Reischauer Lecture #1: The Humanist Spirit of the Confucian Intellectual

By Tu Weiming

Citation: Reischauer Lecturer, Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, Harvard University, April, 1996.

1. Professor Reischauer’s thoughtful pithy essay, “The Sinic World in Perspective,” published by Foreign Affairs in the summer of 1974, was originally presented as a communication to the Trilateral Commission as a background understanding for international-minded American leaders in government, business, mass media, civic organizations, religion, and the academy.
2. There is a tacit dimension to the piece which is predicated on three underlying assumptions:
1. Culture matters. It should not be related to the residual category.
2. East Asia is a meaningful category not only in a geopolitical sense but also in an ethico-religious sense. It is vitally important to understand the shared life-orientation of East Asian societies.
3. While East Asia is a coherent concept, it is neither monolithic nor static. To understand East Asia, a dynamic multicultural perspective is required.
3. Ironically (at least paradoxically), as the idea of East Asia has been fully recognized as the most challenging economic, political, and cultural force in defining the new world order after the implosion of the Soviet Bloc, scholars in North America begin to transcend and to actively deconstruct its significance and relevance as a meaningful category for collaborative research.
4. The lectures on the Humanist Spirit of the Confucian Intellectual intend to show that “East Asia: the great tradition and its modern transformation,” far from an outmoded intellectual enterprise, has both explanatory power in understanding the cultural implications of the rise of East Asia and predicative power in the possible East Asian contribution to the emerging global ethic.
5. The first lecture, “Body, Body Politic, and Embodying the Way,” intends to show that the development of a communal critical self-consciousness in the Confucian fellowship in the classical age provided the basic parameters for defining the Confucian project as the realization of a moral community through personal self-cultivation as learning to be human.
6. The Confucian way as a human way is predicated on the faith that the human condition is improvable through self-effort. The task begins near at hand by recognizing the profound implications and deep meaning of concrete ordinary daily living for human flourishing. However, the celebration of the proper manner of living the life of “everyday” human beings is neither an adjustment to the world nor a rejection of the aspiration for self-transcendence. Rather, it is the natural outcome of a fiduciary commitment to human beings as co-creators of the cosmos who can enlarge the Way through self-realization. Human beings can thus be defined as self-actualizing beings.
7. The process of self-actualization takes the concrete living person here and now as its point of departure. Confucius defines learning to be human in terms of learning for the sake of the self. It is an end in itself rather than a means for something else no matter how lofty the ideal (i.e. economic well-being, political order, or social harmony). However, since the Confucian self is always a center of relationships in a dynamic process of creative transformation, it is neither an isolated individual nor a static entity. As a center, it is socially situated and, as a process, it is culturally constituted. However, selfhood is not reducible to either social relations or cultural productions. While we should not essentialize the Confucian idea of the self, we must recognize that body, mind, soul, and spirit are inseparable dimensions of Confucian selfhood.
8. An exemplification of human beings as self-actualizing beings is the conception of the body as a publicly accountable attainment rather than a private possession. Learning to be human entails the ritualization of the body. The entire program of elementary learning can be seen as the ritual process enabling the body to be gradually transformed into a fitting expression of the self. In other words, Confucian education, by building a cultural code on the biological reality, intends to transform our structural limitations into appropriate instruments of self-realization.
9. Both Mencius and Xunzi subscribed to the thesis that human nature is malleable, that conscientious effort is required for improving the human condition, and that self-cultivation is both necessary and desirable. The reason that education recognizes no class distinction is predicated on the belief that learning to be human through self-cultivation is universal. The dictum in the Great Learning that from the emperor to the commoner all must regard self-cultivation as the root is, therefore, an articulation of basic Confucian faith.
10. Implicit in this faith is the presupposition of a moral community both as a minimum condition for human survival (trust is more important than the military and food for security) and a maximum realization of the full human potential as the co-creator of the cosmos. The Confucian fellowship, which is neither covenantal nor contractarian, is an inclusive human community which recognizes that the Way must accommodate a multiplicity of paths.
11. Politics involves all the intermediary and mediating structures that serve to bring cultivated persons into a variety of symbolic interchange for the sake of human flourishing. The body politic may assume the form of family, clan, school, village, local government, or central bureaucracy, but it is never devoid of an educational function. If politics fails to serve as exemplary teaching for learning to be human, it is no longer “rectification” in its original authentic sense of what it ought to be.
12. This deliberate move to make politics inseparable from morality is not, I surmise, a lack of understanding of the political process as an independent arena in the spheres of interest of complex societies. The Confucians were neither naive nor romantic about power and influence. However, despite their comprehension of how the rules of the game operated in realpolitic, they decided to exercise their power through education and exert their influence through ritual. In modern terminology, they opted for symbolic power and social capital. Although their long-term perspective and integrated approach met with repeated failures, they eventually designed the ritual through which political power was exercised and defined the educational program for the social elite.
13. Through a thorough critique of the physiocratic position that even the emperor must personally involve in agricultural productivity, Mencius presented a sophisticated argument, based on the principle of the division of labor that those who labor with their minds, like those who labor with their muscle, have a proper function to perform in a complex society. Indeed, their service is as essential as productivity in agriculture, labor and commerce in maintaining organic solidarity in society. Mencius envisioned those who labor with their minds to render a manfold social service as advisors, even teachers, rather than obedient servants, of kings, they were ministers of the moral order. As critics of the status quo, they were guardians of the Mandate of Heaven which always “sees through the eyes of the people and hears through the ears of the people.” And, as transmitters of cultural values, they were enlightened thinkers. Mencius created a cultural space and political arena for the “organic intellectual” (who is organically embedded in the real world and intellectually committed to the moral ideal of social transformation from within) by putting the Confucian idea of enlarging the Way through human effort into practice.
14. The intellectual so conceived addresses the four critical issues in Mencius.