In commenting on an earlier post, Sperwer and Gordseller both challenge the idea that Confucianism can be taken out of its traditional Chinese or Korean context and refurbished for liberal purposes, which is something I’m interested in.  These are useful criticisms and I take them seriously.   

     The problem they point to, as I understand it, is this:  The thing we call "Confucianism" is hopelessly bound up with a variety of social and political practices that have, over the centuries, brought to the fore its hierarchical and patriarchal and inegalitarian and conservative features.   It makes little sense, this line of critique goes, to assert that pre-Qin dynasty Confucian thought can somehow be separated from this long historical experience and used as a basis for a more egalitarian and progressive ideology. 

    This is a powerful point, especially if we grant that there is a thing called "Confucianism."  But what if we reject the idea of a singular "Confucianism"?  What if we argue that there is not one Confucianism but many, and that it is  precisely in the historical fact of many Confucianisms that we can defend an effort to revise, yet again, the ideas of the early texts in a manner that suits modern, more liberal, societies?  That is what I will suggest below. 

     Let me start by saying that my purpose is not to excavate a more genuine or authentic Confucianism.  I think it is true that pre-Qin dynasty Confucian thought, especially the Analects and Mencius, was more distinct from Legalism than the Confucianism that emerged from the Han Dynasty.  But it is also true that in the context of its own time, pre-Qin Confucian thought was certainly based on presumptions about social hierarchy and sexual divisions of labor that we, today, would find objectionable.  Confucius was not a liberal.  But neither was he a Legalist. 

    Moreover, from the very beginning – and I am thinking here about differences among the various Adepts mentioned in the Analects – there were differences of opinion among those who took Confucian thought seriously over just what that thought required in specific contexts.   The different views about human nature that separated Mencius and Xun Tzu are, perhaps, the most famous pre-Qin contention.  It does no good to ask "who was right," or "who was closer to the real intentions of the author," because each text came to have a life of its own beyond the influence of Confucius’s own intentions, whatever they might be.  Yes, this is a version of "the author is dead" argument.  To repeat: from the very beginning, the meaning of Confucius’s thought was contested.   There is not one, single strand of "correct" Confucian thought.  There is a field of interpretive possibility that has been called upon in many different ways, by many different subjects over the centuries. 

     When I complain about Legalist appropriations of Confucius I do so to point out how they might contradict what appears to be Confucius’s own preferences about political action as found in the Analects.  But I also recognize, as my good commenters have implied, that a liberal appropriation of Confucian thought runs the very same risk of contradicting the Venerable Sage’s own understandings and preferences.  Such is life.  This is nothing new.  Neo-Confucianisms, in attempting to respond to Buddhism and Taoism, may also have wandered off the original author’s intentions (I do not know enough about Neo-Confucianism to say much more). 

    Here’s my main point: what matters is not what Confucius would say about any of the many appropriations of this thought.  What matters is how well any given appropriation can be justified by philosophical elements internal to specific Confucian texts. 

     For example: I think we can make a strong case the Humanity (ren) was the highest virtue articulated in the Analects.  Confucius said that he himself did not live up to this ideal; it was, thus, the highest ideal.  As such, I think it reasonable to use Humanity as a leading justificatory tool when assessing appropriations of Confucian thought – even when we stray into areas, like, say, gay marriage, that would be wholly alien to Confucius himself.   So, I think we can say that the use of torture or political killing is more violative of the central Confucian virtue of Humanity than is gay marriage.   Indeed, I think that too great a reliance on coercion in general, as Legalist are wont to do, is more violative of Humanity than is gay marriage.

     Where does that leave us?   Again, I am not saying that something like gay marriage is a more "authentic" Confucian practice.  It obviously is not.  Rather, I am trying to say that  we can make judgments about whether certain social and political practices are more or less in keeping with the ideas and ideals of specific Confucian texts.  Our Confucian judgments can be more or less consistent with concepts derived from the ancient books; they do not have to be, nor can they be, more or less "authentic."

    Whether a particular application of Confucian thought will be persuasive or not will depend upon the intellectual and social and political context within which the application is made.  After all, Legalism was grafted on to Confucianism and accepted by many generations of very smart people.  It obviously made sense to them and was not seen as an unjustifiable change.  But that is just the point.  In doing so, they were revising and changing the tradition to suit their own times.  That is what we are doing now: changing and revising the tradition to suit our times, really nothing different than Xun Tzu or the Neo-Confucians or the Koreans or whoever has done through history.  We are, like them, creating another Confucianism.   A modern, liberal appropriation of Confucius will ultimately rise or fall depending upon how well it can find resonance in a modern, liberal context.  We’ll see.

     In the end, my critics are right.  When someone says "Confucius," the ideas that pop into the listeners mind, if any ideas come to mind at all, are most likely to be "hierarchy," "patriarchy," "conservative," and the like.  I know.  I run into this all the time.  My job – and the job of much smarter people than me, like Tu Wei-Ming and Roger Ames – is to create a different set of associations, just as the many, many tinkerers of the tradition before us have done.

    And if it doesn’t work, there’s always Chuang Tzu….