Early Confucian Moral Psychology

Abstract

In this chapter, I discuss an aspect of early Confucian ethical thought that arguably is one of its more distinctive characteristics, namely, its emphasis on self-transformation. By self-transformation, I refer to the transformation of oneself that comes about as a result of one’s own reflective efforts at self-improvement; the process that involves such efforts I will refer to as “self-cultivation.” This aspect of Confucian thought is related to its distinctive nature as a kind of ethical thought. Suppose we use the term “ethics” broadly in the sense that an ethical concern has to do with a concern with how to live, or how one should live, where the scope of “one” is supposed to include most of those whom we nowadays would refer to as “human beings.” This way of describing the scope of “one” is intended to accommodate the fact that the term ren 人 (human beings), which is the term closest to “human beings” in early Chinese, is not understood in biological terms in early China and, on some scholarly views, might have a more restricted scope than that of the contemporary term “human beings.”