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

Transcription

Mou Zongsan, Hegel, and Kant: The Quest for Confucian Modernity
Stephan Schmidt
Philosophy East and West, Volume 61, Number 2, April 2011, pp. 260-302
(Article)
Published by University of Hawai'i Press
DOI: 10.1353/pew.2011.0029
For additional information about this article
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pew/summary/v061/61.2.schmidt.html
Access provided by National Taiwan University (17 Jul 2013 04:24 GMT)
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 (1909–1995) 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 scholars
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
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© 2011 by University of Hawai‘i Press
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
mature 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 theoretical
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-
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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 1968/1969.9
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 anti
quity 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), whereas
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
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Philosophy East & West
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
fully realized.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
coexist.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 NeoConfucianism, 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 devoted
no less than seven years of intellectual labor to his detailed textual studies of SongMing 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
(1130–1200) 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
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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
reconstruction,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
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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
whereas 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
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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
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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
standard, 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
a ttack 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).
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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
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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
another 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 (383–414), 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.
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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 (1020–1077) 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 (1885–1968), 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 yuanjiao
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
yuanjiao 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 pre
sents 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
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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 “self-
confirmation 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
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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 Cogito60 — 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,
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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 ad
dressees 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
“unenlightened 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
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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
object — 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,
intensely 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 advocates
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-
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tion by seeking to modernize Confucianism itself and to make this process the motor
of the social, political, and scientific modernization of China as a country.
As indicated in the introduction, I shall use the label ‘Confucian Modernity’ to
refer to the ultimate but only vaguely anticipated goal of New Confucian philosophy.
In the writings I am dealing with it is much more an ideal — even a utopia — than a
clearly defined concept. At the same time, it expresses a conviction shared by all
New Confucians: Confucianism is one of the great intellectual and spiritual traditions of the world and has a substantial contribution to make to modern humankind.
As such, it is neither outdated nor backward, although it does need to be reformulated in a new and more precise — more ‘philosophical’ in the Western sense of the
discipline — kind of way.71
In this section I will approach Mou’s philosophy from the context of his time and
read his philosophy as a response to this larger context. In order to avoid misunderstandings, let me state at the outset that what I refer to as the ‘context’ — China’s political situation between the Opium War and the Communist Revolution, and the
confrontation of traditional Chinese thought with modern Western philosophy — did
not affect Mou’s vision of life as a Confucian philosopher, but it did have a decisive
impact on the way he argued for his vision philosophically, and this in turn determined how the vision of life expressed in his philosophy was understood by his
readers. To put it differently, while Mou Zongsan was not influenced by Kant (or any
other Western thinker) to the degree that he altered his basic convictions, he thought
he could only successfully argue for these convictions by using a terminology radically different from the one employed by his forebears. In this section I want to find
out what exactly the success was that he was after. I will try to discern a strategy that
he followed without ever making it explicit. The strategy was designed to meet two
criteria for the survival of Confucianism in the age of modernity, which I shall label
the ‘necessary’ and the ‘sufficient condition,’ respectively. They can be applied to the
two phases of Mou’s dialogue with Kant. Despite the many contortions of Kant’s
concepts that Mou’s thinking entails, this dialogue will, through my interpretation,
be made intelligible as one argument containing two distinct steps and will also explain why Mou thought that only through this kind of dialogue could the survival of
Confucianism under the condition of China’s political breakdown be secured. Parts
of my argument, though, will only come into full view in the third section below.
The Breakdown of Institutions and the Search for a Principle of Confucianism:
The Necessary Condition (Phase I)
The guiding question of this subsection is the one I have already stated but not answered in the first section above, on Mou Zongsan and Kant: why is it so important
for Mou Zongsan to prove that Confucianism contains a principle of autonomy? Why
does he insist it is this Kantian principle of autonomy and not any other that a careful
analysis can retrieve from the Confucian texts?
As we have seen, Mou Zongsan was living in a time when Confucianism as a
living tradition embodied in a number of institutions had basically vanished. Neither
the civil examination system nor the Confucian academies nor the whole political
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structure of imperial China had survived. After 1949, China as a geographical cultural
entity was no longer herself. While Mou worked on his study of Neo-Confucianism,
the Cultural Revolution seemed to destroy the last remains of traditional Confucian
China. Therefore, the only thing to do for a Confucian living under these circumstances was to make sure that an intellectual tradition of Confucianism be saved from
collapse — an intellectual tradition that one day might launch the reestablishment of
institutions in which a more wholesale Confucianism could live again. The problem
was and is: how can this be done?
The first thing that is required is the independence of the intellectual tradition
from the institutions that no longer exist. Therefore, I suggest we read Mou’s three
volumes of XT as a kind of declaration of intellectual independence of Confucian
philosophy from Confucian institutions. This independence becomes manifest in the
fact that Confucianism contains a principle, that is, something the validity of which
does not depend on anything else, especially not on its being embodied in social
institutions.72 Only when Confucianism manages to give itself a principle does it
have a chance to survive the loss of its institutions, for a principle is in itself an intellectual fundament on which a tradition can be (re)built. To find this principle is therefore the conditio sine qua non for the survival of intellectual Confucianism after the
collapse of Confucian China. This is one point.
The second point concerns the nature of this principle. Theoretically, the independence of an intellectual tradition from certain institutions may be said to be possible once a principle underlying the tradition has been identified. This could be any
principle. Yet Mou Zongsan was very much aware that the principle of autonomy was
not just any principle, but a decisively modern one. In a way it is the principle underlying Western modernity. Although it is impossible to reduce anything as complex as
our conception of modernity to one single underlying principle, I think it is fair to say
that the idea of autonomy is deeply embedded in and indissolubly intertwined with
modern Western political and social institutions. Autonomy is the backbone of the
doctrines of democracy and liberalism, of the concept of human and civil rights, and
of many other things that cannot be plausibly separated from our understanding of
modernity. In an important respect, then, any idea that violates the principle of autonomy fails the test of its ‘modernness.’ Conversely, if Confucianism does contain a
principle of autonomy and even contained it already in premodern times, then there
is no reason to deny the general possibility of a reconciliation of Confucianism and
modernity. Just as in Kant a principle yields the possibility of that which can be deduced from it, we may say that if Confucianism contains the principle of autonomy a
Confucian Modernity is possible.
One consequence of Mou’s approach is important enough to be mentioned here
even though it leads us beyond the immediate scope of this essay and mainly concerns the possibilities Mou has opened up for modern Confucians who follow in his
footsteps: if a principle of the Confucian tradition can be identified, it becomes possible to appropriate Western ideas and to incorporate them into Confucian thinking as something that is not genuinely but nevertheless authentically Confucian — ‘authentic’ in the sense of ‘in accordance with the principle.’ The affirmation of
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the concept of human rights by New Confucian thinkers in Taiwan is a case in point:
the Chinese tradition does not contain a concept of human rights but it does have the
developed idea of human dignity and the absolute value of human life. Once these
ideas are identified not as contingent opinions of individual thinkers who called
themselves Confucians, but as necessary expressions of the innermost principle of
Confucianism, namely autonomy, it becomes possible to develop them further into a
concept of human rights that is based on the same principle. This then, does not mean
the Westernization of Confucianism but the realization of its very own essence.73
The Limits of Western Civilization and Mou’s Attempt to Surpass them:
The Sufficient Condition (Phase II)
According to my interpretation, the first phase of Mou’s dialogue with Kant was
meant to secure the necessary condition for and hence the possibility of what is
called here Confucian Modernity. Containing as it does, in Mou’s view, the principle
of autonomy, Confucianism is basically fit for modernity. But does modernity need
Confucianism? Is there a necessary and positive contribution Confucianism has to
make, or is the Confucian potential already exhausted once it has caught up with the
West, where — in Immanuel Kant’s philosophy — the principle of autonomy was established long ago? Obviously, Kant was able to come up with this principle without
any help from Confucians,74 and so the West was able to bring about modernity,
which it then exported to China by force. Consequently, for modernity to become
Confucian in a more than nominal sense there has to be more than a mere compatibility of Confucianism and modernity. In order to contribute to global modernity
(which is essentially Western modernity gone global) Confucianism has to tap intellectual or spiritual resources beyond the reach of the Western mind. Only then can
the sufficient condition of Confucian Modernity be met, for only then is a Confucian
Modernity not only possible but indeed necessary. In my reading, it is this sufficient
condition that Mou Zongsan was going for in the second phase of his project.
Let us briefly return to Mou’s discussion with Kant. In the opening paragraph of
Phenomenon and Thing-in-itself he makes the remarkable statement I have already
mentioned above: the entire system of Kant’s philosophy rests on one basic assumption, namely that “man is a limited being” (人是有限的存在), or, more briefly, the
assumption of “man’s limitedness” (人之有限性).75 The central distinction of Kant’s
theoretical philosophy, the transcendental distinction between phenomenon (Er
scheinung) and the thing in itself (Ding an sich), is, in Mou’s reading, an implication
of the thesis of man’s limitedness. His own effort to go beyond Kant therefore starts
with the opposite assumption of man’s limitlessness or, more precisely, with the
claim that “although man is limited, these limits can be overcome / he can become
limitless” (人雖有限而可無限).76 In my discussion above, I have translated this claim
into the doctrine of human self-transcendence. We now have to ask how Mou Zongsan explains that Western philosophers have failed to develop a notion of this basic
human characteristic.
For Mou Zongsan, the doctrine of human limitedness is essentially a Christian
dogma and the result of understanding man as God’s creature. According to this
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Christian view, the difference between man and God is an absolute one, and the
absoluteness of the difference is reflected in the categorical distinctions between
the attributes that can be rightfully applied to both sides. Necessarily, they have to be
opposites: since God is immortal, eternal, all-knowing, good, and so on, man has to
be conceived as mortal, temporal, ignorant, sinful, et cetera, for to apply any of the
divine attributes to human beings would amount to a sacrilege. According to Mou’s
Confucian view, the problem with this — apart from the entirely unintelligible notion
of a divine creator of the universe — is that the basic moral qualities of man do not fit
into the purely human realm as defined (i.e., limited) by the Christian dogma. For
morality, correctly understood, is something that transgresses into the realm that the
Christian worldview has labeled ‘divine’ and hence off-limits for human beings,
which means that under the dogmatic restrictions imposed on philosophical thinking
by Christianity no understanding of man as a moral being in the full sense of the term
could arise. If I understand Mou correctly, he thinks that even Kant’s seemingly technical transcendental distinction is basically a fruit of the cultural soil out of which it
has grown.
The transcendental distinction is an implication of the absolute distinction between man and God, which is fundamental for all Western philosophy. Kant’s first
Critique can therefore be read as the quintessential critique of pure Western reason,
and the limitations his critical philosophy imposes on human reason have to be
understood as the restatement of the dogmas of Christian theology in a different language. Confined in his thinking by a particular cultural background, the philosopher
Kant stays within the confines of the Christian concept of man as a limited being. This
is why he was unable to arrive at a full-fledged system of moral metaphysics, although
his moral sensibilities clearly drove him in this direction. Christianity put a stop sign
to his way of thinking.
Within the limits of this essay I cannot even start to discuss the complex story of
Kant’s relation to Christianity. Let me simply state that while Mou might have failed
to grasp the story’s full complexity, I do think that his Confucian reading sheds an
interesting light on Kant’s many seemingly passing and unimportant remarks on religion in the first Critique.77 But the more immediately relevant aspect is that we are
now in a better position to understand why Kant is so important for Mou Zongsan:
although it is often stated differently, this importance is due neither to Kant’s sheer
greatness as a thinker nor to the attention Kant paid to the problem of moral agency
(or practical reason), but has mostly to do with Kantianism being a critical philosophy : Kant wants to check the claims of human reason in order to understand what
lies beyond its reach and, to borrow one of his preferred metaphors, its jurisdiction.
As we have seen, Mou Zongsan affirms this concept of critique, but aims to restrict it
to the cultural context out of which it came, namely the Christian West. Kant is so
important for Mou’s project because he is the representative of Western civilization
that Mou is trying to come to terms with, in order to transcend and surpass its limits.
In his critical philosophy, Kant — thinking he was drawing the limits of human
reason — effectively drew the limits of Western culture and thus demonstrated the
need for another culture, China, to take over and to free humankind from these very
limits. This liberation is necessary because the limits imposed on human nature by
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the Christian dogma have alienated human beings from their own moral nature and
have locked them inside the confines of their mere abstract individuality. They have
not allowed man to become what he is, a moral being. Arguing along these lines,
Mou Zongsan at the same time argues that Confucian Modernity is not only possible,
but indeed necessary, because (only) China’s tradition of moral thinking can reopen
access to true human moral nature.
To a certain extent, Mou’s strategic concerns explain the otherwise inexplicable
fact that he focused so exclusively on Kant and never followed his own hints at the
Confucian affinity with German Idealism. It seems that if he had engaged in a dialogue with the idealists, it would have been more difficult for him to argue that only
Confucianism could tap certain spiritual resources necessary to overcome the limits
of Western culture as drawn by Kant. Hence, it would have been more difficult to
argue that the sufficient condition for Confucian Modernity could be met. At present,
this may not be a fully satisfying argument, but in my view it is the best one available.78 I shall now try to gather further support for my thesis by going one step back
into the ‘pre-mature’ phase of Mou’s thinking, thus tracing the story of his Kantianism
back to its Hegelian prologue.
Mou Zongsan and History
My interpretation developed so far sees the whole project of Mou Zongsan’s mature
philosophy as a response to the circumstances of his lifetime, or indeed to China’s
development from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. If correct, my reconstruction stands in a certain tension with claims by some of Mou’s critics, who reproach him for having “walked out of history,” as Zheng Jiadong has put it, and to
have pursued problems of a “purely logical and academic” nature.79 In order to see
how far these claims make sense and yet fail to understand the logic of Mou’s project, we need to understand Mou’s often overlooked and — even by himself — largely
unacknowledged indebtedness to Hegel. I will try to show that Mou’s entire dialogue
with Kant was motivated by a particular reading of Hegel’s philosophy of history and
followed a ‘dialectical logic’ that sent Mou Zongsan on a detour through the seemingly ‘purely logical and academic’ realm but was supposed to lead him right into
history and to a higher stage in the development of Chinese culture.
Principles: A Hegelian Reading of Chinese History
In his essay On Hegel’s Dialectic (論黑格爾的辯證法), written in 1951, Mou boldly
states that Hegel “was not a good philosopher, but a good philosopher of history.”80
We are well advised to not read this statement as a judgment of Hegel’s entire
philosophy — of which Mou Zongsan had at best secondhand knowledge — but as an
appraisal of what in Hegel Mou considered useful for his own purpose. Therefore, we
should focus less on Mou’s altogether forgettable excursions into dialectics, but on
what he learned from Hegel and how he applied it in his own thinking.
In the 1950s Mou Zongsan was driven by the desire to understand why China
had failed to produce science and democracy and had thus fallen behind the cultural development of the modern West. Note that ever since the early twentieth cen
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tury, science and democracy were the two catchwords that epitomized modernity in
China’s intellectual discourse. Mou’s question was: what precisely did China lack
and what were the factors responsible for the failure? In his search for an answer he
analyzes the Confucian tradition in a very critical way that does not display any belief in the superiority of Confucianism, although Mou remains committed to its values
and moral vision. Science and democracy are Western achievements of great value
and their lack indicates a serious shortcoming in Chinese culture. Mou wants to identify these shortcomings as precisely as possible in order to correct them and to create
a soil in which science and democracy can take root. In this undertaking, he considered Hegel’s help indispensable.
The first thing Hegel provided Mou Zongsan with is the notion of the dialectical
development of history. This means several things at once. First, history is intelligible
as the development of a principle underlying the various seemingly contingent historical events. Second, this development is necessary in that there is a law that guides
it and can be discerned through a philosophical analysis of history. Third, the dialectical development of history is different from the natural growth of something in that
it implies division, antagonism, resistance, and confrontation — everything that Hegel
calls Entzweiung — and the later reconciliation of the divided on a higher level of
development. In short, without antagonism there is no progress.
Mou Zongsan immediately applied the third point to China’s history, especially
the history of Confucian political thinking, and concluded that there was no
progress — no rise of democratic institutions — because there was no antagonism
(反對) 81 and no resistance (逆).82 Confucians misconceived politics as the smooth
and quasi-natural expansion of moral cultivation. The traditional formula “Inner
moral cultivation/perfection, outer wise political action/kingliness” (內聖外王) focused on the moral virtuosity of the ruler and considered goodness the basic prerequisite for the legitimate exercise of political power. Within this perspective, questions
of institutional setting, constitutional checks, and so forth were altogether secondary.
The translation of moral cultivation into political action, Mou writes, was supposed
to be “direct and smooth” (直通) instead of mediated and “twisted” (曲通).83 For reasons of space and limits of expertise I cannot examine and appraise the adequacy of
Mou’s claims. More important for my purpose is that with these rather direct applications to the Chinese context Mou Zongsan has not yet exhausted the full critical potential of Hegel’s philosophy of history.84
In Hegel, what develops and unfolds dialectically through the course of history
is called Substanz.85 This substance is reasonable (vernünftig) and therefore intelligible, which is why Hegel sometimes also calls it the Idee of history.86 The Substanz/
Idee is dynamic, and there is a necessity to the way it develops, but it is not, strictly
speaking, active, for its realization in history relies on the activity of human beings.
The substance is universal (allgemein), but unless it is realized through the activity of
concrete human beings, it remains abstract and in this sense “not fully real” (nicht
vollständig wirklich).87 For Hegel, reality (Wirklichkeit) in its full sense requires the
cooperation of two principles, namely the universal principle of the idea and the
particular principle of individuality or subjectivity.88 Without the latter, no progress is
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possible, because only the individual subject can provide the kind of opposite (Gegensatz) without which there is no vehicle for the idea to become real. Freedom, for
instance, is one of Hegel’s more concrete names for the idea that evolves in history,
but without human beings who strive to be free and who establish institutions meant
to secure their freedom, the idea of freedom lacks reality and remains abstract. The
principle of individuality manifests itself as the particular will of human beings who
make freedom their purpose and set out to put it into practice.
It is only with these Hegelian reflections that Mou Zongsan believes one to have
arrived at the core of China’s predicament. Following Hegel, he states that “China
has only a universal principle (普遍性原則), but no principle of individuality (個體性
原則).” This means that traditional Confucian China lacked the individual’s consciousness of freedom, which is why the universal spirit of Confucian moral ideals
could not become embodied and realized in man-made institutions that secured the
subject’s freedom. Or, put differently and in purely Hegelian language, the absolute
spirit (絕對精神) lacked the subjective spirit (主體精神) as the necessary vehicle to
become an objective spirit (客觀精神). Thus, the “great (moral) substance” (大實體)
of Chinese culture remained abstract, and, as a consequence, the Chinese people
remained unfree.89
While this is certainly a provocative interpretation of Chinese culture and history,
the crucial question is: what exactly is that principle of individuality that China has
failed to develop a notion of? What is the principle that has come to manifest itself in
the modern phenomena of science and democracy? Since Mou Zongsan does not
answer this question in his writings of the 1950s, I shall attempt to provide an answer
of my own: it is, in Mou’s understanding, the principle of autonomy. On a conceptual level, this certainly makes sense. Science and democracy are ‘applications’ of
human autonomy, and the cultural development of the modern West makes the intrinsic connection between them fairly obvious. On the level of Mou’s texts, my interpretation implies a certain reorientation on his part: whereas in the writings of the
1950s Mou is unequivocal about China’s lacking the principle of autonomy, his
research on Song and Ming Neo-Confucianism carried out through most of the following decade seems to have convinced him that what China lacked was not the
principle as such, but consciousness thereof. From a Hegelian standpoint, this
amounts to the same thing, namely that the principle will not become real (wirklich)
because no historical development that results in its realization is set in motion. But
with regard to Mou’s argument for the possibility of a Confucian modernity and the
strategy he employed in his argument, the difference is indeed crucial. For if China
does possess the principle of individuality/autonomy, although it is only implicit in
the canonical texts, her modernization can be largely self-reliant. All China needs
from the West, then, are certain conceptual tools. Nothing as essential as an intellectual principle needs to be imported; the proper function of the tools will do.
In my view it was this turn in his reasoning that enabled Mou to apply not only
the critical potential of Hegel’s philosophy of history to the Chinese case, but the
constructive and speculative one as well. For now he begins to anticipate Confucian
Modernity, which means that he begins to see the present stage of China’s forced
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Western-style modernization as a mere step on the way, an instance of Hegelian
antithesis and Entzweiung, the necessary but only temporary alienation of China
from her own Confucian substance. The synthesis, Confucian Modernity, is already
looming on the horizon.
Means: The Self-Negation of the Moral Subject
Mou Zongsan has no doubt that Hegel’s philosophy of history is incomplete. Hegel’s
story begins in the East and ends in the West — in Berlin, as it were — and tells the tale
of the Weltgeist’s journey from the Orient to the Occident, which is at the same time
the story of the world-spirit’s gaining self-consciousness, culminating in the storyteller’s very own mind. Obviously, this is self-serving and ignores the possibility of
historical development in Asia after the Weltgeist’s alleged departure. In Mou’s
understanding, there is an epilogue to the story that turns out to develop into a particularly cunning sequel: nothing else but nineteenth-century imperialism is the vehicle for the Weltgeist’s return to the Orient, for in its wake Western philosophy
provides China with the means required to continue the story with a new set of characters. Mou comments: “Because of the East’s gaining self-awareness and development, (world history) will return to its point of departure.”90 He concedes that China
has been in a state of “repetition without progress” (重複無進步),91 of “paralysis”
(僵化), “superficiality” (虛浮), and “suspension in emptiness” (掛空)92 for two thousand years — a remarkable statement for a Confucian thinker, as it includes the entire
history of Song and Ming Neo-Confucianism, of which Mou later says that its thinking is superior even to Kant’s — but he is convinced that China will awaken from her
slumber and take matters into her own hands again. The question is how?
Following Hegel, Mou knows that the road to Confucian Modernity is necessarily
a winding (dialectical) one that leads through a state of division. For two thousand
years China has existed in a motionless moral substantiality that Mou calls “universal
moral substance” (普遍之道德實體).93 China has remained self-identical instead of
becoming self-mediating and self-transformative. Now is the time to negate that substance in order to set its further development in motion. Put differently, it is time for
a self-negation of China as the moral subject writ large. In the second part of the first
section above we saw that the topos of the self-negation of the moral subject is part
of Mou’s mature two-tiered ontology. In the 1950s he had not yet developed this
ontological frame, but its two levels are already discernible in Mou’s terminology,
only that at this stage he is not discussing the individual moral agent but a Hegelian
kind of Volksgeist or “spirit of the people.” He asks how the moral subject can develop out of itself an epistemological subject that is the subject of science and democracy, and he answers that this can only be achieved through a kind of inner
spiritual self-transformation.94 We have to keep in mind that Mou’s line of argument
is basically still set against May Fourth iconoclasm and the result it produced a generation later: Communist China. Against the abandonment of the Confucian tradition
Mou insists that tradition itself has to be transformed or, more precisely, has to transform itself. The very term self-negation rhetorically assumes the kind of autonomy
Mou is arguing for, but even more crucial is that the negation is part of a dialectical
process and by no means an ultimate No. Self-negation is only the prelude to a Hege282
lian kind of Aufhebung and to the more wholesale synthesis of a truly modern (democratic, scientific, and politically autonomous) and, at the same time, truly Chinese
(Confucian, moral, and ‘traditional’) China in the future.95
As far as I can see, Mou does not spell out the process of self-negation in more
concrete and practical terms. In this sense, it is not without reason that critics reproach him for having indulged in pure theory and having all but forgotten the
practical necessities traditional Confucians were so occupied with. But in my reconstruction of Mou’s view, theory is precisely the form that Confucianism in the phase
of self-negation has to assume. And this is not a walk out of history — not in theory,
anyway — but the necessary reaction to a historical constellation that makes the simple and smooth continuation of traditional practice impossible. As Mou reads the
historical situation, the possibility of Confucian practice is no longer self-evident, but
has to be proven theoretically;96 a mere clinging to Confucian practice would be an
instance of ‘unenlightened clinging,’ for it would prevent China from realizing her
potential for further historical (political and scientific) development. As early as 1947
Mou makes the programmatic statement: “To open the door of theory, does not mean
to close the door of practice” (理門一開，事門不閉).97 Actually, the door of theory is
precisely the one that practice has to walk through in order to survive. For Confucian
practice is threatened by the kind of Western theory that undermines its fundament,
and practice alone is hardly able to defend and restore that fundament. Therefore,
Confucianism has to become a philosophy and has to define itself as a philosophical
position, instead of as a tradition. It has to take a stance in the realm of theory. Confucianism needs theoretical self-reflection at a time when reference to canonical
texts alone is not sufficient to defend a particular claim.98
Mou’s attempt to reconstruct Confucian orthodoxy as an ethics of autonomy is
his answer to the demand laid upon Confucian thinkers in the age of modernity. There
is textual evidence that already in the early 1950s Mou anticipated a combination of
Kantian and Hegelian philosophy that would enable Confucianism to transform itself
without abandoning its essence. In the concluding paragraph of his aforementioned
essay on Hegel’s dialectics Mou writes that historical dialectics (Hegel) placed on the
foundation of the Transcendental Analytic (Kant) will provide the superior intellectual force Confucianism needs in order to lead the epoch, to awaken humankind,
and — very important for Mou — to defeat the evil of Communism.99
In my interpretation, then, the entire ‘Kantianism’ of Mou Zongsan’s mature philosophy rests on a Hegelian frame set up during the 1950s. In the writings from this
period, Mou spells out modernization as the “development of a principle of individuality” as the necessary condition for the development of science and democracy.
Only after that does he turn back to Kant, because in Kant he finds the principle
of individuality most clearly expressed, namely in the idea of autonomy in Kant’s
Groundwork.100 Next, he uncovers a principle of autonomy in the texts of Song-Ming
Neo-Confucianism, although, as we have seen, this principle is not the one that Kant
had had in mind, for it is an innate principle and not a self-given one. It clearly favors
the nomos over the autos and grounds the moral law in Heaven rather than in human
reason. It is in XT, then, that Mou begins to play two different language games at the
same time and to make strategic use of the ensuing ambiguities of his vocabulary.
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As schematic as the strategic element of Mou’s project, as presented in the second section above, may seem at first glance, I think it has acquired more credibility
through the discussion of the present section. Without taking his strategic concerns
into account, I find it difficult to explain why Mou turned back to Kant from a position (in Hegel) already much closer to the kind of Aufhebung he himself was supposedly moving toward. But once we have discerned his strategy, the whole undertaking
makes sense (although not to the degree necessary to call it a success). It was Hegel
who had helped Mou to identify the necessary condition for Confucian Modernity,
just as it was Hegel who had first identified Kant’s autonomy as the principle of
Western modernity.101 And it was again Hegel who had convinced Mou that the sufficient condition for Confucian Modernity could be met as well, because the necessity of Confucian Modernity follows from the necessity of the historical process itself,
once the principle of Hegel’s philosophy of history has been turned against his own
application thereof. Simply put, if history follows the law of dialectics, then China’s
Entzweiung — between a Confucian past and a Western present, so to speak — has to
result in a future reconciliation in which the temporarily negated moral subject (Confucian China) will come to realize itself again.
That this self-realization on a higher stage of history implies the necessity for Confucianism to go beyond the limits of Western philosophy — more clearly discernible
in Kant than elsewhere — might be yet another idea Mou received from his readings
of Hegel, and one that dovetails nicely with his Buddhist-inspired panjiao approach.
This ‘going beyond’ is basically how the Weltgeist moves, and all Mou had to demonstrate is that he had indeed kept moving in the post-Hegelian epoch. In other
words, what Mou attempted to write from the 1950s on was a kind of ‘road-map’ for
the Weltgeist’s sojourn back to the Orient, the theoretical guideline for the effort to
achieve Confucian Modernity in reality. In his autobiography from the late 1950s
Mou anticipates this effort in yet another dialectical triple step: he speaks of the
“great emotion” (大的情感), by which he means the sorrow and the sense of loss of
Confucians who have witnessed the collapse of traditional China. This, he says, has
to lead to a “great understanding” (大的理解), that is, the most thorough theoretical
analysis of the reasons for China’s predicament and the possible ways out of it. This,
in turn, will result in the third step, the “great action” (大的行動), which is the prac
tical effort to resurrect a truly Confucian and truly modern China.102 Clearly, Mou’s
philosophy is meant to be a contribution to the second step, which he saw as necessary in order to prevent ‘great action’ from going the wrong way.
Thus, we see that Mou Zongsan wrestled with Kant for the better part of two
decades, but that he did so on a Hegelian stage set up rather quickly in the 1950s.
Heidegger, watching from the stands of this peculiar arena, was the one who advised
Mou to hold a firm grip on Kant’s concept of man (as a limited being) in order to
wrestle him down.
Consequences: Autonomy and Its Discontents
There is both a necessity and an irony in Mou Zongsan’s attempt to claim the principle of autonomy for the Confucian tradition. It is necessary in that autonomy is the
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principle of modernity, and it is ironic in that the principle represents exactly the kind
of emancipation from tradition against which Mou tries to claim it. As Hegel had
understood so well, when ethics is autonomous then tradition is dispensable. The
men and women who generate the moral law through the exercise of their faculty of
reason do not need to turn to tradition for advice. Hegel’s proposed solution was to
consider reason itself as a faculty that develops in history and hence as something
that comes to us through tradition, and at first sight it may seem as if Mou was trying
to develop his own approach along the same lines. In Mou, too, reason comes to us
through history, but this history is not and cannot be one of progress, because Mou’s
traditionalism — his reverence for the superior wisdom of Confucius and Mencius
that is the very quintessence of his Confucianism — does not square any better with
Hegel’s concept of history than it does with Kant’s autonomy. This is why he applies
Hegel’s dialectics critically only to the ‘interlude’ of two thousand years of stagnation
(this does not concern Confucius and Mencius) and then to China’s present and future. Clearly, this is in itself a highly strategic use of Hegel and results in the less than
coherent image of a move ‘back to the future’: the return of the golden age of Confucian thought in a somehow even more golden way (Confucius and Mencius plus
science and democracy). When Mou insists that the starting point of world history is
where world history will come to its conclusion,103 namely in Asia, he mixes Hegel’s
concept of historical progress with his own conservative view of a necessary return
to the wisdom of ancient China.
That Mou’s progressive conservatism is a tension-ridden position becomes only
more apparent once he claims the Kantian principle of autonomy. Nothing could
be more threatening to his traditionalism than a principle that carries in its first
name — autos — the whole pathos of Kant’s spirit of enlightenment qua emancipation.
Autonomy is what man gains after the exit from his self-incurred minority. Autonomy
is therefore the opposite of the incapacity to use one’s intelligence without the guidance of another, and, from a Kantian perspective, this other would certainly include
cultural heroes like Confucius and Mencius. In Mou Zongsan, on the other hand,
autonomy is supposed to open the door for China’s exit from a minority incurred
upon her by Western dominance. It is not an emancipation from tradition and from
the kind of guidance that only the canonical writings of the past can provide, for this
kind of emancipation is the one advocated by the May Fourth iconoclasts against
which Mou’s New Confucian thinking is directed. And it cannot have escaped his
attention that Kant’s concept of autonomy and all that it stands for, and his own attempt to save the Confucian tradition from abandonment are ultimately operating at
cross-purposes. The resulting tension finds ample expression in the self-negation of
the moral subject. Self-negation is as necessary for China’s modernization as it is
painful for the tradition-minded Confucian. It is at once tradition’s only chance to
survive and the biggest threat to its life. Mou Zongsan the philosopher of history argues for it, while Mou Zongsan the moral philosopher insists that our own true self
lies in our moral subjectivity. As persons we are called upon to live in the second and
higher tier of Mou’s two-tiered ontology, while China as the moral subject writ large
has to descend to the first level.
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Thus, Mou Zongsan argues for a compromise that threatens to compromise his
argument, and he knows it. The shift from a more self-critical and progressive (1950s)
to a more self-affirmative and conservative (1970s) stance is the reverse mirror-image
of the two Western philosophers Mou Zongsan uses to define his own position: there
is a conservative and tradition-minded side in Hegel, especially in his notion of Sitt
lichkeit (morals), that allows Mou to apply his thought critically to the Chinese case,
and there is a progressive enlightenment spirit in Kant that causes Mou to pull the
brakes. Kantian autonomy is the concept that threatens to turn the temporary selfnegation of the moral subject into a permanent one. The road of Kantian autonomy
will lead to just the kind of modernity that the New Confucians reject as vehemently
as the May Fourth intellectuals and their Marxist heirs have advocated it: a modernity that does not carry the attribute ‘Confucian.’
Notes
Abbreviations are used in the text and Notes as follows:
XT Mou Zongsan 牟宗三. Xinti yu xingti 心體與性體 (Heart-and-mind and moral
nature as actuality), vol. 1. Taipei: Zhengzhong Shuju, 1990.
XX Mou Zongsan. Xianxiang yu wuzishen 現象與物自身 (Phenomenon and thingin-itself ). Taipei: Xuesheng Shuju, 1990.
ZD Mou Zongsan. Zhi de zhijue yu Zhongguo zhexue 智的直覺與中國哲學 (Intellectual intuition and Chinese philosophy). Taipei: Taiwan Shangwu Yinshuguan,
1971.
1 – For a biographical overview see Umberto Bresciani, Reinventing Confucianism: The New Confucian Movement (Taipei: Ricci Institute, 2001). More phi
losophically systematic is Zheng Jiadong, 當代新儒家論衡 (A discussion of
contemporary New Confucianism) (Taipei: Guiguan, 1995). See also John
Makeham, ed., New Confucianism: A Critical Examination (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003).
2 – As for the followers, see the writings of Lee Ming-huei (Li Minghui), especially
his two books 儒家與康德 (Confucianism and Kant) (Taipei: Lianjing, 1990)
and 康德倫理學與孟子道德思考之重建 (Kantian ethics and the reconstruction
of Menzian moral thinking) (Taipei: Zhongyanyuan Wenzhesuo, 1994). For an
English endorsement of the transformation thesis see Wing-Cheuk Chan, “Mou
Zongsan’s Transformation of Kant’s Philosophy,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy
33 (1) (2006): 125–139. The most thorough rejection of Mou’s Kantianism — and
the most thorough examination of Mou’s mature thought in any language — is
Olf Lehmann’s massive study Zur moralmetaphysischen Grundlegung einer
konfuzianischen Moderne: ‘Philosophisierung’ der Tradition und ‘Konfuzianisierung’ der Aufklärung bei Mou Zongsan (1909–1995) (Leipzig: Leipziger
Universitätsverlag, 2003). For my position on this book see my Chinese-
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language review: Shi Yijian, 中西哲學之會通？論雷奧褔對牟宗三的詮釋和
批判 (A philosophical synthesis of East and West? On Olf Lehmann’s interpretation and criticism of Mou Zongsan’s philosophy), Newsletter of the Institute
of Chinese Literature and Philosophy (Academia Sinica) 17 (2) (2007): 43–52.
3 – See the remarks by Roger T. Ames in his “New Confucianism: A Native Response to Western Philosophy,” in Shiping Hua, ed., Chinese Political Culture
(New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2001), pp. 70–99, and by Zheng Jiadong in his monograph Mou Zongsan 牟宗三 (Taipei: Dongda Tushu Gongsi, 2000), esp. chap.
9, pp. 223–253.
4 – Thomas Metzger, Escape from Predicament: Neo-Confucianism and China’s
Evolving Political Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).
5 – There are, to be sure, remarks on Kant in some of Mou Zongsan’s earlier writings, but since I can detect no bearing of these interpretations on Mou’s mature philosophy, which evolves during the 1960s (my “phase I”) and is spelled
out during the following decade (“phase II”), I need not consider them here.
6 – I use the recent reprint, Mou Zongsan, Xinti yu xingti 心體與性體 (Heart-andmind and moral nature as actuality) (hereafter XT ). My translation should be
read as an approximation of the rich semantics of a title that I find impossible
to render adequately into English. On the term actuality I shall have more to
say in the subsection below on “Mou Zongsan’s Confucian Moral Vision ‘As It
Is in Itself.’ ” The General Introduction of this book is in itself a densely composed book-length treatise, the most important parts of which for my purpose
are pp. 1–60 and pp. 115–189. An interpretation very faithful to Mou’s
claims is Antje Ehrhardt-Pioletti, Die Realität des moralischen Handelns: Mou
Zongsans Darstelllung des Neokonfuzianismus als Vollendung der praktischen
Philosophie Kants (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1997).
7 – Mou Zongsan, Zhi de zhijue yu Zhongguo zhexue 智的直覺與中國哲學 (Intellectual intuition and Chinese philosophy) (Taipei: Taiwan Shangwu Yinshuguan, 1971) (hereafter ZD).
8 – I use Mou Zongsan, 現象與物自身 (Phenomenon and thing-in-itself ) (Taipei:
Xuesheng Shuju, 1990), (hereafter XX ).
9 – See ZD, p. 4 of the introduction.
10 – XT, p. 8.
11 – See XT, p. 6, where Mou writes that this shiti 實體 or “actuality” is realized/
embodied (體現) by human beings through their actions at specific times and
places. It is precisely this realization/embodiment that Mou calls “attainment
of virtue.” The term shiti seems to have made its entrance into Mou’s writings
during the 1950s, when he used it to translate Hegel’s concept of Substanz
into Chinese (Hegel’s geistige and moralische Substanz becoming 精神的實體
and 道德的實體, respectively). See the collection of essays 生命的學問 (The
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scholarship of life) (Taipei: Sanmin, 1970). Here (p. 209) Mou himself adds the
English translation substance to clarify his use of the term shiti, but in later
writings he suggests to render it as reality (see, e.g., XT, p. 22, and XT, vol. 2,
p. 18). Yet by this time the context has shifted, because Mou is no longer translating Hegel into Chinese, but is now looking for suitable English expressions
for his own categories. In this context, however, reality is a rather unlucky
choice to translate shiti, because the latter does not refer to mere factual objective reality — this being shizai 實在 in Mou’s own terminology (see Mou
Zongsan, Zhongguo zhixue shijiu jiang 中國哲學十九講 [Nineteen lectures
on Chinese philosophy] [Taipei: Xuesheng Shuju, 1983], p. 21) — but to the
moral quality of that kind of actuality that is “actualized” (shixian 實現; see
Nineteen Lectures on Chinese Philosophy, p. 185) through man’s moral
a gency. Lehmann suggests to stick with Mou’s earlier usage and to translate
shiti as substance, but since the traditional Western concept of substance with
its Greek and Latin predecessors does not refer to something that is being actualized through human agency, I find this translation misleading. To be sure,
Hegel’s Substanz is a different matter entirely — in that it is dynamic and going
through a historical process — but since Mou’s later use of the term shiti is informed by his Confucianized Buddhism rather than by Hegel, I see little reason to draw a linguistic connection devoid of philosophical significance. For
the role of shiti in Mou’s mature philosophy see XX, pp. 41–119. For Lehmann’s
discussion see Lehmann, Zur moralmetaphysischen Grundlegung, p. 298.
12 – Again, see XT, p. 8, where Kant is explicitly charged with not having come
forward with a Confucian-style gongfulun.
13 – XT, p. 10.
14 – Mou also draws a distinction between this kind of moral metaphysics and a
mere “metaphysics of morals” (道德底形上學), which is another name for
Kant’s project, apparently referring to the title of two of Kant’s works (see XT,
p. 9). In Mou’s view, moral metaphysics is what the great Neo-Confucian
thinkers did: starting from the problem of moral agency they developed ideas
of how human beings are part of social communities, the state, and, ultimately,
everything under heaven. Thus, Neo-Confucians started with concrete ethical
concerns and ended with teachings that explained the workings of the whole
cosmos, thereby expanding the realm of morals to the highest possible degree.
15 – XT, p. 9.
16 – In XT, p. 10, Mou makes a vague reference to the religious tradition of the
West that has somehow made it impossible for Kant to really carry through
with what Mou thinks was his actual plan, namely to develop a moral metaphysics. I will provide a fuller explanation later on.
17 – The methodological paradigm in which Mou is operating throughout the mature phase of his philosophy is the Buddhist panjiao 判教 or “classification of
teachings.” According to this approach, earlier teachings can be perfected and
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synthesized into what Chinese Buddhists call a yuanjiao 圓教 or “perfect
teaching,” which serves as the best means to guide human beings on their way
to enlightenment (i.e., insight into the impermanence of all things). The paradigm originates within the soteriology of Huayan and Tiantai Buddhism. From
a philosophical perspective, its most important feature is its universalistic
premise: it is possible to synthesize all previous teachings into one new teaching without any loss of content. Yet, whereas Chinese Buddhists used this
paradigm only within their own tradition — in their search for the most comprehensive way to express the teachings of the Buddha — Mou Zongsan applies it in a global context. As we shall see, this led him to believe that the
various forms of metaphysical dualism that he found in Kant, Confucianism,
and Buddhism were but incomplete expressions of one truly universal mode
of ontological dualism, which he tried to express systematically in his writings
of the 1970s and 1980s, thereby formulating a new “perfect teaching” for all
humankind. For Mou’s statements on the necessity and possibility of a new
Confucian “perfect teaching” see XT, p. 44; lectures 15 and 16 of his 中國
哲學十九講 (Nineteen lectures on Chinese philosophy) (Taipei: Xuesheng
Shuju, 1983), pp. 331–364; and his last systematic work, 圓善論 (The supreme
good) (Taipei: Xuesheng Shuju, 1985), pp. 243–334.
18 – He does name German Idealism when he restates his claim more extensively
on pp. 181–189. Here it becomes obvious that Mou has misgivings about the
theological leanings of the Idealists, but given the general accord he sees between their project and his own — for they, too, were trying to develop a moral
metaphysics — the fact that he sees no need to probe deeper into their thought
still requires an explanation. Throughout his writings, Mou repeatedly drops
the names of Fichte and Schelling, but nowhere does he enter into the kind of
systematic dialogue he entertained with Kant.
19 – The principle of autonomy is introduced by Kant in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, BA 87. Mou’s “General Introduction” in XT contains lengthy
quotations from this work, especially from the two subsections “Classification
of All Principles of Morality which can be Founded on the Conception of Heteronomy” (BA 90–96) and “On the Extreme Limits of Practical Philosophy”
(BA 119–127), which are both quoted almost completely in XT, pp. 120–134
and pp. 143–155, respectively. However, the beginning (BA 113–118) of the
latter subsection, where Kant explains why within the framework of his philosophy freedom cannot be a “conception of experience” (Erfahrungsbegriff )
but only an “idea of reason” (BA 114) — a central point on which Mou later
criticizes Kant — is not quoted.
20 – See also Lee Ming-huei, Confucianism and Kant, esp. pp. 11–45.
21 – Maybe against the author’s own intentions, Lee Ming-huei’s discussion of the
programmatic concept of reconstruction (重建) makes it plain that any such
endeavor will never be able to free itself from the charge of being a mere
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r etrospective projection. See Lee Ming-huei, Kantian Ethics and the Recon
struction of Mengzian Moral Thinking, esp. pp. 11–24. To work out what Lee,
following Michael Polanyi, calls the tacit dimension of traditional Confu
cianism, requires the introduction of conceptual distinctions that are alien
to the traditional texts. Such a step can (quite actively) make sense, but in
case there are two different interpretations no reference to the original text
itself will help to clarify the issue. The main benefit of such a reconstruction,
in my view, is to bring tradition in line with modern interpretations by seemingly doing the opposite: Producing modern interpretations in line with tradition. Needless to say, it is the rupture we call modernity that makes this task
necessary.
22 – I am using the translation by D. C. Lau, Mencius: A Bilingual Edition (Hong
Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2003), p. 251.
23 – According to the classical dictionary 說文解字 (Explanation of texts and analysis of characters), the term li originally refers to the veins in a piece of jade.
In philosophical contexts it stands for the intelligible pattern of something
(later in Neo-Confucian thinking, of everything). Lau’s translation as reason
certainly gives the term a clearer semantic shape than it had in Mencius’ times,
and in addition turns it into a human faculty, whereas the analogy drawn by
Mencius makes one think rather of something that exists outside the human
mind. In contrast to li, the term yi is already prominent in the 論語 (Analects
of Confucius) and refers to a mode of thought and behavior in accordance
with both the traditional rites (禮) and the universal value of humanity (仁).
Note that the reverse combination of both characters — yili — appears already
in the classical 禮記 (Book of rites), where it represents universal rules of conduct. For a brief history of the term li see my Die Herausforderung des Fremden:
Interkulturelle Hermeneutik und konfuzianisches Denken (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2005), pp. 155–218.
24 – See XT, p. 151, where Mou comments on Groundwork of the Metaphysics of
Morals, BA 123–124. See also the discussion by Lee Ming-huei, Kantian Ethics
and the Reconstruction of Menzian Moral Thinking, p. 94. Lee explicitly tries
to demonstrate that Mencius advocated an ethics of autonomy in Kant’s sense.
He writes: “Of course we cannot expect Mencius to equal Kant in putting
forward a precise set of argumentative strategies in order to support and prove
his standpoint of moral universalism. Yet the basic convictions contained in
Kant’s ethics can almost all be seen in Mencius’s doctrines” (ibid.). Again, I
think that, against his intentions, Lee in this passage concedes that there remains a gap — and not only with regard to conceptual and argumentative
precision — between Mencius and the way his doctrines are being recon
structed in New Confucianism, for it is clear that any “basic conviction” can
be conceptualized in various ways and that Mencius’ moral universalism as
stated in the Mencius yields no argument against understanding liyi simply as
a kind of moral feeling and sensibility that all human beings have. On Lee’s
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perspective on the issue see also his essay 孟子與康德的自律倫理學 (Mencius
and Kant’s ethics of autonomy), in Lee Ming-hue, Confucianism and Kant, pp.
47–80.
25 – See Hume’s Ethical Writings, ed. A. MacIntyre (Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 2003), pp. 76–77.
26 – XT, pp. 115–189.
27 – See XT, p. 119.
28 – See XT, p. 166.
29 – See XT, p. 169.
30 – Kant does so in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, BA 120–125,
quoted in XT, pp. 147–154.
31 – See XT, pp. 155–162, with Mou’s comments on Groundwork of the Metaphysics
of Morals, BA 125–126 and 128. Mou’s criticism on this point suggests an
ontological misreading of Kant’s notion of a postulate as something counterfactual and “not fully existent” — the character jia 假 carries this meaning. In
Kant, though, a Postulat is a notion we have to apply to ourselves as a matter
of necessity in order to understand who we are and what we do, although it is
beyond our means to prove how this notion is possible. Simply put, Mou misreads Kant’s postulate as a mere hypothesis.
32 – See XT, p. 151, for Mou’s expression of utter incomprehension of Kant’s completely mistaken approach to ethics. We might say that for Mou nothing is
wrong with Kant’s argument as such, but nothing is right with the assumptions
on which it is based.
33 – See XT, p. 163. Here Mou argues that Kant lacked a proper notion of the
human heart-and-mind, that is, the notion of an organ that combines our emotional and intellectual faculties, and thus overcomes the dualism of Gefühl
and Verstand in Kant, a dualism so deeply imbedded in Western thought.
34 – See XT, p. 178. “Good knowledge” is a literal translation that does not adequately convey the content of the term that appears in Mencius 7A15 as a kind
of innate faculty of human beings to tell right from wrong.
35 – Basically, what Mou does here is to recast in new terminology the objections
that Wang Yangming had brought against Zhu Xi some centuries earlier. Wang
Yangming protests against Zhu Xi’s doctrine of “examining objects in order to
attain the intelligible pattern of the world” (格物窮理), maintaining that this
intelligible pattern is to be found in our own innermost nature, namely our
heart-and-mind. For an account of Wang Yangming’s struggle with Zhu Xi and
the breakthrough to his own dictum that the intelligible pattern of the world is
inscribed in our heart-and-mind, see Tu Wei-ming, Neo-Confucianism in Action: Wang Yangming’s Youth (1472–1529) (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1976).
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36 – See Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, AB 70–74.
37 – Allen W. Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999), pp. 59–60. As a rejoinder to possible objections against his point
Professor Wood writes: “Kant has no doubt that something natural (and innate)
is a factor in generating both a priori and empirical knowledge. In the practical
sphere, our innate predispositions . . . provide us with the capacity to give
ourselves moral principles. But a priori principles themselves arise only as a
result of our exercise of those innate capacities” (p. 349 n. 13). At first glance,
Mou’s insistence on gongfu and the practical exercise of our moral faculties
seems to be in line with Kant’s position, but his reference to Mencius makes it
evident that this is not so. For it is Mencius’ whole point that liyi is not generated by the individual agent, is not produced, learned, or in some other way
man-made, but is an innate part of our constitution as human beings.
38 – Of course, it has to be granted that Kant’s own concept of autonomy is tensionridden and highly problematic. As Allen Wood notes: “Even the definition of a
priori as ‘independent of experience’ is opaque because it tends to suggest the
quite absurd picture of your closing your eyes, stopping your ears, shutting
yourself off from all external input — and precisely thereby acquiring some
knowledge (which is all the purer for being untainted by sensory information)”
(Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought, p. 56). Therefore, to say that Mou’s understanding of autonomy is at odds with Kant’s is not to label it incoherent. I do
hold, though, that Mou’s use of the notion of autonomy is unclear and that we
need to find out why it is so important for him to classify Confucianism as a
Kantian-style ethics of autonomy instead of connecting it, say, to the moralsense theories of Hutcheson and Hume. Confucianism clearly differs from
Hume’s utilitarian leanings — his confounding the pleasant with the good,
whereas Mencius simply holds that doing the good is pleasant — but it differs
just as clearly from Kant’s enlightenment spirit.
39 – This view had long been prevalent among Western scholars as well, but came
to be challenged around the same time Mou Zongsan worked out his Kantianized Confucianism. See the programmatic remark by John Rawls in A Theory
of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 226–
227.
40 – Sébastian Billioud convincingly demonstrates why ultimately Mou Zongsan
had to disagree with Heidegger’s interpretation. Nevertheless, it was Heidegger
who first led Mou on the path to his solution. See Billioud, “Mou Zongsan’s
Problem with the Heideggerian Interpretation of Kant,” Journal of Chinese
Philosophy 33 (2) (2006): 225–247.
41 – Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1991), p. 17; here quoted from Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics,
trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington [IN] and London: Indiana University
Press, 1962), p. 22.
292
42 – See Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, pp. 25–35. See also
Kritik der reinen Vernunft B 72.
43 – Henry Allison remarks: “Thus, for Kant the concept of an intuitive intellect is
intended to model the divine mind. Although he considers the conception of
such an intellect problematic, since we have no way to understand its possibility, Kant thinks that it serves an important regulative function, indicating the
ineliminable limits of our discoursive cognition” (H. E. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, rev. and enl. ed. [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004], p. 452). As we will see below, this contrast is crucial for Mou
Zongsan’s understanding of Kant’s philosophy as being rooted in Western
Christian culture. Equally crucial for him is Kant’s remark in the Critique of
Practical Reason according to which God did not create phenomena but
things in themselves (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft A 183–184). Mou quotes
this whole passage in XX, pp. 116–117, and underlines its importance repeatedly (see XX, pp. 10 and 318, and Nineteen Lectures on Chinese Philosophy,
p. 306). In Mou’s reading, this remark proves that Kant does in fact have a
positive notion of the thing-in-itself, but has to deny it to human beings out of
dogmatic concerns.
44 – See Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, pp. 50–73. Following Heidegger,
Mou prefers the first edition of Kritik der reinen Vernunft (A) over the second
(B). The reason for this is obvious: Kant’s misleading talk of the transzendentaler Gegenstand (transcendental object) as X in the Transcendental Deduction (A 96–130; quoted extensively in ZD, pp. 60–69, and XX, pp. 137–140)
makes it much easier to misconceive the thing in itself as an ontological entity.
The same goes for Kant’s aside that God created things in themselves and not
phenomena (see note 43 above).
45 – Mou comes close to admitting as much when in XX, p. 7, he states that the
thing in itself is not a “reality concept” (事實概念) but “a concept with valuecontent” (有價值意味的概念). This means that from the start he is pulling
Kant’s epistemological argument into the sphere of moral philosophy, stating
without further ado that this is where it rightly belongs (p. 8).
46 – In order not to appear evasive, I have to say a little bit more on this. Let me first
state that I do not deny or ignore the fact that Mou has delivered a very thorough and detailed critique of Kant in general and of the Critique of Pure Reason in particular, working out tensions and inconsistencies within the Kantian
framework and showing how Kant was unable to clarify a number of central
issues of his philosophy. His criticism can be summarized in the charges that
Kant could not convincingly establish the transcendental distinction between
phenomenon and things as they are in themselves, that he did not arrive at a
sound concept of the freedom of the will — which is why he ultimately only
managed to develop a “moral theology” but not a true system of “moral metaphysics.” As we have seen, this line of argument is the red thread that connects
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phase I and II of Mou’s dialogue with Kant, but it is important also to see that
Mou’s critical analysis of Kant’s philosophy is largely domestic; that is, it
maintains the basic premises of Kant’s system and shows how on the basis of
these premises certain inconsistencies cannot be avoided. This criticism is
grounded in sound scholarship and an intimate knowledge of Kant’s arguments. It is not very original, however, but more or less in line with a criticism
of Kant’s philosophy in the West that dates back to Kant’s contemporary Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and was succinctly restated by Rae Langton in a recent
study: “Kant’s story makes itself untellable” (Langton, Kantian Humility: Our
Ignorance of Things in Themselves [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004], p.
12). Kant scholars like Peter Strawson or Paul Guyer have presented their elaborations of this charge, of which we hear an echo in Mou’s claim that in Kant
the transcendental distinction between phenomenon and thing-in-itself “cannot be stabilized” (不能被穩定) (XX, p. 2). The crucial point with regard to my
argument is that this internal criticism is logically independent of Mou’s construction of a system of Confucian philosophy, insofar as the latter does not
build on Mou’s demonstration of Kant’s shortcomings but rests on entirely different premises. In Mou’s book Intellectual Intuition and Chinese Philosophy
this independence is rather obvious in that the first half of the study (chapters
1 to 17, pp. 1–183) is devoted to what I call a domestic criticism of Kant’s
philosophy, which features very few references to the Chinese tradition,
whereas the second half (chapters 18 to 22, pp. 184–367) presents an outline
of Mou’s Confucian system, based entirely on Chinese sources. The connecting element between the two parts is mainly an external one, namely the
‘Kantian’ terminology in which Mou’s reconstruction of Chinese philosophy is
couched. Logically, the discussion of the second part does not depend on the
criticism of the first.
The argument in Phenomenon and Thing-in-itself is admittedly more complex, yet the basic structure remains the same, although it no longer neatly
divides into the two halves of the book and is therefore more difficult to discern. For the sake of my argument, let us assume that Mou’s internal criticism
of Kant is correct. Then he can be said to have demonstrated two things. First,
the Critique of Pure Reason suffers from tensions and inconsistencies that render the whole system of transcendental idealism unconvincing and in need of
improvement. Second, he shows that these tensions and inconsistencies can
be avoided (that they do not occur) within a Confucian framework of thought.
What he does not show is that this Confucian framework can be synthesized
with the Kantian paradigm of critical philosophy, or, to put it differently, Mou
does not name the commonly shared premises on which this synthesis could
be built. Instead, in his system-building effort, he replaces Kant’s premises
with Confucian ones and then goes on using the Kantian vocabulary, thereby
neglecting (or concealing) the latter’s dependence on the very premises on
which Kant’s philosophy rests. The result is a highly ambiguous and idiosyn-
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cratic vocabulary that is forced to play two different language games at the
same time.
The logical independence of the two elements of Mou’s mature philosophy, namely his internal criticism of Kant’s philosophy and his construction of
a system of Confucian philosophy, should cause us to avoid the label ‘transformation’ when asked to describe the relation between Mou Zongsan and Kant.
It would be a transformation only if logically the Confucian system were built
upon the results of the criticism. As Mou himself indirectly admits, this is not
the case. He very clearly states that only under the precondition of man having a “limitless heart-and-mind” (無限心) is a positive concept of intellectual
‘intuition’ — which is the conceptual cornerstone of his system — possible (see
XX, p. 8). This precondition, he further points out, is explicitly denied by Kant
and can be fulfilled only by accepting the premises of the Chinese tradition.
Nowhere does he say that the ‘limitless heart-and-mind’ itself has to be or indeed could be developed out of a criticism of Kant. The criticism only yields
the necessity — here rather in the sense of ‘desirability’ — of that concept. This
is Mou’s whole point: only Confucianism can do what even Kant could not.
Kant’s function in the system is restricted to having provided the appropriate
terminology, one that makes Confucians see the strength (indeed the superiority) of their own ideas. As for the concept of the limitless heart-and-mind: Mou
treats it as if it were a conventional term in the Confucian writings — which,
however, it is not. It is Mou’s own invention and a kind of generic term for
different expressions having to do with the heart-and-mind and the Confucian
tradition in which this notion plays a crucial role (Mencius, Hu Wufeng, Lu
Xiangshan, Wang Yangming, etc.). See the article by Mou’s disciple Yang
Zuhan titled 無限心的概念之形成 (The formation of the concept of the limitless heart-and-mind), in which the concept is traced to the tradition mentioned,
without so much as acknowledging that the wording limitless heart-and-mind
is Mou’s own contribution, one that quite obviously serves his purpose of arguing against Kant’s notion of human limitedness. The article is included in
Yang Zuhan, 儒家的心學傳統 (The tradition of heart-and-mind learning in
Confucianism) (Taipei: Wenjin Chubanshe, 1992), pp. 287–305.
47 – Hans-Rudolf Kantor, “Ontological Indeterminacy and Its Soteriological Relevance: An Assessment of Mou Zongsan’s (1909–1995) Interpretation of Zhiyi’s
(538–597) Tiantai Buddhism,” Philosophy East and West 56 (1) (2006): 16–68.
48 – See the reprint of 張載集 (Collected works of Zhang Zai) (Beijing: Zhonghua
Shuju, 2006), p. 24.
49 – Xiong Shili, 新唯識論 (Treatise on the new mere consciousness) (Taipei: Ming
wen Shuju, 1991), p. 12 of the introduction.
50 – Note that despite the many sources of his synthesis Mou maintains that it is in
its essence a Confucian one, because the Confucian thinkers of the Song and
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Ming dynasties were the ones who had most clearly understood the nature
and ethical significance of this dualism.
51 – The pattern is something like this: Mou takes one set of distinctions, say, between A and B, as he finds it in Buddhism. Then he takes another set, A’ and
B’, found in Kant, and argues: since A cannot possibly mean B’, it has to be A’.
Obviously, the argument rests on the assumption that both distinctions are
exhaustive and that it is the same criterion that draws the line between the
pairs of each set. Since he does not demonstrate that this is indeed so, the argument is a non sequitur. In other words, Mou Zongsan commits a variant of
what M. Ter Hark in a different context has called a ground floor fallacy: he
sees all these vastly different distinctions on the same level, as so many lots of
land in one single field that can be unified through conversion into one language. Therefore, he thinks that it is possible to arrive at a kind of ‘unified field
theory’ mainly by way of ‘translation’ (i.e., synthesizing equalization).
52 – See Kantor, “Ontological Indeterminacy and Its Soteriological Relevance,” pp.
27–28.
53 – See Lehmann, Zur moralmetaphysischen Grundlegung einer konfuzianischen
Moderne, pp. 421–434.
54 – Again, I quote from the translation by D. C. Lau in Mencius, p. 73.
55 – XX, pp. 100–101. Note that spontaneity is a characteristic of the intellect in
Kant, as opposed to the receptiveness of our senses. For Mou this is important
since he wants to demonstrate the facticity of human intellectual intuition.
56 – Ibid. This is the same expression we found earlier in XT (see note 29 above): a
practical realization that renders the question of possibility superfluous.
57 – Ibid. Following the argumentative pattern identified in note 51 above, Mou
concludes that what is not sensual in Kant’s sense has to be intellectual.
Hence, he feels justified to call the encounter with the child on the well an
instance of intellectual intuition. Viewed from Kant’s perspective, this is clearly
a misnomer.
58 – Ibid.
59 – My interpretation of Mou’s philosophy ‘on its own terms’ is indebted to Tang
Junyi’s interpretation of the child on the well in his 中國文化之精神價值 (The
spiritual values of Chinese culture) (Taipei: Zhengzhong Shuju, 1979; first
published 1951), pp. 140–147, a book that reflects the close collaboration of
both men in the 1940s. Tang Junyi more explicitly speaks of “transcending
individuality” (超個體) as an instance of realizing human “unlimitedness”
(無限性), and in a later section of the book he employs the Buddhist distinction of clinging / not clinging and applies it critically to Kant’s abstract notion
of self-legislation (see pp. 162–165). Despite the different paths both thinkers
followed later in their lives I think Mou Zongsan and Tang Junyi shared a common vision of life that is very clearly expressed in Tang’s writings from the
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1940s and 1950s, but thoroughly disguised in misleading vocabulary in Mou’s
works from the 1970s and 1980s. Therefore, I think it helps to turn occasionally to Tang Junyi when trying to find out what Mou Zongsan was trying to say.
60 – Mou Zongsan would probably have agreed with Charles Taylor’s account of
the mistaken anthropology entailed in Western epistemology. See his essay
“Overcoming Epistemology,” in Charles Taylor, Philosophical Arguments
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 1–19.
61 – See Tang Junyi’s emphatic affirmation of “the basic conviction of [Chinese]
humanism, namely that the whole and concrete person is a subject and must
not be turned into an object” (Tang Junyi, 中國人文精神之發展 [The development of China’s humanistic spirit] [Taipei: Student Book Co., 2000; first published 1971], p. 61).
62 – Mou sees the “use of concepts” (使用概念) as the constitutive act of the epistemological subject that establishes the subject-object relation. See XX, p. 123
(already in 歷史哲學 [Philosophy of history] [Taipei: Xuesheng Shuju, 1987;
first published 1955], p. 65, Mou has identified Western culture as a whole as
one that is “conceptual” [概念的] and therefore — because concepts establish
distinctions — one that thrives on confrontation). All use of concepts belongs
to the realm of clinging (XX, p. 153), whereas the “Self as it is in itself” (我之
在其自己) is one that does not use concepts (XX, p. 161) and therefore does
not turn the Other into an object. To use a language reminiscent of Emmanuel
Levinas is apt here, for he is one Western thinker who does not commit the
category mistake mentioned above. See his distinction between relation
éthique (between human beings) and relation de savoir (between subject and
object) in his Totalité et Infini (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988),
p. 45.
63 – See Mou’s distinction between two kinds of truths in the introduction to XX,
pp. 10–11.
64 – It is tempting to replace Kant’s postulate of freedom — as finite human beings
we must think of ourselves as free — with the Confucian postulate of togetherness: as (morally) infinite human beings we must think of ourselves as forming
a trans-individual togetherness with other human beings. Togetherness is thus
the condition of the possibility of compassion.
65 – Sartre’s famous analysis of the look in Being and Nothingness can serve to illustrate the kind of confrontational situation of two (epistemological) subjects
that both cling to their subjectivity. Sartre writes: “I grasp the Other’s look at
the very center of my act as the solidification and alienation of my own possibilities.” And, “With the Other’s look the situation escapes me. To use an
everyday expression which better expresses our thought, I am no longer master of the situation” (Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes
[New York: Philosophical Library, 1969], pp. 263, 265). As long as two subjects try to remain the sole master of the situation and to subject the Other to
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their power, no transcending step to the second tier of Mou’s system is possible. “In fear or in anxious or prudent anticipation, I perceive that these possibilities which I am and which are the condition of my transcendence are given
also to another, given as about to be transcended in turn by his own possibilities. The Other as a look is only that — my transcendence transcended” (p.
263). To this Mou Zongsan would probably reply that transcendence correctly
understood is neither my nor the Other’s own, but precisely a kind of togetherness that two people can only realize by giving up on their atomistic individuality (egocentricity, confrontational subjectivity, etc.).
66 – In this case Mou refers to the Commentaries to the Book of Changes (易經) as
a source for his concept. See XX, p. 122, and the explanation provided by Yan
Binggang in his 整合與重鑄 (Integration and remolding) (Taipei: Xuesheng
Shuju, 1995), pp. 236–246. The concept is first used in Mou’s earlier 認識心
之批判 (Critique of the epistemological subject) and takes on a crucial role in
his philosophy of history and the critique of Confucian political thinking. For
more on this see section 3 below.
67 – XX, p. 123.
68 – Note that the standard for correctness is in this case a practical one: ‘Correct’
is the self-image that helps us to actualize trans-individual togetherness in
practice. Theoretical correctness applies only to the first level of Mou’s twotiered ontology.
69 – I am aware that ‘cultural identity’ is a vague concept and should be applied
with care in philosophical arguments. Unlike one anonymous reviewer of the
present essay, however, I do not think that the term can be avoided altogether.
Take for instance a statement like the following from Mou’s autobiographical
report Self-Description at Age Fifty. Recalling his mindset after having arrived
in exile in Taiwan, Mou writes: “The foundation of my personal existence is
not reality. In reality everything is lost. Try to see where my country is, where
my home/family is? The foundation of my person is the life of China’s culture,
the ideals of the culture of Confucius and Mencius” (五十自述 [Self-description
at age fifty] [Taipei: Ehu Chubanshe, 1993], p. 128). To be sure, there is in these
lines a whiff of the heroic self-image of a self-declared heir to the great and
troubled Confucian tradition, but there is also the serious conviction that when
the cultural ideals of Confucius and Mencius end up on the scrap heap of history, then something of immense and irreplaceable value will be lost forever.
And this must not happen! For New Confucians like Mou Zongsan, ‘cultural
identity’ can be spelled out as the awareness and the taking over of an obligation: the ideals of Confucius and Mencius have to be presented (reformulated,
translated) in a way that ensures the possibility of their survival. New Confucians are the ones who shoulder this task.
70 – On this see Lin Yü-Sheng, The crisis of Chinese consciousness: Radical anti
traditionalism in the May Fourth era (Taipei: Quanguo Chubanshe, 1979).
298
71 – See the famous New Confucian manifesto published in 1958, of which there
is an English translation in Tang Junyi, Essays on Chinese Philosophy and Culture (Taipei: Student Book Co., n.d.), pp. 492–562.
72 – Note the function of principles in Kant’s critical philosophy: it is from principles that we can deduce the possibility of something “independent from all
experience” (unabhängig von aller Erfahrung), as the introduction to the first
edition of Kritik der reinen Vernunft puts it (A 12).
73 – For one such view on human rights see Lee Ming-huei, 儒家視野下的政治
思想 (Political thought in Confucian perspective) (Taipei: Taida Chuban
Zhongxin, 2005), esp. pp. 71–98.
74 – The story of autonomy before Kant is told by Jerome B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). One
obvious precursor is Rousseau, who in chapter 8 of the first book of The Social
Contract states that “obedience to a self-prescribed law is freedom.” Commenting on this passage, Christine Korsgaard writes: “Possibly it was this suggestion that provided Kant with the solution to a problem he had worked on
nearly all his life — the problem of what freedom is” (Korsgaard, Creating the
Kingdom of Ends [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], p. 40).
75 – XX, p. 1.
76 – See XX, p. 3 of the introduction, and pp. 24–30.
77 – Henry Allison denies that Kant’s theism is behind his transcendental distinction. See Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, p. 454. A position closer to
Mou’s is developed by Merold Westphal, “In Defense of the Thing in Itself,”
Kant-Studien 59 (1968): pp. 118–141.
78 – I think it is stronger than Kantor’s argument that Mou Zongsan was looking for
some prominent Western thinker who could fit into his dualistic frame. Wondering why Mou did not refer to other Western thinkers — Kantor mentions
Spinoza, Descartes, and Leibniz instead of Fichte and Schelling — Kantor
writes: “Probably this is because Mou focuses on his concept of two-level
ontology, which he finds explicitly mentioned in Kantian philosophy only”
(Kantor, “Ontological Indeterminacy and Its Soteriological Relevance,” p. 56).
The problem with this explanation is that Kant has no two-level ontology, as
Kantor knows only too well, and that Mou Zongsan had to enlist Heidegger’s
misreading of Kant’s philosophy in order to squeeze Kant into his own dualistic frame. My interpretation is that it was the differences rather than the affinities that drew Mou Zongsan to Kant and made him couch his own thinking in
Kantian terms. Only in this way did he think that he could demonstrate the
Confucian potential to go beyond Kant and, ipso facto, the West. As a corollary to this interpretation, I think it was the affinities and not the differences
that caused Mou Zongsan to refrain from engaging in a similarly wide-ranging
dialogue with German Idealism.
Stephan Schmidt
299
79 – Zheng Jiadong, “Between History and Thought — Mou Zongsan and the New
Confucianism that Walked Out of History,” Contemporary Chinese Thought
36 (2) (2004/2005): 49–66 at p. 53. This text is adapted from the introduction
to Zheng’s aforementioned Chinese monograph Mou Zongsan, in which the
expression “walked out of history” (走出歷史) appears on p. 21. Yü Ying-shi
has formulated a similar kind of criticism, but in this essay I shall focus on
Zheng Jiadong, because he is very clear on Mou’s indebtedness to Hegel,
which is crucial in the present context. See pp. 75–89 of Zheng’s book.
80 – The essay is included in Mou’s aforementioned collection of essays titled The
Scholarship of Life, pp. 242–255. All texts in this collection were written in the
first eight years after Mou’s flight to Taiwan. The quote is from p. 244. From
Mou’s references to Hegel we can conclude that, apart from the Lectures on
the Philosophy of History, Mou probably knew the Outlines of the Philosophy
of Right and maybe some parts of the Phenomenology of the Spirit. The Logic
he so easily dismisses in his autobiography as having “no particular significance” is probably not a book he deigned to study. According to his own testimony, Mou’s understanding of Hegel owed much to his friend Tang Junyi,
who had spent considerably more time reading the German. See Mou, Selfdescription at Age Fifty, pp. 111–113.
81 – See Mou, Philosophy of History, p. 64.
82 – See Mou Zongsan, 政道與治道 (The principle of politics and the principle of
administration) (Taipei: Xuesheng Shuju, 2003; first published 1954), p. 57.
83 – See The Principle of Politics, pp. 55–62.
84 – So far my account does not differ from Zheng Jiadong’s in his chapter on
Mou’s philosophy of history. In the following paragraphs I will try to show that
Zheng does not probe deep enough into Mou’s Hegelian reading of Chinese
history. Zheng focuses on the political dimension of the problem which Mou
examined in The Principle of Politics; Zheng’s quotations from Mou’s Philosophy of History are restricted to the preface and do not include the crucial
discussion of Hegel’s interpretation of China on pp. 56–70. In my view, it is
this discussion that exposes the real significance of Hegel for Mou’s own project. For Hegel’s view on China see his Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der
Geschichte (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1989), pp. 182–211. The most complete version
of Hegel’s philosophy of history is the Hoffmeister edition of Hegel, Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, Band 1 of Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte (Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, 1994).
85 – “Die Substanz, das, wodurch und worin alle Wirklichkeit ihr Sein und Bestehen hat” (Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, p. 28).
86 – Ibid., p. 32.
87 – Ibid., p. 81.
300
88 – “Sie [die Idee] ist zunächst ein Inneres, Untätiges, ein nicht Wirkliches, Gedachtes, Vorgestelltes, das Innere in dem Volke; und das, wodurch dies Allgemeine bestätigt, herausgesetzt wird, dass es wirklich sei, ist die Tätigkeit der
Individualität, die das Innere in die Wirklichkeit setzt und das, was man fälschlicherweise Wirklichkeit nennt, die bloße Äußerlichkeit, der Idee gemäß
macht” (Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, p. 90). On the same page Hegel writes: “Dies Verhältnis des Allgemeinen und der Subjektivität ist es, worauf es
ankommt, dass nämlich das Innere in das Bewusstsein des Volkes herausgesetzt sei.”
89 – All quotations in this paragraph are from Mou, Philosophy of History, p. 68.
90 – Ibid., p. 65.
91 – Ibid., p. 63.
92 – Ibid., p. 68.
93 – Ibid., p. 67.
94 – Ibid., introduction to the first edition, p. 4.
95 – Interestingly, the notion of self-negation appears also in the joint manifesto of
1958, where the authors state: “When an attempt is made to grasp Western
theoretical science and put its spirit to work, the Chinese people must at least
temporarily withhold their practical obsession, and ban the moral objective
embedded in it” (Tang Junyi, Essays on Chinese Philosophy and Culture, p.
529).
96 – As we have seen above, it is precisely Kant’s theoretical approach to ethics
that evokes Mou’s criticism. Clearly, there is a tension in Mou’s own thought,
that is, an uneasiness with theoretical reflection, which he deems necessary
while at the same time being acutely aware of its dangers. The whole notion
of self-negation is an expression of this uneasiness and thus part of the psychodrama of Confucian modernization. What is being negated is precisely what
must not be negated because it is the ultimate Confucian value (hence that for
the sake of which the negation is carried out).
97 – I quote this line from Zheng Jiadong, Mou Zongsan, p. 75.
98 – This does not mean that for Mou Zongsan personally the canonical writings
have lost their authority. For him, the Mencius is still the book that can tell us
the truth about human nature, but Mou knows that unless Confucians come
up with new ways to express that truth, it will not find the universal accep
tance it deserves.
99 – See Mou, The Scholarship of Life, p. 255, and also Self-description at Age
Fifty, p. 111, for a similar remark. I am inclined to reverse the relation between
Kant and Hegel in Mou’s approach and to speak of the placement of a (com-
Stephan Schmidt
301
pletely reinterpreted and un-Kantian version of the) Transcendental Analytic in
an enlarged but still recognizable Hegelian frame.
100 – To be sure, he could have found it in Fichte and other German Idealists as
well, had he chosen to take a closer look. See Dieter Henrich, “Ethik der Autonomie,” in Henrich, Selbstverhältnisse (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2001), pp. 6–56.
101 – On this see the lucid analysis in the first two lectures of Jürgen Habermas, The
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990), esp. part 4 of the first lecture, pp. 19–22.
102 – See Mou, Self-description at Age Fifty, p. 129.
103 – See Mou, Philosophy of History, p. 64.
302

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

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