Levinas and Early Confucian Ethics: Religion, Rituality, and the Sources of Morality
Résumé
Early Confucian ethics concerns the cultivation of moral virtue as a comportment of ritual propriety applied with appropriateness in one's practices, which consequently become opportunities for the moral performance of ritual. Bracketing their mythical background and religious import, Mencius justified rituals through the moral disposition disclosed and impetus given to moral cultivation. The sacred, bracketed as mythical or transcendent, proves to be the ethical centered in everyday life. Comparing Mencius's interpretation of ethics, religion and ritual to Levinas's philosophical and Talmudic writings, I propose that both conceptualize ritual and the religious ethically. Mencius articulated ritual appropriateness as the cultivation of an immanent spontaneity inherently responsive to the other. Arguing likewise for a sensuous and prereflective ethical spontaneity, Levinas interprets Judaic religious rituals as staging the other's transcendence within the simplicity of the everyday. Despite important differences, their strategies suggest a post-mythical approach to the religious by revealing its other-oriented ethical character.