Confucian Anthropocentric Environmentalism

Discussion

Source: Killing Three Birds with One Stone: A Confucian Institutional Response to Climate Change and Other Challenges. By Tongdong Bai, Professor of Philosophy, Fudan University.

Tongdon Bai:

A word of warning:

"Confucianism is a very long tradition, and as such, it contains ideas that contradict one another. I cannot go into the details of these in this short paper, but let me just assert that all the Confucian ideas used in this paper can be traced back to or are consistent with the ideas in the Confucian classic the Mencius. All translations of this text are mine. For a different translation or for the passages I refer to, see Lau 2003."

Excerpted text:

"In the next section, I will argue that domestic and international institutions that are inspired by Confucianism can address climate change better than the present democratic and international institutions. Before I do that, in this section, I will offer a Confucian account of why human beings should care about the environment.

Confucius (551-379 BCE) was known to be primarily concerned with the well-being of human beings. When a stable was burned down, he asked about whether any human being got hurt, but didn’t ask about the horses (10.12). Responding to the question of why he doesn’t abandon the hopeless human affairs and escape to the wild, Confucius said he had to be associated with human beings, and not with birds and beasts. Despite this “naturalistic” anthropocentrism, according to another early and very important Confucian thinker, Mencius (372-289 BCE), compassion, or caring about others, is a universal moral sentiment that defines human beings as human beings and distinguishes them from ‘birds and beasts’. Though universal, this sentiment is rather tender, and it needs to be nurtured in order for us to become fully human. By cultivating this universal seed of compassion, we learn to care about family members first and then expand this care to neighbors, then to people of one’s county, province, and state, then to all human beings in the world, and eventually even to animals, plants, and things in the whole world. Historically, the emphasis on universal care by the Song-Ming Neo-Confucians may have been a response to the challenge from Buddhism, but the ideal of all-inclusive care is already implied by Mencius’s idea of expanding care and can be considered a natural development of it. The care that should be expanded even to plants is beautifully illustrated by some anecdotes about two Song Neo-Confucians, Zhou Dunyi周敦颐 (1017–1073) and Cheng Yi程颐 (1033–1107). It was recorded that Zhou refused to cut the grass in front of his windows, and when asked why he refused to do so, he said that it was because he felt ‘as if [the grass] were my own family’ (Cheng and Cheng 1992, Vol. 3, 54). Cheng, when he was a tutor for the emperor, saw him playfully breaking a twig off a weeping willow tree. He scolded the still very young emperor by saying, that ‘[the tree] was being reborn and growing in early spring, and [you] shouldn’t break [a twig from it] and damage [it] for no reason’ (Cheng and Cheng 1992, Appendix, 266).

To be clear, according to Mencius, all-embracing care is an ideal that everyone has the potential to achieve but only the few can make it into a reality. Moreover, even for the few, care is and should be hierarchical, meaning that, usually, human needs come before environmental ones. It may, then, be sympathetic to those who are caught in a dilemma between economic and environmental needs, in contrast to some ‘environmental fundamentalists’, who put environmental needs on a par with or even higher than human needs. But the Confucian idea of human needs is rather complex. A good life is not a life of merely animalistic survival but a life that is worthy of human beings. For example, a Confucian cannot accept the possibility that although people may live in an air-conditioned house, there are chimneys next to the house that constantly blow out dark smoke, because living as a human means having a pleasant environment so that we can appreciate nature and life itself.

Living as a human, for Mencius, also means that one should maintain certain family relationships (see, for example, Mencius 3A4). We can also see this from the aforementioned cultivation of care through family. Caring for family means that we should care for the needs of our ancestors and future generations. That is, we should cherish what our ancestors have left us and leave enough for future generations. Otherwise put, the human interests that are at the centre of human concerns are not just one’s short-term material interests but long-term material and spiritual needs as well.

In sum, from the Confucian perspective, there are several reasons for human beings to care about the environment. First, though Confucians acknowledge the centrality of human needs and are sympathetic to poor people prioritizing immediate survival over environmental costs, they also believe that a human life is more than merely animalistic survival and that we need a pleasant environment so that we can enjoy a proper and decent human life. Second, through family, our care has a temporal dimension that connects us with past and future generations, and caring for them requires us to think about long-term material and spiritual interests. Third, also through family, our care has a spatial dimension that connects us with other human beings, and with their past and future generations. Indeed, this spatial dimension doesn’t stop at human beings, but can be expanded to the environment, including animals, plants, rivers, mountains, and other things in the environment. As we have seen in the previous section, the root cause of our neglect of addressing climate change is our lack of concern with other living human beings and future generations, and the Confucian reasons for protecting the environment address this root cause, despite the fact that Confucianism is anthropocentric and Confucian care is hierarchical. Indeed, the temporal dimension of the Confucian care is missing even in cosmopolitanism, and Confucianism is four-dimensional cosmopolitanism while the typical cosmopolitanism is only three-dimensional."