Abstract
In an award-winning essay, Shu-Shan Lee discusses scholarly commentary about obedience to the emperor, focusing on public and hidden records of protest. The thesis of Lee’s essay is that the relationship between authority and subject in imperial Confucianism was built on a conditional obligation of obedience, despite traditional accounts of it as absolute. On his account, the obligation of obedience should be conceived through the rubric of imperial Confucianism as being conditional on fulfillment of reciprocal obligations. As part of my response, I suggest that there is a third way to understand the obligation of obedience through the Confucian lens, which is less transactional than reciprocal obligation, while also providing a plausible alternative to absolute obligation as the correct understanding of imperial Confucian thinking about obedience to the emperor.
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Reference
Lee, Shu-Shan. 2020. “‘What Did the Emperor Ever Say?’—The Public Transcript of Confucian Political Obligation.” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 19.2: 231–250.
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I, Manyul Im, declare that for the manuscript “What is the Emperor to Us? – Relationships, Obligations,and Obedience,” the following statements are true:
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Im, M. What Is the Emperor to Us?—Relationships, Obligations, and Obedience. Dao 21, 611–616 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11712-022-09855-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11712-022-09855-7