of society as the horizon within which to pursue the humanization project or to resist that structure as the chief obstacle to the implementation of this project. To bring this question into focus, consider two circumstances.
One circumstance has been characteristic of most societies and cultures in world history before the national and world revolutions of the last two hundred–odd years. It is the association of power, exchange, and sentiment in the same social relationships. Its characteristic formula is the sentimentalizing of unequal exchange—a relation between individuals in more powerful and less powerful roles, involving a trade of practical advantage, overlaid by reciprocal allegiance. The patron-client relation, so precious to the ancient Romans, provides a characteristic example. It was in such a circumstance that the most comprehensive statement of the ethic of roles—classical Confucianism—emerged.
Another circumstance is that of a nineteenth-century European society with its liberal ideology. Now the authoritative ideological formula proscribes what relations between patrons and clients require: the mixture of power, exchange, and allegiance. One of the consequences is to draw a distinction between the domestic sphere, in which the mixture of sentiment, power, and exchange continues to be tolerated or even cherished, and the workaday world, in which such a mixture has become anathema. In this world, exchange supposedly rules, and power is validated by consent, by the requirements of cooperation, and by the rights of property.
In such a setting, speculative thought may seek to base and to expound ethics in a discourse of universalistic rules and principles. However, this academic moral philosophy will bear little resemblance to the forms of moral thinking and argument deployed in much of social life. A discourse of role-based claims and responsibilities will continue to prevail in practice, although recast on the basis of the new assumptions. What chiefly replaces the amalgam of exchange, power, and allegiance is an ethic of professionalism: respect for the public duties pertaining to the specialized roles that the individual performs.
The role-based responsibilities may be owed to strangers, with whom the individual had no preexisting relation. As a result, it becomes impossible to accept the distinction, characteristic of societies at ease with the mixture of exchange, power, and allegiance, between a realm of high-trust relationships among insiders and of no-trust relationships among strangers. A modicum of trust, albeit of low trust, among strangers, must be universalized as the indispensable backdrop to an ethic of professional responsibility.
Instead of supposing that we owe everything to those to whom we have a connection that precedes or transcends the will and nothing to those with whom we have no such connection, we come by steps to think that we owe something to everyone, but that what exactly we owe is modulated by the roles we perform in society with respect to them. On the foundation of minimalist and universal trust among strangers, we superimpose the more stringent demands that attend the performance of our individual roles. The market economy itself can be represented as a form of simplified cooperation among strangers, unnecessary when there is high trust and impossible, given the ineradicable incompleteness of contracts, when there is no trust.
Gradually, the levels of both generalized trust and specialized responsibility can rise. Their joint ascent will, in this new circumstance, signal the advance of the project of humanization. The individual, however, may continue to live in two worlds: the public world of work and of dealings among strangers, given over to the new moral dispensation, and the domestic world in which, uncomfortably and under pressure, the ancient marriage of exchange, power, and allegiance survives.
This second world may be more than a residue of the old, now forbidden combination. It may also be the seat of a prophecy of a higher form of life. Its guiding aspiration may cease to be the superimposition of allegiance and sentiment on the harsh realities of power and exchange and become instead the softening of the tension between spirit and structure, love and routine, with regard to the possibilities of reconciliation between two individual beings. The life plan of each becomes part of the other one’s plan. Here, however, we reach the limits of a role-oriented mode of moral thinking and confront problems and possibilities with which such a form of thought is unable to deal.
Criticism: betrayal of the past
I now apply to the humanization of the world the same method of criticism applied earlier to the overcoming of the world: its power to realize the goals that were common to these three orientations to existence, its prospect of conforming human nature to its view of the good, and its relation to the concerns that may or should be central to the next revolution in the history of religion.
There are two crucial respects in which the humanization of the world, as exemplified by the teachings of Confucius, comes up short by the standard of its fidelity to the aspirations shared by the religious revolutions of the past. The first respect concerns its relation to the dialectic between transcendence and immanence: the most important point of contrast between the religions and philosophies that exemplify the three orientations to life considered here and the beliefs that they replaced. The second respect in which the humanization of the world fails to do justice to the shared element in the religious revolutions of the past has to do with its attitude to social division and hierarchy.
The assertion of transcendence—of the transcendence of the divine or the sacred over nature and society as well as of our human powers to transcend the circumstances in which we find ourselves—remains insecure within this approach to existence. Nothing in its anti-metaphysical metaphysics or in its naturalistic moral psychology provides an adequate basis on which to affirm our power to resist and overcome the social and conceptual regimes in which we find ourselves enmeshed.
For the Semitic monotheisms, the chief instance of the struggle with the world before the rise of the modern secular projects of political or personal emancipation, transcendence takes the unmistakable form of the separation of God from the world. The problem then becomes how this chasm, once opened up, is to be bridged: through some countervailing embodiment of the divine in humanity and in history. For Buddhism or its precursors in the metaphysics of the Vedas, transcendence lies in the superior reality of hidden and unified being, viewed in relation to the phenomenal and temporal world.
For Confucianism, as the most influential example of humanizing the world, our power of transcendence over circumstance and presupposition, if it has any meaning or force, has as its seat the experience of the personal and of personal encounter, viewed in relation to everything else. What is most real and valuable about this experience lies in a web of relations to others; the personal to be nurtured and revered is the interpersonal.
The sacrosanct experience of the personal stands in contrast primarily to dark nature, which we must master and turn to our purposes but cannot hope to fathom. Secondarily, it remains opposed to the regime of society, which deserves our allegiance only insofar as it respects and sustains this sacred core of existence. The spirit of the interpersonal has, for Confucianism, its consummate expression in jen: the quality of self-expression and self-formation that is expressed in both sympathy and detachment.
The premise of this devotion is our ability to understand the experience of others. Imagination—the imagination of their inner life and aspirations—informs our efforts to minister to their needs. It does so on the basis of the social roles that each of us performs.
The affirmation of the sanctity of the personal (or, more precisely, of the interpersonal) is not peculiar to Confucianism; it is a trait of all the many versions of the humanization of the world that have appeared in the course of the religious history of humanity. Even in our partly Christianized culture, it is captured by a conception that exerts a wide influence today: the view of intimate encounter as a domain of the private sublime, in which we can accept the instrumental calculus of interests and efficiencies only insofar as such calculation serves an experience beyond instrumental concerns.
To form part of a naturalistic account of our powers of transcendence, the idea of the sanctity of personality and of
