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While the external cosmos was seen as tending organically to unite ultimate being
and experienced events, the mind had a diffuse, transnatural power to bring this
tendency to full realization. That is, the ethical activity of the individual could
cause vast changes in the social and metaphysical world. Whether or not this
transnatural power was taken seriously by all neo-Confucians, they at least
emphasized the pathos of this power, and so clung to the terminology which
allowed them to visualize and symbolize it (Metzger 1977, 115; emphasis my
own).
The possibility that proper moral action by one individual on his own can enact grand
transformations in shared social reality has been roundly criticized, and not only by
contemporary Western scholars doubtful that ―everything in the universe is part of a coherent,
internally structured totality‖ available in its entirety to the cultivated mind (Munro 1996). To
late Imperial thinkers of the gongyang school, it was precisely the overreliance on subjective
consciousness by Lu-Wang neo-Confucianism that led to the atrophy of effective administrative
institutions under the Ming dynasty—clearing the way for the Manchu invasion that inaugurated
the Qing (find ref). The concept of ―democracy‖ (minzhu 民主, lit., ―the people ruling‖),
however, suggests a way to recover these cosmological assumptions as a model of political
action without discounting the importance of institution-building or relying on contestible
metaphysical assumptions.
As both ruler and ruled, the ―people‖ as an entity simultaneously act and are acted
upon—meaning that into the place of both Heaven and Ruler steps a plurality of actors with
disparate interests and abilities, who must authorize action as well as perform it. When Zhang
Convention