| Bede Griffiths |
The Camaldolese
Institute
for East-West Dialogue
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* Summary of paper presented at International Symposium 2000
A Confucian Theory of Human Self: Self-Cultivation and Free Will in Confucian Philosophyby Prof. Chung-ying Cheng Confucius has spoken of "self-cultivation" of a human person without spelling out the notion of the self inherent in such a self-motivated and self-oriented project of human personal moral development and moral amelioration of the human self. This project is no doubt most important for the Confucian philosophy of society and state as well. Because to Confucius and his followers a good society and a righteous government must start with and hence be founded on the moral perfection of the human person. Hence the question of how to conceive a human self for the purpose of meeting the needs of constructing a good society and a just government remains a core question for the Confucian enterprise. The purpose of this article is to introduce a theory of human self in which self-cultivation and moral self-development of the human person becomes not possible but necessary. In such a theory we are also able to meet the challenge of clarifying what constitutes a free will against the background of the Confucian-Mencian notion of human nature. We shall start with our empirical observations on the two aspects of the human self, which we shall show correspond to the implicit two dimensions of meaning of the concept of the human self in common Chinese discourse. It is to be shown that it is this common Chinese notion of human self, which is embodied in the Confucian statements on cultivation of moral virtues of the human self. Specifically I wish to relate this notion of self to the underlying notions of human mind and human nature in the Confucian reference to human self. It shall come out that the two aspects of human self correspond very closely to and indeed are intimately related to the notions, of human mind and human nature in the Confucian thinking. It is on this basis that we can see how self-cultivation is both possible and necessary and how a free will to good is essential for the moral development of the human person.
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