My friend had told me that the people putting on our symposium were "New Confucians," but I confess I didn't try to find out what that means. Now I know, at least a little. New Confucians - not Neoconfucians - are a 20th century movement concerned to revive
Confucianism as a tradition of global significance. Fired up by the demise of Confucian China in 1911, its leading lights have been knowledgeable also about Western philosophy; many studied and taught abroad. Kant seems to be very important to them (as he's been for Buddhist and Hindu revivals with similar global aspirations, I feel bound to add). One of my hosts, Lee Min-huei, assured me that Kant would recognize Confucianism as a religion. But Confucianism goes farther than Kant could see, a Mou Tsung-san (teacher of many of the present generation of New Confucians) apparently argued: Kant reserves "intellectual intuition" for God, when in fact it is accessible to human beings.I'm not sure what that could mean (perhaps my thinking is cramped by theism too)... but this is where the question of Confucianism as a religion is particularly interesting to these people, since it shows Confucianism to involve more than ethics but also "transcendence" and "spirituality." These are all terms against which I've been immunized - at home in the "dialogue of religions" but rigorously eschewed by most scholars of religion as modern pseudo-concepts which couldn't possibly illuminate past or non-western traditions but function mainly to insulate religion from criticism. I suspect I was smuggled into this symposium as a reality check on their understanding of what "religious studies" is - though they would of course contest what's "reality" here!
New Confucianism is not a monolithic thing. Most intriguing to me is the supposed "Boston Confucianism" of two professors at Harvard and two at Boston University described by Robert Neville. The Harvard wing (particularly Tu Wei-ming)
seems the main advocate of the "transcendence" and "spirituality" view, while the BU wing (including Neville himself) attend more to the importance of ritual (li) to developing humaneness. As Neville explains, the former (focussing on Mencius/Mengzi) emphasize the fact that the heart would automatically perceive and respond well if society had not taught selfishness, while the latter (drawing on Xunzi) counter that the connection between the ten thousand things and the heart itself needs to be created by appropriate rituals or habitual meaning structures.* Does it make me a terrible cynic (infected still by ideas of original sin even?) that my sympathies lie with the Xunzians?I think I need to think more about all this. By one of those weird coincidences that some people might take as showing that "reality" is more complicated than often acknowledged, I received my invitation to come to Academia Sinica the very day I gave a talk at Boston University this past Spring. My respondent was ... Robert Neville!
*Robert Cummings Neville, "Conscious and Unconscious Placing of Ritual (Li) and Humanity (Ren)," Journal of Ecumenical Studies XV/1-2 (Winter-Spring 2003), 48-58: 55
