the morally superior cultivated shì. He is referred to throughout the literature as the jūn zǐ 君子 gentleman: person of superior character. In the Confucian miscellany Book of Rites (4 th -3 rd cent. BC), the very disciple Zǐzhāng I mentioned a moment ago is given a more lively and indeed more conventional answer to the same question about government. And this answer assumes that the proper practitioner of good governance is a jūn zǐ: 子張問政, Zǐzhāng asked about government. 子曰 : The Master said, 師乎! Shī, 前, 吾語女乎? did I not instruct you on that subject before? 君子明於禮樂, The gentleman (jūn zǐ) who is well acquainted with ceremonial usages and music 舉而錯之而已 has only to take and apply them (in order to practice good government). (LIJI 21.8.24) The conversational style of all this is of philosophical significance: Confucius seems to refuse to enter a mode of discourse in which what he says abstracts from the audience and the situation of utterance. It is almost as if Confucius refuses to enter the kind of generalizing mode which we tend to associate with philosophy, since Aristotle at least. But one thing is clear: zhèng 政 administration is paradigmatically the business of the jūn zǐ 君子 gentleman insofar as such a gentleman is a member of the ruling class. Confucius himself was consumed by unfulfilled ambition. He did consider himself as a member of this ruling class. 2 The Concept of the Jūn Zǐ 君子 Gentleman The problem concerning the pre-supposed social construal of the moral agent implicit in moral statements in classical Chinese comes out clearly when we consider this term jūn zǐ 君子 son-of-a-ruler/person of superior status/gentleman/ person of superior character/exemplary person more carefully. Confucian ethics is 19 Yú Yīngshí 余英時, 士和中國文化 ( 上海 : 上海人民出版社, 1987). 20 郭店, 五行. Scott Cook, The Bamboo Texts of Guodian: A Study and Complete Translation (Ithaca: East Asia Program, 2012, vol. 1, p. 489).

On the Nature of Early Confucian Classical Chinese 527 all about specifying the moral attributes of a true jūn zǐ, the ideal moral agent. Since jūn zǐ is a core concept of Confucian moral philosophy it deserves a close conceptual analysis. To begin with it is not philosophically irrelevant that this pre-supposed moral agent never is and never could be a woman in the contexts envisaged in the Confucian Analects. The exclusion of women, however, is not a dogma maintained by anyone. Especially by Hàn times, the social virtue of filial piety, as we shall see, was exemplified mostly by women serving their parents in exemplary ways. 21 Moreover, the Assorted Biographies of Women of the early first century AD, already referred to above, provides a rich panorama of expected moral behavior by women. 22 The translation exemplary person fails to bring out this essential feature of early Chinese moral thinking. I shall return to this issue in the brief discussion of filial piety below. The term jūn zǐ 君子 literally ruler son is generally taken to have two separate meanings of which the first predominates in pre-confucian literature, and the second in the Confucian Analects: 1. literal: man of superior status, gentleman 2. figurative: man of exemplary character; exemplary person. Similarly, xiǎo rén 小人 little person is taken to have two separate meanings: 1. literal: man of inferior status, ordinary person 2. figurative: man of inferior character, petty person. I believe the separation between the literal and the figurative, here as often elsewhere in early Chinese literature, is far from absolute. The philosophically disconcerting fact is that from Confucius s time onwards there is not so much equivocation as semantic oscillation between these two meanings in the same context, and even something like suspended deliberate ambiguity. It is as if a resonance of the literal meaning tends to attach to the figurative meaning as some kind of unacknowledged vaguely presupposed reminiscence. It seems that whereas jūn zǐ commonly has a clearly social meaning, namely person of superior status without any connotation of moral superiority, it is not so clear that when used figuratively to mean person of superior character, the term ever quite completely dispels the suggestion that such a person of superior character will naturally happen not to be anyone like beggar of low birth. The celebration of supreme Taoist wisdom in persons of extremely low social status in the book Zhuāngzǐ has no comparably insistent parallel in pre-han Confucian texts. A proper upper-class formation (though not necessarily upper-class origins) is perceived to be a necessary condition for becoming a person of superior character in 21 Consider here the extremely popular early 14th century illustrated book Guō Jùjìng 郭居敬, Èrshísì xiào 二十四孝 Twenty-four Instances of Filial Piety which concentrates entirely on filial females. 22 See Kinney 2014.

528 C. Harbsmeier early texts; but as all too many historical examples prove, having enjoyed such an education, being brought up as a member of the upper classes, being a person of superior status is not a sufficient condition for becoming a person of superior character. In the great historical narrative commentary Zuǒzhuàn 左傳 (ca. 4 th century BC) the term xiǎo rén petty man is used literally to refer to persons of low status, ordinary people. The opposition jūn zǐ versus xiǎo rén is often social rather than moral in contexts that have become proverbial in Chinese culture: 是故君子勤禮, 小人盡力 Therefore the gentleman exerts himself on ritual propriety, the ordinary person uses all his physical strength. ZUO 8.13.2.3; see also ZUO 9.13.3.) 23 君子勞心, 小人勞力, 先王之制也 The gentleman works with his mind, the ordinary person works with his physical strength: that is the system of the Former Kings. (ZUO 9.9.5.5) Occasionally, the difference between jūn zǐ and xiǎo rén appears to be one between the civil and the military part of administration, where our literary sources would naturally come down heavily in favor of the former: 立君子以修禮樂, One appoints gentlemen (jūn zǐ) to cultivate the rites and music, 立小人以教用兵 and one appoints ordinary people to train and deploy troops. 24 The Confucian philosopher Mencius spells out the political implications of this: 或勞心, Some work with their minds, 或勞力 others work with their physical strength. 勞心者治人, Those who work with their minds govern others, 勞力者治於人 those who work with their physical strength are governed by others. 治於人者食人, Those who are governed by others, feed others, 治人者食於人, those who govern others are fed by others. 天下之通義也 That is the pervasive principle of rectitude in All under Heaven. (MENG 3A 4.11) Relevant discourse involving the purely social meaning of jūnzǐis well known to be common in the Confucian Analects: 子路曰 : Zǐlù said: 君子尚勇乎? Should the gentleman set highest store by courage? 23 See also Book of Songs 167.5 which contrasts upper class jūnzǐ 君子 with lower class soldiers xiǎo rén 小人. 24 逸周書, 大聚解 ed. Huáng Huáixìn, Yì Zhōushū huìjiào jízhù ( 逸周書匯校集注 ), p. 424.

On the Nature of Early Confucian Classical Chinese 529 子曰 : 君子義以為上 君子有勇而無義為亂, 小人有勇而無義為盜 The Master said: The gentleman should be concerned with rectitude, and that is what he should set highest. If a gentleman has courage but no rectitude he will engage in political revolt, and if a man of low status has courage but no rectitude he will engage in thievery. (LY 17.23) The supposition that someone should be an exemplary person and lack a sense of what is right is rather like the supposition that something should be a circle but have four corners. What makes this statement meaningful and indeed analytically interesting is the fact that for Confucius the notion of jūnzǐhere does primarily refer to social status as such: it refers to a person belonging to the actual or potential ruling class. 孔子曰 : Confucius said: 侍於君子有三愆 : In serving a gentleman jūn zǐ there are three kinds of wrong procedure: 言未及之而言, when one s public presentation has not got to a certain point and one already speaks up on it, 謂之躁 ; that is called rashness; 言及之而不言, when discussions have reached the relevant point but one does not speak up 謂之隱 ; that is called reticence; 未見顏色而言, when one speaks before one has seen the facial expression of one s audience 謂之瞽 that is called being unobservant. (LY 16.6) Again, the reference of the term jūn zǐ must be to a person of potentially high status though not necessarily of literally high rank. This quotation demonstrates that in the Analects the term jūn zǐ is currently used in its social and not in its moral sense. The continuing connotation of high social status for jūn zǐ and low social status for xiǎo rén comes out nicely in a very famous quotation from the Confucian philosopher Mencius: 君子之德, The virtue of the gentleman 風也 ; is like wind; 小人之德, the virtue of the small man 草也 is like grass. (MENG 3A 2.10) It is the influence of the wind that will make the grass bend, no matter whether the grass wants to bend or not. The point here is not that Mencius is guilty of equivocation on the term jūn zǐ. The point is that even when the term is primarily one of moral appraisal, the social connotation is by no means absent. It is backgrounded, suggested, presupposed. In other cases, Mencius takes the opposition between jūn zǐ and xiǎo rén to be clearly social and not at all moral:

530 C. Harbsmeier 其君子實玄黃于篚 The gentlemen filled baskets with black and yellow silk 以迎其君子, to bid the gentlemen welcome; 其小人簞食壺漿 the common people brought baskets of food and bottles of drink 以迎其小人 to bid the common people welcome. (MENG 3B5.9) 君子犯義, When gentlemen offend against what is right 小人犯刑, and common people risk punishment, 國之所存者, if a state survives 幸也 then it is good fortune indeed. (MENG 4A 1.6) Offenders against what is right yì are not exemplary persons. The reference of jūn zǐ here must be to persons of high status, to gentlemen. Similar observations are relevant to the following: 君子去仁, 惡乎成名? If a jūn zǐ rejects human-heartedness, how can he make a name for himself? (LY 4.5) An exemplary person who rejects human-heartedness would cease to be an exemplary man. If he became famous, it would no longer be an exemplary man who became famous. The reference, here, is to a person of the ruling class. It cannot be to an exemplary person. The person who is said to be unable to make a name for himself must be a member of the ruling class, not an exemplary person. Against the background of the preceding, let me now turn to a potentially crucial text from the Analects in which the issue of the relationship between status and moral potential is perhaps even topicalized, if we take the preceding readings of jūn zǐ and xiǎo rén as applicable to this text: 子曰 : The Master said: 君子而不仁者有矣夫? There are those who are jūn zǐ but who are devoid of human-heartedness, aren t there? 未有小人而仁者也! There has never been any such thing as a xiǎo rén who was human-hearted. (LY 14.6) On the face of it, it might appear that Confucius is claiming here that persons of high status, members of the ruling classes surely show a lack of kind-heartedness, as we all know. And then he might be taken to go on claiming that on the other hand persons of low status are never found to show human-heartedness. He would be saying that those ordinary people can be well-governed, loyal, obedient, 不犯上 non-recalcitrant with respect to his superiors and so on. But this particular gentlemanly virtue of kind-heartedness rén 仁 they have not. To be sure, this is not how Confucius has been understood, traditionally. But the problem is that traditional readings of this text first tend to attribute to Confucius a self-contradictory notion that one can be an exemplary person and lack the exemplary virtue of rén 仁 human-heartedness, and then, second, they attribute to him the perfectly tautological thought that a morally deficient xiǎo rén could, by definition, never be rén 仁 human-hearted. As if anybody could be in any doubt about such a tautological observation. I have illustrated in some detail above how the interpretation of xiǎo rén as a primarily social term is current before the Analects

On the Nature of Early Confucian Classical Chinese 531 as well as in the Analects. If we are entitled to read this passage in the spirit of those examples, then our passage becomes plain, though clearly at variance with what many traditional interpreters have wanted to read as a remarkably tautological statement. If a xiǎo rén is defined as one lacking in moral sensibilities like that of human-heartedness, then to say that such a xiǎo rén never is human-hearted is not meaningless but curiously vacuous. But are there any other indications that rén 仁 is a virtue that somehow paradigmatically links up with rulers and with the ruling elite rather than with subjects and ordinary people? That is the question which I pursue in the following section. 3 The Concept of RÕn 仁 Human-Heartedness and the Hierarchical Embedding of Some Early Chinese Virtues Consider now first the very general term yì 義 rectitude; duty. This is how that term is semantically unpacked in the Book of Rites (a Confucianist ritual miscellany dating from the 4 th to 2 nd centuries BC, perhaps compiled even later) and it is resolved and analyzed into a set of ten role-defined virtues. Abstract rectitude dissolves into concrete duties towards others. 何謂人義? What are the things which men consider right? 父慈, Kindness on the part of the father, 子孝, and filial duty on that of the son; 兄良, gentleness on the part of the elder brother, 弟弟, and obedience on that of the younger; 夫義, righteousness on the part of the husband, 婦聽, and submissiveness on that of the wife; 長惠, kindness on the part of the elders, 幼順, and deference on that of the juniors; 君仁, with human-heartedness on the part of the ruler, 臣忠, and loyalty on that of the minister; 十者, - these ten 謂之人義 are the things which men consider to be right. (LIJI 9.2.19) It is in contexts like these that the intimate presupposed link of moral virtues to social hierarchies becomes explicit. Consider the cardinal virtue in the Analects, rén 仁 human-heartedness. The notion is generally expounded without reference to any social hierarchy, as the cardinal virtue that applies everywhere and to everyone. And yet our text here makes it very clear that in fact the notion of kind-heartedness in early Confucianism is very basically a virtue one has insofar one governs or has responsibility for others. It is the paradigmatic virtue or ethical domain of a jūn 君,or by extension of a jūnzǐ 君子 gentleman/(ruling-class) person of superior character. 25 25 And yet, LY 8.2 shows that this ruler s virtue can indeed huà 化 transform through education the people and cause them to rise to the task of imitating him, as Huáng Kǎn s 皇侃 (AD 488-545) commentary takes care to explain in his commentary: 下民效之不為薄行 The people below imitate/ emulate him and do not engage in ungenerous action. 黃小懷, 論語彙校集釋,( 上海 : 上海古籍出版社, 2008), p. 676. See also

532 C. Harbsmeier The following quotation makes the same point about the cardinal virtue of human-heartedness. Here the roles relevant for the definitions of virtues are made explicit. In classical Chinese this is idiomatically expressed by the addition of the word rén 人 of others before the name of each role: 為人君, As a ruler of others, 止於仁 ; he rested in benevolence; 為人臣, as a minister of someone, 止於敬 ; he rested in respect; 26 為人子, as a son of someone, 止於孝 ; he rested in filial piety; 為人父, as a father of someone, 止於慈 ; he rested in kindness; 與國人交, in interaction with senior men of the state, 止於信 he rested in good faith. (LIJI 42.1.19 (Great Learning); italics mine) Here, on the other hand, is a splendid example where Confucius might appear to disregard hierarchical relations and to speak of some kind of symmetrical reciprocity: 子曰 : 忠恕違道不遠, 施諸己而不願, 亦勿施於人 If you do your loyal best and you practice reciprocity/fairness, you will not deviate far from THE WAY: If, when someone does something to you you wish he did not do it, then you should likewise not do this to another person. (LIJI 31.1.32.) 27 Doing one s loyal best and practicing reciprocity are kinds of behavior that inscribe themselves into the social hierarchical system. Supposing for a moment that the passage that follows this should be read as unfolding that WAY from which one does not deviate when doing one s loyal best and practicing fairness, this would illustrate if not demonstrate the predominantly role-based nature of the norms implicit in the notion of the Way: 君子之道四, In the Way of the superior man there are four things, 丘未能一焉 : and I am not yet capable of any of these: 所求乎子, - To serve my father Footnote 25 continued 子曰 : 如有王者, If there is a True King 必世而後仁 then first after one generation human-heartedness will prevail. (LY 13.12) Here again, kind-heartedness is construed as originating with the ruler. In this instance it remains an open question where in society human-heartedness is to prevail. 26 On the central topic of the Chinese virtue of jìng 敬 reverence; proper respect see the comparative study Paul Woodruff, Reverence. A Review of a Forgotten Virtue, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Woodruff compares the cases of ancient Greece and of ancient China. In particular, he points out how Plato and Confucius do converge in the importance they attach to reverence as a crucial constituent of the moral life. 27 Contrast the translation in Goldin 2005, p. 1.

On the Nature of Early Confucian Classical Chinese 533 以事父, 未能也 ; 所求乎臣, 以事君, 未能也 ; 所求乎弟, 以事兄, 未能也 ; 所求乎朋友, 先施之, 未能也 子張問仁於孔子 孔子曰 : 能行五者於天下, 為仁矣 請問之? 曰 : 恭 寬 信 敏 惠 : 恭則不侮, 寬則得眾, 信則人任焉, 敏則有功, 惠則足以使人 as I would require my son to serve me, I am not yet capable; to serve my ruler as I would require my minister to serve me, I am not yet capable; to serve my elder brother as I would require a younger brother to serve me, I am not yet capable; to behave to my friends first as I would require them to behave to me, I am not yet capable. Zǐ Zhāng asked Confucius about human-heartedness. Confucius said: Anyone who can practice five things in the world must count as Good. May I ask about those? Confucius replied: These are politeness, forgiveness, trustworthiness, skillfulness, and generosity. If one is polite one will not humiliate others. If one is forgiving one will win over the multitudes. If one is trusty then others will rely on one. If one is adroit then one will succeed. If one is generous then one is qualified to deploy others. (LY 17.6) Only people of high status can tend to humiliate others, hope to win over the multitudes or deploy others, and so on. Take the important virtue of shù 恕 reciprocity which might appear at first sight to conceptualize the abstraction from relations of social hierarchy: What you yourself do not desire, do not do unto others. This sounds like the Golden Rule, but as Paul Goldin (2005: 1) points out in the context of early China, shù means doing unto others as you would have others do unto you, if you were in the same social situation as they. (Italics mine) 28 Up to now I have found it necessary to illustrate through extensive documentation the deep underlying, presupposed link between social rank on the one hand and morally expected behavior on the other. Now I have to turn to an example that on the face of it seems to indicate that the common people are indeed expected, in an ideal world, to become human-hearted themselves. Indeed, this is how I have always interpreted this passage, much in the light of the memorable statement that All men are capable of becoming a (sage emperor) Yáo or a (sage emperor) Shùn that I have mentioned above: 顏淵問仁 Yán Yuān asked about Goodness. 子曰 : The Master said: 28 See also Harbsmeier 2011 on the same subject.

534 C. Harbsmeier 克己復禮為仁 一日克己復禮, 天下歸仁焉 Gaining control of one s Self and turning to ritual constitutes Goodness If for one day one gains control of one s Self and turns to ritual then all the world will rally to the humanhearted. (LY 12.1) 29 The Confucian commentator Huáng Kǎn 皇侃 (AD 488-545) is the earliest source I have come across which addresses our problem. He glosses the relevant passage very helpfully: 天下之民咸歸於仁君也 then the people of All under Heaven will all rally to the human-hearted ruler. (ed. Huáng Huáixìn 黃懷信 p. 1061) To be human-hearted will naturally lead others to rally to one as a human-hearted leader. 30 The operative phrase guī rén 歸仁 recurs in the Mencius (an important Confucian text dating to the 4 th century B.C.): 民之歸仁也, The people rally to the human-hearted 猶水之就下, as water flows downwards 獸之走壙也 or as animals run off to the wilds. (MENG 4A9.3) 31 The oldest commentator on the Mencius, Zhào Qí 趙歧 (d. AD 200), comments explicitly on the point that interests us here and identifies the attitude of the people as an attitude to the human-hearted ruler (as enlightened through his humanheartedness) and not to human-heartedness as an abstract object: 民之思明君猶水樂埤下 The people s thought of their enlightened ruler is like water s delighting in lower territory. (ed. Jiáo Xún 焦循, Mèngzǐ zhèngyì 孟子正義, Beijing: 中華書店, 1987, p. 505) There is another passage that would appear to be problematic for my account of the social context of human-heartedness in the Analects: 樊遲問仁 Fán Chǐ asked about goodness. 子曰 : The Master said: 愛人 It is caring properly for others. 問知 He asked about understanding. 子曰 : The Master said: 知人 Understanding others. (LY 12.22) Here comes the crux: What exactly does ài 愛 care properly for; love refer to in such a context? And the point is that ài rén 愛人 take good care of others is something that behooves a rén jūn 人君 ruler of men who is beholden to take 29 For further detailed discussion on this passage see Paul Goldin, Confucianism, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), pp. 19 21. 30 I have taken this to refer to turning to the human-heartedness for many decades, as do most translators, and it is only now that I find the other interpretation in the early commentaries. 31 See the authoritative translation by D. C. Lau which has the people turn to the benevolent.

On the Nature of Early Confucian Classical Chinese 535 proper care of his subjects. In order to understand this, it is helpful to concentrate on the proverbial idiom jìng shàng ài xià 敬上愛下 respecting those above and taking good care of those below, for which Google returns over one million results. (This comes in Shuōyuàn 說苑 19.3 (First century AD edifying compendium), and the Tàipíngjīng 108.32 (Taoist compilation of uncertain date, perhaps ca. 4 th century AD)). The Discussions on Iron and Salt of the first century BC sum up the directionality of ài 愛 love; loving care and put politics into that characteristic family-clan context: 古者, 人君敬事愛下, 使民以時, 天子以天下為家, 臣妾各以其時供公職, 古今之通義也 In ancient times rulers went about their business with respectful diligence and took good care of ài 愛 those below. They deployed the people in accordance with the seasons and treated All under Heaven as a family. Male and female subjects each performed their public duties in accordance with the seasons. That was the pervasive moral rule in ancient and modern times. (Yántiělùn 鹽鐵論 29) There can be little doubt that human-heartedness is a virtue appropriate for members of ruling class even though the discourse about it is mostly directed personally at an interlocutor. Thus in the following winning over the multitudes, for example, as well as employing others are not for any ordinary member of society. 32 Norms of morally proper behavior are predicated upon the social roles and social situations of those to whom norms apply. And if a systematic attempt were made in a culture to philosophically (rather than traditionally) justify those norms hallowed by a tradition that attaches to social roles we begin to have role ethics combined with something one might call situation ethics. 33 Until such a philosophical effort is made by Chinese thinkers, what we have is role-governed, situation-based traditional and conventional morality. And it is worth remembering that what we have, there, - no matter how we judge it from our modern analytic perspectives - is one of the historically most profoundly influential moral frameworks the world has known. 4 The Concept of Xiào 孝 Filial Piety The anthropological source of ethically evaluative sentiments in ancient China is adumbrated already in the Confucian Analects. By such sentiments I mean the emotional attachment to moral rules or moral virtues. At the very basis of rén 仁 human-heartedness, we are told, are the role-based virtues of xiào 孝 filial piety and tì 弟 / 悌 brotherly love : 32 It will be remembered that Confucius is concerned with human-heartedness as a virtue appropriate for ruling classes that he is educating also in Analects 17.6 quoted above. 33 Joseph Fletcher, Situation Ethics (Westminster: John Knox Press, 1997). See the lengthy methodological introduction by James F. Childress.