Modern Identity Crisis and Realistic Response of Confucian Ethics

In the process of the May 4th New Culture Movement, the Confucianist ethics appeared a serious identity crisis. The essence of the crisis is the mental disorder of the subject caused by the imbalance of Chinese cultural ecology — the cover of the meaning of existence and the loss of freedom. The cultural cause is that the scientific orientation of the social collective dispels the sacred meaning and ontological commitment of ethics, and throws ethics into the subject and historical appendages. Once separated from the social structure of ideological life and reproduction of public cultural life, the value ideal of Confucian ethics will lose the realistic path of universal realization through the system; at the same time, in the context of pluralistic morality, Confucian ethics must face the dual challenges of other cultures and rational narrative mode. Confucian ethics has been sealed up in the historical spirit by modernization, and has become an individual’s cultural habit and ethical complex. Therefore, Confucianism must return to the life world and integrate the tension of history and value dialectically by absorbing the categories of “society” and “history”, so as to truly reveal the inevitability of Confucian ethical modernization.