Ecofeminism, Anthropocentrism, and the Elusive 'Nature': A Confucian Critique of Environmental Ethics — Epoche C1
Environmental ethics — the branch of moral philosophy that asks whether anything besides human beings can matter morally, and if so why — has been organised almost from its founding around a single accusation: anthropocentrism. The word names the view that humans are the only bearers of intrinsic value, the value a thing has for its own sake, while everything non-human carries at most instrumental value, the value of a means to someone else's ends. The standard diagnosis adds that Western thought became anthropocentric because it is dualist: it habitually sorts reality into paired opposites — mind and body, culture and nature, male and female — defines each pole by its exclusion of the other, and ranks one above the other. And the standard remedy, repeated across syllabuses and anthologies, is to look elsewhere: to re-evaluate non-Western traditions, Confucianism prominent among them, as inherently 'eco-friendly' alternatives to this dualism. The hope is that by moving beyond a human-centred worldview we can foster a more harmonious relationship with the natural world. This essay accepts the seriousness of the diagnosis but distrusts the remedy. It argues that traditional critiques of anthropocentrism, when routed through certain strands of Confucian-inflected ecofeminism, harbour an essentialist tendency: they sacrifice the actual diversity of human–nature relationships to a universalised 'nature'. Three terms of art need their plain meanings at the outset. Ecofeminism is the school of thought which holds that the domination of women and the domination of nature are connected — produced by the same conceptual structure, and therefore to be dismantled together. Essentialism is the habit of treating a category — 'women', 'nature', 'the East' — as though it had a fixed inner character that all its members share and that explains whatever they do. And a postcolonial feminist perspective is one that asks who gets to define such categories in the first place, on the ground that many of them were forged in colonial encounters and still carry that shape. From this perspective the question is not only whether environmental ethics can overcome anthropocentrism, but whether, in doing so, it quietly manufactures a new universal — an undifferentiated 'eco-harmony' — that erases the particular, situated ways real communities live with their environments. Where the Search for a Greener East Began The genre this essay examines has a datable origin. In 1967 the medieval historian Lynn White Jr published a short article in Science , 'The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis', arguing that the environmental crisis was at bottom religious: Latin Christianity's reading of Genesis, in which humanity is granted dominion over creation, had made it, in his words, 'the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen'. White's inference was that a crisis with religious roots needs a religious remedy, and he pointed away from the Western mainstream — towards St Francis of Assisi within Christianity, and towards Zen Buddhism outside it. The article became one of the most cited texts in environmental studies, and its argumentative template — locate the flaw in Western religion, seek the cure in another tradition — has organised half a century of writing since. Roger Gottlieb's A Greener Faith (2006; an earlier version of this essay misdated it to 2004) is a sophisticated later instalment: a sympathetic survey of religious environmentalism across the world's traditions, documenting how congregations, theologians and activists have drawn on their inheritances, including East and South Asian ones, to build moral frameworks for environmental action that are less human-centred. Gottlieb is a careful reporter of a real movement. The difficulty lies less in any single book than in the cumulative effect of the genre, which teaches readers to treat whole civilisations as reservoirs of a single ecological attitude. With that history in place, attempts to transcend anthropocentrism by these means can be sorted into two broad categories. First Category: Universalist Re-evaluations of Confucianism A reader who met Confucianism in a survey course will know it as a social and political ethic: the cultivation of humaneness ( ren ), the primacy of family obligation and ritual propriety, the ideal of the morally exemplary official. The ecological re-reading fastens instead onto a cosmological strand, summarised in the four-character phrase 天人合一 ( tianren heyi ), 'Heaven and humanity form one unity' — the claim that the human and the cosmic are continuous rather than opposed. The eleventh-century thinker Zhang Zai gave it its most quoted expression: his 'Western Inscription' opens by declaring Heaven his father, Earth his mother, all people his siblings and all things his companions. Zhang Zai belongs to Neo-Confucianism, the Song-dynasty (960–1279) revival that supplied Confucian ethics with a metaphysical foundation, and it is chiefly this Neo-Confucian material that modern re-evaluators mine. Tu Wei-ming, the most influential contemporary advocate of the reading, names the resulting vision 'anthropocosmic': humanity is neither the master of nature, as in anthropocentrism, nor an accident within it, but the participant whose self-cultivation completes the triad of Heaven, Earth and humanity. The essays gathered by Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Berthrong in Confucianism and Ecology (1998) turned this into a research programme: Confucianism as intrinsically holistic, a ready-made antidote to dualist thinking. An earlier version of this essay offered, as evidence of this Confucian holism, the famous dream from the Zhuangzi — Zhuang Zhou waking unable to say whether he is a man who has dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming it is a man. The example must be corrected rather than repeated: the Zhuangzi is a foundational text of Daoism, not of Confucianism, and several of its chapters openly mock Confucian moralism. The s