ABSTRACT
Contemporary “political Confucianism” has essentially dominated the present-day Confucian research and discourse, but the so-called political Confucianism does not cover the entirety of Confucian philosophical thought. In the contemporary world of globalized politics, certain pragmatic aspects of political wisdom and practice of classical Confucianism may actually offer a wealth of inspiring new ideas applicable in contemporary political theories. Confucian “pragmatic ethics” (Confucian ethics of concretizing one’s intentionality, rujia shiyi lunli儒家实意伦理, that is, ethics based on Confucian pragmatism) as an ethical theory stems from a practical reconstruction of the traditional Confucian art of governing. This chapter argues that in Confucian pragmatic ethics, an ethical act emerges as a powerful creative momentum of an incipient intention; thus, an act can be evaluated as ethically “Confucian” at the very instant the intention is initiated. The incipient intention then evolves into an ethical act and further, on a practical level, into a concrete expression of the incipient intention in the realm of actual political practice. This chapter provides another way of elaborating the core problems of the relationship between governing (“the ruler”) and the governed (“the ruled,” the people), and by doing so, extends the conceptual reformulation of “the Way of the Humane Authority” (wangdao 王道) in the background of global politics, and argues that Confucian pragmatic ethics might prove conducive to establishing a Confucian-based system of modern Chinese political ethics.
