ABSTRACT
Ethics presumes the substantiality of a self that possesses a putative nature (xing), which, in Confucian terms, is more than a philosophical problem of academic, anthropological interest. Confucian conceptions of human nature are brought to bear on questions of transcendence and ultimacy, such that xing may be conceived as the whole of reality, as well as the wellspring of varied manifestations of the deliberatively acting and critically thinking self. In the words of Mou Zongsan, “xing is that which flows down from the reality mandated by heaven and is fully embodied in the self” (Mou, 1968, 31). For Mou, xing, fully encapsulated in the self and enlivened with moral-ethical instincts and impulses, encompasses the whole of the cosmos. To the extent that “nothing is outside of the ‘reality of the self’s nature’ (xingti), the cosmic order is the moral-ethical order; the moral-ethical order is the cosmic order” (ibid., 37). This ontological interlarding of the self and the cosmos (and the interpenetration of the natural and the moral-ethical), unique to the Chinese way of thinking about the individual and greater reality, cannot be adequately represented by such Western terms as “nature,” “essence,” “substance,” “being,” or “reality,” which do not quite capture the meaning and import of the self as the “morally creative reality.” The neologism of “xingti” (the reality of the self’s nature) is confected precisely to connote the creative ontological quintessence that inheres in the individual self (ibid., 21-41).1
