Self-Restriction,Political Myth,and the Politics of the Ordinary: Mou Zongsan’s Confucian Democracy

Problems with Traditional Confucian Politics

In supporting the thesis that Confucianism requires democracy, Mou does not surmise that arguments for democracy are already evident in the Confucian texts. Nor is there even a germ of justification for democracy. Rather, Confucian ethics does not support democracy in any straightforward manner, as is evidenced in theory and practice in the unfolding of Chinese history. For Mou, the early evolution of Confucianism, in purely intellectual terms, can be divided into three phases, with Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi spearheading the tradition; texts including the Doctrine of the Mean and Great Learning representing the second phase; and Dong Zhongshu of Han finalizing early Confucian teachings (Mou 2013, 1). When combined with political and historical realities, the three phases can be categorized into the first historical stage, and Song-Ming Neo-Confucians stand for the second with their inner turn to ethical self-cultivation (Mou 2010, 10; 2013, 1–2). The mission of twentieth-century Confucians, who Mou considers standing at the historical crossroads and to whom Mou himself belongs, is to reinforce the legacies left by previous Confucians—in a manner that echoes the first stage—and find a way forward confronting challenges “not seen in two thousand years of history” (Mou 2013, 2).

According to Mou, Confucian ethics lays out “universal principles undergirding social progress,” at the core of which is the value of benevolence that he takes as equivalent to the Absolute Spirit or positive liberty in a Hegelian sense (Mou 2013, 9). Distinctive of benevolence is a profound appreciation for moral life within the human realm, which differs from the ancient Greek tradition of logically appreciating the natural world and the Hebrew tradition of transcending the human world in search of godly awe (Mou 2003b, 192). A direct manifestation of benevolence, so to speak, is what Mou (2010, 46) calls the “functional” or “intensional” presentation of rationality, which takes the form of the ruler’s taking care of ordinary people by exercising their subjective judgment under specific life conditions. As he puts it, functional rationality retains a “sense of morality in humans,” which is embodied in the activities of “calling forth this moral sense and intelligently practicing virtues” (Mou 2010, 47). This leads to the perfection of individual characters in moral training, benevolent politics in the political realm, and moral enlightenment in metaphysical understandings (Mou 2010, 47–51). This is why Confucian politics in its traditional form is patterned after a sage-king taking charge of public affairs for the sake of what contemporary political theorists call “virtue politics” (Hankins 2019). A pertinent metaphor is Confucius’s Pole Star, which “commands the homage of the multitude of stars without leaving its place” (Analects 2.1).

The problem with functional rationality, however, is that, despite pointing to benevolent politics and self-cultivation, it stops short of establishing objective structures, an epitome of which is democracy, that can compensate for the deficiencies of functional rationality. These deficiencies manifest themselves in three ways. First, in terms of power transfer, the public spirit, which undergirds benevolent politics, can be easily usurped by the private spirit. Mou is opposed to Mencius’s idea that both abdication between sage-kings and hereditary transmission are righteous because hereditary rulers do not need to go through the complex process of public scrutiny but instead claim a blood-based entitlement to rule to the contrary of sage-king ideals. Second, in terms of governance, traditional benevolent politics is precarious and can be easily jeopardized insofar as it depends for its survival and prosperity on the ruler’s moral character alone. If the benevolent ruler is not in charge, the whole system becomes dysfunctional. Additionally, the traditional vision puts too much burden on the ruler and too little on ordinary people. It expects the impossible from the ruler while refraining from addressing ordinary people’s public responsibility (Mou 2010, 146–55). For Mou, despite high ideals of functional rationality, it always falls short and fails to deliver.

Meaning of Self-Restriction

Coming to its rescue is what Mou calls the “constructive presentation” or “extensional presentation” of rationality, which is composed of scientific knowledge including mathematics and logics as well as modern political arrangements such as democracy, the rule of law, and the modern state (Mou 2010, 51). One of the most important components of the second type of rationality is democracy, which can address problems plaguing Confucian politics while upholding its ideals. For Mou, constructive presentation of rationality is necessary not because they are valuable judging from standards exterior to Confucianism, but because they are the requirement of Confucianism itself, without which Confucian teachings cannot be deemed complete (Mou 2010, 52). Consequently, while Mou concedes past Confucians’ failure to bring about democracy, he does not rush to deny the possibility of justifying democracy in Confucian terms. But how can it be possible?

The way Mou (2010, 56) addresses the dilemma facing Confucianism lies in what he calls the “self-restriction” (自我坎陷) ² of Confucian ethics—an idea that some commentators have recently begun to systematically engage (Angle 2012, chap. 2; Elstein 2014, chap. 3). Confucian ethical values retrain themselves and do not interfere with the independence of the political realm where democracy takes hold. This is also the way in which Confucian ethics and politics are pulled apart. According to Mou, through self-restriction, the ethical self turns oneself into a rational thinking self capable of setting up formal, objective structures (Mou 2003a, 127). As David Elstein (2014, 50) puts it, the idea is “the moral reasoning at the basis of Ruist (Confucian) thought restricting itself to allow for the development of theoretical or constructive reason.” While Mou expects the heartmind or his technical term “moral subjectivity,” which everyone possesses to some degree, to restrict itself, the agent carrying out self-restriction is primarily the ruler as he is concerned with how traditional rulership can metamorphose into new Kingliness. There is, however, no reason why self-restriction should not extend to Confucian scholars and ordinary people insofar as anyone, not just the powerful ruler, ought to respect democratic rule in order for it to function properly.

Mou relies on a Hegelian dialectic instead of deductive inference, which is also one of the most controversial parts of his theory (Mou 2010, 57). Stephen Angle understands Mou as meaning that (1) Confucians are committed to seeking full virtue; (2) full virtue must be realized in the political world; (3) the public realization of full virtue requires objective structures that restrict the ways in which Confucian moral judgement is applied to the political realm; and, therefore (4), the achievement of virtue requires self-restriction (Angle 2012, 29). A different version is offered by David Elstein, who takes Mou to implicate that (1) a good government in Confucianism originally depends on the mercy of the sage-king; (2) there is no guarantee that the ruler can be immune from abusing her power; (3) only democracy can “consistently realize its own goal of a moral politics;” and (4) Confucian morality thus demands that moral reasoning restrict itself (Elstein 2014, 51).

Mou himself does assert that democracy is possible only if citizens come to realize their political agency by themselves rather than remain passive as dispersed masses, and that moral capabilities are shared by all human beings, but, contrary to Angle’s reading, Mou seems to neither expect full virtue of citizens nor do so in political exercises. Mou (2013, 15) dubs the crux of Confucian ethics as “rationalist idealism,” which is undergirded by “the heartmind of restraint and compassion” (怵惕惻隱之心) characteristic of Mencius. The idea of the heartmind can only be procured in the practice of self-cultivation where one hones the skills of uncovering innate moral intuitions, but this does not mean that everyone is expected, let alone required, to obtain full virtue. There is no implication in Mou that citizens, by immersing themselves in democracy, are set on course to achieving full virtue. ³ Equally controversial is Elstein’s attempt to equate democracy with mechanisms capable of “realizing moral politics” in that Mou (2010, 62) is not unaware of the possibility that democracy can generate majority rule that goes against moral politics. Democracy should nevertheless be upheld as an independent political realm (Mou 2010, 59).

In order to understand the nature of self-restriction and how it relates to democracy, we need to attend to three forms of rationality—immanent, intellectual, and political—in Mou’s typology. The difficulty with Confucian ethics is that it only points out what is subjectively immanent in human nature that defines the moral good but fails to generate objective rationality in the form of scientific knowledge (intellectual rationality) and the political modernity of democracy, law, and the modern state (political rationality) (Mou 2010, 133–39). The last one—political rationality—is what Mou refers to as objective political structures. It is not enough to appreciate the external world through moral understandings; one needs to disentangle oneself from moral subjectivity in order to objectively understand and embrace the external world. What Mou means by objective understandings therefore stand in creative tension with moral ones grounded in the heartmind. For Mou, without “objective understandings,” the moral heartmind embodied in the idea of benevolence “cannot unleash its own potential” (盡其用), “reach out to the outside world” (盡其用) (Mou 2010, 136), and secure conditions for a “world for all” (公天下) (Mou 2010, 255).

Benevolent politics is still a supreme ideal, but as part of arriving at that goal, the objective structures of democracy should be upheld as an independent aim valuable in and of itself. A more convenient way to sum up Mou’s reasoning here is that while benevolent politics stays as a figurative goal, the actual goal of self-restraint is for Confucian ethics to always contradict and objectify itself for the sake of establishing the objective structures of democracy. The upshot of this is that even if an enlightened leader has benevolent policies in hand and is ready to seize power and implement them without going through democratic procedure, they should refrain from doing so because they should uphold democracy as an actual goal in itself. The distinction between figurative and actual goals is not one that distinguishes between ideal and nonideal conditions, implying that the figurative goal can come to the fore without the help of actual goals in cases where conditions turn from nonideal to ideal ones, but a permanent condition where the actual goal of objectifying politics always prevails and commands political action. ⁴

But why should self-restriction take the form of democracy in the political realm? Indeed, this is a serious concern raised by Joseph Chan and Sungmoon Kim regarding Angle’s self-restriction thesis, which heavily relies on Mou’s thought (Chan 2014, 787–91; Kim 2018, 30–31). ⁵ Two issues are in line in light of the connection between the demand of self-restriction and the political institution of democracy—what Mou means by democracy and how it constitutes one key element of objective political structures.

Though Mou’s writings are fairly abstract, they strongly suggest that democracy means constitutional representative government. In terms of the language he adopts, democracy is always used interchangeably with “democratic politics” (Mou 2010, 57), which resists a more expansive notion of democracy as a way of life, such as we find in contemporary Confucian theories. Although democratic theory since Mou’s time has blossomed and developed into a highly technical discussion of different types and values of democracy, this kind of discussion is alien to Mou’s thinking. Rather, democracy for Mou entails two senses of justifying political legitimacy and arranging everyday politics in a democratic way. Theorizing at the apex of the Cold War when the Chinese’s traditional way of life was menaced by communism, he saw democracy first and foremost as implying an orderly transfer of power premised upon “the people’s political presence” to safeguard their traditional “cultural life” (Mou 2010, 52). He pits democratic legitimacy as an institutionalized form of politics against the personality-based political power owned by and transferred through monarchs and modern autocrats. Second, equally important is the idea of daily governance managed by politicians elected through voting. The first necessarily implies and manifests itself through the latter because the people’s political presence in legitimacy, which is fairly abstract, necessarily requires everyday democratic politics to back it up (Mou 2010, 52–53).

Further, Mou explicitly understands democracy’s value instrumentally as a “tool” (事工) to substantiate the ideal of Confucian benevolence (Mou 2010, "New Preface," 15). As discussed in section I.i, Confucianism for Mou stands for the “constant Way” (常道), which is a supreme moral vision that is universally applicable (Mou 2013, 7). Democracy in this context pertains to a core package of institutions necessary for the manifestation of the constant Way under modern conditions. As he puts it, “democratic politics can express some of the (Confucian) ideal of giving all-under-Heaven back to itself . . . modernization primarily consists in realizing this ideal” (Mou 2010, “New Preface," 20). But is Mou justified in assigning democracy, above anything else, so special a value, albeit instrumental? What Mou means by “objective structures” and the causal relations among them play a crucial role here. What he does not specify is the empirical evidence—of which democratic theorists today are increasingly aware—that democracy serves as a necessary element in the long chain of arguments leading up to stable democratic constitutionalism. Self-restriction may require more than what democracy can offer, but nothing short of it will do. For Mou, the objectivity of democratic politics consists not in its being morally plausible from a Confucian perspective but in providing universal objective conditions where cultivating moral subjectivity is rendered possible. These conditions call for the adoption of democracy, which forms a coherent package with the rule of law and the modern state. Otherwise, those deprived of political power are subject to the abuse of power by the elite, which de facto prevents them from living a dignified life necessary for virtue cultivation. Mou’s reasoning here is resonant with many instrumentalist justifications of democracy that attach its value to the substantive goods that it brings about and the harms it prevents (Sen 1999).

One caveat, however, is that democracy cannot consistently deliver a moral politics in the Confucian sense. Rather, what democracy can do is consistently rule out tyranny and the elite’s abuse of power, which is the antipode of moral politics. Mou constantly refers to China under communist rule (even after opening up under Deng Xiaoping) as a quintessential example of lacking objective conditions that make moral politics possible. In polemical languages, he laments more than once that people under communist rule cannot even think of shame and self-respect because they live in constant fear and are not free to act on their own conscience in the first place (Mou 2010, 7). Having senses of shame and self-respect is far from achieving the benevolent politics Confucians aim for, but it is the first step toward that noble goal. The ideal of benevolent politics hinges on many factors, including political leadership and collective wisdom after adopting democratic institutions.

By appealing to Confucian moral metaphysics and detaching Confucian ethics from politics, Mou justifies democracy in Confucian terms. His reasoning, roughly put, is that (1) Confucian ethics (along with its metaphysical vision) requires an extension of individual subjective ethical experience to the outside world; (2) an objective structure independent of Confucian ethics provides conditions under which a secure and nonarbitrary ethical extension becomes possible; (3) objective structures are possible if and only if they include democratic institutions; and (4) therefore, Confucian ethics requires democracy. It should be noted that the restriction of Confucian ethics is temporary in the sense that self-restriction is necessary for Confucians’ adoption of democracy in democratic transition but should be set loose during democratic consolidation. Following the entrenchment of democratic rule, the ultimate or figurative goal of Confucianism is still benevolent politics, which requires Confucians to impart Confucian virtues and roll out benevolent policies within the limit of democratic rule.

Sage-Kings, Heroes, and Conceptual Myth

When shifting between different modes of rationality, we still think within the framework of rationality. But what is the source and nature of irrationality in politics? Following Ernst Cassirer, Mou claims that myth, and political myth in particular, stems from a mismatch between human beings’ collective aspirations and what social and material conditions allow. The appeal of myth garners force when aspirations are frequently frustrated by a lack of rational means to make sense of it. These aspirations, for Mou, are not simply thought experiments or imaginations a group of people happens to entertain but are “objective” in the sense that they express the collective will coming from the “depth of their lives” (Mou 2010, 72). Mou (2010, 74) distinguishes between “vertical life,” which represents the tenacity and unpredictability of human life that keeps testing the boundary between the possible and the impossible, and “horizontal life,” which belongs to the everyday, quotidian life conditions. The former is as real as the latter as they both express what life itself calls for.

There are many forms of myth including the political one. Within political myth, there are also many prototypes that express mythologies in different ways. The first type of myth crucial to Mou’s classifications is the ideal personality of the sage, which can be either religious or simply spiritual. Jesus of the Christian religion is an other-worldly religious sage whereas Confucius is a this-worldly spiritual leader without transcendental religion. What is characteristic of both is “purified upward transcendence” that aims for “moral life” (Mou 2010, 79–80). Purely motivated by moral concerns, the sagely figure simultaneously displays sacred love herself and brings out others’ moral consciousness. Sages do not necessarily belong to the genre of political myth, but when they are transported to it, we often call them “sage-kings.” Unlike traditional Confucians, Mou believes that the moral life of the “uncrowned king” like Confucius is more dignified than that of sage-kings because one’s morality cannot be “pure” as soon as one gets entangled in political affairs. Nevertheless, the politics of Confucian sage-kings is not inherently mythical or irrational though apolitical sages belong to the broader realm of myth (Mou 2010, 80). This is because the moral guidance that sage-kings attempt to universalize is, to use Mou’s own words, a kind of functional rationality that imparts moral values and materializes in benevolent politics.

In contrast, the second type of political myth, which is built on the ideal of heroic politics, is mythical all the way down. Heroes do not display profound moral concerns or divine spirituality but are talents commanding universal endorsement through “their intensive life, heroic gestures, and majestic vibes (surrounding them)” (Mou 2010, 81). They are disinterested in existing patterns and ways of life but always ready to bring in swift social and political changes by force. In Chinese history, it was common for heroic figures to appeal to the command of Heaven or religion as a way of justifying their political action (大義), but they were nevertheless this-worldly figures who only appealed to strong energies and intensive emotions. For Mou, Emperor Gaozu of Han and some hegemons of the Warring States period belong to this category. In short, a hero is an amoral, or even antimoral, “superman.” Heroes embody in themselves the collective will of the society, but they also wantonly turn to violence as they see fit, and this is the sense in which Mou (2010, 86) claims that heroes are a mix of “divinity and monstrosity.” Apart from their strength and enthusiasm, another feature of heroes is that they do not have particular principle-based agendas despite their commitment to bringing about swift changes. Their vision is not so much about creating a new order as about restoring peace and order, through leadership and violence, at the time of chaos and disorder. Mou believes that although heroes do not have agendas for radical change down the road—which means that the bulk of familial and social fabrics will be kept intact, the fact that they seek political change and redistribution of wealth by force means that their action can still wreak damaging havoc on the moral values embodied in political and social spheres.

Normative judgment aside, Mou’s heroes strikingly resemble Nietzsche’s superman ⁶ extensively discussed in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Similar to Mou, Nietzsche believes that a human life without vertical orientations is mundane and devoid of meaning, and that a superman embodies the strength and creativity distinctive of vertical life though Mou’s hero seems to be narrower in scope than Nietzsche’s superman. ⁷ For Nietzsche’s superman, humans are “a laughing stock or a painful embarrassment” (Nietzsche 2006, 6). What is nevertheless great in the human is that “it is a bridge and not a goal,” and the human is “a rope, fastened between animal and overman—a rope over an abyss” (Nietzsche 2006, 7). The opposite of mediocre human beings is the Übermensch, who is brave, creative, and ready to subvert established morality. In this light, a superman is, first and most important, a “breaker,” who “breaks tablets and old virtues” (Nietzsche 2006, 171). The old virtues of kindness, righteousness, and pity are only expressive of weaknesses in humans, and the superman’s job is to break these entrenched virtues codified by “herd morality.” Second, the superman is as much a breaker as a creator of values. “What is great,” says Nietzsche (2006, 31), is “the creative,” and a superman “wants to create what is new and a new virtue.” Finally, a superman is also solitary, and solitude is ingrained in what renders them great. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra asserts that “where solitude ends, there begins the market place; and where the market place begins, there begins too the noise of the great actors and the buzzing of poisonous flies,” which is why he urges people to “flee into solitude” (Nietzsche 2006, 36–37). As Nietzsche’s superman repudiates mediocracy and stagnation prevalent in humanity, “the human is something that must be overcome,” and the man who has overcome himself has become a superman.

Although the politics of sage-kings and heroes display greatness among ancients, there is a paradigm of “conceptual myth” (概念的神話) that is distinctive of modern politics, to which communism and Nazism belong. What sets these political myths apart from heroic politics is not that their leaders are less bold and charismatic, nor that they aim at upward moral sublimation as sage-kings do. Rather, what is distinctive of it is that their “vertical life can be embodied in concepts and objectified in the collective and the party while simultaneously taking advantage of modern technologies.” The manipulators of modern political myths—Hitler, Lenin, and Stalin—“enshrined themselves as Gods and God-like dictators through conceptualization” (Mou 2010, 93). For Mou, communism as a variant of conceptual myth wreaks more havoc than Nazism. Although the Nazis invoked nationhood as a conceptual myth, they still retained a significant remnant of heroism, which is personality based and transient. In contrast, the communists dexterously cashed out both magical power of concepts and efficiency of modern technology, which is why the destructive effects of communism are long lasting. On the one hand, the communists are meticulous in their use of modern technology in carrying out their beliefs. On the other hand, “class” is a universalistic and totalizing concept that objectifies charismatic leadership and subsumes every aspect of human life under its sweeping power. They not only behave like martyrs to their faith, which shows their quasi-religious pursuit of divine transcendence, but also ruthlessly destroy everything including moral and biological life that stands in their way, which shows their monstrosity. As Mou (2010, 95) puts it, “(the communists) are not interested in concrete, individual lives . . . they butcher people in the name of their concepts.”

Self-Restriction and the “Politics of the Ordinary”

Given the sagely myth and the political myths of heroic and conceptual politics, why is it that Confucians are in a unique position to buck the trend and restore rationality in politics? Further, even if Confucian exemplars like sage-kings ought to exercise self-restriction and voluntarily abide by democratic rule, why is it possible for them to do so? There are already some hints of the connection between sagely myth and rational politics in our previous discussion. Mou believes that when sages engage in politics and act as sage-kings, their politics is not entrapped in irrational, political myth but provides patterns of functional rationality. Mou’s reasoning, however, is not entirely defensive. Rather, he believes that Confucianism can make unique contributions to rational politics in a way that reconciles functional and constructive rationality. Mou’s argument is sustained by three interrelated claims of the conditions of rational politics, the inadequacy of constructive rationality as found in the Western intellectual tradition, and Confucian self-restriction’s unique potential to secure conditions of rationality in politics.

First, following Cassirer, Mou is profoundly concerned with the extent to which political life in general is inherently unstable. Mou (2010, 119) quotes Cassirer as saying that “in politics, we forever live on the land of active volcanoes, and we must prepare for unexpected seism and explosion.” In other words, the spontaneity of extraordinary politics is always looming on the horizon. We do not have any scientific formula to make sense of Truman’s decision to intervene in the Korean War and the decision of Lee Seungman, South Korea’s first president, to release war captives. From Plato and Comte, philosophers have attempted, but failed, to find conditions—which resemble objective conditions in scientific inquiry—that can provide a rational basis for politics. A lack of rationality constantly menaces the peace and order of political life, which is why politics never fails to be swayed and held for ransom by monstrous supermen including heroes and dictators of the modern age. For Mou, this failure is both methodological (in the sense that Western intellectuals divide up subjects along specific disciplines, thereby glossing over their interconnectedness) and substantial (in the sense that the rationality that is sought after lacks a moral grounding). This leads Mou to claim that Confucian virtue politics can open up the “door of rationality” by laying out holistic standards of virtue (德) for politics. Although virtue politics cannot be stable and reliable in the same way that science is given that it ultimately depends on how humans behave, this does not prevent one from identifying its underlying conditions.

Second, the way in which Western intellectuals attempt to render politics rational has largely turned on the transcendental idea of equality before God as found in Christianity and protection of individual rights in the natural law tradition, which is inadequate to realize rational politics grounded in virtue. Although Mou’s reasoning in this part is sketchy and relies on many questionable reductive assumptions, his key insight is that neither spiritual equality nor natural rights can fully meet the moral demands of rational politics because spiritual equality lacks an upward orientation in this-worldly politics while natural rights do not emphasize the upward orientation itself. It is, however, a mistake to downplay Mou’s appraisal of, and commitment to, extensional rationality, which plays a pivotal role in moving politics closer to rational ideals. For Mou, spiritual equality and natural rights, which later developed into full-blown class struggles, provide necessary constraints on political power. The problem is rather that these constraints do not touch on how “humans’ subjective lives can be made sublime and tranquil.” It is in in this sense that Mou believes that politics remains an “empty shell” without soliciting help from the functional rationality of Confucianism (Mou 2010, 173).

Finally, given the paramount importance of virtue in politics and the inadequacy of Western sources to achieve virtue politics, Confucian self-restriction is uniquely valuable in the whole process of rendering politics rational—in both functional and extensional senses. On the one hand, given that the high ideal of Confucian politics rejects political myth in favor of functional rationality, and further that this form of rationality requires objective structures to carry it forward, as discussed in I.ii, Confucians would naturally adopt self-restriction as a constraint on the way in which they engage in politics. Here, the normative requirement of self-restriction and its theoretical possibility are reconciled. On the other hand, insofar as Confucian politics qua Confucian retains its commitment to virtue politics, it can also compensate for political life solely built on extensional rationality.

The politics following Mou’s reconstruction is therefore what I call the “politics of the ordinary.” By the “politics of the ordinary,” I do not mean a mode of politics that depends on and valorizes ordinary people’s active political participation (or more conveniently, participatory democracy). Rather, it is set up against and radically departs from the traditional ideal of extraordinary politics, where sage-kings exert magical leverage on politics, which is the antipode of ordinary politics. It also differs from the ordinary politics of liberal democracy, conventionally understood, inasmuch as Mou assigns to Confucians a special role of imparting Confucian virtues and encouraging ordinary people’s self-cultivation within the scope of democratic rule. Through the lens of freedom, Elstein (2014, 55–56) rightly points out that characteristic of Mou’s political thought is the unity of formal freedom and moral self-awareness or, simply put, the unity of negative and positive freedom that Mou attributes to Hegel.

It is important here to distinguish Mou’s idea from a view of political liberty in Confucianism that construes Confucian political modernity through Mencian and neo-Confucian ideas of human nature being good and everyone’s potential to become a sage-king. Speaking of the schism between moral and political freedom, Sungmoon Kim argues that political liberty in Confucianism should be grasped in light of Mencius’s view of kingship. Also invoking Nietzsche, Kim (2008, 401) argues that Nietzsche’s self-confident and narcissistic superman acts on “aesthetic construction of his fantasized body,” which breeds the tyranny of pathological realpolitik. In contrast, Confucians, especially Mencius, reinvented Nietzsche’s nature in a way that rediscovers the normative meaning of Heaven. More specifically, Mencius first transvaluates the Nietzschean superman into a “moral outcast,” and further “democraticized the sage-king’s (or the higher man’s) exclusive inner psychological power” by declaring that everyone has good human nature that enables them to become sage-kings (Kim 2008, 411). By positing every ordinary individual’s “possibility of becoming a sage,” which actually resonates with the Yang-Ming school of thought in neo-Confucianism, Kim believes that Mencian sources can be tapped into to justify political liberty.

As a staunch follower of the Mencian-neo-Confucian tradition, Mou would not disagree with tapping into its resources to support political liberty. He would also agree on the innate goodness grounded in human nature. Leave aside Kim’s interpretation of Nietzsche, however, Mou’s self-restriction thesis inveighs against reading the liberal spirit of Confucianism in the way Kim does. Self-restriction attempts to promote Confucian values in politics in a way that retains and safeguards individual liberty, which points back to the indirect connection between Confucian ethics and politics. For Mou, this distinction, though not articulated by previous Confucians as self-restriction, already embodies the spirits of “making way for others and leaving things as they are” (讓開散開, 物各付物) (Mou 2010, 136). The elite ought to observe the constraint of their political power and refrain from imposing their values on ordinary people while ordinary people are left with freedom and leeway to go about their own lives. What results is a virtue politics that not only endorses democracy as the “extensional presentation” of rationality but also sanctions precaution in perfectionist teachings in politics that repudiates an urge to “turn ordinary people into sages” (Mou 2010, 139).

Kim’s approach to justifying political liberty, albeit Mencius inspired, would strike Mou as politically dangerous and un-Confucian in that it can easily end up being a strong version of political perfectionism that suffocates the liberty that one is set to justify, though this may not be Kim’s original intention. In Kim’s account, persons are politically empowered not because they qua human beings are entitled to political liberty but because of the “moral charisma” they have potential to cultivate. This raises two serious questions—first, what to do with apathetic persons inherently incapable of inner goodness? Following Kim’s approach means that we tread on precarious ground whereby one either—to use a Foucauldian language—constructs Confucian psychiatric power to define psychopathy and excludes those lacking potential for goodness from political liberty altogether or comes up with strong perfectionist policies to force any deviants to fit into the personal imagery of Confucians. On top of that, the danger also looms large in political practice that politicians can capitalize on this line of justification to exclude and coerce some group of people in the name of helping with their “moral goodness.” Second, regardless of the existence and/or construction of the apatetic group, Kim’s justificatory approach implies and encourages overly perfectionist policies aimed at educating everyone to become a good person and ideally a sage, given that it is everyone’s potential to goodness, rather than the exemplar’s awareness of the necessity of restraining their own behavior, that grounds political liberty. In contrast, Mou’s account, though justifying democracy from a moral exemplar’s stance and their self-restriction rather than from the people themselves, avoids the danger of coercing people to be good precisely because it is, by definition, the ruler’s duty to restrict themselves. In short, Mou’s approach rejects the possibility of any arbitrary intrusion of extraordinary politics into the ordinary one.

Tension Between Ordinary and Extraordinary Politics

The tension between the ordinary politics valorized in Mou and the extraordinary politics of sage-kings can be grasped by engaging with Nietzsche’s critique of democracy and slave morality. As we have already seen, there are categorical differences between Nietzsche’s ideals of superman and great politics and those of Confucians, and Nietzsche’s ideals are more akin to the heroic politics that Mou is critical of than to Confucian politics. Nevertheless, Nietzsche’s insight bears on our appraisal of Mou’s ordinary politics not so much because of the former’s positive vision as what it runs up against, and it is these negative insights that can potentially create a schism between Mou’s ordinary politics of democracy and distinctive Confucian values that Mou attempts to transmit.

Despite many contemporary scholars’ effort to reconstruct Nietzsche as a radical democratic thinker and the early Nietzsche’s brief teasing with democratic pluralism, he later came to condemn democracy as dangerous “mob rule.” In later works, Nietzsche (1967, 78) spots a hatred of authority endemic to democracy, arguing that “the democratic idiosyncrasy which opposes everything that dominates and wants to dominate, the modern misarchism . . . has permeated the realm of the spirit.” More precisely, there are two ways in which Nietzsche’s diagnosis of democracy may collide with Confucian virtue politics, which cannot be easily addressed by self-restriction. First, democracy, for Nietzsche, promotes the rule of the multitude in a way that prioritizes the “herd’s instincts” at the expense of that of the genius. In a democracy, “you make abundant concessions to the democratic instincts of the modern soul,” which expresses “the plebeian antagonism to everything privileged and autocratic” and reinforces collective conformity (Nietzsche 1966, 30). What pervades politics, then, is “eloquent and prolifically scribbling slaves of the democratic taste and its ‘modern ideas,’” whose distinctive features are “the universal green-pasture happiness of the herd, with security, lack of danger, comfort, and an easier life for everyone” (Nietzsche 1966, 54). The challenge for Mou, then, is not that Confucian politics needs to accommodate the instinct of the many or the spirit of leaving things as they are, but that the “democratic taste” ascends to such sacred status as to hijack the political agenda and squeeze out the virtuous disposition and action essential to Confucianism.

Following from this is an even more serious problem, which can turn on a gulf between morals of Confucianism and democracy that Mou attempts to bridge. For Nietzsche (1966, 100), underlying herd morality is a corrosive form of the “will to power”—that is, “compulsion” by which one group tries to take control of others. By associating democracy with a quintessential expression of slave morality, he claims that “the democratic movement is not only a form of the decay of political organization but a form of the decay, namely the diminution of man, making him mediocre and lowering his value” (Nietzsche 1966, 117). To briefly recall Nietzsche’s analysis of “good/bad” and “good/evil,” the good/evil distinction resulted from a slave revolt against the domination of the ancient understandings of the good as aristocratic and noble—which stands for the qualities of his superman—and the bad as common, plebeian, and low in social status. Through the priestly transformation spearheaded by Christianity, what was previously good becomes evil, and the “ressentiment” of the slaves struck a moral tone in a way that replaced the ancient good with the values of the “common man” (Nietzsche 1967, Essay 1; 1966, “What Is Noble”). What resulted is that “the wretched alone are the good; the poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God, blessedness is for them alone—and you, the powerful and noble, are on the contrary the evil, the cruel, the lustful, the insatiable, the godless to all eternity” (Nietzsche 1967, 34). What is noble for Nietzsche surely does not come close to Confucian nobility, and we do not need to follow Nietzsche all the way down in his caricature of democracy, but his reasoning does indicate a tension between Confucian nobility as embodied in sages, which one needs to work hard toward through self-cultivation, and egalitarian tendencies in democracy to question the elite’s claim to authority, nobility, and moral superiority. Some Confucians even suggest the further retreat of Confucianism into personal and social ethos, ⁸ but the question remains whether there can be a citadel at all in a democratic society if democracy symbolizes a mass revolt with which Confucian virtue politics is inherently at odds.

The best strategy against this Nietzschean skepticism perhaps lies in two aspects of Mou’s thought examined previously. The first aspect lies in a distinction between democracy as a form of government and democracy as a way of life (Chan 2013, chap. 4). The scope of Mou’s discussion falls into the former, whereas for Nietzsche democracy means something much stronger and thicker. The issue that puzzles Mou is how Confucian virtue politics can adopt democracy as a form of government, and there is no indication that Mou attempts to collapse the chasm between Confucian and democratic ways of life, which can potentially reduce subversive democratic radicalism as emphasized by Nietzsche. Second, Mou can turn to the crucial notion of self-restriction to mitigate, if not dissipate, Nietzsche’s worry, not only because democratic control as a form of government does not presuppose or encourage militant citizens in defiance of moral teachings but also because self-restriction is to be exercised by the Confucian exemplars who have wisdom and agency to proactively shape the morals of the wider society. Despite making way for ordinary politics, the extraordinary elements of Confucian politics do not simply peter out but unfold themselves indirectly within the confines of democratic government. In short, the creative tension between ordinary and extraordinary politics offers unique challenges to, and opportunities for, the redemption of Confucian politics.

Stability of Self-Restriction Politics

Granted that, despite Nietzchean challenges, there is no fundamental incoherence in Mou’s justification of democracy through Confucian self-restriction, one may still wonder how stable a political order built on self-restriction can be. Against the worry raised by Jiang Qing and Tang Zhonggang that Mou’s claim to political independence cannot be guaranteed given that moral subjectivity is bound to resurface (Jiang 2003; Tang 2005, 5), I understand Mou (2010, 58–60) as meaning that even if citizens express traditional Confucian values, they are not permitted to use them to undermine democratic institutions created by objective rationality. As Mou himself puts it, “science and democracy have their independent characters” (Mou 2010, 56). He continues, “when people situate themselves in this objective structure (of democracy), politics manifests its independence and forms an independent realm, thereby temporarily dissociating itself from morality” (Mou 2010, 59; my emphasis). What citizens can, as they should, do, however, is acting on Confucian values (e.g., ritual propriety, righteousness) to facilitate and sustain democratic participation because this amoral structure of democracy results from the requirement of virtue politics, and the political liberty and rights ordinary people enjoy in democracy should not stop at entertaining themselves but connect with and nurture the good heartmind. This is the limited scope of reconciliation of Confucian ethics with politics that I identify in Mou’s account, which is reconciliation at the citizenry level.

Although keeping the political sphere independent is Mou’s strength—which is precisely why his account can justify democracy on Confucian terms—the strength can also turn into a weakness. Angle is at least partly right in advocating “an embracing of properly designed political values and institutions as a central part of being ethical” (Angle 2012, 35). If Confucian ethical judgment is indeed universal as held by Mou, then it seems unreasonable to allow for no possibility of Confucian values shaping democratic politics, which points to reconciliation of Confucian ethics and politics at the institutional (contra citizenry) level. The question is whether, in accordance with the spirit of benevolence politics, Mou can allow Confucian values to not only inspire citizens to comply with, but actively shape, the kind of democracy they live under. After all, democracy does not need to take a singular, unified form but can come with many variants and types. For instance, speaking of “linguistic artefacts,” Jean-Paul Gagnon (2018) points us to those thousands of ideas and potential practices the single word “democracy” entails in different cultural and social contexts. The question then is to what extent Confucian teachings where rationality for politics ultimately resides can actively foster a Confucian democracy that socially and institutionally fuses Confucianism and democracy together.

It seems that Mou faces a serious dilemma here as the distinct way in which he justifies democracy structurally prevents him from further accommodating Confucian values in politics beyond reconciliation at the citizenry level. It is true that Mou warns against both “pan-moralism,” which shrugs off democratic politics, and “pan-politics-ism,” which permanently seals off politics from ethics. Ironically, though, his warning that democracy should not stop at “pan-politics-ism” looms large precisely because of the approach he adopts.

In arguing for self-restriction and the (temporary) independence of the political realm, Mou does not simply come up with a new set of ethical reasoning; rather, he applies a categorically different mode of reasoning than he does vis-à-vis the ethical realm. In Mou’s account, democracy is justified by practicing objective rationality, which differs categorically from moral subjectivity applied to ethical reasoning. The two kinds of rationality or subjectivity pertain to distinct modes of metaphysical understanding (Mou 2003a, 38–45). Given that democracy is laid down when one goes beyond the metaphysical understanding of moral subjectivity and adopts objective rationality, and that Mou takes moral subjectivity to demand a natural flow of ethics to politics as ancient Confucians did, it is therefore impossible to stay within moral subjectivity and not demand measures bypassing democratic institutions. The crux of the matter is that it is not Confucian moral reasoning itself but a mode of reasoning entirely different from the Confucian one that directly justifies and sustains democracy. The implication is therefore that if we allow Confucian ethics to not only support but shape the type of democracy, there will come a point where Confucians are tempted to get around democracy itself to directly implement what they think of as benevolent politics. The dilemma facing Mou, therefore, is that either he needs to keep democratic institutions strictly independent of ethics by adopting objective rationality and only permitting moral subjectivity to help citizens participate in democracy, or alternatively, shifts to Confucian moral subjectivity, which then inevitably extends itself to a point where it surpasses democracy that Mou is assiduous in defending.

This difficulty with Mou’s account is inextricably associated with the overall approach that he adopts in separating off Confucian politics from ethics. As the previous discussion shows, the problem of deep reconciliation seems inherent in Mou’s account because he does not allow for the possibilities of directly justifying democracy in Confucian terms. Respect for democracy requires one to shift to a different mode of metaphysical understanding than is embodied in Confucianism. Hence, the issue still remains as to whether it is possible, from a Confucian perspective, to justify democracy while also leaving open the possibility of what Roger Ames (2020, 403) calls a “hybrid model of cultural change” where Confucianism and democracy interact and influence one another to form a democratic vista distinct from the liberal one. In this light, the stability concern shows both flexibility and limit of Mou’s “self-restriction” approach.