This paper aims to investigate the philosophical thought and moral practice of a Korean neo-Confucian female scholar named Kang Chŏngildang 姜靜一堂, who not only believed in moral equality between men and women and the possibility of female sagehood but actually empowered herself to become a moral paragon. Furthermore, Chŏngildang’s strong faith in moral equality between men and women enabled her to engage in social criticism of the existing educational system and social norms which discriminated against women, not by overcoming neo-Confucianism, (...) commonly understood as essentially androcentric and patriarchal, but by wholeheartedly embracing and further re-appropriating it in the service of women’s moral self-empowerment and moral perfectibility. After explicating why Chŏngildang nonetheless subscribed to gendered roles and female virtue with reference to her neo-Confucian worldview, I suggest that she can be called a harbinger of Confucian feminism. (shrink)

The aim of this dissertation is to compare Nietzsche's three transformations of the spirit, as set forth in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, to Confucius's personal experience of self-cultivation in the Analects . For Nietzsche, the first stage, the camel, emphasizes the willingness to be "humble" and wanting to be "well-loaded" in the teachings of the tradition. This is reflected in Confucius's first step in self-cultivation, that is, at the age of fifteen, in which he "sets his heart-mind upon learning." Nietzsche's lion (...) stage corresponds to Confucius's ages of thirty and forty. This is a period of reflective inquiry in which one goes beyond the boundaries of traditional values to evaluate critically what one has learned. Nietzsche's child stage is a new beginning where one is free from the burdens of inherited values and able to "recreate" the world. This is comparable to Confucius's ages of fifty and sixty when he creates the idea of ren and lives accordingly. Nietzsche's child stage is further developed with the formation of the ideas: amor fati and the eternal recurrence of the same. The former is the acceptance and appreciation of one's past whereas the latter is the ability to overcome the world's apparent meaninglessness and to summon the courage to say "yes" to the world and all its foibles. For Confucius, too, there is no other life but living in the world. His junzi is not beaten down by the vagaries of fate. He neither complains nor blames, but lives naturally with tianming. As a disciple of Confucius or Nietzsche, one has to learn from living in the everyday world. (shrink)

Volume 30, Issue 6, December 2022, Page 973-991.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

This essay sheds new light on Korean democracy after democratization. It examines how the notion of ‘transcendental collectivism’, associated with familial bonds and the concept of chŏng, led to an emphasis on citizen‐empowerment. This participatory perspective replaced the militant elite‐led activism of the transitional period, which was underpinned by a Confucian ‘transcendental individualism’ predicated on the concept of ren. The argument is based on a detailed case study of a recent episode of citizen action. The article shows how the search (...) for a new democratic citizenship that was capable of overcoming the parochial regionalism that has bedeviled Korean politics for decades, led ordinary (especially young) Korean citizens to come up with a new national democratic civic ethos that corresponded to the changed political environment. This new ethos was uri‐responsibility, a uniquely Korean view of collective moral responsibility. After examining uri‐responsibility and comparing it with Kantian‐liberal accounts of responsibility, its strong democratic implications for Korea are explored. (shrink)

Why was it not until the mid-1980s that the intellectuals, the "democratic elite" of China, initiated a public dialogue about "inalienable" rights in the Western sense? The reason may lie in the impact of events in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Korean civil society is often criticized because of its dual nature, that is, the paucity of social capital in everyday life and the plethora of collective political actions in the national civil society. Although liberals view such duality as the critical impediment to Korea’s authentic democratization, which would represent a fundamental, liberal-pluralist transformation of Korean society, this article rather acknowledges its cultural uniqueness and utilizes it as the basis on which to construct a Korean non-liberal democracy that is culturally pertinent (...) and politically viable. First, this article critically re-examines the recent neo-Tocquevillian praise for social capital in light of Tocqueville’s original idea on the art of association, and reveals the liberal-individualistic assumption behind them, with which Confucian-Koreans are culturally unfamiliar. It presents a Korean version of Confucian civil society to promote democratic collective self-government and common citizenship, while rejecting modern Western moral individualism. (shrink)

This essay attempts a philosophical reflection of the Confucian ideal of “scholar-official” in Joseon Korea’s neo-Confucian context. It explores why this noble ideal of a Confucian public being had to suffer many moral-political problems in reality. It argues first that because the institution of Confucian scholar-official was actually a modus-operandi compromise between Confucianism and Legalism, the Confucian scholar-officials were torn between their ethical commitment to Confucianism and their political commitment to the state; and second, that because the Cheng-Zhu neo-Confucianism vigorously (...) imported and indigenized by Joseon Koreans exalted the family over the state, Joseon neo-Confucian scholar-officials were torn between two competing moral obligations, filiality and loyalty. The essay concludes by discussing whether, given the problems with which the ideal of the Confucian scholar-official was frequently entangled, liberal individualism should be pursued as its normative alternative. (shrink)

The most constructive response to the crisis in moral theory has been the revival of virtue ethics, an ethics that has the advantages of being personal, contextual, and, as this paper will argue, normative as well. The first section offers a general comparative analysis of Confucian and Whiteheadian philosophies, showing their common process orientation and their views of a somatic self united in reason and passion. The second section contrasts rational with aesthetic order, demonstrating a parallel with analytic and synthetic (...) reason, and showing that rule-based ethics comes under the former and virtue ethics under the latter. The third and final section discusses a Confucian-Whiteheadian aesthetics of virtue, focusing on love as the comprehensive virtue. The principal goal of the paper is to propose that an appropriation of Confucian virtue ethics will enhance the otherwise slow development of a Euro-American process ethics. (shrink)

This article argues that Mencius’ education is ‘holistic education’ that aims at igniting the ‘silent revolution’ from within one’s inner mind-heart to be unfolded in society, state, and the world. Mencius’ educational philosophy is based on his theory of human nature and his theory of self-cultivation. Mencius affirms the totality of human life because he insists that the ‘personal,’ the ‘socio-political,’ and the ‘cosmic’ form a continuum. On the basis of ‘totality’ of one’s life, Mencius regards the educational process as (...) the prompting of the overall awakening of the learner’s subjectivity. Moreover, Mencius considers that the human mind-heart is the creator of values and that human life is endowed with innate capacity to make moral judgments. Mencius holds that the most effective educational methodology is a sort of cultivation of the mind-heart through internal self-reflection. Moreover, Mencius insists that the principles of teaching are to be according to the student’s talent and that the teacher has to make oneself as a paradigm. In conclusion, Mencius’ educational philosophy reminds us of the importance of ‘emic’ approach of education and the true goal of education in this age of increased quantification, standardization, and commercialization. (shrink)

Korean civil society is often criticized because of its dual nature, that is, the paucity of social capital in everyday life and the plethora of collective political actions in the national civil society. Although liberals view such duality as the critical impediment to Korea’s authentic democratization, which would represent a fundamental, liberal-pluralist transformation of Korean society, this article rather acknowledges its cultural uniqueness and utilizes it as the basis on which to construct a Korean non-liberal democracy that is culturally pertinent (...) and politically viable. First, this article critically re-examines the recent neo-Tocquevillian praise for social capital in light of Tocqueville’s original idea on the art of association, and reveals the liberal-individualistic assumption behind them, with which Confucian-Koreans are culturally unfamiliar. It presents a Korean version of Confucian civil society to promote democratic collective self-government and common citizenship, while rejecting modern Western moral individualism. (shrink)

Although contemporary Confucianists tend to view Western liberalism as pitting the individual against society, recent liberal scholarship has vigorously claimed that liberal polity is indeed grounded in the self-transformation that produces “liberal virtues.” To meet this challenge, this essay presents a sophisticated Confucian critique of liberalism by arguing that there is an appreciable contrast between liberal and Confucian self-transformation and between liberal and Confucian virtues. By contrasting Locke and Confucius, key representatives of each tradition, this essay shows that both liberalism (...) and Confucianism aim to reconstruct a society freed from antisocial passions entailing a vicious politics of resentment, and yet come to differing ethical and political resolutions. My key claim is that what makes Confucian self-cultivation so distinctive is the incorporation of ritual propriety ( li ) within it, whereas liberal self-transformation that relies heavily on a method of self-control comes back to the problem that it originally set out to overcome. (shrink)

This paper argues for the pragmatic construction of Confucian democracy by showing that Chinese philosophers who wish to see Confucianism flourish again as a positive dimension of Chinese civilization need to approach it pragmatically and democratically, otherwise their love of the past is at the expense of something else Confucius held in equal esteem, love of learning. Chinese philosophers who desire democracy for China would do well to learn from the earlier failures of the iconoclastic Westernizers, and realize that a (...) Chinese democracy cannot come about by ignoring or dismissing such an important part of China's history, its Confucian tradition. The best chances for democracy in China lie in transforming that tradition without destroying it. Eagerness to learn from others must be united with a proper appreciation of one's own past to nurture democracy as a way of life. (shrink)