Yutang Jin

This essay focuses on Elena Ziliotti’s ‘agent-centered approach’ in her discussion of political leadership. In her view, ‘political leaders are a critical political agency.’ I advance three criticisms: one conceptual and two normative. First, it’s conceptually unclear whether her approach is ‘agent-centered.’ Second, a political leader may need to contravene instrumental virtues to uphold the virtue of public spiritedness. Third, it’s unrealistic to expect politicians to prioritize virtues when they conflict with the goal of gaining power and making a living from it.

This essay explores Zen hermeneutics by locating gong'an episodes at the juncture of Zen Buddhism, Heideggerian ontological hermeneutics, and Derridean deconstructive hermeneutics. Employing Heidegger's understanding of truth as aletheia and the Derridean deconstruction of the subject oriented metaphysical mode of thinking, this essay aims to shed light on the special function that hermeneutics plays in our understanding of philosophy's and philosophers' relation to truth and meaning and show how Zen gong'an shares some visions with the hermeneutical discipline in our time

Recently, Sungmoon Kim developed a theory of what he calls “Confucian democratic perfectionism” aimed at combining Confucianism, public reason, and democracy for contemporary East Asian societies. The primary question guiding this article is whether Kim's promotion of Confucian values is justified by a normative commitment to democratic constitution‐making. I see two specific difficulties with Kim's democratic constitution‐making, with the second more serious than the first. First, in terms of theoretical identity, the Confucian values promoted through a public reason‐based approach are not intelligible as Confucian. Second, Kim's democratic commitment is morally inadequate in two ways—it cannot make sense of substate peoples' right of self‐determination within a singular notion of Confucian democracy, and further, a fallback on the right to democratic participation conflicts with more inclusive standards of popular sovereignty.

This essay examines prominent New Confucian Mou Zongsan’s account of Confucian democracy by focusing on his key notion of “self-restriction.” According to Mou, true sage-kings would willingly respect ordinary people’s individual endeavors in the political realm and endorse democracy as a form of government. This move of self-restriction then aligns Confucianism with democracy in a way that fundamentally restructures traditional Confucian rulership. I make contributions on two fronts. First, I offer a reading of Mou’s self-restriction different from existing ones that can help to disambiguate many aspects of Mou’s political thought. Second, what is often left out of existing discussion on Mou is the narrative of political myth and distinctive personality types associated with it. For Mou, political leadership’s impetus for transcending rule-based order and the people’s aspirations for the “superman” run deep and lie in the lasting appeal of political myth. Invoking Nietzsche, I discuss the sense in which transforming traditional rulership is not only a question of ought—why Confucians ought to adopt self-restriction—but a question of how it is possible for self-restriction to fulfill its mission. Commentators on his thought have so far largely glossed over this second aspect of Mou’s thought, thereby selling short the complexity of the idea of self-restriction. My key argument is that Mou’s self-restriction shows an effort to revamp the superman’s politics of the extraordinary into a politics of the ordinary.

Han Fei was a central figure in Chinese Legalism, which was a leading school of thought in the Warring States period of China, and which left a huge imprint on political culture in imperial China. This article examines the complex duality of public and private interests in Han Fei’s political thought, a crucial aspect of his thinking. I argue that Han Fei adopted a sophisticated statist approach to understanding public and private interests. For Han Fei, public interests are embodied in the state while private ones have dual functions. On the one hand, private interests threaten public ones by inviting corrupt material interests, personal morality, and knowledge, as well as human relationships. On the other hand, self-centered human psychology plays a dialectic role in strengthening the state.

In the spring of 2017, US-based Confucian philosopher Stephen C. Angle took part in a series of dialogues with Chinese Confucians in Beijing. The dialogues engage with topics like the relation between Confucianism and modernity; whether Confucianism should be understood as philosophy, religion, or chief ingredient in a distinctively Chinese culture; the status of pivotal modern Confucians like Kang Youwei and Mou Zongsan; and more generally, the prospects for what Angle calls “Progressive Confucianism.” The present book offers translations of those dialogues into English, together with epilogues by the two editors reflecting on what the dialogues tell us about the contemporary prospects for Confucianism.

The established view in Confucian scholarship today is that Confucian political order serves to promote the material and moral well-being of ordinary people. Loubna El Amine turns this view on its head by arguing that Confucian political order revolves not around the interest of the people but the demands of security, stability, and prosperity. Min are expected to be virtuous only to the extent that they help to sustain such an order. As such, Confucian politics does not follow from ethics in any straightforward manner. In this article, I argue against her revisionist reading. I argue that her account not only lacks arguments for her core thesis of the ethics/politics division, but also goes against Confucians’ concern over the universality of humanity, popular welfare, and the integrity of Confucian thought. I also draw on discussion on political realism to flesh out the sense in which classic Confucianism is realist.