Confucian Moral, Phenomenology of Saying, and Multiple Modernities

Abstract

This chapter aims at examining Confucianism as a public religion, undertaking a comparative study of moral politics of Confucianism, its rationality, and social system for late modernity. It seeks to reexamine the limitation of Weber’s comparative study of Confucian rationalism and its ethical evaluation. A study of basic features of Confucian ideas and its ethics shall be taken care of in a comprehensive manner in dealing with the Confucian contribution to a reality of alternative modernity and civil society. It includes a critical debate with Yearly’s comparative virtue study of Aquinas and Mencius. A special concern in this chapter is performed in response to Robert Bellah’s study of Mencius in terms of vox Dei and vox Populii. Thus, this inquiry is given its religious and humanistic system and develops its prophetic–moral orientation for the sake of religious humanism and the good society. In conclusion, a special elaboration of Mencius’ ethics of rectification is to be explicated in a phenomenological approach to vox Dei as vox Populii as the source of ethics of solidarity in its influential effect in Zhu Xi’s and Wang Yangming’s development toward a postcolonial theory of religion.