This article examines Confucian humility with a special focus on its political dimension, which is central to early Chinese conceptions of the virtue. Unlike the Western tradition, Confucian thinkers rarely challenged the normative status of humility as a political virtue for the ruling elite, particularly for the ruler. This article argues that the core of Confucian humility as a monarchical virtue lies in the ruler’s awareness of existential limitations. Far from implying diffidence and a lowering of self-estimation, it enables a ruler to exercise political agency through a realistic assessment of self and others, while serving as a constant reminder of vulnerability, contingency, and historicity—concerns universally relevant but especially pertinent to the ruler in the supreme position. By framing humility as a defining trait of the ideal ruler rather than of subordinates, which stands in sharp contrast to passive virtues aiming to cultivate docility among the non-elite, early Confucians underscore the political leader’s responsibility to respect the tradition, uphold the foundational principle of the Way, and seriously attend to the voices of both the political elite and the common people. Confucian humility, thus understood, is an essential political virtue that constitutes the moral foundation of Confucian rulership.
Hu Shi's (sic)(sic) (1891-1962) and other intellectuals' expositions of the conceptions of "things" (wu (sic)) and "investigation of things" (gewu (sic)(sic)) are thought-provoking, as they reflect their efforts and ambitions in addressing the impact from the West. However, those who attempt to find the "spirit of objective cognition" or "natural science" in Neo-Confucianism are applying their own understanding of modernity as the criterion to evaluate the value and significance of traditional culture and classical learning. This paper is devoted to elucidating that the conception of "things," in essence, is not epistemological; rather, it is a conception of practical philosophy, embodying the pursuit of ultimate order by Neo-Confucian thinkers. Through their emphasis on "things" and the "investigation of things," Neo-Confucian scholars affirmed the reality of the actual world as a necessary field or medium for realizing their ideal moral-political order.
Scholars often question how Zhu Xi's (sic)(sic) conception of gewu (sic)(sic) (the investigation of things) can lead to the cultivation of the heartmind and, therefore, to moral action. This article answers this question by reviewing how Zhu Xi's metaphysics originates from that of the Zhouyi (sic)(sic) (Classic of Changes), in which the principle of the Supreme Polarity bifurcates and constitutes everything. Gewu therefore does not mean to study the principle of things as external knowledge, but to cultivate a synthetic comprehension (guantong (sic)(sic)) of how principles in things are all connected and all related to the principles of one's heartmind. Such a hermeneutic intuition is the foundation to virtuous actions, as one would be able to intuit the principle at work in all complicated situations. To reach this hermeneutic intuition is also proof that one's heartmind has been cleared, and I argue that this state of knowing is not qualitatively different from the highest ideal of sympathetic correspondence (gantong (sic)(sic)) in the Zhouyi. To build my argument, I analyze Zhu Xi's method of reading the Zhouyi, as he urges the thinker to not merely study the orthodox commentaries of the Ten Wings (Shiyi (sic)(sic)), but to interpret for oneself the meaning of the hexagram specific to the situation-as a challenge of whether one can see how the principle manifests in a certain context. The import of my argument is that it offers a counterview to the disenchantment of the modern world. Whereas modern science has cut a chasm between objective facts and subject meanings, Zhuzi's (sic)(sic) gewu allows every individual to interpret for the manifestations of the principle, while our understanding must be personal.
Focusing on the methodological implications arising from contemporary studies of Confucian philosophy, this paper aims to critically assess Reshaping Confucianism: A Progressive Enquiry and its central theses that Confucian key concepts are relevant to contemporary philosophical discussion and that Confucian philosophy can be reshaped to make real contributions to the rational search for answers to the perennial problems that humanity is faced with. It will be argued that with such an ambitious plan of reconstruction in the context of the world’s philosophical diversity, the “reshaping” project inevitably involves methodological perspectives and evaluative criteria that are to be under scrutiny, and the “progressive enquiry” into the most significant issues of Confucian studies are equally subject to philosophical enquiries.
The term xing (sic), which frequently appears in Warring States philosophical discourses, has been conventionally interpreted and translated as "human nature," conveying the general sense of the essence or fundamental nature of humanity, and the "theory of human nature" has long been designated as a core theory of classical Confucian ethics. Following some scholars' challenge of this convention and applying the theoretical approaches of the division between ethics and morality and contemporary moral psychology, this essay argues that classical Confucians do not specifically emphasize a "theory of human nature" but instead focus on the construction of a prototype of moral psychology, which aims at the psychological constitution and development of moral agency, virtue, and ideal character. This project is completed mainly through two interrelated stages. The first is to internalize the social-ethical norms of the Zhou (sic) ritual tradition to become psychological-moral beliefs and virtues, and the second is to interpret moral values in relation to mental properties and activities. As a result, classical Confucians gradually formulate an interacted and integrated moral-psychological mode of xin (sic)-heart/mind governing xing (sic)-disposition and qing (sic)-emotion while si (sic)-thinking and zhi (sic)-intention directing xin, describing the dynamic process by which the moral agent cultivates moral dispositions, stimulates moral emotions, makes moral judgments, determines moral choices, motivates moral actions, and realizes moral character.
