Tu Weiming

Works

• 1976Neo-Confucian Thought in Action: Wang Yang-ming’s Youth (1472–1509)

  An intellectual biography of Wang Yangming’s early years, read as an example of how Confucian self-cultivation is carried out in a concrete life.

• 1985Confucian Thought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation

  Essays on the Confucian self as a centre of relationships rather than an isolated individual, transformed through learning in widening circles from family to the cosmos.

Position

Tu Weiming presented Confucianism to an international audience as a living tradition of “learning to be human”. The Confucian self is not an isolated individual but a centre of relationships that grows through self-cultivation in widening circles – from the body and the family to the community, the nation, humanity and heaven. He called this a “creative transformation” and described the Confucian worldview as “anthropocosmic”: human beings are not the masters of the world but participants in a continuous cosmic process. Following Mou Zongsan, he spoke of a third epoch of Confucian humanism after the classical age and the Neo-Confucianism of the Song and Ming dynasties, an epoch in which Confucianism has to answer the questions of modernity in dialogue with other traditions. His essay “Cultural China: The Periphery as the Center” (1991) located the vitality of Chinese culture not in the state but in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, the diaspora and international scholarship. His arguments that Confucian ethics could support a distinctive East Asian modernity were taken up in the debate on “Asian values”; critics such as Arif Dirlik objected that this revival of Confucianism served the interests of states and markets.

Life & context

Tu Weiming was born on 26 February 1940 in Kunming and grew up in Taiwan, where his family moved in 1949. At Tunghai University he studied Chinese literature and thought and came under the influence of the New Confucians Mou Zongsan and Xu Fuguan. With a Harvard-Yenching scholarship he went to Harvard, where he took a doctorate in history and East Asian languages in 1968 with a study of the young Wang Yangming. He taught at Princeton and at the University of California, Berkeley, and from 1981 at Harvard, where he was professor of Chinese history and philosophy and of Confucian studies and from 1996 to 2008 director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute. In the 1980s he advised Singapore on a school curriculum in Confucian ethics, and he was a member of the group of eminent persons that prepared the United Nations Year of Dialogue among Civilizations in 2001. In 2010 he moved to Peking University, where he founded the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies.

Further main works

• Centrality and Commonality: An Essay on Chung-yung (1976, revised 1989)
• Humanity and Self-Cultivation (1979)
• Way, Learning, and Politics: Essays on the Confucian Intellectual (1989)
• Cultural China: The Periphery as the Center (Daedalus, 1991)