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2. Literature review
In the past three decades, not a few Western scholars have taken interest in comparing Aristotelian and Confucian ethics, among them a large contingency of North-American based academics. The interest is to a large extent an off-shoot of the revival of virtue ethics in the West. Elizabeth Anscombe’s biting article “Modern Philosophy” (1958) played an instrumental role in this movement by pitting the rich moral psychology of past ethical inquiries against the calculations, colds laws and abstract principles of modern utilitarianism, deontology and consequentialism.
A bulk of studies comparing Confucius and Aristotle were and are being developed along the lines of virtue ethics in its variant streams (e.g., ancient, Humean, Christian, etc.). With regard to comparing Confucian and Aristotelian ethics, in 2007 alone, two monograph works were published, namely, Jiyuan Yu’s The Ethics of Confucius and Aristotle: Mirrors of Virtue (Routledge) and May Sim’s Remastering Morals with Aristotle and Confucius (Cambridge University Press). The same year saw two other books that tackle Eastern virtue ethics, that is, Bryan Van Norden’s Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early China (Cambridge University Press), and an anthology co-edited by Philip Ivanhoe, Working Virtue: Virtue Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems (Oxford University Press) which gives responses to current issues from different strands of virtue ethics, Confucianism included. Other notable publications in this area include those of Shun Kwongloi, who analyses virtue concepts in Mencius and Zhu Xi, and of his one-time teacher, Lee Yearley, whose thoughtful studies reflect the intricacies of applying the terms “virtue” and “virtue ethics” to variant moral traditions.7
In this research, I imagine that there will be much occasion to broach on the topic of virtue in Confucian and Aristotelian ethics. I will refrain, however, from adapting a virtue ethics model for comparing the two schools. I have two reasons for this. In the first place, it seems to me that more important and fertile points of comparison can be drawn between Confucius and Aristotle than their notions and specifications of virtue. The metaphor of archery alone – in the instances of its use in the Analects and Nicomachean Ethics – could lead to rich discussions about moral action and judgment, agency and responsibility, education and cultivation, motives and ends. Other possible and interesting points of comparison suggested by scholars are their notions about the practicality of ethics (Yu 2010), their non-minimalist ethic (Wang 2010, 311), the strong sense of overpowering ends, and the awareness of a socio-political dimension to personal moral striving. These themes may be relevant
7 Worth consulting for suggestions on how to develop comparisons between Eastern and Western moral traditions in a circumspect manner are his book, Mencius & Aquinas: Theories of Virtue and Conceptions of Courage (SUNY, 1990), and his article, “Virtue Ethics in Ancient China: Light Shed and Shadows Cast” in King & Schilling 2011.
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to “virtue”, but I do not think it necessary to force discussions about them into relation with it.
In the second place, it seems to me that the disparity in the two school’s conceptions of virtue – widely equated with “de” (德) and “arête” (ἀρετή) – calls for a more thorough and separate study than I can presume to undertake in this research. I think such study has long been overlooked in the field and would be much welcome.8 To date, there are isolated publications in English which seek to reconstruct original Chinese renditions of “virtue”, for example, a book by Mark Csikszentmihalyi, and articles by Alan K.L. Chan and Chen Lai.9 For the time being, however, I fear that since virtue ethics is a well-defined and long-standing approach to moral inquiry in the West, adapting virtue ethics as framework for comparison could easily run the risk of imposing Western categories. Of the works mentioned earlier that were published in 2007, for example, Yu Jiyuan takes considerable pains to contextualize concepts or ideas within each tradition and draws interesting parallelisms, while May Sim offers creative and insightful ways of relating Confucian and Aristotelian ethics with present-day concerns such as human rights and environmentalism. Both, however, rely heavily on Western frameworks or approaches and, overall, seem to fall short in appreciating the intricacies of Confucian ethics.10 With these examples in mind, I cannot help but echo a doubt raised by Stephen Angle who, in a book review about a similar attempt to explicate ancient Confucianism in terms of virtue ethics, wrote that “without a clearer sense of the kind of virtue ethics that Mengzi is advocating, it is hard to be confident that Van Norden’s use of the category ‘virtue ethics’ is contributing to our understanding of early Confucianism” (Angle 2009, 300).
With regard to publications on the more specific topic of archery metaphors in Confucian and Aristotelian ethical literature, there are – to my knowledge – no existing works as yet. This is unsurprising, as the focus and modus operandi of the research are new. Scholars have taken note of similar metaphors used by Confucius
8 Even Shun Kwongloi, for example, who does conceptual analysis of traditional Confucian virtues, recognizes that using the term virtue can be knotty in writing about Chinese ethics: “such a concept as virtue should be screened (…) in that the concept densely involves a particular historical context unique to Western philosophy; thus, using it as an analytic tool is not likely to enable us to grasp something underlying what can merely be grasped by the tool”, Kim 2010, 136, 138.
9 See Mark Csikszentmihalyi’s book “Material Virtue: Ethics and the Body in Early China” (Brill, 2004).
An article by Alan K. L. Chan explicates de based on ancient bamboo inscriptions: "Interpretations of Virtue (De) in Early China” in Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 2011 (1). For more glimpses of specifically Chinese renditions of virtue or virtue ethics, see Chen 2010, Wang 2010, Liao 2011. I find these three articles written by homegrown Chinese scholars to be highly illuminative of what a Confucian concept of “virtue” or “virtue ethics” might be. However, what they suggest as points of concurrence with the West sound either too vague or play down characteristic features of Western conceptions of virtue.
10 Regarding Yu’s book, I offer my book review in Camus 2010. As for Sim’s book, Ni Peimin’s book review is worth consulting, see Ni 2009, 311-319.
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and Aristotle. Studies on the theme, however, have mostly been limited to abstract, metaphorical concepts such as harmony (和) and the middle (中). An example is Prof.
Alan Chan’s article “Harmony as a Contested Metaphor and Conceptions of Rightness (Yi) in Early Confucian Ethics” (cf. Chan in King & Schilling 2011, 37-62). Edward Slingerland, who vigorously applies cognitive theories in his examination of metaphors in Chinese texts, also offers a handful of relevant material.11 In one article, Slingerland explains the notion of “wu wei” (無為) – which he translates as
“effortless action” – as a common, metaphorical concept between Daoist and Confucian schools. His manner of analyzing “wu wei”, however, disregards its specific context and nuanced meaning between the two schools, leaving us with a concept which may be metaphorical but is nonetheless an abstract notion, an empty image.
It is interesting that while Chinese scholars readily recognize the significance of archery as metaphor in Confucius just as Western scholars do with regard to Aristotle, in-depth study has not been done from either side. Commentators of the Nicomachean Ethics are generally satisfied to dedicate a couple of lines in their glosses to point out use of figurative speech inspired by archery. On the Chinese side, there is a rare article by James Behuniak who looks into archery-inspired metaphors in early Confucian texts such as the Analects, Mencius and the Liji. Behuniak ends his article with strong comparative slant by matching Confucian ethics with the social pragmatism of John Dewey, a modern thinker who also had recourse to archery metaphor. Behuniak does more than Slingerland in contextualizing archery before attempting to explain metaphoric expressions deriving from it, so does Lisa Raphals when attending to the significance of archery ritual in understanding virtue notions of early followers of Confucius.12 There will be occasion to glimpse at their insights when we discuss archery metaphor in the Analects in chapter 4. Yu Jiyuan steps forward in recognizing archery as a common metaphor in Confucius and Aristotle.
Unfortunately, he only takes brief notice of the fact and offers an explanation of the metaphor in a way that speaks more for Aristotle (cf. Yu 2007, 79-80).
11 To name some examples, “Body and Mind in Early China: An Integrated Humanities-Science Approach” in Journal of the American Academy of Religion 2013 (1); “Metaphor and Meaning in Early China” in Dao 2011 (1); “Conceptions of the Self in the Zhuangzi: Conceptual Metaphor Analysis and Comparative Thought” in Philosophy East and West 2004 (3); and “Effortless Action: the Chinese Spiritual Ideal of Wu-wei” in Journal of the American Academy of Religion 2000 (2). The last article has become a book by the same title by Oxford University Press, 2003.
12 Refer to their articles: James Behuniak, “Hitting the Mark: Archery and Ethics in Early Confucianism”, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 2010 (4): 588-604; and, Lisa Raphals, “Embodied Virtue, Self-Cultivation, and Ethics” in Ethics in Early China, eds. Chris Fraser et al. (Hong Kong University Press, 2011).
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