Ren

The entry is a piece of comparative work rather than a definition of Marsh's own coinage. Ren is a central Confucian virtue, translated variously as benevolence, humaneness or manliness, and she takes the old translation seriously by pointing out that man once meant human, so manliness once meant humanity. What interests her is what The Analects actually describes when it describes ren, which she reads as equitable relationships and healthy self-valuation. Both are structural rather than moral. Equitable relationships are balanced interactions in her vocabulary, and healthy self-valuation is what a sound personal membrane produces, which is why she suggests ren may be somewhat equivalent to face or personal membrane. The suggestion is offered tentatively and the tentativeness is deliberate, since translation across frameworks is exactly where meaning is usually lost. Her broader point is the one that motivates the entry. English handles this territory badly, reaching for mental health or self esteem and naming effects rather than the thing, which is the same complaint she makes when introducing face from the First Nations peoples of northwestern Canada. Other traditions have words for a property of a person that English lacks, and gathering them is a way of establishing that the property is real rather than an artefact of her framework. Ren, face and personal membrane are three names arrived at independently for something the dominant vocabulary cannot say.

Ren is the pre-eminent virtue in Confucian ethics and its translation has been debated for centuries, with benevolence, humaneness, goodness, co-humanity and authoritative conduct all proposed. Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont argue for readings that avoid importing Western moral categories, and much of the scholarship stresses that ren is relational, realized in the conduct of the five relationships rather than held as an inner disposition. That relational emphasis is what Marsh's comparison depends on. Where she departs from the tradition is in reading it as a property of a person's boundary and connections rather than as a virtue to be cultivated, which sinologists would treat as a substitution rather than a translation.