| Abstract |
Taking its departure from the kowtow controversy following the Macartney embassy to the Chinese emperor, the paper illustrates the ethical and aesthetic challenge of expressing respect between people from different cultural traditions. The ethics of humility in Confucianism is contrasted to forms of respect among free and equal citizens in the liberal republican tradition from Kant to Pettit. Republican conceptions of respect, paradigmatically expressed by standing tall and looking one another in the eye as part of an “eyeball test”, reflect a specific European history. Culturally inflected forms of showing respect should not be naively universalized. The paper argues that radically different expressions of respect and civility, paradigmatically expressed in greeting rituals and the normative grammar they exemplify, are a major challenge for cosmopolitan forms of political and ethical theorizing. © 2021 Mario Wenning |
