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The claim that some cultures (or worse, ‘races’) are inherently more or less sincere than others is akin to claiming the earth is flat. Facts can always to bent into shape to support it, but they don’t survive the smell test.
Dao of the xiangyuan 乡愿之道
So what do we make of the eagerness of certain PRC influentials to award their own Han culture a sort of Olympic gold medal for hypocrisy? The great early 20th century writer Lu Xun (1898-1936; a.k.a. Lu Hsün, real name Zhou Shuren) lampooned a ‘spiritual victory’ doctrine, personified in Ah Q, a village low-life. No matter that he receives endless thrashings at the hands of prominent townsfolk - even of his peers - Ah Q can always claim some sort of high moral ground.
Ah Q and spiritual victory will be revisited in a later episode. In this episode of Beijing Baselines, we encounter sharp views on the topic from Deng Xiaomang, long a professor of philosophy at the University of Wuhan. He is now 74, so probably emeritus by now; he is the brother of Can Xue, noted woman writer of avant-garde fiction and literary critic.
More scholarly than Lu Xun, Deng sets up the sincerity/self-deception duality in a less comical but equally telling way. He takes analytical stock of a classical form of hypocrisy, that of the xiangyuan 乡愿, or ‘hometown good guy’. Which incidentally describes some Western politicians. To whom we’ll return anon…
Deng Xiaomang (1948- )
Confucian hypocrites in Kantian moral terms*
The term xiangyuan originates in Confucius' saying ‘xiangyuan are thieves of virtue’. [1] In the Analects, a transcript of his utterances, he is heard berating ‘xiangyuan types’ 乡愿之徒, i.e. ‘hometown good guys’ [I discuss in a later episode the old term ‘prig’ as a rendering of xiangyuan]. Getting on well with one and all, they were (are) good at juggling involvements, gaining advantage from all sides; widely regarded as fine people, they were not morally driven, but strive to gain popularity. Ambitious, upwardly mobile people are hence deemed hypocritical.
I take my theme from a line in Tan Sitong's 谭嗣同 On Benevolence 仁学 (1997), where he writes: ‘The doctrines of the past two millennia originate with Xunzi[2], all were xiangyuan.’[3] Confucianism was divided into two branches, the schools of Mencius and Xunzi; Tan held that the Xunzi school was the mainstream.
This goes against the usual cliché that Xunzi doesn’t figure in the orthodoxy stemming from Confucius and Mencius: ‘His doctrines are those of a xiangyuan’. Human nature, he taught, is by default evil: ‘its goodness is contrived’, hence what is good in humans is thanks to cultivation. This is at odds with Confucius and Mencius, who taught that human nature was by default good. Tan Sitong argued that Xunzi’s advocacy of ‘embellishing oneself’ amounts to hypocrisy. ‘Contrived’ means artificial; it does not in itself imply hypocrisy. But as artifice is involved, there is the possibility of being put on.
Another passage runs, ‘Crooks make use of the village good guys, who are good at currying favour with them; they complement each other, and neither of them fails to invoke Confucius.’ This notion of Tan Sitong’s has always been considered extreme and at odds with previous views of Chinese philosophy. His critics argue that Confucians were intent on ‘mortifying the flesh to create benevolence’: how could treating one’s life as dispensable be hypocrisy?
Confucius himself attacked the village good guys; his principles corrupted by self-styled followers, but this wasn’t the problem. Tan said that all Confucians were like village good guys, but not in the sense that they were all subjectively hypocritical. We should accept that many Confucians were subjectively sincere, really bent on practicing Confucian morality. The problem is, who in the end is sincere? Are there any criteria to separate sincerity from hypocrisy? No objective criteria can be found. The standard is entirely in the heart-mind, indetectable from without. Attacking the xiangyuan implied Confucius’ doctrine of ‘interrogating the heart-mind’, i.e. an appeal to the judgment of conscience, blaming people according to their inner motivation. This doctrine of self-interrogation is a Confucian tradition. Confucian moral norms are not transmitted by objective laws, but are ‘passed down as holy commandments’, that is, subjective wishes and motives must proceed from the moral commandments proposed by Confucius; as for external commandments, there are none. Whether someone acts for the sake of what is good or for ulterior motives can't be distinguished from the situation.
Mencius too hated the village good guys, saying that ‘eunuch-like, they flattered their generation’; ‘at rest they seemed trustworthy, in action seemed incorruptible, all were pleased with them, and they thought themselves righteous.’ In reality, we see many people like this, very honest, loyal, filial, very obedient to their superiors, popular with people, and at peace with themselves; then it suddenly transpires that someone like this, say an official, is corrupt, has scammed great sums and keeps a mistress; no one can believe it, arguing that he was framed, but investigation verifies it. These are village good guys.
How to put an end to them, to reform such people by some means? Mencius proposed a method called fanjing 返经: reverting to the classics. To this end, Zhu Xi [1130-1200 CE] proposed a formulaic teaching known as the Dayu mo chapter of the Book of Documents: ‘
The mind of man is unfathomable, morality is subtle, only by grasping this may one grasp the Mean
That is, the human heart is treacherous, the moral mind is very subtle; one must grasp this point to grasp the golden mean, which external criteria fail to do. Hence both Zhu Xi and the Cheng brothers[4] all spoke about the ‘unknowable Mean that must be intuited wordlessly until it pervades the heart-mind’: they could grasp the morality of the Mean only by direct transmission. But no criteria exist for this ‘Mean’. No reliable criteria are to be found for differentiating the base from the noble. Hence the conclusion that no external means can cleanse the human heart-mind.
Even proving one's sincerity by doing good deeds arouses suspicion: dedicating oneself to the public or even dedicating oneself to some ideal of ‘mortifying the flesh to become altruistic [ren 仁] or sacrificing life to become righteous [yi 义]’. Offering up your life is no necessary proof that you are the most noble: even a wise man, discovering he must die, may prefer to do so mouthing a moral virtue rather than a sin. The demise of the Ming Dynasty is often blamed on Wang Yangming's vain talk of heart-nature,[5] ‘proclaiming their merit to the monarch on the point of death, using death to leave a lasting reputation.’ In this way even death can be a ploy to gain fame; nor can death distinguish between the contemptible and the noble.
No external means are enough to show that one is sincere, nor can someone be evaluated by them. No one can use external means to prove that he/she is innocent and unselfish. People should always be on guard against one another. Deeply versed in personal relations for millennia, the Chinese are the shrewdest race. The fleshly hearts of Chinese are subtler than their moral hearts, and they can at any time mask their human heart with morality, and they may have multiple layers of such masks. Confucian ethics and morality are prone to becoming means, indeed unconscious means, of seeking personal gain. Someone who feels that simply by being a good person, getting on with neighbours and colleagues, doing everyone small favours for minor returns, can he then adapt to society, be totally connected, and have everything going his way: this is how Chinese deal with the world. Someone who takes petty advantage of people has no place in it. They have many maxims and precepts about interpersonal relationships accumulated over millennia, such as [the compilation] Sage writings that increase illumination.[6]
A fixed mindset of Chinese people is that the human heart can be sincere[7]: you cannot be wrong about yourself as long as you are sincere. If one excludes selfish distractions, one's true heart is presented to one. It is difficult for me to know others, but surely it is easy to know myself? You only have to be willing to be sincere, ‘do your best and know your own nature’, this is a mindset of Chinese people. But as we said earlier, there are no criteria of sincerity, only self-intuition, no external standards. Examining one's conscience, we say, one feels that one can know the truth when one returns to one’s conscience. One's conscience is sincere as ‘making oneself sincere is the way of mortals.’ Appealing to self-perception, we never doubt its accuracy. When it comes to deeper judgment, we Chinese come to a halt. When the West’s Freudian theory of the subconscious came to China, the Chinese were mystified. Chinese people wrote self-examinations to the point of tears—if they spoke up about their hidden scars, surely that made them sincere ?
But a few score years later, when we re-read these self-examinations they seem quite phoney. We just did them to pass a test, to fool our leaders and ourselves. Just agree to show sincerity, Chinese people think: this will do to settle your affairs. If even I don't believe it, how can I be an upright person? Hence I dare not doubt my innermost feelings, or feel penitent about my sincerity. Once we doubts one's penitence about our innermost feelings, we lose the foundation of our security in life. Lu Xun hence said that the Chinese were good at kidding themselves, excelled at the art of self-deception.
Confucianism is not deliberate hypocrisy. Subjectively, it rejects hypocrisy; we just fail to anticipate its objective effects. But the mindset just described is hypocritical in itself. This personality structure is in itself a structural hypocrisy, hypocrisy in personality structure, not in the concrete individual. Xunzi said, ‘their goodness is contrived’. To be a good person, you must ‘be an upright person’, cultivating and embellishing yourself. This actually legitimises and rationalises structural hypocrisy. Xunzi said that one should use the legal system and etiquette set by the former kings to ‘dissemble human emotions and rectify them’. In the end, ‘correcting’ them meant they need to conform with political power. This is to see issues mainly in terms of their political effects. When hearts and minds are ‘corrected, everyone in the world will be good. Their actual inward goodness is beside the point, only political outcomes matter.
Tan Sitong’s assessment that ‘doctrines of the past two millennia are those of Xunzi, are for village good guys’ hence cannot be refuted. It’s not about concrete individuals, but structural xiangyuan. Given Tan’s revelations, scholars and philosophers must ask whether their consciousness conceals a subconscious. Basing one's security in life on self-intuition is unreliable. Does feeling good about yourself make you a noble person? Tan’s words sound an alarm: every Confucian believer must ask him or herself whether their ‘total self-knowledge’ and ‘clear conscience’ are genuine.
The question mark Tan places next to the Confucian personality can be resolved neither by external means, nor through experiencing one's inwardness. Is there a baseline of the human heart that can be grasped? Sincerity for example: can the heart be cleansed to be a mirror that reflects the way of heaven and the heart of man? Knowing your own nature you know the way of heaven, which is reflected in the nature of man. The question is, can you sweep your heart so clean? When you’ve cleaned it, is there is nothing behind it? This is actually impossible. The human heart is actually an unfathomable abyss. How can you clean it?
Translator: note here that Deng’s sister, whose birth name was Deng Xiaohua, writes under the name ‘Can Xue’ 残雪, ‘which means both the dirty snow that refuses to melt and the purest snow at the top of a high mountain’.
Sincerity is not easy to achieve, and thinking you are sincere doesn't make you so. To be sincere is a painful process. Sincerity assumes knowledge. You have to know a lot and go through a lot. After you have gained life experience, you may slowly know yourself a little bit, but it is quite impossible to grasp all of it. Augustine said that the human mind is a bottomless abyss. To know yourself you must grasp yourself only by entering this abyss, as man's heart is unfathomable. The child says 'I know I never do bad things'. When the child said this, we adults think he is very childish. But can the adult say this?
All the above was about the Confucian personality structure. Now we can look at Kant’s ideas. His moral philosophy fundamentally starts by claiming the human mind-heart is not an object: rather it is freedom, which is unknowable. What we know are phenomena only. There is a self-contained object behind them, that is, ‘things in themselves’. The self-contained things are not known; what we do know are their epiphenomena. Phenomena cannot reflect the actuality of things in themselves. The same is true of human beings. Human being is freedom, but freedom is unknowable, and what is knowable is not freedom. So-called freedom is undecidable. If you can find a basis and reason for freedom, it is not freedom; it is included in the chain of mechanical causality.
Freedom is unknowable and ungraspable. The main contribution of Kant’s moral philosophy is to distinguish phenomena from things-in-themselves. Human self-perception, like human understanding of the outside world, involves only phenomena, does not involve the free noumena of human beings, which are free wills. Freedom is spontaneous and cannot be prescribed, but one thing that can be stipulated is that freedom is only regulated by its own rules and is not subject to any external experience. How free the will is, is regulated by itself, i.e., free will must be consistent. Consistency is binding on free will, is self-restraint, what Kant dubs ‘autonomy’ [zilü 自律]. Free will is not transient, for while I’m free today to do something, tomorrow I‘ll be bound by it. Transient freedom is common: one’s initial action is free, but its sequel action is not. One is free today to indulge once; tomorrow one will bear the consequences of indulging it. True free will is to find a law, and be consistent about it from start to finish, which is autonomy.
‘There’s a saying that people can carry out for life,’ said Confucius, ‘do as you would be done by’. This can be practised throughout life. Kant and Confucius are interrelated. Both insist that true morality is the consistency of free will with a universally enforced law. Kant’s moral imperative is something that while being practised throughout one's own life, can be practised by others throughout theirs. This principle is not merely of this or that person, but the logical principle of all rational beings. As with the logical laws of identity, of non-contradiction, free will must be consistent throughout. Of course, Confucius’s ‘do as you would be done by’ has deeper differences from Kant's.
Free will can’t in Kant's view be proven or explained by external experience or knowledge, cannot be grasped by ordinary theories of knowledge, hence is a holds danger: the ‘human mind is at risk’, is dangerous, is capable of both evil and good. If we were destined to do only good deeds, we wouldn’t be free. Doing good is done freely only if we can do either good or evil. Someone with no choice but to do bad things can't be held responsible. Unable to control themselves, the mentally deranged are, having no freedom, natural phenomena without good or evil. Only when someone can do good but instead does bad can they be held accountable for the bad; only if someone can do bad, but instead does good, can they be rewarded for doing good; these are reciprocal. That people must be governed by free will and perceptually aware is stipulated by jurisprudence too: being governed by free will is a prerequisite for legal judgment.
We generally think that freedom is a good thing. It is in fact two-sided, potentially good or evil. Westerners understand freedom as more inclined to commit sin. Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden. Had Adam not picked the apple he would not have sinned but nor would he have had free will. He would have been an animal determined by God. We propose the pursuit of freedom is not in the sense that it is inherently good, but to elevate people from the level of animals, to endow them with nobility, and to regard them as dignified creatures. Possessing dignity, capable of both good and evil. A villain may also be noble, because he has free will, if [one's] free will is [made] consistent, dares to act and to take responsibility, one can maintain his nobility of person. Of course, we must condemn him morally.
What we are pursuing is such freedom. It is not that we have everything to be free. On the contrary, having a person is usually the first thing to do bad things. But as long as there is freedom, he may slowly start doing good in the midst of doing bad. He will find that doing good is what genuinely finds satisfaction in freedom. Doing bad is temporary, if it's carried on it’s not free. Adam and Eve were driven out of the Garden of Eden, but God said, ‘They were on an equal footing with me.’ Man is on an equal footing with God through sin, that is, man is already noble, and thanks to his nobility he can step by step move toward the good. Free will starts with evil, and ends with good.
For people to achieve sincerity is a long historical process. The Chinese usually regard goodness as the starting point. Westerners think that it is the terminus. When a person finally faces the judgment of God, what he has done in life can be judged good or a bad, and the sins one has committed can be discarded. A good man can only confirm that he become good only before God. In reality, there are always tendencies enticing him to sin: this is the Western view.
As for Kant, he argues that people must always be alert to their freedom. Do not think that you can be good depending only on your sincerity: that is self-deception. Kant believes that true morality is not [merely] "in accordance with moral law," but rather whether it "comes from moral law." A businessman may be entirely honest, not selling fake or inferior products. We can praise him but not necessarily respect him. He does not buy fake products out of fear of losing his business reputation. His actions do not come of moral law, but are only in accordance with it. Kant argues that what is truly worthy of respect is what comes out of moral law, that is, the store will not sell fake goods even if it goes bankrupt. Someone whose acts come from the moral law, can not only be praised, but also respected. There are very few such people. In Kant, there are no such people; it is just an ideal standard by which people are measured. This is a criterion. To be moral or honourable for its own sake, are measures of true morality.
In real life, people can't do this, so in Kant's view, everyone is a xiangyuan and has a hypocritical side. Christian speakers have original sin, just born children, as long as he begins to have free will, there is the possibility of crime, the idea of crime. You can't rely on your own heart to be sure that you don't do bad things. Everyone does not want to be sincere, but can't do it. Self-righteousness is unreliable, and even just happens to be a sign of insincerity. From this point of view, it is inevitable to deceive. The Chinese believe that this view is too extreme and is not used to destroying all our confidence in life. If we think you can't be good people, what goals can we have in life? In fact, Kant’s doctrine expresses a very important foothold of Western spiritual Christian culture, that is, people are free. It is difficult to be a good person, but freedom can be achieved. Everyone is capable of doing wrong, because they are free. Without freedom there is no right or wrong. Behaving on the basis of instinct, what wrongs do animals commit? Christianity does not emphasise free will, but faith and immortality of the soul. Everything is ultimately determined by God. But Kant turned this upside down. God is hypothesised by man. The most fundamental force is the free will of man.
For Chinese people, Kant’s theory can be compared to shock therapy. Don't imagine you can be a saint, a good person, you have to break this belief. Wang Yangming said that ‘everyone can be a [sage emperor] Shun or Yao.’ Some say that ‘600 million Chinese are all Shun or Yao’; this sort of thing is delusion, self-deception. Never advertise your secular behaviour as your sincerity. Nothing can be explained in terms of one's subjective motivation being good. One should by maintaining modesty of principles in the face of moral law see the limited nature of man. Baring your heart to everyone, which is not credible, is not true sincerity. It's not possible to grasp oneself. You show your diary and display your letters. Back in the day a person would keep a ‘diary’, waiting for the day they committed some offence and others would discover his inner heart through his diary, so he could display himself. It is traditional to reveal your thoughts to those above. Wang Yangming was intent on "breaking the inner thief", those years we were intent on ‘fiercely fighting momentary thoughts of “self”’, a revolution breaking out in the soul. If you had evil thoughts seeing a girl in the street, you have to give an account, it seems if your soul is cleansed, but next time it is just the same. The mind can't be accounted for. Do not think the sun and moon in the heavens of my heart can be proof, that the moon represents my heart. It cannot be represented.
We must accept that the human mind is multilayered. Your perception of self is only of a certain layer. Accepting that your mind, no matter how pure, contains impure layers as well, you should be remorseful in advance for the actions you are capable of, but remorse in your own heart and not for [showing] others. In this way, people can abandon the xiangyuan, surpass the xiangyuan, and become more and more sincere.
To become sincere one must have a large amount of accumulated knowledge, and approach sincerity by awareness of their own insincerity; people should work hard in this direction. In this sense, the moral law becomes an otherworldly rather than a secular standard. When people's moral values are elevated to the level of transcendence, they can no longer be used by those worldly xiangyuan or by worldly interests. Morality cannot be exploited, morality is an unconditional imperative, and is of the other world. It cannot be exploited by worldly interests. We mentioned Confucius saying ‘do as you would be done by.’ This of rule has similar expressions in Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, and is called the Golden Rule. Kant argues that by themselves these are inadequate. ‘Do as you would be done by’ is just a popular moral saying, it needs other things to lay the foundation for it. In Kant's view, this deeper basis is free will. What is this 'do as you would be done by'? What is it for? What is its purpose? Kant said that man is purpose; if ‘do as you would be done by’ is placed under man as the purpose, then it’s moral; if there are other objectives, it is immoral. We take ‘do as you would be done by’ to belong to a higher realm, failing to see there are those who are capable of exploiting it. In his ‘Metaphysics of Morals’, Kant pointed out that when a criminal is facing a court trial, he can tell the judge, ‘do as you would be done by.’ You don't want to go to jail, so you should not sentence me to it. There are many examples of daily life. ‘Do as you would be done by’ can be a magic weapon and stratagem for managing human relations.
Another worldly criterion is that publicly advertised by Confucius and Confucians is ‘ruling the country and pacifying world’, to get the world to enact Confucius's ‘do as you would be done by’. Confucius explains ren as ‘those who can en act five words in the world are ren. The five words were ‘respect, generosity, trust, acuteness and mutual benefit’.[8] This was also the so-called five virtues: respect is having no shame, generosity is winning the public, faith is people placing credence in you, acuteness is to possess merit, and mutual benefit is ability to delegate. Confucius also said, ‘If superiors like politesse, people will dare not be disrespectful. If they like righteousness, they will dare not disobey. If they like trust, they will dare not appeal to emotion.’ This is political xiangyuan. These things seem to have moral objectives, but they are actually political. Confucian ethical structural contrivance hence developed into institutional xiangyuan. Institutional xiangyuan are ‘those possessing virtue will gain tianxia [the world]’; ‘those who win the hearts of the people will gain the world’; conversely, in order to win the world, you must have virtue. This is the consensus of the Chinese. But whether this authoritarian system of ‘gaining tianxia’ is moral, Chinese have never asked since ancient times. Tianxia will allow people to go and gain it; the problem is that those who gain it must possess virtue. The absolute imperative for Chinese people is therefore politics rather than moral law. In Kant's view, politics is only an empirical worldly standard. What it cares about is real power, but not the individual heart-mind, and the morality of the individual heart has to serve politics. Kant hence said empirical principles are never suitable to become bases of moral law. They gain their basis from a contingent environment. Our contingent environment is the natural economy, and the unchanging mode of social and governance structure that has been based on it for thousands of years. But Kant believes that such a basis is not universal. Even today we see that with the replacement of the natural economy, traditional political morality will also depart the historical stage.
Kant argues that this kind of empirical morality equalises virtuous and evil motivations, and teaches people to use fine calculations to erase the difference between the two, and teach people to calculate utilitarian outcomes. The systemic hypocrisy of Confucianism objectively leads people to use their most hidden cunning to cloak sin with morality. In Confucianism, since morality is merely one of the methods of politics, in order to achieve political goals, moral means can be used, and unethical, even monstrously evil ones can be used. In order to achieve the goal, using unscrupulous means, he who succeeds is a king, he who is defeated is a bandit. After becoming a king, all immoral means can be made moral. All can be excused for the ruler, distorting and covering up history, and erase immoral means from history books. We must "‘look forward’. What is 'looked forward' to is the political future, political stability; no doubt peace in the world is good, but its moral concept is completely bankrupt.
Confucian political ethics is thus very inclusive and has no moral baseline. Traditional politics is a Confucian surface with a Legalist lining. Kant revealed that the human heart is hypocritical. His purpose was not to ask people to be saints, but to reveal a fundamental evil in human nature. Kant talks about the fundamental evil in human nature in his religious philosophy. What was it? Kant does not see things like sinful desire, murder, robbery, rape, etc., as fundamental evils. These are all derivative. People are sensual animals, but sensual motives are not evil. To pursue a comfortable life is not evil. Kant is not an ascetic. Fundamental evil lies in the placement of wrong sensual motivations and moral rational motivations.
People possess reason, making them have moral concepts, but they also have sensuality. What is the relationship between the two? Fundamental evil is not making sensibility obey reason, but instead making moral reason an excuse for sensual motives. No matter what people do, their ultimate motivation is sensual, even if moral motivation is for their own moral sentiment, they are more comfortable. Seeing a beggar and giving him some money, one's heart would be comfortable. This is obligation rather than morality for its own sake. If you regard this as moral, it is hypocrisy. People can only proceed from sensual motives, which is the fundamental evil in the human heart. When a person does something bad, he has an excuse to forgive himself. Although he knows it is unforgivable, he always finds a reason. The fundamental evil lies in the inherent self-deception and hypocrisy of the human heart. Doing bad things, one thinks oneself innocent: my motives were good; doing a lot of bad things, I claim to have a clear conscience. Sometimes people who have done many bad things, later claim this in their self-account: they feel that their motives were good, despite the outcome. This is the fundamental evil.
Kant thinks evil cannot be eliminated, but it can be discerned and known. If the fundamental evil can be discerned, despite being evil, it can become a transition from evil to good. Hypocrisy is fundamental evil, but fundamental evil is also culture and civilisation. Xunzi said ‘their goodness, is contrived’: the artificial is hypocritical, but also civilised, and is better than barbarism. Civilisation is an advance on barbarism. Vanity, greed, and desire for power are certainly not good, but civilisation has these things that can develop people's talents and tastes. Hypocrisy is ‘an allowable moral illusion.’ Because affected, dissembling morality can step by step awaken people's moral consciousness in history. Kant argues that nature uses the weakness of human hypocrisy to lead the human mind to approach morality step by step. With a barbarian there is nothing of the kind. He sees nothing immoral in murder. The adult rite of headhunting tribes in the Philippines was to go kill a person from another tribe. History teaches humanity in the process of progress. False ceremonial civilises people. When they are civilised, accepting true morality is easier, and provides a prerequisite for accepting true morality. After Hegel talked about "the cunning of reason", about human evil being the lever of historical progress. Kant in fact had already had intellectual sprouts of this.
In this comparison, the Confucian doctrine of ‘inquisition of the heart’ purges intellectual enemies by controlling and punishing ‘intellectual sin’. It makes it canonical that no one be able escape the moral-political network, so people become things. Kant protects the human heart in the unknowable thing-in-itself. This is a black box, the human heart is unknowable, and one cannot believe in people's self-promotion. Kant's agnosticism has a protective function, that is, you should not be dogmatic about the human heart. Only God knows one's heart, mortals cannot, and even one's own heart cannot be known. How can you proclaim your virtues? Protecting the human heart in an unknowable black box prohibits others from testing and reviewing, and cannot violate the privacy of people. In this way, man will not lose freedom and independence because of his depraved nature. The human heart is evil, at least seen in present and historical perspective. Of course, it can become ever more good in the future, and will not lose the freedom and independence of personality because of the fundamental evil. Freedom and independence can develop morality, and free will becomes the source of morality. Regarding the human heart as ready-made creating a moral world, this morality is terrible. Regarding it as concealed has a sustainable development for morality.
Confucians criticised the xiangyuan; its starting point was itself the biggest xiangyuan, pretending to be innocent and refusing to reflect on itself. Zeng Zi[9] was intent on his threefold examination, not to reflecting on his own nature, but on whether he was tainted in his nature, whether he was faithful to it or not. This threefold examination was not the same thing as confession in the West. It was just an examination on whether one could protect one's own nature. This nature itself was indubitable. Therefore, it was necessary to be watchful in one's solitude, and not allow the human heart to deviate from nature. This was a Chinese-style reflection, not a true remorse. True remorse is self-examination of fundamental evil in human nature. Only by reflecting on one's fundamental starting point, can one abandon hypocrisy, otherwise one can only be more and more hypocritical. This developed later to Dai Dongyuan’s ‘reason killing man’, Lu Xun’s ‘eating people’, after eating them one felt that on had done something good. Thus Kant proves that only morality based on free will is true morality. All morality based on the way of heaven, nature, natural essence and heart is not true morality. Free will is imprescriptable, unknowable, spontaneous, and develops and repairs itself in a dynamic historical process. Western free will morality since Kant has undergone crises, but Westerners can always repair themselves and improve themselves from the historical development. Why? Because it retains the root of a free will. Free will can change its morality and adapt to any new moral situation. Contemporary Western ethics is constantly adapting to new situations. In the past homosexuality was considered unethical but is now accepted. Many things have broken through the limitations of traditional ethics, but today we have not lost morality, but have new moral norms, and morality can constantly improve itself.
Audience questions follow, to be continued in a later post.
* This essay was compiled from Professor Deng Xiaomang’s address to the Southwestern University of Political Science and Law, 21 October, 2004.
[1] Lun Yu, 阳货篇。
[2] Xunzi 荀子: Pre-Qin Confucian philosopher.
[3] Tan Sitong, 谭嗣同《仁学》. There is a partial translation of the book here.
[4] Zhu Xi, [朱熹] CE 1130-1200, Song scholar, founder of Neo-Confucianism; Cheng Yi [程颐] CE 1033-1107, Song Neo-Confucian, brother of Cheng Hao [程颢] CE 1032-1085, Neo-Confucian philosopher, making up the ‘Two Cheng’s’ venerated by Zhu Xi.
[5] Wang Yangming 王阳明 CE 1472-1529 Ming Neoconfucian philosopher and statesman.
[6] 增广贤文
[7] zhencheng 真诚
[8] Confucius https://zhidao.baidu.com/question/85012745.html
[9] 曾子