03.12.07
Essay: Critique of Max Weber’s Religion of China
Critique of Max Weber’s Religion of Chian
Upon completion of the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber initiated a project to answer this question: why has modern capitalism only emerged in the western world? Or, more specifically, what qualities of the protestant ethic, i.e. puritan ethic, marked its difference with those of other major traditions to solely allow a western emergence of the spirit of capitalism? This project explains the structure and content of his Religion of China; examining Confucianism and Taoism from the particular cultural-historical background of
The concept of salvation, present in Protestantism and absent in Weberian conception of Confucianism, shall be the first point of comparison. The concept of salvation is pivotal to the Protestant religion; it places a goal distant and separate from life that essentially checks one’s behavior in life; a subject faces two choices, viz. the morally upright life or eternal condemnation. This choice results from a “contrast between ‘god’ or ‘nature’ and ‘statutory law’ or ‘convention’”[6]. That is to say, a dichotomy of the supra-mundane and the mundane is established, with the vision of the former closely monitoring the ethics of the latter. It is through this separation, along with the rationalization of a worldly asceticism that the protestant ethic evolves into the spirit of capitalism. However, as Weber notes, the Christian concept of salvation is absent in the Confucian tradition—“a conflict in the Christian manner between the interest in the salvation of one’s soul and the demands of the natural social order was inconceivable”.[7] Instead of focusing one’s attention to a distant, supra-mundane reality, the Confucian is “saved” from “barbaric lack of education”.[8] The Confucian ethics considers this worldly life of paramount importance and seeks improvement with education solely within the scope of a conceivable, natural life. Weber comprehends it as a “system of radical worldly optimism [that] succeeded in removing the basic pessimistic tension between the world and the supra-mundane destination of the individual”.[9] Because it lacks “any tension between nature and deity, between ethical demand and human shortcoming, consciousness of sin and need for salvation, conduct on earth and comprehension in the beyond, religious duty and sociopolitical reality”, Confucianism cannot support “conduct through inner forces freed of tradition and convention”.[10] Whereas the existence of such tension creates man’s forceful adjustment of the world, taken as material, to his internal ideas, the lack thereof, as manifested in the case of Confucianism, harmonizes to adjust “to the outside, to the conditions of the ‘world’”, producing a “style of life… characterized by essentially negative traits”.[11] Indeed, Weber sees Confucian rationalism a process that deters man from forming a “unified personality” which is “a whole placed methodically under a transcendental goal”.[12] Hence, the Weberian perception of Confucianism is one that lacks any touch of divinity; without transcendence, manifested in the tension between the supra-mundane and the mundane, without salvation, it imprisons souls to a world of traditions and conventions. This world, in addition, is one of inter-human relations, bound by propriety, without duties to a supra-human divinity, or even a sense of abstract community. A person is to sustain his five relationships with his lord, his father, his brothers, his wife, and his friends in harmony, fulfilling a personist principle, “undoubtedly as great a barrier to impersonal rationalization as it was generally to impersonal matter of factness”.[13] Hence, lacking the concept of salvation serves as the first great obstacle for Confucian ethic to advance to a spirit of capitalism. However, missing also in the Confucian tradition is the notion of asceticism, whose worldly form plays a catalyst in the transformation of the Protestant ethic into the spirit of capitalism.
Asceticism, evident in the Protestant ethics, produces a “relentlessly and religiously systematized utilitarianism… to live “in” the world and yet not be ‘of’ it”, which creates “superior rational aptitude and therewith the spirit of the vocational man, which… was denied to Confucianism”.[14] On the contrary, the Confucian way of life, though rational, is “determined, unlike Puritanism, from without rather than from within”, resulting in “mere sobriety and thriftiness combined with acquisitiveness and regard for wealth… far from representing and far from releasing the ‘capitalist spirit,’ in the sense that this is found in the vocational man of the modern economy”.[15] According to Weber, “asceticism and contemplation, mortification and escape from the world were not only unknown in Confucianism but were despised as parasitism”.[16] As a result, the Confucian never engages in the Puritan—Protestant par excellence—form of “rationalism”, of which “the typical Puritan earned plenty, spent little, and reinvested his income as capital in rational capitalist enterprise out of an asceticist compulsion to save”.[17] Instead, “the typical Confucian used his own and his family’s savings in order to acquire a literary education and to have himself trained for the examinations… thus he gained the basis for a cultured status position”.[18] Therefore, the Confucian ethic sans ascetic element produces a kind of contradiction that drives one into fame rather than capitalist enterprises; he lacks the transcendental, ascetic goal of the Puritan, “the true Christian, the other-worldly and inner-worldly asceticist, [who] wishes to be nothing more than a tool of his God”.[19] While the Confucian sought worldly pursuits, no great economic accumulation results; while the Puritan eschews the very same pursuit, the spirit of capitalism begets. The result from the lack of salvation and asceticism in Confucian doctrines embedded in the particular historical development of an early patrimonial imperial bureaucracy creates a society with life-aspiration focused on status, manifests in a privileged literati class with prestige in officialdom as its highest aspirations in life.
The patrimonial system trains a “superior man” mastered in the art of propriety who both opposes commercial activities and seeks personal gains in office, and who opposes useful training of a socially useful man and seeks self-cultivation through learning. In short, he is expected to become a moral man, not a Puritan individual who seeks his own salvation and engages in worldly asceticism from his sense of duty, of calling from God; however, his very focus on worldly morality produces a fortune-hunter without real spiritual guidance. On one hand, the Confucian opposes commercial activities, which Confucius denounces to be those of profit and unsuitable for a superior man. He further separates himself from the Protestant ideal of one who becomes a tool; instead, “the fundamental assertion, ‘a cultured man is not a tool’ meant that he was an end in himself and not just a means for a specified useful purpose”.[20] On the other hand, the only way for a Confucian to prove himself a “cultured man” or “superior man” is through the gaining of official position through various examination systems; he has no God to reaffirm his inner value—only societal recognition would serve the purpose. In addition, because the Confucian generates “an absolutely agnostic and essentially negative mood opposed to all hopes for a beyond”, he places his “’messianic’ hope for a this-worldly Savior-Emperor” and employs himself to be an official, an aide, to that glorified individual.[21] As Weber observes, the Confucian goes as far as “deifying ‘wealth’” and engages in unlawful activities of acquiring wealth in the short terms of his office, while at the same time show condescendence to merchants and profiteering.[22] The Confucian, because of his worldly aspirations in life, engages in adjustment to vanity fair, acknowledging wealth while surrendering to enjoyment. The resulting ethic from this aspiration, along with the previously stated absence of salvation and asceticism, is a rationalism of adjustment that opposes the mentality of capitalism. [23] Further, Confucianism does not lead to any formulations of newer ethics as it necessarily supports and reinforces its current, patrimonial system, as its “reason” is a “rationalism of order” essentially “pacifist in nature”.[24] Hence, in drawing these various differences Confucian ethic hold from protestant ethic, Weber postulates a possible explanation to a historical fact: while modern spirit of capitalism emerged in the west through rationalization of the protestant ethic, its impossibility of development in
This paper, then, has compared Weber’s notion of Confucianism with Protestantism as an attempt to explain
To properly understand Confucianism, especially its heavy emphasis on the world here and now, one has to first attempt an understanding of its basic weltanschauung. A key concept, anthropocosmic unity, ought to be explained prior to the discussion of Confucian asceticism, life-aspiration, and ultimately, harmony between the supra-mundane and the mundane world. Anthropocosmic unity, or “unity between heaven and man” (tianrenheyi), “has been generally regarded a feature uniquely characteristic of Chinese religious and philosophical imagination”.[26] In Confucian belief there always exists a concept of heaven (tian) that, contrary to Weber’s notion that it completely lacks metaphysics, are at least omniscient and omnipresent, though not necessarily omnipotent.[27] Chinese emperors called themselves “sons of heavens” as direct inheritors of the will of heaven; the concept of “mandate of heaven” is further used to justify the transition of dynasties.[28] This heaven is omnipresent because everything on earth is encompassed in heaven; it is omniscient because heaven and human form a co-operative relationship in seeing, hearing, and adjusting to the environment.[29] However, unlike the Protestant God, Heaven assumes not the sole power of creation, and hence, not omnipotent. It is through this distinction that the Confucian heaven doesn’t stand as a force completely separate from man, and allows a different type of transcendence which enables man to become a co-creator with heaven.[30] Ying-Shi Yü, following the tradition of Karl Jaspers, notices that during a period known as “Axial breakthrough” different religious traditions “led directly to the emergence of the dichotomy between the actual world and the world beyond”, which “essentially what transcendence is all about: the actual world is transcended but not negated”.[31] Confucian transcendence, however, does not fully qualify this condition: “In the Chinese breakthrough, the two worlds, actual and transcendental, do not appear to have been sharply divided”.[32]. The result is a tradition that focuses on an “inward transcendence” through the notion of anthropocosmic unity (tianrenheyi), one which links the “two worlds, actual and transcendental… by the purified mind/heart in a way ‘neither identical nor separate’”.[33] Yü distinguishes the Confucian transcendence from the west: “The Chinese transcendental world is not systematically externalized, formalized, or objectified… After the Axial breakthrough, Chinese thinkers tended not to apply their imaginative powers to nature, shape, characteristics, and so on of the world beyond… This Chinese attitude contrasts sharply with the Western predilection to imagine, often vividly and profusely, about the world beyond with the aid of speculative reason”.[34] The path to this anthropocosmic unity, undoubtedly, is self-cultivation; the Confucian thrives for “the quest for sagehood”, as Julia Ching says, “the heart of Confucianism”.[35] Without an understanding of anthropocosmic unity, this quest indeed would seem Weberian Confucian and worldly in nature; however, with proper understanding, this quest is now a Confucian’s path to become united with Heaven, to find inner transcendence, to work his own salvation in this world, but nonetheless retain an understanding of the greater world of Heaven.
Similar to the concept of salvation, those of asceticism and life-aspiration also exist for Confucianism. Ching notices that important concepts of “self-conquest” (keji) for “restoring propriety” (fuli) are found in Confucian Analects. It is a process of continuous self-examination which Neo-Confucians used to keep “spiritual account” of themselves.[36] This asceticism, however, “remained a disciple of moderation, which did not inspire any flight into deserts or produce any monastic movement. The Confcuian teaching was to control one’s passions, not to live as if one were without them. Besides, Confucian asceticism was always practiced for the sake of a higher goal: that of rendering the individual more humane for others, in the service of a larger group, namely, the family and the society”. [37] Confucianism also contains life-aspirations beyond office-seeking of the literati class, as Weber suggests. Earlier in the paper it is already stated that the Confucian seeks sagehood and anthropocosmic unity as his life-long goal. It is perhaps more lucid to term the Confucian life-aspiration one of “holistic humanism”. Drawing from the opening lines of Great Learning, Confucian scholar Tu Weiming notes that Confucian ethic is one of humanism, in the sense that it emphasizes on the human ability of self-transformation and self-cultivation, and one of holism because it perceives one’s conduct of self, family, state, and all-under-heaven (tianxia) as inseparable parts of an expending concentric circle, with “self” serving as its inner core.[38] Indeed, “for Confucianism, life is [] a process of continuous self-cultivation and self-transformation leading to self-transcendence, the realization of one’s authentic nature in which the all-pervasive principle of Heaven are fully manifested”.[39]
Since Confucianism contains asceticism, life-aspiration, and salvation, why does it lack seeds to the capitalist mentality? Weberian observation of the socioeconomic reality results from fundamental Confucian disregard of tension for the sake of harmony, or he. The asceticism described above is to be distinguished from the Puritan asceticism, which relies on a contradictory tension between service to God and accumulation of capital. The fundamental approach to Confucian asceticism—harmony through moderation—eliminates an asceticism of tension; a Confucian would find the Puritan model unnatural. Evident in Confucianism is its life-aspiration, but this, too, lacks a notion of “tension” that the protestant model relies. Whereas the Protestant ethic creates a life-aspiration through calling of God to become “nothing more than a tool of his God, in [which] he thought his destiny”, the Confucian would see this tension between God and man, or master and his tool, as a disruption of the cosmic harmony.[40] Indeed, while the Protestant man sets to master the nature entrusted by God, the Confucian lives with the nature, a part of the heaven with whom he unites. Fundamentally, it is the Confucian salvation, a complete internal process of self-cultivation and inner transcendence, which renders capitalist mentality indifferent to him. The capitalist mentality, as Weber describes, results from the rationalization of a tension between asceticism and fulfilling God’s will for material production; the Confucian rationalization of inner transcendence, asceticism without monasticism, and life-aspiration of holistic humanism, does not need a capitalist mentality to serve its will. The quest for sagehood does not need material and economic manifestations. The office-seeking mentality and profiteering of officeholders observed by Weber are but deviants to the appropriate interpretation of the Confucian tradition—similar deviations exist in other traditions as well. These deviations should not be used to judge the normative ethic of the Confucian life-aspiration.
At this point, though, it is necessary to consider Weber’s approach to Religion of China itself; key to his theory is the concept of “rationalization”, which is the process of tension between every religion’s rational, ethical imperative with irrationalities, or traditions of the world.[41] Confucianism abandons possible tensions for harmony; to judge it in terms of a theory based on fundamental tension perhaps dwarfs its true light. For a Confucian, rationalization of his self-cultivation and quest for anthropocosmic unity signifies moral bankruptcy and justification for politico-economic gains of vanity. Such a process cannot be accepted by a tradition that never separates facts from morality, or, human from his perception of heaven. In conclusion, the Weberian analysis in Religion of China materializes a convincing argument to explain
[1] Max Weber, Religion of
[2] Xinzhong Yao, An Introduction to Confucianism (
[3] Weber, 226.
[4] Ibid., 248.
[5]
[6] Weber, 210.
[7] Ibid., 210.
[8] Ibid., 228.
[9] Ibid., 235.
[10] Ibid., 235-236.
[11] Ibid., 236.
[12] Ibid., 236.
[13] Ibid., 236.
[14] Ibid., 247.
[15] Ibid., 247
[16] Ibid., 229
[17] Ibid., 247.
[18] Ibid., 247.
[19] Ibid., 248.
[20] Ibid., 160.
[21] Ibid., 145
[22] Ibid., 237
[23] Ibid., 238.
[24] Ibid., 169.
[25] Ibid., 248.
[26] Ying-shih Yü, “Between the Heavenly and the Human”, in Confucian Spirituality, Volume One, ed. Tu Weiming and Mary Evelyn Tucker (
[27] Weber, 155.
[28]
[29] Ibid., 175
[30] Roger T. Ames, “Li and the A-theistic Religiousness of Classical Confucianism”, in Confucian Spirituality, Volume One, ed. Tu Weiming and Mary Evelyn Tucker (
[31] Yü, 66.
[32] Ibid., 67.
[33] Ibid., 77.
[34] Ibid., 78.
[35] Julia Ching, “What is Confucian Spirituality?”, in Confucian Spirituality, Volume One, ed. Tu Weiming and Mary Evelyn Tucker (
[36] Ibid., 86.
[37] Ibid., 87.
[38] Tu Weiming, “The Ecological Turn in New Confucian Humanism: Implications for
[39]
[40] Weber, 248.
[41] Ibid., 227.
