东西方都在当下提出了人类(命运)共同体的伦理理想,但在其伦理基础的问题上却出现了分歧。西方的他者伦理学构建了绝对被动的“无我”理念,以期克服现代性中封闭、独立、支配他者的主体性,却无法找到现在向未来过渡的动力学,未来变成了“将——来”。相较之下,中国伦理理想中的“忘我”理念更有利于规避当前国际伦理政治关系中的保守主义和隔离主义,其中包含无我、有我、忘我三重境界,在让渡中进入既有我也无我的状态,规避了西方现代主体性的孤立、封闭和霸权主义,未成为彻底的无或无能,而是保留了与他人携手行动的自由和能动性,其基础恰恰是审美中的“无我”。

Chinese and western ethics lay different foundations for human community. In the west, to avoid the hegemony in the post-Kantian ethics based on the free and liberal Subject, Levinas imagines an egoless state in which “I” respond passively to the “face” of the Other rather than becoming a solitary, enclosed and totalizing subject. Shaped by its philosophical tradition, however, the ethics of the other does not contain an agency or dynamism to guarantee itself as a realizable ethical ideal. Chinese ethics, in a quite different way, distinguishes tree states, egolessness, self and selflessness. The ethical self, formed from an egoless aesthetic-ethical relationship with nature, is a self beyond egoism. Therefore, it takes as its responsibility and freedom to sacrifice itself and build a shared community with others in a selfless state. Since the selflessness comes from an active self-sacrifice, the self is not impotent, as the one in the ethics of the other, but rather active and capable of acting for the other.