Reply to Dr. Yu Yihsoong

Abstract

Reply to Dr. Yu Yihsoong Stephen C. Angle (bio) I am grateful to Dr. Yu Yihsoong for having engaged so deeply with my book Sagehood and its view of Coherence (or li 理), and to the editor for giving me this opportunity to reply. I am also pleased that Dr. Yu is not hung up on the translation of li as “Coherence”—indeed, he says he likes the translation—but rather argues with the details of what I say about li itself. As I read him, Dr. Yu’s critique of my book has three main aspects. First, he sees that I defend a virtue-ethical rather than a rule-ethical reading of Neo-Confucianism, and based on his sense of what virtue ethics is and requires, this leads Dr. Yu to conclude that I am forced into certain errors of interpretation. Second, Dr. Yu believes that while my views are problematic as interpretations of Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming, they resonate much more closely with the ideas of Wang Chuanshan, whom Dr. Yu himself endorses as a superior philosopher. Dr. Yu therefore regrets that I did not develop my account in closer conversation with Wang Chuanshan. Third, Dr. Yu argues that I downplay the ontological (for Zhu Xi) and immanent (for Wang Yangming) aspects of li. In this brief reply, I will focus primarily on the first and third of these points. Dr. Yu is surely correct that I would benefit from a more detailed engagement with Wang Chuanshan and that we should all pay careful attention to the recent work that has been done in this vein, most especially in JeeLoo Liu’s excellent Neo-Confucianism: Metaphysics, Mind, and Morality.1 Still, a dialogue with Wang Chuanshan that is both charitable and yet critical would require more space than I have room for here, and I believe that it is possible to clear up some potential confusions about my views without taking that further step at this time. In brief, then, I will argue that the particularist emphasis in my account of Neo-Confucian virtue ethics does not depend on a bifurcation of intellectual and moral virtues, and that once we have a clearer understanding of what I mean by “agent-based” virtue ethics, several other misunderstandings of my views on Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming can be resolved as well. Before turning to these two arguments, it might be useful to call attention to one of the major methodological differences between Dr. Yu’s approach and mine. He relies on the idea that Neo-Confucianism can be usefully divided into three distinct schools—the “School of Principle,” the “School of Mind,” and the school of “Qi-based Ontology”—and that the differences among these schools are sharp. A premise of my work, both in Sagehood [End Page 260] and in the book I have more recently co-authored with Justin Tiwald, is that the major Neo-Confucians do not divide neatly into such schools and that focusing on these divisions often obscures more than it reveals.2 We are better off attending to differences and similarities in piecemeal fashion and noticing different patterns of emphasis (Justin and I write of different areas of “focus”) as they emerge from our interpretive work. I will suggest some ways in which this approach—which, admittedly, runs against the mainstream of modern intellectual historical work on Neo-Confucianism—might make differences to the outcome of our interpretations as I proceed. Dr. Yu’s understanding of what I intend by “virtue ethics” has two key dimensions. On the one hand, he sees that I believe that the Neo-Confucians stress the “virtues of responding well to one’s circumstances” instead of what he calls the “the virtues of following moral doctrines.” While I am surprised that he finds it obvious that “traditional Confucian ethics” stresses the latter, Dr. Yu is correct that I do not think that Neo-Confucians endorse a rule-based (or moral-doctrine-based) understanding of ethics. In their different ways, neither Zhu Xi nor Wang Yangming believes that our ultimate guide is one or more state-able rules or “principles” that we can follow. It is true that Wang...