Now we examine Tu Weiming’s response to the call of the Transcendent.
Without a doubt, Tu follows Mou’s path in many aspects in his campaign for the revitalization of Confucianism. In this philosophical and spiritual enterprise, does Tu also inherit Mou’s moral metaphysics without reservation? Or does he take another route in elaborating Confucian religiousness? Before offering answers to these questions, we need first compare the two thinkers’different conceptions of self.
First, Tu considers Confucian self as a “center of relationships,”which is completely distinct from the Kantian self as an autonomous subject and Mou’s self as transcendental subjectivity. Although Tu might like to place more weight on the notion of “center,”he cannot disallow the alternative reading which emphasizes the importance of “relationship.”If the reading of “self”as a center of interrelatedness is granted, as I suggest, then it becomes squarely opposed to the reading of “self”as an identity based on sameness (i.e., idem-identity) found in Mou’s thinking. For Mou, the true self is seen as an “unchanging core”of human subjectivity. According to Tu, on the contrary, the Confucian self should be viewed as an ipse-identity in which, as Paul Ricoeur points out, “the selfhood of oneself implies otherness to such an intimate degree that one cannot be thought of without the other.”(Ricoeur 1992: 2-3) This view of “oneself as another”is clearly echoed in Tu’s writing:
Indeed, since the Confucians perceive the self as a center of relationships rather
than as an isolable individuality, the ability to show intimacy to those who are intimate is vitally important for allowing the closed private ego to acquire a taste for the open communicating self so that the transformation of the body can start on a concrete experiential basis (Tu 1985: 176).
In that passage we see that Tu rejects the interpretation of self as “isolable individuality.”On the contrary, what Tu deliberately reads into the Confucian notion of self as an “open communicating self”reminds us of the Habermasian theory of communication which, instead of appealing to the individual subject in the Kantian sense, affirms that rationality can be realized only in a system of open communication.12
Following Tu’s conception of self as a locus of relationships, we come to understand the reason why he puts so much emphasis on the idea of community as a crucial dimension in the constitution of Confucian selfhood. For Tu, Confucian religiousness arises from the boundless expansion of human sensitivity via community and state upward to Heaven. In this process of spiritual ascendance, community is not merely taken as mediator. Rather, it is conceived as part of the holistic dynamism of being. Although Tu does not explicitly explore the fundamental ontology of self as interrelatedness, his insight is open to the interpretation of the Confucian self as “being-in-community,”a notion which is close to Heidegger’s definition of Da-sein as “being-in-the-world.”In view of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, self and community are not considered as two separate entities. Prior to the separation between individual and community, we are always already part of a community, because we are the locus of interrelatedness.
In comparison, Tu’s repeated emphasis on the fiduciary community as an
“irreducible reality in ultimate transformation”was never seen in any of Mou’s reflections on Confucian religiousness. According to Tu, the Confucian way of being religious can be defined as “ultimate self-transformation as a communal act and as a
faithful dialogical response to the transcendent (Tu 1989: 94, 97).”There are two
points in Tu’s emphasis on the irreducibility of community. First, Tu’s hermeneutics is rooted in the ontology of self as interrelatedness, which is completely different from Mou’s theory of true self as transcendental subjectivity. Second, the cultural diversity in the pluralistic world that Tu faces was never a serious issue for Mou, who lived in the rather simple-minded pathos of cultural nationalism. For Mou’s generation, to rise12 Tu considers Habermas’theory of communicative rationality as the same attempt to move “beyond the Enlightenment mentality”. See Tu Weiming, “Beyond the Enlightenment Mentality,”in Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Berthrong, eds., Confucianism and Ecology: the Interpretation of Heaven, Earth, and Humans (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions, 1998), 6.
up to and overcome the challenge of the West was always the main concern. As a consequence, not much attention was paid to foreign religious traditions other than Christianity. On the contrary, Tu recognizes that the Confucian community, as it were, must see itself as merely one of the world’s many religious communities. Confucians should live together with Buddhists, Christians, Muslims and Jews. Each group has its own distinct community and set of religious practices. For this reason, Tu also emphasizes the importance of religious dialogue, an idea that had never been taken seriously in the generation of his mentor.
In the hermeneutical turn from Mou to Tu, another philosophical complication in need of further elaboration also arises. Tu himself may not be clearly aware of the fact that his hermeneutics of Confucian religiousness deviates from Mou’s path when he characterizes the self as the center of relatedness and emphasizes the significance of community. This can be seen in Tu’s reading of Mou’s Intellectual Intuition and
Chinese Philosophy. In Tu
’s reading, at least on the surface, we do not find any disagreement with Mou’s main thesis, especially regarding Mou’s criticism of Heidegger. Tu clearly admits that, in contrast to Heideggerian thought, the guiding principle of Neo-Confucian thought is “neither historicity nor temporality,”but “the (non-temporal) unfolding of humanity as the self-disclosure of ultimate reality through intellectual intuition of human beings (Tu 1985: 163).”And in the conclusion of the article, Tu unequivocally defends Mou’s philosophical stance:In Neo-Confucianism as well as in Heidegger’s thought, there is the necessity of developing an intrinsic relationship between the problem of man and a laying of the foundation of metaphysics. However, while Heidegger focuses on the finitude in man and thus on the importance of Dasein as temporality, the governing perspective in Neo-Confucian thought is the realization of humanity in the absolute unity of man and Heaven. The central question for the Neo-Confucians is, then, How can I really know my true self? or, put in the context of the above discussion, How can I cultivate my capacity for intellectual intuition as a way of manifesting my true self and participating in the fundamental unity of the cosmos? To borrow from Mou Tsung-san, the question can be simply restated as the ontological possibility of intellectual intuition for human beings (Tu 1985: 165).
For Mou, the possibility of intellectual intuition is predicated on the vertical trinity of Mind-Nature-Heaven that had been thoroughly elaborated in the Neo-Confucian version of moral metaphysics. By contrast, Heidegger was devoted to disclosing the meaning of Being, a notion which is said to have been long forgotten in Western
metaphysics. It is quite obvious that Mou and Heidegger take completely different stances toward metaphysics. For Mou, metaphysics is considered to be the ontological ground of existence. For Heidegger, on the contrary, metaphysics should be deconstructed in order to disclose the truth of Being.
In Intellectual Intuition, although Mou did not misinterpret the intent of Heidegger’s deconstruction of Western metaphysics, he did criticize Heidegger for being wrongly preoccupied with thinking of facticity
.
What led to Mou’s discontent was the fact that no idealist vision could be found in Heidegger’s thought. For Mou, the Confucian mission was to resurrect transcendent metaphysics, a philosophy which had already been characterized by Kant as being dogmatic and by Heidegger as being onto-theo-logical in the negative sense. While Kant provides the rational foundation for the subject of knowledge and morality, Heidegger instead vows to break the spell of subjectivist metaphysics that had enchanted the whole of Western philosophy from Plato down to Nietzsche. On the contrary, Mou contends that the transcendental ground of being as affirmed in Confucian metaphysics should never be compromised by attempting to conceive of temporality as the ontological structure of Dasein. This explains why Mou rejects Heidegger’s destruction of onto-theo-logy as “rootless”or“groundless.”(Mou 1971: 353-354, 360)13
Turning to Tu’s hermeneutics, Heidegger’s thinking might be more inspiring than Tu estimates. This is the point I want to make in this aticle. According to Heidegger, the ontological conditions of Dasein have been totally concealed in metaphysics, within Platonism and Cartesianism in particular. In Descartes’view, for example, the self is seen as the subject of cogito that is completely separated from the external world. Existence is represented in accord with the duality of subject and object. As Heidegger observes, it follows that the world becomes picture and man becomes subject in the sphere of representation (Heidegger 1977c: 132-133). As a result, modern technology as framing, which is embedded in representational thinking and subjectivism, leads to the domination of nature, a condition which can only be salvifically cured through the disclosure of the primordial situation of existence prior to the segregation between the self as the subject of cognition and the world as the object of representation. Heidegger names the primordial situation of human existence as “Dasein”or “being-in-the-world.”Dasein is being-in in the first place. It is not the
subject alone. It is always being-in the intimate relationship which is characterized by
Heidegger as ready-at-hand or as one body without any conceptual bifurcation between subject and object (Heidegger 1962: sections 12-13; Polt 1999: 46-48). If we turn to Neo-Confucians, especially Zhou Dunyi and Zhang Zai, we will find in their13 It is worth noting that in later period Mou appreciates the paradoxicality of “groundless”in his interpretation of Tiantai Buddhist metaphysics.
writings a similar quest for the primordial experience of oneness in the cosmos prior to any conceptual discrimination.
In this connection, Tu’s conception of self as the center of relationships can be better illuminated with the help of Heidegger’s notion of Dasein as Being-with (Mitsein). As Heidegger explains, “Being-with”is “an existential characteristic of Dasein even when factically no Other is present-at-hand or perceived (Heidegger 1962: 156).”This means that even when one exists alone one is always already Being-with in the world. It is worth noting that, as Richard Polt points out, Heidegger’s “Being with” also refers to the communal dimension of being-in-the-world (Polt 1999: 60). Community is not seen as something separate from the self. Conversely, the self should be conceived as being-in-the-community in the first place as community is also ontologically rooted in Being-with.
Heidegger’s discussion of community has been quite controversial where he discusses the fate of Dasein and the destiny of people. Dasein’s “historicizing is co-historicizing and is determinative for it as destiny [Geschick] (Heidegger 1962:
436).”Whether Heidegger’s strong statements such as “our resoluteness for definite possibilities”and “only in communicating and in struggling does the power of destiny become free”can be interpreted as the evidences of his political involvement in Nazism, he did clearly stress the role of community in the constitution of Dasein’s historicity.14 In parallel, the similar notions of community and historicity can be found in Tu’s hermeneutics. In many places, Tu repeatedly emphasizes that “one becomes fully human within a community (Tu 1989: 97).”As Tu explains:
The Confucians believe that normally it is desirable to establish fruitful communication with the transcendent through communal participation…The preferred course of action is to integrate all levels of the community (family, neighborhood, clan, race, nation, world, universe, cosmos) into the process of self-transformation. The Confucians believe that this gradual process of inclusion is inherent in the project of learning to be fully human (Tu 1989: 97).
For Tu Weiming, religion as ultimate self-transformation is to be realized through the
“communal act”only, instead of through secular individualism. In this respect, Confucianism and communitarianism are perfectly compatible with one another. If Tu goes on to dig deeper into the ontological ground of the communal act, however, his hermeneutics will undoubtedly come even closer to Heidegger’s own analysis of
14 “Our fates have already been guided in advance, in our Being with one another in the same world and in our resoluteness for definite possibilities. Only in communicating and in struggling does the power of destiny become free. Dasein’s fateful destiny in and with its ‘generation’goes to make up the full authentic historicizing of Dasein.”See Heidegger 1962: 436.
Dasein as Being-in-the-world and Being-with. It is precisely along these lines that we can see the possibility of a paradigmatic shift from Mou’s metaphysics to Tu’s hermeneutics beginning to emerge.
This paradigmatic shift is also evidenced in another similarity between the four categories of self, community, nature, and the transcendent in Tu’s hermeneutics and the four symbols of earth, sky, divinities, and mortals employed by Heidegger to interpret the meaning of dwelling. By tracing the etymological of the term in the Old Saxon and Gothic languages, Heidegger re-interprets “dwelling”to mean “to remain in peace,”a usage that had fallen in oblivion, similar to Chinese saying of “resting one’s body and standing for one’s destiny”: “To dwell, to be set at peace, means to remain at peace within the free, the preserve, the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its essence.”(Heidegger 1977: 327) Dwelling also means the stay of mortals, human beings that will die, on the earth and under the sky, waiting the coming of the divinities. The fourfold belong together in one in which mortals are dwelling.
Heidegger goes further to tell us that the true meaning of dwelling is to preserve:
Mortals dwell in the way they preserve the fourfold in its essential being, its presencing…
Mortals dwell in that they save the earth…
Mortals dwell in that they receive the sky as sky…
Mortals dwell in that they await the divinities as divinities…
Mortals dwell in that they initiate their own essential nature—their being capable of death—into the use and practice of this capacity, so that there may be a good death (Heidegger 1977: 328-329).
Surprisingly enough, the above passage of Heidegger finds its echo in the
“anthropocosmic vision”in The Book of Change: “Thegreat man shares with the virtues of heaven and earth, the light of sun and mood, the order of four seasons, and the fortune of ghosts and gods (Chan 1963: 264).”More surprising is the similar picture found in Zhang Zai’s “Western Inscription”(Chan 1963: 497-498). For Zhang Zai, Heidegger and Tu, the way of knowing and serving Heaven is to dwell in the midst of the fourfold, instead of to realize it through intellectual intuition.
Conclusion
Although I believe I have sufficiently demonstrated the philosophical parallels between Tu and Heidegger, I am by no means suggesting that Tu has actually completed his own hermeneutical turn. Rather, I have attempted to outline ways in
which Tu could make that turn more feasible. It goes without saying that we still sense in Tu’s thinking a strong tendency toward the metaphysics of subjectivity.15 Tu also never gives up his insistence on an inclusive humanism in which the self is regarded as the center of a concentric circle. This stance is contrary to Heidegger’s claim that a humanism embedded in the metaphysics of subjectivity would destroy the meaning of being.16 For Heidegger, humanism and subjectivism are two sides of the same coin in that both lead to the forgetting of the meaning of Being. On the other side, Mou and Tu insist that their version of humanism is open-ended in the sense that human beings are not isolated from Heaven. Humanity cannot be defined as, and therefore constrained within the limits of, the humanitas of homo humanus. For through self-cultivation humanity becomes open to the Transcendence of Heaven.17 Here lies the philosophical tension between Heidegger and modern Neo-Confucianism.
Lastly, in responding to the problem of religiosity, while Mou and Tu appeal to the capacity of intellectual intuition in human nature, Heidegger shows us a path to dwelling “in the nearness of gods.”As he says, “Let us also in the days ahead remain as wanderers on the way into the neighborhood of Being (Heidegger 1977a: 224).”
For Heidegger, man is not supposed to intellectually intuit gods or Heaven. All man can do is to dwell near to the place where gods live. This is exactly what
“community”means. Gods are not supposed to be intellectually known, they are rather to be neighboring in community. This insight might be considered as the best response of Heidegger, and Tu Weiming as well, to Mencius’two most fundamental questions: How does man know Heaven? How does man serve Heaven?
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15 This can be seen in Tu 1985: 179-180: “On the other hand, Confucians, as opposed to collectivists, firmly establish the “subjectivity”of the person as suit generic. No social program, no matter how lofty, can undermine the centrality of selfhood in Confucian learning.”
16 According to Heidegger, the most popular form of metaphysics in the modern age is humanism in which “the humanitas of homo humanus is determined with regard to an already established
interpretation of nature, history, world, and the ground of the world, that is, of beings as a whole.”In other words, all forms of humanism are rooted in the traditional metaphysics as a science of beings as a whole. For that reason, humanism belongs to the understanding of beings, but not of Being. See Heidegger 1977a: 202.
17 I have examined this problem elsewhere. See Lin 2002: 45-56.
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