Tu Weiming, Harvard-Yenching Professor of Chinese History and Philosophy and of Confcian Studies at Harvard University and Director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute, graduated from Tunghai University (1961) and obtained his MA (1963) and Ph.D.(1968) from Harvard University. He taught at Princeton University (4 years) and University of California at Berkeley (10 yrs). His primary research is the modern transformation of Confucian humanism. He has published eleven books in English and twelve in Chinese, all centering around Confucianism as a living tradition. A five-volume collection of his monographs and essays (including translation from English) was published in China in 2001. He is a member of the “Group of Eminent Persons” invited by Kofi Annan to facilitate the dialogue among civilizations, a participant of the World Economic Forum in Davos, a moderator of executive seminars at the Aspen Institute, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is an honorary professor at Zhejiang and Renming Universities and an honorary researcher at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences and a recipient of honorary degrees from Lehigh, Michigan State (Grand Valley), and Shandong Universities.

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Below is a short essay by Harvard Humanist Chaplain Greg M. Epstein on the significance of Professor Tu’s work to contemporary American Humanism. To read the essay by Tu to which Epstein refers, entitled “The Ecological Turn in New Confucian Humanism: Implications for China and the World,” click here: ecologicalturn_confucian.pdf

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Despite all his remarkable accomplishments, Professor Tu’s selection by the Humanist Chaplaincy as an honoree in 2007 for outstanding achievement in Humanism may provoke some discussion, even controversy among American Humanists. While he has become the world’s leading advocate for Confucian Humanism, Tu has also at times been outspoken in his criticism of what he calls “secular humanism.” Do his criticisms amount to a rejection of contemporary “lifestance Humanism,” as described elsewhere on this site?

Here we must keep in mind that Tu, as a politically and theologically engaged Chinese philosopher, is responding to an entirely different recent political landscape than are most contemporary American Humanist thinkers. In the past century in the US traditional religion has maintained much of the political power it had in the past, and Humanists have been articulate and loud critics of politically assertive religious fundamentalism in its many forms. But in China the communist regime abandoned theism rather explicitly, and yet hardly succeeded in avoiding human rights violations of enormous proportion. Tu clearly highlights the Chinese case as a check against any arrogant atheism which would suggest that traditional religion is the root of all evil or that rejecting God is all that is necessary to produce a more humane society.

But with his profound concerns that communist China has imposed an anthropocentrist nationalism at the expense of nature and ecology, Tu’s Confucian Humanism is consistent with the ideals of modern lifestance Humanism in more ways than it is not. Like Tu, we contemporary American Humanists affirm the tremendous importance of nature and of stewarding our natural world. We do not content ourselves to think that we can do this all-important work of stewarding alone, in arrogant isolation from those more traditionally religious individuals with whom we differ on “first-causes” of the universe. E.O. Wilson’s recent work is a profound example of this open and generous approach.

Moreover, Tu’s focus is on this natural world, not any other for which we lack empirical evidence, as the one Confucian Humanist ethics must address. As Tu notes in the essay below, “[a] priest whose ultimate concern is the Kingdom yet to come would not choose to be a Confucian; nor would a monk who is totally devoted to the journey to the other shore or a Sufi who is primarily involved in the purification of the soul.” This echoes the naturalism of contemporary lifestance Humanism, which should lead us to ask: what does Tu mean when he refers negatively to “secular humanism?”

I would argue that Tu somewhat imprecisely chooses the term “secular humanism” to refer to a Chinese communist movement that has combined irreligion and power-hungry repression. “Secular Humanism,” after all, was coined by the American religious right as a slur against american liberals or progressives with Humanist religious leanings; though it has since been adopted by many of those it was originally intended to denigrate, as for example many US gays and lesbians have elected to call themselves “Queer” as a term of pride. But Humanism is not, nor should it be identified with, political or social movements that deny God but fail to affirm human freedom, including religious freedom.  Thus, contemporary American Humanists may question Tu’s choice of terminology. However, we should take his message as a warning which must be heeded: let us prove with our actions just how different our philosophical naturalism is from the scientism and arrogance of the Maoist regime. I personally will never forget the semester I spent in China during college, where I may not have seen much Biblical Creationism or Pro-Life extremism but I did witness first-hand that nation’s utter failure to develop policies to protect its natural beauty from terrible pollution; we Humanists must work hand-in-hand with people of all faiths to ensure we do better.