On the cusp of a new world order? a dialogue between Confucianism and Dewey and pragmatism

ABSTRACT

At the end of 2013, China introduced what it calls the ‘One Belt, One Road Initiative’ (BRI) (yidaiyiluchangyi 一带一路战倡议). From a Chinese perspective, this initiative is nothing less than a strategy to replace the existing world order in all of its parts with a vision of ‘intra-national relations’ that emerges out of traditional Chinese thinking reaching back as early as the Yijing 易经or Book of Changes. The self-conscious rhetoric of BRI is ‘equity’ (gongying 共赢) and ‘diversity’ interpreted through the language of a ‘shared future for the human community’ (renleimingyun gongtongti人类命运共同体). China can be challenged to live up to its own rhetoric. John Dewey makes a helpful distinction between the ‘idea’ and the political ‘forms’ of democracy, where his ‘idea’ of democracy is his own account of equity and shared diversity. Again, there is a direct link between Dewey’s ‘idea’ of democracy and his ‘internationalism.’ Can we use Dewey’s ‘idea’ of democracy to formulate the ‘idea’ of BRI as a Confucian version of ‘internationalism?’

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Notes

1 A fuller version of this essay is included in an edited volume: Confucianism and Deweyan Pragmatism: Resources for a New Geopolitics of Interdependence. Roger T. Ames, Chen Yajun, and Peter D. Hershock (editors). Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2021.

2 This section and that which follows it further develop arguments previously presented in Ames, “Tang Junyi and the Very “Idea” of Confucian Democracy,” in Sor-Hoon Tan & John Whalen-Bridge, eds., Democracy as Culture: Deweyan Pragmatism in a Globalizing World. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008, 177–199; and Ames, “A Second Enlightenment: Confucianism in a Changing World Cultural Order,” Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences (Taiwan), 2015, http://www.ihs.ntu.edu.tw/zh_tw/pub/IHSNews/?wiki=1725741.

3 Tang Junyi 唐 君 毅 (1991, 1:8): … 將部分與全體交融互攝 之精神 ; 自認識上言之 , 即不自全體中劃出部分之精神 (此自中國人之宇宙觀中最可見之) ; 自情意上言之 , 即努力以部分實現全體之精神 (此自中國人之人生態度中可見之)。This focus-field rather than part-whole language is an expression of the correlativity ubiquitous in Chinese cosmology that, in some of its most abstract and ancient iterations, is captured in the language of “reforming and functioning” (tiyong 體用) and “changing and persisting” (biantong 變通).

4 Analects 2.21: 或謂孔子曰 : 「子奚不為政?」子曰 : 「《書》云 : 『孝乎惟孝、友于兄弟 , 施於有政。』是亦為政 , 奚其為為政?」

5 Zhou Yiqun cites Yan Fu as claiming that social and political order in the two millennia of imperial China was from its beginnings “seventy percent a lineage organization and thirty percent an empire.” (Zhou 2010, 19n55)

6 Analects 2.3　子曰 : 「道之以政 , 齊之以刑 , 民免而無恥 ; 道之以德 , 齊之以禮 , 有恥且格。」

7 This dependence upon the institution of family as the primary source of social and political order has not been given full shrift except by a few of our most astute observers. Today as we anticipate the continuing rise of Chinese economic, political, and cultural influence, we might remember that, centuries ago, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a comparative philosopher in an earlier age, attempted to make productive sense of Confucian China for the culture of his own time and place. For texts and a substantial foray in this relationship between Leibniz and China, see G.W. Leibniz 1998 and Perkins 2004. In advancing his own generalizations about European and Chinese cultures, he saw a clear contrast between the value invested in those abstract, theoretical disciplines in the European academy that are in search of axiomatic-deductive demonstration and the more aesthetic and pragmatic applications of the Chinese tradition—a distinction that broadly distinguishes a European confidence in the disciplining dividends of the rational sciences and formal institutions from those alternative rewards that can be derived from virtuosity in the art of living within the forces of family and community life. See Leibniz 1998, 46–47.

8 Analects 1.12: 禮之用 , 和為貴。先王之道斯為美 , 小大由之。有所不行 , 知和而和 , 不以禮節之 , 亦不可行也。See also 12.1 and 12.15.

9 聖人以天下為家 , 不別遠近 , 不殊內外。。 。 。 聖人舉事求其宜適也。。。。賢聖家天下。 (王充論衡16.7-8)

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Roger T. Ames

Roger T. Ames is Humanities Chair Professor at Peking University, Co-Chair of the Academic Advisory Committee of the Peking University Berggruen Research Center, and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Hawai’i. He is former editor of Philosophy East & West and founding editor of China Review International. Ames has authored several interpretative studies of Chinese philosophy and culture: Thinking Through Confucius (1987), Anticipating China (1995), Thinking from the Han (1998), and Democracy of the Dead (1999) (all with D.L. Hall), Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary (2011), and most recently Human Becomings: Theorizing ‘Persons’ for Confucian Role Ethics (2021). His publications also include translations of Chinese classics.