A Confucian conception of the self: A Nagelian reconstruction

Abstract

It has become a commonsensical platitude that one of the central claims of Confucianism is that human nature is good. Yet, there has never been any commonly agreed sense of the saying, and more controversial still is how it can be justified at all. Instead of engaging in a historical-textual analysis of the Confucian classics aiming at digging up the “real” doctrines upheld by the various Confucian masters throughout the history, I will, in this paper, provide a philosophical reconstruction of a Confucian conception of human self, which incorporates the core and valuable Confucian elements, in terms of Thomas Nagel's notion of the subjective-objective structure as the fundamental feature of human subjects. I want to show how my Nagelian conception of Confucian self can make good sense of the complicated nature of and the intricate relations among the rational, the emotional, the communal and the ethical dimensions of the Confucian self, and how a plausible understanding of the claim that human nature is good can be achieved in light of it.