Abstract:

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.