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78 J. Ren

the dislocation and slicing up of the “eight essential principles” and of the over-
view in The Great Learning. This is why Zhu Xi criticized Lu Jiuyuan for seeing the
heart as paramount, which is what Chan Buddhism preaches. When the four
elements for achieving “expounding illustrious virtue” and the four for “renewing
the people” are discussed separately, “self-cultivation” is in fact the link in both
progressive and recursive order for both rectifying one’s heart and regulating one’s
family affairs. However, often in the recursive process, “rectifying one’s heart” is
instead regarded as the focal element, while in the progressive process, the
“family” in “regulating one’s family affairs” is regarded as the focal element. In
fact, both have mistaken the true basis of the “eight essential principles.”
Each step in these principles is indispensable to the overall framework. How-
ever, there have been repeated efforts to take them apart, or break them to pieces.
This is precisely what poses challenges to some modern interpretations of Confucian
ethics today. For example, the widely-held discourse on Confucian collectivism will
need to be reviewed. This is because, whether in “expounding illustrious virtue,”
which is the goal of “self-cultivation,” or in “renewing the people,” where “self-
cultivation” is listed in recursive order, Confucian thought clearly asserts the key
role of the individual both in moral cultivation and in the building of society and
states. The concept of Confucian collectivism only emerges when individual self-
cultivation is either downgraded or even totally disregarded in the process of
building state power. In this sense, it is extremely important to compare the atom-
ized individual in Western philosophy and the Confucian individual embedded in a
relationship, because even within relationships the individual will never disappear.
It is true that the complex, sociopolitical relations in traditional Chinese society
severely restricted the environment of the individual, but this did not turn the self-
cultivated individual into “agroup.” In other words, the individuality of the indi-
vidual in a relationship remains unchanged and does not become a collective. It is in
fact “regulation of family affairs, good state governance and ensuring peace to all
under heaven” that is the collective, not “self-cultivation.” No social group or col-
lective can emerge or perform any action without the planning or the key role of
individuals; without individuals the group would be an abstraction. A group must
exist in the concrete since it is composed of individuals. This is a confirmation of the
3
individualistic approach as described in The Logic of Collective Action. Abstract
3 According to Mancur Lloyd Olson, Jr, “But it is not in fact true that the idea that groups will act in
their self-interest follows logically from the premise of rational and self-interested behavior. It does
not follow, because all of the individuals in a group would gain if they achieved their group
objective, that they would act to achieve that objective, even if they were all rational and self-
interested. Indeed, unless the number of individuals in a group is quite small, or unless there is
coercion or some other special device to make individuals act in their common interest, rational,
self-interested individuals will not act to achieve their common or group interests” (The Logic of