New Confucianism
from 1920
An argument that Confucian moral metaphysics survives the encounter with Kant and with science, made by people whose country had just repudiated it.
- Active
- from 1920
- Where
- China, then Hong Kong and Taiwan
- Status
- living
- Tradition
- Chinese
The claim
Human beings have intellectual intuition — direct moral knowing — which Kant denied to us and reserved for God. If Kant is wrong about that, Confucian moral metaphysics stands.
What it held
The May Fourth movement of 1919 held Confucianism responsible for China's humiliation, and the case looked strong. New Confucianism is the answer, worked out over the following decades largely by scholars who ended up in Hong Kong and Taiwan after 1949.
Mou Zongsan's argument is the most ambitious. Kant holds that we cannot have intellectual intuition — direct non-sensory knowledge of things as they are — and that morality therefore rests on a postulate rather than on insight. Mou argues that the entire Confucian tradition, and Buddhism and Daoism too, is founded on the claim that we do have exactly that, in moral awareness. If so, Kant's limitation is a parochial finding rather than a universal one.
The political argument is separate and equally serious: that Confucianism must develop democracy and science out of its own resources rather than import them, by what Mou called the self-negation of moral consciousness — moral subjectivity stepping back to allow objective knowledge and law their own domain.
The 1958 manifesto, signed by four of them, is the movement's public statement: Chinese culture is a living thing rather than a museum, and it has something to say to the West rather than only to receive.
How it argued
Comparative philosophy at a technical level, reading Kant, Hegel and Heidegger in the original alongside the Song and Ming masters.
What it was arguing against
The May Fourth verdict that Confucianism caused China's weakness, and the Marxist account that displaced it; also wholesale Westernisation.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether intellectual intuition can be established or is asserted. Whether the tradition can generate democracy from within, or whether the claim is retrofitted.
Common misconceptions
That it is nostalgia. Mou translated all three of Kant's critiques into Chinese and argued with him line by line; this is technical philosophy rather than cultural defence.
How it began
Xiong Shili in the 1920s and 1930s, and then his students, most of whom left the mainland in 1949 and continued the work in exile.
What became of it
Living, and now studied on the mainland again after decades of suppression. A third generation works in Chinese and English.
Lasting influence
Chinese-language philosophy in Taiwan and Hong Kong. The comparative philosophy of Kant and Confucianism is largely its creation.
Why it still matters
The question of whether a moral tradition can adopt democratic and scientific institutions without being replaced by them is not confined to China.
Put another way
A house whose owners were told to demolish it, arguing instead about which walls are load-bearing.
Where to start
The 1958 manifesto. It is short and it states the programme plainly.
The surprising bit
Mou Zongsan translated the whole of Kant's three critiques into Chinese, from English, in order to argue that Kant was wrong about one thing.
In their own words
If human beings cannot have intellectual intuition, then the whole of Chinese philosophy collapses.
Chinese culture is a living being, not a specimen.
Connections
The verdict
A tradition defending itself at the highest technical level, from exile, against its own country.