Positive Liberty Through a Confucian Lens — Epoche C1
The phrase at the centre of this essay is four characters long. Keji fuli (克己復禮) — conventionally rendered "overcome the self and return to ritual propriety" — is what Confucius offers in the Analects 12.1 when his most gifted disciple, Yan Hui, asks what ren (仁) actually consists in. Ren is the master virtue of the text, usually translated "humaneness" or "benevolence": the disposition of a person who treats others as fully human. The question this essay puts to that phrase is a European one. Isaiah Berlin, in his 1958 Oxford inaugural lecture "Two Concepts of Liberty", argued that a certain family of ideas about freedom — freedom as self-mastery, as becoming what one truly is — has a standing tendency to curdle into justification for coercion. Keji fuli belongs unmistakably to that family. The claim defended here is that it belongs to it without the defect, and that seeing why teaches something precise about where the defect in the European versions actually lies. Berlin's fear is narrower than it is usually reported to be, and separating its two components is what makes the comparison work: the Confucian material meets one of them and — this is where the compressed version of this argument overreached — leaves the other standing. What Berlin distinguished, and what he actually feared Berlin's two concepts answer two different questions. Negative liberty answers: over what area am I left to act without interference by other people? Positive liberty answers: who or what is the source of the control that determines what I do? The first is a matter of doors that are open, whether or not I walk through them; the second is a matter of authorship. Berlin's own gloss on the positive concept is that one wishes one's life and decisions to depend on oneself and not on external forces of any kind — to be a subject and not an object. Stated that way the second concept looks harmless. Berlin's worry begins at the next move, and it is a specific move, not a general suspicion of self-mastery. It is the postulation of two selves: an empirical, appetitive, everyday self, and a "real", "rational" or "higher" self identified with something larger — a nation, a class, a church, a party. Once the higher self is identified with a collective, the collective can claim to know the individual's real will better than the individual does, and coercion becomes, by definition, not coercion at all but the liberation of the real self from the empirical one. Rousseau supplies the formula Berlin quotes against him: in The Social Contract (1762, I.7), whoever refuses to obey the general will is to be compelled to do so by the whole body, "which means nothing else than that he will be forced to be free". The danger is not self-mastery. The danger is the transfer of the mastering agency from the person to an institution that speaks in the person's name. The two objections, stated precisely Two distinct objections come out of that analysis, and they need separating because the Confucian material meets them very differently. The imposed 'true self'. If freedom is defined as conformity to a higher or rational self, whoever gets to specify the content of that self acquires the authority to override what the person in front of them actually wants, while still describing the override as an act of liberation. The objection is not that the higher self is a fiction; it is that the specification of its content is a political prize, and that whoever wins it wins an argument that cannot be answered from inside the framework. The erosion of pluralism. This one does not depend on coercion at all. Berlin held that human ends are many, that some of them are genuinely incompatible — that a society cannot maximise both perfect equality and perfect spontaneity, and that a life cannot be both that of the monk and that of the general — and that the incompatibility is not a symptom of our ignorance but a feature of value itself. Any doctrine that posits one harmonious ordering of all goods therefore says something false about the world, quite apart from what its adherents do with police powers. The first objection is about the transfer of authority. The second is about the structure of value. Confucianism, as will emerge, has an unusually strong answer to the first and a weak one to the second. What Analects 12.1 says when read in full The exchange is short enough to characterise completely. Yan Hui asks about ren . Confucius replies that keji fuli is ren : if for a single day one could overcome oneself and return to li , the whole world would turn to humaneness. Then comes the sentence that the slogan usually loses: wei ren you ji, er you ren hu zai — the practice of humaneness proceeds from oneself; how could it proceed from others? Yan Hui asks for specifics, and receives four prohibitions: do not look, do not listen, do not speak, do not move contrary to li . Li (禮) needs its own gloss, because "propriety" in English suggests table manners. In the Analects it covers the whole inherited repertoire of formed conduct: sacrificial ritual, mourning observance, the ordering of a court, the way one greets, defers, mourns, gives and receives. Herbert Fingarette, in Confucius: The Secular as Sacred (1972), made the case that li should be understood as "holy rite" — not a set of external rules laid over spontaneous behaviour but the medium in which distinctively human dealings are constituted at all, in the way that the conventions of a language are not restrictions on speech but the condition of there being speech. On that reading "returning to li " is not submission to a rulebook. It is the acquisition of a competence. Two features of the passage do the work in what follows. The first is that the four prohibitions are reflexive. Every one of them governs what the disciple himself looks at, listens to, says and does. Nothing in the passage authorises the disciple to regulate the seeing, hearing or speaking of anyone else. The grammar of the teachin