Confucianism lacks the essential self-consciousness of freedom, reducing the ethical systems to external commands rather than expressions of true moral freedom.

Even morality, which is so closely connected with the consciousness of freedom, can attain a high degree of purity before any such consciousness is present; for it may simply enunciate universal duties and rights as objective commandments, or even remain purely negative in character, prescribing a formal elevation of the mind and a renunciation of the sensual and of all sensual motives. Chinese morality, since the Europeans have become acquainted with it and with the writings of Confucius, has received the highest praise and the most flattering tributes to its merits even from those who are familiar with Christian morality; in the same way, men have acknowledged the sublimity with which the religion and poetry of India {or at least the higher kinds of these), and in particular the Indian philosophy, express and enjoin the removal and sacrifice of all sensual things. Yet these two nations are lacking - indeed completely lacking - in the essential self-consciousness of the concept of freedom. The Chinese look on their moral rules as if they were laws of 'nature', positive external commandments, coercive rights and duties, or rules of mutual courtesy. Freedom, through which the substantial determinations of reason can alone be translated into ethical attitudes, is absent; morality is a political matter which is administered by government officials and courts of law. Their writings on the subject are not, however, collections of legal statutes, but are addressed to the subjective will and disposition of the reader. Like the moral writings of the Stoics, they read like a series of commands which purport to be necessary for the attainment of happiness, so that it is left to the individual to adopt and follow such commands or not; in the same way, the idea of an abstract subject, the wise man, is the culmination of such doctrines with both the Chinese and the Stoic moralists.52 And in the Indian doctrine of the renunciation of sensuality, desires, and all earthly interests, positive ethical freedom is not the goal and end, but rather the extinction of consciousness and the suspension of spiritual and even physical life.