Let's Not Overlook the \"Human\" in \"Human Rights\". Reading Confucius alongside Hegel, Mauss, and Levinas

In this lunch lecture, IIAS fellow Prof. Sinkwan Cheng will use a comparative philosophy method to draw out the deep ethical, social, and political meanings of the Confucian idea of ren. Her goal is to introduce to a non-Chinese audience a non-Western ethics and politics for preventing crimes against humanity.
 

At the drafting stage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Chinese representative P. C. Chang (張彭春) proposed the “humanization of man” [1] as the foremost mission of the Declaration. For good reasons: for the Chinese who had suffered an estimated loss of 10,000,000-20,000,000 lives in World War II, crimes against humanity were committed not because of the absence of the concept of “rights” in the world, but because people have lost their humanity and humaneness, as well as their ability to recognize the victims of such crimes as human beings. Chang’s pleading fell on deaf ears.

World history since the adoption of the UDHR by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 10 December 1948 seems to render it time to reconsider Chang’s proposal. Rights discourse has become ever more elaborate and sophisticated over the past 65 years. Yet the long list of human rights violations simultaneous with the burgeoning of rights discourse should enjoin us to reexamine whether “rights” were not yet another abstract notion hypostatized into a monotheistic God, and whether it would not be more to the point to refocus on the human in “human rights,” and to reprioritize the flesh-and-blood human being before the intangible idea called “rights.”

It is not surprising that in calling for the humanization of humanity, P. C. Chang drew extensively from Confucian philosophy whose humanism had inspired some philosophes in their formulations of rights discourse and their critiques of tyranny (including tyranny of the church and tyranny of absolutism). Chang’s “humanization of man” is an idea taken directly from Confucius’s “ren ren” (仁人)—a core idea in Confucian ethics. This lecture will examine the contributions that could be made by Confucianism’s idea of “humanizing human being” in preventions of human rights violations. It will attempt to elucidate the many deep layers of the ethical, social, and political meanings of  ren (仁）so far neglected in scholarship on Confucianism. The profound contributions that could have been made by ren to the UDHR (an opportunity that had regretfully been missed) will be elaborated by engaging Confucius's ren in dialogue with Hegel's idea of love, Mauss's formulation of the gift, and Levinas's discussion of the suffering face of the other which holds me hostage and compels me to clothe the naked and feed the hungry.
 

[1] The classical Chinese language is not gendered, and a literal translation of ren ren would be “humanizing human being.” Chang used “man” to avoid the awkward repetition in favor of idiomatic English usage of the time.

Every third Wednesday of the month one of the IIAS researchers will present his/her work-in-progress in an informal setting to their colleagues and other interested attendees, followed by a lunch provided by IIAS. These lunch lectures are organized to give the research community the opportunity to freely discuss ongoing research and to exchange thoughts.

Lunch is provided. Please register using the form below.