In Confucian Metaphysics, the notion of identity is understood to exist merely as a component of a social relation; that is, a self is not taken to be a discrete ontological entity.  Mary Bockover's conception of the Confucian model of personhood rigidly acquiesces to this tradition. Her argument is staked on both ethical and metaphysical grounds. The former comprises both pragmatic concerns — elucidated in the parlance of liturgical and ecclesiastical rituals — and deeper ethical concerns. The moral structure of Confucianism is described in terms of destiny, and so necessarily discloses teleological and eschatological aspects of the system; the importance of Li and Ren in a technical sense is therefore ancillary to a plainly philosophical examination of Confucianism, but it does lend context to the discussion of Confucian metaphysics and the Confucian conception of personhood — the focus of this examination.

Bockover's interpretation of the metaphysics of identity in Confucianism consists of two fundamental claims. The first is that the notion of persons and selves is intelligible only insofar as it is conceived of in terms of social relations. The second is that the prevailing positivistic orthodoxy in philosophy of mind and metaphysics is inadequate. For this second point, much is made of the fallible nature of scientific investigation; there is a particular critical emphasis on the presuppositional metaphysical underpinnings of the current science. In this regard, the Confucian system seems quite in line with Kuhn's and Feyerabend's brand of scientific skepticism.

The central metaphysical claim of Confucianism is that the self is social. By this, it is meant that the idea of a self is meaningful only if it is taken to be social and that there neither are nor could there possibly be any selves as ontologically discrete entities. As Bockover puts it, "there is no independent self — anywhere." Further, she claims that "there is no internal/external distinction." This claim denies more than just the Western idea of personhood; it rejects the foundational modal delineation of subjective and objective ontology in its entirety. It is thus clear that, in Bockover's Confucianism, the related concepts of identity, mereology, and the mind itself — as singular entities — just do not exist. "Mind is a metaphor," she says, and "consciousness is not an internal mental event."

The second part of Bockover's argument, a bold articulation of antiempiricism, tacitly concedes the strength of the reigning scientific orthodoxy, for it is evidently necessary to overturn the scientific method itself to preserve the integrity of the metaphysical claims made for Confucianism. Thus proceeds a discussion, and subsequent denial, of essentialism and psycho-physical theories of identity. It is not evident, however, that logic itself is expelled from the Confucian methodology.

With that in mind, we take a look at her contentiuon that there is nothing meaningful in saying that a person exists independently of others. The intuitive countervailing point to this claim is the fact that there are, it seems, in this world people who choose to avoid all and any contact with others. These persons are detached from all social relations and thus appear to constitute counterexamples to the unrefined claim of Confucian ontology. However, to the rejoinder that feral children and hermits (along with whichever other persons are similarly isolated from society) constitute an exceptional specimen, we are assured that they are social entities just the same because, after all, they were born unto a person and therefore into a relation.

A disposition of isolation is thus intelligible only insofar as it is purposefully asserted toward, or, as may be the case, away from, other people. We should understand solitude as a state of separation and we cannot meaningfully articulate this notion of separation without implicating the entities—i.e., other people—from which one diverges. And since we are not born alone, but rather inside another person, there is no state of being that cannot accede to this formulation of self. It is not that in the state of being alone a human being ceases to be a person, but that persons, by themselves, never are alone and never can be alone. What then should we say of persons who avoid other persons? We should evidently say, by the tenets of Confucianism, that these persons do indeed disclose a relation to other persons, but that it is a disharmonious relation and thus an ethical misdeed.

However, this conceit does nothing to deprive us of the conviction that our mental world is subjective, whether or not we deprecate the terminology. The privacy of phenomenal consciousness is unmistakable and undeniable. If I drink a glass of wine—or if I dream of drinking a glass of wine—there is no sense to be had in saying that you drank the glass of wine and no chance to be had in your getting drunk. Furthermore, whatever moral significance inheres in the action of drinking a glass of wine is intrinsic to me. For even if there are no persons that are not social there are nevertheless human actions that are not social. Now, of course, it could be the case that I drank the glass of wine in the charge of some social task. But I could have drunk the wine by myself and for myself, and I could have dreamed of drinking the wine because I was drunk. The denial of this possibility is tantamount to the assertion that actions and social actions are the same. That is, every action, of logical necessity, is a social action. Since Confucianists evaluate actions in terms of virtue, all social actions are either good or bad—i.e., they are either harmonious or disharmonious—but there is no sense in deferring the moral character of these actions to the relation between persons because it is only insofar as this asymmetry persists that there is a comprehensible notion of virtue. For if there is no element better than the worst, and none worse than the best, then there can be no sense in evaluating relations by their goodness any more than there is sense in judging lines by their straightness.

As a consequence, there should be many more relations than there are persons, for even the loneliest person must acknowledge at least his or her mother. No temporo-spatial intersection of ontological predicates could point out any discrete self because each relational role is established only in virtue of its attachment to another role and whatever its ontological terminus, it has no intrinsic features and its actual features are only those sufficient to establish its nature. However, these features disclose only the type of relation; they cannot say anything about the things being related per se (other than that they are human beings) for such a consideration would presuppose identity a priori. Therefore there is no sense in distinguishing relations in terms of the character of the things being related, for the being of these relata is only meaningful in virtue of such a relatedness, and this relatedness is bestowed by nature incidentally. If a person is a mother and a daughter, then we must suppose that she has a relation to two people at least; that is, there is a manifest second-order relation between the relations. But Confucianism does not countenance these points of commonality. Therefore, we must then ask: what are they common to? Their coincidence does not point out a self, according to Confucianism, but if this relational relation is a meaningful construct, it won't do to deny it's ontological status in toto.

Bound up in the Confucian sense of duty and obligation is the asymmetry of interpersonal relata. We might understand this in volitional terms or in moral terms, but in any case it is customary to explain relationships by the properties of the relata. Confucianism, however, explains this asymmetry by the properties of the relation. As a consequence, it has the uneasy obligation to unwind the tautology that obtains in assigning discrete dispositional predicates on the basis of a relation between morally and volitionally vacuous relata. 

So while it is of course true that a master and slave relationship discloses an asymmetry, it is an asymmetry that is caused by the differences of its participants. Otherwise, there is no distinguishing the two. Each of the relata must persist in time as a distinct entity. Suppose that there is a master and slave relation. If the slave thence buys the master, the relation is reversed, as we identify the current slave to be the same person as the former master. Unless this distinction is meaningfully conceived of in terms extrinsic to the slave and master's relational actions, there is no distinction between the two, and our ability to distinguish the ontological points of relation is thus undermined. Identity persists if and only if the relation persists. We could obviate this inconvenient exigency if we impose a condition of extrinsic ontological preservation over temporal frames. A purely functional account of personhood would define a king in terms of ruling. That is, if one rules then one is a king. However, one cannot rule unless there is at the very same time one who is ruled upon. These requisite conditions, obviously, don't eventuate ex nihilo, nor does some platonic relation of hegemony descend from heaven. Any realistic causal account of relations takes a hard turn away from Confucian metaphysics. 

Now the existence of persons is a necessary condition for the existence of the relations by which they are thereby made meaningful. So while it may be contingently true that every person comes into existence coincidental with a relation as a part of this relation, it is neither logically nor metaphysically necessary for such a relation to attend the existence of every person. It is logically and metaphysically necessary, on the other hand, for there to be persons in order for there to be a personal relation. Now we could say that there are just these person-like things, and then they interact, and then those things—those same things—become persons. But under this interpretation, Confucianism is just a flimsy exercise in confused descriptions. The Confucian relation is descriptive. It describes persons. But notice the circularity in defining relations by the entities thus related and thence defining the entities by this relationship. I am a brother on account of my having a sibling and being a male. One of these predicates might precede the other temporally, but they both describe the same entity—me. It is not enough that, for sibling y (my brother) to have a brother, there be a male x and there be a sibling z; these entities must have in common an ontological point of attachment; there is no meaningful brother-relation unless these predicates are conjoined in time. Now the Confucian could say that they are not conjoined to something else (i.e., me), but that their conjunction—and nothing else—establishes an instance of me nonetheless. It cannot be the case, however, that this conjunction represent merely a part of me, or an aspect of me, because there can be no meaningful way to ontologically situate the relatedness of the two if personhood is defined by relations.

To pursue this point, let's suppose moreover that I have a child. I am a father to this person only insofar as I am a male and her or his father, just as I am a brother to another person only insofar as I am a male and his or her sibling. But to whom am I both a brother and a father? Myself? Surely not, for it is supposed that there is no such thing. We would have to thence conclude that the brother and the father are not the same person. This is not a satisfactory state of affairs. It is made worse if we should endeavor to identify the basis for one's having a sibling in the first place. It must be one in which there is a commutative morphological relation to a mother person. Neither relation is sufficient, however, to unify these predicates unless we resort to independent conceptions of personhood.

The world in which this is not the case is also the world in which there are necessarily many more persons than there are personal bodies. Confucianism, by this manner of reckoning, seems like a tortuous exercise in conflating personality and personhood. To this, the Confucian should reply that it is indeed true that persons are not identical to their bodies and furthermore true that the relations in question do, of course, have to do with insubstantial spiritual persons. But this is a religious answer to a philosophical question.