gregory m.

reihman

CATEGORICALLY DENIED: KANT’S CRITICISM

OF CHINESE PHILOSOPHY

If Kant is right, then Chinese philosophy is impossible.

—Mou Tsung-san1

Philosophers who bring Kant and Chinese philosophy together typi-

cally do so to illuminate one by the light of the other, to supplement
one with features of the other, or to accomplish some blend of these
two purposes. In this paper, I shall explore somewhat different terrain
by discussing the grounds of Kant’s own interpretation of Chinese
thought.
Although Kant’s comments on Chinese thought are not well
known, those who become familiar with his mostly negative and
dismissive remarks may be tempted to conclude that his views are
grounded more in prejudice than in serious consideration.2 Against
such a conclusion, I argue that Kant’s interpretation of Chinese phi-
losophy is guided by his specific views on religion, metaphysics, and
ethics and hence is more carefully considered, more internally con-
sistent, and less prejudicial than it may initially appear to be. In this
paper, I do not address the question of the accuracy of what Kant says
about Chinese philosophy, nor do I evaluate the strength of his criti-
cisms; rather, I offer an account of his thought on these matters and
argue that his writings on China can best be understood when seen in
the light of his primary philosophical commitments.
Before turning to Kant, let us briefly consider by way of contrast
the views of Leibniz and Wolff, two of Kant’s philosophical predeces-
sors who also commented upon China and its philosophy. Leibniz
praised Chinese culture and urged European scholars to study
Chinese thought more seriously. In a detailed account of Chinese
philosophy, he claimed that Chinese metaphysics was closely akin to
his own monadology. Relying on this similarity, Leibniz refuted those
who viewed the Chinese as atheist by pointing out that the Chinese
shared his view of God as the ultimate organizer of moral and onto-
logical principles.3 He also held Chinese ethics in such high esteem

GREGORY M. REIHMAN, adjunct professor, Department of Philosophy, Lehigh

University. Specialties: history of modern philosophy, Chinese philosophy. E-mail:
reihman@lehigh.edu
©2006, Journal of Chinese Philosophy
52 gregory m. reihman

that he called for moral missionaries to be sent from China to teach

Europeans about ethics.4 In Leibniz we have an example of a philoso-
pher who built an interpretation of Chinese thought principally on
what he understood to be a set of shared ontological beliefs.
Wolff, too, held Chinese philosophy in high regard, echoing Leib-
niz’s claim that China’s moral and political systems in many respects
surpass those of Europe.5 Unlike Leibniz, Wolff concluded that the
Chinese had no distinct knowledge of God. However, this conclusion
was not a problem for him; in fact, he was the first Western philoso-
pher able to bring together two ideas that earlier thinkers were
unable to reconcile:6 That the Chinese had no concept that was
equivalent to the Christian God and that they nevertheless had
developed admirable and exemplary political and ethical systems.7
Wolff declared that the elements found in Chinese morality—a com-
mitment to reason as a guide for action, an acknowledgement of a
law of nature, a devotion to continual progress, and a focus on
helping others improve as well—are “the summary of all natural
law.”8 In Wolff we find an interpretation of Chinese built on shared
ethical beliefs.
In sharp contrast to these two acts of philosophical admiration,
Kant takes a decidedly dim view of Chinese religion, metaphysics, and
ethics. As he writes in the Physical Geography, “Many [Chinese] do
not believe in God; others who take on a religion do not occupy
themselves with it very much.”9 He has little good to say of Chinese
Buddhism: “It is nothing other than a Christianity degenerated into
a great paganism.”10 Elsewhere, he directs his criticism at what he
takes to be a tendency among Chinese Buddhists toward mysticism
and self-negation, both born of a mistaken attempt to know the
unknowable:

If we were to flatter ourselves so much as to claim that we know the

modum noumenon then we would have to be in community with God
so as to participate immediately in the divine ideas which are the
authors of all things in themselves. To expect this in the present life is
the business of mystics and theosophists. Thus arises the mystical
self-annihilation of China, Tibet, and India in which one is under the
illusion that he will finally be dissolved in the Godhead.11

Kant diagnoses the cause of this mysticism in “The End of All

Things,” where he writes that in mysticism, “reason does not under-
stand itself and what it wants, and rather prefers to dote on the
beyond than to confine itself within the bounds of this world, as is
fitting for an intellectual inhabitant of a sensible world.”12 Kant sees
Buddhists as persons unsatisfied with restraining themselves to the
immanent who mistakenly attempt something transcendent.
 kant’s criticism of chinese philosophy 53

Kant raises a similar criticism against Daoism. Once again, he sees

reason shutting itself off from the world in the quest for an unaccept-
ably mystical goal.
Thence arises Lao-kiun’s [Laozi’s] monstrosity of the highest good
which is supposed to consist in nihility [im Nichts], that is, in the
consciousness of feeling oneself swallowed up in the abyss of the
Godhead through the fusion with it, and therefore through
the destruction of one’s personality. To have the presentiment of this
condition, Chinese philosophers strive in dark rooms with eyes
closed to experience and contemplate their nihility. Thence the pan-
theism (of the Tibetans and other Oriental peoples) and the subse-
quent Spinozism engendered from the sublimation of pantheism.
. . . All this merely so that people might still ultimately have an
eternal repose to delight in, which then constitutes their presumed
blissful end of all things. At the same time this is really a concept in
company with which their understanding disintegrates and all think-
ing itself comes to an end.13

From the above descriptions, it is not hard to see why Kant would
reject Buddhism and Daoism as he understood them. While Kant
would find the drive toward transcendence understandable (he
would equate such a drive with movement of reason itself), he would
clearly reject both the failure to check reason’s ambitions and the
resultant conclusion that transcendence has been accomplished.14
Moreover, any attempt to access noumena by closing off one’s senses
and losing oneself in meditation would be anathema to his entire
critical project, which is directed at exposing the errors that arise
when reason leaves the senses behind and seeks direct access to
things in themselves.
Here we see why Kant could not share Leibniz’s conclusions about
the Chinese metaphysical viewpoint being basically correct. Leibniz
claimed that the Chinese had anticipated his view of the world as
composed of a plurality of isolated individual substances interacting
only in that they all were organized and harmonized by a creator God.
Rejecting the strictly materialist interpretation of li promulgated by
earlier interpreters (e.g. Nicholas Longobardi, Antoine de Sainte-
Marie, and Nicholas Malebranche), Leibniz had constructed a vision
of Confucianism in which li was equivalent to the monad, and qi was
equivalent to material force. It followed that the Chinese believed in
a God, since they believed in the harmonizing power of the principle
of principles, the taiji. As theists, they needed only to reject the
pernicious influence of contemporary atheist scholars and common
superstitions and they would find themselves on the path of true
philosophy, which for Leibniz was fully compatible with Christianity.
On this foundation, Leibniz envisioned building ecumenical accord
between East and West.
54 gregory m. reihman

However, the metaphysical views that supported Leibniz’s conclu-

sions are exactly the sort of views Kant would not accept because, as
he would put it, they stem from a procedure of pure reason that has
not yet undertaken the task of discovering its limitations. According
to Kant, truths discoverable through the analysis of concepts and
deduction from a priori principles reveal only the workings of reason
and say nothing about the truths of the reality beyond appearances.
Kant’s philosophical project can in fact be seen as a series of powerful
arguments that theoretical reason is powerless to address the topics
that are most important to the human mind (the existence of God, the
freedom of the will, and the immortality of the soul) and, further, that
these concerns can best be approached from a moral point of view.
This point is relevant to the current project because by closing down
the possibility of appealing to theoretical reason to answer these
crucial questions, Kant closes down the interpretative possibility of
finding commonality with Confucianism (or, more correctly, Neo-
Confucianism)15 at the level of metaphysical speculation.
Kant thus has no similar conviction that the Chinese got the basics
of the universe right, primarily because he thought that on these
questions (where “the basics” means answering fundamental meta-
physical questions) there was no getting it right. Kant’s antinomies of
pure reason show that reason can provide equally convincing argu-
ments for contradictory answers to these questions and thus that
reason is not to be trusted to answer them at all. Most relevantly, Kant
demonstrates the impotence of reason when faced with the question
of deciding on the existence of simple substances (second antinomy)
and the existence or nonexistence of an absolutely necessary being
(fourth antinomy).16 Moreover, whereas Leibniz had argued that
monads, as simples, cannot truly interact and hence require a guaran-
tor (God) by whom their perceptions are orchestrated with the
goings-on of the rest of the universe, Kant writes:
[The interaction of substances] is not even comprehensible among
things each of which is entirely isolated from the others through its
subsistence. Hence Leibniz, who ascribed a community to the sub-
stances of the world only as conceived by the understanding alone,
needed a divinity for mediation.17
The details of Kant’s argument (and the question of whether he is
right) are not as important here as the fact that he breaks the con-
nection between individual substance and God, the two crucial con-
cepts on which Leibniz’s accord with Chinese philosophy was built.
Kant solves, or dissolves, ontological puzzles in an entirely different
way (such as the problem of how substances interact) that Leibniz had
solved by pure reason. Substance, for Kant, is no longer a category of
existence but rather a category that the mind imposes on experience.
 kant’s criticism of chinese philosophy 55

And God, no longer needed either as the great harmonizer of the

universe of substances or as the necessary being grounding all con-
tingent entities, becomes a moral concept rather than a metaphysical
one.
Thus the very tools that Leibniz had used to ground his inter-
pretation of Chinese thought are believed by Kant to be born of a
misguided use of reason. As for the Chinese, we have already seen
how Kant criticized them for their abuse of reason and so they cer-
tainly received no praise for allegedly having anticipated Leibniz’s
mistaken monadic metaphysics. When Kant rejected Leibniz’s theory
of individual substance, it followed for Kant that both Leibniz and the
Confucians whom Leibniz praised were engaged in misguided philo-
sophical flights of fancy that he had rendered obsolete.
Kant thus was never led to question the meaning of the central
metaphysical terms of Neo-Confucianism (li, qi, and taiji) that so
preoccupied Leibniz because, given his approach to questions of
metaphysics, there was nothing he could have found that would have
convinced him that the Chinese were thinking about metaphysics in a
correct way. While we have no evidence that Kant actively considered
and rejected the Confucian or Neo-Confucian philosophies that were
earlier interpreted by Leibniz, the point here is that Leibniz’s
approach would not have persuaded Kant, for Kant rejects the theo-
ries of individual substance and rationalist theology on which Leibniz
based his reading.
Having closed down the interpretative angle that Leibniz found so
fruitful, Kant approaches Confucianism from a moral angle instead,
a change that parallels Kant’s redirection of Western philosophy:
Transcendental theodicy, rationalism, and metaphysics were to be
replaced with natural science, ethics, and philosophical anthropology,
all kept in bounds by the careful watch of the tribunal of reason.
Given that many Confucians, like Kant, criticized the Buddhists
and Daoists for their purported other-worldly focus, one might
suppose that Kant would find himself allied with the Confucian
outlook and its concern with the ethical world of humans and their
interactions. However, if there is a commonality between Kantian and
Confucian ethics, Kant himself certainly did not see it. Unlike those
of his predecessors who tended toward an idealization of Chinese
morality, Kant takes a dim view of Chinese ethics. In the Physical
Geography, he portrays the Chinese as deceitful and unethical as
businessmen.18 More importantly, in his lectures on ethics, Kant uses
a series of multicultural examples to discuss various ways individuals
stand in relation to their natural passions. Using the feeling of
modesty as an example of the artificiality of certain feelings, he writes,
“Spartan children went naked up to fourteen years old; Indian women
56 gregory m. reihman

never cover up the breasts, in Jamaica they go stark naked . . . Caesar,

Livia, when dying would not uncover themselves.”19 These illustra-
tions are followed by one additional example of artificial feeling: The
refusal of the Chinese to show their fingers.20
This passage is part of a larger discussion in which Kant argues that
being moral means following our moral nature (i.e., the moral law
within) rather than authority, custom, or natural feeling. As part of his
procedure for discovering moral nature, Kant separates natural
feeling from artificial, cultural feeling. The argument employs an
empirical method of falsifying feelings that are putatively natural: If
behaviors are motivated by feelings, and if behaviors differ markedly
among cultures, then the feeling that motivates the behavior cannot
be universal, and hence the feeling cannot be considered natural.
Thus, in the example above, modesty is shown to be artificial and
therefore a reflection of custom rather than of natural feeling.
But how significant is it that Kant mentions the Chinese? This
passage is surely not about the Chinese, any more than it is about
Jamaicans or Native Americans. Rather, he uses examples drawn from
far-away lands in order to relativize some specific action. For this
reason, Kant’s use of Chinese ethics here is best seen as pedagogic: He
wants to relativize modesty to show that there must be some nonem-
pirical justification for being modest. Scanning the globe for examples
allows him to avoid simply reinforcing his local morality. This
approach has the added advantage of causing his listeners to reflect
back on themselves to discover which behaviors to endorse and which
to reject. Kant himself certainly thought that modesty was morally
recommended, for elsewhere he writes, “Modesty, a self-restraint that
conceals passion, is a salutary illusion that keeps the sexes sufficiently
far apart that one is not degraded into a mere tool for the other’s
enjoyment.”21 So he would criticize the behaviors of immodest indi-
viduals for having come up with the wrong attitude toward modesty
but not simply because their behaviors contrasted with things as they
were done in his native Prussia. In such passages he is not being
merely prejudiced or Eurocentric.
Further scrutiny of the passage reveals more about Kant’s view of
the matter, for the ordering of the examples implies a hierarchy. The
Jamaicans he describes are wholly unclothed, Indians are half-
clothed, the Spartans are unclothed only up to a certain age, the
Romans are clothed right up to their deaths, and the Chinese, the
extreme of modesty, hide even their fingers. On Kant’s view, modesty
is beneficial because it conceals passions, but the Jamaicans and the
Indians have such a limited sense of modesty that they would not
even be able to conceal their passions, and would thus quickly be
“degraded into mere tools.” The Chinese, however, have elevated
 kant’s criticism of chinese philosophy 57

their modesty to such a level that they, presumably, avoid such deg-
radation into the condition of being mere means to bodily ends.
But Kant does not go on to praise Chinese ethical behavior. In fact,
he follows the example about the fingers with another brief but infor-
mative mention of Chinese morality: “In Africa, theft is allowed, in
China parents are permitted to throw their children on the street, the
Eskimos strangle them, and in Brazil they are buried alive.”22 In the
earlier example about modesty, Kant relativized a customary behav-
ior both to demonstrate its nonuniversality and to show how people
of various cultures stood in relation to their own natural desires. In
the example of theft and infanticide, Kant begins looking at the ques-
tion from the perspective of the society. What is significant here is the
fact that these behaviors are socially permitted and that theft and
murder in these cultures flow from socially sanctioned custom in
which individuals willingly participate. This observation indicates for
Kant that the cultures that follow such horrid customs operate merely
at the level of custom and have never initiated the process of delim-
iting moral laws that would promote a higher-level consideration of
morality. There is thus an important conceptual and pedagogical dis-
tance between conjuring images of half-clothed Spartans or long-
sleeved Chinese on the one hand and murder-sanctioning Brazilians,
Africans, and Chinese on the other.The former focuses on individuals,
the latter, on cultures.
Kant’s enumeration of the various ways people mistreat their chil-
dren is thus not so much a criticism of child abuse (which would be
simply an expression of disapproval toward the bad behavior of certain
people) as it is one corner of a blanket condemnation of the culture that
permits these behaviors. And yet Kant nevertheless does create a
conception of the individuals within the culture. For he implies that
individuals who act so contrary to the moral law simply because the
culture condones some action have a weak sense of moral autonomy
and no concept of the moral law. In fact, Kant follows up the examples
of theft and infanticide with a telling comment. In such circumstances,
he says,“we act . . . by example of custom and by order of authority, so
that there can be no moral principle other than what is borrowed from
experience.”23 And here we arrive at the heart of Kant’s critique of
Chinese ethics: The Chinese may have passed what we might call
the “inclination test”—their actions are not guided by their baser
inclinations—but they have failed the “autonomy test,” for they act as
they do not because they are guided by rational reflection or respect for
the moral law, but only out of obedience to the command of experience
and custom. While Kant ranks the Chinese set of customs higher than
others, he presents this as an accidental state of affairs: It just so
happens that their customs are particularly strict and modest.
58 gregory m. reihman

The critique of China is more fully elaborated in the Physical

Geography, in the form of a criticism of Confucius himself (whom
Kant calls the “Chinese Socrates”24):
Confucius teaches in his writings nothing outside a moral doctrine
designed for princes . . . and offers examples of former Chinese
princes. . . . But a concept of virtue and morality never entered the
heads of the Chinese.25
Confucian morality, he claims, is merely an empirical morality
grounded in the historical actions of exemplary figures, aimed at
teaching rulers how to rule. But despite any prudential efficacy of such
advice, it does not count as genuine morality because it has not been
raised to the level of conceptual reflection. When he says that “a
concept of virtue . . . has never entered the heads of the Chinese,” the
stress should be on the term “concept” (Begriff ), for the point is that
the Chinese are not thinking about what they are doing. He makes a
similar critique of the Chinese approach to science: “[The Chinese]
can never get very far in those sciences at which one arrives through
concepts.”26 The Chinese, according to Kant, are unable to work well
with concepts and so their science, morality, and philosophy have
languished.
Kant underscores this point by lamenting the prosaic nature of
Chinese ethics, complaining at one point that “their morals and phi-
losophy are nothing more than a daily mixture of miserable rules that
everybody knows already by himself,”27 and elsewhere that, “the
entirety of Confucian morals consists of ethical sayings that are
intolerable because anyone can rattle them off.”28 Robert Louden has
commented that Kant’s claim here “seems odd, given his own com-
mitment to building a normative theory that is reached through a
descriptive analysis of what ‘common human reason (die gemeine
Menschenvernunft)’ holds to be true.”29 But Kant is not complaining
about the fact that everyone knows these maxims because they have
reached them through reason, nor about the fact that anyone could
discover them using reason; rather, he is criticizing Confucian ethics
for being a set of unreflective and often artificial ethical propositions
that anyone could have dreamed up and that now everyone has
learned by rote thanks to the strong force of custom. In other words,
he thinks they are pedestrian moral maxims that have not been scru-
tinized to see if they really do accord with common human reason.
The fact that “common human reason” grounds genuine ethics does
not mean that anything that anyone comes up with counts, nor does
agreement among a large populace count as evidence that the indi-
viduals are all using reason.30
Thus the morality of the Chinese, in Kant’s eyes, amounts to an
external show devoid of conceptual reflection or even the idea of the
 kant’s criticism of chinese philosophy 59

good.31 The Chinese may be modest and decorous in their interac-

tions, but they have no awareness of the conceptual framework that
supports their behavior and hence no formal sense of ethics. The
Chinese, though they are seen by Kant as more civilized than most,
are nevertheless criticized principally for never having become self-
critical or ethically sophisticated enough to guide their actions by
principles; thus they remain unaware of the moral law.32
There is one final feature of the Chinese system of morality that
Kant found untenable; namely, what he saw as its presupposition of a
separation between God and morality. Unlike Wolff, who argued that
the Chinese ethical system functioned just fine without a concept of
God, Kant believes that God’s existence, though unprovable, is an
absolutely necessary postulate of practical reason.33 His argument is,
in short, that—contrary to the demands of justice—good behavior is
not necessarily rewarded in this life nor is wicked behavior punished.
Thus, if one is to follow a system of morality, one needs to believe in
the existence of God as the arbiter and guarantor of this justice.34 This
view, combined with a conviction that experience shows that happi-
ness is not matched with morality in this world, leads Kant to endorse
belief in the existence of an afterlife. “God and a future life are two
presuppositions that are not to be separated from the obligation that
pure reason imposes on us in accordance with principles of that very
same reason. [Without these postulates, we would have to] regard the
moral laws as empty figments of the brain.”35
Unfortunately, Kant found that “many [Chinese] do not believe in
God; others who take on a religion do not occupy themselves with it
very much.”36 The Confucian literati, he claims, are deists, but by this
he means (echoing Wolff37) they have a very ill-defined notion of God:
“[Chinese scholars] speak of a highest regent of the world, beyond
which they know nothing.”38 Indeed, even the concept of God they do
have is taken to be merely materialistic: “They have only natural
concepts of God, and indeed say Tian (sky) or Tian Zhu (ruler of the
sky).”39 Kant further claims that “[the Chinese] view the future life
with the utmost indifference”40 and thus he finds the second postulate
missing from Chinese morality as well.
Understanding Kant’s positions on God and morality makes clear
the relation between Kant’s judgments of Confucianism as atheistic
and this-worldly on the one hand and as mere moral dogma on the
other. According to Kant, an ethics must do more than prescribe
moral codes. It must also provide rational justification that allows the
individual to see moral duty as being simultaneously self-legislated
and divinely commanded.41 More, it must provide hope to one who
has acted morally that she somehow will eventually become happy.
Finding no arbiter of justice and no view of the afterlife, both of which
60 gregory m. reihman

he claimed were demanded by practical reason, Kant concluded that

Chinese religion is little more than an ungrounded, arbitrary code of
behaviors rather than a true system of ethics or, as he puts it, “Instead
of a religious catechism, they have a catechism of compliments
[Komplimenten-Katechismus] that is taught in school.”42
On the question of Chinese religion and ethics, Kant is at odds with
the views of Enlightenment thinkers such as Bayle,Wolff, and Voltaire
who argued that the Chinese were the ideal example of how ethics
could thrive independently of knowledge of or belief in God. These
other thinkers held China up as an example of excellent morality and
they longed for Europe to follow China’s example of prioritizing
social and ethical concerns over religious ones. Kant, who agrees with
Wolff that the Chinese did not know God, disagrees with Wolff’s
attitude toward this fact: Whereas Wolff found it admirable, Kant
finds it abominable. For him the very suggestion that ethics could
exist independently of belief in God is unacceptable. Kant’s view
of moral motivation, his emphasis on autonomy, and his support for
the postulates of practical reason all led him to conclude that any
agnostic Confucian command to duty based merely on tradition was
unacceptable.
Thus we see that Kant’s critique of Confucian ethics is well
grounded in his philosophical positions and arises in large part
because of the defining features of his unique projects. Again, this is
not to say that he is right—either in his characterization of Chinese
thought or in his particular philosophical views—but only that he is
being consistent and not merely prejudiced when he applies his views
to Chinese philosophy.
Although my purpose in this paper prevents me from making
extensive evaluative claims about Kant’s views, it is not hard to find
ways that Kant gets much of Chinese philosophy wrong. Most notably,
he is mistaken in his interpretation of the role of “Heaven” (Tian) in
Chinese philosophy and he underestimates the importance of creativ-
ity and individual reflection in Confucian ethical practice.43 Part of the
reason Kant went wrong is historical: He applied his philosophical
view to an image of China he received from others and thus his
conclusions are connected to Europe’s growing disenchantment with
China during his time. The selective reports of enthusiastic, politically
motivated missionaries that had bolstered the generously charitable
interpretations of Leibniz and Wolff were being replaced by a grittier
vision of China and its philosophy.44 Leibniz and Wolff thought about
a China that was received from the earlier century; Kant was heir to
a very different way of perceiving China’s strengths and faults.
But what I have argued here is that the more important change is
the one Kant himself wrought in what was expected of a philosophical
 kant’s criticism of chinese philosophy 61

system. Whereas his predecessors found commonality and grew

excited over the prospect of a shared approach to philosophical and
ethical improvement, Kant found one more example of the misuse of
reason, one more ethical system that was excessively empirical, and
one more group of ethical agents whose wills were unacceptably
heteronomous. Thus China for Kant was a civilization that failed to
discipline its thought. As a result, its citizens committed two opposing
errors. Some became mystics, denying attachment to this world
and striving for mystical communion with God, an illicit maneuver
through which, as he puts it, “all thinking comes to an end.” Others
relied on common-sense ethical sayings, followed artificial customs,
and lived under an ill-defined, materialist concept of God. For these
reasons, Kant at last pronounces confidently that “religion is handled
there rather foolishly”45 and that “Philosophy is not to be found in the
Orient.”46
Such dismissive, overgeneralized comments as these make it diffi-
cult to remain patient with Kant’s interpretation of Chinese philoso-
phy. Indeed, they lend credence to the view that he was speaking
prejudicially rather than philosophically. In this paper, however, I
have argued against such a view by showing that Kant’s specific
conclusions are consistent with his philosophical commitments and
that the charge of prejudice is thus unfounded. This is to say that he
would raise the same objections against these ethical, religious, and
philosophical views whether they arose in China or anywhere else. It
is the views that he objects to, not the people who hold them.
In this paper’s epigraph, I cite Mou Tsung-san’s observation that if
Kant is right, then Chinese philosophy is impossible. I would add here
that the converse holds as well: If Chinese philosophy is right, then
much of Kantian philosophy is impossible. Seeing Kant’s comments
about Chinese thought as closely connected to his philosophical com-
mitments may not help us decide which views are right and which
impossible but, by bringing into focus the genuine tensions and
incompatibilities between the two philosophical worldviews, such an
approach may perhaps facilitate the ongoing enterprise of comparing
Kantian and Confucian philosophy.

LEHIGH UNIVERSITY
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

Endnotes

I would like to thank Martin Schönfeld, Bob Solomon, Kathy Higgins, and Chung-ying
Cheng for their comments and suggestions, and the Mellon-funded Penn Humanities
Forum for its research support.
62 gregory m. reihman

1. Mou Tsung-san, Chih-te chih-chüeh yü Chung-kuo che-hsüeh [The Intuition of Nou-

menal Reality and Chinese Philosophy] (Taipei: T’ai-wan shang-wu yin-shu-kuan,
1970), as quoted in Thomas A. Metzger, Escape from Predicament: Neo-Confucianism
and China’s Evolving Political Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977),
248, n. 36.
2. It is perhaps Kant’s comments regarding race that most lend credence to the conclu-
sion that he was simply prejudiced when writing about non-European thought. Martin
Schönfeld and Charles Watson have contended, in separate conversations, that Kant’s
views on race play a larger role than my interpretation allows. Although the question
goes beyond the scope of this paper, this topic warrants further investigation. Helpful
resources include Robert Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000); and Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ed., Race and the Enlightenment
(Malden: Blackwell, 1997), 38–70.
3. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Discours sur la théologie naturelle des Chinois [Discourse
on the Natural Theology of the Chinese] in Leibniz-Handschriften, no.1 (Hannover:
Lower Saxony State Library, 1810), 37. For an English translation, see Julia Ching and
Willard Gurdon Oxtoby, Moral Enlightenment: Leibniz and Wolff on China (Nettetal:
Steyler Verlag, 1992), or Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Writings on China, ed. Daniel
Cook and Henry Rosemont, Jr. (Chicago: Open Court, 1994). The Discourse was
originally written in 1716.
4. Leibniz writes, “[If] we are their equals in the industrial arts, and ahead of them in
contemplative sciences, certainly they surpass us (though it is almost shameful to
confess this) in practical philosophy, that is, in the precepts of ethics and politics
adapted to the present life and use of mortals” (Preface to the Novissima Sinica, §§
2–3, in Leibniz, Writings on China, 46–47). After pointing out that Europe has sent
mathematicians and scientists to China, he notes that “it is desirable that they in turn
teach us . . . the greatest use of practical philosophy and a more perfect manner of
living, to say nothing now of the other arts” (Preface, § 10, in Leibniz, Writings on
China, 51).
5. See Christian Wolff, Oratio de Sinarum philosophia practica: Rede über die praktische
Philosophie der Chinesen [Discourse on the Practical Philosophy of the Chinese],
German trans. Michael Albrecht (Hamburg: Meiner, 1985). The Oratio, published in
1726, is the annotated version of a lecture Wolff delivered in 1721 at the University of
Halle, entitled De Sinarum Philosophia Practica. Parts of the Oratio are translated
into English in Ching and Oxtoby, Moral Enlightenment.
6. In fairness, it should be noted that Pierre Bayle first expressed this conclusion. Bayle,
in his Dictionaire historique et critique of 1697, used the atheism of the Chinese as
evidence for his conclusion that morality could exist independently of religion.
However, Wolff had justifications for his pronouncements that are lacking in Bayle
who, it seems, was simply inverting the typical conclusion drawn from assumptions of
China’s atheism for his own argumentative ends.
7. This claim caused considerable controversy. When Wolff’s adversaries at Halle
accused him of heresy, King Frederick William I dismissed Wolff from his position and
gave him 48 hours to leave Prussia, under threat of death by hanging. For additional
details of this fascinating event, see Donald F. Lach, “The Sinophilism of Christian
Wolff (1679–1754),” in Discovering China: European Interpretations in the Enlighten-
ment, ed. Julia Ching and Willard Gurdon Oxtoby (Rochester: University of
Rochester Press, 1992).
8. Wolff, Oratio, 55 (Discourse, 177–78). For a helpful commentary on Wolff and
China, see Robert B. Louden, “What Does Heaven Say? Christian Wolff and
Western Interpretations of Confucian Ethics,” in Essays on the Analects of Con-
fucius, ed. Bryan William van Norden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). I
am grateful to Robert Louden for making available to me an early version of his
essay.
9. Kant, Physical Geography, in Kant und die Religionen des Ostens, Beihefte zum
Jahrbuch der Albertus-Universität Königsberg/Pr.; 5, ed. Helmuth von Glasenapp
(Kitzingen-Main: Holzner, 1954), 88. Kant’s lectures were first published in as Phy-
sische Geographie in 1803, based on lectures delivered from 1756 to 1796 as edited by
 kant’s criticism of chinese philosophy 63

F.T. Rink. There is at present no English translation of Glasenapp’s work, so all

translations are my own.
10. Kant, Physical Geography, in Glasenapp, 89.
11. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Philosophical Theology, trans.Allen Wood and Gertrude
Clark (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 86.
12. Kant, “The End of All Things,” in On History, ed. Immanuel Kant, trans. Lewis White
Beck (New York: Library of Liberal Arts, 1963), 79 (Ak 8:335).
13. Ibid. (Ak 8:335–36).
14. I am indebted to John Marshall for his helpful comments on this section.
15. Most of Leibniz’s writings about Chinese philosophy focus on the Song Dynasty
Neo-Confucians, specifically Zhu Xi, whose views Leibniz erroneously attributes to
the classical Confucians.
16. Immanuel Kant, “The Antinomy of Pure Reason,” in Critique of Pure Reason, trans.
Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (New York: Cambridge University Press 1998), book II,
chap. II.
17. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B293, p. 336. “Community” here means the interaction
of substances. Kant solves the problem of community by appealing to the way we
represent objects to ourselves in space: “We can readily grasp the possibility of
community (of substances as appearances) if we represent them in space, thus in outer
intuition. For this already contains in itself a priori formal outer relations as condi-
tions of the possibility of the real (in effect and countereffect, thus in community)”
(B293, p. 336).
18. Kant writes, “They deceive artfully. They can sew together a torn up piece of silk so
nicely that even the most attentive businessman does not notice, and patch broken
porcelain with an in-laying of copper wire so well to that no one notices the initial
crack. He is not ashamed if he is confounded in a lie, but is ashamed only to the extent
that, through a slip, he allowed the lie to be discovered” (Kant, Physical Geography,
in Glasenapp, 83).
19. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, in Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel
Kant, ed. Peter Heath and J. B. Schneewind, trans. Peter Heath (New York: Cambridge
University Press 1997), 5 (Ak 27:9).
20. Kant, Lectures on Ethics, 5 (Ak 27:9).
21. Kant, Anthropology, Ak 7:152, quoted in Allen Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 269.
22. Kant, Lectures on Ethics, 49 (Ak 27:254). Cf., “In China everybody has the freedom to
throw away children who become a burden, through hanging or drowning” (Kant,
Physical Geography, in Glasenapp, 88).
23. Kant, Anthropology, Ak 7:152, see Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought, 269.
24. Kant, Physical Geography, in Glasenapp, 89.
25. Kant, Physical Geography, Ms. 2599, p. 304, in Glasenapp, 103. The citation is from a
manuscript containing Kant’s notes for the Physical Geography lectures. I have bor-
rowed Glasenapp’s system of referring to these notes. See Glasenapp, xv–xx, for an
explanation of his system of labeling the various manuscripts. Julia Ching also makes
use of this passage in comparing Confucian and Kantian ethics, in Julia Ching,
“Chinese Ethics and Kant,” Philosophy East and West 28 (1978): 169. I am indebted to
Roger Ames for first introducing me to the Ching article and Glasenapp’s text.
26. Kant, Physical Geography, Ms. 2596, in Glasenapp, 179. On the question of Chinese
science, helpful writings include Nathan Sivin, “Why the Scientific Revolution Didn’t
Take Place in China—Or Did It?” Chinese Science 5 (1982): 45–66; Roger Hart, “On
the Problem of Chinese Science,” in The Science Studies Reader, ed. Mario Biagioli
(New York: Routledge, 1999), 189–201; and, more generally, Joseph Needham’s
Science and Civilization in China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1956).
27. Kant, Physical Geography, Ms. 2596, p. 179, in Glasenapp, 97.
28. Kant, Physical Geography, Ms. 2599, p. 304, in Glasenapp, 103–4.
29. Louden, “What Does Heaven Say?”, 89, n. 20.
30. Louden translates “. . . Sittensprüchen, die unerträglich sind, weil sie ein jeder herplap-
pern kann” as “. . . moral maxims that are unbearable, because every individual can
reel them off.” While Louden is right that such a claim would go against Kant’s view
64 gregory m. reihman

on the use of common reason, I think the meaning of the passage is made clearer if
“ein jeder” (which could be translated here either as “anyone” or as “each
individual”—thanks to Orrin Robinson on this point) is translated as “anyone.” Read
this way, the sense of the passage accords better with Kant’s other comments on
Chinese ethics and with the views about common reason that Louden discusses.
31. “To arrive at the idea of, and the striving for, the good, studies are required of which
they know nothing” (Kant, Physical Geography, Ms. 2599, p. 304, in Glasenapp,
103–4).
32. Julia Ching has correctly pointed out that Kant raised a similar complaint about
Wolff’s ethics: “I do not dispute Kant’s philosophical consistency, in dismissing the
seriousness of Confucius’ claim as a philosopher, on the ground that his teachings
represent only certain material goals, and notions of value and order with specific
content rather than a formal ethics centered in the freedom and self-determination of
the practical reason. Kant had indeed criticized Wolff’s ethics on the same count for
being a mixture of rational analysis and empirical inquiry, which allows for no clear
distinction between the two” (Ching, “Chinese Ethics and Kant,” 169). I fully agree
with and have taken much inspiration from Ching’s insight that the differences
between Kant and Wolff’s views of Chinese thought can be connected to differences
in their philosophical systems.
33. For a detailed discussion of Kant’s ethics as a departure from Wolff, see J. B. Schnee-
wind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), chap. 22.
34. Kant does not believe that ethics should grow from revealed religion or that we
should act out of obedience to God. Since we can have no concept of God and hence
no understanding of his will, a divine command theory of morality would require an
arbitrary guess at the content of the command and (worse) a heteronomy of the will
insofar as we are obligated to obey only to the extent that we fear, love, or respect the
commander: “So far as practical reason has the right to lead us, we will not hold
actions to be obligatory because they are God’s commands, but will rather regard
them as divine commands because we are internally obligated to them. We will . . . be-
lieve ourselves to be in conformity with the divine will only insofar as we hold as holy
the moral law that reason teaches us from the nature of actions themselves” (Kant,
Critique of Pure Reason, A819, B847, p. 684). See Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought, 160.
35. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A812, B840, p. 680.
36. Kant, Physical Geography, in Glasenapp, 88.
37. Wolff writes, “I do not doubt that the ancient Chinese and even Confucius admitted
that there was some kind of Creator. But I am certain that they did not know his
attributes. They had a confused notion of the Godhead, but no clear idea of it” (Wolff,
“Discourse on the Practical Philosophy of the Chinese,” in Ching and Oxtoby, Moral
Enlightenment, 163, n. 42). Note that Ching and Oxtoby present only an abbreviated
version of Wolff’s comment partially quoted here. In the Albrecht edition of the
Oratio, however, one can find the full text of Wolff’s explanation, which runs for five
full pages. See pp. 145–55 in the Anmerkungen of the Albrecht’s edition.
38. Kant, Physical Geography, Ms. 2599, p. 300, in Glasenapp, 101.
39. Kant, Physical Geography, Ms. 1729, p. 152, in Glasenapp, 101. The original reads: “Sie
haben nur natürlich Begriffe von Gott, und zwar sagen sie ‘Tien’ (Himmel) oder Tien
Hu (Herr des Himmels).” Here Kant equates ‘tian’ with the purely physical aspect of
the term “heaven” (German “Himmel”) and thereby fails to consider how tian actu-
ally functions in the Confucian ethical system.
40. Kant, Physical Geography, in Glasenapp, 83.
41. Kant regards the “recognition of all duties as divine commands” as lying at the heart
of religion (Kant, Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft, Ak 6:153,
quoted in Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought, 160). This recognition, again, does not mean
that we derive the content of the duty or justification from God, but rather that we
recognize the universality and certainty of the duties that we have derived.
42. Kant, Physical Geography, Ms. 1729, p. 152, in Glasenapp, 101.
43. Tu Wei-ming, working to synthesize elements of Kantian and Confucian philosophy,
has argued extensively against the view that Confucianism advocates the kind of
 kant’s criticism of chinese philosophy 65

servility and heteronomy implicit in Kant’s reading. See in particular Confucian

Thought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation (Albany: SUNY Press, 1985).
44. Jonathan Spence claims that this new perspective begins with the arrival in China of
new embassies and merchants. In The Chan’s Great Continent, Spence titles his
chapter on Western thought about China in the eighteenth century, “The Realistic
Voyages.” See Jonathan Spence, The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds
(New York: Norton, 1998), esp. 41–51. Julia Ching makes a similar claim in “Chinese
Ethics and Kant,” 168.
45. Kant, Physical Geography, in Glasenapp, 88.
46. Kant, Physical Geography, Ms. 2599, p. 305, in Glasenapp, 103.

Chinese Glossary

li tian
qi tian zhu
taiji