Conf%cianand Feminist Perspectives on the Self

I chose to sketch the ancient Confucian view of what it is to be a hunla~l

being for another reason as well: Over and above some feminist perspectives,
this v i w is not altogether breiglr even to the great m;l_jorityof the inhabitants
of the Western capitalist democracies; Confucian though it sounds, it was,
after all, an Englishman who m o t e "Nu man is an island entire of itself . . .
Axly man's death diminishes me, because 1am involved in mankind, and there-
fore nwer send to know for whom the bet1 tols, it tolls for thee."23
To those who believe that totalitarian governmenrs will contirlue to pose the
greatcst threat to h w a n well-being, thcse semiments expressed by Donne
may be seen as elegantly phrased, perhaps, but condemned to the dead past.
Yet Donne continues to live on in the midst of those who believe that among
the Western cxyitalist dcnaucracies, as well as in tbe developing wurId, rhe
greater threat to human well-being now lies in the increasing atomization of
human life, the loss of community and of common purpose, and the increasing
rending of the social fabric,
Perhaps Confucius can teach us, then, among other things, that to aban-
don our roles, communat rituals, cusroms, and traditions altogether is mad-
ness, because they can only be replaced by the et-ltical, psychological,
social, and spiritual void into which far too many autonomous, rights-
bearing, individual-oriented, capitalist Americans are already gazing. And
perhaps he can tcach us as wclt that it is time to relhink the wisdom of cxport-
ing and imposing our ethical conceptual framework on the four-plus billion
people for whom it is cerrainly alien, probably inappropriate, and possibly im-
moral.
I t may seem presumptuous t o call into question almost the whole
literature of modern Western political and moral theory in the space of a
single chapter. But because so much of that: literature presumes and
elaborates the Enlightenment model of human beings as purely rational,
self-seeking, autonomous individuals, the many arguments and views in
that literature cannot have more plausibility than the basic assumptions on
which they rest, To be sure, this modet-especially as it has been taken to
imply human rights-has significantly advanced the cause of human
dignitY1especially among the Western democracies, as noted earlier; but it
also has a strong self-fulfilling prophetic nature, which is strengthened fur-
ther by the demands of capitalist economies that can never be the norm for
most of the world's pycoptes, nor can they conctnue to be the norm for
ourselves much longer. Thus I suggest that this modei is rapidly becoming
more of a conceptual liability than an asset as we approach the twenty-first
century, continuing our search for how ro live, and how best to live to-
gether on this increasingly fragile planer. And I suspect most feminist
philosoyhers wbluld agree,'"